Search terms 8

Ah, the wierd and wonderful world of search terms. George Michael continues to be a popular theme, as does Kingston University, although for very different reasons…

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My worms and I

My worms and I have had a tumultuous relationship. When we first met (they were delivered to my door), I cut the bag open and peered inside and there they all were, just pink and wriggly and innocent-looking.

O, how exciting, I thought to myself. Hundreds of teeny tiny worms, all my own.

I felt like a proud mother. “The worms arrived,” I would tell people. “They’re doing really well in school (the mud).”

Mistakenly, as described in K is for…., I thought I had ordered a home for the worms. I had not. So the worms were put in a big saucepan to live until I could work out what to do. “Worms,” I was told in my worm blurb, “do not like sunlight and will automatically burrow down into the mud.”

Brilliant, I thought, I don’t need to worry about them. They will just burrow down.

Then the evening drew in and the natural light faded. And this is when the other part of the worm blurb, which I had not read, became relevant. “Worms,” this section read, “are naturally inquisitive and like to explore.”

Ah…

This is a problem….

After an evening out seeing friends, I got in quite late. It was probably after midnight.

Let me check my babies are ok, I thought to myself, smiling happily at my new status as full time mother. I opened the door to the little back porch type area where I had left them.

They.

Were.

EVERYWHERE.

And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. I switched on the main kitchen light and saw them crawling all over the kitchen floor! A good portion had made off in the opposite direction for the outside world but in their rush to get out had, stupidly, all mashed into a little hole at once and become stuck. I couldn’t get a hold on any of them and they couldn’t move (they are still there as it is impossible to get into).

Infuriated, I gave them a real telling off whilst gathering them up.

“You were supposed to burrow, you idiots, not climb out!” I raged, stomping around in the garden with a torch, picking them up off the path before they wriggled away into the cracks between the paving stones.

I think I lost quite a lot of my children that evening.

So I put all the ones back that I could find and put foil over the top of the saucepan to stop them escaping.

When I woke up in the morning to go to work, at about 6.20am, I went downstairs, rubbing my weary eyes and going to the kettle to make tea. And of course there were worms everywhere! Of course there were. I wouldn’t expect anything less. Impatient little things. I was ordering a home for them that day. But they just had to go running off, didn’t they?!

So there I was, at 6.20am, pre-morning tea, picking worms up from off my kitchen floor. I opened the little door and looked at what had happened. They had simply been too excited to stay still and had pushed little grooves in the foil to squirm out from underneath it.

“Right! That’s it! I’m getting the clingfilm out!” I told them sternly. And sure enough, over went the clingfilm. “You can’t escape this.”

In conversation with Danda later that day, he said, “You can’t put clingfilm over! They won’t be able to breathe.”

Ah. Right. Ok. Sure. I see.

Panic! The shift couldn’t end soon enough that day and I ran home, terrified there’d be a massacre and I’d be the one with blood on my hands. There was condensation on the clingfilm and the worms were barely moving! I tore it off and poked a few.

“Come on come on come on! Please be fine. Please be fine. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I forgot you needed to breathe, little worms! Come on, move!” After some poking and gently squeezing to resuscitate them, they started moving again, rather sluggishly. I brought them into the kitchen under the light and waited to see if they would burrow.

They did, thank god!

I then moved them into a massive bin and clingfilmed the top but poked loads of holes into it and left them in the kitchen overnight with the light on, as that was the only guaranteed way to keep them in the soil and not trying to make a run for it.

Their home arrived the next day so they were immediately transferred into it and have been there ever since. Apparently it takes a few months for my first lot of compost to be ready and mine’s not even been going a month so I’ve got a little wait before those naughty schoolchildren can prove to me that they’ve grown up to be contributing members of society.

They just chill down by the shed at the moment. I give them egg shells and vegetable peelings and they hide so I’ve not seen hardly any of them and am unsure if they’ve all died actually. But I faithfully put my vegetable peelings down there and hope for the best

P.S. I picked up the mop a few days ago to do the kitchen floor and three worms fell out!

