Per ardua ad astra

I was lucky enough today to arrive back from lunch just as a couple of incentive rides were taking off. An incentive ride is essentially a prize for doing something really special like winning the Wing Airman of the Quarter Award and it involves a flight in a fighter jet - Boeing F-15Es in this case.

It's quite something to watch and hear as they're taking off but it must be something else to actually be inside the jet because once the jet has lifted off the runway the pilot throttles forward the engines to full afterburner and climbs vertically about 60,000 feet into the sky. I've been told it's virtually impossible for the passenger to breathe even with a g-suit.

From the ground it's amazing, a friend of mine got a ride a few years ago and I was allowed to watch him take off right from the end of the runway. Even with double hearing protection the sound was deafening and with those twin Pratt & Whitney F100-229 engines at full throttle you can feel each one of your internal organs vibrating.

On a clear day you can watch the jets until they're just a tiny speck way up above you. Today was cloudy so the cloud ceiling was low and they disappeared pretty quickly but this was offset by being able to see the stripey twin cones of the afterburner flame against the dark grey of the clouds, you just can't see them on a bright day.

As you can probably tell I'm a bit of an anorak when it comes to planes.

I almost got to have an ride myself once, not in an F-15 but in a KC-135 refueling tanker belonging to the Alabama Air National Guard. Unfortunately some bureaucrat decided that they didn't want to take a "foreign national" ie me so my friend Dave got to take the flight instead. He smuggled on board a Union Flag as a protest against the decision which was later presented to me with a lot of ridiculous pomp and ceremony by my squadron commander!

Here's a picture of the flag and a certificate, you might be able to make out the text, maybe not, but trust me every time I read it I have to giggle as it's all so ahem, serious

Pussy Galore

According to Scary Duck (not scary and not a duck but pretty freakin' funny) and someone he can't remember the name of, starting a new blog is "like getting a kitten. You either lavish your undying love on it for the rest of its natural life; or you get bored of it after a fews days, brain it with a rock and leave it for carrion."

How true. If my blog were a kitten it would be stuffed full of tuna and tuckered out from chasing the feather-and-jingly-bell-on-a-fishing-rod toy one day and shut in the porch with nothing but the litter tray and a manky spider-plant for company the next.

Poor wee thing.

There's a rat in me kitchen

Well actually it's either a shrew or a vole, hard to tell which as its head has been gnawed off by one of my cats. Typical really they catch something and then bring it indoors and drop it in front of their food bowl while they have a nibble of Go-Cat. Still I should be grateful that they haven't brought in another bat and let it loose to fly around the house.

Little darlings.

Count Fistula

Looks like I shall be having more surgery just before Christmas which will be difficult to say the least especially as I was supposed to be cooking the Christmas dinner this year. Cap'n Marvel (my pet name for my husband) may have to do the catering instead ... he can just about manage beans on toast or mashed potato.

The surgery will be to either fix my existing fistula or to create a new one in my other arm. The current one clotted and collapsed following a procedure I had yesterday to X-ray the blood vessel. I'm fairly depressed not only because of the surgery but also because it means that I have to have this blessed tube in my chest for at least another 3 months.

I've spent 18 months trying to get a functioning fistula in use, I've had 3 operations so far - first to create one in my left wrist (it never worked), the next in my left elbow (it developed a kink that narrowed the blood flow) and finally I had surgery to remove the kink.

But it's not all doom and gloom, I'm finally starting to lose some weight - 1.5 kgs in the last month! Only another 20 or so and I can finally get on the transplant list and then life will get really interesting!

Frozen Cherryrita

I like a little tipple, me, so when I discovered a new item in Tesco's alchie alley called Sourz Cherry and what with it being a. cherry flavour, b. sour and c. ahem alcoholic I just had to try it.

YUM!!!

Neat it's quite nice, a little syrupy, maybe a bit like cough medicine. I also mixed with some diet tonic and it made a lovely drink.

Considering it's only 15% alcohol I got tipsy quite quickly (it happens with kidney disease, I've always been a lightweight when it comes to how much I can take but it's worse since I started dialysis) and I couldn't finish the second (or maybe the third? hic) drink that I made up last night so I decided to freeze it.

