No entry. It's your own fault.

What is it with my family and keys?

Years ago, when me and my sister were just kids, we all went on a day out and had ourselves a wonderful time - right up to the point our parents locked BOTH sets of car and house keys in the boot. Or trunk, for non-Brits. Cue an expensive journey home, including three trains, a bus and a taxi. Not necessarily in that order. And then we had to break into our own house. Oddly enough, it was soon after that that us kids got our own house keys. I wonder why...

Some years later, I was working night shift at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham, when my shift leader came to me with a message that my parents were at the security gatehouse and needed to see me. I started panicking - after all, when you get an unexpected visit from your folks, it's not often good news. Besides which, you will have got the gist already. Yes, they had gone out for the evening and locked themselves out. I had a little rant about communication.

Fast forward some more. Not long after I had moved south to live with Julie, the two of us went to the beach. I'm not great with the idea of leaving my belongings unattended on the beach while we go for a swim, and there was a small pocket on the inside of my shorts. Unfortunately, when I went for a dip, the keys fell out. Fortunately, I found them rolling in the surf on the water line. Fortunate indeed. Never before or since has Julie been so angry with me.

And now yesterday.
I was talking to my Mum by means of the old telephonic device, and she was telling me of her 'little bit of fun' the day before. Apparently, my mother had had a hospital appointment. Parking there is abysmal, so she booked a taxi, removed a lot of crap from her bag in order to make moving about on crutches a bit easier, and then shut the doo...oh shit.

No sooner had the door clicked shut than she realised she hadn't put the house keys back in her handbag. Crap. The taxi and appointment still need to happen, so off she went. When she got back, my mum found that while house keys were absent, she did have the car key. Deciding to use a cafe as an impromptu office, Mum tried to think of how to get a locksmith - not having one on speed dial, you see.

Having failed to come up with a solution, Mum then went to a garage to fill the car with fuel, and noticed a police car there. Collaring a copper, she asked him if he knew of any locksmiths in the area. Confused, he asked why, and got the whole story.

Well, there's handy.

Interestingly, I have come across a couple of good ideas for trying to make sure you have a house key with you at all times.

Found on Tuvie, this one looks funky, but I can see you would have to have a key specially made. Far better is this idea from Pocketbands.com - it's a silicon rubber bracelet with a pouch for you to put a key or an emergency tenner inside.

Naturally, the bands you would wear would not be transparent - it sort of defeats the idea of hiding something. I'm seriously liking this product, actually. Ideal for kids, clubbers, people on the beach (ahem), I am actually thinking about finding out if there is anywhere over here that flogs them.

So long, farewell, etc etc

*cue a bugler playing 'The Last Post'...

Yes, this is all about goodbye, I'm afraid.

It's been a good few years, and yet this moment had to come. Today, I have decided to blog about bidding people fare-thee-well...

...what?

You thought that Julie's Gems was ending? Oh no, I'm on about a particular instance when I was meeting up with some friends.

...I'd best start again.

My job entails working a twilight shift, meaning that all the evening activities (Magic: the Gathering) had to be knocked on the head. On Monday, however, work had been cancelled, so I found myself free to play some cardboard crack (as M:tG is often known).

A good night was had, a Conspiracy cube was played, as well as a three-way standard, and some very nice trades for decks we were constructing. Not only that, but there was discussion about wedge commanders, Khans of Tarkir, and the merits of using counters or dice.*

However, all things must end, and I gathered my stuff together and dropped by various groups to say my goodbyes.

For none-British people, a Brummie is a resident of the city of Birmingham. Along with residents of the nearby area known as the Black Country (all the coal), including Walsall and Dudley (or Doodlay, as it is pronounced), this is a common way to send someone on their journey.

In any case, my contribution was well-received and served as a good way to end the shenanigans.

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* Ladies and gentlemen, this conversation is currently cruising at an altitude of 20,000 feet over your heads...

Oh! The jiggery pokery!

Knees bent, arms stretched, rah-rah-rah.... ...sorry.