Hilarious memories

After an evening of reminiscing about my gap year with a friend, I just had to share some of this nonsense with you. The highlights of the evening discussions were:

1. The time a friend flipped his car and was all stressed that the police would get him so ran off into the sand dunes. We had heard about it and been given a lift to where he was. We also ran off into the desert and were covering his white shirt with Lucy’s long skirt, to avoid him being seen by a helicopter….! When one has consumed much alcohol, this seems to make perfect sense, that in a place where there is no ambulance service, they would be sending a helicopter out in the night to catch a man who had flipped his car. He was quite shaken so in my 18 year old mind, I decided the best way to be supportive was to declare my love for him. (I didn’t love him at all. I’m not even sure what made me say it.)

2. The time Lucy and I got in a car with a total random who drove us to Cape Town and, right before the border, while stopped at a petrol station, both went to the toilet at the same time. We suddenly realised what we’d done and rushed outside. Thankfully he hadn’t driven off with our stuff.

3. The time our friend, Ramon, came over and we made up a story about a purple fairy who lived in the garden called Finesse, then went down to the tree and started calling out to her.

4. The time another of the gap year volunteers went off with some random guy after two days in Cape Town, then came back one day, told us his name was Rudolph and he’d asked her to marry him and she’d said yes! (She didn’t end up staying and marrying him, much to the annoyance of the other girl at her project, who had to deal with her for the next year.)

5. The time I tried to climb up on the ledge round the house to look in the bathroom window, where Lucy had locked herself and fallen asleep after a night out. My arms and legs couldn’t handle the exertion of the climb so I just let go and fell straight backwards on to the ground. I’m surprised I survived that fall, actually.

6. All the times we ate plates of rice and faux dumpling-things or the peanut butter sandwiches the kids used to make as part of their activities at school, cause we couldn’t afford anything else! A box of Frosties was BIG news in our house! We only bought those when we’d just been paid and were feeling really flash with our money.

Potential life-changing stuff here today

Ok, I’m calling today’s post Cop Out Thursday, as I woke up late and am having a friend over for breakfast so haven’t really time to write the post about worms that I was planning to (don’t worry, I don’t mean tapeworm, I mean my actual worms that make compost for me).

So what’s going to happen is this. I’m going to show you a collection of photos which don’t really mean an awful lot to anyone and were picked in a hurry. Are you up for that? Ok, let’s do it.

First up, it’s a dinosaur drinking from a glass….

Second, we have a quote from a magazine that I’m sharing with you because I feel it is important.

I’ve always felt the same way about free standing cupboards actually.

Next is a really old recipe with the original spelling of the word ‘apricot’ which made me giggle. Rather like a small child.

Next up, a Christmas tree made of chocolate slabs. Obviously. (I did say it wouldn’t really mean anything, didn’t I?)

And now, some tomatoes in my garden.

And finally, to see off this fabulous, well-thought-out, life-changing, awesome post, a photo of me with some clingfilm stretched over my face.

O wait, one last one, Yaya with an egg box on his face.

Danda and the cinema

When Danda was younger, there was a cinema club on Saturdays that the young kids could go to. They’d watch a film together in the morning and they even had their own song:

“We are the boys and girls well known as the minors of the A! B! C!
And every Saturday all line up,
To watch the films we love and shout aloud with glee!
We like to laugh and have a singsong,
Just a happy crowd are we,
We’re all pals together,
The minors of the A! B! C!”

When not engaging in this fellow cinema-goer love, Danda spent a significant portion of his childhood sneaking in to the cinema by the side door.

The stories are plenty. There was the time when their friend went to the toilet during the film and found the box with the main electrics. Inevitably, he needed to test it so he turned everything off then on again before returning to his seat and asking Danda and co if anything had happened. They said that the whole cinema had been plunged into darkness and the film had gone off. The friend thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard so got ready to make another trip for some mischief-making.

Unfortunately for him, the first blackout had alerted the cinema staff to the presence of a group of young boys who had not paid to get in. In came one of the staff with a policeman (they were pretty unoccupied in those days) to get those naughty boys.

