Single and Surviving (just)

Hop Along Hound

2010-12-30T17:34:00.000Z

I warn you now; I am not having a good week. Within five minutes of arriving home on Tuesday, I had a client on the phone in a panic because she was about to go skiing and there was a drama at her house. Could I please sort it out??? Sure. Why not? This was going to be the first three days off I had had in a year but I'd love to work instead. Time off is overrated isn't it? I am feeling very Bah Humbugish about that particular client now. The drama is entirely one of her own making and yet she has that peculiar skill of making everything somebody else's fault; usually mine.

To top things off yesterday morning the hound became the Reliant Robin of the dog world and refused to use his front foot. It, he said, hurt a lot. This was slightly baffling. He had been fine the night before but we had done a very strenuous amount of work on Monday, sliding down gullies and crossing frozen rivers. There was obviously something horribly wrong. By the afternoon he was booked in to go to the vet. Being Christmas, the local one wasn't open and so it was a 40 minute drive to their main branch. Joy. Having mercilessly prodded and squeezed the offending paw, the vet decided that he had probably stubbed his claw so hard it had jammed back into the bad. We were sent home with medicine.

I have overly optimistic faith in medicine. I felt certain that with a cocktail of drugs he would be better by now. Instead his paw is even more swollen and is now a third bigger than the other one. He has a new appointment with the vet tomorrow morning and I am now in a dilemma as to what to do.

I am supposed to be going to Guildford for New Year's Eve, leaving tomorrow morning. Then on to Hastings, back to Guildford for Sunday, Southampton on Monday and London on Tuesday... However if the loyal hound has to be admitted then I am not going to want to go. This raises two questions.

Question One; Am I becoming a sad old spinster whose life revolves around her equivalent of a pack of cats?

Question Two: If I do cancel my trip south will my friends think me pathetic????

This may well be my worst ever Christmas / New Year week. Oh, and I didn't win the lottery, even though I actually went to the trouble to buy a lottery ticket this time. Grrrrr

Why didn't I buy everybody book tokens for Christmas?

2010-12-22T17:19:00.000Z

It is dark and about minus 10 outside and I am about to make my umpteenth trip up the forestry track with my toboggan laden with presents. This is because my car is at the end of the track, next to the gritted road. It's a good thing really as with a foot of snow on the ground already I had another six inches last night. Hurrah.

When I bought my presents I was rather delighted with the scale of some of them. They were so excitingly large after all. Their size is infintely less appealing when they have to all be carried nearly a mile on a toboggan and you can only fit one or two on at a time.

It is at this point that I realise the true value of book tokens. With just a laden pocket I could have skipped out of the hovel for Christmas. Why or why didn't I think of this a month ago???

Anyway, here are some snowy photos of the view from my garden to put you all in the Christmas spirit. Think of me with my sledge of presents under the starry sky. I had better watch out as with my stomach's profile I could easily be mistaken for Father Christmas.....

One more for you - I took this two nights ago as I took the first toboggan load up. Yes, that's the moon.....

In which I am invited to not one, but two parties....

2010-12-15T19:10:00.000Z

Great Excitement at the hovel. Apparently, every year there is a party for those of us foolish to live in the middle of the forest and around a reservoir. This is held in the local village, in the glamorous venue of the education centre. Cue fluorescent lighting, strange acoustics and no heating..... This will be a first for me. Last year, having only lived here a measly 8 months, I was not eligble for an invitation, but this year I have made the list.

I feel touched to have been included, and faintly horrified on the basis that it might be one of those hideous sorts of parties where everyone mills about not being quite sure who to talk to and wondering if they dare risk eating the stale egg and cress sandwich curling up in the corner next to the sausage roll which has never seen a sausage in it's life.

However, I am very conscious of the fact that if you snub these things you in turn will be snubbed for ever, so I am going. Next question. What to wear?

I mean, my clothing of choice usually involves multiple jumpers and jeans but I know how the Welsh love to dress up. What if I turn up in jeans and they are offended that I haven't made any effort. Equally if I dust off the tiara and they are all wearing jeans I shall look like a complete idiot. It's a dilemma. I am thinking tiara with jeans might be the way forward. Any thoughts out there?

Also, do I take wine or mince pies or something? What is the etiquette on these things???

That is not my only clothing dilemma for the week. I have been asked to a party on Saturday night and the dress code is 'the twelve days of christmas'. Having checked the verses of this particular carol I see that there is a 50% chance that I shall have to go dressed as some kind of bird, there is the option of being a pear tree I suppose, or 5 gold rings. I can't go as one of the 'Ladies Dancing' as I have two left feet, no coordination and people will just think I am having an epileptic fit. Neither do I long to go as a milk maid but unless I am missing something my options are limited.

As some of you may know, I loathe and detest costume parties. I always, always get them wrong and make either too much effort or not enough. I need help. Step by step instructions on how to make a costume using nothing but what might be found around the house would be a good start. Anybody have any ideas????

Are you in need of a happiness fix?

2010-12-14T11:46:00.001Z

Well, if you are I suggest you try this; (sorry - can't get the links to work but cut and paste it - it will be worth it....)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&feature=related

I defy you not to at least smile.... If you need more of the same then this one in all its glory has got to work. I particularly like the old ladies with their umbrella....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

Happy Tuesday everyone....

In the words of the Terminator

2010-12-12T15:26:00.003Z

I know, it's been an awfully long time. There are all sorts of exciting reasons I could give for this but very few of them would actually be true. The shameful truth is that something had to give, and it was the blog.

Fighting off a recession single handed (yep, that's me - the lone musketeer) when you are self employed is no laughing matter. Choosing to live on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere when all the work is 200 miles away also complicates things.

I meant to get all technologically updated so that it wouldn't matter where I was but the whole attempt was a disaster and I managed to delete one e mail account and lock myself out of the other one.

I am now sitting in the hovel, fairy lights strewn around the door in a tocken gesture towards Christmas and waiting for a load of logs to be delivered. I am suspicious of the green world I see around me this week and don't think it is going to last. In fact negotiating my road is a task worth of Mr Fiennes as it is a sheet glacier some two inches thick from top to bottom. Yesterday I made it three quarters of the way up before elegantly sliding all the way back down hill. I was not to be beaten though and turned the car and reversed out the half a mile or so instead.

Various things have shifted on a cellular level in the lives of the family. To my horror Chutney Mary has moved home and now lives an alarming 12 miles or so away. The box of frogs has married her prince which meant a summer of endless wedding discussions and me the only voice for elopment in the room.....

So, this is just a short snippet but I promise not to leave it so long. In the words of the Terminator, I'll be back.

Seven things you don't need to know, but now do...

2010-03-30T11:53:00.005+01:00

Sorry, I've been a little bit rubbish about posting this year. Work seems to have sucked the life out of me and has meant that I can't blog whilst pretending to work in the day as there has been too much actual work to do. In addition I have been seizing any spare moments to try and sort out the house and garden. Since this involves small tasks like moving seven tonnes of top soil by hand around the garden, learning to build dry stone walls and trying to get the vegetable garden planted up it hasn't left much time for anything else.

The lovely Not Enough Mud has tagged me with this pretty picture:

and tasked me with telling you seven things about myself that you might not know. She has set the bar pretty high as She has a Saint for an ancestor, owns a Blue Peter Badge and other rather initimidatingly marvellous things. I shall not be daunted though and will try and tell you seven things you actually want to know. Here goes...

1: I won a holiday to South America and went to Bolivia and Peru and saw Macchu Picchu (which it appears I still can't spell).

2: I blush. Really easily and at the slightest provocation. I thought I would grow out of this but I haven't. Damn.

3: I wanted to be a film or television producer. I did a lot of theatre production at University and loved it but when I got into the real world it turned out that I didn't know 'the right people' in order to get a foot in the door. To this day I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had got into that industry.

4: I camped my way around East Africa when I was twenty or so. By far away the most beautiful country I went to was Rwanda (it was just before the horrors that were to take over that country). The extraordinary thing about it was that the people there were the most visibly happy of any I met in all my travels. The hatred was well hidden.

5: I am not mad about spiders. Ever since I saw Arachnaphobia I have a secret worry that normal, harmless English spiders have had sluttish sex with horribly poisonous spiders and that they are going to kill me.

6: Someone once told me I reminded him of Drew Barrymore. I loved that. Sadly it has never happened again though my sister once said that I reminded her of Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge.

7: I envy married people the fact that they had a wedding list and so all their cutlery and china and stuff matches. How pathetically materialistic can you get????

Now. Work calls - I have to go to London and need to put on my Drew Barrymore kit and find important bits of paper that could be anywhere.....

Car Crash Dating.

2010-03-15T12:15:00.012Z

As of this moment I'm officially single and not even bothering anymore to try and change that. Friday night has broken me. This might be the worse one yet. I am a wreck, a broken woman, a date hater and I am never, ever, ever going to one of those parties again. You want to hear all the details? Of course you do. Brace Yourselves. If I had to go through it, then so do you.

So. First I'll confess. I failed to acquire a push up bra. I did do all the hair washing, the primping, the make up, the scent. I was a goddess, prepared to do battle. I was even on time, well I was, until my mother insisted that I needed to come by and change a spotlight bulb for her, at that point I was fashionably late.

The deal was you turned up at the pub at 7.30. All of you would gather in the bar and introduce yourselves before being sat down to dinner at eight. I turned up at 7.45 having failed to bring directions and the pub being in the middle of nowhere in a sprawling village with no lights or sense of anyone actually living there. It took a while to find the place. Heart beating slightly fast at the prospect of real single people being inside I pushed open the door.

Stepping into the warmth of the bar I was greeted by the 'hostess'. Clipboard in hand she ticked me off (the list, not verbally) and reminded me that I needed to buy my own drinks apart from the wine at dinner. Darn. Forgot to bring cash.

I headed to the bar and decided to really go fo it and order water (I know - dashing isn't it?). There are two men at the bar talking to each other. They pay me no attention so I assume they are locals, not willing victims for the slaughter to follow. I head for the 'lounge bar' where I can hear some subdued conversation. I wondered if I had the wrong room. Where were the thirtysomethings? The room had a mixed bag of terrified and or / bored looking men, over made up women and some more relaxed looking 'retirement age' bachelors. Giving myself a stern warning not to judge, I went in.

Nobody spoke to me. I introduced myself (bold hussy behaviour). They stood around in small groups, not really talking to each other at all and clutching their drinks. Some of the men were busy bonding but in classic British male behaviour they were pretending the girls weren't there at all. This was not good. Despite the average age being around the late forties none of them seeemed to have acquired the art of conversation. This might be why they were all single? I chickened out and headed back for the bar. I was going to need more water to get through this.

The two men were still there chatting. They turned out to be friends who had come together to the date night hell but they didn't seem that bothered by actually getting involved in it. We spent a quarter of an hour or so chatting. Well. I asked them questions and they regaled me with stories, tales of derring do and made each other laugh a lot. They were neighbouring farmers. One of them has fifteen dogs, the other looked as if he had had too much botox (very strange over stretched skin on his face) which is an odd look for a hill farmer. They never even asked me my name during all this. Perhaps I should have worn that push up bra?

Noticing silence from the lounge next door we suddenly realised that possibly everyone had gone through to dinner without us and leapt to our feet, galvanised by a British anxiety of being late / rude. Sure enough, like cattle herded into the abbatoir, they were all in the dining room. There were several tables, all with seating arrangements. The boys were to move with each course so that everyone would get to meet everyone else. What a hideous prospect.

Seeing my place name near the door, I sat down at a table laid for eight, at which there were only six place names. Apparently, there were people who looked through the window at the company and ran away rather than coming in. Why didn't I do that?

To my left was a round faced, ruddy cheeked boy / man who was bringing the average age down by about twenty years. To my right an older man. Opposite were two more girls and another man. I sat down and introduced myself to Boy/Man. I soon found out that he was only there because his girl friend (not girlfriend) wanted to come and didn't want to come on her own. He was a farm manager and when I asked what he liked about the job, he answered (with a little too much enthusiasm) 'I like tractors'. Right. My tractor conversation is limited. I persevered. It turned out he also liked combine harvesters, and ploughs, and basically all machinery. He was a boy with a dream job where he played all day with large machinery. He didn't need or want a girlfriend. He wanted the new Massey Ferguson.

Throughout our conversation I was constantly aware of the opposite side of the table. The girl opposite boy/man wasn't saying a thing and the man opposite me, and next to her, was making her look overly chatty. They sat and avoided looking at each other and the silence between them really was deafening. I should defend the girl. She had really lucked out with her 'starter man'. I think he deserves his own paragraph actually. Here goes:

I'll sketch him out for you. Probably the shortest man in the room, he was permanently stoop shouldered. This was good as it showed off his pattered, knitted cardigan which was buttoned up to the top. All the way to the neck sort of top. He didn't seem to like to look up that much, which was also good as it gave me a perfect view of his combed forward hair with its coating of brylcream (or maybe engine grease). Most disconcerting of all though was the fact that he was to spend his entire time unconsciously trying to touch his nose with his tongue. Honestly. I'm not making this up. You couldn't make it up. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone whilst opposite you there is a man trying to touch his nose with his tongue. You can't. It's disgustingly mesmerising. You want to ask him to stop but it feels rude. Taking pity on the poor girl next to him, who he had failed to talk to and who hadn't (sensibly) tried to talk to him, I asked her what she did.

She turned out to be an ex occupational therapist who was currently writing three books. The 'most literary one' (and I quote directly) was set in the 1970's and was about a farmers wife who becomes a porn star. Really? Truly? This girl is who you would see if you looked up the word 'meek' in the dictionary and there was a picture illustration. She wasn't going to say boo to a puppy, let alone a wolf and she was writing the great literary novel of our times about Farmer Giles's porn star wife? Tongue to Nose man speeded up his tongue to nose action. Eeerugh.

Feeling faintly queasy, and having got the author to talk to the boy/man tractor driver, I turned to my right as the starters arrived. Chicken Liver Pate with one lone piece of bread. Why do they do that in pubs? Give you a great block of pate and a tiny piece of bread so that you can't actually eat any of it? Actually it turned out to be a good thing as the first bite revealed that it was possibly pureed pedigree chum, not chicken liver pate. Toying with the artfully arranged raw onion and red pepper garnish I studied my companion.

Salt and peppered dark hair, tallish, normalish - very 'ishy' in all. Sadly more wishy than dishy though. On the plus side: no cardigan. Phew. Having introduced ourselves, I asked him what he did. 'I'm a leading expert in agronomy' he replied. I know roughly what that is - something do do with crop production and outputs. He dropped in that he had just been in canada and New Zealand. I expressed awed amazement at his cosmopolitan life. He pulled out his phone to show me photos of New Zealand, and of his ex girlfriend in New Zealand. I looked gripped and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

Further lecturing from my new best friend revealed that he had the solutions for the agricultural slump at his fingertips, if only the world would listen to him. It also revealed that he was essentially a travelling fertiliser salesman who spent his time persecuting farmers into buying stuff they didn't want. I avoided thinking to myself 'hmm, he sells crap for a living'. He carried on telling me all about his exciting life. Other than my name, he still knew nothing about me, nor seemed interested in finding out anything. I heard all about the ex girlfriend, the special needs of maize crops, and how tenant farmers are the future and farm owners are spawn of the devil. I started wondering whether I could force down more of the Pedigree Chum pate in order to induce a vomiting attack and a perfect excuse to leave.

I was saved from the pate and the agronomist by clipboard girl, who announced in a falsely cheery voice that 'it was time to move please gentlemen'. Thank god.

My new companions sat down. To my right was a sprightly, grey haired man with an interesting taste in Mrs Merton style glasses (you know the ones - really pointy corners). To my left was a duplicate of salt and pepper man from course one. I blinked. Had he just swapped sides? No - this one had on a different coloured pair of corduroys and it turned out, had a really exciting job. We began with the 'so how far have you had to come tonight' opening bid. Not too far which boded well, in theory. A single man who lived within twenty miles. I didn't know there were any. He then told me that he commuted four hours a day to get to his job. I put on my awed and amazed face and asked if his job was worth it. Fool. I am a fool.

'Ohhhh yesss.' he replied. 'I'm really lucky. I mean, I have my ideal job. How many people can say that?' I agreed. He was lucky. Intrigued by such enthusiasm I asked for more details.

'I work for East Cheshire council. I'm in charge of'... Wait for it.... 'ROAD WIDTHS'. OH MY GOD.

I didn't have to put on a stunned expression. It was there already. Pleased with the effect his announcement had had on me, he carried on. It turned out that he did all the research back through 'historical council documentation' into what widths roads should be. It also emerged that he had a 'real passion' which was for (sound the drum roll) bridlepaths. Bridlepaths it seemed, were more of a hobby for him. An amusing past time. Of course they were. So many of us aspire to amusing hobbies and he had snagged the best one. Damn him.

Gripped as I was by his conversation, I hadn't noticed the main course arriving. It was steak and there was good reason for the steak knives. You needed a chainsaw to get into them. The side dish was 'mixed vegetables'. I don't actually know what they were as they were topped off with red cabbage which had dyed them all to the same shade of purple as the cabbage.

I'll confess that by now I was panicking. Was this what I had paid forty hard earned english pounds for? I couldn't drown my sorrows in my one free glass of red wine because A) it had burnt the inside of my mouth with the first sip and B) I was driving. I started to feel like a hunted animal and looked longingly out of the window at my car.

I realised I couldn't do this. Bridlepath man was telling me with great enthusiasm about a knotty right of way problem that he had solved to the detriment of all parties. Over the table, the porn writer was trailing her scarf through the vegetables as she leaned in to give a glimpse of her push up bra. Opposite me, botox farmer had joined us and was roaring with laughter at his own joke. In desperation, I turned to Mr Merton on my right. He turned out to be a very nice widower who disliked 'all the brassicas' and had seen porn writer in her dressing gown earlier on (they were staying at the same place) which might explain why he spent most of our conversation gazing longingly over my congealed steak at her.

I'd love to tell you more about my pudding companions but I will admit right now that I panicked, and ran for it. The prospect of two more dinner companions and black forest cheesecake was too much to bear. I used Chutney Mary's imminent arrival at my house as an excuse and I fled the scene.

No more internet arranged dating for me, ever again. I officially give up.

Now, does anyone have a failing maize crop or a bridlepath dispute? I know just the men to help you out.

Oh God. It's dating season again.

2010-03-09T09:19:00.003Z

It's that time of year again, when I launch myself on the stormy waters of the dating world. This year I have chosen a new dating site. This one organises singles 'parties' and outings. It's a good idea. I'm going to skip the whole online chat bit and go straight to the source and actually meet people. Hopefully this will get around the whole issue of thinking that I have met someone nice and normal and sane online only to discover that they are not what they pretended to be when we finally meet.

You see, I have decided that the whole internet dating thing does not work. The problem is that people lie so much. They seem perfectly nice online and then when you meet them they are, in my experience, loons. Men who live with their mothers (there have been two of them), men who ask me my marriage plans the first time they meet me, men who can't speak to a woman when they actually meet her. You get the gist of it. It has not been a good experience.

Honestly, I was thinking I wouldn't bother but the other day someone asked when I last kissed anyone and I was ashamed to realise that it was a figure that ended with the word 'years'. This seems like some horrible kind of failure on my part. I mean who, other than career nuns, goes years without kissing anyone (or any of the things that follow kissing for that matter)? I don't miss it particularly but I feel I should try to do something about it. So, here I am, trying.

The big party is on Friday night of this week. It is in a pub some twenty miles away and the idea is that there will be about forty people - even boys and girls - and we have supper and get to meet each other in relaxed circumstances.

I don't feel particularly relaxed about it. I feel like bottling the whole thing and not going. I've paid for my ticket though and I don't have enough money to just throw it away on dinners that I don't go to.

A friend has told me to wear a push up bra, a low cut top, and just go for it. Easier said than done. I want to go and hide in a corner. I can't imagine who else will be there but I won't be surprised if it isn't a lot of men whose favourite reading material is Farmers Weekly and a lot of girls whose make up and hair products will weigh more than the clothes they are wearing. I can't compete with that. I'm not going to miraculously lose a stone by Friday, and I'm not sure I will have time to buy a push up bra by then either.

My life at the moment seems to consist of being in the car for hours on end and packing and unpacking suitcases. I have not had two consecutive days at home for a while now and until next week there is little prospect of that changing. This weekend is the latest nephew's christening. This means that I have Chutney Mary and her children coming to stay with me. As an unofficial OCD sufferer she has already rung me three times to discuss arrangements for this state visit. Naturally, I have done nothing about it at all and will be rushing around in a panic on Friday trying to get ready for their arrival. This leaves even less time for the installation of the push up bra and locating my hairbrush and makeup.

Wish me luck. It's going to be a rough weekend. If I survive the date night, I still have to make it through the Christening weekend and the state visit.

Tap, tap, tap at the window.....

2010-02-25T11:23:00.004Z

Sunday night. The weather outside is bitter and so I was very happily sitting doing a jigsaw in front of the fire. The Loyal Hound lay curled in his basket, dreaming of rabbits and twitching with the thrill of the chase. Outside the temperature was dropping to an icy -5 and the compacted snow on the road meant that there would be no going anywhere for me that night. The weekend had been pleasing though. A dinner party on the Friday night, DIY and long walks on Saturday followed by tea with friends and then Sunday had been spent stripping yet more woodchip and making a hideous mess of everything I had tidied the day before. I had waited for the sun to soften the snow on the road and had slid my car to the end of the road so that I could get out for work the next day. All was well in my little Welsh world.

So, you have the scene in your head? Isolated from the world there is me, doing my jigsaw. The television murmuring away in the background. The hound snoring and twitching in the corner. The fire crackling quietly away to itself. Into this idyll comes a gentle 'tap, tap, tap' at the window.

Not expecting this, I almost wondered if I had imagined the sound but glancing up I saw a pale face at the window. My heart leapt. The face moved back from the window. I resisted the urge to shut the curtains and pretend I hadn't seen anything and, assuming it was my neighbour (it was only a brief glimpse that I got of the face so I wasn't sure), I went to the front door to see what he wanted.

Round the side of the house came a man. Small and unthreatening he looked exhausted by life. Dressed in what you might call 'office' trousers, ordinary shoes and just an anorak to keep out the cold he might have been dropped in by Martians he was so unsuitably clothed for deepest, rural wales. He was pale and his hair stuck out from his head as though it had never seen a brush. His general shabby air made him ideal to be typecast as the worn out and unglamorous PI.

Without so much as an apology for frightening the living daylights out of me, or an introduction, he said baldly. 'My car is stuck'. Not 'Could you help me' I noted.

"Where is it stuck?" I asked. Though I was pretty sure I knew where. There is a car park for walkers down the track from me. The access to it is down a short slope and only that afternoon it had taken four of us half an hour to get a car up the hill. No great surprise then when he said 'at the car park'.

I enquired if he had tried to get my neighbour. In a low voice that I could scarcely catch, he said that he couldn't get him to answer the door. Pulling on a coat, hat, gloves and boots and grabbing a torch I locked up and followed him out into the night. Well, I couldn't leave him there to freeze could I?

The neighbour was at home so leaving him to get straw (for grip on the icy road) and other handy bits and bobs I went to look at the car with the PI. I wasn't feeling hopeful about the whole thing. Unless he had a four wheel drive there was little hope we could get him up the icy track.

It's about a five minute walk to the car park. The air was biting at any exposed skin and I wondered how he wasn't shivering convulsively. I asked his name. Asked again. 'Roy' he finally answered. Then I asked him what he was doing up here. I mean he wasn't dressed for a walk or for fishing which are the two main reasons people come here. 'Where had he come from' I added.

'From Rhyl. I came down at about five o'clock'. I was dumbfounded. I've always wondered if people can be dumbfounded and now I can tell you with conviction that they can. This shrimp of a man had come down a track covered in several inches of snow, snow that was compacted to a lethal icy sheen on the road. Even coming down in daytime would have been risky but to come down as it was getting dark and the frost was setting in was ridiculous. 'Did he have a towbar' I asked. He didn't know. 'What about a snow shovel. Better shoes. Gloves?' Frankly, anything that would be sensible to have with him if he was going to risk a road like that. Unapologetically he said no. He seemed to feel no sense of responsibility for getting himself into the situation he was in. As a result, I was feeling very little sympathy, and what little I did have was chilling with every whispered word he uttered.

I mean. No-one in a four wheel drive would have tried that road at 5pm on a freezing night. Certainly not on their own. Would you drive down a forest track thick with snow and ice, with no certainty that anybody lived there (you are unlikely to find houses down these roads)? Nobody would. I do live here and I wouldn't drive down it in that state and I get a lot of practice driving on snow and ice.

Getting crosser and crosser with him by the minute I stop talking to him and in silence we reach his car. It had slid off the road into a ditch in his efforts to get it out of the car park and nobody in their right mind would think that it could be pushed off the sloping ditch without the help of a towrope (which he didn't have) and another vehicle. Why didn't he just say that? Why make me (and my neighbour who was following us down) walk down there to view the car with him?

I thought longingly of my fire, the jigsaw, my Sunday evening and shivered under the starlight. Curtly I said to him 'we can't push this out of the ditch with just three of us and even if we could, we'd never get you up the hill'. I wished I could be kinder about it but he seemed to expect me to work miracles for him as a matter of course and it made me angry. Anyway, I knew what I was talking about after the efforts of the afternoon when the snow was softer and not hardened by the frost. He was going nowhere until morning. This left another dilemma. What to do with him.

My neighbour and I decided to take him back to his house. I had already decided he wasn't coming anywhere near mine. I would go back to mine and see if I could find anyone prepared to come down and pull him out. It was a fruitless effort. Not even a tractor was going to risk getting stuck. I headed back over to my neighbour's house to break the news to them.

The shrimp was sitting in a chair by the gas fire. He wasn't speaking or even getting involved in the conversation about how to rescue him. I wanted to hit him. There we were, doing our best to help and he couldn't have been less interested. Even when we asked him what he wanted to do, he would just shrug. He obviously felt it was our responsibility to rescue him.

Vexed beyond belief by this stage I said the only thing possible was that he walked to the top of the road to meet a taxi we could book for him. They could take him to a pub and he could sort out his own rescue in the morning. No comment on this plan from the PI. Exasperated, I then said that another option was that he could try the RAC. Was he a member? 'Yes' came the answer but not with any enthusiasm for actually ringing them. I wasn't hopeful they could help anyway. How would they get down the hill, and back up it again anyway? We'd end up with more stuck people. My neighbour said he was welcome to stay the night with him if he wanted to - an offer above and beyond the call of duty. Not a word of thanks for that offer. Just a shrug of the shoulders.