By now, you should have a fair idea that I am a great fan of wordplay, both intelligent and base. In case you aren't too sure what I mean by those terms, the difference comes when you have the reaction of either 'heh - clever' or 'hurr-hurr-hurr'. And just in case you still aren't sure, here's a handy visual guide.

"I see what you did there."                         "He said bottom... pfffff!"

However, I am erratic. Sometimes, it takes me far longer to 'get' a gag - but then there will be times when I am stuck in a manic free-associating mode, and almost everything is twistable. And yes, Julie usually tends toward the latter mode.

That's not to say that everything that comes off the cuff* is 'naughty'. Many people, mostly professional comedians, thrive on firing out barrages of clever little gags (Milton Jones comes to mind), or comebacks to snide comments/hecklers. A lot of what I say, when I want to twist the meaning of another person's sentence, will tend towards the less cerebral, shall we say. The thing is, by doing that, I am training everyone to believe that will be all I would come out with. The my fun really begins; firing off on bizarre tangents, people will start laughing at the joke they expected to hear and then go blank and say, "wait, what?"

If this is sounding familiar to you, I'm not surprised. You've been reading about Julie doing this to me and others for a few years now...

Now and then, though, I screw up. I will say something without really thinking about it and fall foul of my own methods (this recent slip comes to mind)...

Changing the scene a little, now.

Until recently, I was out of work. Now, I have a part-time job in a factory, dealing with soaps, bath lotions and tanning products. As such, we have large cubic tanks of the appropriate chemicals at the start of the line feeding into the bottles. On Monday night, we were dealing with a foaming handwash. While it's cleaner than, say, tanning mousse, it's still a bit of a bugger if it is spilled, because it is incredibly liquid, and moving the tanks around is a process carried out with great care.

When it came to hanging one tank for another, a colleague set to removing the empty tank, while I got the full one. Moving very slowly to avoid sloshing the handwash, it seems I was concentrating more on my work than my words...

Oops.
It was fortunate that my colleague had the empty tank, as he was laughing far too hard to be careful with it. Meanwhile, this was the look our team leader gave me...

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* Hurr hurr hurr...

Equal ops for children.

Taking Roxy for a walk yesterday, I stopped for a rest (Roxy's request - she refuses to go past a certain stretch of low wall until we have sat there for a few minutes). Sometimes, Roxy will hop up onto the wall to sit next to me. This time, however, she simply flopped to the ground (a sure sign I needed to get her home soonish) and basked in the warm sun.

As we sat there, a small group of schoolchildren came along with a couple of adults carefully shepherding them in the right direction. When they were encouraged to ask questions of random people, I realised they were on a field trip.

A couple questions later, it seemed they had fulfilled their quota, and were preparing to head up onto the pier. Before they did so, the teacher wanted to make sure her charges understood what they needed to do and what to look for.

At that, the teacher held her clipboard over her face to hide a smile, while the less restrained man at the back of the group wheeled away, doubling up in silent laughter.

My own laughter was not silent, and I felt moved to literally applaud the young boy for an apparently progressive attitude. The teacher, may or may not have been impressed, commented to me that, "in all the years I have done this and asked these questioned, not once have I had that answer."

Win.

Not to be sniffed at.

One thing that all dog owners know is that unless their dog has been very highly trained, then a dog is a curious creature, and wants to investigate interesting smells.

'nuff said, right? Roxy is certainly no exception to the rule, and having almost total freedom after three years in a last chance rescue centre means that she will make the most of it. Especially since she is still settling in, and half-believes she might have to go back to the centre.

One of her regular - and favourite - strolls is along the promenade and past the pier. Just before the pier, the prom splits in two; one path leading up and past the pier's entrance, and the other continuing by the beach and going underneath the pier.

Taking the lower prom route, you start to get a long series of low walls, one of which surrounds a sort of picnic area. Obviously, many people sit on these walls, and on this particular day there was a family of parents and young children perched on the wall, munching on chips (British chips, made with thick cuts of potato and deep fried).

Roxy, ever interested in all the different smells, always makes a bee-line for the wall, and that it also bore people with food was simply a pleasant bonus. As she was sniffing at the wall, the family were making a fuss of Roxy, something that is usually welcome. However, with all the various odours, her canine attention was pretty much set to 'distraction mode'. So, while Roxy was amenable to being stroked, the most important thing was to check out all the interesting smells on the wall.

