Blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles

Over the years Husband and I have become occassionally-avid players of boardgames, favouring in particular those of a fantastic bent. Our first love was Talisman (1st edition* I think - the one where the expansion sets come in a wild variety of graphic styles and don't really fit together with the main board in any meaningful way) and we have enjoyed this in many locations with many different friends.

More recently we have become rather enamoured of Arkham Horror, a fabulously complex little beauty that has you battling co-operatively against a different one of H P Lovecraft's Great Old Ones each game. Yesterday we took on Nyarlathotep - a damned close-run thing in the end, what with one of us in the Assylum and two more barely clinging on to both sanity and stamina whilst battling hoards of nasties in the streets of Miskatonic University. With four of us in the game it took about 5 hours and many cups of tea to get the job done. Fortunately it all ended without loss of life, and a hearty and well-deserved curry was enjoyed by the victors.

* A fourth edition is due out in October - you can see an overblown and rather crap trailer for it, if you really want to waste eye-power in that way.

Who needs friends ...

... when you've got this:


Visit Friends of Mister Roy


Yep, the world of Web 2.0 sucks me even further into its gaping maw as I now ning and twitter with the best of 'em.

Frank's funeral

So, yesterday was the day of Frank's funeral and a hard day it was, but I think we gave him the best good-bye we could manage under the circumstances. My brother Ken oversaw the proceedings and friend Chris spoke with affecting wit of Frank's renaissance-man life, love of Merrydown cider and house full of musical gadgets (many of which he'd made himself), while later at the 'do' a friend from work explained the significance of pink shirts. Afterwards we talked of our beloved friend and of ourselves, swapping family news and gossip, talking about the easy stuff because the other stuff was just too hard.

And despite the utter tragedy of the whole affair, it was a day of strange, almost guilty, pleasures: meeting up with old friends, some of whom not seen for decades, and finding the old connections still intact despite my neglect; being back in my beloved Black Country and hearing my accent echoed back to me in many voices; taking tea and cake on Stourbridge High Street, familiar from the days when Roy used to live there but strangely unfamiliar too; driving through the country lanes of Shropshire, most beautiful county in England, and remembering it as our old stamping ground from the Wolverhampton days; and finally westering home up the M6 with a huge orange sun beside us and Blazin' Fiddles on the CD. Not putting the 'fun' in funeral exactly, but reminding us of our connection to life.

You've got a friend

Husband has recently been fiddling around with Facebook in an effort to understand its appeal to the Young Folk. Not wanting to be left out I done got me one o' them critters m' self.

At first I thought the whole thing was a bit (a) fatuous (b) puerile and (c) pointless, but having played with it quite a bit when I should have been transcribing interviews or reading Very Hard Books I'm really beginning to warm to it.

Strangely, since Facebook is a so-called Social Networking Site, its appeal to me is directly related to my lifelong difficulty in making friends. Because I'm articulate and funny, people mistake me for an extrovert (if that binaried nomenclature has any real validity) when I am in fact a much stranger beast, an introvert in search of an audience. This is to say, I find the company of others both frightening and draining (the more so when they are strangers) but I'm driven to perform a version of myself to entertain these fearful entities, in order to feel part of the human race.

This need to 'dance my dance' has resulted in my keeping not one but four, count 'em, four blogs (all with pretty much identical content): A Lull in the Proceedings (LJ), Thinking of Wittering (blogger), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (wordpress) and Celia Johnson's Enormous Face (blog.co.uk). Lull was my first foray into the blogosphere and initially the LJ friending mechanism drove me to distraction. I longed for friends but could never decipher the protocols for making it happen. I'd gaze enviously at other people's friends lists, darkly muttering 'nobody loves me, everybody hates me, going down the garden to eat worms'. Things got so bad that I had to lay off the whole blog thing for a couple of years until I'd calmed down. It only got better when I realised what I was doing and came to appreciate that, as in fleshworld, I am a creature who requires a few, close friends and a big audience.