Normally, I would have offered to walk anyone in that situation up to the road to make sure they got to the top safely, but I was sick of him. Having curtly pointed out that he couldn't expect anyone to risk their vehicle coming down a road he had no business coming down himself, or words to that effect, I left him with my neighbour and returned to my jigsaw.

A couple of days later I saw my neighbour who said that the drip had got a taxi and disappeared into the night without a word of thanks.

The whole thing was extraordinary in the extreme. It seems like a dream now, or perhaps a film seen a long time ago and not quite remembered. The tap, tap, tap at the window. The silent, translucent man in his city clothes, the frozen night and the icy lake. Everything else aside it gives me a greater appreciation of The Good Samaritan. I felt extremely uncharitable and resentful about the whole thing and by the end was set against being helpful.

It does go to show though. If the PI had been friendly and appreciative, I would have felt totally differently about the whole thing. You get what you give seems to be the lesson in all this.

Sobbing with rage

2010-02-16T11:37:00.003Z

I met with the builder one evening last week. I had some queries about the bill for the work he had done and wanted to run through them before I paid him. He gave me 20minutes notice that he was coming round so I scarcely had time to find my paperwork before he was there.

My queries were simple. 'Why is the bill nearly double the estimate'. I had done my maths and my homework. I knew exactly what I had asked for as extras and I figured it would be a 20% increase on the original quote. You can imagine my horror when it was more like 70%.

I had tried to bring this up before but to no avail. My builder does not like to talk about money. Not at all. He likes to be given money without complaint. End of story.

Now, essentially, the builders did a good job, and at a good price. Even the inflated price was still a good price. But I resent being told something will cost X and then, once the work is completed, being told that actually is was Y + a few zeros.... I think that an estimate should be accurate within about 20%. I'm naive like that it seems.

Not a fan of paperwork, the invoice was a simple one sided page. On it was the original cost plus the extras which were lumped into two categories. Plastering and Joinery. I had already asked how the plastering had trebled in price when we had not done triple the amount of work. The builder produced his time sheet for 'time spent plastering'. Just one glance and I knew it wasn't accurate but what was I to do? he is the only builder for miles, also a neighbour, and I couldn't call him a liar to his face (quite happy to do so here though). I showed him the spreadsheet I had done which showed what was allowed for and what was extra. He went red and he went on the attack.

'Nobody else would have done this work for the price we did it' he spluttered.
'That's not the point' I replied 'you estimated for the work at the price you chose and that's why I went with you, not someone else'.
There was more spluttering and more along the same lines of what a bargain they were, how hard they worked, and that the cost is what it was. All this underlined with a sort of accusatory note that I was to blame for this and shouldn't be questioning him.

The thing is that in my line of work I run a lot of building jobs and I have never had this problem before. Then again I haven't had to deal with welsh builders before either.

The builder's son, who was there too, tried to calm him down and let me speak my piece, but to no avail. 'I've got men to pay, mortgage payments, children to feed' were all thrown into the mix. I felt myself flushing under the onslaught. I knew I was being steamrollered. I also knew that if I were a man I would not be in this position. If I were a man, or had rented a man for the evening, he would have a sane conversation about it and we would come to a compromise. I know this because other couples I know have used him and that is what has happened. 'He's very reasonable' the husbands say. Not this night he wasn't. My builder hates dealing with women and I was suffering because of it. I simply couldn't get him to listen.

To my intense rage and humiliation I felt my eyes well up and my throat tighten. These were tears of frustration and rage and though I could stop them welling over it was going to be obvious that they were there. I was fulfilling all his stereotypes and I was also being bullied into paying a bill that I didn't fully understand.

Several days later I am still bitter about it. I feel I have somehow failed myself. It is not the money (though now my emergency 'rainy day' savings have been horribly depleted which I hadn't wanted). It is the failure to communicate. That night, I felt that being single was not a good thing. I felt lonely.

Anyone for Marmalade?

2010-02-11T09:03:00.003Z

So, like a good bear, come the end of January I wriggled my nose, curled my toes and then stretched languourously before deciding it might be time to get up. This was such an exhausting decision that I had to go back to bed to ponder it more thoroughly.

Of course I did also have to get out of bed in order to do some work, eat a great deal of food, very little of which was my five a day rations, and to watch rubbish on television.

By last weekend I emerged tousle headed and determined to stay awake for the whole weekend. As I had someone staying it seemed like a good hostess type thing to do. Be awake. It is now some months since I have had a free weekend so I was rather grumpy about the whole thing, particularly since my guest is renowned for waking very early. No lazy mornings for me then.

It was therefore ironic that when I dragged myself from my bed at 8.30 on Sunday morning there was not a peep to be heard from the spare bedroom. Admittedly vast quantities of wine had been shipped the night before, and I had some left a very tantalising quantity of books by the bed for midnight and dawn reading material but still... I cleared up from the night before, and laid breakfast. The Loyal Hound and I went for a long walk. We read the remnants of the Saturday paper. We tried not to feel bitter about the fact that we could have still been asleep. Then, like a vision on the road to Damascus, my eye fell upon a plastic bag that one of the supper guests from the night before had brought me. Marmalade oranges. Aaaha. My mission was clear. I must use this time to make marmalade.

I would generally consider myself to be an accomplished cook. I will try most things and have recently merrily made puff pastry, cooked fillet steak for 17 and made a tart that would have been put in pride of place in the window of Patisserie Valerie. How tricky could marmalade possibly be?

Four days later, as I clean up the last of the chaos that one batch of marmalade caused I realise the error of my ways. Making Marmalade it seems, is like travelling to the arctic. You should not set about it unprepared.

Several hours (well, it felt like hours) of squeezing, chopping and weighing later I had the contents in a pan simmering away. The kitchen was a sticky mess of juice, escaped pips and fruit pulp. At this moment my houseguest emerged from her room. Turned out she had woken at four and picked up one of the books I had left for her. unable to put it down she had read it until she finished it then collapsed in a state of exhaustion and slept until 10.30... Sorry. I digress.

So, lucky her comes down for breakfast to find me covered in bits of orange, the kitchen covered in bits of orange and the marmalade simmering on the stove. No sign of any breakfast for her or anything like that. She took it well.

We decided a walk was the way forwards so I put the pan in the oven to carry on doing it's thing and off we went. Upon our return I found that the muslin bag of pulp and pips had gently floated to the top of the pan, like a corpse in a crime drama, and had then scorched itself. MMm. Nice added flavour. I carried on regardless.

My guest, who had a long journey ahead of her and was probably afraid of becoming covered in marmalade, left after an early lunch and I decided to finish making said marmalade. At this point I discover that I didn't have quite as much sugar as I had assumed. What I had was thrown in, along with the coffee sugar that was welded to the bottom of the pot. The marmalade came to the boil and I dumped in the thermometer. Glancing at it, it did seem strange that it was already at a temperature that was nearing the top of the marker. Naturally I did not investigate any further for a good few minutes at which point I discover that the bulb on the thermometer had smashed.

The question is, did it smash in the marmalade, or in the drawer??? What the hell. It was probably in the drawer and as it wasn't a mercury thermometer I was unlikely to have poisoned the batch too badly.

At this point I start hunting for jars to discover that I have been ruthlessly throwing empty jars away and have scarcely any left. A quick sweep around the kitchen turned up a few 'nearly empties' which were ruthlessly scraped clean and washed. It was then time to decant the wretched stuff.

Using a handy plastic jug I then proceeded to spread marmalade all over the kitchen. It dripped on the oven, it slimed down the side of the boiler. It splatted on the floor where I promptly trod on it and spread it all over the kitchen. As I discovered later that day it also dripped on the chair, where I then proceeded to sit on it. Very little of it seemed to actually make it into the jars.

The end result was chaos. The marmalade that made it into the pots looks good but I am too nervous to try it in case I get a bit of glass bulb or thermometer liquid flavour. Then there is the nice undertone of schorched muslin to watch out for. It looks good. But as we know, looks aren't everything. See, here it is:

It wasn't worth it. I'm sticking to jams, jellies and puff pastry as the easier option. Shop marmalade will be just fine thank you. It's not worth risking life and limb for this. The only question left is this: Who wants a pot of marmalade? I have several looking for good homes......

Struggling to start the New Year

2010-01-21T13:36:00.003Z

I am really struggling to get into the swing of the new year. I can't seem to get my head around the fact that it is January and I need to be all proactive and filled with New Year's resolutions. Instead I seem to be struggling to get up in the morning, let alone earn a living, clean the house, brush my hair and do all those other things that we should tackle with savoir faire and enthusiasm. Is it just me?

I normally like January. I like getting Christmas out of the way and having a clean slate that I can scribble all over indecisively.

I blame the snow. It has given me a strange extended holiday from the world and now I can't seem to reconnect. Instead my urge to hibernate has emerged and is constantly snarling at me that I should be eating fattening things and sleeping through the bad weather. As a result of this I am barely distinguishable from this:

So to all those wannabe hibernators out there. You are not alone.

In, Out, In, Out - shake it all about.

2010-01-11T11:15:00.003Z

I made it out, I made it back in again. Now I am sitting watching the snow fall and plotting how I pack for three days of work meetings in just one small bag that I can carry, whilst wearing suitable clothes that I can walk out in this afternoon. Not only do I need clothes but also work stuff. I may have to do two trips to the car which is a real bore. I think that minimal changes are the way forwards and I shall have to risk smelling by the time Thursday comes around...

It is bloody snowing AGAIN. Another two inches overnight and more as I watch. It is also drifting which will make the road over the hill fun to traverse. If one more person tells me 'it is thawing now' I shall come down off my mountain like an enraged yeti and stuff snow in their mouth until they eat their words....

Wolf at the door (well, panther apparently...)

2010-01-08T10:09:00.005Z

Three friends took great pleasure in ringing me yesterday to tell me that the local paper has headlined the fact that PANTHER TRACKS were seen in the snow just 1/4 a mile away from my house.... Oh joy. Not only do I have snow to deal with and icicles taller than me that plunge off the house at intermittent points, but now there is supposedly a 'third generation big cat' roaming the woods around my house. Could life become trickier? Will the chewed bones of the loyal hound and I be discovered in the spring?

Luckily I got online and read the article where in very small print at the end of it Chester Zoo suggested that rather than a panther, the tracks could be that of an otter. Normally this would comfort me but having seen where the tracks where I'm not convinced that anything other than a cat could have walked there. The tracks were on the top of the fall side of the dam which is some 80 feet high and a gradient that makes me feel sick looking over it. I guess they must be otters who don't suffer from vertigo.... Please let them be otters.

So, now I am walking out and about in my strimmer glasses and wielding the carving knife in case of a surprise otter / panther attack. It makes going outside more interesting I suppose.

I made a break for freedom yesterday. The Loyal Hound and I walked the half mile or so through the snow and were picked up by a friend with a 4 x 4 and we went to the nearest town. The excitement. The bright lights, the people! It was almost too much for me. We went to the supermarket and I chose all my shopping on a weight basis as I would have to carry it back. So, I now have mushrooms, spinach and maltesers to see me through the next couple of days and to give some variety to the diet of porridge. Exciting n'est pas?

My neighbour fought his way back home yesterday as well. He had been out the day of the blizzard and hadn't managed to make it back until now. We walked through the woods together. Me laden with groceries and him towing a gas bottle and a sack of pony food for the horses. He then very kindly shovelled a path through the snow to my gate which I had not got round to yet (I was going with the wading through the stuff idea). There is so much snow I can't actually open the gate but now I do have a path to it so it is all progress. I have dug myself a path around the house and to the woodshed so it feels positively civilized here now as I can go out in just boots if I stick to the paths. It's all progress.

My next task is to come up with some kind of a plan for the weekend. I am supposed to be going away to stay with friends and feel it would be rather wimpish to cancel because of the snow. But, I am not keen on the idea of lugging a suitcase off the hill. I wonder if I should try a 'wear all my clothes at once' number and walk them off, then hope that I can get my car started once I get to it. If I leave in the daylight this shouldn't be too bad. I mean I'll look madder than usual wearing my party clothes with my rubber trousers but that can't be helped. It's either that or I spend the next few hours making a rucksack out of curtains and coal sacks. Suggestions on a postcard please...

Mad woman on a mountain

2010-01-06T12:55:00.005Z

I know, it's been a long time since I was here. I didn't die or anything. Life just escaped me for a while. Builders, Christmas, a crushed finger, snow. The usual excuses. Now I am marooned and there are no excuses not to return. There is a possibility that overnight the hovel, loyal hound and I were whisked off to Switzerland. The only reason I know this isn't the case is that there is no chair lift or gluwhein in sight. Instead there is snow. nothing but snow. So much snow that I have had to shovel a path to my woodshed. You want to see a picture? ok - here's one for you...

I should point out that I took this photo before it started snowing yesterday, when another 7" fell.....

I know that many are excited about the snow but I am on my third week of being snowed in and am thoroughly bored now. I had to evacuate the week before Christmas and ended up spending a fortnight over Christmas with my parents and family. It was about 12 days too long in my book. Carless, and with a house only 7 miles away that I couldn't get to, I was rapidly entering a state of madness. Chutney Mary and the nephews were not too bad but the Box of Frogs had brought her new man home for Christmas and they were lucky to escape with their lives as I was ready to commit foul and dastardly Midsummer Moider style acts after day 2. By day 9 I could barely look either of them in the eye without snarling. Friendly aren't I?

On Sunday I made it home in a combination of four wheel drive vehicles, toboggans and foot slogging and the relief at being back in my own house delicious.

So what happened whilst I was away from cyberspace? The crushed finger was an exciting interlude. I'll set the scene. The builders had finished and after spending three weeks stripping woodchip off the walls and then two weeks painting I was nearly finished. All that was needed was a bit more painting and the carpets to be delivered and laid.

The carpet arrived in a 25 metre x 4 metre roll. Unfortunately the carpet layers didn't arrive. The delivery man was determined to lift nothing more than a piece of paper so my batty neighbour, his ex girlfriend and the postman were roped in. We hauled the carpet onto a ladder and struggled to pull it out of the van into the barn. As the ladder came off the van, the weight kicked in. Everybody apart from me dropped the ladder and my finger was left, trapped between it and the floor. Much cursing and swearing ensued. Then pain. a lot of pain. This being me, I didn't go to the doctor on the basis of 'what would he do anyway?'. By Thursday I gave up and went to see him. He promptly said 'Aaaah yes. You have crushed the bones in your fingertip and the nail needs to come out. Come back tomorrow'. Clutching my arm to my chest I went off and licked my wounds for 24 hours. When I returned he injected my finger with local anaesthetic and then, WITHOUT WAITING FOR IT TO WORK he pulled my finger nail out with a pair of pliers. The Spanish Inquisition had nothing on this man.

Cue shrieks of pain from me and gasps of horror from the nurse who had me pinned to the table. The doctor gave me a scathing look and said 'pull yourself together'. I resisted punching him with my good hand and then shrieked some more as he re crushed all the bones in the finger. ('just checking to see if they are broken - they are!') I'm never going to a doctor again.

Two weeks later the finger felt better but I had torn all the muscles in my shoulder from holding the finger up to my chest (as instructed by the doctor). Why not give me a sling? Apparently this was not worth doing. It would be much better to make me spend over a hundred much needed pounds at the physiotherapist thank you.

This incident put another delay on my life. No painting, no typing and no sleep as the finger / shoulder worked hard to keep me awake. This was a little bit gutting. Having lived on a building site for six weeks all I had been looking forward to was the nice bit at the end when I put the furniture back, cleaned like a lunatic and painted. Instead everything had to be done one handed and at a snail's pace. I could have wept (actually, at one point, I did). This really was a time when I was Single and only just surviving. I longed to have someone else here who could help.

I am now entering a state of cabin fever and rely on all of you to keep me in touch with the world. There are people out there aren't there???? I am living on porridge and cigarettes and am running low on both so tomorrow I will fight through 3/4 mile of snow and see if I can find someone with a four wheel drive to give me a lift to the shops and back. The road over the mountain is not for the faint of heart. The drifts are 8' high the road has been reduced from a wide two lane tarmac ribbon to a single lane of icy slush between the drifts.

I have already brought in two wheelbarrows of logs and dug the loyal hound out of a drift that he misjudged. The reservoir is frozen over and snowed on and looks beautiful. In some ways it is a good thing there is nobody up here at the moment. I must look like a madwoman. When it is snowing hard my stylish outdoor wear consists of a pair of boots with rubber trousers over them to stop the snow filling my wellingtons (actually I have to wear that delightful part of the ensemble all the time now as the snow is too deep to walk in without the trousers). Top half? Coat, gloves, russian style hat with ear flaps and yesterday I was reduced to wearing my strimmer glasses as I couldn't look up into the snow without them. I am the mad woman on the mountain.....

Word Play

2009-10-28T13:47:00.004Z

I saw these the other day and thought I would pass them on to you. They are from the Washington Post. Mensa each year asks their readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the 2009 winners: (Number 2 of the second list has great meaning for me!!!)

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time. (this one describes me alarmingly well)
2. Ignoranus : A person who's both stupid and an asshole. (I know several people who this word describes beautifully)
3. Intaxication : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. (Been there, done that)
4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future. (this surrounds Ignoranus's I feel)
6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon : It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you. (have no idea what this would be like. Sounds terrible though)
13. Glibido : All talk and no action.
14. Doppler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. (so that's who it was....)
17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:
1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted , adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate , v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. - Ahmen!!!!!!!!!!
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n.. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

So, there you have it. Wordplay for a Wednesday.

Holding back the Sahara.

2009-10-27T11:44:00.005Z

You will be delighted to hear that I resolved my costume dilemma in the time honoured way. I threw money at the problem and rented something. The local costume shop does not really 'do' fictional characters but they specialise in medieval dress. This resulted in me going as Maid Marion complete with long blue silk dress with laced up bodice, sleeves that small families could have camped in and a waist length curly black wig. Oh, and a girdle of course. I have now been told that I must grow my hair long, black and curly, which could prove tricky. Also, that I must instantly throw out my wardrobe and only wear medieval dress. This is either because I looked unutterably ravishing or because it gave everybody such a laugh that they want me to hang about like a court fool to amuse them everyday of the week. I am going with the latter as the most likely option.

Back in the real world, the builders are working so fast that if you blink, you'll miss something. There are skylights going in in the new corridor and doorways being bashed through. Studwalls are flying up and the new chimney breast is built. The electricians are festooning the house with cabling and the icing on today's cake is that the Forestry Commission have turned up and are taking down the trees that border my garden.

These have been slowly and steadily falling down and the next winter storm could have seen them tumbling onto my garden. As they are at least 80ft tall this was a problem which made me glance at them furtively in the lightest of breezes as I wondered whether they were leaning just a little bit more than yesterday. Taking them down is also going to have the added bonus of flooding my garden with evening light. OK. Flooding the garden is an exaggeration, but it will make a big difference. It is all too exciting for words.

The dust, on the other hand, is not exciting. Overwhelming would be a better word. The Loyal Hound is an interesting shade of grey, as am I, and all my worldly goods. Everything is coated in dust. I left footprints on the carpet when I went upstairs earlier. There is so much of it that it seems improbable that I will ever get rid of it. I am determined to not worry about it. I shall cross that dustbath when I need to. Right now it would be like trying to push back the Sahara to try and tackle it.

Costume Crisis

2009-10-22T13:25:00.007+01:00

It seems that I stumble from one crisis to another. This weeks' mini drama? A costume party on Saturday night.

The title is 'Favourite Fictional Character'. I have come up with many cunning ideas for what I could wear to this. My favourite being Mavis the Fat Fairy from Will o' the Wisp (does anyone else remember that?? Heaven with Evil Edna the television). Here they are for you to admire...

I already have the figure for this, but couldn't face dying my hair blue and my wand is missing in action.

Having discarded that, I have had many hours in the car this week to think of cunning alternatives. Unfortunately I have not been near actual shops where I could then FIND whatever genius costume I came up with. Consequently I have done what I always do. Absolutely nothing. I live in the hope that on the night I will mysteriously come up with a fabulous idea which I can create using loo roll and double sided sticky tape (neither of which I have to hand).

This weekend's party is made more complicated by the fact that the cooking season has started again. So from Friday I am cooking for 14 people and will need to get a four course dinner onto the table in record time on Saturday night. The moment coffee is sent out I will do my 'wonderwoman' quick change in the kitchen before running off like a reverse cinderella to join the party.

So - back to my clothing dilemma. Bearing in mind how I am spending the weekend, I briefly considered The Swedish Chef, from the muppets. I just don't have the eyebrows for it though, and neither do I think I should be drunk in charge of a knife.

Then I thought I could go as God but that might offend those who think she is real, rather than fictional. My next idea was to dress entirely in black and decorate my Thumb with a small wig and dress and go as Thumbelina. All my black clothes are now dust clothes though and I don't have a wig small enough for my thumb. I wish I were a boy 'cos then I'd go as Captain Pugwash who is possibly my favourite fictional character ever. I have the perfect stomach for this costume so that would save on padding.

So, I now have to stop coming up with improbable ideas that I can't execute and instead, come up with a costume that can be made up out of bits of string, building rubble and carrot peelings. Any cunning thoughts?

One week in and I'm already behind.

2009-10-19T16:32:00.003+01:00

So, the builders have started. The hovel has started it's metamorphic process and will soon shake off its chrysalis of dust and become a palace. Or so it goes in my fantasy world.

The builders started last monday and true to form they flooded the house in record breaking time - just three hours! That was fun and a novel way of keeping the dust down I suppose.

Despite the fact that this is supposed to be a five week project they have already been AWOL for two days out of the last six. Impressive, no? At this rate the five week job will escalate into a seven week job which will see me being seriously unamused.

They have done lots of destroying though. Walls have been knocked down and ripped out and I think they bought some extra bags of dust and rubble to scatter around and make the works look more impressive. Somehow, not only the house but also the garden is smothered in rubble.

This week should see new things going up - stud walls and things and the house I imagined will start taking shape. At that point I expect I'll start panicking and wondering if I am doing the right thing so that is an emotional rollercoaster to look forward to.

In the meantime I have moved all my possessions into one end of the house and am working in the kitchen with all the company business crammed into the understairs cupboard.

The nice thing about starting is that I can get excited about finishing. I have made improbable resolutions to myself about sorting all my things out before I put them back. Books will be alphabetically ordered (or if I am feeling shallow, then colour co-ordinated!!!), odds and ends that I hang onto for no apparent reason will ruthlessly be delivered to the charity shop. In this dream, mysteriously, my remaining possessions will become chic and elegant items rather than shabby and decrepit bits of ikea uselessness. World of Interiors will be slavering over the prospect of photographing the wonder that is the hovel. My optimism knows no bounds at this point.

What does a boyfriend turn into?

2009-10-07T12:27:00.004+01:00

I have a great friend who has just had an article printed on her. In said article, her other half, who is close to 70, was described as her 'boyfriend'. This is blatantly not suitable. You can't call a 70 year old man a boyfriend. But what choice did she have?

She couldn't call him her lover. Possibly if she were French this would have worked, but not for a Brit. We just don't do that. Neither can she bring herself to call him her 'partner' as it sounds too pc for words and also, faintly businesslike. But what is she left with?

There are moments when the English language is horribly deficient, and this is one of them. So what do you call your lover when you start rolling down the hill of life? What alternatives are there? If I ever find a man, and it might take years, then this is a dilemma I may face.

Suggestions please.....

My Underwear is not good enough.

2009-10-05T14:03:00.003+01:00

I have been in London a few times in the last fortnight and I have come to one inescapable conclusion. My underwear simply isn't good enough.

Let's get something straight here. It's not as if everyone was strolling around wearing nothing BUT underwear, but they all looked so well turned out, so co-ordinated and fashionable and in vogue, that they quite obviously were wearing beautiful underwear. Most likely the sort where pants and bra actually matched and were made of intricate lace hand stitched by elves, bred for the purpose.

All of a sudden my cotton knickers and tired bra, which only match because I accidentally dyed them all in the wash, felt horribly tired. I am a useless female and it is no wonder that I am single. It is beside the point that I can't remember when anyone last saw me in my underwear but perhaps they can tell just by looking at me that I am a failure on the lingerie front?

The thing about it is that I balk at the cost of lovely underwear. A decent bra and knicker set costs the same as the bathroom taps. I need the taps more. My priorities are obviously all quite wrong. If I had good underwear, I would have a lover who would then urge me to let him pay for the taps. I see now that good underwear would have been an investment that would have paid for all other things. Why did my mother never tell me this? Why did I have to wait until I was 36 for this vital piece of information to reveal itself to me in the middle of Kensington High Street?

The problem is now too big to solve though. My bank account is under severe strain at the moment and paying for new underwear was going to be an impossibility. I mended my shoes with duct tape the other day rather than buy more. You see the problem.

Something had to be done though and my solution was pathetic in the extreme. I bought underwear in the supermarket. It wasn't plain white or plain black which is my normal approach. There are small patterns that nobody but me will get to see and bows on the front in delicate red ribbon. This is harlot underwear in my world. I even bought a new bra which had lace on it. The extravagance is shocking, I know.

Let the Stripping Begin....

2009-09-22T15:57:00.003+01:00

So, after a week of every plumber within a hundred mile vicinity coming to visit, and the arrival of two builders estimates I have made decisions. The gold plated boiler is going to be installed at the beginning of October, and the builders start work on October 12th.

Armed with actual dates, I have hauled out the trusty steamer and begun steaming off the many acres of woodchip that are holding the house together. I always envisioned this being done by somebody else but budgets (and boilers) have made me abandon this plan and the work falls to yours truly.

I have a fantastic range of woodchip wallpapers. My office has three different styles in the one room and there are four other styles through the house. None of them seem that willing to leave which is vexing. In addition to the ones on the walls, there are those between the raftered ceilings which also need to be removed. I am going to have some sympathy with Michaelangelo at the end of this.

So far, after three hours of hot and sweaty labouring I have managed to strip just one wall of one room. I have until the 12th of October to get 5 rooms done. Hmm. It's going to be interesting isn't it?

I'm skipping school this afternoon.

2009-09-17T12:01:00.003+01:00

That's right. Work is reasonably under control, if not verging on quiet at the moment and I am running away to play for the afternoon. I am going to drive up to the coast and go to the cinema to see Julie and Julia.

This seems like the perfect thing to do on a grey september afternoon. It's indulgent, unnecessary and at four pounds a ticket, cheap. Perfect.

It will be an excellent distraction from worrying about builders, topsoil, boilers and clients who haven't paid their invoices and it will hopefully inspire me to cook something delicious for tea on Saturday when ElizabethM comes to visit.

Going to the cinema is rare for me. It is miles away and though I can be bothered to drive the 50 minutes to get there, I can't be bothered with the journey back afterwards late at night. I'm lazy like that.

