Category: bees

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We wore our red shirts

red shirts for burma

And told everyone we came across why, particularly secondborn at school apparently.

Last night I went to dinner with friends. There were five international news journalists round the table. “What’s going to happen in Burma” I asked. “Give me the top line.”

“Well of course it’s very difficult to tell,” started one, “information about the military and what their thinking is…”

“It’s quite simple,” interrupted another, a financial journalist. “The protests will be put down by the military, ruthlessly, possibly as ruthlessly as they were in ‘88. The international community will do nothing beyond the usual public hand-wringing. None of the countries with any economic clout will do anything to jeopardise their investments. And Sarkozy,” he said, turning to the European news specialist, “is such a hypocrite. Nothing is going to touch Total‘s involvement in Burma. China, India and Thailand, the biggest regional investors, aren’t going to lift a finger either.”

Depressing. And past experience tells me it’s probably correct.

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Resistance is futile

I am of course only putting this here so I can find it again and show it to the boys, both highly dedicated Dr Who fans. Yes. Really. Nothing to do with the track in question being one of the first singles for which pocket-money coinage left the grasp of my hot hands.And where did I find it? At Mind Hacks where each day Vaughan (just look at that scan) demonstrates more and more clearly his status as what the Inky Circus girls would term a man “whose babies we want to bear” – smarts and laughs, what’s not to love?

I’ve always thought of the above as one of the best blog categories ever. I would adopt it myself if it weren’t through with that sort of thing.

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Small things of great beauty

Few things, I said dreamily to firstborn, are as beautiful as the skin of a conker just out of the shell, so smooth, so lustrous.

So bothborn found a conker tree for me.

conker

And many conkers.

guarding

Many, many conkers.

conkers

It was also a day of butterflies – red admiral, tortoiseshell and comma. There was a cabbage white too, but I didn’t get a picture.

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International Nestlé-Free Week

Nestlé-Free Zone

Quite coincidentally it was only yesterday that I initiated the boys in the evils of the Nestlé monster. The illegal and unethical pedalling of powdered baby milk, the avoidable deaths of more than a million and a half babies every year because of inappropriate feeding. They were alarmed. They were disturbed. Then deeply distressed.

What, no more peanut kitkats? Ever? Not from me, I said, thereby letting them know that I was well aware they’d already calculated kitkats would still be forthcoming elsewhere.

I am printing out a list of brands and products from which Nestlé benefits and attaching it to the fridge. In fact the worst-affected member of the household is poor Maizy who loses out on a couple of favourite pet treats. Followed by firstborn who lusts after L’Oreal haircare products to maintain his desired “dragged through a hedge backwards whilst being electrocuted” appearance.

I am of course totally unaffected. Never touch chocolate. Can’t abide the stuff. And as for coffee, well I only drink the highest quality espresso especially prepared by… oh shit.

What is sauce for the goslings has, I suppose, also to be sauce for the goose.

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If only Maizy was a bloodhound

The firstborn has a mobile. It is sleekly curved, slightly rubberised to the touch, a pleasing matt black. It is called a pebl. That’s pronounced “pebble”. Firstborn flips it open with a neat flick of a single hand which is considered extremely cool by his peers. According to the manufacturer:

With chic simplicity, the subtly stylish Motorola PEBL adds a calming convenience to your everyday travels.

Really? Calming? We are currently on our travels, camping on the top of a cliff overlooking this beach (also a gratuitous Maizy picture but I can’t resist).

her supreme saltiness of sea dog

You will note that it is shingly. Stoney. It is, in fact, entirely covered in pebbles. They are its most obvious feature. Can you guess what’s next?

Yes. Firstborn managed to lose his pebl on the beach.

We narrowed down the area of potential loss to a quarter mile or so between a notice about crumbling cliffs and a lump of concrete which had crumbled down to the beach. Firstborn was extremely grumpy about being forced to go to the beach and the last time he had seen his phone was apparently when he made a call to moan about how miserable his life was and this call was by the yellow sign.

grumpy

Part of the outward and visible signs of extreme grumpiness are the headphones indicating that the grumpee is listening to music at an extremely high volume. It is, I conclude, an electronically-aided version of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “la la la la la”, but I have decided not to mention this to the grumpee in question.

It would be an exaggeration to say that we subjected the place to a finger-tip search but we certainly spent more than an hour scanning the area, first side to side in strips parallel to the sea then, when that revealed nothing, in strips up and down between sea and cliff. At intervals I rang the phone hoping that we would hear it over the crash of the waves until its owner remembered that it was set on vibrate.

The organisation of the beach was fascinating. At the base of the cliff tiny pebbles which gave way to succeeding banks of shingle organised by size of stone. The most difficult to scan were those banks where the pebbles were the same size as the phone. What we really needed was a bloodhound, suggested secondborn, because Maizy was no help at all and when told to “seek” ran up the side of the cliff like a mountain goat and disappeared over the top.