So where does Facebook fit in? Well, with the fear of other people comes the retincence, the feeling that any personal communication from me could only ever be regarded as an impertinence and an imposition. My habit is, therefore, to lose touch with people, even those I really like, rather than engender in them an imagined irritation. Facebook, however, with its poking and message walls, aquariums and gardens, allows me to send gentle and not-very-importunate reminders of my existence that require no more response than the occassional poke back to let me know I'm still human. Furthermore, its endless array of personality-divulging titivations, which inform the world of your favourite books, films, TV show, backpacking holidays, llama farms and so on, have enormous appeal for my Inner Performer.

So now, while I still think Facebook is fatuous and puerile, I no longer think it useless.

MySpace though - that's just ugly!

Plant problems

It's a glum old day in the office this morning - everybody else is on holiday, so I am alone with just a fan heater and some ailing plants for company. My aloe vera plant, which was doing so well last year, has suddenly started to develop crispy brown bits. Could this mean it needs water? Odd, since it survived the last twelve-month on barely a teaspoon of liquid. Or am I perhaps overwatering? Eek - how do I tell? Add to this the fact that my trail-y creeper-y vine-y thing is looking a bit the worse for wear and only one conclusion is possible: I am NOT Good With Housplants.

Alternatively they might have Sick Office Syndrome. I do after all work in a location which requires cooling fans in the middle of winter and warming fan-heaters at the height of summer. Not the way to lessen our carbon footprint, is it chaps?

Something big in a small box

Last week I wrote that my friend Frank's wife had died. Over the weekend Frank died too. Official cause of death is still to be determined but we all know he died of a broken heart.

I first met Frank (whose given name was Neil) when he was 16, so I would have been 18-ish. A friend of my little brother Ken, Frank was notable for his fierce intelligence, extraordinary skill with maths, mighty sense of humour, encyclopaedic knowledge of what we would now call indie music, and for having, at 16, a full beard which made him look older than most of his teachers.

When I left University in 1979 I was honoured to join the group of Ken's friends of which Frank was a part. Together the group made regular trips to The Trumpet in Bilston, sought out the weird and wonderful pubs of the Black Country, played hide-and-seek at midnight up the top of Clent and, because Frank was married at 18 and therefore had his own place, had many wonderful parties.

Even now Frank-isms litter my speech. Because of Frank I say 'Cheers Chief' (sometimes abbreviated to 'CC'), and 'awroight maaaaayt' (trans. 'Alright mate') in an exagerated Blackheath accent. Because of Frank I call underwear 'unterwegs', and quote one of the best jokes he, or anyone, ever made: 'Ah, the badger's sett ... but the weasel's still a bit runny'.

He shaped my musical tastes as well. With him I went to see The Fall, and The Residents (speculating in the pub afterwards that under those enormous eyeballs lurked Eric Clapton, George Harrison or other rock legends). He lent me bootlegs Elvis Costello tapes and introduced me to Little Feat. And because of Frank I listened far too many times to a rather odd piece of contemporary clasical music called The Sinking of the Titanic, which he used to play as a way of getting rid of people at the end of a party.

In the early 80s he invited me to sing in The Leisure Pets with him and Paul and the drum machine (called Ronnie) - I was pretty rubbish really but Frank let me keep on singing. So, fragments of his songs are part of my consciousness too: 'son, don't vote - they all make you wear funny coloured shirts'; 'something small in a big box'; 'pointless packaging'; and the drum machine programmed to sound like the steam hammer at Lench's chain works.

So, even though I haven't seen him since we moved north, there he is, fragments of Frank cropping up in everything I do - sadly missed but never forgotten.