Tonight I retrieved it from the freezer and found that it wasn't quite frozen solid and with a little help from a fork I managed to break it up in to fairly slushy crystals. Now that's good stuff - very refreshing and fun to eat/drink - a kind of cross between a granita and a frozen Margarita.

Apparently also available in Pineapple (can't wait to try that one) or Apple (meh).

Kaboom-cha

Over the last year or so I've become addicted to butternut squash, I absolutely love it - roasted, boiled, microwaved, mashed, souped - it's all good.

Jamie Oliver seems to have caught on to it too but I feel rather smug knowing that I started eating it before it became trendy. Ol' wubber lipsth wrote a recipe for it recently in our Sunday magazine, it was a variation on Pumpkin Pie and he used the seeds as a topping by roasting them off and sprinkling them over the top.

It got me thinking that I might try and do something with the seeds the next time I got a squash rather than just chucking them in the compost bin. It just so happened that instead of a butternut squash I bought a Kabocha which looks like a small green version of your standard Jack O' Lantern type pumpkin.

I scooped out said seeds and set about washing the pulp off them (which was revolting as it felt like dense, slimy, matted hair). I then dried them off, put them on a baking tray and drizzled over some oil, some salt and smoked paprika. Then I put then in the oven where I was roasting the flesh along with some other veggies and a turkey breast.

After they had been in the oven for about 15 minutes I tried a couple of them - and found them somewhat crunchy - the seeds were considerably thicker than in a butternut squash. Still I thought I would persevere with them, perhaps they would be better if cooked a little longer.

After the seeds had been back in the oven for a while I was busy washing up when I started to hear strange noises coming from the oven. Kerpow! Pop! Kerpow! Ping! I rushed over and looked through the glass door only to the seeds dancing in the oven and exploding. I got the tray out of the oven and almost lost an eye as the damn things were cracking open all over the place.

I could see inside the cracked shells that there was a brown kernel but it was impossible to get out whole so I gave up in the end. Sigh, another cooking calamity ... the salt and paprika was an inspired combination though, it smelled gorgeous while coooking so I shall give it one more try with butternut squash seeds before I write-off the experiment completely. Stay tuned.

My God, it's full of stars!

I took a week off last week and spent the time mostly on Christmas shopping. One of my favourite shops to visit is Lush. I don't in all honesty buy much there, I often tend to go in and drink in all the delicious scents and being unable to decide which lovely thing to buy I often just walk out again.

This time however I took the plunge and bought some black licorice soap which is supposed to be great for the complexion, an exfoliating bar for spotty botties (not mine I hasten to add) and a big bar of Angel's Delight soap which smells heavenly (boom boom).

I first used the Angel's Delight at the weekend and I was rather disconcerted to learn that it contains little gold foil stars like table confetti. I hadn't noticed them when I bought it and I was a little miffed to have to fish them out of my delicate bits as they were rather sharp!

Big Bang Theory

Hands up everyone who remembers Space Hoppers! My Space Hopper was my favourite toy when I was a kid. I spent many happy hours bouncing round the garden pretending that I was riding Black Beauty or Champion The Wonderhorse. I have a picture somewhere of me sitting on it in an extraordinarily short dress with my own coltish legs on display (God, how I wish I still had those legs).

I don't know what happened to the original but I am now, at the tender age of 39, the proud owner of another Space Hopper courtesy of Hawkin's Bazaar. It's not as big or as sturdy as I recall and I'm a little concerned that it might burst under my not inconsiderable weight, but all the same I spent the evening bouncing round my living room like a complete maniac. It was truly liberating and I can heartily recommend it as a supreme method of stress relief.

Oh yeah it's best to wear a pair of Tigger ears for full effect. Bounce, bounce, bounce!

Moonstruck

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the Moon. If I ever get my finger out and write this novel that I've been mooning over for years, it will probably be set on the Moon.

At the top of my Christmas list every year for the last umpteen years has been "Moon Globe". So far I have received an array of Earth globes in styles ranging from antique schoolroom (which is intriguing to pore over and look at how the country names and boundaries have changed) to inlaid with semi-precious stones. I even have a globe with the constellations on it. But alas, no Moon Globe. I know they exist, people just aren't looking hard enough.