The sun lowered in the sky. The shadows cast by the cliff were deep and dark. The chill was enough to make us, t-shirted as we were, shiver. Secondborn sat on the stones and screamed about how miserable his life was.

When the shadows reached the sea I called off the search. Secondborn and I set off along the beach, Maizy trotting at our heels. Firstborn appeared to be labouring under a powerful and private emotion and we let him mourn alone.

When we were halfway across the stretch of beach between the yellow sign and the steps up to the campsite, the stretch of beach we had not searched, there was the phone, clearly visible, lying on top of the small stones in an entirely un-pebble-like manner.

Another search which concluded successfully was that of the identity of secondborn’s monster of the deep.

creature of the deep

Click through to the picture on flickr to discover the amazing resource that is the ID Please group. Many thanks to Dem for suggesting it.

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Hail and wifi

Good grief. There’s wifi in the campsite. It rained a lot. Torrentially. Then it hailed. Then, at dusk, it stopped and some people went fishing.

dusk sea-fishing

The van has such excellent ventilation.

ventilation

Is it any wonder my feet get so cold when driving?

Thank goodness for Adnams beer.

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Moooooo!

Due to a forthcoming engagement which just might be an opportunity to tout for work I made some cards via moo on flickr. Choose a picture or selection of pictures to appear on one side of the card, define one set text for the other. Simple.

I should have known, having seen other people’s moo cards. I should have known, having helpfully been informed of the dimensions of the cards several times during the process. But still it came as a surprise. It’s like looking at pictures through a letterbox. A particularly narrow letterbox.

Although initially disconcerting, this turns out not to be a bad thing. Before you finalise the order each picture chosen is displayed on a page with a thin rectangular template over it which you can wiggle around, rotate or make smaller (ie zoom in on a detail of the picture).

It’s really interesting to see what ends up in a narrow slit in the middle of each picture. Sometimes it’s just never going to work but most times there’s a very pleasing, and rather surprising, new image to be seen. I’m not going to want to give them away.

And in non-bovine, listed, news I was sent a haiku by text message yesterday. Such a surprising and delighting thing, I’m still polishing it in my brain and smiling when I think of it. A new mode of transmission perfectly suited to this venerable form. And what an amazing thing to think of doing.

Secondborn announced this morning “my breath smells like a colobus monkey”. I asked how he knew this and he said he had many tiny noses on his tongue. When I explained that it wasn’t the method of detection so much as the colobus I was enquiring about he replied airily that he’d sniffed them at the zoo. And they smell? horrible.

Returning to the vexed subject of dog treats (Pedigree dentastix for small dogs are more expensive, per kilo, than parmesan cheese), I was further incensed to notice on a recent trip to the supermarket that Pedigree dentastix for unfeasibly hugely mutantly massive slobbery dogs are about half the price, per kilo, of those for small-but-perfectly-formed gorgeous dogs. So my clever compromise, although it pains me to be handing cash over to this wicked company which discriminates against the companions of sensibly dimensioned canines, is to by a box of the huge ones and cut them in half. Thus reducing the dog treat bill from £13 to £4 per month. Ca-CHING!

And finally, as they say on all the best lists of news, Curious George is excellent and exceedingly cute fun for all the family. And, not being a colobus, he doesn’t even smell.

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An unordered week's worth of list

