Having said...

Having said I had returned, I am now feeling guilty for neglecting you. But once again, I was busy then tired. Last week it was a shopping trip to Cambridge, which was great fun. I spent £6.25. It was a spree!

Well it's not quite September yet. Come September, I shall blog more regularly.

Return of the Goldfish

I was very slow, then I was very busy and then I had some serious sleeping to do. Now I'm picking up again and making a tentative return to blogging and the world generally.

The busiest bit involved a trip to Southampton to visit Alexander. I was only there a few days, but they were very full days, as days tend to be in the company of a two year old.

Alex is still not saying a great deal, but he made several admiral attempts at my name. He is also adept at pointing out churches and miscellaneous Christian iconography (crucifixes etc.) with a very musical "Dong!" (the sound a church bell makes, presumably and much easier to pronounce than church

I have been monitoring Alex's verbal progress on account of the competitive auntying my friend Vic and I engage in; Vic's two-year-old nephew is using grammatical tenses and learning to count in Cantonese! However, my mother informs me that I didn't have a lot to say for myself at two either. See, I wasn't a smartie-nappy (which is like a smartie-pants, but smaller).

I got to see the school where Alex is starting nursery in a few week. I know, two years old, but now I've inspected the place I reckon it'll be a lot of fun for him. It'll only be a few mornings a week in any case.

For his birthday (which is actually this Wednesday), I made Alex a playmat, a blanket with roads and fields sewn on. This took me ages, sewing it all by hand, hours and hours and hours.

Fortunately, it didn't cost me anything, as I seemed to have a few green remnants from things like Alex's jacket plus two green tops, one of which had paint down the front and the other had an irreparable hole on the chest. I found a scrap of blue lining fabric for the river and teh roads are made of less than a remnant of black PVC that I bought ages ago because it was very cheap (although I told my sister it had come from one of [...]'s old catsuits). There are even road markings embroidered on there but you probably can't make them out.

Oh yeah and the blanket I sewed all this on? It was the accursed wheelchair blanket my mother gave me some years ago. When she noticed, I claimed it had been on my lap (serving its purpose) when I had begun to sew and it accidentally got stitched into the project.

Hopefully Alex will be able to use it for lots of different games, for toy cars, farm animals and later on, as a landscape for a Lego town (which was the favourite use for the one Mum made us as children).

Alex knew exactly what to do with it and I could only get blurred images of his zooming a toy truck around the roads. I tried to observe whether he 'drove' on the right side of the road. Even though the steering wheel of his Little Tykes car isn't attached to anything, he nevertheless steers in the correct direction every time he turns. Which I think is genius.

In other news, tomorrow marks twelve years of the Dreaded Lurgy. I am rather proud of my near indifference to this event - not quite so near that I haven't noticed, but pretty damn near.

Summer Holiday

I'm now so very behind with blogging, with reading blogs and keeping up with the world in general that I have decided to give up for August. As I said a fortnight ago, it is not that I am especially ill, I'm just really slow at the moment. There are also things going on this month which I want to save my energy for. Fortunately, only three you are still reading, and the Internet is generally quite quiet in high summer.

I'll probably be posting again in a couple of days, but this is just in case I vanish for a bit.

No time, no place to talk about the weather

The tedious thing about the British and the weather is when you find yourself a moment of great joy, tension or sadness and you find yourself having a conversation about the rain, the wind, the sunshine or the approaching cyclone. When you have relatives whom you have known for many years and you can't recall any conversation between you that wasn't about the weather. Or when all you ever hear about the weather is complaints, whether it is too cold, too fair or too middling.

But sometimes the weather is an entirely appropriate subject. In the last few days, we've been having a heatwave (not sure who decides it is a heatwave – when a leading supermarket claims to be selling 800 cucumbers an hour perhaps?). It is perfectly reasonable, therefore, for this event to come up in conversation; it probably impacts on all our lives in some small way. For my own part, my body has responded by sleeping half the day.

And when it comes to strangers, the subject of the weather is vital. Apparently they've published a guide for Polish people workinng in Devon which recommends breaking the ice with the natives by talking about the weather. Which makes me wonder how on Earth you begin a conversation with a stranger in Poland or any other country? I'm the last person to celebrate small-talk, but you have to start somewhere and being under the same sky is the only thing you can be sure you both have in common.

There is some skill to this, skill which the writer of this article hasn't fully mastered when he attempts to discuss the weather with his fellow commuters.

