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It did not even seem like a good idea at the time. I went to Ikea yesterday. It was not a good idea (is it ever ?). Why ? The closest I came to a New Year resolution was to go with the flow when Him Indoors went into a sorting out frenzie the other day. I am a hoarder and I am not known for my tidyness (kitchen cupboards being the only notable exception). I have decided to go with the flow and let him get on with it because Him Indoors was threatening again to call that terrible woman from Life Laundry. My colaboration so far has been limited. I have nodded here and there when he has asked if some thing or other could be thrown or recycled (when I said no he asked a number of questions about the last time the item was used/looked at etc and did I even know I had it - the swine...). A pile of clothes has been bagged ready to go to the charity shop - magazines have been disposed of. Him Indoors pointed out that putting fresh lavender smelling wooden balls in the cupboards and taking out the old ones did not quite count as a contribution to the great tyding up effort. So I thought of what could be done which was with in my capabilities ie did not involve any sorting out or throwing of any sort. I bought some new plastic boxes to put in the utility room to organise the laundry (one for whites, one for dark colours, one for light colours and one for delicates - see my autistic side is resurfacing - if Him Indoors is not carefull I will start listing the contents of the freezer on the door again). The idea is that the boxes are just big enought to fit a load so when it is full, whoever put in the last item should transfer the contents of the box to the washing machine (a whole 2 feet away) and put it on. I can just see how it works in theory. Not sure about the implementation. I also thought maybe we could get some shelves and some bookcases so that we could tidy up the office and get rid of a) the shelves above the desk which are buckling and b) the cardoard boxes full of books which currently clutter the dining room. I could have bought some wood, have it delivered and made something (after all, as Him Indoors pointed out, I do have a city and guilds in basic woodwork and the necessary hand and power tools). But I though that there are enough of my unfinished projects cluttering the house. With the time it takes me to make a mortice joint it may have been a while before the carcasses got given doors. I could have asked the facilities manager to come round and quote me for some lovely made to mesure shelves but for some reaseon I dismissed the idea as too expensive before even checking with him. Instead I went for the lazy, cheap and tacky option and armed with the mesuring tape a piece of paper and the Ikea catalogue, I tried to work out to get as many books as possible in the office while not blocking the window and still keeping enough room for the potted plant and for the chair to swivel. I made the most of being able to leave work at 1500 (reduced service during over the Christmas/New Year period) and set of for Wembley. That is when the madness of the entreprise came to light. I knew the items would need to be delivered to me (I cannot put a 2 m long parcel in the back of my car). Any other supplier would have given me the opportunity to place the order over the phone or on the Internet. Even John Lewis does it for crying out loud, and they are not known for their modernity. But no, not Ikea. I read somewhere that the Partners have the exclusive use of green ink in the company so that if you receive a green memo you know instantly it comes from the top (how progressive). When the company introduced e-mail communication they carried on the tradition by using a green coloured font for e-mails from the top. Mind you I like John Lewis very much and when I am master of the universe and don't have to pay for anything I will buy all my groceries from Waitrose. Anyway, 1 hour 50 minutes and 12 miles later I parked and remembered they have a sale on. Now anybody who has been to the Ikea sale knows they never have anything worth buying in the reduced items, or if there is the reduction is so stupidly small that it makes you regret having queued for the privilege of experiencing the life of a warehouse operative for half an hour. So why do people still get taken in and go to Ikea in packs when the sale is on ? Wrongly I assumed that if I wanted to do was to have some bookcases delivere to my house all I would have to do was go to a desk, get confirmation the stuff was in stock, place the order, pay and get out. It is Ikea we are talking about and The Experience would not be complete if I avoided: walking around the shop following the arrows, trying to locate the articles I wanted to buy, taking note of the location of the objects/parts in the warehouse, pushing a trolley around the warehouse to find that a couple of the item are not at the said locations, waiting in line at the "information" desk to be advised the items where in the process of being put in location and that I would have to queue at the other desk in the other part of the warehouse to find out about the stupid doors of the stupid bookcases because it's another area and he does not know about it. By then I thought it is probably very unwise of them to have a kitchen section which contains knives to which I could go back in a flash if I was mad enough to attempt to walk against the flow. After collecting the last bits (with the help of a nice fellow sufferer who could see the madness in my eyes and helped me load the trolley with the items marked "over 25 kg - to be handled by a minimum of 2 people for safety" before I could grab a folding chair and use it as a blunt object) I went to the till and then to the delivery point and last but not least in the line of traffic which was trying to get back to the North Circular. I am proud to say I managed the whole thing without blowing a fuse or even throwing a mega strop. I must be mellowing in my old age. Mind you, The Ikea Experience is not over. I will still have to put the shelves up on Tuseday when they are delivered (if all goes well).