There is a local cinema nearby. It shows films on Wednesday nights in the village hall and is a little behind the times. At the moment I think that the first Lord of the Rings film has just arrived for a grand premiere. Tickets are sold by a nice lady who is officially 'simple'. She is interesting though. Some years ago she won eight million pounds in the lottery. She bought herself a new second hand volvo and her children new mini coopers. They were not thrilled. Farmers one and all they live up mountains at the end of rutted tracks that Mini Coopers were not designed for. If you see a new mini cooper abandoned at the bottom of a track, you have found one of her sons! I don't know what she did with the rest of the money but she still sells the tickets for the cinema, and the ice creams and packs of minstrels and I have never seen her wear anything except her brown cord skirt, plain shirt and knitted cardigan. Her money did NOT go on designer shopping. Anyway, back to the 'cinema', such as it is.

You sit on those plastic, stacking chairs which after an hour are guaranteed to give you a numb bum, and halfway through the film, regardless of plot, dialogue etc the film stops for an interval! It's not the most comfortable experience and as they usually keep the film schedule top secret until the day afterwards, I rarely manage to go there!

Today's cinema trip though will be to a proper cinema with plush velour seating, the smell of old popcorn and probably children who really are skipping school talking and snogging in the back row.

A peek at my summer idyll.

2009-09-15T16:33:00.004+01:00

In case you think that I am just one big grumble at the moment I thought I would remind myself, and show you, that there have been some idyllic moments over the summer at the new hovel.

Here are some photos which I haven't even doctored to show why life is good. I need to remember these things more often. It is all too easy to get sucked down by the vexing things, and forget the perfect moments. This will serve as a reminder for me.

The Box of Frogs is in Love.

2009-09-14T14:29:00.003+01:00

My sister, mad as a box of frogs, hence the name, is in love. She met her beau at a houseparty in the North of Scotland. Tall, ex army and with a head of thick, grey hair, he was promptly nicknamed 'the Silver Fox' and so he shall remain.

They went straight from being strangers to being a couple. Literally. They met on a Saturday. They parted company for their respective homes on the Sunday. They met up the next weekend and officially became 'a couple'. They are at the stage where they can't remember each other's name and call one another 'Darling' a lot. Now they are talking about moving in together.

It just goes to show how quickly these things can happen. After all they only met two and a half months ago. My prediction? If they are still going out by Christmas then this time next year I'll be shopping for a wedding outfit. Apparently he is coming to stay with us for Christmas. Brave of him. Christmas in our household is a deranged affair with an excess of decorations, bickering, food and sulking. If he makes it through that then marriage to the box of frogs will be a doddle.

That's not actually what I wanted to tell you about though. Box of Frogs has been out of a relationship for a while now and she is a few years older than me. She knows what it is like to be single and how vexing the questions you get asked are. You want examples? Ok, how about this one:

"I can't understand why you are single?" This is usually said by well meaning friends but is intensely irritating as it is a pointless statement. I mean, if I knew why I were single, presumably I would do something about it. Are they expecting me to respond by saying in an insouciant fashion "Oh, it's because at midnight I like to eat a kitten and wash it down with the blood of a freshly squeezed bat." What am I supposed to say when people ask that. Do they want an answer? Seriously people, I don't know why I am single, but I am and I am getting on with my life. It doesn't make me less of a person or anything.

Box of Frogs, more than anyone knows how this type of question is not helpful at all. The other night she came to stay and she said to me.

"The silver fox and I feel so bad that we are happy and you are single. I must introduce you to some of his friends". (ok I'm paraphrasing a little)

So, let me get this straight. If I am single I therefore cannot be happy? Pah! Harumph and Bah Humbug to you. How is it that Box of Frogs, having been single for years and years, is suddenly converted to matchmaking me? It's not that I'm averse to meeting the Silver Fox's friends. They may be George Clooney, or Clive Owen. I'm all for that. What I'm not keen on is the instant pity factor that she has developed now that she is in a relationship and I am not. It is a betrayal of those of us who are single and surviving.

I imagine it is a bit of a conversion thing. She is converted to lurve and all it's glories and wants me to be on the side of the couples, god and all shiny happy things in the universe. Instead I am loitering on the dark side, eating crisps, watching House and wearing mismatched underwear because nobody gets to see it and I can! Obviously, I need to be saved.

Well, not today. Box of Frogs is off on holiday with the Silver Fox this week. Next week I expect she'll start matchmaking me with his accountant.

I've been FIRED.

2009-09-10T16:34:00.002+01:00

Since I work for myself, you will have probably already leapt to the correct conclusion that I haven't been fired by myself. Mind you, I did have to give myself a verbal warning last week but that is another story. No, this time, I have been fired by my builders. What makes this story even worse is that I hadn't even hired them yet.

Searching for a builder is a tiresome and depressing job. You want somebody you like, somebody with sensible prices, and somebody reliable. There is a local builder who I have worked with before but I have been avoiding going to him because he can't bear working for women. He thinks we can't possibly know what we want, or understand what we are asking for, and so tends to do what he thinks is right. This generally makes me apoplectic, very red in the face, and tempted to use his tools for purposes they were not designed for. So, I searched farther afield. I asked around for recommendations and finally was put in touch with a really nice firm. Well, 'firm' may be a bit of an exaggeration. Three guys who came highly recommended.

They came to see me and I liked them enormously. They understood what I wanted to do, and why, and my hopes, like a hot air balloon in May, started to rise. Their estimate came in. It was higher than I wished, but realistic all the same. I started to soar and dream of a house that wasn't a testament to seventies nastiness. However, due to the gold plated boiler requirements, I realised I would have to slash a third of the work off the budget. To do this, I needed a breakdown of the prices.

This is where it all goes horribly wrong.

I rang and asked if they could breakdown the estimate so that I could work out what bits could be done this year, and what would have to wait. 'No need to type it all up' I assured them, 'just scribble the figures on the specs that I gave you.' Two weeks later I had heard nothing. I chased them up. Still nothing. I left a shirty message asking where it was. Monday night I had a phonecall from John, one of the builders, apologising profusely for the slowness. They had tried to get in touch with me last week, he said, but I hadn't responded. I pointed out that they had my e mail, my house address and two telephone numbers and one of those would have reached me if they had sent anything.

Not wishing it to be a big drama I suggested they send me the paperwork by e mail or post so that I could give them a decision this week. I assured them that I wanted to go ahead with the work but I just needed to decide which bits had to be put on hold for a year. They promised me a response by the next day. Tuesday came and went. Nothing. Wednesday still nothing. I left another message wondering where the estimate was. Thursday I get an e mail. I shall copy it directly for you:

apologies but we are unable 2 help with your proposed works

No 'Dear Welsh Girl', no 'yours sincerely', nothing. It could have been from anyone. Anyone at all. That is quite aside that I can't bear the laziness of typing '2' instead of 'to'. Luckily for me the e mail address hinted at it being the builders. Otherwise I wouldn't have known who was firing me with one succint sentence.

I thought there was a recession on? I thought people wanted work? Surely you don't throw away £15000 of work this year with more to come for the next few years because doing an estimate is too hard? That can't be it? I think it is though. I have been fired by the builders I wanted to hire because they couldn't be bothered to do an hour of paperwork.

I don't think it was unreasonable to want a cost breakdown, particularly as I had assured them I wanted to go ahead, but couldn't do all the work this year. No, I feel certain that this is a direct result of me being a single girl. The builders have decided that I am tiresome with my need for estimates, and that they would rather work for someone who just says 'Whatever' to the costs and goes to the pub for a pint with them.

I know I should just move on, but this whole process has wasted two months when I could have been getting other builders in to estimate. I really did think they were the ones for the job. If I was married, or had a boyfriend, I bet they would have responded and produced the wretched paperwork when my other half requested it. Perhaps I should teach the Loyal Hound to write?

This is a huge thing to be doing on my own and it is frequently overwhelming in its enormity, both financial and emotional. Being fired by the builders I wanted to hire does not make it any easier at all.

It's been a while. Sorry about that but I'm back now.

2009-09-09T10:56:00.005+01:00

I know. I've been gone for ages. I'm not dead or anything. I don't really know what happened. I got blogging block! Anyway, I have overcome my fear and here I am again. Back luck. Thought you had got rid of me didn't you?

So, in my absence I have been busy. In addition to working like a loon, I have started work on the garden of the hovel. I have built a vegetable garden (of sorts) and am now spending my time trying to dig up top soil from elsewhere in the garden and lugging it over to the new beds. Back breaking work that is oddly satisfying. Here is a photo of the garden so far....

Hopefully, next year I will be able to show you a picture of it filled with a cornucopia of vegetables!

I have also made a driveway and parking area next to the house. This was done with the help of a local farmer and his digger and then 10 hours of crucifying work when I raked out eleven tons of gravel. That night I was so stiff that I thought it would kill me. The next few days even walking was a struggle. However, now I have an actual drive which you can turn in and everything.

My real battle is with the plumbers. The heating system in this house is deranged. The boiler, which the previous owner assured me was marvellous, is actually insane. There is only one thermostat in the house and it is in the sitting room. If it is cold I, not unnaturally, light the wood burner. Consequently the Sitting Room heats up and the thermostat goes off which then means the heating in the rest of the house goes off. In addition there is no timer switch and no way that I have found to turn the hot water on. If I want hot water I have to use the immersion override and wait an hour for the water to heat up. It is not ideal. Not ideal at all.

I have now had four different plumbers out to quote for a new boiler. I had naively thought that it would cost a painful £3500 or so. 'Or so' doesn't even begin to cover it though. It turns out they think £4500 PLUS VAT is more like it. The boiler is only £2000 so where is the rest of the money going? I am frequently driven to wanting to weep just thinking about it and it is becoming an issue which sums up the 'single and surviving, just' principle. I have to sort the wretched thing out but it is taking up a quarter of my budget for doing up the house, a quarter I desperately wanted for other things. Moments like this I would love to have somebody else in my life, not only to share the dilemma, but in all honesty, to also share the cost.

I know that it is horribly mercenary but it has taken me YEARS to save up the money for this project and now it is all being sucked up by the vile plumbers. Hateful, hateful boiler. It has given me sleepless nights, and chillblains. Ok, not actually chillblains, but if I don't get it fixed before winter then they are an option.

I am doing everything I can to earn more money. I am working on two book proposals but neither of those are likely to earn me any money for years (if at all) and the recession means that, though I have work on, people aren't spending as much so I am travelling as much as ever, but not earning as much.

In addition I made a mistake earlier this year (long story that I won't bore you with), that cost me nearly two thousand pounds. I have cancelled a trip to China to try and recuperate the costs but this is definitely my summer of money worries. Perhaps there will be a Karmic refund and I will win £10,000 (or a hundred thousand?) to balance out the arterial bleed that is my bank account.

Anyway, I shall stop whining about my life. The sun is shining, the blackberries are ripening and the sheets are flapping on the line. I just need to adjust my dreams for the house. Instead of it taking a couple of years to get the bulk of the work done, it may be a lot longer. A lot, lot longer.

It's all downhill from here

2009-08-04T11:53:00.003+01:00

You know how you never feel as old as you actually are? We live in a pleasant state of denial and it is only the occasional thing that makes us realise time is travelling faster than we noticed. The other day a friend pointed out that we had known each other for twenty two years. This seemed like a shockingly long time. Surely I couldn't have known somebody I only met in the sixth form for that long? But the maths was incontrevertible. We had been friends for over two decades. This was alarming. I must be getting old if I can have known someone for that long. However, nobody else would know my shameful secret. Surely I could carry on living in denial and pretending that I am only just out of my twenties? NO growing old for me!

But recently I have been kicked out of my state of denial with a resounding and painful thud. How can this be? I hear you cry. I want to lie, to tell you anything else but this but I must be brave. I must confess. Deep breath. Here goes. I am starting to go grey. (see how I put that in bold, not grey - it's all part of the denial process). It is the start of a slippery slope. There is no going back from here.

Last time I went to the hairdressers she kindly offered 'to pull out the grey hairs' before announcing that 'there were too many and she didn't have time'. What?? I'm young. I'm full of the joys of youth. Being 20 isn't that long ago. But it is. It's nearly twenty years ago. 40 is approaching like an out of control train and there is no avoiding that after that the next big birthday is FIFTY.

I don't know when this happened. I have been living in denial for the last few years but these evil grey hairs have made me face the horrible truth. I'm getting older. My youth is a memory and one that I can't revisit on a whim. Soon, I can say that I am 'middle aged'. I should probably be saying it now. I don't want to be middle aged though. I want to be anything but middle aged.

But the fates are out to prove to me that old age is all that lies ahead of me. Yesterday the small son of a friend, one who had announced he was going to marry me when he grew up, rescinded his offer on the basis that I would be too old and maybe dead when he grew up. He has obviously seen the grey hairs and rethought his plans. I'm devastated.

I am going online to look for a zimmer frame and may have to trade the loyal hound in for a posse of cats and some knitting.

Hospitality Man - a tale of woe.

2009-07-27T16:53:00.006+01:00

I'm really not sure where to start. Friday seems a long time ago and I have had a weekend of friends and godchildren to try and forget the hideousness of the big date(thank the lord). However a promise is a promise, so I shall relive the experience of the last of the cybermen for your edification.

Friday morning saw me rather frantically getting ready for my much anticipated date. You know what it is like when you are in a rush? Suddenly there are a million and one things to do, none of which are things you actually want to do. Somehow, in between client phone calls, I dug up some clean clothes and found my makeup which I remembered to apply. I even located my hairbrush and was in the car and on my way in good time.

I looked ok, as good as I could hope for and as I drove to our meeting place my stomach churned queasily at the prospect ahead of me. Was this going to be another disaster or, more frightening still, somebody sane and normal and interested? I really wasn't sure which prospect made me more nervous.

I arrived a little early and headed for the pub to find that it was closed. Oops. Crossing my fingers that I hadn't made a hideous error and suggested a meeting place that wouldn't open at all, I waited outside the front door. There was no sign of HM (hospitality man) but I found myself scanning the faces of everyone who passed by wondering if they might be him. Absorbed in this entertaining pasttime I was pulled out of my reverie by a voice shouting my name from an upstairs window. It was Andy, my friend who runs the pub.

He came downstairs and let me in through the staff door and ensconsed me at the bar. I instantly told him that I was there on a blind date and filled him in on all we knew. He promised to duck out of the way as soon as HM arrived and we moved onto chatting about other things. Soon enough the pub opened for business and early lunch guests started turning up. The bar was still quiet though so I couldn't help but notice when a lone man came up and stood just round the corner of the bar from me.

He wasn't exactly like his photo, but then nobody ever is, so I decided to take the plunge and turning to him said 'Hospitality Man?' in what I would think is a friendly tone. He turned. He stared at me blankly with no recognition whatsover. He turned again and stared at the bar before turning back to look at me once more. I started to feel a blush rise across my face. How mortifying. I had obviously just accosted a stranger and he couldn't work out how to tell me so. Aaaaargh. He turned back to the bar and ordered a drink and I turned back to Andy to wince and carry on our interrupted conversation. But it didn't feel right. I was sure the man next to me was HM. I turned back again and there he was, staring at me. He put out his hand and I, not wanting to be rude, took it. He shook it without speaking then said 'Hospitality Man,'.

I was rather flustered by this and must have had an interesting expression on my face. A combination of relief that I hadn't been mistaken, and horror that I hadn't been mistaken. This was him. The man that had been e mailing nearly non stop all week. He wasn't a horror to look at or anything but neither did my heart go 'pit a pat' or my knees go week. (I wasn't really thinking either of those things would happen but a girl can hope). Still, it was early days and we had both made it to the assignation. Who knew what lay ahead of us? He still seemed incapable of saying anything so I suggested we move from the bar to a table. Since he seemed unable to do anything but stare at this point, I led the way and found a table round the corner where we both sat down. Bear in mind that he still hadn't really said anything other than his name at this point.

Once we sat down, he put out his hand and said once more 'Hospitality Man'. Being British, and unfailingly polite, I shook his hand and introduced myself again. He gazed speechlessly at me and I carefully removed my hand from his grasp. To break the silence I asked whether he had found the pub without any problems. He stared at the wall ahead of him and took several deep breaths. I wondered nervously if asking him if he found the pub was an offensive opening bid. Finally he spoke. "Do you think we can sit outside?" he said. I'm pretty sure he said that anyway. It turned out that he spoke with a south african accent and in a mumbling tone that you would expect from someone wearing ill fitting false teeth. "Certainly" I said. Up we got from our table and went outside and found a new table. Once we had sat down he again proferred his hand. I again took it. He shook it, again. He introduced himself, again.

At this point we have spent five minutes together and I am already feeling desperate. However, this is obviously his first 'blind date' so I decide that I had better try to get the ball rolling and say 'So, this would be your first blind date then'. He looks away from me and stares across the river. He draws a breath, as though he is going to speak and I look at him expectantly. He lets it out. He draws another. Finally he says 'so you have done this before?'. Relieved to have got a complete sentence that didn't involve an introduction out of him, I reply that I have and add that they are always awkward to start with. He starts several sentences but never finishes them. This makes having a conversation quite awkward. I decide to try a new tack. This has the same result.

We are now ten minutes in and I am already wondering whether throwing myself into the river might look desperate. Suddenly HM lurches into action. "Would you" he asks "be a good mother?" WHAT? That's his first question??? Seriously? I answer that I would be ok I supposed but that I didn't long for babies. He offers nothing back himself on this topic but after some more staring and failed sentences he suddenly says: "our eyes are the same colour". I agree that they are similar, though it is difficult to compare them as I don't have a mirror handy. Facetious I know but I couldn't help it. He then seizes the conversation once more and says: "what kind of wedding would you have?" The direction the conversation is going in is a little alarming but at least he is actually talking. Each answer I give involves him sucking my words up like a hoover and, with lips pursed (a personal hatred of mine) he would stare into space. If I asked him a question he simple couldn't answer it. It didn't matter what avenue I tried. Each one ended the same, with an awkward silence which he ignored by staring into space or staring at me in what I can only describe as wonderment.

He then asks why I live in Wales. I answer. Three minutes later, he asks why I live in Wales. I point out that I have just answered this question but he seems to think that it is not the same question if you ask it twice so I answered, again. At this point I have drained my drink and am wondering if it is too early for a triple vodka and tonic but he shows no sign of noticing that I have an empty glass and I am uncertain of how to excuse myself so early in the conversation. Luckily nature comes to my rescue and it starts to rain. I suggest we move back in (he seemed oblivious to the fact that we were getting drenched). As we pass the bar I realise that if I get myself another drink I'll have to stay longer. I decide death by dehydration would be better and we find another table to sit at.

I then struggle to find things to talk about. How was his interview? How long has he been in his last job? How did he like living in South Africa? None of these questions generate answers longer than a sentence so I start running out of gambits all too quickly. Every answer involves him starting into space for a disconcertingly long time, heaving in deep breaths as though he is going to answer, then letting them out without saying another word. Occasionally I try to prompt him but it is useless. He seems oblivious to the awkwardness of the whole thing. Indeed one of the complete sentences he gives me is how amazing it is to meet me and how he is struggling to come to terms with the idea of us. I am now worried.

Even worse, he would suddenly fire a question at me. This would be unrelated to anything else we might be trying to talk about at that moment. An example of this would be when he said to me 'Girl or Boy?' I looked blankly at him. Was this some kind of a test? Was he not sure what I was? which direction my sexual orientation was? I went with the first option and said 'Girl'. For once he wasn't lost for words and said 'Why'. I was bewildered but tried to help out by pointing out that I knew I was a girl because I didn't have the necessary anatomy to make me a boy. Seeing his expression I suddenly realise he was still on the baby / motherhood question and wanted to know which I would like, a girl or a boy.

Vexed I answered that is was a pointless question as you can't control what you get so wishing for one or the other is a sure road to disappointment. At this point I realise I can't keep going for much longer. I make up an appointment with the accountants and explain that I will need to leave.

He looks crestfallen and says that he was hoping to take me out for lunch (possibly on to a registry office afterwards?). I gently point out that I had only agreed to a drink and that I don't have time for lunch. He then eagerly says that he can meet me again on Saturday. Having already told him that I have friends staying for the weekend I am surprised at this. I remind him of the houseguests and he says 'are they not the sort of friends who would like to meet me?'. I firmly squash this and reply that we are going to be busy all weekend and he can't see me at anypoint in the weekend. 'Well' he says, 'when can I see you again?' Resisting the urge to say 'never' I say I will e mail him but that I am VERY busy for the next six years or so, and for the fourth, and hopefully last time, I shake his hand and leave him in the pub. Still staring at the wall and gaping like a fish. He was probably mid sentence but I didn't have the time to stay and find out.

Despite the fact that I had shopping I needed to do in order to feed my friends at the weekend, I fled the town. I arrived home and without further ado wrote my first 'Dear John' e mail. I very much hope that that will be the last I ever see or hear of him. Thinking of him now makes me go 'eeeeurgh' and shudder.

I officially give up on internet dating. Cybermen are all nutters and I can't put myself through this anymore. The Loyal Hound and I will have to grow old together and I shall start wearing purple and hats and banging my stick along the railings. It has to be a better way to live....

Possibly the worst one yet.

2009-07-24T21:16:00.002+01:00

I'm alive. He wasn't an axe murderer. However if there was an axe to hand I was tempted to use it. This may have been the worst date yet.

I'm sorry to leave you in suspense but I have friends arriving to stay for the weekend any minute now, so I can't regale you with the story until Monday. I have though managed to e mail off a 'Dear John' to Hospitality Man to explain that I will never again be hospitable with him. I suspect he will cry upon receiving it.....

We are meeting, but I suspect he IS a fruitloop.

2009-07-22T16:10:00.003+01:00

So, the date is planned. Friday at 12pm at a busy pub that is run by friends of mine. Worth having the amused and curious glances of friends as a small price to pay for not being hacked to pieces with an axe by a deranged fruitloop.

I confess that I am feeling more and more dubious about Hospitality Man's sanity. In the last 24 hours he has become increasingly keen. He has sent me a song (I'm just waiting for the mixtape to arrive) and many, many e mails and skype messages. He is so keen that is putting me off.

That is so typical isn't it. If they are too keen, I run away. If they aren't keen enough I think they aren't interested and, run away. But Hospitality Man really is keen. He e mailed me at THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. I shall give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was working some strange night shift. If he wasn't then I really have picked up a deranged stalker man haven't I?

I thought I might as well meet him. He is going to be in North Wales and has agreed to come slightly closer to me. Considering he has no car so will have to try and use the convoluted and erratic public transport system this is brave of him. My thinking was that if I meet him now then we will find out quickly whether he is a fruitloop, or a sane and wildly attractive man who seems to think I am marvellous. The latter does not come about that often. Well, ever actually.

Precautions will be taken though. I shall notify some particularly sane friends of mine with all the details and line them up to ring me (I wonder if there is a phone signal there?). We are to meet in the middle of the day which is not really a time that I associate with stalkers and murderers so that is a good thing.

The downside of meeting him so soon is that I have not had time to lose the 10lbs (ok, should be 20) that I would like, find clothes to wear, and generally make myself look presentable. Everyone else that I have met has never come back after the first meeting so, assuming he is a nice and normal man, then I should make an effort. Instead I am in a dishevelled state of disrepair that is not fixable in two days. He might run a mile at the site of me (if I haven't run already).

I think this is the moment to point out that I HATE dating. Really hate it. I hate the worrying. Will he like me? Will I like him? What will we talk about? etc etc. I wish that there were more bachelors around here who you just got to know gradually in the pub etc and then things could unfold at a more relaxed pace. Instead I have to go down this crazed strangers route, which is fraught with angst and seasoned with the raising and crushing of hope. Yup. I hate dating. Maybe that is one of the reasons that I am single?

So, any advice on first dates - whether it be what to wear, what to talk about etc etc, it would be VERY welcome. I am a complete novice at this and on the slim (and getting slimmer by the e mail) chance that Hospitality man is actually normal then I would like to avoid messing it up myself and you could help with that.....

Oh God, I think we might be meeting up....

2009-07-21T13:22:00.004+01:00

It turned out to be the nicer of the two potentials who had paid for the sub. That's good isn't it?? Or does it mean he isn't actually nice but finds his victims by paying for three days of internet dating subscription for them?

Anyway, there has been a flurry of e mails and he is obviously deluded since he has decided that I am God's gift to internet dating. Seriously, he has. Hold on and I'll get some of his e mails off the site and put them here so you can judge for yourselves.... Here goes:

He says that I have "a most captivating smile hinting at the nature of your character" and that "Frankly,i'm quite taken aback by the fact that a random decision to join this site has resulted in....well,meeting up with someone like you.." and then "I am truly,truly still coming to grips with the fact that one can get a sense of empathy with someone never met or laid eyes on."

This is good isn't it? Or is it the sign of a deranged person? Aaargh. I don't know.

So what else do you need to know? He is tall (hooray - a man who is taller than me!), he doesn't wear cravats (I had to check), he seems to have a sense of humour, he works in the hospitality industry, he is VERY keen. He has already given me his e mail address, telephone number and skype address and he wants to meet on Friday because he is coming to caernarvon for work.

Should I? Meet him I mean. If I do, at least I get to find out now whether the whole thing is worth pursuing or not. That's a good thing isn't it? Typically he won't have a car so I'll have to drive there and it is about an hour and a quarter for a cup of coffee then the same back. Annoying if he is as disastrous as all the other cybermen.

Advice please. Do I meet up with him or not?

Emergency Poll - feedback needed asap!!!

2009-07-20T17:24:00.004+01:00

To subscribe or not to subscribe, That was going to be the question. You see, the last cyber dating hell site that I was on never took my details off the site when I cancelled my membership (after Cravat man and composer man I felt there was no hope left in the world). In the last week or so I have had a couple of e mails from random cyber men who have seen my details and mistaken me for Cindy Crawford crossed with Victoria Wood (easy mistake to make). One of them sounded quite nice, and the other was friendly, so I sent them one of the set (and free) one liners provided by the service to say that my subscription had run out etc etc. I then sat and pondered whether I should reactivate myself (metaphorically and on line).

That was going to be the topic of this fascinating blog entry. I had a whole poll worked out which you - my fascinated readers - would have eagerly filled in. All decision making would then have been taken out of my incapable hands and the resulting chaos would have been your fault. It was a good plan and I do like it when a plan comes together.

Only this one didn't. Just as I started writing this post an e mail dropped into my inbox from one of the cybermen. He has PAID FOR MY ACCOUNT FOR ME!!! Just for three days mind, but still, that's keen isn't it? Or is it, in fact, stalkerish? Am I now obligated to bear his children and wash his socks for evermore? And on an etiquette front, is it rude to use the free sub he has given me to e mail the other cyberman as well?

