Pollenia Rudis

Otherwise known as the cluster fly, came to my attention today as a great quantity fell out when the loft door was opened where I am staying.

An ancient family violin was being retrieved from the roof cavity but before we were able to inspect the condition of said instrument we were entertained by the dog,la Espagnol (Springer variety), scurrying around the cream carpet eating the dead and dying insects. She was shooed off with much fake vomming and retching from the assembled children before the remaining carcasses were sucked up for one final whizz round the storage cylinder of the vacuum cleaner.

As it turned out the violin, which in a Victorian version of brand piracy, has Stradivarius imprinted on its innards, is in a derelict sort of state with a broken fingerboard, displaced bridge and something rattling around inside it. Maybe it too swallowed a fly.

A fly eater

Friday 13th: out of the frying pan

We’ve had these before. In my experience, bad things happen on all the other days of the week and dates of a month. Anything else is magical thinking. I have done my fair share of that too, before now, but these days I try to catch the superstitious thought before it starts thinking me.

I was tested yesterday when a black cat crossed my path twice. Fortunately my walking companion thought that it was a bad omen which cancelled out my former insistence it was all to the good. So, if you are a greeter of sole magpies, a thrower of salt, a non-walker under ladders (which must be purely health and safety?), or a believer in bad things happening today, empirical evidence shows otherwise.

Unless it’s windy. In which case stay indoors, where there is a rich source of accidents to be had. I can vouch for this, having hosted the towering inferno in my frying pan last weekend…

‘Everything Changes’

but you… was on a loop in my head at the launderette this evening. I don’t really like that song; I never really liked Take That either.

The thing is, or was, or is – I’m not sure – that the ‘you’, that doesn’t seem to change at all, is the launderette. I don’t go to them much, in fact, the last time was the 28th October 2009, so I’m in a good position to notice any drastic (or even minor changes). There aren’t any as far as I can see. As I sat on the thin wooden shelf for bums with the massive tumble driers heating my back, it was as if I was still 14, or 21, or 25, or any other age up to the age I am today. The launderette is the nearest I can get to time travel into the future too – everything changes but you.

The machines look the same as before and they roll round in the same direction as they ever did. I couldn’t say whethere it’s clock or anti though as I don’t pay that much attention – although I should. The smell is timeless and the decor, whatever launderette you find yourself in and wherever that may be, is always that whey-like worn formica yellow, or a wrong blue. There’s no word for the blue, barring wrong. And the word launderette, it’s a womanly word isn’t it? Invented for when washing was women’s work presumably. What would the testosterone-laden version of the word be, I wonder. Two rocks and a river probably. In India, they take your service wash at the launderette down to the ghats, the steps on the river bank. And they suds it and bash it and rinse it, and the children leap in and out of the filthy water, buzzing around the bright saris of the women that wash for a wage. I never saw how they dried it all.

Bunking off school in my teens might involve having a spin in one of those tumble driers, back in the day. A metal cocoon for teenage angst. A few revolutions and a bang on the bonce a great way to put those teenage angsts into perspective. I put my head right in to the drier today, on a mission to rescue clothes at the back of the hot cylindrical void and I wondered if I would still fit into the drum; if I could take a whirl in the drum for old times sake. The thought didn’t last long.

What Thoreau said

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out of the window in disgust.

How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

From ‘Walden’

The life of a tinker’s cur…

…is a tiring business what with having to leave hair all over the upholstery and mud on the seats.

Tools of the trade

The only tool I could claim to have any conversance with is a computer. Beyond that I can just about deal with a screwdriver, an allen key, or some kind of gardening implement, but it always an interaction fraught with potential disaster.

I have had two run-ins already this morning: one with the hoover, and one with the hairdryer.

I don’t really dry my own hair with a hairdryer. I see other women using the things quite adeptly; they do stuff to their hair with serums and mousses and things. My hair is mainly always the same only because I know no other way. I thought, for a while, once I had children, that having a different perspective on the hairdrying process might uncover new potential in me as I dried their hair. It did not.

