Sorry

It is time I faced up to the truth. Last night the offspring sat on the edge of her bed running through the set she and the rest of the school 'choir' will be inflicting on unsuspecting shoppers in a own near us this morning.

She can't sing. She cannot carry a tune. When it comes to carols to gladden the heart of the archest of arch traditionalists the words are familiar, the tune (such as it is) could be absolutely anything and probably over the course of a rendition is pretty much everything.

Sorry sweet heart. You had to inherit something from me. You can't do maths. You are disorganised and dishevelled. But you've inherited my voice.

Slacker

Post rate has dropped off like a medieval monk's willy, though not from overuse. I have been superwoman. Really. Briefly.

The infant off-colour, unable to go to school. Play Florence Nightingale in morning then go to work for pm/evening shift.

Following day up at four-thirty to be in the office by 6:00 to get the essentials covered to race home so that The Idiot can get to his job and get the essentials of his role covered. And find him lounging about with a leisurely cuppa and fag and not yet actually dressed for work (at 11:15). Thanks.

Play Florence Nightingale for four hours until rescued by returning Idiot, fresh from slaying tons of paperwork. Return to office for supervising newest New Starter, who is not at all like our Fat BNP poster-girl. Actually seems to have grasped some of the essentials. Feel less un-cheerful about prospect of being able to take any of this year's leave before it expires in April.

Repeat above experience on Friday.

Repeat Wednesday's experience on Saturday. Am too tired to chase Tom which is SO unfair. Not too tired to wonder whether he did really want me to chase him or not. Reflect that we've still a couple of Saturday evenings before heartless Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief wrenches us apart.

Family Day on Sunday which is absolutely the worst of the lot. Dragoon the lot into unplugging TV/entertainment crap, dismantling everything, packing boxes of crap for rubbish or recycling (charity shop), create much turmoil and shout a tremendous amount. Achieve heaps.

Reprieve Christmas. How fucking stupid is that? I hate Christmas.

This morning decide offspring is well enough to go to school - I need a day on my own.

Muck up departure time this morning so get to Dreary Nearby Major Shopping Centre later than planned. Finally notice phone is chirruping at me.

Calamity. Class-mates fainting left, right and centre; dropping like flies according to school receptionist. Idiot dispatched.

I am Christmas Shopping. I hate Christmas, I hate Shopping. If I stop now I won't get started again this side of Christmas 2008. I plough on heroically.

I buy too much. I have no money left.

I hate fucking Christmas so much.

Mea Culpa for a Twit

I got hot under the collar and was slightly premature. Kev has come out and said that his Federal government will not intervene where states and territories enact civil unions. This, for the benefit of any young Australian readers who won't have come across it from a Federal Government, is what we old folk call Progress. So I owe Kev an apology and McClelland is still a twit, shooting his mouth off just as he was during the election campaign.

Another annoying New-Labour-ism

"I'm very clear..." as in "I'm very clear I can get detention without charge for 42 days for 'terrorism' suspects through parliament provided sufficient blandishments are dished out" as not quite said by the Home Secretary Jacqui lunch time.

What the fuck does 'I'm very clear' mean? In this context? I am A Pane of Glass? or something sounding quite similar?

Are all athletes morons (or is this one a special case)?

Jaw-droppingly stupendous stupidness from Mark Lewis-Francis who is a British sprinter.

Athletes may be required without notice to submit to a drug test as part of efforts to control and limit the extent of cheating, through drug enhancement, within sport. Athletes are required to provide advance notice of their whereabouts at all times. Three strikes (within a five year period) and you're out: happen to be not where you are supposed to be when the tester calls three times and you are out of competition for a year.

They all know that the drug testers will call, but not when; and they know perfectly well why this regime has been put in place. The consequences of missing tests have been spelled out and are clear as crystal.

So consider now some of the words of Mr Lewis-Francis, who tested positive for cannabis in 2005 and was stripped of his silver medal won at the European Indoor Championships in Madrid in the same year.

