I have apparently been "staycationing". Which is odd, as I wouldn't have been "vacationing" what with being one of those frightful British people who get inordinately annoyed about Americanisms, ulcers bubbling away on hearing "Can I get" instead of "Could I have" and stiff upper lips quivering at the thought that most software will heartlessly brand such beautiful words as "honour" with the Squiggly Red Underline Of Wrongness. But obviously some sub-editor somewhere didn't like the sound of a "holistay" so merrily staycationing I have been.
So I was in Devon, celebrating my birthday by going to someone else's birthday party and making her guests sing Happy Birthday to me despite none of them having a clue who I was, and doing a number of other British holiday cliches like attempting to eat an ice cream before the pelting rain turned it into a pavement-based gravelly soup. One evening, as there was a blissful lull between the terrifying humanoid screeching of the seagulls and the equally terrifying racist mewling of the locals, conversation with the young chap turned to the new house we will be imminently squatting in, and the pet cat who will be accompanying us into this brave new world of thirty years of debt and likely squalor. This cat doesn't exist yet - well, it probably exists somewhere, and seeing as we want to get a rescue cat, that must mean that I'm hoping it's getting horribly abused in some way right at this moment, which is obviously completely true - so it will need naming when it eventually comes to pass, and here are a few ideas we came up with.
1. Steve, Dave, Wayne etc - I was always taken with the idea of naming a cat after a builder, purely because I like the juxtaposition of it sauntering in in a slinky, feline manner and me going "awright, Dave?" in the voice of Garry from EastEnders. Always a danger I would kill the little bugger by getting a little carried away and feeding it too much tea with five sugars.
2. Odin's Beard, Gandhi's Hairdryer, Voltron's Vector - because I will never be proficient enough at the double-necked guitar or own enough sequins to actually be in a gothic-space-prog band. And I did nick the middle one from Robert Rankin. It's tradition, or an old charter, or something.
3. The Punishment, Destroy Him! - especially if the cat is weak, declawed, and a pussy. Cat. Pussycat. *fail*
4. Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem - by far the winner in my non-rested eyes, this is if we manage to cobble together a bushel of cats. One would be the leader - Dr Teeth - and the rest would be only known collectively as the Electric Mayhem, and would skulk around in beautiful synchronicity, to a soundtrack of '50s bebop, clicking their little claws and occasionally freezing in flamboyant jazz poses. Picture it. Come on, just picture it. Nothing better.
I'm sure that when the time finally comes to welcome a fluffy pile of goodness into our good hearts and shitty home, we will be overwhelmed with mediocrity and name it something like Socks, or Sooty, or Manfred Mann. I will keep you posted.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Don't Know Why, There's Some Sun Up In The Sky, Lovely Weather
Time for my annual moan about atmospheric conditions that have happened with clockwork precision every 12 months for the last 28 stinkin' years of my life, but which I still react to with surprised indignation, like a walrus being slapped by the fin of an insolent guppy. Yes: according to all the sources, it's gonna start (continue) raining (being sunny) men (no men are involved).
I am not suited to this weather. I am supposedly descended from good, solid Italian womenfolk, but if I merely glance at the sun I crisp up like some kind of Celtic porcine demon. I dislike the feeling of being so hot that you cannot undress any further, so you wish to rip your flesh away in great steaming chunks and plunge your skeleton into liquid nitrogen. And it alarms me when we're trapped under the oppressive reign of the heatwave; it's unnatural, like the Earth has suddenly spun off its axis and everyone is just lolling about in parks while we're hurtling towards the centre of the sun and ONLY I HAVE NOTICED. It does seem like the zealous, chipper little tykes at the Met Office share my overhyped sense of panic, which pleases me greatly. Not a weather forecast has gone by in recent days where they haven't been looking imploringly out at me, with their puppy-dog eyes, wiping their nose down their sleeve, and beseeching that I check on the nice old lady next door lest she dies! That's right, dies! In the heat! The heat can make you die! Quite why I'm painting the weather forecasters of this fair isle as satanic children, I don't know. Must be the heat. Tee, and indeed, hee.
