A blank page. White. Snow? Snow in May? Hay, hay, hay..
I trudge through the emptiness, the whiteness, the ice. Ice! Ha ha! The only water or concentrated fruit juice is in the title.
Trudge. Snow. Ice. Not a Frost-Giant’s daughter in sight. Just my luck. Or is it? I’m not a Cimmerian. Good chance I’d be Frost-Giant steak.
Then I see it. A block. Not a writer’s block or a mitre block, just a block. Like me..
In this Godforsaken world, there’s just the two of us.
Getting organised back here in Blighty has been hampered by the wholly admirable tendency of authorities to doubt my claims to be me. They have had plenty of practice dealing with incomers of all shades and I applaud their even-handedness. Of course it would have been easier if I had kept a record of all my British identifiers – like my NHS number and the first name of my doctor almost 20 years ago – but I didn’t.
Back in the land of the Vikings, the bureaucratic logic is easier to follow. Every resident is given a ‘health card’ displaying a number. (No difference there then, unless the GB resident doesn’t register with a doctor.) This number is then used for all official registrations and services: tax, utilities, banks, insurance, local gubmint. There are supporting security systems too to avoid identity theft.
I never felt my official ID threatened my independence or limited my freedom as a citizen but it avoided the circuitous routes one has to follow here to be recognised. Generally speaking it’s in my own interest to sign up for things without complications.
But the two societies are different! Over there it is uncommon to see a post box without the occupant’s name. How very un-British that is!
One of the things that will remain with me when I leave Vikingland for pastures old and loved is the memory of compulsory outdoor lunches and preprandial drinks sessions dictated by the first marginally optimistic weather forecasts of Spring. ”16 grad. Dejligt. Det er så hyggeligt!”’ They’ll happen throughout the country next week – after I leave. Perhaps, in some cases, because I have left! The participants will be pale, cold and prevented by tradition from escaping inside to a warm fire.
Ever since the world’s media started to report hygge a few years ago, the natives here have allowed their inbred hygge to acquire disproportionate importance in their lives. And now they want UNESCO to recognise it as an ‘intangible’ treasure alongside the Mediterranean Diet and Turkish Coffee.
Back home I shall retaliate post haste with Afternoon Tea and the Village Cricket Match experience. Now that’s what I call hygge.
It’ll soon be the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. On that Sunday 500 million viewers worldwide tuned in, mostly on black and white TVs, to watch the Lunar parking. I missed it myself, only three at the time, and probably in jammies in bed. Now for the older, wiser (?) me the buzz words “over eyes” and “pull the wool” knit my brows. Was this a big hoodwink?
You could say I am an agnostic Moon Landing conspiracy theorist because I believe it could be 50% right. Firing a rocket with men in it to the moon seems possible. It’s the getting them back that puzzles me. The spaceship has shrank, there’s no scaffolding on the moon that can support/straighten Apollo’s back to earth trajectory and the computerised age of steering things is in its infancy. No drone technology here, only rotary dial phones. Cars in the 60s were basic beasts and prone to breakdown, what chance a ship going all those light years without any wear or tear? I mean, even the communication system was on the blink and the sound man missed an a on Armstrong’s rehearsed script.
I blame Concorde. Continue reading “Ripley’s believe it or not!”
The Corona float delivered pop door-to-door. We paid a deposit on the bottles and were reimbursed when we returned them to the pop-man a week later. Then shops and plastics and cans took over the pop trade, deposits were forgotten and the rest, as they say, is detritus. Continue reading “When I were a lad……”
Unlike, say, Exorcists, hypnotists are for real. There’s no way the charlatan mesmeriser can put so many pre-planned plants on the stage. Like the bodysnatchers of old they’d run out of bodies. Ergo(es my reason for living), hypnotism must be a genuine article. That being the suitcase, this means we can all be mind benders, if we put our mind to it.
Corrupt hypnotists
All walks. It has to be said that if there was an upsurge in the hypnotist community a roguish element would take foot and mouth and hand and Adam’s apple. These non-Marquess of Queensbury rules hypnotists would indulge in all manner of crimes: robbery, humiliation, blog post manipulation. The world would be their Facebook. Luckily, the gift of hypnotism is limited to a less few humanoids.
Instant Kaa ma
I’ve tried and tried to hypnotise without success. My human hypnotees, in pity, shake their heads at me as I fail to make them recite a Loony Limerick. In desperation, I turn to inanimate objects and will the clock (i.e. hypnotise the clock, not the clock is called Will) to go an hour forward. I stare at the face of the time machine. Look me in the eyes. Right in the eyes. Come closer. Closer still..
He has a strange name. He should be a diarist* with a name like that. He is? Oh, sorry, Q. Anyway, he rang a few of my bells with his thoughts in today’s DM.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5503019/QUENTIN-LETTS-lists-linguistic-pet-hates.html.
I’d add a common pleonasm people employ,as follows: ‘They both attended the same school.’ Just one will do, dear.
I bet my reader seethes over a few common malapropisms too.
* Didn’t you have a Letts diary as a youngster?
Don and Kim’s unprecedented head-to-belly calls for some creative thought. Geneva won’t do – because the boy went to school nearby. Singapore is too, well, Asian. So for me, that leaves Cuba, which has all the requisites for a world title fight. History, communism, cigars, Gitmo (the honey-pot destination for serial-killers) – and proximity to Florida for the inevitable round of golf. Don claims to play off nine; no doubt matched by Kim’s as-yet-unpublished handicap. Cuba will also enable Don to show off his perhaps limited Spanish vocabulary, upstaging the (allegedly) polyglot Korean. Covfefe, por favor, barista. And Ladies and Gentlemen, your Master of Ceremonies for this headline bout is none other than the darling of the media, winner of the Nobel Prize and everybody’s best friend, Barack Obama! Enjoy!
My picture, courtesy of today’s Times, illustrates the error of cantabrigian ways. They encourage tourists to believe they can have fun there, and the steersman stands on the wrong end of his craft. ‘Twas ever thus.
The sad saga continues: monied men are being outed for inappropriate treatment of women (mostly) who are seeking employment or already employed in service rôles. I am trying to use neutral language here – so that the wood is distinguishable from the trees. Continue reading “Men misbehaving and women…..?”
Boadicea's Chariot 
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