Moving along, Roxy started snuffling at a section of wall one of the women was sat on. I kept an eye out, because some people take exception to having a dog smelling their nether regions. It didn't help that the woman offered a dubious origin for a particularly interesting smell.

...sometimes, I need to engage my brain before sending messages down to the mouth...
Fortunately, the woman laughed it off.

I suppose it could have been worse...

Perverting a proverb

A friend of mine from the Magic-playing community was talking to me the other day about how he enjoys reading this blog (which made my day, believe me). He especially enjoyed, apparently, that a lot of what Julie says, and how she says it, mirrors his girlfriend's habits. It seems that she has a reputation for being a bit 'out there', and revels in it - to the point she will deliberately behave and speak oddly.

To illustrate this, Tom (my friend), recounted the tale of when he and Cass (his girlfriend) were playing a card game. He can't recall the game, not that it matters. It could have been Magic, Happy Families, Uno, or even just Gin Rummy.

Whatever the game, it was Tom's turn, and he drew a card. Unfortunately, it turned out to be something he most definitely did not want or need. Tom let out an exasperated noise and grimaced. Cass then assumed a comically lofty expression and berated him with this:

Obviously punning on the proverb 'don't look a gift horse in the mouth', Cass then enjoyed the sight of Tom laughing and spluttering.

For my part, I seem to be channeling a mix of Cass and Julie, because I was mixing both the original and Cass's version in my head and coming up with a mental image of a terrified and disturbed horse.

Surprise butt-text!

I was talking to my mum on the phone the other day, catching up on the health matters of various family members. It was entirely inappropriate, then, to hear my sister in the background suddenly hooting with laughter. Bear in mind that I didn't even know she was there up until that point, either.

It turned out that my sister had received a random text message from a friend. A very bored friend.

To be honest, if I got that text, this would have been a little more like my reaction:

A lengthy problem

This one is old. And I mean 'before I met Julie' old.

I used to work in a warehouse that stocked and supplied electronic components. It was a pretty big warehouse, and at the time this took place, I was a shift team leader in the goods in department.

As anyone who has ordered multiple items at a single time knows, what you ordered isn't necessarily what you receive. One supplier even threatened to take us to court because we were refusing to pay for items we hadn't received - but they were adamant they had shipped. And then they found said items in a dark corner of their own warehouse. And two suppliers seemed to think it would be a jolly good wheeze to throw a load of components into a box with polystyrene chips (a fantastic idea, courtesy of static electricity), and then leave us to guess what each item may be.

It didn't help that the term MICROelectronics was often a very salient term to describe the parts. While some items had the device code printed on them somewhere, others were too small to fit the entire code, no matter how small the print.

As team leader, it fell to me to contact the sales department in question and ask them to iron out any problems. Cue this conversation (and yes, Mary was Irish)...

All around me, people were either laughing or demanding to know what the laughter was about. All I could think of was that I had just well and truly scuppered my chances of asking Mary out...

Heard of sleeping

It's time for a guest spot; Sam is a frequent visitor to this blog, although this is the first time she has been mentioned by name. One of Sharron's daughters, she seems to delight in coming up with the most innocent, knowing - and way-out-there - phrases. Today, it seemed, there was a conversation going on, although it was fairly one sided. Never mind that neither Sam nor her mother could strictly be classed as being present at the time...

This might actually ring a bell or two with various members of my family, as I am well known for being able to hold a conversation with someone while I am asleep. As is my sister. Yes, we managed to have a conversation with both of us being asleep, apparently. It was enough to turn a mother to drink...

Right to roam - doggie edition

Sorry about the absence, folks. What with the festive period and other things, I didn't prepare enough Gems to last for this long.

One of the things that has occupied us is a new member of our family. We have fostered, from a rescue centre, a Staffordshire bull terrier/bulldog (or boxer, it's not been too clear) by the name of Roxie.

"OMG! WANTS!"

