Monthly Archives: July 2006

Summer Holidays: The One With The Conundrum

Posted on by
Click on the image or be ever confounded by what I’m ranting about.

I’ve been doodling around in the garden quite a bit lately, trying to rake away about a thousand years of fircones that fall endlessly from this monster of a tree that takes up far too much space for my liking. It’s been taking so much space in the real world that its presence has even seaped into my own personal space.

I’ve been trying to do some amateur quantity surveying, attempting to work out just how much firewood we would have if we could ever get the thing cut down without destroying our house or killing the neighbour’s dogs. Although since they seem to spend all their time locked up in cages, barking ceaselessly at everything that moves and most things that do not, I’m not sure they would actually object.

Anyway, this tree is fucking huge, and continues to cause me constant raking expeditions.

It was on such expedition that I noticed something: lodged firmly in the craggy bark is a rather small fircone. How this fircone got there is either a complete mystery or a freak of nature. The only possible explanations I can think of are:

1. The fircone fell with such a force (perhaps accompanied by a vicious downwind) that it simply burrowed itself into the bark, like an arrow.

2. A really angry three-foot squirrel had decided that there was more to life than eating fircones and running away from everything, and at the very moment of passing our tree had chosen to vent its animosity at said fircone (realising that his “running away from things” gene would never allow him to go a kick a small child in the shins).

3. The fircone had dropped on the ground many years ago, right next to the trunk. As the years passed it got slowly scooped up by the growing tree, and engulfed into its boosom.

The second option appeals to my sense of reality; however, I believe it’s probably something nearer the third. Whatever the reason, this truly shows that nature can deal the occasional joker. Compared to this, crop-circles are wank.

Posted in Jon

Summer Holidays: The One With Peppe

Posted on by

You know, writing a blog ( known in today’s vernacular as ‘blogging’) is no easy task. Although it may appear to the untrained eye that I write the first thing that comes into my head without even glancing for bad punctuation, grammar use or syntactic errors, I actually don’t.

But even disregarding the technical aspect of ‘blogging’ (blogging! What will they think of next?), there is more to making it look like a random assortment of the twenty-five letters of the alphabet (I never use ‘z’ out of principal, except back there, but that was for explanatory purposes, and except for the word ‘pizzle‘, which simply demands to be used, to the point of becoming hackneyed).

Sometimes the most difficult part of writing is not the words, or word structure, or knowing what to write: it’s flow.

I can spend an eternity writing the opening sentence, deleting it, rewriting it, realising I’m going to hit a dead-end, sit thinking about it with pen in hand, get frustrated, then forget the whole idea and go and get really drunk. This was nearly one of those situations, and only exists because of this rather long aside.

Hobnobbing with the elite

Anyway, the original point of this entry was going to be that last Saturday I met Peppe Eng ( a well-known Swedish sports journalist/commentator who has become even more well-known due to a recent appearence on some celebrity ‘learn different dance styles every week and embarrass yourself on national TV by showing that you dance like a pelican with a stick up its arse’ dance show/competition), and that Inger performed two short dance routines with him; however, in getting this entry together I ended up, after every failed attempt and deletion, going to play my latest PS2 acquisition, a psychedelic Beatmania game, Frequency.

Three or four days of tapping shoulder buttons in progressively anarchic and near impossible combinations has led to me seeing the game when I close my eyelids. A sure sign, then, that this game rocks.

I was particularly chuffed with this purchase because it’s an old game, sought after by the cognoscenti, and I got it brand-spankling new for a tenner at some Toys R Us style shop.

Although ten pounds of good quality LSD would get you extremely fucked for a very long time, this is a good second choice, with the added benefit that your friends get also get arsed for the same money. Like Rez, this game is a work of art.

Oh, did I mention that I met Peppe Eng?

Summer Holidays: At The Hospital

Posted on by

Jo woke up at 6.30 this morning, crying in pain from what I first thought was a headache.

She suffers from the occasional migraine, but this was significantly worse than anything I have seen her experience. She, herself, admitted that giving birth without any pain-killers was nothing compared to this particular pain (!).

Luckily, Jo’s mum was at hand to call an ambulance (a more normal occurence when living in the countryside, one-hundred kilometres from the nearest hospital) and after an hour’s speed-ride, we got to spend seven hours in a room with Jo constantly in pain.

These five-hundred minutes of nothingness (for Inger, Freya and me, that is) were interspersed with doctors’ and nurses’ visits, giving Jo morphine, taking her away for various x-rays and scans, and, as Freya and I got to see, taking brain fluid from near Jo’s spine.

Freya, as usual, seemed in her element, just thankful, I suppose, to be in Mum’s, Dad’s and mormor’s presence. I went to the local toy-shop after about five hours (not knowing how long we would be there) and bought her a toy doctor’s kit, and a 4cm tall Barbapapa.

Jo was given a clean bill of health at around 7pm (no tumour or hemorrhaging). It is possible, the doctor said, that this was a particularly unusual form of migraine, coupled with a cramp-induced headache. Whatever it was, I just hope it is as frequent as it is unusual.

Summer Holidays: Jo’s Birthday

Posted on by

It’s Jo’s birthday. I had, as usual, forgotten which day it was on, this time mixing up hers with my mum’s, who celebrates hers in two days (mental note: try and remember this, Jon).

This year’s presents were not as grand as previous years, due to economic reasons; however, they weren’t bad: a Narnia DVD, tickets to see Linton Kwesi Johnson, and New Super Mario Bros for the DS.

Being Jo’s birthday, Freya received a present (why am I still not a child!) from mormor: an inflatable crocodile. We asked Freya what it should be called, and she at once replied “Tim” (although it may have been Tin or Bim). So congratulations to Jo, who is thirty-blghrrhmm years old, and Tim, who celebrates his first (and maybe last, depending on the construction) birthday.

Summer Holidays: At The Toy Shop

Posted on by

In town, we stopped by a toy-shop to buy presents for the two birthdays that occur this week, Jo’s and Jo’s nephew, Alexander.

Freya found the plastic animals (of which she already has a small, but growing, collection) while we waited to pay, and, after some deliberation, she made an interesting choice of purchase.

Not the forty centimetre turtle, or the equally as long killer-whale; she did not bat an eyelid at the giraffe, and nonchalently ignored the array of farm animals. No, she went for something not all young children would immediately clammer for: two flies and a beetle. All of them, black. And small (though much bigger than the biggest fly I have ever seen). And, best of all, cheap.