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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Well done, blogger.

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.

Ill thought through football post

While I was waking up this morning (I don't think I actually dream about football) I had a little brain wave (I think). This is it, without any polish.

I have no particular brief for English football and only a tangentially vested interest. In the same way I care about the state of English cricket I care about English football. After years and years and years of laughing at English cricket I got impatient and longed for a decent fight. I wanted to be engaged in the way my parents and their parents once were, with the outcome of test series in the balance sometimes until the last match and then not actually always going our way.

I didn't actually enjoy watching us lose the Ashes but I could point to a couple of mitigating factors and also that the thing was a close run series.

I was comforted though by the knowledge that nothing in the structure of the game in England or the quality of players made likely a sea-change; we remained likely winners in the return series at home and likely to continue for the foreseeable future to produce better quality players, playing better quality cricket with greater determination to win. And we would on balance continue to do that more often than not against all comers.

It was my misfortune some years ago to meet with the Chief Exec of a county cricket board and it confirmed that in English Cricket there exists an obdurate block to success at that level. The man's interest lies in his county, not county cricket let alone the game at national level. They have the game by the balls, as it were, and have no plans to shed their blazers and county ties.

In England the creation of the Premiership has created a similar situation and I think it time the FAE learned the rules of Billionaire Chicken, which is known in some households as Call My Bluff. Legislate in the interests of the national game and the national team. Politely invite the representatives of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea [as well as anyone else for that matter with the temerity to object] to take shove off and play their football outside the English game and with their rich continental friends.

De register the clubs. Have nothing further to do with them. Simple. Of course it won't work. Even the FA doesn't bother to pretend that these clubs get anything from being affliliated with it they wouldn't get from throwing their lot in with their rich and glamorous continental friends. Their web site is nothing but a promotion of a mind-blinding whirl of insubstantial frentic activity.

Good riddance if they go, good behaviour if they stay.

Diary of Yoda

06:00 am oh, my god! oh, my God! We have no staff. I rush about and issue a series of instructions that put everyone else in a flap. Why is that infuriating foreign woman looking still looking calm? Perhaps I have a hair out of place. I go upstairs as we are about to open to check my hair, my lipstick and file a slightly ragged nail.

07:00 am we manage to open thanks to all enormous effort I put in. No one understands how hard I work. I'm sure that foreign woman is laughing at me. The Maltese one will be in later. She loves me. 'He' has left me with several deliveries to manage; I go out and stack kitchen roll to help clear out the warehouse.

07:30 my hiaitus (?) hernia is playing up. I abandon the store and go home to take a tablet.

08:00 some of the staff are cross with me. I think the foreign one is amongst them but she is smiling so I cannot be certain. I don't understand why they are upset with me. My instructions are always crystal clear. I haven't done nothing to upset anyone! I don't know what that kontradictory word I caught the foreign one using means. Perhaps the Fat One knows what she's talking about when she says she needs to bring a dickshunrary. What ever it is one of them seems to be something that makes working with the foreign one easier.

I haven't checked my hair for hours.

We don't have either of the Sue's in. One is falling a part and sucks up to me so that's ok. The other one is Trouble and gives me the shits. I bet she doesnt' really have them; she just wants to get out and do some Christmas shopping.

09:00 oh, my God! The Maltese one is in and I haven't raked over the latest developments in Strictly Come Salvage My Jungle Career yet. That should soak up half an hour; even longer if I attempt to probe her on the question of Secret Santa Presents. That should upset the smug foreign one.

09:30 I have remembered another way of upsetting the foreign one - I have started to enter an order on her computer. I have told her I will be back in a few minutes I just need to check something; I will leave her machine tied up for the rest of the morning. That will free her up to some of the thousand crappy jobs I like to torment her with.

10:30 I must pup upstairs and check my hair, lippy and nails. While I am up there I'll phone mum and have a cup of coffee.

11:30 I don't think that anyone understands how hard I work. That warehouseman is so rude and now he is saying that he will go home at two rather than help with the big lunch-time delivery. Who does he think he is? I'm not interested in his excuses about no longer being warehouseman but head of greengrocery; who does he think he is?

