skate 30 April 2009
i am in a state of high excitement! i have found some wifi in moretonhampstead which means on my days off i can walk in the mile and a half, buy a lovely cup of tea, use the wifi and walk the mile and a half home – so exercise and proper contact with The Outside World. the locals now realise that i am easily pleased and in turn this seems to make them happy too. result.
i apologise for the lower case but i still fear being cut off in the throes. i suppose the answer to that is simply to prepare a file for when i am online and paste it in – hmmm, ORGANISED and sensible – is that to be my way from now on??
i’m waiting to hear on a job at the moment and the longer the wait the more i steel myself for bad news – in this business i am of the opinion that good news travels fast and bad news slowly. although i never think i am all ‘lovey’ like some in the industry turns out i am being a bit ‘needy’ right now. richard has been great and has now perfected the Pep Text as opposed to Pep Talk – it’s a corker and many thanks to him for that.
yesterday ‘at home’ we wondered how a skate, which is a fish, could have wings…which it does (and delicious they are too). but the flat fish that is the skate doesn’t fly like, well, a flying fish. in fairness they do look like wings so it ain’t the worst misrepresentation of a body piece i’ve heard.
rainy today but mild and the countryside is looking lush and fertile. could be worse, eh?
speaking of which i SO don’t want swine flu – i AM quite interested in Wine flu which my sis in law is convinced she has (symptoms are similar but you get to drink a lovely red or white first). i didn’t want bird flu when it was The Latest Thing in diseases and didn’t get it either so hopefully that’ll be the way of Swine flu too. A friend tells me the thing to do these days while bored on a journey is to talk loudly into your mobile about your recent month’s trip to Mexico…then sneeze…
liver 29 April 2009
today is the adventure of using the tourist information centre computer, photocopier and fax at Moretonhampstead here in devon – my racey lifestyle, eh?
heard a great story (while laughing with the ladies and gents of the cast) about a friend of a colleague who had a nasty problem with her kidneys and after that had been dealt with she had to go to hospital to undergo some more blood tests because ‘her liver had been insulted’ by the incident. what a brilliant term! apparently it is actually medical parlance.
we’re still getting pretty much every season each day here in devon but forging on with the work.
and i am trying not to eat everything that passes by on a tray – it really is difficult – very much a case of ‘i see therefore i eat’ – ooh, i feel another runner coming on (in answer to our American brethren who are wondering what such a thing is , it’s a long strip of decorative linen or whatever usually place on a table)
Miss Maggie Steed also declared of a tablet the other night that it was ‘not adhesive’ rather than ‘not addictive’ and we are well pleased with that gem too.
sad news from the family home in galway – our beloved Felix has gone to the great cattery in the sky – old age basically. sad. he was one of the greats and a very VERY gentle creature.
WWW 28 April 2009
well, we are in a layby off the motorway near okehampton and i’ve got a slow bit of coverage so hurrah for this spot. I’ve been acting with a turkey this morning – yup i know there are a thousand milliondy jokes about that and hams in the acting trade but this is a real live bird. he’s very sweet and good at showbiz but the poor fellow is moulting at the moment and has few enough feathers – he thinks he’s IT though and continues to strut his stuff and puff himself up for all the ladies.
other than that myself and maggie steed have decided she should make a new line of runners (she is embroidering at the moment) with helpful hints for life on them, not the sugary sweet ‘a friend is…blah blah whatever’ but stuff like Never Lick a STeak Knife – i think we are onto something here…
coverage 27 April 2009
i’m headed into devon now and have no idea what the arrangements will be re coverage of phone or email! bear with me…
grass 26 April 2009
I really need to get Richard interested in the garden. He used to cut the grass with the push mower because I told him it was great exercise (which it is) but then found the ground ‘too bumpy’ and decided to give up. In the meantime the poor mower has been living under a tree at the back of the garden with a lot more of its cousins in the gardening line (builders…) and has somewhat given up the ghost. So, today I took to The Lawn (well, the green bit in the middle, it’s unfair and inaccurate to call it a LAWN) with my nice new shears and was still cutting (dandelions mostly) as darkness fell, along with the rain – that fell too. Oh, and shifting pots around. And binning rubbish. I will be as stiff as a board tomorrow. I need help. It’s not even as if he is afraid of the garden in a Spinal Tap sort of way, which one of my other boyfriends used to love to quote: he too was a drummer and one of the Tap drummers was said to have died in a bizarre gardening accident, which was enough to put my lad off…What Richard IS interested in are the 2 new water butts we’ve had installed to harvest rainwater – we’ve had so much rain over the last while that they are well full so he likes to go out and run some water off from time to time (sounds rather ‘ooh MATRON!’). It’s a start, I guess. I long from him to embrace the cliche of Man Cut Grass though, LONG for it….
clowns 25 April 2009
I was reading old Sunday newspapers today (no, there is no end to my displacement activity, hence the avoidance of Twitter as discussed last night – I SO don’t need any extra right now) and in one of the old editions I came across news of an exhibition of photos of clowns. They terrify me. To be honest, I never saw a funny one in a circus and thought they were eejits too (and not in the correct, charming and lovable way – just annoying and stupid). As I got older a horror grew. They are, of course, a staple of the horror genre and who can forget Stephen King’s ‘Thing’*? I guess it’s the garish make-up and desperate smile slashed across the face. Add into that mix the Pierrot doll – also spooky as far as I am concerned. And it puts me right off going to Venice for Carnivale if everyone is in that kind of get-up. Oh, and I nearly forgot Mimes – again the make-up, the faux tear sometimes painted on the face – gimme a break. I would rather solder my retinas to the back of my head or iron my own legs than go to a mime show. In case any of you were wondering… *NOT a euphemism!
twitter 24 April 2009
Right, thanks to all who tried to explain twitter to me – basically, as I understand it, it’s a way of ‘texting’ people/lots of people (who you don’t need to know at all) short thoughts of no more than 140 characters (or letters and numbers to those of my vintage – dealing with 140 or less ACTUAL ‘characters’ sounds like War and Peace to me…). And in my life right now that would be THE biggest displacement activity I can think of – and believe me I have those aplenty. I am therefore going to HAVE to pass on it…for the moment. I think it calms me to know that if I ‘break’ it’ll be there waiting for me.