Frank Skidmore
Rest in peace, m' dear old thing

Big head

If you go here and watch the Short Cuts Documentary Video, you will eventually see me coming over all rhapsodic about Celia Johnson's enormous face. Rather confusingly, the preceding bit (shot in almost total darkenss as an accidental homage to Clint Eastwood) features one of our esteemed Film Studies Lecturers talking about the 1979 gang movie The Warriors and the doc is cut such that I appear to be talking about that film and not, as I actually was, Brief Encounter. I am however mightily tickled by the idea of an archetypal icon of the English middle classes going all hard-assed on the gangs of New York. Bet old Celia had a mean left hook, and woe betide if you got on the wrong side of her broken bottle, eh, Trevor!

Surprised by joy

So, to banish gloom, I have been working on something to present tonight at my Quaker Meeting. Every month a few of us meet for something we call Creative Listening, taking it in turns to bring a poem or snippet of some writing we think might inspire us all to deep thoughts. Flicking through my poetry books I came on this one, a rare thing in that it is about (among other things) a Quaker Meeting for Worship. Appropriate for its Quaker-ness then but also because both it and a good friend have reminded me that joy is a pretty special thing and not to be sniffed at.

Daffodil Ministry* by U A Fanthorpe

One of the more difficult denominations.
No artless formula of psalms, collect,
And-now-to-God-the-father; unrelenting ministry
Of the solo conscience. Mankind’s cheerless concerns
Can drop in here like friends

And yet the daffodils, she says

And yettishness: a state of mind.

O yes, of course the world is harsh
And suffering, O yes — and yet
This morning, as I walked along
And saw the daffodils, I thought —
And so forth, daffodilling on.

Easier not to meet each others’ eyes.

And yet, and yes, the daffodils
Making their point, in scurfy gardens,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Municipally distributed, like grit.
Wherever a bulb can lodge and multiply,
Long-legged, gape-mouthed, a yellow hop in air,
Daffodils are.
Homelessness, poverty,
Injustice, executions, arms trade, war
Are too.

The stillness isn’t easy with itself.

And yet, and yet.

*Daffodil ministry - every spring a Friend notices how lovely the daffodils look as they come to meeting for worship, and they minister about how lovely the world is. Generally a pejorative term to describe uncritical and predictable ministry.
from Quaker Jargon Buster

Dying - hate that stuff!

Am not the cheeriest of mortals at the moment. On the same day my aunty died last week, I found out the wife of an old friend (one of the original Scouts-in-Bondage shareholders) had died of pancreatic cancer. She was no age, not much older than me in fact.

Time was when all the significant life-stage events I celebrated were weddings and birthdays and other happy stuff. Now, the only time I see my extended family en masse is at yet another funeral. And that wedding we went to a couple of weeks ago was the first we'd attended for about 7 years.

Aunty Muriel
Rest In Peace

meanwhile in Emmerdale ...

(haven't been here for a while)

... Rosemary, The Black Widow of the Yorkshire Dales, has come over all Mrs Danvers on her mournfully baren daughter-in-law Perdy, doping her orange juice, hiding her kitten and bestrewing the attic with baby clothes. Why the sinister old bird is tripping merrily down the Gaslight path to Charles-Boyer-Ville I have yet to determine. Could be she has some sinister outcome in mind or could be she's simply run out of spiders to de-leg.

Damned fine telly, though.

The horror, the horror

Off down to Brighton for the weekend to see our friend Stav marry his Russian sweetheart, Anna.

Perhaps foolishly, I have agreed to travel by train. Now, I'm not much of a one for train travel normally, preferring to contribute generously to the destruction of the planet from the comfort of my tiny blue car rather than to suffer the mobile phone conversations and tinny drumbeats of other rail passengers. However, thanks to the ever-generous Richard Branson and his cheap ticket scheme, we had a First-Class journey to Brighton at Christmas which I found to be very acceptable. And so I've agreed to give it another try, though this time we'll be travelling with the plebs (cheap first-class tickets are not as readily available for weekend travel as they are for the dead days between Christmas and New Year, it seems) so the journey may not be the unalloyed joy it was in December.