For instance, last night as we were driving home from a day out at about 5pm, the sky over my home was a beautiful dusky lavender and set into this sky was one of the largest full moons I have ever seen. It was stunning, golden yellow and looked as though it was illuminated from within. The man in the Moon was perfectly visible too. It wasn't just a disc in the sky, it was 3 dimensional, you could tell it was a globe.

That's not too much to ask for is it?

Rubber Bullets

I recently took the probably unprecedented step of actually forwarding the link for my blog to my boss. I needed him to know what caused my near-breakdown last week especially as the Shirt had wrongly indicated that it might have been the new Lieutenant who had stirred up the trouble; I couldn't adequately express what the problem was in person so I wanted him to read it instead.

He's a good egg and we had a heart to heart the next day and everything is fine now. He also seems to have taken on board the fact that I'm neither happy nor challenged in my present job and asked me was there anything else that I could take on. I told him that I fancied having a go at maintaining the squadron website to which he agreed and said that any training the squadron could fund I could go for.

I am now thinking that I might have bitten off more than I can chew after my first HTML lesson with the squadron's resident pointy headed computer whizkid, Codename: Tigger. A week ago I couldn't even spell HTML never mind would have considered writing my own code.

Now I know a little about code, and you know what they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Well I'm armed and dangerous, luckily I'm armed with blanks but I have to tell you when you shoot yourself in the foot with a blank it still frickin' hurts!

Fortunately the only casualty so far has been my own blog. I had recently attempted to post images by clicking on the image button in the Blogger editor but each time my pictures have disappeared into the ether. I've tried troubleshooting with the Blogger Help files but have actually found them spectacularly unhelpful.

Today I decided to try writing an HTML tag (giggle, check out the techno speak) and after writing several broken tags I finally managed to get a picture of my husband uploaded (yes he's sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 simulator, but that's another post). However, the picture takes up most of the screen and as much as I love the guy I figured my profile and all the links to archives, hit counter, etc, probably would be useful to have on display - he was obscuring the lot. So I moved him to the bottom of the page instead but my stuff is still missing in action.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!

Oh well back to the drawing board. Now where did I put that 'HTML For Dummies'?

Mission Improbable

Today is my 17th wedding anniversary. We lived together for 5 years before we eventually made it legal, aside from my few spells in hospital over the years we have never spent more than 2 nights apart. I've known my lovely husband for more than half my life and I cannot happily visualise life without him.

We met a month before my 17th birthday in a pub called The Forest which sadly is no longer a pub but a large private house. On that fateful day we had both been dragged up there by our respective best friends against our wills. His best mate had wanted to introduce him to my best mate but fate intervened.

He was (and still is) a biker, not the grubby grebo kind of biker, instead he was a cleancut lad who happened to only have one mode of transport - a Honda 250 Superdream. I loved his cheeky grin and twinkly blue eyes framed by gorgeous long eyelashes. He still has the blue eyes of course but the cheeky grin with its slightly crooked teeth has been replaced by some dodgy crowns of which he is very self-conscious and now he rarely smiles.

I don't know what he liked about me. I was wearing some white trousers which used to be my karate trousers but I managed to convert them into day wear. As it was the mid 80s I was also wearing my New Romantic navy blue boots that had zips that curved from the front of the foot round to the outside of the calf - I had used some pink ribbon to make little bows and tied them to the zip-pull. I thought it looked cool but probably I looked like a dork. On top I was wearing an almost backless teal sweater. Like I said, it was the 80s - no-one ever made fashion sense in the 80's.

My 'friend' did her best to distract his attention and wore his leather jacket and basically draped herself over him as often as she could while I contented myself with squirting a soda siphon into a little gremlin charity money box, convinced that I was going to be left on the shelf again. But apparently he only had eyes for me.

When it was time to go home we didn't exchange phone numbers or make plans to see each other again and I thought that was that. However, the next night I was on my way up to my friend's house when I heard a bike pull up next to me and it was him!! We stood and chatted for over an hour in the pouring rain - all the time he kept his helmet on because he'd been down at the burger van eating burgers with raw onion and he didn't want me to smell his breath. He told me he was on his way home to watch, wait for it, Dynasty! Once again we parted company without making any plans.