She's seven, but has spent three years at the rescue centre. When I first saw her, my heart nearly broke, because she was so depressed and wary of forming attachments that would be broken. She would lean against the fence of her pen for the slightest bit of contact, but would refuse to react to it. She has been with us since last Friday, and as that picture shows, Roxy is settling in nicely.

In our company, in our home, at least.

When it comes to leaving the house, she is resigned about needing to wear a muzzle (legacy of a poor past), and wary of almost everything. That said, Roxy is incredibly well-behaved, and it's only with one or two dogs that she feels threatened enough to take action. Apart from that, she is very happy stay close to us.

Today, our early-morning walk took us along the seafront - there and back again. One of the things about Roxy is that she decides when she has had enough and stops. Literally. We will be walking along, happy as anything, and I will be chatting with Julie. The next thing we know, an arm will be nearly wrenched from its socket because Roxy has had enough and stopped dead without us realising in time.

This morning, we managed to get quite far along the promenade before we reached Point Nope. Probably, Roxy wanted to investigate all the new smells. Certainly, she was fascinated by the pebbled beach and the smell of the sea.

As we strolled back, Julie noticed something interesting. Something which elicited a silly remark from yours truly...

AN APPEAL

If you have a pet you no longer want or can no longer keep for whatever reason, don't dump it. Take it to a rescue centre.
If you would like to have a pet, don't get one from a shop or pet farm. Get one from a rescue centre.

Rescue centres are charitable organisations, are registered as such, and have to provide documentation of everything they do and must adhere to basic guidelines. This means that any animal given to them will be treated, and treated well. It also means that you are essentially guaranteed of a healthy animal should you come to adopt or foster one.
As you can see from the picture of Roxy, she is a happy doggie indeed, despite her demeanor in the rescue centre. Proof, surely?

However, rescue centres, as I said, are charities. This means they are reliant on donations and the occasional Lottery grant. Last Chance Animal Rescue is the place Roxy came from. It's a tiny place with minimal resources, and the abnormal weather we have had in the south of Britain recently has caused a lot of trouble. The high winds and torrential rain certainly did the centre no favours, as they went without power and a phone line (and therefore no internet connection) for a while.

Just think.
That means all the animals rescued had no heat. Apart from personal mobile phones, absolutely no contact could be made with the outside world, unless you braved the flooded roads - the entrance to the centre is slap-bang at the bottom point where the road cuts across a valley.

If you are local to the centre, please think about using them as a resource for a pet. And even if you are or are not, please think very hard about donating to them. People often drop by with food and/or toys and bedding, but money is the one thing they desperately need.
Drop by their donation page to find out more.

Thank you.

Love over Scrabble.

As a family, we have always liked word games, Scrabble in particular. Of course, there have always been personal foibles, and I don't expect that will change. Dad, in particular, used to make random guesses at word spellings; in case you couldn't tell, he was more of a numbers man. Many times, he would play a word and there would be a chorus of  "what the hell's that?", only for us to find out he was going for some semi-phonetic version of a common word. In fact, it got to the point when "Bagsy* coming last!" became his opening gambit.

He wasn't that bad a player though. As he always liked to put it, he was often runner-up. Pity there was usually only two of them playing.

On one occasion, a family game, it was my sister who was failing and trailing. In fact, by the end of the game, she had only managed 98 points. To put that into perspective, anything below 150 in a four-player game is, for us, a bad result. Ever the dutiful father, Dad decided to console his stricken daughter.

*'Dibs' for those more used to USA English

A lickle trouble

Viewers of programmes like Eastenders, and those who have seen films with Jason Statham in them will know of a certain vocal characteristic of those who live in the London area. Essentially, letters and wholes syllables are swallowed up in a glottal space, resulting in an almost total absence of the letter 't'. In fact, the very word 'letter' ends up being pronounced as "le'ah."

Dad had a similar, yet different, approach to pronouncing whole words. It was - and still is - a family in-joke that Dad could never really pronounce the 't' in the middle of a word. Instead, the hard sound of the consonant was transformed into a 'k' sound. Since my father was fond of Derbyshire, and a lot of his and Mum's spare time revolved around trips there, this invariable meant going through Matlock. Or, as Dad would call it, 'Macklock'.*

You can see how this is going, can't you?