So, new poll for you.

Is the latest Cyberman a stalker or a gentleman?
Do I have to bear his children for him in return for three days subscription to cyberhell? If not his children, must I give him my e mail address, bank account details and mother's maiden name?
Can I e mail the other cyberman (possibly the nicer one) without being plagued by guilt that cyberman one has enabled it.

Answers asap please. The subscription is running out as I type....

Life is out of my control....

2009-07-06T14:11:00.004+01:00

Rubbish holiday. Grrr. Group of people did not mix well and I, as gracious hostess, was horribly distracted and saddened by the totally unexpected death of my Uncle at the beginning of the week.

He had what you could argue is the ideal departure for him. In the middle of a walk, hunting for butterflies, he sat upon a rock and never got up again. This is fine but it is fifteen years earlier than any of us thought he would go. My father said the saddest thing. "I have had a brother for 73 years, and now I don't". Heartbreaking for him and for my Uncle's wife and son.

I didn't come rushing home. There were reasons for it, and I think they were right, but this week is now a maelstorm of trying to cram a week's work into half a day, move flights around and find black clothes to wear for the various services taking place on Thursday and Friday.

I had to cancel a set of flights for work to france and move them to tonight, and I can't claim on the insurance because they want a copy of the death certificate and I can't bring myself to ask for it. It seems so callous.

So forgive my absence from the ether world for a while. I leave for France tonight and am back just for funerals before going away again for work.

I feel as though I never went on holiday. The only reminder is my still packed suitcase sitting in the hall, where I expect it will remain for another ten days, my still damp swimming costume rotting away somewhere at the bottom of it.

OK, so you can go further North than Thurso...

2009-06-25T23:45:00.008+01:00

I wrote some great posts whilst I was away. Unfortunately, as ever, they were all in my head whilst I drove several hundred miles at a time. Wish you could have heard them. They were witty, anecdotal, enraging and amusing, and that was just the titles.

I even wrote a couple of posts on my mini laptop but now I can't find my USB stick thing to move them to this computer so that was a waste of time.

To amuse myself on my journey I took photos through the windows of the car as I drove along, about one every hour. They are thrilling stuff and illustrate very clearly how this country is NOT overpopulated. As does the fact that I drove for an hour at about 60mph and didn't pass a single house.... I did pass deer, sheep and one cyclist who I think was lost.

I worked my way up the country and on my day off I decided I hadn't gone far enough North and caught the ferry to Orkney. It's an odd place. Much more cultivated than the mainland and covered in the ugliest houses you have ever seen. More surprising is that there was NOBODY there. Not tourists, and not locals either. The place was abandoned. Maybe they had all gone for Sunday lunch on another island? Or they were in a Midsummer Day Druid ritual somewhere? Who knows?

Things that are worth seeing there? Well, they aren't beautiful but the Churchill Barriers are an amazing feat. Much more fascinating is the Neolithic Village. This is three thousand years old and is a village that was underground. Everything was made of stone; the beds, the furniture, the rugs, the works. There was a reason they called it the Stone Age. They really loved that stuff. Having said that they feasted on lobster and scallops and built underground villages. If you happen to be dropping by Orkney in your travels it is definitely worth seeing.

So is the Italian Chapel. Built by prisoners of war out of Nissan Huts it is tiny and look innocuous enough from the outside, but inside it is beautifully painted to look as though it is made of stone. All the metalwork was done with salvaged metal off shipwrecks and it is strangely moving.

Monday saw me back at work on the North East coast of Scotland and at half three the hound and I piled back into the car and drove the nine hours home. The next day the book club was convening at the new hovel so I went foraging for food. Unfortunately, as I stepped into Somerfield, there was a powercut. A harassed manager shouted - you have five minutes to do your shopping before the batteries run out in the tills. Supermarket sweep in the dark. Where is Dale Winton when you need him. I'm sure he glows in the dark.

Shopping in the dark on a time limit though. Not so easy. Why oh why didn't I take a torch shopping with me? I normally do of course. I must have been jet lagged from my drive. So I ended up with pork (which I thought was chicken), parmesan (which I already had at home), a bag of salad with cabbage in (eerugh), a punnet of raspberries that I thought were blueberries, a pack of lard instead of butter and a bag of pre buttered new potatoes. We feasted like kings, as would anyone if lard were involved....

I am now repacking to leave again tomorrow, this time on holiday. I have had the normal vile time before going away where work escalates to improbable levels of franticness not experienced the rest of the year, and you wonder why you are going away. I have thrown anything clean into my suitcase and the loyal hound is sleeping on it in a rage that I am packing again.

I'd love to come back and have some time at home but NO. Instead I have to go to France for work the week I get back, and then fly to Edinburgh for a day as soon as I return. All the good work my holiday has not yet done is already undone.

Also, why is it that when you go on holiday, the weather at home is always idyllic? Cerulean skies, hot sun with a cool breeze and starry nights.

I will stop wibbling now (wibbling is what happens when I start typing a blog entry at midnight) and leave you with some photos of my road trip.

There was a lot of motorways - like this:

I saw this on a client's bird table:

Then there was several HOURS of this:

Followed by nearly three hours of this (an extra hour was thanks to a FORTY MILE DIVERSION due to a lorry slewing itself across the A9.

Welcome to my life. Glamorous isn't it.

A crafty nudge for Charity!

2009-06-16T11:10:00.004+01:00

I know you all do a lot of stuff for charity but you might like to hop over to Lettuce Eating as she, along with others, has set up a fab charity auction involving handbags, which must always be good. What is even better is that they are vintage craft handbag things... Oh - just pop on over and have a look. I promise you will like them and they are raising money for Darfur which is always a good thing.

I am in the midst of packing as I have one of my leisurely trips ahead of me. "Where to?" you eagerly cry Why, in about an hour - Manchester and then on to London. Tomorrow Staffordshire, then Edinburgh on Thursday, then Pitlochry, Brora and Thurso on Friday(yes, it isn't possible to go much further north without gettting seriously wet feet!). Monday sees me back at Brora then on to Lancaster for Monday night and finally home to the hovel on Tuesday. The Loyal Hound has already packed his bag as he is accompanying me on this merry jaunt. I have packed very little but have strewn an awful lot of stuff around the house and lost all the chargers for my phone, laptop and camera.

We won't be back until next week so, unless I manage to track down a squirrel with internet access in the wilds of Scotland, I'll be back then... Must go and pack.

Raise a glass to yourselves.....

2009-06-15T14:04:00.006+01:00

It's thundering at the moment and I can see lightning flickering in the next valley. The air is still and tremulous with the occasional bird song sounding startlingly loud against the waiting silence. This is a good thing as I need to be inside working and good weather would have lured me out into the wilderness beyond my windows.

In contrast to today, we were blessed with great weather over the weekend. This meant that my visiting friends and their children, who had arrived wtih macintoshes, wellington boots and all other manner of rain gear, were instead scrabbling for sun cream and got to enjoy an idyllic weekend of Wales at it's secretive best.

We walked through sun dappled woods, the children looking for fairies and listening out for bears. Their two and a half year old son marched ahead of us with a big stick 'to stab the bears and dragons with' and their morbidly fascinated 5 year old daughter pointed out multitudes of 'dead fairies' which she took great joy in. The baby slept in the shade then sat under an umbrella to play on a rug. We threw stones in the lakes, built dens out of boxes and old sheets, and the children ran around barefoot and delighted on the grass. It went well.

I had enough food of the right kind (though not enough kitchen roll which turns out to be a vital implement in the child rearing process). The playdough was a success, the lego provided amusement and I even remembered to prerecord stuff of CBeebies onto Sky+. We ate, we drank, we walked, we lolled, we gardened, we had more friends over for lunch; to sum up, we had a proper weekend. It was lovely.

By the end I was exhausted and am yet again amazed at how you all do the whole parenting thing. It is relentless and selfless and never ending (unless you are me in which case it ended at 7pm on Sunday night when they left). I say raise a glass to yourselves parents out there. You do an extraordinary thing every day.

How to kill a town....

2009-06-12T14:28:00.005+01:00

As you may know, if you read my earlier, panicked posts, I have friends coming to stay this weekend. Living in the back of beyond, as I do, this means that preparation is required. Lists must be made, menus planned and the shopping tackled. If I forget it now, that's it for the weekend unless I want to do a 30 mile round trip for milk. So this morning I headed off, list in hand, to a local town to do the food shopping.

From the new hovel I have three towns to choose from. They are all about the same distance (16 miles or so) from me. One of them has a large Morrisons, one has a Tescos, and the other has a smaller Somerfield. The last town was the most convenient today as I needed to head off in that direction in order to drop some things off at a neighbour's house.

Due to the fact that my money cupboard is virtually bare, I had done a cunning menu plan which would look as though I had gone to vast effort, whilst in fact spending very little. Or so I thought.

One small trolley later I was a HUNDRED POUNDS poorer. What? How the $?@* did that happen? I always mentally have a figure in my head for how much my shopping will cost. My worst case scenario for this one was seventy pounds. If it wasn't for the fact that I simply didn't have the time to drive the now 40 miles to the next town and back home again, I would have refused to pay. It was daylight robbery.

Shopping is getting more and more expensive, whatever they say about inflation. It's not like I was buying scallops on the shell, caviar and blinis. I was buying value chopped tomatoes, bread, milk; ordinary things. The cashier watched me go white and sway slightly with interest.

"Expensive isn't it." She commented.
"Euurgh, splutter, swoon, YES" replied I.
"They can charge what they want here, no competition see." she explained.

And that is the nub of the problem. There is no other supermarket within a good 30 miles of this one and they can charge what they like, so they do. The thing is that this is a surefire way to kill the town.

I had been to the bank, the post office and the hardware store before I went to the supermarket, as I imagine do lots of other people when they come into town. However if Somerfield doesn't get its act together people will stop deciding on that town for their shopping. They will head in the other direction instead. At that point, not only does the wretched supermarket suffer, but also all the other shops in town. Slowly but surely, it will die. All because Somerfield are too greedy.

Do Animals want to be Celebrities?

2009-06-11T10:21:00.005+01:00

I ask this question purely because this morning, upon sitting down at my desk to work I saw these photos in an e mail. They were both taken by someone stopping to get petrol at a garage in Mexico.

You can imagine the way your heart would race upon realising that instead of the standard alsation chained to the wall (standard movie casting I know), this particular garage had the equivalent of Vin Diesel as security. Padding across the forecourt is the celebrity of the animal world - a lion.

Those of us who watched Tarzan films as children may have wondered how we would fare when a lion turned to give a baleful and hungry glare. The thing was usually we were improbably surrounded by imaginary jungle (should have been savannah, I know) not innocently trying to buy fuel. So, are you ready? Stare down the beast....

Good Dog!

So, in answer to my question, apparently Animals do want to be celebrities. This one went to the hairdresser and said the equivalent of 'I want to look like Jennifer Anniston', but instead of being told 'I'm a hairdresser, not a miracle worker', this particular scissor holder thought, 'why not? I could do this' and set to, and voila! Celebrity animal lookalike.

I suspect it is wrong, wrong, wrong. Where will it end? Goldfish having prosthetic shark fins added to their backs? Finches wanting a Golden Eagle makeover? Spider monkeys longing to be Silverbacks? We could be witnessing the start of the end (or the end of the beginning?) and a new culture of animals obsessed with celebrity is to sweep the world. Don't say I didn't warn you. Watch carefully for the signs. I have banned the Loyal Hound from reading Heat Magazine, and I send him out of the room when I watch The National Geographic and Discovery channels in case he starts getting ideas....

Do Dogs Speak French?

2009-06-10T10:55:00.006+01:00

I'm sorry everyone, I can't help it. You see, I drift about my house and my life with nobody but the Loyal Hound to bounce my thoughts off. Most of the time this isn't problematic. He has a charming habit of agreeing with everything I say, and looking at me with a worshipful gleam in his eye the rest of the time. He's an excellent listener. However, every now and then (or every ten minutes or so) I have a crazy thought which I want an actual response to, and this is where you come in.

You see, most of the time I resist plaguing you with inane questions, or I forget what they were before I get to the computer. Not this time. This time I need answers and as you lot are the equivalent of a long suffering husband / lover / boyfriend / flatmate etc then you are the ones that I have to ask. It's a downside to reading the ravings of a single woman who lives at 1200 feet with little to no oxygen and only mad neighbours.

Ok, so to my deranged question: are you ready? Pens to paper, pencils sharpened? OK. Here goes. DO DOGS SPEAK OTHER LANGUAGES???

I mean, does a dog from France speak in French? Is the french poodle totally incomprehensible to the English Cocker Spaniel? Does the Irish Setter have such a thick accent that none of the other dogs know what he is going on about? Assuming that animals have vocabulary is there just one 'language' for the same species wherever they live on the planet? In the Tintin comics Snowy doesn't say 'Woof Woof', he says 'Woo Woo' so obviously french dogs bark differently. I mean Tintin wouldn't lie would he?

I mean is 'dog' a universal language or are they all speaking individual languages? If we do, why shouldn't they? And if that is the case then do all animals have the same problem? Does that mean that migratory birds are bilingual or are they like the British on the Costa del Sol and refuse to speak a word of the holiday countries language? Swallows could be sitting in South Africa in the winter speaking very loudly and slowly to the locals and asking for "FLIES AND CHIPS PLEASE" then saying to each other "I just don't know why the locals won't TRY to learn English".

If my theory has merit then the zoos must be very confusing places. It could explain the failure of the mating programme for the Pandas. I mean there are loads of chinese dialects so if you get two pandas from different places they probably have no idea what they are saying to each other. Sex is not going to be on the cards until they have found some common vocab and that could take a while....

If they don't have different languages though, then how come? Why would dogs the world over speak the same language but people wouldn't? I need answers and as the wisdom of the ages is out there in the interweb thingummy then I figure I am asking the right people.

P.S. Now that you get a glimpse into the deranged workings of my mind perhaps my single status is less of a surprise.

P.P.S. Obviously I don't mean actual French - I mean dog version of French, though perhaps there are dogs out there going "Je voudrais un saucisson. Possible but highly unlikely

Mothers out there - help please!

2009-06-09T11:23:00.004+01:00

I'm panicking and I need help (more than usual!). This weekend, I have friends coming to stay with their three children who are aged between 9 months and 5 (I think she is five anyway).

I am now in a complete panic about what to buy in the way of food and what to do about toys etc. Their mother has been very lacksadaisical about what I need to get in the way of food. I don't think she has really understood the lack of local shopping if I don't have the things she would have in her store cupboard. What should I stock up on? Do five year olds and three (ish) year olds eat the same as grown ups?

The only experience I have is of Chutney Mary's boys who eat strange food free of gluten / dairy / taste and definitely don't eat grown up food.

I'm also worrying about the toy status of this house. My toy supply does exist as I got fed up with children arriving and saying "do you have any toys" and then seeing their look of horror when I said "No." Consequently I have a little Noah's ark and a couple of other miscellaneous things. I also have packing boxes which I have found to be hugely successful as child entertainment. Various forts can be constructed and there is always the ever popular option of 'how many children can fit into one box'. I do also have a few children's books. What else should I bed / borrow / steal?

I am used to children who live up here and can spend hours playing outside but these are London children who are used to on tap entertainment and the equivalent of Hamleys in their own house.

I thought I could make some fairy cakes that they could ice. Perhaps I should borrow some DVD's? What else?

All ideas and suggestions are welcome, and much needed......

The calm after the storm

2009-06-06T12:09:00.005+01:00

I haven't had a moment to show you the landscape that I have moved into. Last night, during a brief break in the torrential, Malaysian style rainstorms, I took the Loyal Hound along the track from the house and took these photos for you of the nearby puddle.

This is what lies round the corner from the hovel, quite literally three minutes walk away.....

I know, it's pretty terrible isn't it? Wait till I take some pictures on a sunny day, then you'll really see how awful it can be.....

Oh God No. Not Big Bloody Brother again....

2009-06-04T16:17:00.002+01:00

If I had a list of Bete Noirs, the top five things on it would be stupid Big Brother. I hate it with a passion. All those people with no merit whatsoever and an insane desire to be famous. Famous for what? For their erudite interpretaion of Thomas Hardy's bucolic novels? For their ability to knit faster than the speed or sound? For blindfolded wedding cake icing? Singing like Susan Boyle? Composing verse in Iambic Pentameter and knowing who Milton is? NO. Instead they seek fame for snogging someone of their own sex in the hot tub or smothering themselves in spaghetti and then rolling in lawn clippings or whatever it is they do that generates headlines for weeks and weeks of the summer.

The initial idea of Big Brother was interesting. How would 20 odd people get on if locked in a house together for what seems like a lifetime? The actual reality is not remotely interesting. It is an excuse for silly vain people to leap up and down and say 'love me, love me, vote for me I'm meritless but here'. No thank you.

I have a cunning plan for a highly entertaining Big Brother series. The contestants would enter the house in top secrecy and live out their pathetic lives for the cameras etc WHICH WOULD NEVER BE TURNED ON. At the end of each week one contestant would be 'voted off' by the producer, and on exiting and expecting the media and country's eyes to be on them would be greeted by a psychiatrist with a lone camera who would interview them to find out how they felt about the fact that all their scrambling for attention in the house had been for nothing. Now that is an interview I would watch.

I don't understand what grips everyone about this series. The contestants never ever talk about anything except themselves and each other. I'm not even sure if they can read. After all, you never see them with a book, or hear them discussing politics or plays or the world outside their tiny, pea like brains. There are so many things they could do while in the house.

They could make them all read a classic novel and then have a debate about it. They could make them all learn yoga, tai chi and knitting. They could teach them to speak another language, to grow their own food, oh a million things. Instead they treat them like spoilt ten year olds, incapable of doing anything other than bickering, crying and doodling. It's patronising in the extreme and the tragedy is that the thousands of wannabe entrants all think it looks like heaven. I would say it is more like hell on television.

Neighbourhood Watch

2009-06-01T13:02:00.005+01:00

Things have been so hectic I haven't really had a moment to tell you about my neighbours. Having neighbours is a new thing for me. The previous hovel had no neighbours at all. The nearest house was three quarters of a mile away and I liked it like that. The new hovel has a house on the other side of the road which was one of the things on the 'con list'. However I decided that since we weren't in eyeline of one another and this location was remote enough as it was I could live with neighbours.

Then I met them.

It took a few days. With moving and everything I simply didn't have a moment to go over the road and introduce myself. When I finally made it over one evening it was an interesting experience. The neighbours, let's call them Bob and Peggy, had just arrived back and I called out a cheery 'hello' over the fence. Bob turned around with a friendly smile but Peggy ducked behind the car. I know that I'm not an earth shattering beauty or anything but I've never had anyone duck and hide at the sight of me before.

Bob came to the gate to chat and some minutes later, Peggy followed. She apologised profusely for hiding and announced that 'she thought I might not want to meet her so she had hidden.' This isn't normal behaviour but she was effusively friendly from this point, almost disturbingly so. She told me she was a mental health worker and that she housed unwanted horses, which I was welcome to ride at anytime. I admired the horses and after five minutes of chat I left and retreated to my garden.

We didn't particularly see much of one another for the next fortnight. A quick hello here and there, the perfect lack of communication as far as I was concerned, and I was just starting to feel at home in the new hovel. Life was looking good. The night after my birthday I was having a Mrs Tiggywinkle moment and hanging sheets out to dry on the line. The washing line is in the one spot that is in eyeline with the neighbour's house. Within moments of starting to peg out my washing I hear Peggy's voice shouting over the road.

"Hello there, I hope we didn't disturb you last night?"

I turned and smiled in her direction. She was hanging out of a window beaming at me.

"No, I didn't hear a thing" This was almost true. I wondered if I had heard some shouting earlier that morning but it honestly didn't intrude. My walls are 70cms thick. It would take a Harrier Jump Jet landing on the house for me to hear it. I waved and turned back to the washing.

"I've been up since 3.30 this morning you know. I haven't even had a cup of tea yet"

I'm not sure what to say to this but I call back in as cheery a manner as I can muster. "Perfect time for a cup of tea now though"

"I like mine black and weak. Haven't had it yet though". There is a disturbing note to this conversation. We are virtually shouting to each other and she won't move from the window. The word I realise I would use to describe her today is manic.

"Did you have a good birthday dinner last night?"

"Yes, thank you I did. I hope we didn't disturb you" I'd mentioned to them that I was having friends over for my birthday earlier in the week and she had latched onto this

"No, not at all. I wish I'd known it was your birthday..... I must get you a present. What colour horse do you like?"

With a faint feeling of horror I realised that she might actually mean this. She houses horses for people and all credit to Peggy they are fantastically healthy and happy horses, but she does collect them in the same way that some people buy reduced books at the supermarket.

"No need to get me anything" I call back with a desperate note in my voice but it isn't enough.

"What's your favourite colour? Tell me?" There is a demanding note in her voice. I don't want to get on the wrong side of her. There are rumours in the village about her. It seems she isn't a mental health worker but a mental health patient and like a small child, she doesn't like to be thwarted. Tales abound of the odd revenges she has taken on those who have displeased her. Most of them are probably exaggerated gossip but it isn't a truth I want to discover for myself by vexing her.

After more shouted 'casual conversation' and persistent questioning I said that I liked Black horses and scarpered back to the house. The whole conversation had made me feel horribly nervous. Suddenly my hovel felt less secure.

The next day a friend came with her children for coffee and a nose around the new house. We decided to walk down the forest track to the lake. As we left the garden a voice yelled out of the window. "I haven't forgotten. A black horse. I won't forget!" Oh dear I am in trouble. More shouting followed us as we walked away and I realised that now I was nervous of seeing Peggy, or being seen by her, and getting caught in conversation with her. I wondered if she would start stalking my garden and presenting me with horses every time I came out of the door? My hovel suddenly felt a lot less like home. I decided to try and catch Bob and mention to him that I did not want a horse but the moment did not arise.

I hated feeling nervous in my own house about going outside and getting stuck in conversation. There are millions of different types of people that you can end up with as neighbours. People who become friends, people you never talk to, people who will water your lettuces while you are away, people who will steal your lettuces when you are at home. It seemed I had got the bipolar mental health patient with nothing else to do but sit at the window and wait for me to emerge from my lair. The only good thing was that she was apparently too shy to emerge from her house and actually descend on mine.

This morning, resolved to catch Bob and talk to him about Peggy's disturbing longing to give me a horse I emerged from the house to see Bob and a friend sitting outside the gate. To their right was a police car and another car was parked along the verge. Bob came over to me and explained that Peggy, who was 'not well' had been getting increasingly worse and had that morning let all the horses loose onto the road, and had been getting increasingly upset, and he had had to call the police and the doctor to her. It seemed she was being sectioned as life had got to be too much for her.

My overriding feeling was one of relief. I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I can live in my house without looking over my shoulder every minute. I feel bad for Bob, though it seems he knew this was coming. He is a quiet and gentle man and he obviously is very fond of her (she is his girlfriend of some years and technically lives in the village though her horses live with him). He said she has 'two sides to her and unfortunately the wrong side was ruling at the moment'.

I am now feeling giddy with happiness that she is gone, and correspondingly guilty to be so happy about her misfortune. If I am being honest, I am also hoping that this is a long term solution. I know this makes me a terrible and selfish person but if you are living in the middle of nowhere on your own the one thing you don't want is a mentally unstable neighbour. God, that makes me an awful person but I can't help it - I feel as though a great big burden has suddenly been lifted and I look out of the window now and feel happy.

The mystery of what gets lost when you move house...

2009-05-28T13:52:00.003+01:00

It is baffling how the oddest things go missing when you move. The biggest thing on my list is the boot cover for my car. It's one of those sliding cover things that hides all the junk I have left in the boot. I remember taking it out of my car in order to cram more stuff in there but now it has totally disappeared. It's some 3 1/2 foot long for goodness sake. It's not as if it could have slipped between two books or something.

Other things on the list? The dvd remote control. Now that is irritating. The mandolin from the kitchen (not the one that you strum when dressed in medieval clothes. I know where that one is!). My knife sharpener.

There are other things but I can't remember what they are. It seems that the god of moving extracts a price and it is an odd miscellany of household objects.

Everything is unpacked and put away though some of it now needs extracting and putting away in different places. I seem to spend my life drilling holes in the walls for pictures, curtain poles etc etc. Having said that it is all feeling more settled.

My birthday dinner went well last night and I collapsed into bed at quarter to two this morning. The kitchen was a horror this morning; covered in a mixture of leftovers and chocolate sauce from the profiteroles. It also smelt oddly of petrol because one of the guests was running out of fuel and so I gave him the 3 litres I had for the lawnmower. Unfortunately one of the other things that has gone missing is the funnel for the fuel can. This meant that at 6.00 o'clock this morning there was an episode of Blue Peter taking place in the kitchen as he made a funnel using a fruit juice carton, safety scissors and, I hope, a loo roll and some sticky backed plastic.

My mother would never get me sticky backed plastic when I was a child. This meant that Blue Peter was an open wound in my childhood. Never would I be able to make a miniature of Buckingham Palace out of loo rolls, egg cartons and fairy liquid bottles, all because I was only given copydex and not double sided tape or sticky backed plastic. This is a source of great disappointment to me and definitely thwarted my hopes to become a diorama maker when I grew up. Then again I did spend an awful lot of time painting the palms of my hand with copydex and then peeling it off when it had dried. Aaah, the fun we had. The highs of copydex sniffing. It all comes rushing back to me.

Actually, I wonder where my copydex has gone? Perhaps it is stuck to the boot cover?

Photos.....

2009-05-26T13:17:00.006+01:00

So, I have finally found my camera, unpacked my charger and found the linking cable thing and here are some photos of the new hovel in all it's glory!

Here is the Sitting Room (one day it will be the kitchen), with it's monumentally scaled fireplace and light absorbing red carpet....

And here it is with my furniture in it...

This is a view of the lean to, homemade conservatory before I painted it...

Now, hang on a moment whilst I run outside and take a photo of the house itself, and of the conservatory repainted....

And here is the view from the house (with the Loyal Hound surveying his new domain)

And finally the house itself

I have more pictures of rooms with furniture in and stuff but those will have to wait as I have to go to Manchester for a meeting and don't have time to upload them.

This weekend has been transforming on the house front. I had a couple of friends to stay and we worked like dervishes each day, painting the conservatory and uncovering flower beds, mowing acres of lawn and moving curtains round. It looks as though I have lived here for a year, not three weeks. The house works brilliantly for filling with friends. This is a good thing as I have 8 for dinner tomorrow to celebrate my birthday, and more people staying this weekend, 12 for lunch on Saturday and TWENTY for lunch on Sunday. I suspected insanity in myself before but now I know it's true.