The next day I decided to look up his phone number and give him a call but he wasn't in when I called. I went out for a jog in the woods feeling like an idiot for calling and when I was on my way back I saw in the distance someone walking up the road with a Golden Labrador. Thinking it was my unpleasant next door neighbour I started walking away as fast as I could but fortunately not fast enough because it turned out to be my future soulmate walking his boss' dog, Solomon, trying to find my house. He came home with me so I could wash and change and then we went out for a walk together. The rest as they say is history.

I cannot fathom how we have managed to stay together so long because we are so different. He's a leg man, I have limbs that can only loosely be described as legs. I like tall men, he's the same height as me. I like kissing, he likes to get right on down to business. He's a clean & tidy freak, I'm the world's worst housekeeper. I like to cook hearty meals from scratch, he likes something frozen and out of a packet. He is Yin to my Yang, Crockett to my Columbo, Beano to my Beckett, Captain Birdseye to my Nigella Lawson, Jimmy Osmond to my Jimi Hendrix.

Somehow by a miracle we have stayed together through more differences than sames, through happiness and tragedy and my love for him grows stronger every day.

Halloween

All Hallows Eve in Twisted Pines
A night to stay inside
A gibbous moon ‘neath hazy cloud
Casts feeble light but wide
Goblins, ghouls and skeletons
Are creeping round outside
I sit by the fire and wonder
What’s going on out there?
A ghostly force quite playfully
Starts lifting up my hair
I hear cackling and rattling
Strange shadows pass close by
My hands are weak and trembling
I let out a quiet sigh
The doorbell rings, I start to shake
Perhaps it’s Frankensnail?
I creep to the door my knees a-quake
I fear my legs will fail
I open up that dread portal
My heart skips half a beat
It’s far, far worse than I imagined
Surprise! It’s Trick or Treat!

<©> Calamity Jane

I See Dread People

OK this will be my last rant for a while, just need to get this out of my system.

Just lately I've developed an enormous core of bubbling contempt and resentment that I fear I'm about to go off like Krakatoa. My boss had the misfortune of walking in yesterday just when the pyroclastic flow was about the reach the surface. Just as well that it was him really, if it had some dumb little Airman he'd be forming some rare exotic igneous rock called Ignoranticite by now.

As is usual with us gals it's the stupid things that set us off, we're dealing with the heavy stuff just fine but someone comes along and utters some banality and suddenly the end of the world is nigh.

Episode the First: Last week I was talking to the Shirt outside. A Tech Sergeant comes along and asks the Shirt how he likes his Volvo. Shirt says he likes it just fine. The TSgt say he's unhappy with his brand new Volvo, just had to have the fuel tank stripped out because of some fault with a sensor. Shirt says oh did you have that fixed by the dealer in Bury? TSgt says no, he's ha ha, been, ha ha, barred from that one ha ha, he takes his to ha ha, Downham Market.

Mental screech of brakes - barred from a Volvo dealership? WTF? What the fudge did he do? The Shirt asks the same question.

Apparently the TSgt went in one day to see if they could take a look at the problem, they tell him that he really needs to make an appointment as they are rather busy. TSgt says what do you mean I need to make an appointment, I want my car fixed! So it turns out that to appease him they take a look under the bonnet and there appears to be a faulty sensor which they fix and he goes away.

2 months later the same fault happens again. TSgt screeches to a halt outside the showroom storms in and throws his car keys at the service manager and yells at him something to the effect of you said you fixed it, I want it fixed properly NOW! The service manager of course doesn't take too kindly to this attitude and he throws the car keys back at TSgt. TSgt loses his rag and in the ensuing slanging match makes a mess of the service manager's desk and the receptionist's desk. TSgt gets ejected and is barred.

Now I know the service manager, the sales manager and several of the staff at this dealership - my husband has bought 2 new Volvos from them in the last 3 years. They are extremely nice people. I am ashamed that someone from my squadron could be such an arsehole to them and relate the story in such a braggardly and unashamed fashion with a British national standing by. I am even more ashamed that I didn't have the nerve to say something to this guy but he was escorted away by the Shirt before I had a chance. I'm having to suppress keying his Volvo every time I drive past, I content myself with giving him Paddington stares instead.

Episode the Second: The RAF Commander gave me a message for my boss that there had been a complaint about engine noise from our engine testing facility and could we supply him with our rules of conduct as far as noise ordinance goes. I passed on the message and we had a little conversation about noise in general. My boss said if I was bothered by the noise then I should move. I took it in the way it was intended, as a joke but when a senior NCO made the same remark but with more barbs round the edges I got a tad annoyed.