"My two are for being lazy. It was while the system was brand new and they should have given us a bit of leniency. I think it's a rubbish system."

"I do not understand why they are singling us out as British athletes. We are not the biggest cheats in the world."

"I feel like I am back at school and have to report to the headmaster everywhere I go."

Diddums

Another sex fantasy lust object related post

Almost I suspect the Paper Shuffler in Chief of reading this blog. How else to explain that I've no sooner developed wholly inappropriate and equally entertaining feelings of lust towards Tom and I'm being taken off Saturday shifts? How mean is that? I thought she liked me? Grrrrr

Troglodyte City

You've almost got to feel sorry for Kevin Rudd and his happy band of newly minted cabinet ministers still in awe of their big desks, squeaky chairs and shiny titles.

Hardly have they drawn breath and the nitpickers are out in droves; and they're making fun of the fact that Peter Garret has the job title but Swann has all the responsibility for the Environment and the general bottling on the green agenda, but the cracks are already showing in other areas and any hopes Kev might have held for a honeymoon of any length are fading fast.
And this is all Kev's fault.

Johnny might not have had any meaningful insight into the reasons the ingrates turfed him out on his arse, but equally it seems Kev doesn't much seem to understand why he know has the keys to the Kingdom.

Empty gestures of the protocol signing / troop withdrawal pledge variety are no substitute for meaningful change and an embittered electorate will not be long in smelling the rat with its feet under the PMs desk.

The electorate not only wanted something else, they wanted something different and inherently better.

Instead we've got another bloke in a suit in thrall to the Christmas Pudding Party and those of their ilk: Yesterday, the powerful Australian Christian Lobby warned "federal Labor would … not want to be seen to break an article of faith with the Christian constituency so soon after winning office". Federal Labour might not, but the rest of us are positively wriggling with excitement in anticipation of the happy day.

These people (the fruit loop legion) believe that though they have never submitted themselves and their manifesto to the public scrutiny of a plebiscite they yet have some mandate to wield an (un-mandated) veto over elected bodies.

And so, because Rudd is another Chicken Shit in the Howard mold, no doubt soon to be found licking the arse of the Elect Vessel of the Exclusive Brethren and other deeply peculiar people, the ACT Government is in for a round of wholly outrageous interference from outside as it steps up its struggle to implement Civil Unions for same sex couples.

Who the fuck gets to vote for the ACT government and can't they quietly dispatch some of these cowardly lick spittles of the fundamentalist hue. Howard for Rudd, McClelland for Ruddock. Some change, let alone improvement.

Here's a question for the straight married members of the new cabinet: Would you be satisfied if your relationship were cloaked only in the ornamentation and protections to be offered by this new fangled register system you are holding out as a sop? And if so, if it is good enough, what purpose then does the existing arrangement for civil registration serve? And if not, please explain why you then believe it good enough for poofs and lesos.

Fed up, fed up, fed up

And looking at WordPress again...

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Andrea "Crank" Williams

I'm in two minds about this, believing the fruit loop brigade shouldn't be encouraged; not even for the entertainment of the sane. Alas, I also pay taxes and hold a TV licence, since the BBC gives this particular pudding airtime I'm going to have my say anyway and against my less bad judgement.

This awful woman already has had far more than her allotted fifteen minutes, thanks mainly to the perch she crafted for herself within the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship as that body's Public Policy Director.

When an organisation pays someone to be its Public Policy Director it abandons all pretence of being anything other a Lobbyist.

She has taken what might once legitimately have been a safe haven of fellowship for people who are both lawyers and christians and turned it into a vehicle for her crusade against encroaching secularisation of civil society and the privatisation of religion.

In the run in to christmas (which I hate, anyway) the media are doing their usual, and therefore now hackneyed, annual Meaning of Christmas routine. In that context The Talking Head muscled in yesterday to proclaim her familiar catalogue of grievance against the march of rationality.

