*Cough, blush*

This is me tiptoeing back in, to the back of the room.

Husband has now mentioned his 'minor breakdown' on his own blog, so if anyone noticed one or both of us looking like Stevie Smith's Dead Man (not waving, but drowning) since September last year, well now you know why.

Sorry about that.

All much better now.


Happy New Year!

Primal Scream, My Arse

I find it very strange to imagine a bunch of well meaning therapists trying to encourage people to 'scream it all out' for £X per hour, but then when I think of new age therapists I think of lentil munchers of the hand-knitted-socks variety - lolloping, amiable, ineffectual, with a slight sagging to the shoulders, and not one of them over nine stone.

See? I'm not anti-therapist. I've never even gone to one, but you will note that I didn't insist that they all wear tight polyester trousers with a Golden Virginia tin in one back pocket and a mojo (bag of crystals) and notebook in the other. I didn't even demand that they all have 1970s-reject woolly-mammoth style shoulder-length hair, dodgy teeth and a penchant for multi-coloured stripy yak-herders' hats.

I've been using scream 'therapy' since my early teens, by which I mean I found a railway bridge that nobody else ever crossed, where, as the 5 o'clock through train stormed along underneath, I could scream

B O L L O C K S !

at the top of my voice and to my heart's content then skip back down the steps looking like the assistant Sunday School Teacher that I truly was.

That's why the idea of meek, well meaning, encouraging souls having anything to do with the sheer JOY of empowered fury seems so, well, ridiculous.

I don't like confrontation - mostly, I admit, because I scare myself.
I hate hate hate allowing adrenaline to turn me to a whimpering jelly. Puke.
My only recourse, then, is to storm, decry, brandish, exert, ROAR.

That's why I adore Pink.

Tonight I need to express myself, because tomorrow morning I must act as if nothing has happened and nothing phases me. I must act it so well that I achieve twice as much as normal and make it true as quickly as possible.

This is all part of my 'coping' mechanism ('coping'! How, how mediocre!) - this is all part of my opposition obliteration mechanism, because by tomorrow I'm fucked if I'll allow what ails me to still be getting in my way. I need for it, this inanimate, incorporeal beast of a situation, to 'understand' that I fucking win, in a way that only insolent, shitty little situations can. Or can't. Who gives a.

So. Pink. Wheeeee! This is how I will be exorcising the pumping fury that has no other out - by stomping up and down to this tune and these words FULL VOLUME - even if it all has to go on in my head...........

Hey, hey, man! What's your problem?
I see you tryin' to hurt me bad
Don't know what you're up against
Maybe you should reconsider
Come up with another plan
Cuz you know I'm not that kinda girl
That'll lay there and let you come first

You can push me out the window
I'll just get back up
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler truck
And I won't give a fuck
You can hang me like a slave
I'll go underground
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler but
You can't keep me down, down, down, down

Can't keep me down, down
Can't keep me down, down, down
Can't keep me down, down

Hey, hey, girl! Are you ready for today?
You got your shield and sword?
Cuz its time to play the games
You are beautiful
Even though your not for sure
Don't let him pull you by the scar
You're gonna get your feelings hurt

You can push me out the window
I'll just get back up
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler truck
And I won't give a fuck
You can hang me like a slave
I'll go underground
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler but
You can't keep me down, down, down, down

You can push me out the window
I'll just get back up
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler truck
And I won't give a fuck
You can hang me like a slave
I'll go underground
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler but
You can't keep me down, down, down, down

Everywhere that I go
There's someone waitin' to chain me
Everything that I say
There's someone tryin' to short-change me
I am only this way
Because of what you have made me
And I'm not gonna break!

You can push me out the window
I'll just get back up
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler truck
And I won't give a fuck
You can hang me like a slave
I'll go underground
You can run over me with your 18 wheeler but
You can't keep me down, down, down, down

Graaaaaaaaaa!!!!! (hehe)

ColorQuiz.com

Oooer!

Cheryl took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Her need to feel more causative and to have a wide..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

Schoolbook Funnies

Note: This is the shameless re-issue of a very old post which was a steal from somewhere else in the first place. So I have been caught out and judged brain-dead, twice, already. Suck it up.

Found this list. Laughed so hard.
Then fought my husband (a new and obsessively prolific blogger) over who was going to post it.

We compromised. Here's half; the rest is over at Wulfweard.

In some rocks we find the fossil footprints of fishes.

Many dead animals of the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be oil.

All animals were here before mankind. The animals lived peacefully until mankind came along and made roads, houses, hotels and condoms.

Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity.

The law of gravity says no fair jumping up without coming back down.

Galileo showed that the earth was round and not vice versa. He dropped his balls to prove gravity.

Mare Curie did her research at the Sore Buns Institute in France.

Men are mammals and women are femammals.

Proteins are composed of a mean old acid.

The largest mammals are to be found in the sea because there is nowhere else to put them.

Involuntary muscles are not as willing as voluntary ones.

Methane, a greenhouse gas, comes from the burning of trees and cows.