It was the general tone rather than the words - We, the Mighty US Air Force, are Your Protectors! Bow down before us and be grateful that are here to wake you at 4:45 am every morning! If you don't like it move! Forget that your family has lived here for generations! Never mind that house rental to Americans has pushed the house sale prices up to unaffordable levels!

And when the Shirt chimed in with we should restrict everyone to base so they don't spend their money "on the Economy" and we'll soon show the local populace how grateful they should be. Puhlease!! The only businesses that will notice the difference will be the pubs!

Episode the Oh Whatever: I'm too tired to relate the rest of what I hear every day like it's so expensive in this country (oh really, maybe you should try living on a British salary without COLA (no not the Real Thing, Cost Of Living Allowance) or utilities allowance or housing allowance - we'll see how you manage on 975 quid a month) or we get ripped off at the garage because we're American (no you get ripped off because you're a punter just like everyone else trying to get their clutch fixed) or we're a target for crime (try not leaving your thousand dollar stereo on display in your unlocked car or maybe throw a little council tax our way to fund the police so they can do something about it) or raining AGAIN?! (after the driest July and Autumn in living memory? Hurrah! It's raining!) or the roads here are sooo narrow and the cars are soo small and no free refills when you go to McDonalds and where's the nearest mall and gas is sooooo expensive I can't afford to drive up to Scotland for the weekend ... Boo effing bloody hoo!

And so, on to the heavy stuff. I have diabetes and kidney failure. I need to lose about 70lbs before I can get on the transplant list, I've managed to lose about 1lb in the last 5 months of virtual starvation. My daily fluid allowance is only about 1.25litres. I take God knows how many pills very day. I have very little spare time these days, Sunday is my only free day. I'm quite likely going to need surgery on my arm again, this time to be cut from shoulder to elbow to bring those blasted blood vessels closer to the surface. My Mother has Parkinson's disease and is losing her marbles and her mobility. My Uncle-in-law has Prostate Cancer. My Dad can barely walk. I think I've started the menopause. I'm childless and too ill and too old to adopt, too broke for surrogacy. My brother has disowned me for reasons wholly unknown to me. I expect to get a 1.5% pay rise this year - wow what will I do with an extra £160 a year? Whee, let's hit Poundstretcher!!

It's no surprise really that I have to vent a little from time to time is it? Relax everyone the eruption is over.

Serial Monotony

I have a new officer working with me; she’s the Section Commander – basically the squadron personnel officer/customer service manager/Commander’s executive officer all rolled into one. She wants to take work from me and give it to someone else. I run the performance reporting program for the squadron, all military personnel have a written performance appraisal once a year, more often if they have a change of supervision; I request all the paperwork, read and make corrections, track everything and make sure it gets turned in on time.

I’m pretty darn good at it too – my squadron is the only one in the Group that has a 100% on-time rate. I’m a legend in my own lunchtime.

The thing is as the Commander’s Secretary it’s not actually my job, I got the program to look after temporarily about 3 years ago and for one reason and another I’ve kept it. The new Lieutenant wants it to go back where it belongs which will leave me with monitoring the Commander’s calendar and proofreading correspondence that comes in for his signature. Woo hoo.

Most people would be overjoyed at having their workload decreased but I get ground down by the tedium. The logical answer would be to find another job but that’s a tall order if you have diabetes & kidney failure, can you imagine sitting there in your interview finery clutching your CV and glowing references telling the interviewer that you’re wonderful and reliable and oh by the way you will need Tuesday and Thursday mornings off. New disability laws be buggered, you don’t stand a snowball in hell’s chance.

Even within the MOD it’s difficult especially as most jobs that are vacant are only open to staff who are due to be made redundant and have first dibs.

I joined the MOD to get away from being a secretary (not that there’s anything specifically wrong with being a secretary – I just had my midlife crisis early and thought there has got to be more that I can do apart from office management). I left school with the bog standard array of O levels and I took the path of least resistance as dictated by my parents who don’t hold any truck with careers, no dear what you want is a job.

