RosieBell

Home at last

On Boxing Day last year pipes in the upstairs flat burst and torrents of water at full mains pressure poured into my bedroom.   

I had dragged in wheelie bins to catch the water - they would fill in a few minutes

My insurance policy covered for alternative accommodation, and so my flatmate and I have lived in two different flats in Edinburgh.

Work couldn't start on my flat until the upstairs flat was finished, which was the end of July.  My flat was dried out with dehumidifiers and then work started on it at the beginning of October.

Today, just over 10 months since the initial disaster, my flatmate and  I finally moved back home.

Thought for the day

It would cost you less grief to turn a cyclist into a boyfriend than a boyfriend into a cyclist. Holds for many things really. One of the reluctant cyclists in my past could find and replace "cyclist" and "boyfriend" with "jazz lover" and "girlfriend".

The problem with holidays. . .

The problem with holidays is that they are so much nicer than work that works feels five times as bad when you return to it.  Holidays sensitise you to how unpleasant it is to spend the best part of five days a week being somewhere and doing things that no sane being would do except for the money.  It takes a fortnight or so for me to get into the mood of numb acceptance that makes work endurable.

Everyone acknowledges this with their facetious:- "Glad to be back at work?"

Holidays should end with a hideous ordeal - being kidnapped by Somalian pirates, say, or interrogation by the Syrian police, so that work will seem like a haven of normality, and you might kiss your desk and computer when you see them again.  "Return to work easing" it could be called.

 

Gap fortnight

I'm away for a couple of weeks.

Premature burial

Photographic evidence of my death is not to be trusted:-

I quite like the headstone design though they got the initials of my parents wrong.

In codpieces we trust

UK troops will be provided with armoured underwear for pelvic protection to offer protection from pressure-plate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and bombs in Afghanistan.

The combat codpiece is made of special ballistic material crafted from silk and synthetics, and is ultra-lightweight as well as capable of stopping or mitigating the effects of a blast.

Based on the armour technology used by Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors in the 13th century, the codpiece could also be implemented by the US and other Nato forces.

About time, if Ghenghis Khan’s squaddies were issued with such items of protection.  It’s not as if British soldiers have only just got round to fearing injury to the male apparatus:-

From a soldier’s account of marching through Normandy after D-Day:-

At night there was much air activity.  I mention this only to record an interesting psychological consensus.  Like my colleagues I slept in a small individual canvas tent, near a slit trench in which it was considered bad form to take shelter.  Nor was there more than minimal danger, though my own side did get quite near killing me with an unexploded anti-aircraft shell.  But the noise was immense at times.  I found myself lying on my back in my camp-bed with my tin hat, supposedly proof against shrapnel, on my head.  After a couple of minutes’ thought I would transfer the hat to the area that included my genitals.  A couple of minutes’ more thought, and the hat was back on my head.  Still more thought - back down to the balls.  Yet more thought. . . At some stage I would get fed up with the fandango and fall asleep.  Coyly mentioning it one morning at breakfast in the Mess tent as a possibly amusing quirk, I was greeted with a roar of agreement, sympathy, relief - “Thank God somebody’s said it at last!”  All my brother officers without exception regularly went through the same routine.

Memoirs by Kingsley Amis

Colour Red

I like this poster:-

I was sick and ye visited me

I visited a friend in hospital.  He's a bit confused.  The first thing he says to me is:- "Are they setting the clocks?" 

"What clocks?" 

"I Want to see if time is watching time pass."

He goes on, in a low voice.  "I sit here and count things. Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all."

I join in, "Playing solitaire till one, with a deck of fifty one."

"Thirty one."

"No, fifty one.  There are fifty two cards in a pack, so you're one short."

"I dreamed that the Ramones were on a plane to Melbourne."

"It would have to be a tribute plane," I said.

The conversation went on. part Ivor Cutler, part Samuel Beckett. 

"What kind of ward is this?" I asked.

"A zombie ward.  Everyone's a zombie.  You can see their fixed staring eyes."

Photo Poster

I liked this photo of a poster for a reading by my brother-in-law, John Lyall:-

A thousand degrees of separation

I’m one of those Facebookers who was recruited because I didn’t want to appear churlish by turning down requests to be a friend to someone I know on the music or blogging scene.  Then other people already in the Facebook party got me to sign their friendship petition.   So I’m now a friend of friends of friends of people, in longer and longer chains of separation.  The signal of friendship is sent like electromagnetic radio waves directed to galaxies thousands of light years away, the pulse ever growing weaker. 

I’m then startled by being tracked down on Facebook by someone I have been in touch with since high school who asks me to be their friend (we already are friends, aren’t we? Old friends in fact.  And don’t we meet up now and then?), or if someone who I haven’t been in touch with since high school asks me to be their friend (but we haven’t seen each other in donkey’s years.  Isn’t there a reason for that?).

Venn diagram of ordinary friendship interacting with Facebook friendship:-