Mundane Is Too Mundane An Expression For This

Thursday morning saw me back in the office away from all human contact. Well, apart from the stream of phone calls obviously. The day started in a similar way to the Thursdays when I was on holiday; with a taunting e-mail from the National Lottery saying I had won a lucky dip. In the last three weeks I’ve had seven e-mails, five to say I’ve won lucky dips and the others saying important news about your ticket, which both turned out to be wins of £2.50. From occasional teasing they have moved into full on mockery now. I’m not greedy, I don’t need the sextuple rollover of tens of millions of pounds, just enough to be able to retire and never have to deal with a holiday or position management query ever again.

I didn’t realise quite how much I had written in notebooks whilst on holiday until I actually got around to typing it all up. Thursday night saw the next batch of travelogues being typed up and posted on my blog, and in the case of the Leicestershire ones on Medium as well (I can add as many, better quality, photos on there without using up all my site’s file space)..

Friday wasn’t pizza Friday this week. Instead, we were heading to a field just outside Rusper for a barbeque. This may sound a bit random place to go for a barbeque, but friends keep horses in a field here. They rent part of the property from a lunatic who uses the rest of the space to store random conked out vehicles. We have been a few times to help them sort the place out, removing ragwort (I had something else to do that day), and build stables. There is plenty of space to socially distance and so a few of us gathered.

I’d been a few times, but never walked up to the other end of the land. I haven’t seen as many old, rusted and immobile tractors in one place since news reports on French farmers’ blockades. Lots of four by fours, a couple of sports cars and various other cars are strewn in different places, most of them in danger of being completely reclaimed by nature. It is like a proper old junkyard.

It was a lovely warm evening; right up until the point where the sun started to disappear and the temperature dropped like a stone. And then the pyromaniacs came out to play building a fire, enough to keep people around it until it was properly dark and time for everyone to head home.

Saturday was wet, which suited me as I just spent all day finishing catching up on typing everything up, then linking everything to my social media, and loading the hundreds of photos to Facebook, both to my personal page and where appropriate to my interest groups (i.e. History of Leicestershire). It wiped out most of the day, as it was soon quarter to seven and time to drop Helen off at the Parson’s Pig for her to meet colleagues for a birthday meal.

I got back and had pizza Saturday, and looked at the laptop, and the next thing I knew it was nearly eleven and time to pick Helen back up. I’m sure that days at the weekend go at three times the speed of weekdays. It was the same Sunday morning, I looked at my watch and it was about eight, blinked and woke up at eleven.

Helen was taking her mum for lunch, so I had Charlie walking duties. I found out that to walk around the field at the end of the close takes exactly 571 steps and equates to 0.29 miles, which means that four laps of that (three of which used exactly the same amount of steps), three laps of the park behind the house and to and from the front door of the house works out to be two miles in total.

Whilst the final games of the Premier League season were on, I got around to collating pictures of street signs I’d taken photos of before my birthday, so were over a month old. I know we’d been away in the interim, but it was a shock to find I’d not done anything with them for five weeks. Two more collections finished – Norfolk Settlements and Forestfield Conservation Area.

I would have loved to have blinked for as long Monday morning as I had Sunday, but instead of blinking when I see the time is eight o’clock, it’s a panicked reaction as I have to get showered and into work. At which point time slowed to a trickle again and the next eight hours took four days. And then the evening went in about thirty seconds.

My mum rings me on my mobile, and she sounds all worried. “Just checking you’re alright, I’ve been ringing your landline for a few days but no one was answering”. Considering we were in most of the weekend, and at the time she said she called this is confusing. Right up until she says she copied all the numbers into a new address book last week, and she had copied the wrong number. Just leaves the question of who was she actually calling?

We’re watching the last few episodes of the last season of The Wire, and I was gutted that Omar wasn’t the last cockroach standing; he has made me laugh out loud so many times watching the whole thing from the start in the last couple of months.

Charlie has picked up two new habits in the last week or so. The first is to pick up his bowl and wander the house and garden with it, as if he is hungry, even though he’s just been fed. The second is morning attacks on my rucksack, trying to ransack it. He ignores it from when I get in, all night and before he goes for a walk, but once walked and fed he is relentless in trying to get into my bag, regardless of whether there is food in there or not.

Just Eat’s TV and radio adverts are showing up just what a rent-a-rapper Snoop has become. Seriously, get a grip, you’re showing less self-respect than Joe Hart did in the Head and Shoulders adverts a few years ago.

Speaking of things on the radio, Absolute 80s plays Wham’s “Club Tropicana” a lot. Yet it’s only recently I’ve noticed (after thirty seven years of hearing the song), that they contradict themselves in it. The chorus has the line “all that’s missing is the sea”, yet the second verse has the line “watch the waves break on the bay”.

A couple of recent meals Helen has cooked have included artichoke. To me that sounds more like an instruction than a food stuff, especially if it wasn’t chopped up into small pieces. I now can’t help but hear it as Artie, Choke!

After quite a few weeks I’ve levelled up in Jigsaw World, I’m now at level 18 and I’m called a Jigsaw Shark now. Who would have thought there could be such a thing? I’m just hoping this doesn’t mean that all the jigsaws at this level are of sharks.

Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse

I had written about some of the lunacy going on in the world in last week’s blog, but I took some pieces from that and did an extended blog on those elements.