Now, since Dad was rather fond of a tipple, especially single malt whiskies, the family joke has always been about 'lickle bockles'. My father always took it with good grace, and even enjoyed joining in with the banter. Brilliantly, this Gem has someone else falling foul of the whole scenario...

Hmm. If this was Twitter, this would probably be given "#guessyouhadtobethere".

Interestingly enough, when I was having an idle google, I found a site that would seem to have been named by my father...

I'm not making this up - ickle bockles is a site that provides you with all those horribly small toiletry containers that airports demand these days. Visit THEIR SITE to find out more.


*either way, Matlock is a lovely place to visit, but it is a right bugger to drive through as it's at the bottom of a long, narrow valley.

New old news

Even before we suspected anything was wrong, Dad was one of those people with an offbeat sense of humour and liked to look at things from skewed directions. He was also well known for being easily distracted and for getting his sentences tangled up.

When we finally noticed he was becoming even more vague than usual, we suspected Alzheimer's disease. The real cause, a massively aggressive brain tumour, floored us all.

As a tribute to my late father, I want to dedicate this week to him with three Gems (Monday, Wednesday and Friday). Silly and yet sharp, he's still missed, and always will be.

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My dad is the reason I'm a big fan of surreal humour. The Goons, Monty Python - even The Young Ones - all came to me via my father. It may have surprised some people, knowing him as a sober-looking besuited man with a very well-maintained beard, that he would have such a liking for these things. However, 'silly and surreal' was a very good way for him to let his hair down. One of our favourite things was to hold a conversation about nothing at all, with each sentence being replied with something that took the chat in another new direction.

"So, what do you think?"
"Orange. Definitely orange."
"Not square, then?"
"It's a close call, but square is very Marmite."
"True, true. The brakes make too much noise as it is."

See what I mean? Absolutely bizarre. This is why he and Julie would get on so well. In fact, they would take this conversational art and take it to new, utterly baffling (yet logical) extremes.

A few years ago, a new newspaper was launched in the UK.

Nice and cheap, the i is a news digest, meaning that all the stories are pared down to the minimum. In other words, no rambling articles where the same thing is repeated ad nauseum. As an added - or removed, possibly - bonus, there is very little in the way of celebrity crap. Even better, being a sister publication to The Independent, it is resolutely liberal and fairly open-minded. Unlike the 'newspaper' below...

Yes, it's a fake. Yes, that's me.

Originally, this newspaper was only published Monday-Friday. It was less than a year, though, that a Saturday edition was introduced for the stratospheric cost of 30p. Before that point, though, my dad and I had a conversation...

It took me far long than it should have done to work that out.

Beware the muffin man

I have a nasty and possibly life-threatening habit.
Eavesdropping.

Even NP Harris does it...

Well, eavesdropping and then joining in the conversation, without the other person/people being aware.
Hopefully.

I have done this with pissed-up clubbers queuing for a kebab, old dears as they wait for their pension in a post office queue, chavs hanging around in gangs in shopping centres and various random people talking loudly on their mobile phones. Obviously, some of these situations are more dangerous than others - I leave it to you to decide which.

Julie is somewhat unsurprisingly disapproving of this habit of mine, possibly due to the potential for fist & face meetings. In my defence, I do have to call hypocrisy on this one, as Julie does engage in this on occasion. Of course, when I call her out on it, her reply is normally, "...that's different."
Joe Jackson had it right.

One time, we were in our local shopping centre, thinking about having a cuppa and perhaps a bun. Ahead of us in the queue were a couple of elderly women who were definitely in the market for some baked goods. I had already been feeling mischievous, and when one of the women asked her companion a poorly-phrased question, my reply was more of a knee-jerk reaction than anything that was thought through...

...here comes Muffin, Muffin, the mule....

Daylight rubbery

Time for a little geekery. I am a relatively recent convert to the card game known as Magic; The Gathering.

I won't go into details, just to say that you have to beat opponents using cards featuring fantasy creatures, spells and enchantments. It can be quite competitive, and there are usually a lot of events going on each month. Currently, the Magic community is gearing up for the release of a new set of cards (Theros), one based around the ideas of Greek mythology.