The structural engineer comes on Friday morning and that will be the critical meeting. If I can afford to take out the wall I want to take out then it will be all change on the house front in the next few months. Keep your fingers crossed it's good news.

I'm Alive - Just!

2009-05-21T10:45:00.004+01:00

I can't believe it has been nearly a month but I am finally back online and the relief of having internet connection is making me feel giddy with excitement! Now that I'm back though I scarecely know where to start. The last few weeks I have very much felt that I am single and scarcely surviving. It has been testing to put it mildly.

I have mixed feelings about the new house. I spent the first week in floods of panicked tears. The house felt spooky and the landscape is so totally different from the Hovel that I felt a million miles away from everything familiar. All I could think was that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake and that I had ruined my life. I feel slightly calmer now and though I don't love it yet, I have accepted that I live here which is a start.

I know this sounds mad. Why buy it if I didn't love it? The thing is that I have been looking for four years for a house. I have fallen madly for a couple but have missed them. This one had been on the market for ages and I never came to see it because a) it was out of my price range and b)I didn't want to live in the forest.

However they then dropped the price and I thought I would come and look at it. My first instinct was that it wasn't for me. It was too big and too much of a shrine to the seventies lack of architecture for me to wrap my head around. That night though I sat and drew a plan of how the house could be laid out, and I also wrote a pros and cons list. The plan on the back of a napkin solved all of the layout problems with the house and when I looked at the list I realised that this house had everything on my wish list. Four bedrooms (one more than I wanted actually), a big garden, a barn big enough to have an office and storage for junk that I can't be bothered to sort out, a field (which I have no use for but what the hell - perhaps I'll get some pigs!). In addition it has the potential to have a huge sitting room, a good kitchen, a utility room, downstairs loo, a front hall. Finally it is literally two minutes walk from a huge reservoir with miles of walks in all directions.

I let my head rule my heart and I made an offer and you know what happened next.

The difficulty that I hadn't forseen was that I don't love it. I have bought twice before and both times I fell in love with the property before I had even seen all of it. Neither of them had everthing that I wanted and yet I wanted them passionately anyway. This one had everything and I didn't want it but I bought it anyway.

Not having your heart involved is a strange way to go though. I have spent the last few weeks talking the house up to myself and persuading myself that once I have spent every last groat in my bank balance on ripping it apart I will then love it. Sometimes I truly believe that. Other times I don't.

It would definitely be easier if I weren't single. It is a house that needs two of you to drive each other on and to pick each other up when it all feels overwhelming. The Loyal Hound does his best but he gets bored talking about what colour to paint a room and has a nasty tendency to go to sleep on the pile of curtains that are heaped on the floor.

The plumbers are here today moving the bath from the downstairs to the upstairs. I am looking forward to being able to have a proper bath upstairs. I think it will make it feel more like home. In addition I have friends coming to stay this weekend and if the weather plays nice then perhaps we can see the house at it's best, and go for long walks, tackle the garden and sip pimms in the sunshine.

I have taken some photographs but have now misplaced the camera (the joys of an excessively large house!) but I will find it and show you what I have committed to and you can be the judge. Am I 'single and have lost the plot' or 'Single, surviving and possibly thriving?'

I missed you all.

Terrified House Owner reporting for Duty.

2009-04-29T19:25:00.004+01:00

It is done! I am now the terrified owner of a house in the middle of nowhere, as of 2.30pm today. At the moment I'm not excited about it. Instead I'm wondering if I have made the worst mistake of my life and will be miserably unhappy there. You know how it is. You get the keys to this empty house and suddenly you see all the damp patches, the exposed pipework, the shell bath (yes, truly, there is a shell bath) in all it's glory and you think. What have I done??? I am hoping that over the next couple of days this feeling will be replaced with excitement.

I know that one of the reasons that I am not that excited yet is that I feel horribly displaced. My current hovel is a fort made of packing boxes with newspaper tumbleweed blowing down the stairs. All of it's Brambly Hedge charm has been packed away and it sounds, smells and feels like a different place. Equally the new house doesn't feel like mine yet either. Nowhere feels like mine.

This will change. It just may take time. I will take photos tomorrow of the new house for you and when I can get on line then you can see for yourselves whether you think I am a lunatic or an inspired interiors genius.

Now accepting that moving is in the top three most stressful things t do, it has been the icing on the cake that my idiotic broadband suppliers cut me off on Friday last week, instead of this coming Friday. Consequently, in between packing and a trip to Dorset and a trip to London, I have spent the last few days shouting and sobbing down premium rate phone lines at indifferent call centres. All to no avail though. It seems that cutting me off is easy, reconnecting me takes millenia. Growing crystals is faster. This is why I have been so quiet on the blogging front. I simply don't understand why it takes 'up to THIRTY FOUR DAYS' to connect me back onto broadband? What are they doing that takes that long? Weaving the lines out of spider silk? How do they expect small businesses to survive if this is their idea of speedy??? On Monday I really did break down on the phone, sobbing with frustration and fury and then slamming the phone down on them. On Tuesday I actually yelled with rage when I had to explain the situation for the SEVENTEENTH TIME. Honestly, the seventeenth. The whole thing has nearly killed me and it has certainly put me off moving ever again. I'd better learn to really love this house.

So, on top of giving up smoking I have had to give up blogging. It's too much to ask of a girl. The smoking quitting thing is going okayish I suppose. I have had the occasional cigarette break but we are talking one every four days, not one ever four minutes, so I am getting somewhere. I don't think the hypnotist can take that much credit for it though. I did have a return match there but left feeling no different (though no worse this time either).

There has been one lone ray of sunshine in the last few days though. On Saturday there dropped through my letterbox a jiffy bag filled to the brim with honest to goodness delicious chocolate. This was from Just Me (who has a link over there on the left) and who has now been elevated to a goddess in my world and is going to have a shrine built to her at the new house. I mean seriously. This is somebody who sent me chocolate because she wanted to cheer me up. Just Me - THANK YOU. You are a kind and lovely person who deserves better neighbours, the lottery numbers and your very own George Clooney. If Karma really works then all these things will be yours. You have been my silver lining this week.

So. I know this is another demented and incoherent rant from the mountainside. I blame moving and no nicotine. It fries the brain, drains the soul and leaves you a crumpled rag with no ability to be coherent. Bear with me - I promise that, Phoenix like, I shall emerge from the ashes a new and lucid Welsh Girl.

Oh BAUBLES! I've just realised I was supposed to organise a date with composer man last night and I forgot. Oops....

Return to the Hypnotist

2009-04-20T11:12:00.004+01:00

As if I don't have enough on my plate with trying to move house (Completion date is set for the 29th April!!!!), I am now in a full scale battle with the hypnotist.

I rang him to tell him that the mind experiment seemed to have gone horribly awry and was rather taken aback to have him lecture me for ten minutes on how I was too stressed, bitter, angry and a miserable failure as a human being and that was why the whole thing hadn't worked. The fact that, right from the start, I had expressed doubts about whether I was a good hypnotism subject was irrelevant and any sense of culpability on his part was a ridiculous assertion and I should wash my mouth out with soap just for thinking it.

This is not good. The service he offers means that if the hypnotism fails then I have to go back for a rematch. That is to happen this afternoon. By now, I have so little trust in him that the idea of letting him hypnotise me is horrifying. So, I have a dilemma. Walk away from the £250 I spent, or go back and risk either being turned into a chicken or being done for murder most horrid when I stab the hypnotist in an infuriated rage as he lectures me on what a problem child I am.

All this on top of the fact that I am spending my morning speaking to all the varied customer service departments of the phone / insurers / broadband suppliers etc etc trying to get my house move sorted out.

So far I have managed woefully little, despite spending three hours on the telephone speaking to various people round the world. It turns out that moving house is a preposterous thing to do that involves mockery, dickensian paperwork and apparently no broadband access for the rest of my life. Not amusing. I now AM a bitter and angry person and am completely shocked at how wildly unhelpful the majority of the firms have been.

I know this is an incoherent rant but I'll be back when I have seen the hypnotist and will cluck away more coherently then.....

Hypnotism sucks....

2009-04-14T11:49:00.006+01:00

Ok, I must confess or all will be lost. I smoke. I know - I can hear you all recoiling back and gasping with horror. Smokers are after all the ultimate example of pariahs in our community. There is something horrible and repellent about them and I speak as a smoker. Non smokers despise smokers, ex smokers despise smokers, even smokers despise smokers. That said, I will defiantly admit that I enjoy smoking. I do - not all the time, but there are certain moments when it is blissful and lovely. Those are good moments. Despite this I do know that I need to stop. It's expensive, bad for you, isolating and pretty unattractive as well (despite all those glamorouse Marlene Dietrich posters suggesting otherwise).

If I could go back to the day I started smoking and NOT smoke I would, in a heartbeat. Sadly, David Tennant and his handy tardis seem to be elsewhere at them moment and even then he can get all persnickety about changing the past. So, I'm trying to give up the hard way.

I actually tried to give up the easy way. On Thursday afternoon I parted with a large chunk of my hard earned cash and went to see a hypnotist. A friend had done just this earlier in the year and had extolled his virtues. She has tried to give up several times over the years and with him she has succeeded and in a fairly relaxed way which didn't involve biting off her families heads and running screaming from the room every ten minutes. I was inspired because I have seen her try and quit before and it wasn't pretty. This was positively elysian in comparison.

The one thing I didn't want was another stress in my life but I do see the need to stop, on so many levels, finance being one of them. Running my own business in a recession whilst buying a house is stressful enough. The extra money that normally goes on cigarettes would make a difference. In addition I reasoned, what better than to start in the new house as a non smoker? What I needed was a calm and stress free way to quit and according to her, and him when I spoke to him, this was it. I made a booking and paid my deposit.

Now, whilst I do think hypnotism can work I have always been dubious about it's ability to work on me. I have a stubborn and recalcitrant mind that likes nothing more than to unpick rules and invert them as quickly as possible. It only takes someone telling me I can't do something for my evil subconscious to instantly start working on a plan to do the exact thing I have been forbidden to do. The garden of Eden wouldn't have lasted a minute if I had been Eve. (Maybe it would actually - that annoying snake telling me I 'had' to eat the apple might have made me determined not to....)

I explained this worry to the hypnotist and he insisted that there would be no problem. Anyone, he explained, can be hypnotised and nobody could make me do something I didn't want to do. I decided to believe him. He spent a lot of time telling me how hypnotism would be like 'waving a magic wand' and at the end of the session not only would I have stopped smoking, but I wouldn't want to smoke. The very idea of it would be repellent and laughable. I would be free. Not only this but I would not need to eat to replace smoking, or be grumpy or stressed. I would be free, healthy, balanced and happy.

This was seductive. I like the idea of being free and I love the idea of not missing smoking. I particuarly like the idea of not ending up eating everything in site rather than smoking. Hurrah, I thought, and lay back and thought of England.

"I will now count back from 20......" You can hear pretty much everything going on in a hypnotism session, though I was very tired, and the chair is very comfortable, and I did doze off for a bit. However, an hour later it was all over. I remember most of it quite clearly. I know that every morning I am supposed to wake and crave a glass of water, and that the colour red would reinforce my desire to not smoke. What else I remember is irrelevant because something went horribly wrong.

I drove home thinking to myself over and over again - "I am now a non smoker." It didn't feel as though this were the case but I thought I perhaps had to get used to the idea. That evening I ate supper twice in order to distract myself from the fact that I wasn't smoking. I went to bed an hour and a half earlier than usual just to avoid the pink elephant that was chain smoking in the corner. I looked forward to waking the next morning as a new, non smoking and relaxed me.

That night, for the first time ever I think, I dreamt about smoking. I actually woke in the middle of the night wanting a cigarette. I have never done this in my life before. Things did not get any better. When I woke the next morning, I didn't have a compulsive urge to drink a glass of water as I was supposed to. I had a compulsive urge to smoke. I have never smoked first thing in the morning. I don't know how people can, I think it's disgusting. Or I did until Friday morning when it became all I could think about.

In fact from the moment I woke until I went to bed that night ALL I could think about was smoking. Things I would never normally associate with smoking became inextricably tangled up with having a cigarette. I don't know how I made it through the day but if you had put fire ants in my pants I would have been more relaxed than I was (or still am for that matter). The weekend did not improve. I ended up going for long walks several times a day, going to bed at odd times, going to visit friends, eating everything in site and gritting my teeth and planning vile and vitriolic letters to the hypnotist. Anything to avoid smoking.

The bloody hypnotist has quite obviously broken me. Somehow during the session he persuaded my brain to connect everything to smoking, rather than to disconnect it. I can't stop thinking about it FOR A MINUTE - I kid you not. There is a permanent monologue going on in the back of my head about how I should be smoking, how I'll never be happy if I don't smoke, how smoking is the answer to world peace etc etc. You get the point. I can't get it to shut up for even a minute. It is the ultimate stuck record and it is giving me a headache.

I now face two difficulties. Firstly I am trying to give up on my own which is making me cranky, fat and cranky. Secondly I have to decide what to do about the charlatan hypnotist. I should get him to fix the problem that he has created, but the prospect is hardly comforting. What on earth might he do this time? I could come out of the room a crack addict, or an obsessive morris dancer, or clucking like a chicken, all the while still longing for a cigarette. That's too hideous to contemplate. Equally so is the prospect of wasting £250.00.....

This might be the best thing I've ever seen....

2009-04-07T16:23:00.002+01:00

You have to watch this - it's faBAAAHlous and it'll make you laugh and go 'oooh' and 'aaaah' and it will make you realise all the mad and eccentric reasons why I live in Wales. Where else would you get a production like this?

P.S. Have the sound on if you can!

New Cyberman stomps onto the scene...

2009-04-07T14:00:00.004+01:00

I have been seriously thinking about ditching the internet dating. I resent paying to be snubbed by men I haven't even met. I know men already who are all too happy to snub me for free. Besides so far in this dating malarkey, let's face it, there have not been any success stories. Remember Cravat Man? Pilot Man? Need I go on?

The latest cyberman is intriguing though. Let me introduce you to 'Composer Man'. A self confessed workaholic his photograph shows a fierce looking man with a tousle of dark hair and a large glass of wine. The wine is a good indication surely? The fierce look is a little intimidating but then I decided that it was a good thing that he didn't care that he looked all cross in his photograph. There are too many carefully posed photos of the cybermen out there which is always a little suspicious to my mind. My heart didn't go 'pitter patter' when I saw the photograph but then my heart rarely does that, and if it did I would suspect Angina rather than Love. Also, so far every one of the cybermen that I have met up with has looked like the second cousin to his own photo so they aren't that helpful as a judging aid.

Now I should warn you that composer man is not the world's greatest romantic. In fact he defines the classic repressed Englishman who has no tact and little concept of the effects of his conversation on those around him. Oh, you want proof of this do you? Ok, here goes. Here are just a couple of extracts from some of his e mails to me.

'I have to say I find the Welsh rather an odd bunch' This is always a good start to a blossoming relationship. Tell the welsh girl you think she comes from a nation of odd people!

'Your reply, within the limits of the English language , endears me to you.' Fabulously stilted and rather Georgian somehow. Actually this one got bonus points because he went on to say that I was a girl who 'transcends the ordinary'. So thumbs up for him on this one.

This one is my favourite 'I'm almost getting to like the sound of you.' I'm not sure what you are supposed to say to such an overwhelming compliment. Swoon gracefully away perhaps? The fact that he isn't getting to like me, but is almost getting there. Be still my beating heart. I think I'm having an angina attack....

Instead I took the plunge and suggested that we meet up. He has sent me his number and I have to be brave and ring him. I have no idea what to expect or what to say for that matter. 'Hello, I'm the odd welsh girl you almost like?' doesn't seem like the best opening ever. Any suggestions?

Do Not Leave Unsupervised with Children

2009-04-06T11:01:00.003+01:00

Had an idyllic day at the hovel yesterday. Two sets of friends with their respective children agreed to risk their health and come for Sunday lunch. I was a paragon of efficiency and had everything organised with military precision. Well, until I decided to quickly try and do the general knowledge crossword and got distracted, forgot about the lamb and overcooked the potatoes.

The day was mild and sunny and the wind chill factor was only on the -3 mark, so T shirt weather really. The house was as tidy as I was going to make it, and I had warmed the plates and everything. Fine, the lamb wasn't as pink as I would have liked, and the leeks could have been cooked for a little longer, but the chocolate and chilli pudding was a work of art and I had all the ingredients for Bloody Mary's so everyone was happy.

The small boys had a bag full of dinosaurs to play with after lunch. Much roaring and shrieking accompanied this but they seemed pretty happy (or perhaps that was the sound of dismemberment, it can be hard to tell). The Loyal Hound did eat three of the dinosaurs, but they only found out about one and never noticed the other two were missing.

Small girl kept herself happily occupied playing shut the box, reading a book and helping to clear up the lunch by eroding the edges of the remaining hunk of pudding with her finger. It was all very M & S advertish.

After coffee, chocolates and more wine, we rose to the lure of the sunshine and went up to the pond. Mack and Mabel, the geese, have returned to their usual nest and we hauled the boat out for a tour of the island that their nest is on. Having loaded the three children into it we then kindly pushed in one of the fathers and let him row them round and round for half an hour. There were shrieks of 'ALLIGATOR' and 'CROCODILE' from the small boys who were torturing themselves by trailing their fingers in the water and then snatching them out at the prospect of primeval monsters surging up from the deep. Mack and Mabel took the gawping with good grace, though Mack did have to have strong words with one of the dogs who had also come visiting and misunderstood the territorial rights of a father goose. One chastened puppy retreated rapidly to the other side of the pond.

High entertainment was provided when small boys returned to the bank, and small girl insisted on learning to row. She sat in the middle, oars in hand and her father sat in the stern of the boat. The weight disparity between a small, sylph like child and a large man became instantly apparent. The bow of the boat was so far out of the water that the rest of us could see the keel. It looked like some sort of a Miami power boat. Small girl could scarcely reach the water with the oars she was so high up. Whilst we rolled about laughing they rowed, stately as a galleon, studiously ignoring our snorts and gasps.

Finally they returned to shore and the children's attention turned to the wildlife. It is toad shagging season and for anyone who lives near freshwater they will know that there is a week of Toad Porn going on. Everywhere you look there are clusters of toads busy ensuring the future of the species. It is not unusual to see some 40 or so toads at it in the sunshine in one small patch of water.

It didn't take the children long to spot the toads but due to their camouflage it is easy to see the small male but not the larger, drabber female beneath him. After prodding several of the beleagured things with reeds I finally agreed to sweep up a toad in a bucket so that they could study him at close quarters.

So busy were they that the toads scarcely seemed to notice their change of habitat, but the children noticed all too quickly that I had presented them with not one, but two toads, apparently giving each other piggy backs. That is of course a nice, straightforwards story that I could have used but did I? Did I heck. When asked what they were doing I absent mindedly said 'Oh, they are having sex'.

What the hell was I thinking? The boys are 3 and 4, small girl is 7. I think there are rules, inviolable rules about this sort of thing. Rules along the lines of 'don't mention sex to other people's children, even in the context of toads'. It was too late though. I had brought the topic up and was rewarded with an instant question from one of the small boys; 'what's sex?'. I will say that I recovered fast. I had realised the quicksand that I had leapt into and took steps to edge myself out. 'Sex' I replied 'is how frogspawn is made'. This was taken on board with disinterest and attention reverted to whether it would be possible to hold the copulating toads, keep them in a matchbox, or poke them with a reed. It seemed disaster was averted, but only by the skin of my teeth.

It is one thing to educate your own children, but involunatry education of other people's children is a whole other kettle of fish that I wish I had come nowhere near. I must remember to say nothing in front of children, ever again, before I accidentally mention STD's, alternatives to the Missionary position and the truth about Father Christmas to more of the little wretches.

Random Fact Friday

2009-04-03T13:00:00.003+01:00

For your amusement here are some random facts that I have in the dustier corners of my brain. Naturally I have no idea if they are true, I just know that I know these things, and now, so do you.

* Sweden consumes more ketchup per head than any other country in the world.

* Humans share 98% of the same DNA as a banana. I know some people who possibly share more than this.

* Banana fact two - you can't take bananas onto a boat in the Whitsunday islands as they are considered horribly unlucky.

*France is the only country where you can legally marry a dead person. (Why? why would you - and who?)

* A pregnant woman can take a pee anywhere she wants in Britain. The rest of us must cross our legs or risk arrest.

* You can pay approx £1.20 for a bottle of Evian water Evian is NAIVE spelt backwards...

* You would have to count from one to a thousand before you have reach a number with the letter A in it.

* More people are killed by coconuts than sharks. In Thailand, if you are hit by a coconut people won't help you because it is said that only evil people are hit by coconuts.

* It is against the law to die inside the houses of parliament. Would you care though as you would, presumably, be dead?

* Ants can survive for two weeks underwater

* There is a law in Chicago that forbids you from eating in a place that is on fire. How good is the food there that people stay eating when the place is burning up around them?

I know that there is other totally random stuff jumbled up in the odd sock drawer that is my head but I can't sort them out right now. This is my token effort at a spring clean for my brain!

I have Wii'd myself....

2009-04-02T10:23:00.004+01:00

On Tuesday, work necessitated an overnight trip to London. Blah blah. All very unthrilling. Routine even. I was not even going to be there for 24 hours. I rang one of my endlessly patient friends to find out if I might stay and headed South.

Tuesday evening began innocuously enough. A glass of red wine, a quick catch up on events since we had last spoken. That is when the trouble flared up. The last time we had spoken had been her birthday and her boyfriend had given her a Wii machine thingummy.

She extolled its virtues to me. She suggested I try it. I viewed it askance. Such a thing was surely not for me? She started plugging things in and it seemed that it would be rude, churlish even, to refuse to play. In my innocence I imagined that five minutes or so would prove to be enough and I would then be able to return to my wine glass and the armchair. Fool. Fool. Fool. How little I knew.

It began innocently enough with a game of bowls. My kind hostess told me with glee that she thrashed her boyfriend at this on a regular basis, consequently I had no hopes for my own prowess. But then the seduction began - STRIKE!!! The sound of cheering crowds, scores in the hundreds. Best of three turned into best of five. I was winning. I was hooked.

It might have been during the last, hotly contested match that I strained a muscle in my bottom. I hadn't worried about this since I didn't think I had any muscles there but it turns out that I do, and it is a muscle required for bowling victory. Ouch. But like a true sportsman (ok, sportswoman) I persevered through the twinge and carried on.

When my friend stopped to answer the phone I started playing Baseball. Now that is hard and it turns out that there are a whole set of muscles in my shoulder blade that are required to play it, muscles I have not used for a long time. Muscles that are protesting.

It didn't end there. Exhausted after the fourth innings I switched to what I presumed would be a leisurely game of golf. Not that I have ever played golf in my life mind you. I hit a Birdie. I don't know what that is but it was very exciting. I also hit a tree and hit the ball straight down the fairway onto the green. I was 1 under par. NO idea whether that is good or bad but I was addicted.

After a brief stop for food we resumed and decided to take up skiing. We had downhill races, we slalomed. We swore at one another and we shouted at the screen in frustration. By the end I was exhausted. It would have been less tiring to do the real thing.

That was just the beginning of the end. This morning I can scarcely walk. Little old ladies with two walking sticks travel with more agility than I do. Entire muscle groups that I thought had retired for good have come out to play and cripple me in the process. I have Wii'd myself, and I'm paying the price.

God it was fun though.

Holding out for a Hero?

2009-03-30T10:44:00.004+01:00

So, I spent my Sunday evening lolling about on my sofa with the Loyal Hound snoring gently on my foot. The fire was crackling away and I decided to watch the film Signs with Joaquim Phoenix and Mel Gibson.

Now, the merits of the film (or lack of them) aside, I found myself pondering something deep and meaningful. This is most unlike me and gave me rather a shock. Then I realised it wasn't actually that deep and meaningful rather flippant and irrelevant which made me feel a little more at home. Despite pondering this for a full lap of my concentratcion span (a good thirty seconds then) I came to no decisive conclusion so I have decided to share my hypothetical dilemma with you and gather your thoughts on the matter.

Here goes:

Are men naturally more 'heroic' than women? Is their natural instinct to protect and defend or is that just what they think they should do? This thought came about because Signs is a predominantly male cast. Without any token women to protect it addresses much more the question of how brave men might be on their own without the stimulus of protecting 'the little woman' and rescuing her from the proverbial dragon (or aliens in this case).

All our lives, the literature and stereotypes that we are fed show us girls being rescued in the nick of time by the tall handsome hero. Films and television perpetuate this myth more often than not. I must be honest here. I don't find this to be particularly true in real life but as I am very rarely carried off by Godzilla or King Kong and left stranded in improbable places and in need of a Bruce Willis style rescue it is hard to judge. Perhaps this happens to you all the time though?

I am also handicapped by the fact that I have never been in a situation where I have not had to sort the monster under the bed out on my own. I've not been given the opportunity to see hero man in action. Also, being a tall person, men don't tend to view me as being in need of much protection. I shall be honest and admit that sometimes I wish this was not so because somehow the sense that I can look after myself makes me feel less feminine. Less like a heroine. Consequently I behave less like one. It's a self perpetuating thing.

Opportunities to be a screaming heroine in need of rescue are scarce though and in my case, futile. If a mouse runs across th kitchen I could leap on a chair and scream but what would be the point? I'd still have to deal with it myself so that is what I do. Deal with it. Would I do things differently if there was man to rope in to deal with it though? Would having a man around make me less brave and does it force him into a position of having to be heroic even if he didn't want to be?

Being on my own does not make me heroic though. I mean, if there is a noise downstairs in the night I choose to ignore it on the basis that I don't want to meet a burglar (so far I am happy to report that it is the mice or the wind). My decision to stay in bed is self preservation rather than bravery. Going downstairs to investigate is asking for trouble. Why would I want to do that? What I don't know is if I was lying in bed with somebody, would he insist on going to investigate? What's more I don't know WHY he might want to go and investigate? Is it stupidity, bravery or foolhardiness?

So here are some questions that I have and that you might be able to answer?

Ladeeez- do you feel safer if there is a man in the house? Why?
Big Strong Men- if you are on your own would you hide from the proverbial burglar in the night?
Ladeeez- if you are home alone and there is a noise in the night do you hide or grab your handy hair straighteners and go and investigate? In other words are you braver when you are on your own?
Big Strong Men- Would your answer to the first question have been different if you were with someone? Why? Do you feel obliged to be a reluctant hero or is it some instinctive reaction to defend those that you love that sends you hurtling into the arms of danger?

Enlighten me. Please.

You've changed.....