In solidarity with the lovely Anna, I have packed for my on-train entertainment The Night Watch, described on its cover as 'Russia's answer to J K Rowling', which is absolutely nothing to recommend it in my opinion (but we won't go into my utter loathing of the Rowling Phenomenon here, lest we slip into a darkness from which we may never return). Fortunately I already knew a bit about the book and Xherri Potterski it most assuredly ain't, which is otlichno as far as I'm concerned.

Camera shy

I find myself in a bit of a quandary. Having had a substantial birthday cheque from The Mater I have almost decided to buy a new camera but am torn between a DSLR and a compact. I'd love the flexibilty you get from an SLR but am remembereing that I gave up my old 35mm one because I got tired of carrying all the kit around. So I think maybe I should go for a high-end compact, but then I'd loose out on the control that the SLR would give me. And then, I think, if I'm looking at compacts, I couldn't do much better than the Contax T2 (35mm) I already own, so why don't I just stock up on film for that puppy, and then use the birthday cheque to buy a really good scanner for the digitising plus a much better printer (which I'll need whatever I choose to do).

And then I think, if I wait a year, everything will get a bit cheaper or a bit better or a bit lighter or a bit functionalitier (or any/all of the above), so maybe I'll just hang on a bit ...

And so it goes ...

In the meantime I just keep taking not-bad snaps on my camera phone and thinking I could be doing much better if only I could make a decision.

Help!

Hey, big spender

Best Beloved has recently been lured into reading my copy of the classic 1930 boys' adventure story by Geoffery Prout, Scouts in Bondage, which has been lurking on my bookshelves for many years. As he describes in his post, the book achieved a minor degree of fame in the late 20th century on account of its mildly comedic title.

How the book came into my possession was on thiswise: many, many years ago a group (7) of us, camping in North Wales one excessively hot August Bank Holiday weekend*, happened upon the volume in a second-hand bookshop in Machynlleth. It was priced at £1.25. Of course, because of the extremely chortle-able title, we all wanted to buy it but, being both penurious and fond of beer, weren't prepared to stump up the readies, thinking it better to hang on to our ha'penny for the coming night's drinkage. Then we came up with the idea of a consortium purchase - divide the cost into 7 (17-and-a-half pence each or thereabouts) and we each buy a share and circulate the book amongst us. So that's what we did (though one of our number, being even tighter than the rest of us, wasn't prepared to shell out, so her more Rockerfellerian husband bought two shares - why on earth we didn't just divide by six instead I'll never know).

Over the years I have made it my business to acquire, by fair means or foul, the shares of my fellow Bondage-ites, ending up with five of the original seven and permanent caretakership of the book. Since good quality copies sell (according to AbeBooks) for anything up to £150, I'd say it's not been a bad investment. Wish I could remember which of us has the remaining two shares though, then at last it could be mine, all mine ...

* this weekend was also noteworthy for the fact that temperatures rose to the high 70s but, in a classic demonstration of my extreme neshness, I remained huddled in my duffel coat complaining that it was 'a bit chilly' I had the last laugh though: everyone else suffered spectacular sunburn and shed skin like snakes for weeks afterwards, while I smugly flaunted my pale-and-interesting-and-I'm- never-going-to-get-skin-cancer-(at-least-not-from-sunburn) look in their red flaky faces.

By the many blogs of Vishnu

Have just downloaded an addon for Firefox (ScribeFire) that should let me post to multiple blog, so should finally be able to keep both of the blighters up-to-date. Am therefore checking out the functionailty with this little post.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Non angli sed angeli

Am listening to festive CDs in an attempt to "get Christmassy". Currently on the turntable (?) is Comfort and joy: a Christmas Celtic sojourn, and it is this subtitle which gives me cause to saddle up the old hobby horse and take it for a bit of a canter.