This morning, with minutes to spare before school, the youngest appeared with wet hair. There was nothing for it, the hairdryer would have to be employed. Mindful that I had knocked my bedside glass of water in the night all over the extension board I use for my panoply of plugs, I turned the hairdryer on, half-expecting an minor explosion.

We were ok in that respect, but it was not long before I was swearing mightily because I had sucked a huge chunk of my own hair into the back end of the dryer (one end blows, the other sucks, in case you were wondering). The smell that it created is acrid and took me right back to the days when I used to regularly get my hair caught in the back of the hairdryer.

Those were the days when Norman Lamont couldn’t stop raising interest rates and I had a mortgage that doubled practically overnight. The hairdryer that I had then had had the back casing smashed off somehow, so the fan that makes the suck and blow was exposed. It was therefore understandable that I was constantly getting my long hair caught and wrapped round the back of the fan. I persisted with the contraption, perhaps enjoying the element of risk to start the day with, I can’t remember. Then one day, I caught not just my hair but my fingers in the fan and cut them into a bloody mess.

Nearly in a faint, I staggered over the road to a neighbour called Ron’s house. He was an 80s sales executive and had not yet left for work in his company car. Ron had a very particular way of parting his hair and his fringe arrangement was definitely no stranger to hair styling product. He seemed just the person who might have what I did not have in that particular emergency: plasters.

As it turns out I have run out of plasters today too. There is still a Ron up the road who might have them, in fact I am sure he would, but he is an elderly gent with a spaniel called Honey and has no need of hairstyling or products. Even factoring in that detail, it rather seems to me this morning the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The hoover is another story. It involves a Phillips screwdriver, a recalcitrant retractable lead and some paracetamol.

4 Billion: it’s not enough

That’s 4 Billion IP addresses for the whole world: the IP being a set of 4 two or three digit numbers that your computer or internet-connected device uses to route all the information to it’s door. Without them the whole shebang wouldn’t work; like a homing pigeon with no loft.

Anyway the current system doesn’t include enough possible numerical variations to go beyond the original 4 billion arrived at so, a bit like they had to change the London telephone codes from 01 to 071 and 081 as more and more impertinent people wanted a phone line, they are going to have to start changing the format of new IP addresses from four sets of number variations to six sets. Otherwise they will run out next month…

Oh how my poor nerves are wracked by the very thought of it.

I wonder who came up with 4 billion in the first place? Did they even consider China: population 1,341,750,000 or *India:1,198,003,000. What the hell those two numbers are in words, I’ve no idea. Anyway, whichever eejit settled on 4 billion (4,000,000,000,000) it was a bad day at the office for them, and they should be sent to stand in the corner to think about it.

That's about 5 per person I reckon

.
*India’s population predicted to exceed that of China’s by the year 2030.

Steptoe’s Yard

It seems to be the rule in this house that if there is work going on in one room, there will be uncontrollable overspill into the others.

The dynamic duo of plumbers are back this morning; look what they left overnight and they weren’t even working in this room.

On another Groundhog Day note I just popped into the garage to buy a sack of coffee beans and some petrol.

“All together?” was the opening gambit. I was on my own and yes, shockingly, I did want to combine the two items on the same receipt.

They don’t let you away so easily in that gaff: “Do you want a hot drink with that this morning?”

*screams silently*

Everything but the kitchen sink

Is what the two plumbers brought with them today (and that was only because I already had a handful of those).

I took this photographic proof whilst they popped out “shopping” and this was only the half of it. You would never believe the muddle on the floor earlier. Still, it’s all progress innit.

The Stairs

This is the scene that I came home to yesterday. Our *neighbour (who runs a carpet cleaning company) was just leaving. He was giving me some aftercare instructions which I can’t remember and then said to me something about wearing slippers as the carpet was a bit damp. He then looked at me hard, and stopped.

But of course you don’t wear slippers he said

I half-started a mumble about the boots I had on being my notional slippers, but as I had just returned from a dog walk in them and they were sopping wet I shut up.

In my mind, I was throroughly damned.

*Our street is stuffed full of lovely and useful people: a chippy, a hairdresser, a butcher, a publican, an imam, a youth worker, artists, a GP, a childminder and of course yer man who has done a great job on what was probably a very filthy carpet.