2009-03-28T11:45:00.003Z

One of the people I count as my greatest friend is my old boss. I worked for her and with her for 8 years and only left because I no longer wanted to live in London.

I have helped her move house (twice), am an executor on her will, have had her children to stay countless times and seen her through an affair, a divorce and the death of her mother. All that on top of working together in a fairly high pressure environment and still managing to laugh an inordinate amount and stay friends. In eight years we only argued once. That's rare.

The thing is that in the years since I have left London she has changed. I expect I have too but I really notice it in her. She is harder than she used to be, more impatient and more self centred. These are deliberate changes. She was always an incredibly generous person, hugely accomodating and would bend over backwards to help the friend of a friend if she could. I think she got fed up with it and decided that she was going to put herself first from now on and have what she wants. I can understand this but I confess that I feel I have lost a great deal of the person that I was friends with.

She is so much more impatient now and much less accessible as a friend. She was always my first port of call if I had a major dilemma or crisis and now I think twice before ringing her as I'm not sure of the reception I'll get. In the last three years I have asked her to stay countless times and each time she has cancelled me at the last minute with frankly really poor excuses. Essentially she couldn't be bothered to come from London to Wales. What does that say about how she views me as a friend?

I loathe situations like this. People change, I know that, but I don't want to give up on a friendship that has meant so much to me over the years. Equally the friendship simply isn't the same anymore. I know that there isn't an easy answer to this. No quick fix that can resolve it. The obvious answer is to talk to her about it but that is the crux of the problem. She is incredibly hard to talk to now. Aaargh. Life is always so hideously complicated.

I shall stop moaning and get on with painting the office instead.

Surveying my Domain - it seems I'm doomed. Doomed I tell you.

2009-03-27T18:21:00.004Z

So, after a manic week spent mostly on building sites, in the car or at the airport I have made it home and have been able to speak to the surveyor. He took great pleasure in suggesting that the house of my dreams is a deathtrap that will suck up my lifesavings, my will to live and leave me penniless and in debt for life. He was on the verge of suggesting I watched 'The Moneypit' and took it as a serious documentary.

The difficulty is how much attention should you pay to a survey? They are naturally pessimistic and never tell you good things that make you feel happy about spending the most money you will ever shell out on anything. In fact they are designed to part you from large paper bags of cash in order to persuade you not to part with further bags of cash for the actual house.

The big problem on this one seems to be the roof. Unlike most welsh houses the roof does not have slate but is done in some delightful tile invented by a lunatic in the sixties. I had naively hoped that, despite its ugliness, I could live with this for 20 years or so before worrying about replacing it. Not according to Survey Man. Apparently, the tiles are 'shaling' which is a BAD THING. Not that he has ever seen it before, but that fact in itself seemed to induce a gloomy outlook over the whole roof.

In addition, he added morosely, the roof trusses might not be strong enough to support the weight of slate tiles so replacing the sixties tiles with slate might mean changing the entire structure of the roof. Great.

His advice? Pay for more specialists to come and look at it and then throw myself off the nearest cliff when overwhelmed with depression.

Naturally he also said that the house had, and I quote, mysterious damp which was erratic and unsourced. Well, that's a welsh house for you.

Oh god - am I biting off more than I can chew? Are my eyes too big for my stomach? Am I cursed with an inability to write anything other than cliches?

What do I do now? I'm sort of afraid to haggle in case I lose the house entirely but equally I can't buy it if I can't afford to look after it. I can feel myself getting stressed just thinking about it. I will go and lie down quietly and moan to myself for a while and hope for words of wisdom from all of you as to what course to take.

Chutney Mary squashes the Pickle.

2009-03-20T16:34:00.004Z

My earth mother sister, ensconsed in Devon, and nicknamed Chutney Mary, had a bad day yesterday.

Going into the sitting room to sort out some childish squabble, she tripped over her own shoes and fell, squashing her eldest son, the Pickle, under her as she went and knocking his head into the hearth. Blood, tears and casualty later and the Pickle is a proud owner of some skin glue, a new toy motorbike and a Peppa Pig DVD. Chutney Mary may be scarred for life though.

She is quailing under the guilt. I mean, she is prone to being more sensitive than you or I anyway. The slightest hurt or criticism will be hoarded for years, brought out every now and then, polished lovingly and then carefully stored again in acid free tissue paper. This one may beat all our past insults thugh. I think it will never, ever go away.

I imagine that accidents like this are totally normal if you are trying to bring up children. You are tired, bored and trying to do a million things at once and they are small, wriggly and inevitably in the wrong place at the wrong time. This defines incipient disaster. Chutney Mary can't see this quite yet. She is tormented by the fact that she was cross with the Pickle anyway - as though she caused some Karmic disaster by not being permanently loving and sweet natured. I could explain to her that that sort of parenting is only achieved with Valium but she seems convinced that there is natural state of perfect parenting that she could achieve if only she cooked her children more organic food, knitted them ugly clothes out of leftover newspaper and made up a new and imaginative story every night at bedtime.

Her life would be so much less agonising if she was not aspiring to win the mother of the year award all the time. She might even get to enjoy the chaos and madness that parenting seems to engender.

Obviously I am speaking from a child free position. In her book this means I can have no opinion as 'I won't understand'. Maybe she is right, but I can see how she is tortured by the very act of being a parent and as my sister, deranged or not, I'd like her to have an easier life. I could give her a million pounds and a nanny and she wouldn't rest any easier though. She hasn't had a full night's sleep in FOUR YEARS and has martyred herself to the cause for good. Days like yesterday, whilst horrible, will never become a funny story to tell at future parties. Not just because she won't go to any parties (she couldn't leave the children!) but mainly because she will never let go of the guilt for long enough to see it as just an accident.

I wish that a bit of skin glue and a Peppa Pig DVD could fix things for her.

I officially owe lots of money to the men in suits..

2009-03-18T17:58:00.003Z

So, I have a mortgage. It's official and to prove it the bank has just nicked nearly £600 out of my bank account as an 'arrangement fee'. Translation - money in return for them lending me money which will be repayed threefold over the years. I might set up a bank - I'm mystified as to how they all have lost money in the last couple of years as I have never been so conscious as I am at the moment of how they make money off you at every single bloody opportunity.

Anyway, enough whinging. Spring is after all officially here. The geese have arrived back from their winter holidays, parents and three children in noisy and ebullient form. They are currently practising their formation flying over the house then landing in the field and discussing in their loudest voices who did the best.

The crocuses (crocii?) are in such full bloom that they have fallen over under the weight of their own blossoms and there are bright green leaves unfurling on the dog roses.

It's odd to not be gardening but there seems little point as I should be in the new house in the next six weeks. There is plenty of garden space there but no actual garden - a lot of lawn and a few bedraggled shrubs. I'm not sure how much actual top soil there is either - this is Wales where you often discover granite mere cms under the soil. I'm planning on taking as much of my current garden with me as possible but will first have to find somewhere to plant everything at the new house.

I spend a lot of time at the moment imagining myself living there to get used to the idea and to wean myself off the current hovel. I think it is working. I nearly drove to the new house after my meeting today I was so convinced I already lived there. I was going to go for a walk round the reservoir and everything.

The estate agent board has a 'sold subject to..' sign on it and I have a mortgage - it must be real. Up until now I have been convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax and that something would go wrong and I wouldn't get the house. From this point on if the whole thing falls through it will be very expensive as I will have paid for the survey, have incurred solicitors charges and the banks arrangement fee. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong. How odd that by May I might be living in my own house though. For four years I have been agonising over the house search, despairing of ever finding anything and wondering if I should just give up and stay where I am. Now, in the space of just a few weeks, my whole world has been shifted like a kaleidescope and there is suddenly a new view ahead of me of what my life will look like.

Insuring I'm ripped off....

2009-03-17T16:46:00.004Z

So, life is a little hectic right now. In addition to trying to buy a house I have been working in France, London and Dorset (small commute then!) and at the moment it is a miracle if I am in one place for more than three hours at a time. This is a little tiring but it's the life I chose, and still choose, so I shall not complain too much (today!).

The thing I do want to whinge bitterly about is insurance and house surveys. I met with the bank today to finalise the mortgage arrangements (aaargh - fear - debt - penury - fear...). As part of the mortgage I have to get a valuation for which they charge a small yet painful fee of £256.00 This is for somebody to drive by the house on their way home and say 'looks rubbish to me - I'd only pay X'. They then inform the bank of this on their headed paper knocked up on Powerpoint. It's a disgrace and the world's biggest con. I mean I could do that. You could do that. For god's sake, the Loyal Hound could do that.

The next option is to do a Homebuyers Report. This is when they do exactly the same thing but write a longer report explaining that though they didn't see anything because the door was closed / they didn't go upstairs / they never actually went there the house could have damp, a roof that will blow off if somebody sneezes, windows that don't fit, a boiler that will explode every other Tuesday. This is an even bigger rip off at £550. I could still do that, as could you. It's just a bigger con.

The last and only viable option is a Buildings Survey. This is where they visit the house and actually go inside. They are usually a qualified surveyor of some kind and they prove it by bringing damp meters, test tubes and pipettes and possibly a lab coat and they test everything they can find. Then they inform you that the house is a death trap, everything that could go wrong, just might and that you would be nuts to buy it. This small novella will cost £856.00. OUCH. There are so many other things that I could buy with that money. Things I'd actually like to buy. I mean, when else do you pay to receive bad news?

I would so love to be the person who says 'bollocks to that' and just doesn't get a survey but at the back of my mind is the fact that if I don't get the survey then Sod's Law says that I will end up with a house that does have death watch beetle encamped on the sofa watching daytime television and drinking Horlicks. If I get the survey at least I would know this, but if I don't then I will have bought a house with a sitting tenant that could make it worthless. So, I have had to agree to spend nearly a thousand pounds on a survey 'just to be sure'. It's downright depressing.

I mean, we seem to insure against EVERYTHING. Car Insurance, health insurance, contents insurance, building insurance, travel insurance, life insurance, mortgage insurance, public liability insurance (Ok I have that one for work but I do have it). The bank also wanted me to take Sickness Insurance and Trauma Insurance (I might need that one if I survive the process of buying a house which is vilely traumatic). If I saved up all the money that I spent on insurance I'd be a millionaire and could retire in a fortnight.

When it comes down to it I don't actually know anybody whose life has been ruined because they didn't have insurance. I do know plenty of people though who had insurance which didn't pay out at the vital moment because of some incomprehensible and devious bit of small print that said the insurance was invalid if you had a vowel in your name, or you tried to claim in the afternoon, or you preferred Cindy to Barbie.... you get the general gist. It's the world's biggest scam and I fall for it everytime. Why? well, just in case of course.

I'm never going to be the person who doesn't insure, but I am it seems always going to be the person who bitches and moans about the fact that I wish I didn't have to. The only thing insurance seems to do, whether it be a survey or travel insurance, is insure that I get robbed once a month like clockwork.

Friday is Award Day!

2009-03-13T14:40:00.005Z

A couple of weeks ago the lovely Not Supermum gave me an award. How very lovely of her is that? Unfortunately since then I haven't had much time to do anything with my lovely shiny award. It has sat collecting dust in the trophy room while I run around like a headless chicken. Now though I have polished it up and I am putting it here for all of you to go 'ooooh' and 'aaah'....

There is some rather fabulous text that goes with this award. Here it is: “These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.”

So, now not only do I get to go up on the podium and weep copiously and thank everyone I have ever met but I get to make other people go through the same thing. Huzzah. I only wish that I could do the links properly - I'll try but last time I turned the entire blog post into one giant link so don't hold out any hopes.

I would like to present this award to... (drum roll please)
Katyboo because she is the one who seduced me into this blogging malarkey.
Welsh Hills Again because she writes beautifully, and has also chosen to live in Wales which is worthy of an award in itself.
Not Enough mud anyone who kisses an elephant and gets set up on dates by the waiters in the hotel she is staying in deserves an award!
Country Lite because her blog is great and you should all rush off and read it.
Confuzzledom because she has a new and shiny flat and an award would fill her mantlepiece nicely!
Singlutionary This is a blog which gives the insider scoop on single life on the other side of the pond...
Australian in Florence. Monika lives the life I sometimes want - in Florence with a husband who she loves, travelling round to see as much as they can, eating wonderful food and then bloggin all about it!
Home Office Mum because this is a woman who has her own business, two small boys, a husband etc etc and is going to head off and sail a clipper ship for weeks and weeks because she can. Now that deserves and award!

Oh dear. Typing out all those links individually is exhausting work and I think I need to go to a post awards party to recover.....

HOLY CAMOLE & GADZOOKS!!!!

2009-03-10T14:17:00.003Z

Things got a little frenetic last week so I haven't had a chance to catch you up on the drama of the search for a new hovel. As some of you may know I had put an offer in on a bijou residence in the middle of nowhere, just to the left of the back of beyond and I had been waiting to hear if I was to be the lucky owner.

The news was not good. A new buyer had appeared on the scene with a higher offer. Not much higher, but higher. However they needed a mortgage the size of a small country's national income. I chewed my nails, I counted up my shekels and I decided to play hardball. I refused to up my offer. I said I was the better bet, the nicer person and had shinier hair. I pointed out that the Loyal Hound was sought after by thousands and what an honour it would be to have him move in. I also pointed out that I had my mortgage lined up, I wasn't in a chain and I WASN'T UPPING MY OFFER.

A deathly silence followed. I panicked. Had I made a horrible mistake? Should I spend the weekend building a small mint and printing off some extra money? How important was food in the general scheme of things? Could I budget on not eating for a year and up my offer that way? OK, obviously I'm never stopping eating (even if perhaps I should). I held my ground (sobbing and wailing all the while mind you) and I went back to waiting by the phone.

So, after a week of sitting on tenterhooks (not a position to be recommended and should definitely be looked at by Health & Safety), the phone rang yesterday evening. It was a miserable grey day with rain driving horizontally across the windscreen as I drove home. Ironically it was one of those days when I wondered why I live in Wales when I'm sure I could have made a life for myself and the Loyal Hound in Jamaica. However, I digress. The phone rings. Naturally I can't find it to start with as it is buried under old receipts, cheque books, mascaras I don't use and bits of lint at the bottom of my bag. Despite this obstacle course I find it in the nick of time.

Who should it be but Smelly Sheet man. Shockingly, he has finally made a decision and his decision is (drum roll please) - FOR ME!!!!

Holy Camole, Gadzooks and Jiggery Pokery. Suddenly there is a very real chance that I will have a house of my own. After four years of looking the shock of actually getting something may be too much for me. I can't imagine it. Before I start dancing a jig I give myself a stern talking to. There is much that can go wrong between now and being given the keys and I won't get my hopes up in case I jinx the whole darn thing.

By the time I got back onto my mountain side the excitement had worn off and been replaced by fear. Crippling horrible fear. What if I didn't like it enough? What if I couldn't fix it up the way I had so merrily planned? What was I doing taking on a mortgage in the middle of a recession (god forbid, depression). What if I was attacked by yetis living in the surrounding forest? Aaargh. I am now living on an emotional rollercoaster of joy and terror at the possibilities that my life suddenly holds.

Deafening silence.

2009-03-05T17:52:00.002Z

He hasn't rung yet. AAARGH. People say girls are indecisive but this is just ridiculous, and cruel.

Hurry up pale bachelor man, hurry up and ring me to tell me that I can hand over all my worldly goods in return for your house that smells of old sheets. If you don't ring soon I may have expired from frustration and then the offer will be no more.....

Waiting for the phone to ring.....

2009-02-28T16:36:00.007Z

So, I've been looking for a house for 4 years now. Having sold my flat in London some 5 years ago it never occurred to me that buying in Wales would be difficult. In fact I was pretty certain that I would be able to afford well, Wales. What a fool I was! The last few years have seen property in Wales go stratospheric. Beyond sense or reason and certainly beyond my self employed budget. A small hovel in the hills, usually with 2 bedrooms, a downstairs bathroom (lucky it's not outside I suppose) and tiny rooms with doorways so low that I concuss myself has been disappearing off the market at the 350k mark, well out of my reach and not what I want to live in anyway.

For the last 18 months though I have had my eye on a house that I couldn't afford but which looked interesting. Finally the price dropped in January. Not really within my reach, but certainly enough for me to justify going to visit it without the estate agents going 'Pah! I don't think so fair and impoverished maiden. You shall not cross the threshold of this house you could never afford'. Instead, they sighed a heavy sigh (they are used to me visiting everything that comes on the market and then saying I hate it and think it is overpriced and not big enough for the Loyal Hound should he wish to live on his own). A visit was arranged.

The house is lived in by a bachelor and his brother. Not a dating type of bachelor but an overweight and pale man who has a shy smile and possibly a fear of the outdoors. The house smells of unwashed sheets and the Sitting Room was dominated by a large flat screen television on which Battlestar Galactica or some such sci fi thing was playing.

Although the house technically has everything I have dreamt of, I didn't like it. It didn't feel like home. I left feeling despondent but that night I drew up how it could be laid out, I dithered, I agonised and I realised that though I didn't love it at the moment that could change. I didn't love the hovel when I moved in and now it is more home than I could ever have imagined. Things change. So, I rang him and offered him money for the house. Nothing like as much money as he wanted and unsurprisingly he said "No. Sod off." (well more politely than that).

This should have been the end of it. I went off to the big smoke for work and couldn't shake the house from my thoughts. I'd lie in bed thinking about it before I fell asleep. It had everything that I say I want for the forseeable future. I have looked at a lot of houses in the last four years and finding something that ticks all the boxes I have is not easy and is inevitably well out of my financial reach.

This house needed more thought. I made an appointment to go back with a builder and look at how much it would cost to make it what I wanted. I met with the bank to find out how much money they would lend me. I went back to the bachelor on Saturday and I made him an offer. I didn't think it had a hope in hell so you can imagine my shock when he said that his answer was likely to be 'yes, 99% yes' and he would ring me and confirm once he had spoken to the people he was buying from.

Now I am waiting. Waiting for him to ring and say definitely yes. In the intervening days between making the offer and waiting for him to ring I have realised how much I want this house. Please, bachelor, ring me and say yes.

See the irony of how my life seems to be dependent on single men failing to ring me?

Cyber dumped, I think......

2009-02-27T15:14:00.003Z

So, it is nearly two weeks since I met up with Pilot man, the best of the cyber men to have come my way. We had a pretty good time all in all, though there was no particular jolt of attraction on my side at least (I don't know about him) and at the end of our date he suggested that we meet up again. He suggested, not me. He is based in Manchester this week and so it was agreed that this would be a good time to meet up. That was the plan.

Since then - NOTHING. Not a text message, a phone call, an anonymous note, or a carrier pigeon. I sent him a brief friendly e mail last week saying thank you for lunch and that it would be lovely to meet up again. I haven't even had a reply to that. I can't read anything good into this deafening silence.

Have I been dumped? If I have then why can't he at least e mail me to say 'I'm really sorry but I don't think this is going to work.' Is that not the done thing? Or is this just typical dating behaviour and I am living in a Georgette Heyer novel to expect actual communication?

Should I be ringing him to find out what is happening? Is this a test? Am I supposed to just know that he doesn't want to see me again because he hasn't rung, or is he just a useless male who hasn't noticed that two weeks have gone by and we haven't spoken. I didn't think he was that dozy to be honest and suspect this is a major hint that I am dumped, did not live up to expectations and was a waste of his time. But what if I'm wrong?

It's a dilemma. If I don't ring then he might think that I wasn't interested. If I do ring then he might hang up on me then change his number and move to Guatemala because all he wants is to never see me again, hence his deafening silence over the last fortnight which I was supposed to recognise as a firm 'bugger off' signal. The etiquette of this whole thing baffles me.

God, this dating thing is hard work. My heart isn't broken or anything but I would like to know where I stand. How on earth do I find out though? Help please.

Death of a car salesman

2009-02-26T15:58:00.003Z

There are lots of people out there who can get very excited about buying a new car. I am not one of them. Despite my disinterest, this week I had to trade my car in and buy a new one. This nearly resulted in my being sent to jail for murder most foul.

The person I normally get my cars from has nothing at the moment that fits my particular requirements. As I needed to get this whole thing done and dealt with as quickly as possible, I widened the search and found the perfect charabang online. The whole thing went downhill from here.

This gets me to the real reason for this blog entry. It is not to bore you with the details of me trying to buy a car but for me to vent my rage at the intolerable, endless and appalling sexism and general uselessness of car salesmen.

Let's make something clear. I am not a bra burning feminist. I like my bras for one thing, and I have no objection to having a door opened for me. I don't think that's sexism, I think it is gallantry. However this particular experience was filled to the brim with old fashioned, patronising and excruciating sexism from an older man towards 'the little woman'.

The prat that I dealt with was consistently patronising, and at the same time shockingly stupid. He had obviously decided that as a girl buying a car, I could not possibly understand what I was doing, despite me explaining that this was the third car I had traded in in as many years. He ignored this fact and instead spent his time explaining things in a deliberately slow voice as though he were dealing with a lunatic. Things that I already understood and didn't need explaining to me.

At the same time he wouldn't actually answer my questions because 'you don't really need to know that dear'. All this while he constantly called me by the wrong name, didn't listen to me when I explained what I wanted and told me to 'calm down dear' when I exploded with rage as he ignored me for the umpteenth time.

I longed to just walk away from the sale rather than deal with him but I didn't have the time. So I bottled my ire and headed to Lincoln to fetch the wretched thing. It turns out that the prat had no idea where he actually worked. He had insisted that it would take me no more than 2 hours to get from central london to Lincoln. Try 3 1/4 hours. He then gave me such terrible directions to the showroom that it took an extra half hour to backtrack and find him. I am good at directions - my job entails me finding new places three or four times a week and I get lost about twice a year. Even the other people in the showroom looked baffled when I showed them the directions I was given. He didn't even apologise. He just mentally patted me on the head and said 'well you got here didn't you dear'. How did I not stab him there and then with my car keys?

Where do they get these people from? How are they still alive, let alone employed? This man was a dinosaur and needed to be made extinct. I longed for a comet to land on him and leave nothing but a charred pair of shoes and a smoking crater. I mentally put my hands round his scrawny neck and choked him to death, laughing maniacally, then put him through a potato chipper and burnt the remains before driving over them in my newish car. The whole experience was hideous because of him. I am getting cross just typing about him. AAAAAAAARRGGHHHH

I am glad to say that it is rare to come across this sort of attitude, but invariably when you do it is in a car salesmen. Do the dealers go out looking for sexist, stupid idiots to patronise us? Do they think to themselves 'hmm, next to a house, this is the biggest purchase most people will make so let's make it as hellish and insulting as possible?' If that was their plan then they succeeded. And as for me? I am going to drive this car for the rest of my life so that I NEVER have to deal with a used car salesman again. Ever.

Tragic, cruel world. It really isn't fair.

2009-02-25T10:39:00.003Z

On Thursday night last week my Godson was born; Sam. In the early hours of Tuesday morning he died. His mother fed him at midnight then got up again at three to feed him again and he was no more.

It isn't fair.

I don't know how to process information like this. It's not fair. It's cruel. It's inexplicable.

Cos your feets too big...

2009-02-19T11:45:00.003Z

There's a fabulous song by Fats Waller called 'Cos your feets too big'. When we were little we used to run around the lawn screaming the words out and laughing hysterically. Little did I know how prophetic this would be.

You see, I'm tall. Just under six foot and I have correspondingly large feet. Size 9 to be exact. This is useful if you want to go water skiing and don't have any skis but downright hideous if you worship at the altar of beautiful shoes, or for that matter just want everyday shoes.

I could take vanity out of the issue and persuade myself that shoes are just for protecting your feet and stopping you getting cold toes but I am fooling myself. Shoes say something about you. About the woman you want to be, the mood you are in. Killer heels for vamp days, pretty strappy things for days when you want to pretend you are a feminine and enchanting mille feuille of a girl. Knee high boots for Saturdays spent strolling through Borough Market, ballet slippers for supper with friends. The list goes on.

Fairytales are filled with women whose feet predetermine their destiny. There is the Devil wears Prada, when Anne Hathaway's transformation from student shabbiness to New York uber cool is marked by the day she is given new and ravishing designer shoes. Cinderella's life revolves around her tiny feet with their double glazed slippers, The Little Mermaid's story revolves around her tiny white feet being stabbed by red hot knives in order to get the Prince (no happiness without pain in the feet seems to be the moral). I could go on.

It seems that my feet are never going to lead me down the fairytale ending. Quite aside from the fact that the killer heels add so much to my height that I have to have an oxygen tank to cope with the thin air, they make me far too tall for men to want to talk to me and too tall to hear what my more vertically challenged friends are saying. It's irrelevant anyway because the shoe shops just won't stock shoes in my size.

Somebody out there has decided that girls with big feet don't deserve pretty shoes, or necessarily want them. Apparently we are so ashamed of our monstrously sized feet that we wish to hide them in remedial style shoes in various shades of dog pooh.

I walk past shoe shops and peer through the windows like The Little Matchgirl, gazing at what I can never have. Occasionally I brave the doors and go in and ask longingly what size the shoes go up to. Invariably the assistant says 'size 8' and when I say that won't do as I am a size 9 they look faintly horrified at the thought of feet that big and their sigh of relief as I leave their emporium of beauty sends me on my way. Often I boil with rage when they crush my hopes. Why is this avenue of loveliness shut to me? 'It's not fair' I sob in my head.

Now that shoes have become so affordable everyone seems to have the loveliest of shoes. I find that I buy shoes just because they fit me, even if I hate them. Anything to fulfill the craving for shoes. If I were a millionaire I would have shoes made for me. Sparkly shoes, strappy shoes, shoes in every colour (Ok, not yellow or peach but every other colour). It would be heaven.

I know that there are websites out there now that do shoes for bigger feet but the choice is limited and often the only lovely ones are too narrow and often the more mundane shoes are only just a size 9, making them wildly uncomfortable. I once found the most beautiful pair of shoes and ordered them. They arrived and were a thing of such beauty that I scarcely dared lift them from their nest of crisp tissue paper. It was a soul destroying moment when I tried to put them on and discovered that they were never ever going to fit. They were sent back in a tear stained box.

The reason for this blog is that the dull, dull, dull pair of brown shoes that I wear everyday are wearing out and I must face the prospect of a search for a replacement pair of everyday shoes. I am off to London tomorrow, the mecca of footwear. The only thing I can guarantee is that I will want to cry during the search and will end up buying ugly shoes just because they fit. It's cos my feets too big.

Mad woman needs help.

2009-02-18T11:44:00.003Z

So, in the wonderful world of the blogging stratosphere I have come across the lovely, funny and energetic Home Office Mum. With two sons, a business she runs from home and a husband you'd think she'd be resigned to life as she knew it and would be happy to only dream of all the things outside her ken that the world would say she now could not have.