Communication in general may be an issue over the next while. I’ll be intrigued as to how much coverage I get with my roaming broadband thingette while in Devon next week and the week after (we are not staying in our normal inn which had wifi) – memory suggest that signal strength is wayward and it’s not unknown for intrepids to have to climb a hill or small mountain to make electronic contact with the outer world – fabulous in one way but frustrating when things like blogs Have. To. Be. Done. I may have to take to writing youse all letters – yes, billets doux with stamps affixed to envelopes and all of that malarkey.
national days 23 April 2009
Happy St George’s Day to all who celebrated that – am wondering if any of you call it George’s Day or Georgie’s Day the way we Irish say Paddy’s Day?
As it happens, today is also Shakespeare’s birthday and the day he died – yup he went on a birthday – so it’s momentous all round.
I had a tedious Heathrow experience this morning made good by the fact that there were a few VERY handsome men on my flight to gladden my (aching, conjunctivitisy) eye when I finally got on a plane and out of there.
Back to a house in Dublin full of strange and fairly nasty smells. The (as yet largely unusable) new ensuite has a drainy smell that would knock you sideways and there is something down the back of my treasured new cooker that is causing a horrid niff in the kitchen. Not sure what can be done about either.
So not a lot to lift a gal’s spirits, I’ll admit, and I’ll also admit that I am still quite blue – just can’t seem to shake it, dunno why, just this general ennui (not sure if I’ve used that word properly but I like the sound of it for this). I’m walking a lot so it’s not a lack of exercise. No drinking alcohol this evening so it ain’t that. Perhaps it’s weirdly seasonal – I say weirdly as the weather has been good and that generally lifts a spirit. In fairness, it was raining when I got to Dublin today but the temperature was balmy and it was quite a nice soft misty sort of precipitation and the sort that’s a pleasure to walk in when you have all your protective gear on, and very good for the complexion I’m guessing. Ah well, an early night and hopefully lots of sleep and we’ll tackle this general downness tomorrow and hopefully banish it. I have 2 weeks in beautiful Devon to look forward to in spite of having to put in a bit of work too, and that SURELY will sort me out.
WHAT IS TWITTER??? I know some of you follow me on it but I have no idea if I understand it properly or want to get yet another addiction and potentially brilliant timewaster into my life if I start to follow people…
mixum 22 April 2009
A few things exercising the brain today…
First up, I had a very strange dream last night in which I had very hairy legs – they looked sheer from a distance but up close were a furry mess (though light hair so presumably that’s why they seemed smooth from a distance). Now how I know that they were smooth from far away is beyond me as they’re attached to the bottom half of my body. Thing is you hear that dreaming about ANYTHING is about/symbolic of sex (or lack of it, presumably?) but SURELY not The Hairy Leg??
I took a trip to Manchester today and on my travels was struck by how happy we all are with a bit of sunshine. These days it’s lovely enough to be enjoyed and not be ‘too hot’ which is when we get sweaty and sticky and cranky and then when the 3 days of good weather go away (our summer in other words) we whinge for a year till they come again and then we can say how sticky and uncomfortable it all is all over again…But although we may be better suited to drizzle, a ray or two of sunshine is lovely, ain’t it.
On my way to the station this morning (c 9.30am) I passed a group of youngsters in ‘nude’ suits and blue scarves on the street – anyone have any idea why? Could’ve been shtyoodents, I guess, though a little early in the day for them to be having a lark surely? So am guessing advertising but as the product wasn’t glaringly obvious maybe the campaign should be rethought??
harley street 21 April 2009
I strolled through a very sunny London today to have my medical for Jam and Jerusalem in Harley Street – so my list of ‘things to do’ from yesterday was headed by 1) write novel and 2) Harley Street 10.45 – SO cosmopolitan, my dears! There were lots of posh cars with drivers waiting outside various clinics where, no doubt, expensive people were having costly treatments. As to my own examination – turns out I am very healthy and I learned my body mass index is 22 (smack bang in the middle of the parameters for a shortarse like myself). In the recent past I have met a lot of people for the first time who have been amazed that I am not ‘bigger’ – this is because tv is CRUEL and always exagerates your size. I am a roundy gal, no doubt about that, but not actually HUGE in most ways (except for the upper arms – oh how I would love to shed those). For a while just now I took to wearing flat shoes so that anyone I met would also see that I am 5’4” on a good day, when I straighten up and not some sort of ginormous frightening thing – some have remained SCARED, however…Of course, telling me I’m healthy means I now think the abuse can continue – not so. Have to get good rest (and rid of the red left eye) as it’s showtime again and there was one scene in the last series where I looked SO WRECKED it was untrue – in fairness we were playing netball at 7am in the cold, but still…
In answer to Joyce’s query: no, Mrs Doyle’s mole never moved – it was always placed on a small natural indent on my lip – sometimes newspaper photos were printed back to front and that made it seem that it was bouncing from side to side.