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.
I'm emotional and I always have been. It's a family trait: we cry at anything and everything. I put it down to an over inflated empathetic gland in my brain, or some other medical lunacy. It can't be a bad thing surely?
It's not unusual for my husband to walk into the room to find me ugly-crying and pointing desperately at the radio/telly/book/newspaper/takeaway mailshot.
My trip to Winchester was for all the worst reasons.
It had been a sad and difficult day, and I was on my own. I decided to console myself with good food and wine. Dining alone is not something I'm particularly good at, I don't especially like my own company and I never know where to rest my gaze.
Armed with a book I ventured down to the rather lovely hotel restaurant. At first irked to be seated in a dimly lit corner, at what can only be described as a child's sized table, I soon revelled in the anonymity this provided. I could listen and gawp at the other diners. Mainly couples, in various states of soberness and love.
Take the couple in the far corner. He looked like an army officer. You know the type; chinos, conker brown oxfords polished to a looking glass, pale blue pinstripe shirt and ghastly pale pink tie. He had an air of self-importance, belied by his irritating habit of surreptitiously picking his nose between mouthfuls. His wife, older looking (but not) and dowdy, seemed flustered and quietly apologetic.
As if the ricochet of his braying clipped vowels was not bad enough, this man seemed to suffer from 'waiter's back tourettes':
I'm always at my best in a seated position. That's why gardening and me will never get on. I would be a little more willing if it didn't require any movement at all, could be done without chipping my nail polish and if plants grew with Super Mario speed. But it can't and they don't.
When I say 'I'm doing the garden', I mean that I'm sitting in a deckchair, greedily slurping a glass of wine and flicking through a book. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fair-weather gardener. I'll garden in all weathers, bring on the rain or snow, I'll merely adjust my
http://www.flickr.com/photos/babylonlanetales/5507484554/in/set-72157626093346897/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/babylonlanetales/5490393446/
There is something both depressing and uplifting about this journey.
This post was originally written in December. I'm cheating and reposting again so that I can brazenly show off as part of Lizzie's Magpie Monday. Lizzie has magnanimously permitted this cheat because recycling is entirely in the spirit of Magpie Monday. Ahem, little does she know that she's just enabling my lazy ways. Go here for more.
Not only am I a clutter-slut, I am also a sparkle junkie. A magpie. Come the winter, come the Joan Rivers wannabe. I have no shame, I'll wear sparkles during the day and not just one discrete piece, oh no, no, no I wear lots. Lots. Less is definitely bore. Why wear one brooch or necklace when five or six will truly do?
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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