Water is melted steam.

Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.

A monkey has a reprehensible tail.

Some people say we condescended from the apes.

The leopard has black spots which look like round soars on its body.

Those who catch soars get leprosy.

A cuckoo does not lay its own eggs.

To remove air from a flask, fill the flask with water, tip the water out and put the cork in, quick.

Cadavers are dead bodies that have donated themselves to science. This procedure is called gross anatomy.

The cause of dew is through the earth revolving on its own axis and perspiring freely.

Hot lather comes from volcanoes, when it cools it turns into rocks.

A liter is a nest of young baby animals.

The earth makes a resolution every 24 hours.

Parallel lines never meet unless you bend one or both of them.

Algebra was the wife of Euclid.

A circle is a figure with no corners and only one side.

A right angle is 90 degrees Farenhight.

Genetics explains why you look like your father and if you don't, why you should.

A supersaturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.

The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects.

Respiration is composed of two acts, first inspiration, then expectoration.

An example of animal breeding is the farmer who mated a bull that gave a great deal of milk with a bull with good meat.

The hydra gets its food by descending upon its prey and pushing it into its mouth with its testicles.

If conditions are not favorable, bacteria go into a period of adolescence.

When oxygen is combined with anything, heat is given off. This is known as constipation.

The hookworm larva enters the body through the soul.

As the rain forests in the Amazon are shrinking, so are the Indians.

A major discovery was made by Mary Leaky, who found a circle of rocks that broke wind.

The skeleton is what is left after the insides have been taken out and the outsides have been taken off. The purpose of the skeleton is something to hitch meat to.

You can listen to thunder after lightning and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don't hear it, you got hit so never mind.

First posted 30 October 2005

Why I LOVE Spoof Adverts

(A.k.a. Why I LOVE The British Sense of Humour)

Here's the original. Its a beautiful, creative ad' and one that I believe was only ever shown in the UK. Enjoy.


Now here's the retort.



Perfect.

Or do you know better?

The Pleasures Of Being Odd

You have to try this.

Clearing out under the sink (no I haven't had a sudden attack of domestication, I mean under duress, during the recent (recent?) and still ongoing works at this house in which we received not one but two new kitchens with another to come, plus four complete changes of counter top...)

To begin again.....

Clearing out under the sink, I found a great many pairs of rubber gloves, all used once, rinsed, and chucked in there for later. Obviously for many of them, later never came. Eventually they begin to perish and become tacky.

Still,...

.....my point...

Christmas! When you were a kid, back in the days of single glazing; do you remember the week of Christmas? The warm, golden, even superheated few days when nobody seemed to go outdoors at all, when grown-ups wanted to include you in board games and you couldn't tell the pouring rain outside from the condensation on the windows, except by hiding behind the curtains and drawing smileys? That brief and heavenly period when the decorations were holding up and there was still a bowl of walnuts or satsumas to be found, to hold on your lap through The Wizard Of Oz or whatever Christmas movies they stuck on TV?

When absolutely everything was right with the world? When the bottom of the Quality Street or Roses tin still held three or four different types of chocolate in their tantalising brightly coloured wrappers, not just all the toffee pennies that granny couldn't get her teeth round any more?

No?

Your loss. I can - at least I couldn't and wouldn't have tried, until I smelled a single, decaying rubber glove.

Now I can't stop sniffing it. It says: 'My mum's old front room, the wet Wednesday after Christmas, when the paraffin heater has been on the go all day and the compulsory balloons on the wall (twenty or more, in groups of at least three - start with the corners and the window) are beginning to droop.'

I never knew that magical moment smelled like perishing balloons, but I do now.

I think I'm going to like autumn more than usual, this year.

Things I Learned Yesterday

God Bless Anita. Completely beside the point, but it had to be said.


Yesterday I learned that:

• There are three farms and between Bishopstone Village and Denton.
  
• The one nearest the coast is not really a farm any longer but stables.
• The one on the brow of Rookery Hill, where you can see for miles, has a very gentle and indifferent herd of brown cattle.
• The one down into the valley, nestled in beside the ancient village church, is owned by a proper gentleman, a Mr White, who is very welcoming and will allow locals to ignore the official footpaths and simply cut across his land wherever they will; so long as they respect it; a wonderful piece of information which is very slightly tainted by the fact that
  
• his cattle are quite possibly possessed.

Seriously, he has a herd of large, black and white creatures that spend their days aspiring to be the Vicky Pollards of the bovine world. Have you ever seen perambulating beef look like it was loitering with intent? Cross their patch and they will chase you. On the run. Even if you are the gentle, retired lady replete with tweed a-line skirt, who was just nipping to church for a spot of flower arranging.

I no longer feel like quite such an idiot for making a stiff and sudden u-turn in the middle of a meadow, under the gaze of a dozen sleepy cottages and two dozen large and very dissaproving cows.


~~~~~~
One other thing I learned - if you start to import your blog to your facebook notes, posts are uploaded retrospectively, and it goes back an awfully long way.........