I thought it would be a fresh start, I thought I could get my toe in the door and retrain to do something else. The dream was to do an OU degree or similar in Engineering and transfer into the Research & Development branch. At first I was assigned to Quality Assurance and for 3½ years I was happy. Then a US Air Force regulation decreed that foreign nationals couldn’t do the job I was doing so I had to take the next job that came up – a secretarial job.

According to the local personnel office, the MOD only fund training that relates to the job you’re in already so I can train to be an even more efficient administrator but little else. I feel like my life is slipping away before my eyes without ever having done anything worthwhile.

Sorry I’m just a miserable old bat today.

3 Gross Things

I recently discovered Clare's positively inspirational and inspirationally positive site which was being featured on Blogger's Blogs of Note. It's a wonderfully uplifting site, she sees beauty where most people see the mundane so at at first I thought I would mention a few beautiful things myself but then I thought why steal Clare's thunder, she has the beautiful stuff market cornered already so why not put my own icky spin on it.

1. I decided to give myself a beauty MOT today and have a pedicure, body scrub, exfoliate, depilate, etc, etc. While clipping my toenails I discovered that the lady who waxes my legs has been neglecting my toes. I had to tweeze out several hairs on both little piggies that were over an inch long. I didn't think toe hair could grow that long. I need to get better acquainted with my feet.

2. I found a small white lump in one of my armpits and being of the better out than in persuasion I gave it a squeeze. Out came a HUGE blackhead with a long, thick tail. I swear it winked at me.

3. I have a large lump and and enormous purpley-black bruise from yesterday's kerfuffle with dialysis and bleeding in Tesco's carpark. It is shaped roughly like the USA, except Maine and the northeast appear to have been flooded by the Great Lakes. The needle puncture appears to have taken out Chicago.

A Big Prick

I should have known today would be a terrible day when I was halfway to the hospital and realised that I had forgotten my insulin. Great no breakfast while I'm dialysing, I was starving too, so I had to make do with 2 small cups of tea and the salad out of my sandwich (1 slice of cucumber, 1 & a half slices tomato and a few shreds of lettuce = NHS salad sandwich ... I've had more salad garnish in their regular sarnies).

Sister Mac was assigned to me today and she successfully managed to get a needle in my arm which was used as the arterial supply for the dialysis machine, my chest line was used as the venous return so I got a really good dialysis for a change.

When it came to having the needle out I didn't stop bleeding for about 20 minutes - they had given me a mega dose of heparin which is an anticoagulant because I have a history of clotting the machine, and this prevented me from getting up as quickly as I would have liked. But eventually it did stop and I made my way home.

When I got to a village called Culford I got caught doing about 40 in a 30 limit. It's the first time in 19 years of driving that I've ever been caught, I'm not a speed freak as such but like most people I often do about 5 -10mph above the posted limit. I'm a bit peeved about the whole situation as I do normally stick to the limit through this village but I tend to coast from 40 down to 30 in my own time, the speed trap was round a corner about 200 yards in from the end of the 40 limit and the police were hiding behind a dark reddish-brown Range Rover so I didn't think it was very sporting of them. I expect that will be my first 3 points on my licence and a hefty fine.

When I got into Twisted Pines I needed to get a loaf of bread for bacon sandwiches for lunch so I stopped in at Tesco and parked in their back car park. As I was getting my stuff from the back seat an old geezer in a Corsa swooped in through the whole row of vacant spaces next to me and almost took my offside wing off! He then attempted to park in the spot next to me where I was standing with my doors open rummaging for my bag and jacket. Then he pulled forward again and revved his engine several times which I took to be impatience causing me to grab whatever I could so I could get out of his way. Why the other 10 spaces were no good to him I don't know but he wanted to park next to me - I almost said something to him but when I saw how doddery he was I thought better of it.

While I was walking towards the shop and putting my jacket on my arm felt warm and wet so I felt my elbow and sure enough I'd sprung a leak! I went back to the car because I had some gauze on the passenger seat and by the time I got back my arm was soaked. I stood there beside the car with pressure on the leak, covered in blood wondering what on Earth I should do. I have rarely felt so isolated as I did standing there in a public carpark covered in blood with no-one taking any notice.

The pad I was using soaked through pretty quickly but I didn't want to take the pressure off to put a clean one on, I just needed a nice thick pressure pad applied but wasn't sure where I was going to get one from. I decided to try and get someone to help and eventually managed to get someone's attention and the next thing I know is she's got someone from Tesco to call an ambulance!