But, dear readers, life is not like that. About three weeks ago she blogged about an advert that she had seen to do one of the round the world clipper ship races. She mused on the fact that she'd like to do it, and then she applied AND GOT A PLACE!

Suddenly she has been launched into the choppy waters of managing a business, a family and the race to raise £8000 sponsorship and then flee her life for a few weeks to live life on the high seas. She has set up a new blog for the rest of us to follow her in awe as she sets out on this epic journey from normalcy - More to Life than Laundry. I hope you will go and visit her there, and if you can spare some loose change, sponser her via paypal.

It seems to me that we all spend our lives dreaming of 'what if' and very rarely dare to try it so those of us who do take the plunge deserve loud cheers, cash or at least a supportive comment.

Just how necessary is 'the spark' with a cyberman?

2009-02-16T11:52:00.008Z

So, I have a question for all you halves of couples out there. How important is the SPARK? Did you meet your loved ones and 'just knew'. Did your pulse race? Your heart accelerate and your palms go sweaty? Was your first thought "how quickly can I jump this man / woman's bones?".

You see I am an innocent abroad in these matters. I know, I'm 35 and should be jaded, worldly and wise but I'm not. I've only gone out with one person and that was years ago and I'm not quite sure how it happened. I know that it ended because he sent me flowers (contrary I know, and obviously glib too but that was the genuine catalyst). So, it's been over a decade since that momentous event and I have been skipping along through life, single, footloose and literally fancy free.

On Saturday I met with pilot man, after months of delicate UN style negotiations and failed treaties. The spot was Ludlow, half way between our respective homes. I was nervous the night before and scarcely slept. Would this be the love of my life? Was Friday the last night of life as I knew it? Was I going to be initiated into the world of those who had 'another half?'. Consequently I woke on Saturday morning with a cracking headache. Not the best start.

The day was thick with low cloud and I only knew I'd reached Ludlow because the sign said I had; you could scarcely see the town for cloud. I was early and managed to find parking at completely the opposite end of town to the pub we were to meet at. Pilot man sent me a text to say that the road he was coming in on was closed so he would be late so I wandered through the town, past the busy shoppers and after getting directions headed down the hill to the pub. It was the pub you always imagine you'd like to have down the road. Low beamed, with wide, scarred oak floor boards and a roaring fire. A whippet puppy was busy destroying half the newspapers and locals would drop in every now and then to tease the barmaid and catch up with friends nursing a pint. I settled myself at a table with a slant that would be defined as a black run were it a ski slope and rescued some of the paper from the puppy.

Ten minutes later Pilot man rang to say that he had parked and was on his way. I watched the door anxiously. Was this it? The door swung open and a man came in. Like every date I have met off the web, he was sort of like his photo, but not completely but I did at least recognise him. I'm not sure he recognised me mind you but I called out to him before he could look around and decide that I wasn't there and run away.

He's nice looking. Wearing jeans and a black polo neck he looked as though he had made an effort which is flattering. Also, there was no cravat and that is always good news. His hair, which is a dark brown grows in a widows peak above a friendly used sort of face. He comes over and joins me at the table. We kiss hello (on the cheek). After a brief 'how was your journey' kind of conversation he looks a little embarrassed and says he has no English money to buy a drink. I finger the stack of cocktail sticks in my pocket and wonder if I will be needing them. But after Wednesday's debacle I am now prepared for the drinks thing so offer to get him a pint. He has a good excuse. He only landed back in the UK at midnight on Friday and had not had time to change his stack of foreigh currency back into sterling. He immediately says that he will buy lunch in return. This seems fair, and generous. I put the cocktail sticks down.

We sat and chatted easily for a couple of hours. Conversation ranged from the forthcoming Rugby to Philosophy, via the state of the economy, the joys and woes of snow and various other topics. We touched on the thorny issue of valentine's day and he had strong feelings on this. They were that men who had to make an effort on valentine's day quite obviously did not make enough effort the rest of the time. I pretty much agree with him on this point and am glad that I took my kind readers sage counsel and arrived bearing no gifts of any kind.

Two hours later, lunch over, our respective parking was running out. At this point, I was wondering in the back of my mind what next? He's nice, he's easy to talk to. We chortled over similar things and were happy to disagree on others. There was nothing wrong at all. But shouldn't my heart be racing? my stomach churning with lust? Or is 35 too old for such things? Does lust come slowly, or not at all and I should just be looking for company, with wild passionate sex discarded as a 'service' station that I have shot past and can't get back to?

He's paid the bill and I am wondering whether I should suggest a walk around the town? But why should I suggest it? Why hasn't he? It could be that he doesn't want to be pushy, or that he can't wait to get away? I want him to take the decision but none is forthcoming. I weakly suggest that I should get back to my car and he offers to drive me through the town to save me the walk.

A few minutes later we pull up by my car. Pilot Man says that he has enjoyed meeting me and that it would be nice to 'do this again'. I agree and we work out that he will be based at Manchester airport in a fortnight so we could meet up again then. We kiss on the cheek again and I get out of the car and he drives off.

I'm left confused and slightly indifferent. We had a nice time, he was charming and kind and the time passed easily but he could have been a long lost cousin, not a date. Does that mean that we are on a road to indifference, or just that it is too soon to tell? This is all horribly new to me and I don't know the rules.

So. I've established that he isn't horrible, he doesn't have a flat cap or an autocratic mother. I've also established that my stomach doesn't churn at the sight of him and the prospect of seeing him again is neither dreadful nor thrilling.

I return home muddled and confused and needing your advice. How important is the spark?

Sucker for Punishment. The cybermen march on....

2009-02-13T11:02:00.003Z

So, after many moons of no single men on my horizon, this week spat up three at once (rather in the manner of buses). You all know the disastrous results of Wednesday's date. Tonight a friend had lined up a single man for me. There were some caveats mind you. The main one being that she was 90% certain that he is gay. Despite this dubious point it seems she felt that desperate times called for desperate measures so a casual dinner with the four of us was arranged.

I should have known that my luck was not about to change though. It is after all, Friday 13th. I have just had an e mail to say that Gay Date has come up with a limp excuse and dropped out of the evening. It seems that my appeal is not enough to lure him off his chosen path, even to have dinner with me. Darn it.

However, all is not lost. Some of you may remember Pilot Man, another in the ranks of the Cybermen. There was a moment when I wondered if I was accidentally stalking him over the summer and then a long, long drought when I heard nothing from him. Then, early in the winter, he got in touch again. We have now spoken several times and had several failed attempts to meet that have been thwarted by snow, flying schedules, and possibly fate. I have ignored fate though and we have a new date made - for TOMORROW! At the time I had not appreciated that this was valentine's day. I mean valetine's day does not generally have much significance for me. So when we picked Saturday to meet it did not occur to me that we would be surrounded by couples smothered in chocolate and roses and pretending to adore each other. This might make a first meeting a little awkward.

In addition there is an etiquette issue. Should I take some token valentine like gift with me? My instincts are throwing up at the thought and I want to trust them. Advise me readers, advise me....

You'll have to wait until Sunday to find out what happens as I won't be able to get near a computer tomorrow. Perhaps this is the one? Then again, perhaps he too will have a flat cap and a cravat.....

NOT Hugh Grant then......

2009-02-12T11:41:00.005Z

So, picture the scene. I have had a seven hour meeting and driven two and a half hours and I am nearly at Cheltenham, scene of the Cyberman date. Traffic is lousy and I am running late. It's dark, it's raining. It could be the scene from Scary Movie.

Despite running late I pull into a layby and do a quick change into something not covered in builders dust and slap on whatever makeup I can find on the floor of the car. Then I text the cyberman to say that I am nearly there. Get the encouraging reply 'OK'. I am faithfully following the ludicrous directions but as I get closer to the hotel where we are to meet the directions fail me horribly. This is because they are filled with helpful things like 'there is a street that runs off at right angles - don't take this!'. Ten minutes later I have been swept round the one way system twice and seem to be heading from Edinburgh. Desperate I pull over and ring the cyberman to get new directions.

He doesn't sound remotely sorry that I am having difficulties, in fact he sounds impatient and has that tone in his voice that says I am being stupid and must be an idiot to be lost in a city that I don't know, finding a hotel that I don't even have a street name for. Despite this I finally locate the wretched place. It is the only commercial building in what is otherwise a residential square and it looks as dull as the proverbial ditchwater. Standing outside the doors is the Cyberman.

It's dark and raining hard so he is just a dark outline and I don't get a chance to assess who I am meeting until I am inside. I apologise for being late and don't get a word of apology for the fact that his directions were useless or sympathy for the fact that I have had to come 90 miles to meet him in the middle of a 250 mile journey.

By the light of the lobby I realise to my horror that I am apparently meeting one of my father's school friends. He's tallish, with greying hair swept carefully back from his forehead. He is wearing a tweed jacket with a handkerchief nattily arranged in the pocket, dark jeans, a red and white stripe shirt nd the piece de resistance; a paisley CRAVAT!!!!! Who wears a cravat for god's sake? Tucked into his coat pocket is a flat cap. My heart sinks but I am determined not to judge the evening on the basis of his sartorial approach to life. I give myself the pep talk where I point out that I am not 20 anymore and can't expect the cream of the crop. There is a strange sense of familiarity to him though. It niggles at me and as we walk back to the bar I realise what it is.

For those of you who watched Four Weddings and a Funeral, there is a character in it who has a thing for the Andy Macdowell character. He's the one who is staying at the same pub as her character and Hugh Grant's and she spends her time hiding from him while he calls her 'a damn fine filly'. I think it is his brother that I am meeting. Shit.

The bar is horrible. Reminiscent of a railway bar it is all dark wood, plush red velvet and fake pictures. It is virtually empty with only a depressed looking old woman in it and a bar man who is overcome by having three people to serve at once. This is not going to help with the atmosphere. In fact I wonder if I am going to start hyperventilating. Was there nowhere else in cheltenham that we could have gone? Somewhere with people and life? If this was his idea of a 'suitable' venue then we were already worlds apart.

We've not said much to each other at this point. The cyberman wonders if I would like a 'snack' as he thinks they do them here. I picture a tiny pack of peanuts such as you find on aeroplanes and realise that this might extend the date so hurriedly say that I am not hungry. The drinks are ordered. I've gone for a soft drink due to driving, despite the fact that a bottle of tequila suddenly feels like the only way through the night. I then realise that cyberman is taking an awfully long time to produce any money. I hadn't really thought about the paying thing much. To be honest, I didn't think the £1.20 my drink cost would leave me indebted to him and having done the bulk of the work to get to the date then one drink would be the least he could do. It seems I was wrong. I fumble in my bag and pull out my wallet at which point he grandiosely says 'Oh no, don't worry I'll get this' as though he is doing me the world's greatest favour. I wonder how soon I can leave.

We move through to the front of the hotel where he says there is, and I quote, 'rather a marvellous regency portrait'. Why would I care? However I dutifully follow him and we stare at a portrait of a bewigged man in brown velvet. It could be my date. I hurriedly sit down at a nearby table and cheerily ask him if he has had to travel far to get to the hotel. With the air of a man who has been greatly put out he announces that he has had to come at least '400 yards'. I start to boil over. All his insistence that this was the only place we could possibly meet, despite me pointing out that it took me out of my way, and he WALKED HERE. Could he be more self centred? Apparently yes.

The next hour dragged by as he told me of the biography he had written on Le Clerc (a french general). I vainly tried to make this interesting by saying how lovely it must have been to go and see all the places he had been. The crushing response was that 'he couldn't possibly allow a £20 - 30,000 budget for travel expenses'. Where the hell was Le Clerc fighting? on the moon? No. Morrocco and France. What is this man's idea of suitable travel? I am then informed of the difficulties of finding an agent, the cruel monopoly that history professors have on publishing historical books (odd that!). I change the subject.

"So, do you manage to get away from cheltenham much?". Instantly the autocratic mother is brought up. Apparently he can't leave her though further investigations reveal that she is in the peak of health. The poor woman is probably desperate to have him leave the house once in a while but he just won't go.

Every conversational avenue I try is quashed and I want to run away / weep / stab him through the eye with a cocktail stick. The few questions he asks me, he kindly answers for me and the rest of the time is spent telling me about how vast his family is, how they all hate each other and are constantly falling out with each other bickering over inheritances. I point out that I wouldn't fall out with a sister over heirlooms if I could possibly help it. He points out that heirlooms are more important than family. The cocktail stick route is starting to look really appealing.

After what feels like a lifetime, but is only an hour, I brightly announce that I must get back on the road as I have at least another three hour's driving to do. It is seven thirty. He says 'so you'll be home by nine then.' WHAT??? I resist the urge to explain the maths to him and gaily laugh in a brittle way that I despise about myself but has to be better than the bloodbath that such falseness is preventing.

As we go through the doors back onto the street he pulls on his flat cap and says 'well, I'll be off then'. Not a word about my journey, or how to get out of Cheltenham. I call out to him as he walks off. 'How do I get out of Cheltenham?' and I can see the look of exasperation on his face under the glare of the streetlight as he comes back to tell me how to get out. He doesn't see me to my car or say anything further. I can see he is disappointed but I couldn't care less.

As I pull out and drive around the corner I see a lovely wine bar not 50 yards away. It is the perfect venue for a blind date. I wish I had gone there instead and left him on his own in his flat cap with his Georgian ancestor portrait.

Cybermen - the story continues

2009-02-10T11:33:00.003Z

So, I am just packing to walk through yet another blizzard with my suitcase and the loyal hound. We are off to Dorset for work. But, not just work. I am meeting one of the Cybermen.....

Now this one I'm fairly underwhelmed by. In fact I think I might be meeting the ultimate early old fogey. Things to worry about:

1) He lives with his mother! She is apparently 86 and autocratic. They live together in a vast and draughty pile in Glouctershire that he is slowly refurbishing.
2) He lives with his mother. I think this point is worth re-iterating.
3) He writes historical books. Not Bernard Cornwell type novels but esoteric tomes on odd bits of history I think. I am worried I will be lectured to.
4) He is fairly inflexible. Considering I am driving from Dorset to North Wales - a five hour journey at the best of times, he is still making me come 30 minutes off the motorway to meet him as he says there is nowhere between Cheltenham and the motorway that would be 'suitable'.
5) He can't give directions for toffee, let alone a hotel. The directions he gave me were so convoluted that I doubt we will ever actually manage to meet. They included helpful things like 'go past my bank' 'there is a street that goes off at right angles' 'Go north here' (this last one when you are in a town with no helpful compass to hand).
6) When he sent me his telephone number he asked me to text him before I rang. This annoyed me and made me wonder if he was worried that one of his wives would answer the phone otherwise. Am I meeting Bluebeard?
7) When I didn't ring him he get marking me as his favourite on the website every day, twice a day for a week. This verges on stalking.

I know, I know - why am I doing this? As a warm up I suppose. As an effort at showing willing in this dating game and so that nobody can say of me that I am not trying. I'll let you know how it goes. So sorry, I know this is a muddled entry but it is snowing hard and I need to get moving. Not only do I have a meeting to go to but a cyberman to meet. I wonder if he will bring his mother?

Dare I say the word 'Thaw'

2009-02-09T15:57:00.003Z

Although my world is still white I am silently dancing with glee because there just may be a thaw in the air. For the first time today, my footprints in the snow have turned transluscent, giving a glimpse of the ground beneath. In fact, the whole texture of the snow has changed. The top is a frozen crust that rattles when you walk through it but beneath this icy top the snow is wet and rotten.

You wouldn't know this to look out across the valley. The world is monochromatic still. White with black hedges and woods scratched across the glare and not a hint of green to be seen yet. But I have hope.

Yesterday, before the two hour blizzard that blotted out the world once more, I managed to get my car off the mountain. This involved getting friends with a tank like four wheel drive to cautiously edge their way down my track, before leading me on a towrope back out. There were a couple of hairy moments. One where i slid down a gully with no steering control or brakes, straight towards an outcrop of granite, and a couple of times where my wheels spun uselessly on the snow as I went nowhere. However, we succeeded. An hour later my car was parked safely in the village. So now, though I still have to walk in and out, I can at least then drive myself wherever I want to go, whenever I want and for as long as I want!

The long walk back up the hill does not encourage road trips just for the hell of it but it is a taste of freedom and not soon enough for me. This means that my work trips can now be safely rescheduled so tomorrow it is off to Dorset and back again on Wednesday night. If the thaw does come then I might even be able to drive all the way to the hovel by then. If instead we have another foot of snow as they are forecasting then I will be knocking on doors in the valley to beg a bed for the night. I don't fancy walking a mile up the mountain carrying my suitcase after a five hour drive. I'm a lightweight like that!

Day Six - silver lining on snow clouds.

2009-02-07T16:29:00.005Z

After the excitment of seeing actual people yesterday, and shops and everything I was on a high! I mean the town I went to had not one, but two greengrocers, and a Barnardos and a mad knitting shop. I went into all of them just because I could! Coming home later that night, pulling my groceries along on my toboggan with the loyal hound diving into the snow around me, I decided that I would make the most of this situation. That plan lasted all of ten minutes.

You can tell how bad it is by the fact that I am in the office on a Saturday when I don't have to be. This is entirely due to the fact that I am bored of being in the house, and I have been for three walks today just to pass the time and needed a newish horizon to make my return to the hovel more exciting.

I keep thinking the snow will go, but each morning I wake to find that yesterday's tracks and footprints have been eradicated in another snowfall and I am back to square one. I rescheduled last weeks meetings to next week and honestly, I'm not sure that I will be out by then.

By the time the snow does finally go I will have the tidiest house in Britain, the best organised office and the crazed look of Tom Hanks in Castaway. If I had a football I would instantly name it and start talking to it.

Watching the news / forecasts it is fascinating to see the presenters skate over (scuse the pun) the fact that every day they forecast more snow for North Wales. Because it is just 'small showers' then it doesn't count as anything much, but small showers (for which read several hours of snow) add up to multiple inches of snow on the ground and massive annoyance for me. But watching the news it is as if it is uninhabited up here and so snow falling in the mountains isn't relevant. Nothing like as relevant as a couple of days of inconvenience elsewhere in the country anyway. Currently we are getting the edge of the weather front that is in the South West, and the one travelling down the Irish Sea. This means I have had snow coming in from both ends of the valley. Sorry, enough of a whinge about national forecasting.

However there is an upside to the snow. The light. This time of year is normally so grey and drained of colour but the snow casts such wonderful light everywhere. Yesterday the hound and I went for a walk at 10 at night because the snow made it so light that you could see for miles. I guess that is my silver lining. Every snow cloud has one.

I'm escaping again...

2009-02-06T12:49:00.003Z

In order to protect my dwindling sanity I am escaping. Just for the afternoon mind you but anything in order to see other people and remind myself that the world is still turning out there. I am donning my arctic gear and digging out the toboggan and then I'm heading down the mountain where a friend is going to come and pick me up and we will go and stare in shop windows with looks of astonishment on our faces. I will buy more junk food, and very little that is healthy and return to my mountain a new woman.....

Cabin Fever - HELP!

2009-02-05T14:09:00.003Z

I'm getting cabin fever. Seriously.

It is now the fourth day of being stuck in the snow and at the rate the snow is still coming down there are at least another two days to go. I'm not totally snowbound. I can walk off the mountain (or, like yesterday toboggan down 400 feet (in altitude terms) of mountain at ridiculous speed, shrieking like a loon) and hitch a lift to pick up supplies. This means that I'm not reduced to eating my shoes or anything in a Stalingrad style. However the inability to be independent and choose when and where I go, and for how long, is astonishingly frustrating.

I have caught up on all my chores. I've finished my work, thought about doing the filing. I've painted the second coat of paint on the bathroom, and painted all the beams in the house so that they aren't all black and glowery but elegant and taupey instead. I've fed the birds and plucked the brace of pheasant I had. I've cleaned the kitchen floor and watched nearly everything on my sky + box. I've read a book of John Updike short stories and finished A Thousand Splendid Suns. The Loyal Hound and I have been tobogganing just for the hell of it, rather than for transport purposes. This afternoon I think I will throw everything out of my wardrobe that I keep pretending I will fit again and hide it all in the car which has currently turned into a snowy storage depot. I am soon going to be forced into writing my own great novella just to pass the time.

More importantly my secret stash of kit kats is running low and I may have to resort to making fudge to keep me going. In addition the Loyal Hound is addicted to the snow and spends the entire time nagging me to let him go outside and play in it, again.

I watch the news and see reporters across the country discussing in all seriousness the fact that 'it has stopped snowing here in outer Cambridgeshire' or 'there are at least 4 inches here in the local town and people are having to walk to the shops' and I wonder if they even know that there are those of us who are quietly going crackers with genuinely limited access to the rest of the world.

So, entertain me, amuse me, make me feel connected to the rest of the world. Please!

The Curse of Pollyanna

2009-02-04T11:46:00.002Z

Lately, I seem to get a lot of phone calls from depressed and miserable friends. I'm not sure whether this is just due to the fact that they know I am trapped on a mountain and can't run away, or whether it is because they want me to cheer them up. Possibly the answer is a combination of both things at once.

You see, I suffer from a Pollyanna like state of always trying to look on the cheerful side. I can't bear feeling unhappy and in addition I am an inveterate 'fixer upper'. If something is broken I want to put it right. My friends know this and will ring me when the world feels overwhelming and get me to put it in perspective for them, or I assume that is what they want me to do. Now of course this is lovely, and flattering in a way but listening to one monologue on the misery of life after another is draining. Ironically, this constant stream of people wanting me to cheer them up can get me down a little. It is exhausting being everybody's Pollyanna.

To illustrate two examples at the moment. I have a friend who is a very successful artist, but like all artists I know, she has an ambigious desire to see her work sell but a complete inability to actually sell it herself. Consequently she spends the time bemoaning the fact that the Cork Street Gallery that she sells at won't push her work hard enough, but if somebody came up to her and said 'Can I buy 3 of your paintings please' there is a good chance she would say 'No' and then run away and hide.

I can understand the opposing forces that influence her, and none of it is helped by the fact that she is in the throes of post natal depression. The difficulty is that there are only so many times I can repeat the same mantras to her and if she acts on none of them then I start feeling like Sisyphus and his rock. My will to help evaporates and I dread the phone call. I'm not sure that that doesn't make me a terrible person.

The second example is more local. A girl (well, woman really since she is nearly 40) who lives nearby is about to have her second child and once again the father has left the scene. This can't be easy, though it was very much her choice to have the baby which I think she wanted more than the father. She frequently rings me, or invites me over to supper, and will tell me for hours of how badly the world has treated her, how unkind everyone is to her. In her world she is Cinderella, surrounded by evil relations and courtiers trying to thwart her from her happy ever after. I try and be sympathetic to this as it can't be easy being in her situation. But secretly, I can't help but feel that that attitude achieves absolutely NOTHING to change her life.

I mean, if everything is always somebody else's fault, then you never take responsibility for anything yourself. I do believe that ultimately our own happiness rests on ourselves, not everyone around us. If you start out optimistically and are responsible for your own life, then you can control how you react to whatever life throws at you. Even if you start out depressed then I believe you can force a fixed grin onto your face, and bully yourself out of the worst of it, with your friends there to cheer you on. It is interesting to consider that the people who are happy inevitably make you feel a little happier. Happiness can be as contagious as the winter flu. So, if you take care of you feeling happy, then those around you are likely to be happier, which in turn will make you feel happy. I know that's simplistic but it is also true the majority of the time.

However, if nothing is your own fault then it seems that the general consensus is that you shouldn't be expected to do anything about it. Somebody else should come and pick you up, dust you off and wave a magic wand over you. I don't think life works like that at all; in fact, it's a recipe for disaster.

So, I sit and listen, occasionally I will make some Pollyannaish suggestion about how she could break the cycle, walk away from the baggage and detritus of everybody else letting her down and start afresh in her head. Stop the cycle of saying 'if only they would...' or 'if only I had' and instead take charge of her own life. Be the one who is responsible for her own happiness, rather than hold the rest of the world responsible for her life. I try to put it more kindly than this of course.

I recently read a book called 'The seven habits of effective people'. Excluding the tiresome Americanisms of it, there are some interesting points. First habit: Be proactive. You are responsible for your life and you can control how you approach it (not necessarily what happens in it, but how you react to it). Abandon the past and just look forwards. Don't blame the past, and those around you for what happens to you tomorrow.

There is a lot to be said for this but it is a point that most people seem incapable of absorbing. If you suggest to somebody that they forget the past and start afresh their instant response is 'Oh, I couldn't do that - I mean, my past won't let me' or words to that effect. We cling to what has happened to us, rather than what could happen. It seems to dictate everything we do. So, the artist friend will say 'I've never been able to sell my own work so I couldn't start now'. She never wonders whether perhaps she could if she wanted to. That what happened yesterday doesn't have to repeat itself every day unless she wants it to. In fact, I think that she doesn't like the idea that she could take control of things - if she did do that then she would have to be responsible. God, I'm such a bitch to feel this way.

What is particularly noticeable about these phone calls is that they NEVER ask me a single thing about me. Not how I am, where I am, whether I am happy, sad, insane etc etc. They just give a sigh of relief that I have answered the phone and start in on the free therapy session. This can stop the phone call feeling like a friendship, and make me feel more like the official 'Pollyanna helpline'. I know that this is part of what friendship is, but endlessly repeated you start wondering if it is a two way friendship. All else aside, if they only ring when they are depressed, and never when they are happy, then you end up with a one sided view of them.

So, that is the curse of being Pollyanna. I am now going to take my own advice and cheer myself up by taking the Loyal Hound and the Toboggan out. There isn't much that that can't fix. Thanks for listening.....

Snow days of yore (well, the seventies anyway)

2009-02-03T17:07:00.004Z

Katyboo (hmm, not sure the link worked - look on the left hand side if it didn't) had some rather fabulous and fond memories of being a snow child of the seventies. I'm with her 100% on this and reading her entries has inspired me to pass some of my snowbound time with fond misty recollections of my own:

Being Snowed in: this had a nasty habit of happening the day after we were taken back to boarding school. Our parents would ring and tell us that several hundred feet of snow had fallen the moment they got home, and what a pity that we weren't there to enjoy it! One famous time though we had a houseful of people staying - 12 of us in all and we got snowed in, then the power cut out and we lost the hot water. We were there for four days living by candlelight, with the boys taking thermoses of hot water heated on the aga upstairs to shave. I can remember how strange it was to be woken in the dark morning by my father with a candle.