Her peroration (and I am paraphrasing as no transcript appears to be available) went something like: "Historically where there's been christianity people have been free to live along side one another."

Wow. What a mind!

Capable of blanking out, in no particular order (and this list is just a few headline grabbers and by no means exhaustive): Nazi Europe, The Reconquista, sundry expulsions of Jewish populations (Iberian Peninsula, 1492/3; France, 1182; England, 1290 etc), Northern Ireland, The Huguenots, the Templars, USA pre-emancipation, USA post-emancipation, Indigenous Australians.

Head in hands

Against my better nature I am making tentative moves towards that bloody day towards the end of the month. I hate Christmas!

And the thanks I get is this: flush with his mini triumph in filching a $500 book from the doddery old dears running the local charity shop he's bought and brought into my home another armful of tatty, dusty, foxed and falling apart old books.

The deluded sloth believes old = valuable. 1840 must therefore be Very Valuable. Possibly. But not when it is a hackneyed reprint of a work first published in 1621. Now the 1621 edition would pay off the mortgage. The 1840 reprint might pay for a big nosh up at the local Indian on a cold, wet and miserable Sunday night.

I am annoyed. He is unaware of this. If I throw these out or give them back he will find out and be annoyed. And I will be very aware of that.

Bastard.

I am going to write a story for children about ....

Ha! But it is better than re-writing my dreary Gothic Horror. I hated the first two paragraphs of that so much I carried out chemical warfare on the oven instead and gave myself an altogether different sort of headache. This has been that sort of day.

I had a drink a few days ago. Just a drink, just one. It was such a non-event and there were no ramifications so I didn't bother you with the news. What a good girl I can be. And gee, patronising myself is almost as much fun being patronised by my trainee teenager.

Knew there was something else

That old duffer in the long white frock has been at it again, publishing a short (76 page) whinge about 'modern atheism' Perhaps something was lost in translation. What's right with out-dated, out-moded, old-fashioned atheism?

He is a199 years old so one must make allowances but timing is everything and his assertion that atheism had led to some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice ever known" looked odd coming as it did in the same week the Sudanese Islamic Tyranny banged up a benighted English teacher for allowing her pupils to give a teddy bear the same name as most of the boys in the country.

Addendum: the best bit

After the shenanigans relayed in the previous post and as we were closing up the telephone rang. It was one of the attending officers. Had she by any chance left some paper work in the security suite?

When the security suite isn't being used for the interrogation of suspected thieves it is being used as an office by the staff who as part of their duties prepare orders and by our chief butcher as a doss house. It isn't particularly tidy.

"Can you give me a description, please?" I asked in my best brisk and efficient telephone voice. I wasn't taking the piss, honest. Still can't believe I put it like that. Why couldn't I just have said 'Wha' duz i' loo' like?' as anyone else would have done?

You're nicked

Our staff, for pennies more than minimum wage, are the nation's unsung army of social workers. They bear the brunt of daily life as it is lived by the dysfunctional, the weird and the seriously creepy.

Then, after they've negotiated their way past their colleagues in the tea room they get to deal with the hard cases amongst our customers.

To our collection of crack-pots had recently been added a fairly young man who comes in after dark, always wearing a beanie on his head that he styles with a conical peak. He will spend about an hour in the store with a basket over his arm, pausing to chat with the staff and usually asking to be shown to something in a completely different area of the store.

He is always polite and clean. We tend not to mind the customers who are polite and clean. Indeed after a day of dealing with the usual middle class trash - the sort who cannot bear to bring themselves to be civil to anyone conceivably socially and economically inferior - anyone polite and clean comes as a blessed relief.

But he'll want ponds cream for his mum, or condoms but not pack of three because he 'doesn't want to buy that many' or a particular kind of this or that which we happen not to stock. He usually leaves empty handed having abandoned his shopping basket somewhere about the store and having had a good long natter to a few people over the course of the previous hour or so.