  • Purple and red. Both very bright. Both very together. Why have I never seen this before?
  • Snowing downdrift of chestnut-coloured plane-fluff on titian curls.
  • The view of Canary Wharf from C’s window last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
  • There are many paths but only one mountain.
  • Using whiskey then, when that doesn’t work, a glowing match to remove a tick results only in the strong reek of flambéed fur. And has no effect on the tick. In fact it might make the tick cough crap into the dog. Tweezers are recommended. And don’t crush the arachnid using any unprotected part of your anatomy – the crap might get into you too. But how come, I wonder, my brother and I were de-ticked every evening in the bath when we were in the Isle of Man using neat whiskey?
  • “I am feeling more stable and happier than I have done for years.” Me, out of nowhere, to my father.
  • Penny Serenade has to be one of the most excruciatingly bad films ever. His Girl Friday is much better, one of my all-time favourites, but I fell asleep.
  • Dead Man, on the other hand, is one of the most brilliant films ever. And, serendipitously, is on offer in the Virgin megastore.
  • The smell of incense and the sound of sirens while meditating in a central London church.
  • “Why is it that we regard positive sentiments and phrases describing happiness as trite while misery and suffering is seen as more ‘real’?” Thought-provoking question indeed. Maybe another manifestation of Milton’s Paradise Lost v Regained syndrome.
  • Champagne. First Moët then Nicolas Feuillatte (I still have the corks). Later in the week a palette of champagne cocktails chosen and given by a friend: the pale pink of champagne, cointreau and cranberry juice with a delicate spirogyra of orange peel in a poinsettia; glowing orange-yellow of a Bellini (champagne and peach juice, the cocktail of Venice); the golden russet of a vanilla champagne cocktail.
  • Leap and the net will appear: Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, lent by a friend.
  • Second-born: “I thought I was going to have a nightmare last night, but I thought of something lovely, a happy time, and it went away”. Astonished mother, knocked sideways by this step-change in the aforementioned spawn’s unremitting negativity: “How fantastic! And what was the happy time that you thought of?” “Our camping holiday in Cornwall.”
  • Cooking for friends from Delia’s vegetarian book.
  • Hospice at Home charities and the fund-raising party a friend had to honour her mother who died, at home, a year ago.
  • Comforting a friend’s child after he fell over when she wasn’t there. Loving the trust and depth of our relationship that allowed me to hold him and calm him and wipe away his tears.
  • The crashing to the floor onto a metal object of my camera and splintering of glass… the fall destroyed the filter and left the lens unmarked.
  • Pale dry sherry and cheese-and-chive pretzels. Powering this post.
  • Loop. Again. With a loyalty card. A fabulous pattern for looooong fingerless gloves (buttercup armwarmers) in pure silk Alchemy Pagoda yarn which I’m making in Pablo’s Solace (aka purple) which was 50% off in the sale. But I’m going to modify the pattern a bit and make a thumb and thread a red ribbon (see list item number one) round the wrist.
  • I *am* a dirty old mystic. A term of abuse coined by the ex. Ok, I’m not dirty, but I’m an old mystic. And I love it. I absolutely love it.
  • Great minds. Great Minds.
Posted on

An unordered week’s worth of list

  • Purple and red. Both very bright. Both very together. Why have I never seen this before?
  • Snowing downdrift of chestnut-coloured plane-fluff on titian curls.
  • The view of Canary Wharf from C’s window last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
  • There are many paths but only one mountain.
  • Using whiskey then, when that doesn’t work, a glowing match to remove a tick results only in the strong reek of flambéed fur. And has no effect on the tick. In fact it might make the tick cough crap into the dog. Tweezers are recommended. And don’t crush the arachnid using any unprotected part of your anatomy – the crap might get into you too. But how come, I wonder, my brother and I were de-ticked every evening in the bath when we were in the Isle of Man using neat whiskey?
  • “I am feeling more stable and happier than I have done for years.” Me, out of nowhere, to my father.
  • Penny Serenade has to be one of the most excruciatingly bad films ever. His Girl Friday is much better, one of my all-time favourites, but I fell asleep.
  • Dead Man, on the other hand, is one of the most brilliant films ever. And, serendipitously, is on offer in the Virgin megastore.
  • The smell of incense and the sound of sirens while meditating in a central London church.
  • “Why is it that we regard positive sentiments and phrases describing happiness as trite while misery and suffering is seen as more ‘real’?” Thought-provoking question indeed. Maybe another manifestation of Milton’s Paradise Lost v Regained syndrome.
  • Champagne. First Moët then Nicolas Feuillatte (I still have the corks). Later in the week a palette of champagne cocktails chosen and given by a friend: the pale pink of champagne, cointreau and cranberry juice with a delicate spirogyra of orange peel in a poinsettia; glowing orange-yellow of a Bellini (champagne and peach juice, the cocktail of Venice); the golden russet of a vanilla champagne cocktail.
  • Leap and the net will appear: Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, lent by a friend.
  • Second-born: “I thought I was going to have a nightmare last night, but I thought of something lovely, a happy time, and it went away”. Astonished mother, knocked sideways by this step-change in the aforementioned spawn’s unremitting negativity: “How fantastic! And what was the happy time that you thought of?” “Our camping holiday in Cornwall.”
  • Cooking for friends from Delia’s vegetarian book.
  • Hospice at Home charities and the fund-raising party a friend had to honour her mother who died, at home, a year ago.
  • Comforting a friend’s child after he fell over when she wasn’t there. Loving the trust and depth of our relationship that allowed me to hold him and calm him and wipe away his tears.
  • The crashing to the floor onto a metal object of my camera and splintering of glass… the fall destroyed the filter and left the lens unmarked.
  • Pale dry sherry and cheese-and-chive pretzels. Powering this post.
  • Loop. Again. With a loyalty card. A fabulous pattern for looooong fingerless gloves (buttercup armwarmers) in pure silk Alchemy Pagoda yarn which I’m making in Pablo’s Solace (aka purple) which was 50% off in the sale. But I’m going to modify the pattern a bit and make a thumb and thread a red ribbon (see list item number one) round the wrist.
  • I *am* a dirty old mystic. A term of abuse coined by the ex. Ok, I’m not dirty, but I’m an old mystic. And I love it. I absolutely love it.
  • Great minds. Great Minds.