It is astonishing how much washing up there is to do when you have to heat all the water to do it in a kettle, and how often it has to be done with 12 people to feed. Eventually we tracked down some paper plates and resorted to those, burning them after eating. The nice thing about it was that we all ended up in the same room, writing letters, playing board games and playing cards. It was too cold to go off and sulk on your own and there werent' enough candles to light more than one room properly. Each night we took our own candlestick upstairs to bed. It's the closest I've ever been to being remotely like a Georgette Heyer character.

Tobogganing: I grew up in the mountains of Wales so hillsides weren't exactly in short supply. On snow days the four siblings, the parents and the inevitable pack of dogs (my parents have never had less than four) would pile along the track behind the house each dragging a toboggan. The road drops precipitously off into fields with a slope so steep it is hard to get onto the toboggan before it shoots off down the hill. The slope was long, incredibly fast and laced with frozen mole hills that could destroy a cocyx with one blow or send you flying through the air. As the bottom approached, you had to hurl yourself off the toboggan into the snow or hit the dry stone wall. Each time, the dogs would come pelting down beside you, occasionally one of them would throw themselves onto the toboggan with you, risking life and limb (ours) in the process. The long walk back up took five minutes and we spent our entire childhood trying to persuade my father to create some sort of a chairlift using the tractor from the farm. We told him that Hannibal from the A team would be able to do it, so why couldn't he?

Epic Journeys: I think my parents specialised in epic journeys. The one and only time I have been a bridesmaid was one such time. It was a January wedding and it snowed and snowed and snowed. The sheep were buried under drifts and had to be rescued and the half mile of drive leading to our house had disappeared entirely, becoming level with the hedges either side. I was to be a bridgesmaid to a girl who had been my mother's bridesmaid and the wedding was taking place relatively nearby - some 25 miles or so. To this day, I don't know why my parents were so determined that we were going to make it there but the decision was made.

I remember being dressed in an abandoned ski suit of my sister's. The bridesmaid dress was put in a bag and I was put with said bag in a toboggan then my father and mother set off down the drive pulling me along. I couldn't have walked if I had wanted to as the snow was so deep. I have such a clear memory of my father, who is 6'2", disappearing up to his shoulders in a drift at one point.

We walked nearly two miles to a farm near the A road. He lent us a landrover and we piled into this. The main roads were relatively clear, as I remember it, but the road up to the church and house was a steep single track lane that no gritter had seen for years. Ahead of us was a coal lorry. I have no idea how, but this coal lorry made it to the top, clearing a path for us to follow behind him.

I don't remember much of the wedding itself. I have a clear memory of being lent a cream shawl to wrap around myself because the church was so cold, and of eating eclairs under a billiard table in a vast and draughty house where the reception was held. My next memory is back in the Landrover. Dad had bought us fish and chips and we drove through a starlit and snowy world and watched a total eclipse of the moon.

I don't remember the toboggan journey back up the drive. I must have been asleep by then. I do know that most of the wedding party, including the bridge and groom, were unable to leave, and so the reception went on for three days!

Now, I must go and muffle myself up in my snow kit as I have to relive my youth and make my way through the dusk to the village where a friend is dropping off some stuff for me that I need. I wonder if he will bring fish and chips?

Pesky Snow has trapped me again!

2009-02-02T17:39:00.005Z

So, more snow then. I have to say, in a curmudgeonly way, that I have possibly lost the thrill of being snowed in. This makes the fifth time this winter and as I was supposed to be on my way to London right now and in Dorset on Wednesday it has rather buggered up my plans. Despite the fact that all the forecasts said that we would scarcely notice the snow I have several inches covering my world and I can't find the track at all in the white wilderness. I had vaguely considered getting my trusty wheelbarrow and gritting all half mile of it but if I can't find it, I can't grit it!

It never seems to do this when I don't have to be somewhere. Instead there is always something horribly urgent that means I have to walk off the mountain and hitch a lift with somebody with a four wheel drive to achieve whatever it is that needs doing. Today that was a trip to the solicitors and post office that took FOREVER. The document I had to sign was wrong and had to be re-done. The only cafe was closed and we ended up sitting in a car park watching the snow bury us alive. Once I had finally got the wretched thing and dashed through the snow to the post office the girl at the counter took the greatest pleasure in telling me that she could no more guarantee me delivery than she could look like Kate Moss. I suspect that she might eat my vital letter just to prove her point.

The Loyal Hound on the other hand could not be happier. That dog just adores snow. His favourite activity is to travel at a hundred miles an hour scooping snow up into his mouth as he runs. One day he'll crack his jaw on a rock and I'll laugh - a lot! He loved the walk through icy blizzards over the shoulder of the mountain and I suspect he laughed when I went flying as we went down the hill. All the same, it is almost better to have a dog with you in the snow than a small child. They get just as much enjoyment but don't care about being cold and wet!

So, now I have an enforced stay at home for at least another two days. This after the luxury of an entire weekend at home. I'm not sure that I remember how to spend that much time in my own house....

Boing, boing - I have spring in my steps......

2009-01-26T16:20:00.002Z

I had a spring in my step this morning. I woke up and stretched like a cat (ok, an overweight cat in mismatched pyjamas but you get the picture), then I wriggled my toes and for once I didn't mind that it was a Monday morning. For me this is the New Year; no more cooking jobs for months and so the burden of normal work seemed like a feather as I lay in bed.

Ten minutes later, having failed to brush my hair or care what clothes I put on, I emerged into the daylight with the Loyal Hound frisking at my heels, delighted at the prospect of his morning walk. The air was balmy and I could smell spring in the westerly breeze. A halo of cloud was waterfalling over the top of the mountain but the rest of the sky was blue and for the first time in months I didn't need to put a coat on. Finally it seems that the icy shroud of winter may be being shrugged off by a defiant spring. I know that this is a false spring, that winter will return, enraged and chilly, but for today I enjoyed this glimpse of what could be.

After a leisurely breakfast where I had to have toast and butter because there wasn't enough milk to be healthy and have cereal, I wandered over to the office. I didn't have much to do today. I just needed to gather together everything hat I need for my Scottish trip, catch up with my mileage sheets (I know - it's gripping isn't it), then I had this cunning plan that I would venture into the garden and try and dig over the vegetable patch and plant the garlic out.

Naturally, from the moment I entered the office this plan was blown out of the blue and spring like sky. I have been deluged with hideous e mails that have taken hours to deal with and it is now half past four and I haven't been anywhere near the garden. Incidentally though, there was a very nice e mail in amongst the horrible ones offering to get the Loyal Hound a new toy - how nice is that!

Somehow though, despite not having the day I was looking forward to, I don't care. That sense of spring has buoyed me up and nothing will get me down if I can help it. I hope you all feel the same.

Musings on the divide between those who do, and those who don't have to.

2009-01-23T13:56:00.004Z

So, this is the last cooking job of the year. Thank God! 16 people for a weekend is not my idea of heaven however my menu planning has been rather cunning and most of tonight's dinner is done in advance. This did involve working in the kitchen until 10pm last night mind you.

I've made a delicious pudding for tonight - Cointreau and Orange Jelly with grapes and stem ginger. It set in about 5 minutes. I mean I turned around to talk to the Loyal Hound, went to fetch the pudding to put it in the fridge and it was set! Jelly never does that when you want it to. Let's hope that this doesn't mean that it is revolting because it has too much gelatine in it. The main course is lamb tagine, which I have cooked already so that the flavours can develop so that makes that a bit easier as I only have to do the couscous and vegetables now for the main course. The starter is a doddle and so now I just have to do the nibbles and I'm sorted for this evening. Only two cooked breakfasts, a lunch, tea and another 4 course dinner to do.....

Once the cooking is done, I don't have a lovely relaxing time to enjoy my new found freedom. Oh no. The next fortnight is pretty hideous. I am in Scotland next week, then London and Dorset the week after. I know it is all money in the bank, for which I should be grateful as we are now officially in recession, but I confess that I am tired just thinking about it.

There are some women out there who seem to live their life without this kind of manic running around to stay ahead of themselves to afford their book / chocolate / cashmere habits. Instead, they drift around after school looking pretty, marry somebody wealthy and never have to work - EVER! They then spend years complaining that their nanny is unreliable, the new Chanel collection is unwearable and their holiday house is SUCH a chore to maintain. They wouldn't know an electricity bill if it jumped up and bit them and the idea of finding a cheap flight to try and go on holiday just once every two years would be laughable.

How is it that I wasn't one of those and why were they the 'lucky' ones? I don't get it. They aren't necessarily any brighter, funnier, or better read than you or I and I'm not saying that their lives are perfect, or that they are necessarily happy. In fact from the few I have met, they are usually dissatisfied. Perhpas that's the thing that gets me about this peculiar category of women; they don't realise how lucky they are.

In which I reveal that I am thinly read, and seek your help

2009-01-21T17:51:00.004Z

Today, I am prepared to show my ignorance to the world and to seek your advice on how to remedy my sad situation.

In the words of the great Eddie Izzard, I suspect that rather than being widely read, I am in fact, thinly read. I know part of the reason for this; you see I am a re-reader. If I like a book, I'll read it several times over the years. I love re reading a book. It's like visiting old friends, catching up on the gossip and finding that, in a comforting way, nothing has changed. Some books don't stand the test of time and when you return you wonder why you liked them to start with, but most are just as good second time round.

I'll put it another way. If you ate chocolate for the first time, and found it delicious, you wouldn't refuse to eat it ever again because you know what it tastes like. No, you'd go back for more. Well, that's what I do with books.

It frequently occurs to me how much else I might have read if only I didn't read the same books over and over. There's a lot of misspent reading time in my past. Then it occurs to me how many of the 'great authors' I have never even touched, because I was busy reading my favourite authors all over again. So this is where you come in. Here are some authors I have NEVER read and my pathetic reasons why; tell me, faithful blogging companions, should I read any of them? What am I missing?

Tolstoy - the books look so heavy - literally. I'm not sure I could actually take the physical strain of reading them.

Salman Rushdie - the man is prolific, I'll give him that, but are his books any good or just published becasue of the Fatwah and only read by people who eat at Nigella's house.

Kafka - now, did he write The Unbearable lightness of being? If he did then I have read that, but if he didn't then I have read nothing by him.

James Joyce - I did once start Ulysses but my brain exploded and I fell asleep with the weariness of the worlds that fell on my shoulders during Chapter 1, so I did not persevere. Did I miss out?

Emily Dickinson & Sylvia Plath - I put them together because I've read neither and for the same reason. To me (who has never read them!) they give off a rather depressing vibe of female angst and misery. It's not appealing but I am basing my opinion on very little other than third hand opinions (probably of people who have also not read them). Give me some first hand feedback. I know someone out there has read them.

Tom Stoppard - now it's decidedly odd that I have never read any Stoppard as I love his screenplays and the way he writes. Despite this I never pick up his books. This is, I think, because I am worried that I won't like them as much as his plays and films, and then I'll be cross. Am I right to worry?

Tolkein - I am reading Lord of the Rings, but only when I stay with one particular friend in London who has a copy by the Guest Bed. This means that in three years I have only got as far as chapter 4. It's slow progress. I don't actually own the book myself and I keep resisting buying it. I just don't know whether this is the wise decision of one not swayed with Tolkein fever, or the sign of an idiot missing out on one of the all time great storytellers.

Who else have I missed of this list? I'm so badly read I can't even tell you.

Honest Guv!

2009-01-20T14:52:00.006Z

So, Just Me Really (I can't do the links but she is over there on the left of the page), has tagged me with an award. Here it is and can I just say that I rather like it. I love those old signs so to get one as an award is a double whammy.
Anyway, it turns out that there are rules to this award thingummy. I have to tell you ten honest things about myself and then ruin other bloggers' days by making them 'fess up as well. So, here goes:

1: As a small child I announced that I would like to be called 'Alopecia'. I had no idea what it meant and thought it was very glamorous. My family have not stopped laughing about this ever since.

2: I get horrible hairs on my chin that I pluck out as soon as I see them. Apparently this is a result of having polycistic ovaries but I am paranoid that I will miss one and then people will talk amongst themselves about my hairy chin. Aaargh - I can't believe I told you that.

3: I didn't vote in the last election even though I told everyone I did. I lost the postal vote form thing. Now I am a firm believer in voting because if you don't vote then you can't really complain about the government you get. Consequently I have had to lie about my ballot status in order to whinge about the world today and point out to everybody how it would be so much better if they only made me chancellor, or just the Emperor Ming.

4: I have lost a ring that Crazy Frog lent me and haven't confessed to it yet. I keep hoping it will turn up even though it is a YEAR since I lost it (I took it off while I was making Beef Wellington and never saw it again. I suspect I cooked it in the Beef Wellington and somebody ate it....)

5: When I was small, and special boy was still smaller, we were playing superman in his bedroom. This involved jumping off the top bunk and pretending we could fly. The bed had a removable ladder with metal hooks which was lying on the floor with the hooks face up. Special Boy leapt, landed on the ladder and very nearly lost his eye as he impaled his face on the hooks. He still has a scar through his eyebrow to this day. I made up a totally different story to tell my mother as we went to hospital so that I wouldn't get into trouble.

6: I once worked in John Lewis in the run up to Christmas. My very first morning I overslept and was late in. In my defence this is because I was sleeping in a box room with no windows and I had no idea it was daytime! However, when I turned up to work the manager gave me this look of utter disdain and said "Overslept did we?" in this incredibly sarcastic way. I was so vexed to be caught out that I found myself saying "Actually no, my grandmother died last night" At this point all my grandparents had already died so I didn't feel this was going to jinx any of them but I spent the next few weeks explaining why I didn't go to the funeral....

7: I am very bad at returning books that I am lent. I have very good intentions but if I don't get said book back within a week of borrowing it then it seems to make it's way onto my shelves and never goes home to it's real owner. Considering that I hate it when I don't get books back which I lend out, this is rather a repellent habit.

8: I always wished I had titian coloured hair but I was too frightened to dye it in case it looked mad on me. I hate that I didn't take even small risks like that when I was younger (or even now), instead I always tried to do the right thing and consequently missed out on all sorts of excitement (see point 9)

9: I was once offered a full time job cooking for a Senator but I turned it down because my parents would have hunted me down and killed me if I didn't go back to University and I was too chicken to tell them that I was wanted to defer. I still wonder what my life would have been if I had accepted that job.

10: I don't seem to have a biological clock. I don't long for babies though I do want a family (if you see what I mean). Sometimes I wonder if that is why I am still single.

So, there you are, 10 random but true facts about me, just for you. So in the name of passing these things on I nominate Katyboo, Bevchen, At Home & Happy, Mr Farty and Home Office Mum to take up the baton and show me how this should be done.

They have to be kidding?

2009-01-19T15:07:00.003Z

So, I went to see a house today. To be honest it was WAY out of my price range. I mean a hundred thousand pounds out, but I thought 'what the heck? It's been on the market for over a year, why not?' and off I pootled to check it out.

The estate agents (foul untrustworthy fiends) had painted a picture of a 4 bedroom farmhouse with kitchen, sitting room, dining room and utility room, a couple of acres, stables, outbuildings etc etc. Everything I wanted in my dream world (well, a swimming pool, Library and walk in dressing room wouldn't go amiss either). It looked sort of interesting on the site and over the last year of property searching I have looked at this house over and over again and persuaded myself that perhaps the reason I can't find a house is because this one is perfect and naturally therefore out of my budget. But in these hard pressed times perhaps they would take an offer, a ridiculously low laughable offer. I am an optimist. I booked a viewing.

It was blizzarding as I drove through the lanes, following the directions from the foul, untrustworthy fiends. Naturally these were ludicrous and took me 5 miles out of my way on the most circuitous route possible. Finally I find the house. First problem? You can't turn into the drive. Instead you have to drive past it and reverse in with a lovely three foot drop off on one side of the car. Not encouraging.

The yard was a tip. The 'stables' were a ramshackle corrugated shed, with a second shed randomly placed behind it and then bizarrely a small garden shed with a balcony looking, not at the view, but at the road. Turning my attention to the outside of the house, I see that the doors are painted in seventies brown and the window frames in a shade of yellow that should be illegal. That definitely did not show up on the website but it's all fixable so I refuse to run away and instead, knock on the door.

The man who showed me round said they had lived there for 18 years and had not had to do anything to the house. This might be because it was too messy to see that stuff needed doing to it. I mean in all honesty, it was a tip (I'm always amazed at people who don't tidy up AT ALL when they are trying to sell their house). What I could see was not particularly exciting. The utility room is, well, utilitarian. The downstairs loo had a charming blue loo and sink with contrasting cream loo seat (mmm, nice!). It turns out that if you want to flush the loo you have to run the cold tap on the sink. Really, for hundreds of thousands of pounds, you can get charming personal touches like this.

The kitchen isn't nice or horrible, it's just a kitchen and it turns out to be one of the lightest room in the house. I could see my hands and see that there was only 1 metre of worksurface. However there is a narrow room next door that could be knocked into the kitchen with money I don't have so I refuse to let this get me down. Next we go through a biggish room that is the sitting room but is also the corridor so they have only been able to fit one chair and a short sofa into it. The room is bitterly cold and with no doors on the openings leading out of it, I can't see that getting any better. We turn into the old part of the house and move into what I am told is the 'Dining Room'. The ceilings so low the loyal hound might risk concussion and the walls are painted the colour of an aubergine. It's so dark I trip over a chair. Fumbling towards the doorway on the other side of the room I find myself in a lobby at the foot of stairs so steep I may need crampons to climb them. It turns out that the Master Bedroom is on the other side of the stairs, but on the ground floor. It is also dark and icily cold due to the fact that all the floors are tiled. Now I know that a lick of paint can work wonders but this is all starting to get ridiculous. I feel like a mole, a mole facing the eiger.

I climb the stairs wishing for safety ropes and choose door number two. This is apparently bedroom 3. I'm not sure I'd call a room so small that you can't open the door fully into it a bedroom but there you go. Opposite is a tiny bathroom and then there are two more bedrooms, not small but definitely not big. I take a deep breath and go back down the stairs, beaning myself on the meter box that hangs precariously over them as I go.

Emerging back into the cold wind whipping over the hill I stared across the valley and wondered exactly what I would get for the hundreds of thosands of pounds that I don't have. Concussion? Hypothermia? An inability to see in real daylight?

I know that we all put our hopes and our hard earned cash into our property. It is the ultimate nest egg but this is ridiculous. If that house had been half the price I'm not sure I would consider it and they want twice what it could possibly be worth. They have to be kidding. I'm sticking with the hovel. At least I can see inside it without a flashlight at midday.

If I were a lady of leisure I would.....

2009-01-15T13:33:00.003Z

My feet are cold. Just thought I'd share that with you. I'm in the office and have the wood burner going but I have just put the last log on and that means I shall have to brave my way across the yard through the driving rain and wind to fetch more. Eeeugh. Where are servants when you want them?

So, this is what I would like to do with the rest of my afternoon.

Have a wonderful, leisurely hot bath. I adore baths in the middle of the day. They feel so luxurious and faintly rebellious. I would put in my peppermint and lavender space NK bath oil and read A thousand Splendid suns.

Once I'd emerged clean and shiny and with warm feet I'd slather myself in Chanel Mademoiselle Body Cream and put on my new trousers and jumper that I bought in the sales (though naturally, they weren't actually on sale) and go and make tea and toast and eat it whilst watching Memories of a Geisha which I sky + at Christmas and haven't had time to watch.

At some point I would have to wrap up in every waterproof I own and take the Loyal hound for a walk. Perhaps I shall do this before the bath? Then i'd light the fire before going up for my bath.

Come 7.00 o'clock I would pile into my trusty charabang and head off into the hills where I am having supper with a friend.

That would be heavenly.

In actual fact I am going to have to stay in the office and work all afternoon, oh and fetch the logs. However, at least I know how I would spend my day if I was a 'lady of leisure'. How would your perfect afternoon pan out? Go on, spill the beans.....

Death threat by Sausage Casserole.

2009-01-14T18:18:00.004Z

I've been feeling bad all week. As I drove through the dawn on Monday to Dorset, froze my little socks off at various meetings and then drove through the Dorset lanes and back to Wales I have been suffering from pangs of inadequacy, guilt and just a soupcon more inadequacy. Why? You clamour. Read on and all will be revealed.

So, to celebrate surviving the puppy experience I spontaneously asked friends over for Sunday lunch. I mean to have friends over all the time, I have a vision of a Nigella like life where my house is filled with an ethnically appropriate mix of people who work in 'meejya' and write novels and who rave about the fabulous time they have at my hovel. In truth, as a result of the minimal amount of time I am actually home, the time I spend cooking elsewhere and my hermit like tendencies invites are issued all too rarely. When they are issued it is to perfectly lovely and thankfully normal friends. Not a 'meejya' babe in sight.

So, invites were issued and at lunchtime on Saturday I suddenly realised that I had six people for lunch and no food to speak of with which to feed them. Now in most places this would not be a problem. You would dash out to the nearest deli / supermarket and stock up on delicious things. This is Wales. They don't do delis, or supermarkets for that matter. Plus, I was puppy sitting so the amount of time I could leave the house was going to be limited. I decided to cook a stalwart favourite; Cider and Sausage casserole with pancetta. This is normally DELICIOUS and one of my favourite things, particularly as I usually have all the ingredients floating around the house.

Reviewing my larder, I discovered that I had not a sausage to my name. A dash to the village Londis was my only option. The sausages looked..... well, cheap. Not particularly appetising and that naked shade of pink that is rather worrying in a foodstuff. At this point I should have changed my menu plan but I thought 'No, the sauce is delicious so the sausages needn't be.' How wrong could I be?

On Sunday I discovered that cheap sausages, rather like Blue Nun wines, are never, ever a good buy. With the best cooking in the world, I was in trouble and there were no other options. I had nothing else I could cook instead, and nowhere to go to buy alternatives. It was too late. I had to serve the casserole even though I KNEW that the rubbish sausages were going to ruin it by being disgusting.

I tried to hide the horror by merrily offering bloody marys to one and all, only to discover I had no tabasco, no ice and no celery, so they had warm tomato juice with worcester sauce in it. And all the while, like a stormcloud on the horizon, lunch amd the repellent sausages were looming. Finally, it was too late to delay anymore and I served up the food.

It was torture watching my poor friends chew away and say in a manful way 'mmmm, delicous' as they reluctantly forced another mouthful down. The sausages were so tasteless and of such a revolting texture I was wondering if it would be cruelty to give the leftovers to the Loyal Hound later on that day.

God, I hate it when my cooking goes wrong. I'm not looking for flowers to be thrown at my feet and guests to pass out at the joy of the gastronomic experience I provide, but I do firmly believe that guests should get good food that makes them feel loved and wanted. Sunday lunch was more like an assasination attempt, or at the very least a hostile death threat. And all because I couldn't be bothered to drive the extra sixteen miles to get decent sausages.

I did make a tart au citron for pudding which turned out beautifully but it wasn't enough to make up for the disastrous casserole. Let this be a lesson to me. Never, ever think I can buy food from the local shop and actually eat it. The food there is for a nucleur holocaust, or hated enemies.

Now I can't decide whether to ask people back so I can try and redeem myself, or never have people over ever again in case they are frightened to actually eat......

Puffin 'eck!

2009-01-10T11:42:00.002Z

I am a fool. Special Boy was given a puppy by his wife for Christmas. She is the great granddaughter of his much loved childhood Spaniel who went to the great kennel in the sky two summers ago. There was a lot of dithering about whether he should be given the puppy this year. Dithering with good reason.

Special Boy and his wife live in a tiny flat in London. It's known as The Mouse House and with good reason as it is small enough for mice to sniff at it in a sneering way and refuse to live there. If you want to sleep on their sofabed you have to open the oven door in the kitchen to fit your feet into the room as well as the rest of your body.

Anyway, my parents, who already have five dogs, had agreed to look after said puppy, thinking one more dog would make little difference, and the decision was made. Christmas day came and the puppy bounced out of a box with a ribbon round her neck and gave Special Boy the fright of his life. She was christened Puffin and subsequently she has been spoilt rotten by everybody who comes near her, as is only natural with a small, fluffy puppy.

Now, special boy and his wife have returned to London and my aged parents have sodded off to stay with friends having persuaded me that with my first free weekend in months I would surely love to do nothing more than puppy sit. Fool, fool, fool. I said fine.

She has been with me since about 4pm yesterday and in that time she has peed in the office 5 times (despite going out every half hour). She has pierced the Loyal Hound's ear with her needle sharp teeth (truly, she has), and stolen and shredded his favourite toy - The Phuck (so called because it looks like a pheasant but squawks like a duck).

She barks if you shut her in a different room, even if she can see you, and thinks that furniture is her plaything to be chewed, leapt upon and generally mauled so she has to be watched like a hawk. Once she was put to bed in the laundry room she barked until 1.30 am and then started again at 6.30am. When I finally staggered out of bed to let her out it turned out that she had poohed everywhere and then gaily jumped about in said pooh, spreading it all over the room before hurling herself at the door with poohey paws and decorating the door in crap. Quite literally. She is totally unrepentant and joyfully threw herself at my leg when I let her out, covering me in aforesaid crap as well.

I am now exhausted, have cricked my bag from bending over to clear up endless mess, scarcely slept due to puppy barking (and had odd dreams about giving David Tennant a puppy when i did sleep) and I have another 24 hours to go. So much for my luxurious weekend. In addition the Loyal Hound is in a terrible grump about having his toys stolen, his ear pierced, and his peace cut up by the Puffin terrorist.

p.s. I know, I know, all you mother's out there will be chortling to yourselves at the easiness of my task compared to small children but there are supposed to be upsides to being single and childless and this weekend was going to be one of them.

Who says Prince Charming isn't out there?

2009-01-08T16:09:00.003Z

I have been a little slack recently about checking up on the old internet dating site. What with one thing and another it moved to the bottom of the heap of priorities, and then to the bottom of the heap of things that were lost beneath the priorities. However, today I thought I would log on and have a look at who was out there. Imagine my surprise when I find that ROYALTY is out there a wooing... and wooing me it seems. He is currently my Number 1 fan. This is what he has to say for himself:

"I am Prince Onyeka
Handsome man looking for that special soul mate to share all of life up and downs , very outgoing honest and yes i don't play games , slim build for now chose me and i will do everything to make you happy meaning cook clean and yes i can do laundry and i will even pick up the milk call during the just to hear your voice very kind honest and loyal i promises never to make you cry or even shed a single tear ,if interested just drop me a line trust me your friends will be jealous your friend will wonder why there soul mate doesn't do that for them."

The fact that he lives in Ghana might make dating a little tricky but what do you think? I like the fact that he is 'slim build for now' - is he hoping I will feed him up? It's tempting, very tempting, particularly if you could see his photo where he sports a jauntily positioned white baseball cap in a very Back Street Boys fashion.......