Don't get me wrong - this is a great CD, and without doubt Very Christmassy. My problem is that it is billed specifically as "Celtic" and yet contains a number of (very splendid) English pieces. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, these are all Celtic countries. England however is most definitely not Celtic - England is Anglo-Saxon. This is not to say that the one is better than the other, or that there are no Celtic influences in English folk music. It's just that the mindless lumping together of our islands' folk traditions under the Celtic banner means that the subtleties and ambiguities of the different traditions are lost and, more importantly, the distinctive voices of the English rural working classes are made invisible.

(The same kind of thing happened with the film of The Lord of the Rings. More than once in the supporting documentary footage(1) Peter Jackson or one of his apparatchiks talks about wanting to capture the "Celtic feeling" of the books. Wrong! LOTR is not Celtic - Tolkien was very clear that in writing this, he was attempting to create an English mythology.)

So, if'n y'd like to hear a quintessentially English folk carol, have a listen to the snippet of Shepherds arise(2) on Amazon - a tiny taster of England's Glory. And if you live in the States, you can hear it in full here. English folk music doesn't get much better than this little beauty.

Non celtici sed angli.

Gut Yule!

(1) extended DVDs - yeah, I know, very sad!
(2) this is a very good version by Waterson-Carthy, on whom I don't normally go a bundle . There's an even better version by The Copper Family, veteran folk singers from Sussex, which I recommend you seek out and purchase this instant.

Miserable sinner

I was very angry today (justifiably so, I must add) and took my anger out on some poor unsuspecting call-centre worker who didn't derserve it. Call centres are such a ubiquitous part of 21st century commerce that it's easy to forget that the people who work in them are not the company they work for. They're usually just lowly aparatchiks struggling on poor wages and lousy conditions.

So now I am filled with remorse.

I have phoned back and apologised - not for being angry (which, as I've said, was entirely justified) but for making this poor soul the target of my anger.

Don't feel much better though. In fact I feel like a complete miserable idiot and, what's worse, a Bad Person!

Having said that, the call-centre person at the Royal Mail the other day did a much better job of handling Angry Caller than did today's. Royal Mail Woman was not in the least defensive, was friendly and charming, offered me a hearftfelt apology for my trouble and sidetracked me into a bit of banter about the name 'Jennie' (her daughter's name too apparently). She also dealt with my complaint efficiently and to my utter satisfaction. Very different from today's experience in every way.

Which however neither justifies nor excuses my behaviour.

Sorry!

Mists and mellow fruitfulness my arse!

I have to say, I'm not the greatest fan of autumn. It is a time of the year when lots of Bad Things seem to have happened in my world. Or perhaps, it is not that more Bad Things have happened in autumn than at any other time of the year, but simply that the wet, grey descent into winter amplifies the misery. Any road, whatever the reason, today is a day for moaning, so here goes.

On Monday I betook myself to the oncologist for my annual checkup and, as predicted, was taken off Tamoxifen and put onto this aromatase inhibitor thingy called Letrozole. No bad thing, per se, since Tam is useless for old ducks like me, whereas Let is apparently Just The Ticket.

So that's the good news. However, like a bad 70s comedy sketch, hard on the heel of the good news comes the bad: I'll probably have to take the new tabletki for another five, count 'em, five years. Now, I know I should be grateful and all, that the creaking, cash-starved NHS is willing to stump up the readies for another 5 years of prophylaxis, and I know this is so much better than getting another cancer, but I'd painted this picture in my head of what it would be like when I got to the end of the Tamoxifen years next October. I'd be able to lose a bit of weight, my hair would regain some of its former glory, my fingernails would toughen right back up so I could wear nail varnish again, I'd stop having inexplicable aches and pains all over my bod, I might even stop the migraines, etc, etc. In short, I could go back to being Me, instead of Cancer Patient. I feel like a prisoner who's not just lost the chance of parole but whose sentence has actually been extended. I now have a whole new set of potential side effects to keep an eye open for and to worry about. I tell you, hypervigilance is a tiring game - I've played it for the last 4 years and I've had enough.