It's been pretty hectic, as there have been a couple of pre-release events over this weekend just gone. In these, we got to see the cards and play with them for the first time in a couple of organised tournaments.

On the Saturday, I played spectacularly badly and wound up last of about thirty people - but at least I had fun. Yesterday was a tad different. For one thing, we were playing in teams of two. For another, me and my teammate actually had the temerity to place second.

Sweet.

Back to the Saturday, though. One player, who was there for both days, was toting around a foot-tall statuette of some Greek-style chappie, all in the name of a little extra luck.* For one match, he was placed against a young lady. Sixteen years of age, looks a bit older and swears like a trooper. Oh, and you can hear her from the other side of a crowded room, which means that little snippets tend to intrude on your thoughts.

...I don't want to know....

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* A pity, then that his team was one of the ones we beat yesterday.... hehehehe...

Cartoon cats ahoy!

These guys are the brainchild of one of my friends. I call him Mikey, but he's also known as The Arty One. He's just started off a cartoon blog featuring these cats, based on a lifetime of observing their real-life counterparts. Only the introduction is up at the moment, but why not drop along all the same?

Stan and Tim's Imaginative Adventures

The great Greek flip-flop flop

Heh - say that fast three times in a row...

Anyway - as I mentioned in Monday's post, We have a friend from Greece visiting for a few days. Since she and Julie are familiar with each other, it was no effort to either of them to fall into an easy banter - especially when it came to taking digs at me. Julie may come out with some odd things now and then (yes, really!!), but she is very quick-witted, and usually manages to put me in my place with no problem.

However, the Sunday was the first day after our friend arrived and she was still somewhat jetlagged. Since I am really not at all good in the morning, Julie was pretty much the only bright spark in a sea of bleary dullness. It didn't help that I had the grand idea of taking our friend to her first car boot fair, an event which can be best described as a yard sale held in a field, where everyone turns up to sell their crap - I mean surplus goods.

As you can tell, you do get some turn up in vans; traders of one sort or another - but they have to pay a larger pitch fee as they will take up more space. Fair play. It is truly astonishing, though, just what people try to sell. Mind you, it's not nearly as astonishing as the fact that people will actually buy it. From rusty car parts, old Paul Young records (usually No Parlez) to a truly staggering amount of baby clothes and dog-eared paperback books, you will find pretty much everything.

On the other hand, you will also find the odd hidden gem, something that is just what you need. That rusty car part might be from an Aston Martin, a part that was last in production fifty years ago. If you are living on the breadline and are expecting a baby, this will be an ideal way to clothe your newborn tot. And yes, there are still some Paul Young fans out there.

As for me and Julie, we view these events as a good opportunity to add to our already substantial collection of hedgehog ornaments, toys and nick-nacks. It may have been at a car boot fair or in a charity shop that we managed to snag a lovely hedgehog doorstop.

Handsome chappie, no? Oddly enough, we haven't named this one, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

But I digress. This hedgehog is not simply for looks, we do utilise it as a doorstop. In fact, the door it is responsible for is that which belongs to the guest room, the room in which our friend is currently sleeping as I type this.

Back to the car boot fair. It had been a hot day and we had just dragged our still-weary friend around a dusty field. Having said that, we did treat her to her very first cream tea - with clotted cream, naturally. Unfortunately, despite the delicious refreshments and the elation of having bought her very first item from a car boot fair (a Stephen Fry book), our friend was unaccountably tired, so we bundled her off to her room for a bit of a rest.

On the way into her room, though, she stumbled. Now, I thought she had tripped over the 'hoggy doorstop, and, jokingly, accused her of mistreating that poor, poor animal, "I mean, what has it ever done to you?" I demanded.

How wrong I was. Our friend had not been guilty of mistreating a weighty stuffed animal, but of making a small misstep as a result of her footwear.

You mean, instead of being 'flop-flip'?

Heh. What a day; first boot fair, first cream tea - and her first Gem.