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3.1.04 22:28 |
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Encounter of the housing kind - Episode 6 To recap, Kim and Stroppycow had decided to move to bigger premises and had found the house of their dreams. Guy whose hears my legs were once wrapped around half way up a step ladder provided a van and helped move my stuff out of the 2 garages it was stored in and Kim's stuff out of the studio into the house. The Boy was thrilled to find that he had for the first time in his life a bedroom and a bed to himself. At nearly just over 1 he had moved to a proper big boy bed (with one of those guard things on the side but a big boy bed nonetheless). He was even more chuffed to find out there was a railway line at the end of the garden and if you stood on the plastic climbing frame you could see them go past really well and that we were just under the flight path. In 3 words Little Boy Heaven. Because it was summer we had "Sunday Breakfast parties" where people bring sunday papers and breakfast stuff and you end up cooking loads of fry ups and pancakes and everybody just hangs around in the garden drinking gallons of tea, eating and swapping comments on the contents of the papers. Very civilised. Not sure why we stopped doing it. Anyway one evening, at about 11 - as you do - we decided it would be a great idea to go and pick blackberries along the footpath next to the railwayline to make jam for breakfast. Honest, it seemed perfectly sensible at the time. We grabbed a couple of chairs so we could pick the more out of reach berries (avoiding the lower strata seemed a good idea - something to do with avoiding Wiels disease). We judged the amount of light provided by the lamposts to be sufficient so did not take torches. The aim was to fill a couple of bowls. Enough for a pot as a trial run. All was going well, the bowls were filling up nicely and we were on our way back when we came face to face with the local yooves walking their bulldog. They are easy to picture, latest branded tracksuits and trainers, not an H or a T between them, sharp crew cuts with "stripe" motif on the sides with matching strippy shaved eyebrows and more gold on their fingers than in the Tower of London. I spotted the dog and Kim spotted the dog. Kim knows I am weary of dogs I am familiar with (excluding from my parent's late labrador but including their spaniel) and insanely terrified by dogs I don't know. I have been known to cross a busy road without even looking, runnig in panic because a dog in an enclosed garden had barked through the gate as I was passing and to grab hold of a passing stranger in another incident. Kim knew even before it happened that I would certainly just freeze or break her fingers while squeezing her had or run away so far she would have to launch a search party. Kim saved what was left of the day by doing something which was (strike as appropriate) selfless/brave/incredibly stupid/the only sensible course of action in the circumstances: she stepped in front of me to shield me from fido, its sharp teeth and its strong jaws. The yooves hurled some abuse and got annoyed that Kim failed to be impressed at their offers of underage sex and decided to launch their weapon on four legs at us. They reasoned aloud that Kim must prefer the dog since she is a bitch innit. The most incredible thing happened. The dog ran towards us and Kim stood her ground, bared her teeth and groweld a mighty growl (she must have been a grizzly bear in a previous life). Fido took one look back away and ran to its master yapping. Yoof in chief then stated that "it shows she's a right dog innit" and let us go home in relative peace. The backberry jam was yummy. The moral of the story: don't mess with Kim if you do you may find her bite to be worse than her growl and her growl can scare a bulldog away. |
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4.1.04 23:55 |
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Ever wondered why people knit ? On my list of things I would quite like Santa to bring me for christmas was "Le Voile Noir" by Anny Duperey. A little browse on Amazon.fr and the postman has brought it to me last week when semi-normal postal service resumed (he also brought a DVD of the Shadoks - Him Indoors does not really get it but it has me giggling in the small hours which is always a good thing). Anyway in the book the author talks about her childhood and her quest for memories of her parents. It is illustrated with photos her father took before his death. Sometimes you read a book and a chapter strikes a chord. The book has a small chapter which may just hit the spot for quite a few knitters and for people who know or live with knitters and have always failed to see the point/attraction of it. I thought I may translate it and post it (forgive the clumsy translation, I am not much of an interpreter). If your French is any good (don't you that there is an English version out there) you could always give the rest of the book a chance. Anny's mother died went she was 8-1/2 and she fails to remember her. Amongst the information she has gathered : her mother loved knitting and she was particularly adept at it. The following extract follows: [...] I know, for I have practiced it for a little while and observed its effects on me that knitting is a pastime for the alienated. It is similar to a drug. We can have knitting attacks, we can feel withdrawal if we found yourself with a free hour during which we could have knitted and find