“Six were positively bright and chatty, one was too immersed in his iPod to hear me, another couldn't understand me and one gave a courteous response but then returned to reading his newspaper.”

See, one might regard it as the Golden Rule of starting a conversation with a stranger: If your intended stranger is currently reading, listening to music or engaged in a conversation with someone else, do not interrupt them in order to talk about the weather. Not only may this fail to illicit a response, but it is bad manners. And thus decidedly unBritish.

But of course, one does wonder whether talking to strangers, let alone talking to strangers about the weather, is a particularly British attribute. Clearly the London reporter wasn't used to it. Oop North, I often found myself indulging in meteological intercourse several times a day, but Down South (at least my corner of the South), one has to drag this stuff out of people.

My neighbours may be a particularly odd bunch and not representative of anyone. But they will not talk to us. In eighteen months only one person has volunteered a name. Even this most sociable of neighbours doesn't always say return a greeting but he does have a severe stammer so I might have gone indoors again before he can get it out (that isn't a joke; it is the benefit of the doubt). The other names we have learnt were obtained by direct interrogation and misdirected post. “Hello, I'm the Goldfish, I've just moved in next door.” (and not even that; I use my off-line handles for these purposes) didn't illicit any response whatsoever.

Don't get me wrong, they haven't turned against us; nobody is unpleasant and there's no community that we're being excluded from. We do hear chanting coming from the village green of a full moon, but that's probably just the Neighbourhood Watch.

Anyway, not sure what I'm rabbitting on about, except, it is jolly hot just now, isn't it?

.....

I've not gone quiet because I am particularly unwell, I just seem to have slowed right down. Or perhaps it is you lot who have sped up. Anyway, I am okay, merely trundling along at a more leisurely pace than the rest of the world at the moment. And I'm not getting anything done.

House Martin Drama

The house martin nest built in the apex of our roof collapsed today under the weight of the chubby little house martin chicks. It is as yet unclear as to whether this disaster is the result of shoddy workmanship or rising obesity among house martins.

One of the chicks is staying balanced inside the ruined nest. There are a couple of chicks on a nearby rooftop who apparently managed to fly to safety. But one young House Martin was found on the grass. We haven't cut our grass this year so there is quite a lot of cover, but it was still an apparently flightless black and white bird on the ground surrounded by green. It had to be rescued!

Fortunately, you may remember that we have six chronically unoccupied bird-houses, so [...] picked up the bird and delivered it to the safety of the top of this house. Concerned it would need shelter later on, he then enlarged the hole in another bird-house, one with more of a ledge, placed dry grass in it and transferred the infant.

But would parent birds feed their chicks when they are in two different places? We watched and waited. The baby bird went into his new shelter, and soon enough the parent came to visit it. The united parent and chick had a prolonged conversation, after which the youngster flew all the way up to our rooftop.

So it could fly after all. And the birds could probably have sorted themselves out without our intervention. However, after flying all the way from Africa, all the weeks it took those martins to build that nest and all the months that they've been feeding those chicks, we could hardly stand by and watch the young bird get gobbled by a cat.

What would you do if I sang out of tune?

This is a portrait of my friend Vic, whose thirtieth birthday we've been at this weekend. She is the first person I have painted who isn't a blood relative and thus could conceivable disown me if my painting compared to my cake-decorating skills. As she was still talking to me a full 48 hours after seeing it, fingers crossed.

We had a very good weekend. Vic rented out an enormous house called Black Dyke Barns, not far from here, where a small gang of us hung out and lounged about for a few days. Apparently (according to the guest book) the place has been used for filming by the adult entertainment industry. This knowledge haunted us throughout the weekend.

Other highlights included our performance of With a Little Help From My Friends on guitar, ukelele, tin whistle and a string instrument which is possible a zither (we weren't sure), played in a key that none of us could consistently sing at. There were also sparklers (see below), my decisive victory at Bagpuss, the boardgame and the formation of a top secret underworld organisation of as yet indeterminate purpose. We came up with a really good name but it is top secret.

Having borrowed and learned to play Don't look back in anger on aformentioned ukelele I have fallen in love. It only has four strings! My guitar is broody! And I've already seen a purple one on eBay!

Anyway, had a really good weekend, made new friends and probably didn't knacker myself too badly.

A belated Happy Bastille Day. Vive la France!