The naughty boys, however, had noticed the arrival of the policeman and hotfooted it out via the fire escape. Conveniently enough (some might say it had been planned ahead), a bucket of water was on hand and while closing the door behind them, the bucket was left balancing precariously on the top.

They retreated to a safe distance and watched. The policeman charged through the door, followed by the cinema staff member, both of whom got drenched as the bucket fell. The boys laughed and laughed! In the confusion which followed they ran as fast as their little legs would take them, out of the cinema and off to a good hiding place.

There was the time they got bored during the film and went for a wander and ended up on the roof of the cinema.

There was the time they sneaked in to the box and worked out how to turn the film off.

Ah, the joyful exuberance of youth!

The Theatre-Goers Manifesto

I have been to two musicals in the past few days and it gave me some food for thought. At the end of Thriller (which, strictly speaking, isn’t really a musical), there was a moment of seriousness when they sang Heal The World and Man In The Mirror and told us to think about Michael’s message of peace. This then descended into chaos when they did Bad and everyone got up and danced like maniacs but as we left, I was feeling the MJ love and thought I might try incorporating a little of his lyrics into my day to day life.

Then last night, we went to see The Rocky Horror Show and my mind was blown. I didn’t really have a clue what was going on but it didn’t seem to matter. There was much wooping and dancing. I do like a good woop. Every time one of the characters said something, a group of dedicated Rocky Horror fans up the front yelled something and then everyone laughed.

The best example of this was when Brad and Janet knocked on the door of the house to ask if they could use the phone and the butler guy said something like, “Well, you’d better…”

And out of the blue, a large section of the audience yelled, “FUCK OFF!”

Clearly, there was a lot of fun being had and I do think it is important to remember to have fun so I have made the following theatre-based manifesto for my life….

If ever I feel something is wrong, “I’ll start with the (wo)man in the mirror” but, more importantly, whilst doing so, I will always “jump to the left before I step to the riiiiiiight.” That part is important. The good thing is that “I’m gonna make a change” and “it’s gonna feel real good.” But while thinking about what’s wrong, I realised that “maybe the rain isn’t really to blame” and maybe the problem is that I’m a “sweet transvestite from Transylvania.” You can see how that would be a problem, right? People say, “I’m bad, I’m bad, you know it,” but I haven’t got time for that nonsense. Because I know what to do when things get tough. I’ll remember not to “get flustered, use a bit of mustard.” Great advice.

Well, that’s me sorted. I was getting all bothered about what to do but the theatre this week has sorted that all out.

And before I go, a little word on MJ and his song “Liberian Girl,” which I love. I definitely thought it was called “Librarian Girl” when I was younger. And I think that’s why I loved it. And loved Michael Jackson. I knew he recognised the importance of books and what a fabulous job librarians do.

On that note, I’m off. Enjoy your Sunday…..

Why don’t I have a Michelin star yet?

Ok, so who is organising this nonsense? Where’s my bloody Michelin star? I shake my proverbial fist at you, food gods. It’s not like I don’t try. I do try. Very hard. Look (those breadsticks and crackers are all homemade)…

And look….

And look…

Yes, Mr Michelin, I made that. And no, your eyes are not deceiving you. That is homemade walnut and honey semifreddo you can see on the far right there. It’s all homemade, Mr Michelin. Including the cantuccini.

You want more? I got more.

And more…

All homemade. Even the pasta.

Now, Michel Roux and Rene Redzepi, because I know you’re both reading, it’s no good pretending you don’t, could you two sort this thing out for me. I honestly don’t get what’s taking so long.

Rene, I’m right up your street. I’d fit in perfectly at Noma. Did I tell you I foraged some nettles the other day?! Yeh. You see? That’s changed your mind, hasn’t it? I even bought a book about foraging today. A book, that’s right! Shit just got serious.

Now go get this thing sorted, people! I’ll keep an eye on the post.

Thanks, guys.

Vegetable chat

Pretext to this conversation = I have been foraging once. Once.

This is a conversation I had with some of the other volunteers yesterday at Ham House.

Volunteer 1: “Oo, this asparagus is huge! Is it from the kitchen garden?”