we negected to take the work with us, it generates a pernicious addiction. We quickly get accustomed to the confort of being here and absent at the same time, protected by the impassible barrier of needles and curtain of small stitches which hangs between us and the others. With the golden alibi of being "useful", it is a wonderful excuse not to participate to the life that surrounds us and allows us to delay quite a while the moment when we have to join those who are calling us. "Wait, I am finishing my row..." However we know full well that when one is finished, there is nothing easier than starting another, almost inadvertantly. During a severe attack, we do not even notice, it just happens. A blessed amnesia falls between the last stitches of the rows which we have just finished and the first of the one which has just been started. "Wait, I am finishing this one..." There is no lack of justification - we are in the middle of a motif, it is the last row of the ribs, we are getting to the decreases for the armholes... "Wait, I am doing the other side otherwise I won't know where I am..." After the fith, sith row started, close ones who are waiting - to go out or to have dinner - can rightly take the inertia for provocation or a mark of hostility. If it is pointed out to her, the knitter looks upans in yer eyes you can be read the greatest of surprise, the look is "far from it all" very soft and slightly misty, proof of total innocence. Most of the time she is sincere, you rarely knit against others but more for your own relief. Because knitting is a powerful anaesthetic. At the lower stages of the need for anaesthesia is the plain knit, with a simple repetitive stich. From the outside it seems more mind numbing, "dumb" knitting - it is untrue. While the hands are busy with the automatic mouvement, the head is free to wonder and is is hard to cut ourselves completely from the outside. Compilcated stiches, multiple coulours seem to me to be a matter of a more serious stage of voluntary alienation. At high doses, under the cover of artistic creation, you can litteraly become an intarsia junkie. Somebody who is busy incessantly counting stiches to avoid mistakes cannot be disturbed. Close ones soon avoid any intervention. "That's it, you have made me miss a stich, I'll to start the row over again..." In the case of large motifs, covering the entire front panel ore better still the entire jumper, including the sleeves, the screen between yourself and others is about perfect. The screen between yourself and yourself too... Faced with a constantly changing number of stiches we cannot even dream any more, And well protected, the eyes, hands and brain busy, stich by stich, row after row, we lose ourselves in an hypnotic lethargy, closed on ourselves in a corner we knit for those we love, and that we cannot during of these hours touch or listen to. Then once the work is complete we wtch them go to work or to school, coered, wrapped in this little mass of powerless tenderness knoted stich by stich. Then the hands are empty and the mind worries and all that is left to do is to start another piece. Knitting for our close one is a compensation for a feeling of powerlessness and uselessness - at least that is what I think. My mother knitted. Preferably complicated pieces. Incessantly. I do not know what to deduct from this information, but I know that she pushed those around her close to nervous breakdow with her "Wait I'm finishing my row...". And now I know something else [...] It was not enough for her to knit constantly, the extreme skill she had acquired having probably reduced the calming effect, just as drug users add an ingredient to the poison which has become ineffective, she had managed to find a way to knit and read at the same time. At least a book a day, It seems, and anything she would lay he hands on. Maximum anaesthesia... Hope you liked it and the porr translation did not put you off. I can recognise myself in th Wait, I'm finishing a row. I have been known to knight and read a magazine at the same time and I have occasionaly chose complicated patterns for no particular ereasons. The Boy wore many outfits which were knitted on the commute to Oxford. Maybe I should use marketing and sell to Him Indoors the theory that is so many of my needlework project are scattered around the place, unfinished it is because my alienation/lunacy is only partial. |
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5.1.04 22:46 |
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It's Epiphany... yummy! Constance the lovely Au Pair is back from her holiday in France. She has brought back a Galette des rois (a sort puff pastry pie with a frangipane filling). We warmed it up, cut it in 4 - you cannot have leftovers with a King's pie as you have to make sure somebody gets the "fève" so you can make them king for the day. The boy closed his eyes and shouted out loud who should have which piece (in some families, the youngest goes under the table to perform the task). Constance got the "fève" (in this instance a small ceramic dolphin). As the queen she chose The Boy for King. Constance admitted she was a bit sick of galette by now as she has littel brothers who all wanted to make sure they were kings before she left so she had to eat a large number of portions at the week-end. I suppose if I get my act together I could make a kings' cake at the week end for a change. Not sure about the lurid colours of the icing. Maybe milk, dark and white chocolate would be a good alternative.