Bah, humbug!

On the bright side however, it appears to have stopped raining, so I shall get dressed and take a stroll into town to pick up a CD from the record shop and a pair of trousers from the Surly But Efficient Alterations Ladies.

Oh, and I think I have a cold a-coming.

Git on board!

Just back from Southport, having taken the car in for its 38,000-mile service. Apparently (and I say this because, having no automobilular knowledge of my own to fall back on, I am at the mercy of every lyin', cheatin', adjustable-spanner-wieldin' grease monkey in the world and have to take what they tell me on trust) it needed a Really Big Service this time round and so I return home nearly 600 quid the poorer. I comfort myself with the fact that work done today will not have to be done in Feb when it's due for its first MOT, but it's cold comfort indeed.

My ever-so-slight dischuffment was not ameliorated by the fact that today our Trusty Posty decided to leave a parcel not in the relative safety of the porch as is this normal custom but on the drive in full view of the pavement, where any passing Scally* could nick off with it without a "by your leave" or a "with your leave". I complained to the Royal Mail of course, and now have an apology, an Official Complaint Number and a sneaking feeling that Trusty Posty will somehow Wreak Awful Revenge upon us for dobbing him in to The Queen.

On the bright side though, we're off to Glasgow tomorrow to see the deeply splendid Common Rotation gigging at some low dive on Sauchiehall Street. Oh how we do love their subversive pop-folk-rock stylings!

*though if said Scally had indeed performed said act of thievery, he would have been mighty disappointed with the contents - somehow can't see a rather nice dress shirt going with the obligatory shell suit.

And, as a sartorial aside, there are apparently places in Liverpool where people habitually go to the supermarket in their nightwear and slippers. It's a mad world, my masters!

One monkey don't stop the show

So here we are, back from two weeks' holidays and fighting a wee touch of the post-holiday blues, as usual.

What we did on our holidays

The peregrinations started off in Dorset at the community, where a somewhat less-than-entertaining exec committee meeting occupied most of the weekend and gave me three migraines in two days. It was a bit of a relief, therefore, to relocate to Brighthelmstone for a few days with the in-laws.

Highlights of this visit were a trip to the Weald and Downland Museum (arguably the best open air museum I've ever visited) and the obligatory shopping expedition to North Laine, this time in search of boots*. Kapla! Not one but two pairs of rather fetching knee-high boots were purchased, one red and one black. The red ones, styled 'Women's Action Boots" on the box, apparently make me look like a superhero - Theology Girl, leaping tall steeples in a single bound perhaps. Not only that, but they are Vegetarian (i.e. plastic). And the black ones are very lovely also (not vegetarian, these, but actual dead cow). Sales Assistant remarked that they had "featured in this month's Vogue" and that's good enough for me.

Creaking under the weight of newly-acquired footwear, we quit Brighton for the less heady pleasures of Essex,where we checked out the fleshpots of Colchester, a pleasant but rather damp experience - the Essex drought was a bit less droughty than usual that day. Was also furnished with an opportunity to compare Spotty Dog impersonations with m' dear friend Anonymous Lesley (though not in her son's place of work as had previously been promised - curses!)

From thence we pressed northwards to the Lincolnshire Wold where we stayed in an utterly delightful cottage for the week. As a county Lincolnshire proved to be a pleasant diversion, but hasn't set it's seal in our hearts like Dumfries and Galloway did in June. It has, however, got some bloody great farm shops selling some of the best local cheeses you could wish for. Unfortunately for Best Beloved, over-consumption of cheese caused his sinuses swell to the size of golf balls, so I was left to polish off the goodies. Plus a whole box of sloe gin truffles. And some rather delicious blackcurrants in white chocolate. Well, I was on holiday, dammit!

Then we came home.

Ho hum.

* I'm not exactly sure what has caused my Imelda Marcos gene to kick in at this stage in my life (possibly hormonal?) but kick in it well and truly has.