Me: “Yeh. The gardeners just brought it over. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Volunteer 2: “I don’t know how they’ve got it so soon either. The warm weather hasn’t been here long.”

Volunteer 1: “The cabbage in my vegetable patch has only just put in an appearance and my cherry tomatoes are yet to arrive.”

Volunteer 2: “Mine have only just started to grow and are still really small.”

Me: “I know what you mean. The long cold winter has meant hardly anything has grown.”

Volunteer 2: “Yeh.”

Me: “I mean, the best thing I’ve found has been nettles, because the winter doesn’t affect them.”

Volunteer 1: “Nettles?”

Me: *all knowledgeable* “Yehhhhh. They’re great. I make nettle soup with them or steam them and have them as a vegetable with my dinner.”

Volunteer 2: “That sounds interesting.”

Me: *super casual* “O, I’m always doing it. It’s so easy. I just come to the river with a glove and a tupperware box. I love it. I forage loads of stuff. Some people call me Madame Forager, actually.”

Volunteer 1: “O, right. What other stuff do you get?”

Me: *panic* “O, there’s loads of things about. Loads. Edible flowers… Sorrel…. Nettles….”

Volunteer 2: “Wow, that’s brilliant.”

Me: “It is, yeh. I love it.”

From bolt cutters to the Bible

Good morning everyone. Today is Wednesday so I’m handing over to my guest blogger for a recap on his Bank Holiday activities…

 

I’m writing this week’s post at the end of a brilliantly sunny Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK. These holidays have a reputation for two things: getting bad weather and long traffic jams. The latter because so many people decide it would be a good idea to go out for the day. They do seem to decide this en masse and so end up travelling out in queues of traffic and then, as if by mass telepathy, they travel home at the same time as everyone else causing big queues on the return journey. Our day was good but will fill you in on that next week.

I checked to see what happened on the day I am writing this (6^th May) back in history. It seems to have been quite an eventful date. Thanks to Chambers Book of Days for the following info:

In 1954 Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes – his time was 3m 59.4s.

A number of important people were born on this date (6^th May):

French Revolutionary politician Maximillian Robespierre (1758), Psychoanalyst (& neurologist) Sigmund Freud (1856), Film actor Rudolph Valentino (1895), former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (1953), American actor George Clooney (1961)

Other May 6^th events:

In 1642 the Canadian city of Montreal was founded (as Ville Marie)

In 1937 the Hindenburg airship crashed while it was attempting to dock with its mooring mast at Lakehurst, New Jersey. 97 were on board and 35 were killed.

In 1994 the Channel Tunnel (between the UK & France) was opened.

So you can see it has been quite a date for important things to happen.

Interestingly on this date, in 1536, Henry VIII ordered that a copy of the Bible was to be placed in every English church and what I did last Saturday relates to this indirectly.

However, before I tell you about Saturday, Friday kicked off my week-end with something rather bizarre. It was time to give the grass its first cut this year. Out I went to the shed which had been padlocked through the winter. This year our winter seems to have dragged on rather along time and everyone (here in the UK) has commented on how long the cold weather has continued for. (Up to last week our nights were still hitting temps close to freezing!) Anyway I thought I could do a whizz round with the mower before Saturday which was going to be a really busy day (which we’ll come to).

I put the key in the lock and tried to turn it – nothing. I waggled it about and bashed it with a hammer a bit – still nothing. It seems that I’d now found out the reason why the lock I’d bought last summer had been such a bargain – it was rubbishy and just one winter had caused it to rust up. I now felt like a contestant on a new game show – no, not Who Wants To Be A Millionaire - but Who Wants To Be A Grasscutter!

Question 1: You have come to get your mower out of the shed but the lock is rusted up. What do you do?

A – Sit down & cry

B – Try some 3-in-1 oil

C – Use a sledgehammer

D – Use bolt cutters

I was struggling at this point so I decided to phone a friend. “I think it’s D he said.” He also said he had some bolt cutters. Well that was good enough for me. I leapt out of the chair and drove to his place and picked them up. Now I have used bolt cutters in my work on occasion so when he said his were big I’d said not to worry I could handle them.

