gin-nurtered time waster.
©Elsie Anderton,
The Babylon Lane Tales 2012
The Babylon Tales
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the almost award winning blog from Manchester
This week is all about work and ill-health.
I'm huddled over a laptop in my piccalilli stained pyjamas with hair that would make Krusty the Clown jealous, perma-snarling at anyone who comes within a 5 metre radius. Without The Internets (that means you), by now I would have pulled my frazzled, tiny mind out of my left nostril.
This week The Internets have been lovely. These my favourites:
1. Letters of Note: letter from a 20 year old Madonna to a film-maker. I love Madonna, and have recently taken to trapping my child in the bath with her songs blaring. It's an important part of her education she feels the love and learns all the words to Holiday. It is not abuse. It should be on the curriculum.
This letter is pure Madonna magic:
'By the time I was in the fifth grade, I knew I either wanted to be a nun or a movie star. 9 months in a convent cured me of the first disease'.
And:
'I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan where I began my career in petulance and precociousness.'
If you don't read Letters of Note (here) - which you obviously do, because who doesn't - do so immediately. Guaranteed brilliance.
2. Nobody can have missed the death of Jimmy Savile. Whatever you think of him - and I do concede that displaying his body at the Queen's Hotel in Leeds is more than a little ghoulish - he was a big part of my childhood.
And I'm from Leeds.
And as a teenager I worked for his bestmate as a gulag inmate of his, not so, chi-chi hair salon.
And he and I share a love of Scarborough.
(This is about as far as I can take our mutual similarities, before admitting to an early 1990s love of flamable tracksuit material, gangster gold and cuban cigars. Need I go on?)
It's in my blood, and no doubt in yours; I watched and wanted to be on Jim'll Fix It with weekly jealous fervour. Read Dom Lawson’s account of Jim fix-in it (here). It made me tearily nostalgic.
3. I've watched The Sound of Music for the seventy billionth time with my child.
For years I’ve baffled over other people’s love for the curtain wearing nun. Really? Come on, if you had to choose (I mean had to, like your life depended on it), it’s always the Baroness, right?
She has Christopher Plummer under her thumb, looks like a dream and has the good plan of sending the seven god-awful, do-re-mi kids to boarding school. I’d send them in a brown paper package, tied up with string, but that’s just me. I never know when to stop.
Some things never change. Whatever. Did you not see it’s been a bad week?
You may think it's a given that you see the sea at the seaside. Well you'd be wrong. I live within spitting distance of many of the North-west's seaside resorts (Blackpool, Southport, Morecombe). "I bet I see the sea first" is a game of inevitable failure, as you all ugly squint and confusedly point at the distant horizon, hoping that the murky grey line, covered with cloud is water. To prove it's the sea, you set off determinedly, walking two miles with bucket in hand, to drearily dangle your toes in the jelly-fished water. (Don't even get me started on Grange over Sands/GRASS).
The sea in Yorkshire is proper sea. When the tide is out you can still touch it, feel it, smell it. It's noisy and wild, forcing you and your possessions to dance the slow, seaside shuffle, as it steals the beach from beneath you.
In Scarborough it's worth spending the day building elaborate sand castles, because you know the sea will come in and satisfyingly fill your zig-zag maze of moats and tunnels. (In Southport you would be too exhausted from the hike to the shore or to daunted by the prospect of digging a stream for a mile to even begin.)
Scarborough gives good sea.
gin-nurtered time waster.
©Elsie Anderton,
The Babylon Lane Tales 2012
The Babylon Tales
Promote your Page too
gin-nurtered time waster.
©Elsie Anderton,
The Babylon Lane Tales 2012
The Babylon Tales
Promote your Page too
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