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6.1.04 21:25 |
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Happy Birthday to me... Him Indoors and The Boy are sulking because ungrateful me has failed to show sufficient chirpiness when openting my present... some new lights for the bike. It's not their fault really. Him Indoors had been so good at Christmas that he had ran out of ideas. He only got them because I am using his lights at the moment and he wants them back (I can't recall the last time he has been on his bike at dawn or dusk so I can't think why he is missing them). Well at least it wasn't a helmet (I don't do helmets despite the constant nagging of the men in my life - I'll wear the fluorescent tabard but don't try and strap polystyrene to my head). Having a birthday so close to Christmas and New Year is a bit rubbish. Everybody is partied out (even me), broke and still working hard on keeping New Year resolutions of healthy living going. How old. Older than you probably. You could try and guess. I have a theory that nothing dates people like their taste in music. Here are some clues: The first LP (yes it was vinyl) I ever chose and bought for myself was Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. The last CD I bought was Revolution in me by Siobhan Donaghy (and if it had been out 10 years ago I would never had admitted to listening to it). I think I only bought 3 CDs last year and my want list contains more old favourites than new stuff (tape copies age badly). I have put some CDs back in the displays in the shop after working out I would hardly get a chance to listen to them and it did not seem worth it (Feeder for example... no chance of listening to it at adequate volume - misses the point then). One of the 3 CDs was The Mabuses, bought 2nd hand on Amazon, only to find out the seller was my next door neighbour's son. Favourite track on the CD Kicking a pigeon of course. I still recoil at the idea of buying compilation CDs but I have not made a compilation tape for 6 years. Anybody else out there has spent too many hours carefully selecting songs and then cutting out pictures and reproducing the fonts used by their favourite artists to write out track lists to give out to friends in the hope to convert them/impress them/ as a token of your undying love... I have not been to a gig for nearly 6 years (the last time I was not long after the birth of The Boy) and my groupie days have been over for a very long time. The Boy's paternal grandmother had a job in the music industry during the 60's. She once told The Boy's Father "I kissed George Harrison once you know. And I also went backstage with The Rolling Stones. And then I met your father (wistful sight)". I hope I never tell the Boy anything that will make him feel I could have had a better life had I not met his father and had him - then again I don't really do regrets. I found the last compilation tape I made the other day when Him Indoors was going through a Big Tidy Up. It was recorded while the relationship with The Boy's father was crumbling, it flaunts most of "the compilation tape rules" but certainly captures the feelings of the time. It was not recorded to give to somebody but for my me to listen to so it probably says quite a lot about what I like and when I stopped buying records in a serious way. Heres' the tracklist - you are welcome to snigger and advise how you would improve it (my best friend Lila would point to quite a few of the songs and say: "tu as vraiment des goûts de chiottes ma grande - presque que de la daube"). A Side: 1) Bluetones - Slight Return. 2) Ash - Goldfinger. 3) Manic Street Preachers - La Tristesse Durera (scream to a sigh). 4) Charlatans - Just lookin'. 5) Longpigs - She Said. 6) Shed Seven - Where have you been tonight ? 7) Blameless - Breathe (a little deeper). 8) Ash - Girl from Mars. 9) Lush - Ladykillers. 10) Cast - Alright. 11) Garbage - Milk. 12) Sinead O'Connor - Ode to Billy Joe. B Side: 1) Charlatans - Just when you're thinkin' things over. 2) Manic Street Preachers - A design for life. 3) PJ Harvey - C'mon Billy. 4) Radiohead - High & Dry. 5) Gene - Sleep well tonight. 6) Garbage - Stupid Girl. 7) Ash - Angel Interceptor. 8) Sleeper - What do I do now. 9) McAlmont & Butler - Yes. 10) Manic Street Preachers - Raindrops keep falling on my head. 11) Bluetones - Nae Hair On't.