And, no sooner had I finished writing that and click on publish, then I found another news story. A scientific exploratory team had uncovered an underground cavern, which supposedly haven’t been opened in something like five million years. And in the cavern were some creatures that hadn’t been found on Earth before. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, this really isn’t the year to be looking for new creatures that have survived in an enclosed space for five million years. Re-seal the effing cavern and walk away. Or even run; just don’t bring anything out of there.

I’ve started doing Couch to 5K. Before you all die of shock, this has nothing to do with running, those earth tremors you’ve been feeling this week have nothing to do with me. It’s a free writing course, and the 5K relates to words, not mileage. One of the exercises was around the use of language, bad language in my case, as my submission was the following.

I swear a lot.

People say it’s uncouth, but allegedly, the more intelligent a person is, the more they swear. In which case I must be an effing genius. And I’m sarcastic as well. They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, which must be why I like the London Underground so much. They also say it’s the highest form of intelligence, so it is back to that genius tab.

I remember the first time I swore at home. An effing b@st@rd were the words I said. I must have been about eight or nine. And it led to being dragged into the kitchen by my ear and made to drink a glass of water with washing up liquid in it. My mum didn’t eff around when it came to washing your mouth out with soap and water. I still swore a lot after that, just not in front of the psycho woman with a washing up liquid bottle to get through.

It would be a lot better nowadays; they have all these lemon, or strawberry washing up liquids that smell nice (I haven’t tasted them – being of sound mind and all), but they hardly seem the deterrent the old green stinky stuff used to be. And of course if parents tried to do this nowadays, the kids would be straight onto the NSPCC.

I’m doing the course in the hope it will help push me back into working on the proper writing I’ve got sat gathering dust on my hard drive, rather than writing random b0ll0cks in blog posts.

Charlie is barking the house down at three in the morning again in a rush to go out to the toilet. The little sod isn’t in any rush to come back in though, slowly making his way back from the bottom of the garden stopping to sniff every plant and weed along the fence as he does so. No rush at all, not caring that some of us want to go back to bed.

And what fresh lunacy is this? I go to feed the woofy tw@t only to find his bowl isn’t there. So, I check to see if it’s in the pile for washing up. Nope. Then I go around the house to see if he’s taken it for a wander as he has taken to doing recently, but it was nowhere to be found. Out into the garden it is then, and there it is, under a chair under the patio table, close to a collection of balls, like he’s building up a little display of trophies. He’s been shredding tissues found on tables and in bins as well. Anyone would think we didn’t feed him.

I took a wander Saturday morning before it got too hot. Taking more pictures of street signs, drinking establishments and churches. I picked up a couple that I had missed on the previous wander, and did a new set of signs. I could say I walked up hill and down dale, but there wasn’t much of a hill, just eleven dale signs (none of them were Chris though).

You know the expression about people who eat their food quickly, that they inhale it. Now there are certain things that I’ve been known to eat so quickly I give myself hiccups. Burgers is one of those, but I managed to surpass myself and really did inhale it. Not that I knew at the time, it was only twenty minutes later when I blew my nose and a piece of bun come out. I didn’t realise it was part of the bun at first, as I’ve been streaming and coughing with hayfever my initial though was it was a part of a lung. And breathe (somewhat raspily). Now if I need a reminder to slow down when eating that is surely it.

The ice cream van turned up Sunday afternoon, full blast “O Sole Mio” playing, and I was out. I’m partial to ice cream. I don’t care if it’s the middle of winter with three foot of snow on the ground, if there is an ice cream for sale I’ll buy it. “Ma, throw down some money, the ice cream man is coming”. If you haven’t seen the ice cream sketch from Eddie Murphy’s “Delirious” then you won’t know what I’m on about, it is worth going and watching.

Anyway, I wandered out and there was the guy from the Italian family three doors down about to order, but new late instructions were being screamed at him from the house so I got to be first in the queue. And then it was like a stampede; by the time the Italian guy turned around he was fourteenth in the queue which was all the way back up the close to the junction with Southgate Avenue. It was difficult to tell whether people were in the queue for the ice cream van or the butchers. Back inside Charlie was rapt. When Helen got to the cone she offered it to him. He took a sniff, and then threw his head forward to inhale the whole thing, running off with it as if we’d take it back off him.

So, eighteen years after it first began to air, we’ve started to watch “The Wire”. A fair few people I know always say it’s the best TV show ever made, but until last week I hadn’t seen a single minute from a single episode. But it was showing as being available on Sky On Demand, and we started to watch it. We’re now in the middle of series two. I’m not sure it’s the best show ever, but it is good.

After it appeared I missed 2019 where music was concerned a couple of CDs have turned up this week as I attempt to catch up a bit. Mabel’s “High Expectations” and Lizzo’s “Cuz I Love You”, with more on the way. I’m going to make an effort to try and ensure that 2020 doesn’t pass my by. (Musically that is, in all other ways 2020 can effing do one.)

The sesame seeds are back, now accompanied by the Sesame Street Theme in my head. More rewritten lyrics may be incoming.

Wednesday snuck up this week again, time is going faster and faster, but the slow down light at the end of the tunnel for me may be coming. There is hope that by the time this blog goes out next week I might be back in the office. Fingers, toes, legs, arms and eyes are all crossed. If it does happen then I can do Kris Kross and Jump Jump (for joy – back to the tremors), just not sure about wearing my clothes back to front though.