Spike goes all Statler on Skype

Throughout all the posts over the last few years, it may appear that I am slandering my poor wife and perhaps portraying myself as unfillable and perfect. However, while everything that I attribute to Julie is completely accurate, there is no way in hell I am free from an occasional faux-pas. If you look in the labels section (to the right), you will see one by the name of "Spike's Slips". Those are all mine, baby!

Today's Gem also features myself, but I have to confess to having an accomplice this time, via a conversation on Skype.

I've known Pierre a few years now, enough for us to realise we have a certain similarity of mindset. We'll object to the same things, laugh at the same things - and when we get together via one medium or another, we'll mine the same comedic vein of silliness - with an added dash or two of nerd and geek just to flavour the dish that bit more.

Most of the time, it will begin innocuously enough, usually with a throwaway remark or typo...

Actually, I'm quite liking that crossword idea... lol

I'm hoping everyone understand all the acronyms we used there. 'Wotnot', of course, is Julie's own little word of wonder (again, look in the labels on the right...).

As for me and Pierre, it has been said before, by many people - including us - that we are very much like this pair. All I'll say is that the one reminds me very much of one of my grandfathers. It must be the eyebrows...

ps - I'm hoping you realised the typo was blatantly intentional...

The bawdiest banisters

Well, it's a handrail, really.

My mother has trouble getting around now, and got a handyman in to fit a handrail on the wall side of her stairs to go with the banister and rail on the other side. Since I live half the country away, it's not that often that I get to visit, so my sister tends to do what she can - considering she has her own life to run too.

On one of the times both my sister and myself were visiting, I needed to go upstairs for something or other. On one step, I stumbled slightly and snatched at the new handrail for support.

Which moved.

Wait, what?

I took hold of the rail again and pushed lightly against it. I hadn't imagined it, the rail did move. I looked closely and realised that the bastard cowboy who had fitted it had only done the minimum possible. Certainly not enough for someone who relies on sturdy supports.

I went to my sister and showed her the problem. If you were shocked at my use of the term 'bastard cowboy' above, you definitely don't want to know what my sister spat out. Put it this way, it was more venomous than the nastiest of Australian creatures, and more virulent than the bubonic plague.

My little sister has such a genteel soul.

We discussed what needed to be done. Getting a proper professional in, for a start. I'd have done it, but I'm no use when it comes to DIY. I can put up a shelf, but you'd be unwise to load it up too much. For the moment, though, we couldn't do much, as it was the weekend, and I had to get home.

This was my suggestion:

Yeah. Sure, I gave her possibly the best feed line ever, but you know that comment of mine about my little sister being a delicate soul?
Forget it.

World Book Night 2013 - update

Hi folks, you may recall that for the last couple of years, we have been involved with World Book Night, which encourages people to read by the wonderful process of giving away brilliant books for free.

Well, we're at it again. This year, out of the twenty titles available, I chose to give away copies of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.
However, in keeping with our previous efforts, we will also be giving away other goodies too. Over the next few weeks, I will be introducing them. Here's the first; Skallagrigg by William Horwood.

This is my all-time favourite book. It's not a fantasy novel, but it has an invented mythology within it. It challenges you to face up to facts of life that are extremely uncomfortable. What would you do if you suddenly found you were the father of a cerebral palsied baby and that the child's severe handicap was due to the car accident that also killed your wife?

The threads in this book are woven together with such care and skill that you not only find you are able to follow Esther Marquand's life in various care homes and schools, but that you also want to. You want to help her along, cheer her on and doff a cap to her when she achieves something amazing.
I love Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. When Frodo leaves Middle Earth at the end of the book, I will cry rivers for him. Esther Marquand is different. My emotions for her are nowhere near as primal. However, for a middle-aged man with no severe handicap to find himself identifying with a frustrated, heavily cerebral palsied young girl (and later, young lady), that indicates writing of the highest calibre.
Don't just take my word for it, though - here's a great blog about it.

Skallagrigg is going to be one of the prizes for one lucky person in our free draw. Since it's been out of print for a long time, the copy on offer is not of the highest quality, but it's readable and won't fall apart on you.

That's it for this time - next week, I shall reveal one of the other prizes that will be up for grabs.