Here’s the picture of them

They weigh 21lbs (1 stone & a half); they are nearly 43” (109 cm) long. I managed to get them home but trying to lift them into a horizontal position so I could snip the lock off was quite a feat. Anyway I managed it. Now you’re probably wondering just how big the padlock was. Well take a look at this next picture. It shows the cutters, the padlock – it’s that tiny thing up at the top left of the cutters, and as an indication of size I put a wooden broom handle (without the brush head) alongside the cutters.

Oh well they did the job even if a slight case of overkill.

Saturday dawned. I was booked for a whole day of lectures at one of the halls in the University in Liverpool city centre. I had planned the journey starting with a mere 10 min train journey a couple of stops along the line towards the city centre. How hard could that be? I knew the time of the train as it was from my local station; they’re every half hour. I just needed to make sure I wasn’t late as the next one would get me there too late. I walked and got to the station with about 7 mins to spare to be greeted by a notice: “Due to engineering work on the line a bus replacement service is in operation”. I went outside – no bus. I went back inside and asked when the bus replacement service was due. “It’s already left”, the man said. When I pointed out that the train was scheduled to leave at 8.50 and it was still only 8.47 how could it be a replacement. It was then he told me that the buses don’t keep the same time as the trains. That meant that if I waited for the next one it would get me there too late for the start time. So off back home I walked and then drove to a station on a different train line; this line has a 15 min service and more importantly they weren’t digging it up on a Bank Holiday week-end! I parked the car and sped in. The train arrived a couple of mins later and when I got out in the town centre and walked to the lecture hall I actually arrived 30 mins early!

The lectures were on the subject of Archaeology & the Bible. There are many who believe the Bible stories and accounts of past events are a kind of made up mythology. This view is easy to understand when you see the way the popular press and the film industry have treated certain areas: think of the recent series (1981-2008) of Indiana Jones and the ark (as in a chest, not Noah’s Ark), the Temple of Doom, the Last Crusade, etc as well as many down the years that have not followed the Bible’s version of a particular event.

The first speaker highlighted just how many books had been written on the sensationalising of various “Quests” to find articles related to ancient Israel & Egypt. He also drew attention to the fact that they were thin on factual detail themselves while criticising traditional views for the same thing.

The main speaker was from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois and he tackled two other contentious areas: that of the time the Israelites spent in Egypt and then their route back to their home, which we call “The Exodus”. Again a fascinating look at the facts and how to interpret them.

The day was closed by a look at the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible which has been dated to the reign of the Greek speaking Egyptian king Ptolemy II in the early 3^rd C BC. Its Egyptian features were analysed and briefly its impact on the New Testament.

When you listen to guys who have studied in their field for a long time (one guy over 40 years) you need to give their views a fair hearing and there was a lot to take away and ponder.

And finally, on a more light-hearted note:

On a recent visit to a bird sanctuary, I was in the part where they keep the kestrels. It was late and the sun had gone down. I thought I could hear one of the keepers singing these words:

“Enola gay, you should have stayed at home yesterday
Aha words can’t describe the feeling and the way you lied.”

There was a lot of noise like a vacuum cleaner also as he sang. I asked the receptionist about it and she said,

“Oh, that’s our kestrel man – hoovers in the dark” (say it quickly!)

HaHaHa!

Looking through old photo albums

This one is of my brother and I, when I was about two, I think. I had both my legs in plaster when I was little and had very recently had it off when this photo was taken.

This is me in earlier mentioned plaster, hence I’m in a wheelchair. I look very uncertain about something….

I think my brother’s sweatband really brings this photo alive.

Christmas lunch. That’s me in the orange hat. Everyone else was too cool to wear theirs.

My friend Naomi and I in our best sporting gear (we didn’t play any sport) and centre partings in our hair.

I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on in this photo. The curtains hairdo, the Hello Kitty t-shirt, the gold chain thing, the non-smile on my face.

On the left, in the white jumper, that’s me. Yep, I sported the fringe and bob look then. It wasn’t my best look.

This is me age 19 on a zipwire thing over the Yellow River in China. Boy, do I look excited!