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8.1.04 00:13 |
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It did not even seem like a good idea at the time #2 The Ikea boxes were delivered on Tuesday, as planned. We thought we would clear the office and put them up on Sunday, so we did. When I came back, Him Indoors help me carry the bags into the kitchen to put things away, hands me a cup of tea (I should have known he was up to something!) and said "by the way, make sure you don't go barefoot in the living room". I asked for the reason why and the answer was that while he was moving the shelves away one of them fell on the mirrors and there was some breakage. That's ok, I said, we have a spare somewhere (or so I thought). "Well, the thing is, the shelf fell in the middle of a row and broke 2". Then starts the strop. The Boy's father would have joined in and there would have ensued a mighty row. Him Indoors knows better and deflected it quite cunningly. As I pass him the bags of flour to put awayhe says :"I can see why you were complaining about the Ikea jig not being very well set up. If you thought you had trouble puting the shelf together, you ought to have tried puting together the next one". I brace myself for the next strop. What the hell was he doing taking initiatives and not following the work schedule I had given him. Men, take note. However much we say we would like you to show initiative from time to time, we do not actually mean it. He answeres that I should have put it in writing and that he had done his bit appart from the desk because he did not know where to cut exactly. I answered that cutting on the line I had marked out would have been a good option (Yes I know, I am a domestic tyrant). And if really he wanted to be helpful he could have made a start on The Boy's homework. And then I see the shelves he had put together... Before I met him, Him Indoors was described to me by my manager as "a clever cookie". He is smart and practical. He got at least 20 points more than me on the BBC test the nation IQ test. Amongst other things he can do rewiring and he can do plumbing. However, he cannot do flat packs. They say the key to getting the girl is to make her laugh. He certainly did. One lok at the 2 shelves and I could not keep a straight face. How could I carry on with the strop when I saw the result of his efforts (bless!). He had only put half of the bits the wrong way around (no wonder the wholes did not line up). Whe he saw he did not look quite right, he did not think of trying a different way. He just assumed they were faulty and carried on (I suppose I should think myself lucky he did not get carried away and drilled new holes). In the process he had managed to give his thumb a blister with the alum key. I was still laughing about it when we went to bed.
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12.1.04 22:17 |
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My son the ginea pig.
Last night one of the women on the child of our time programme on TV was having her son tested for early signs of dyslexia in what looked like a very well equipped american lab. He was fitted with an electrodes net to read his brainwaves while various sounds were put as background noise to see how long it took his brain to recognise changes in the sounds. It reminded me of The Boy's ginea pig days. at the Cognitive Development Unit of the Medical Research Council at Birbeck College in London (also known as babylab) and I just had to dig up this photo and share it. The photo was taken when The Boy was six months old and doing his bit for science (developmental psychology to be more precise). Before you ask : * No, it does not hurt (the yellow bits are bits of sponges wetted with water and a tiny bit of baby shampoo for conductivity). * Yes, The Boy had a hoot (all the nice toys and then a bit of watching a computer screen while boffins recorded his brain waves) especially since it meant a trip on the train and the tube - what more could a little boy want ? * And yes, he has lost the gourmless look since. |
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14.1.04 22:09 |
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