He came to be regarded as a bit of a pain but essentially harmless. The general run of customers, this being a fairly small town, are usually spot on in warning us about problem types and nobody had a bad word to say about him.

Then on Thursday night he was spotted on CCTV helping himself to a £35 bottle of champers. Oops. At a couple of minutes before closing time he lifted the bottle and he scampered, with it under his jacket, through the exit as I was bringing down the steel security shutter almost on his heels.

It was a shame the CCTV footage was only reviewed after he'd left.

Friday morning PC Plod turned up to review the evidence. He was exceeding tall. In fact he was almost as tall as he was pompous. He went so far as to dispute the evidence of the footage and left with a request that we call in the next sighting of the light fingered friend who didn't turn up on Friday evening almost to every one's disappointment. He turned up last night though.

We had almost as many staff in the building as customers and with the exception of the two till operators everyone was deployed on Operation Bollinger. This was not a subtle thing. As special Customer Liaison officer my brief was to explain to the bemused that we were on Crime Watch, but there was no reason for alarm. The staff on hands and knees peering through shelving and around corners were only doing their job.

Our target had come in with a taller and equally skinny mate who meandered separately about the store. This tactic of dividing to conquer was only partially successful. Mate got off, presumably with some goods about his person and made good his escape on a train (we're next door to a railway station). Target man was gathered up and taken to the security suite to be baby-sat by a couple of the young lads, for whom this was probably the most exciting thing to happen in their lives since the day their voices broke, pending the arrival of the constabulary.

They did turn up quite promptly and mob handed though PC Pompous was not among them.

Our light fingered friend spent the night in their company and we are not expecting to see him again any time soon. In the familiar parlance he is Known to the Police. Indeed not only the police but the judiciary and wardens of one or more places of post-sentence incarceration. He's not long out after spending three and a half years away. And you don't spend three and a half years away in this country anymore unless you've done something seriously wrong.

And that is probably why one woman customer last night, having worked out what we were all up to and who we were after muttered "be careful; really, be careful" to me as she walked past on her way out.

Sex and chocolate

I've been at a loose end for days now, which is the downside of finishing the first draft of my gothic horror novella.

I have achieve a Quentin Crisp-like state of grace in respect of the housework. The laundry basket is overflowing. We have nowhere to put up a christmas tree because of the crap I've allowed the family to accumulate (see previous post, for some elucidation).

I should be washing, ironing, dusting, vacuuming, scrubbing & etc not to mention having unbridled (or even bridled) sex with the college student we recently employed to work part time (and I ain't giving up my Saturday shift any time soon, let me tell you!).

However, something more important than all this - only speculatively not including the last which is only a pipe dream after all, while the rest is semi-obligatory - is on the agenda. It is the time for truffle making.

Once I've got all these annoying little thoughtlets out of my head (except perhaps the one about Tom) I shall start with the chocolates. Much easier than buying presents for people. And I can drink any left over rum, cointreau, chivas regal & etc. Not to mention eat the samples.

I might hate this time of year but it is not without compensations. All of which leads me right back to Tom and my current pet daydream. Mmmmn Sex and Chocolate

New Sex Game for the Doomed to Disappointment

I got home yesterday evening from work to find the Sloth in a highly unusual and unexpected froth of excitement. After a while I worked out that he was actually saying book of the tarpon. Okay. Steady on. Sounded seedy, turns out just to be unfamiliar.

Know what a Tarpon is? Not me, either.

Turns out it has been lurking in the local charity shop by the book shelves and is now full of it.

The Book of The Tarpon for 50 pence. Hardback, no dustjacket. Good condition. Covers are inevitably worn particularly at top and bottom of spine. Paste down image on cover very good. Top edge is gilt, pages are otherwise uncut. A previous owner has written his name on the inside front cover. The hinges are slighty loose. Pages are inevitably age-coloured but there is very little foxing inside. It is the 1911 first edition and dealers are asking several hundred US dollars for copies in very similar condition.

Jammy bastard.

A tarpon is a fish, btw.