A Tesco first aider came out to me and she was lovely, she obviuosly had some knowledge but what she lacked was equipment. I had a whole cluster of Tesco staff round me when the ambulance turned up - siren wailing, lights flashing - I was mortified. I'd been hoping for the first response guy rather than the full blown ambulance jobbie.

Anyway suffice to say they were great, I kept apologising to them for calling them out to such a minor event but they were OK about it and cleaned me up, patched me up and generally made a fuss of me. Thanks James and Graham the EMTs, and thanks Sharon for not walking away like everyone else!!

A Little Alliteration, Part 2

Desmond the debt-collector was only really dastardly by day. During his downtime he was indeed quite a dear, and dishy too with darned good diction. Desmond was becoming decidedly disaffected with dastardly debt-collecting and was only doing it for the dosh. His dearest desire was to design a dinghy and sail it down the Danube.

So Desmond with duplicity in his heart drove his Ducati to the Dilks’ domain over in deepest darkest Dorchester. He dismounted and dragged his despondent feet towards the door. With a trembling digit he depressed the doorbell. DING DONG! declared the doorbell while Desmond waited with a distinct feeling of dread.

Behind the door Desmond could discern a dissonant discussion debating the danger in opening the door on a day when the family was due a visit from the dastardly debt-collector. Deciding that Desmond looked a decent dude who definitely couldn't double as a debt-collector, Dilbert Dilks opened the door.

“Good day Mr Dilks, I’m Desmond the debt-collector” declared Desmond displaying his dazzling dental work.

Dilbert Dilks dropped to the deck in a dead faint.

"Damn!" said a disgruntled Desmond and drooping his shoulders dejectedly, "I'm quite deficient in the discretion department, I do hope he isn't damaged."

To be continued ...

Saddle Up

Here in the rural hinterland of East Anglia, there are plenty of things you see everyday - tractors towing trailers laden with carrots & sugar beet, suicidal pheasants, F-15 fighter jets using 88,000lbs of thrust to get off the ground, even Asian mini-deer called Muntjacs who were introduced by some local landowner with a sense of humour, sometime last century.

But something you don't see everyday is gentlemen trundling down the pavement on invalid scooters wearing spaghetti ties and ten gallon hats. Yup bet your bottom dollar cowpokes, I saw one today. Yeeeehaawww!

Tray Bong

I've been told that the French refer to us Rosbifs as a nation of shopkeepers. I've never really been sure what that is supposed to mean except that it is derogatory. Well all I can say is it takes one to know one.

Last Saturday, Twisted Pines was the latest small market town to succumb to the curious spectacle of the traveling French Market. I had visited one when it came to a neighbouring town and I wasn't overly impressed but as the only alternative was laundry or paperwork I walked down to take a gander.

I had a Tony Bliar-type vision (cue heavenly choir and Vaseline smeared lens) of the Brits and the French trading side by side, working together on the free common market, each bringing trade to the other. However, clearly anticipating French embargo and tension between the natives and the visitors, the local council shrewdly set aside one of the car parks in town for the market instead.

Malheureusement it was a dozen stalls at the most selling goods that ranged from cheap Chinese-made belts to cheap Chinese-made straw baskets. Qu'elle deception! And this country just isn't ready for cured sausages, we like 'em plump and pink not turdlike! There was a stall that sold nothing but garlic - but zut alors £7 for 500g is too beaucoup de l'argent even for the likes of spendthrift gastronomes like myself.

My only hope of consolation for this blatant ripping off of the unsuspecting British public, is that the French traders had to buy petrol before driving home.

A Little Alliteration, Part 1

Dilbert Dilks the devilishly debonair Dane, along with his dame, the desirably delectable Dora and their delightfully dippy daughter Dinah, were doing their darnedest to dodge the deviously diabolical dilemma that was destroying their diverse Delicious Dildo Deliveries To Your Door service in deepest darkest Dorchester.

Determined to deliver only the dandiest dildos, they disdained to pay their dues and descended into the direst debt causing them to deliver the deeds of their dear domicile to the dastardly debt-collector, Desmond. Dear oh dear what a debacle, what will they do?