Body builders

I'm glad my husband hasn't got a man in tomorrow.

He's had an electrician in, he's booked a chippie and a decorator who've both been for a measure up and for the past week there's been a builder in the garden who bares his cleavage whenever he can. 

Not my builder

When the sun even threatens to come out in a minute (if you're lucky) he pulls his shirt off.  Glance through any window to feel like a voyeur.

He does have a near-Olympian body.  (Boxer rather than 100 metres.)  But what is it about builders that they treat the bodies they flaunt with disdain?

His sun-baked back, never plastered by sunscreen, is as red as the bricks he's digging up and occasionally moving about.  He doesn't wear a protective mask when he saws up things that he shouldn't inhale.

He stops sawing and has a fag and asks for three sugars in his tea.  "When you're ready, love."
 

The body he's building won't look so good in a year or two.

A roofer arrives and before you can say Health and Safety he's flat out on a dodgy roof cuddling the old asbestos before beating it with a hammer.  Without a mask. 

The senior builder arrives and says stop worrying, he's moved tons of asbestos lately:
 

"You don't need a licence, love.  Just common sense." 


     

FARMERS' MARKET TIME TRAVEL

Time travelling is easy.  Go to a farmers' market.

Not a poncy sun-dried goat's cheese  farmers' market.  A market with farmers, in a proper market town.  Selling sheep and pigs and ducks.  One where they warn you when you park that your car could get dented by an escaping bullock.  "Happened last week."

In the madding crowd there are canny groups of Thomas Hardy men, conferring about the price of calves and black-face sheep, which are the coolest sheep at the market. 

You expect to see Bathsheba Everdene any minute, turning heads and bartering sharply for sheep feed.  You certainly see her nightie in the indoor market, hanging on a rack with several more.  Pristine, but definitely Victorian. 

You see Mellors and his jacket with all the smeared waxed pockets and his young pheasants.  And his gun, among a lot of other guns and cages for ferrets.  And ferrets. 

There are the odd jarring notes.  Dayglo harnesses and jackets for ferrets.   A few men like Mellors's mates, if Mellors had mates, selling night-shot videos about catching pheasants and rabbits. 

And an iphone on a water trough, in a sheep pen with straw on the floor.

10 quotable quotes

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.  Oscar Wilde

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.  Winston Churchill

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.  Mahatma Gandhi   

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.  Russell Lynes

And what is the use of a book...without pictures or conversation?  Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
 
Pay no attention to what the critics say. There was never put up a statue to a critic.  Jean Sibelius

I got nasty habits. I take tea at three.  Mick Jagger

Exit, pursued by a bear.  Stage direction, A Winter's Tale, Act III Scene 3, William Shakespeare

There is no need to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist.
But seeeing what the man will do unbrib'd, there's no occasion to.
Humbert Wolfe

A foolish man would have swallowed it.  Dr Johnson, after spittting out a hot potato.

Angry Birds

The Angry Birds are really making you angry.

How many hours did it take to learn everything?  I mean, all the permutations of the Angry Birds' skill set?  

Learning how to draw the catapult looks fun.  Intuitive even.  But learning how to maximise the explosions?  The blue birds dividing into three smaller birds!  Those suicide bomber birds.  White birds dropping explosive eggs.  The Angry Birds are more accomplished than a Jane Austen heroine's rival.

How many hours to adjust for the pigs' perversely complex fortifications?  For their switching building materials to concrete, wood... ice?  To work out by how much helmets improve the pigs' health and safety: exactly how much more damage helmeted pigs can take? 
Those pigs wearing crowns!           

But you seems so good at it.

It must take up a lot of energy.

...Why do you hate the pigs so much? 



Judgment by Shoes

Say hello and in one second look down at shoes and back up.  Judgment made.

If your shoes are high you pass.  Extra points for expensive, mad, painful and red.  Walking boots with mud on and trainers: dismissal.

Obviously if I had narrow pointy feet and didn't have a muddy dog and enjoyed pain or had a shoe fetish I'd join in; but as it is I look at eyes, the whole person and eyes again.  Not that I'm deep or anything - I just like other things.  As Oscar said, only the shallow don't judge by appearances.    

                                                                                                                      

List

Take picture to be framed

Find picture

Measure old frame upstairs so new frame will match, making a pair of pictures

Find tape measure

Make tea

Find biscuits

Mend broken stool with sharp nails sticking out

Find plasters

Find glue

Take broken stool to picture framer's in case he can mend it

After finding picture

And tape measure

Make list

Buy

Glue

Tape measure

Plasters

Nicer biscuits - not Nice biscuits, they're horrible

To Do

make list *

* When you get to the end of the list, you're dead

Statement Necklace

What statement is the statement necklace trying to make?



I am a very important necklace, so the woman I am wearing is obviously the most important woman in the room. She can afford me for a start and didn't notice or anyway care about people smirking as she held me up against her throat in the shop. And as original as any woman wearing a statement necklace.'

Somehow a statement necklace doesn't suit me. I'm not really strong enough to stand up to one. A yellow-gold and black collar borrowed from an African queen. A cape of red and amethyst wedges. A circle of orange stones guarded by deep spikes. A bold piece of armour bolted together in the B&Q hardware section.

I would like to be able to wear something which speaks louder than this silver chain with the little teacup pendant, which I suppose is saying, 'I'm not very good at jewellery, but I'd love a cup of tea, thanks.' But when I try on anything bigger I just look foolish, diminished and sidelined by my statement necklace.