That's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the feet. Oh, the feet! Feet are, by absolutely the furthest margin ever, THE most unattractive part of any human anatomy, and suddenly they are everywhere. I once knew a guy at university who had really freakishly long toes, making him look like he was walking around on a pair of Beadle's teeny hands. I'm expecting the long, piercing scream I emitted on first spying them to bounce off Saturn and reflect back into my ears at some point in the near future - probably when I'm sitting on a river bank, maybe watching the evening sun speckle prettily off a duck's bill, and suddenly I will be assailed by an unearthly shriek that will shatter my peace and tip my brain into merry insanity. And what will I see around me as I stagger through the streets drowning in a hell of my own creation? Feet! Everywhere, the feet! There's a guy, looks perfectly normal, t-shirt, jeans, nothing wrong with that, and then OMG flip-flops! Why would you voluntarily wear footwear that is so very uncomfortable? It is the shoe equivalent of a t-shirt that you wear by clothes-pegging it to your armpits.
I am forever summer-doomed. Doomed to be the only one who sees the sense, sweating in my trainers, scuttling from air-conditioned building to shade of tree to hiding under my bed. Until I move to...Canada! Canada! Canada! (It's only a model.)
Update: because it takes me so gosh darn long to write these things, as if they're the fucking Gettysberg Address or something, the sunny weather of last week has been washed away on a flood of...well, floods, and the sky has chucked enough water on the planet to fill, say, a Nissan Micra with its sunroof left open by a forgetful and heat-addled simpleton. Needless to say, after all of that whinging, I have a quite poetic cold now. Bovril!
I am not suited to this weather. I am supposedly descended from good, solid Italian womenfolk, but if I merely glance at the sun I crisp up like some kind of Celtic porcine demon. I dislike the feeling of being so hot that you cannot undress any further, so you wish to rip your flesh away in great steaming chunks and plunge your skeleton into liquid nitrogen. And it alarms me when we're trapped under the oppressive reign of the heatwave; it's unnatural, like the Earth has suddenly spun off its axis and everyone is just lolling about in parks while we're hurtling towards the centre of the sun and ONLY I HAVE NOTICED. It does seem like the zealous, chipper little tykes at the Met Office share my overhyped sense of panic, which pleases me greatly. Not a weather forecast has gone by in recent days where they haven't been looking imploringly out at me, with their puppy-dog eyes, wiping their nose down their sleeve, and beseeching that I check on the nice old lady next door lest she dies! That's right, dies! In the heat! The heat can make you die! Quite why I'm painting the weather forecasters of this fair isle as satanic children, I don't know. Must be the heat. Tee, and indeed, hee.
That's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the feet. Oh, the feet! Feet are, by absolutely the furthest margin ever, THE most unattractive part of any human anatomy, and suddenly they are everywhere. I once knew a guy at university who had really freakishly long toes, making him look like he was walking around on a pair of Beadle's teeny hands. I'm expecting the long, piercing scream I emitted on first spying them to bounce off Saturn and reflect back into my ears at some point in the near future - probably when I'm sitting on a river bank, maybe watching the evening sun speckle prettily off a duck's bill, and suddenly I will be assailed by an unearthly shriek that will shatter my peace and tip my brain into merry insanity. And what will I see around me as I stagger through the streets drowning in a hell of my own creation? Feet! Everywhere, the feet! There's a guy, looks perfectly normal, t-shirt, jeans, nothing wrong with that, and then OMG flip-flops! Why would you voluntarily wear footwear that is so very uncomfortable? It is the shoe equivalent of a t-shirt that you wear by clothes-pegging it to your armpits.
I am forever summer-doomed. Doomed to be the only one who sees the sense, sweating in my trainers, scuttling from air-conditioned building to shade of tree to hiding under my bed. Until I move to...Canada! Canada! Canada! (It's only a model.)
Update: because it takes me so gosh darn long to write these things, as if they're the fucking Gettysberg Address or something, the sunny weather of last week has been washed away on a flood of...well, floods, and the sky has chucked enough water on the planet to fill, say, a Nissan Micra with its sunroof left open by a forgetful and heat-addled simpleton. Needless to say, after all of that whinging, I have a quite poetic cold now. Bovril!
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