12:00 Victory is mine. I have succeeded in upsetting the foreign one. I don't know how, but I have. I can always tell. She stops smiling. She is so moody! What ever it was that upset her happened while I was discussing with Bolshie Book Worm how she and I operate our British Home Stores store cards and the discounts we receive and the sale they're having today and how long I've had the card and what I did when I didn't get my discount and what they gave me when I complained and what I'm planning to buy when we go shopping this evening and ... excuse me while I draw breath ... and how I use it there and also at loads of other wonderful shops and what I got last year and what I will be buying my gorgeous grand-daughter for her birthday and... oh, is that the time. I've just remembered something very important.

12:30 Only another one and a half hours until my shift finishes. I haven't done my shopping yet. What is it I planned to buy? A yes. Plenty of time to do my shopping before my shift ends and I stop being paid to be here.

13:30 my gorgeous little grand-daughter is in and being pushed about the store by my lovely daughter-in-law. She is the most beautiful baby in the store right now and if I go out and accompany them about the store then lots of people will come up to us and be really nice. We could make that drag out until two when BBW arrives to take over.

14:05 thankfully BBW has arrived on time and for some reason the foreign one has just shot out the office door and gone upstairs. Perhaps she has the shits? The Maltese one isn't back yet, but I'm sure the foreign one will come back down stairs and deal with customer service, the telephones and the inept check-out operators until she gets back from lunch.

What a hectic day I've had. In since 6 in the morning and having to deal with that rude, obstinate man. As BBW says since he's no longer the warehouseman, he's just a general assistant and he has no right to speak to us in that way. The kitchen roll section is looking well stocked which just shows what can be accomplished when you give a section to someone competent and hard working.

In my fantasy the couple who were left standing at the customer service window at ten minutes past two will write to the Manage and complain about service quality and I will be able to point out the Mr Big Swinging Dick that the Foreign One simply walked off without a by-your-leave or making sure someone else would be in the office to deal with such enquiries, clocked out and went home without even saying good-bye.

She really is getting too big for her boots and it is quite outrageous that she is paid as much as a third of the amount I receive for doing all the work what I do and which no one ever gives me credit for.

Trying very hard and failing badly

On Monday evening the money had been gifted to friends to do with as they saw fit and only accompanied by a 'suggestion' that the Labour Party might make a suitable destination. While openly giving charitably to other worth causes such as academic institutions the nation's Chicken-Shit of the Year award winner (by default) David Abrahams preferred not to make political donations in his own name in order to protect his privacy.

Confused? I was.

Mr Chicken-Shit is a property developer in the north-east which I now want desperately to believe is a euphemism for Slum Lord.

In the meantime Mr Chicken-Shit has been forced to clarify. The money was um, to be given to the Labour Party and that's why it was passed to friends and employees. His ruse was rumbled by the spouse of one of the 'donors' who obviously had only ever been given an early draft of the Hymn Sheet. Oops.

Mr Chicken-Shit is now aggrieved, not just because his privacy has been invaded but because the nasty media types coming at him from both right and left have made him 'feel like a criminal' which when you think about it Mr Bleating Chicken-Shit is precisely what you are for your tawdry little attempt to subvert Electoral Law and don't bother attempting to have it otherwise, for only someone who has spent the past decade with his head up his own arse could be unaware of the 'wrongness' in what you were attempting to do.

So which is it Mr Chicken-Shit? Crime or world-class Head Up My Own Arse Yoga?

While Mr Chicken-Shit stands head and shoulders above the rest of the field in his own class a special mention is deserved by Diane Hayter. Her championship quality obfuscations surely qualify her for something. The sack perhaps? Fat chance. You can't get her, she's part of the union and on the NEC to boot.

Diane went to barricades on Monday evening to shore things up when the news spilled over the parapets that these donations had not only been offered but accepted by the party. Diane wants you and me to believe that the only person who knew about the donations, knew and understood the source of them, was a young chap you've possibly not heard of called Peter Watts, but who happens to have been until very recently (that is to say until he resigned over this business) the General Secretary of the Labour Party.

Peter led himself to the chopping block and brought the axe down on his own neck. In his valedictory address from the scaffold to the nation he confessed to having accepted the donations in ignorance of the fact that they were made in breach of electoral law - though he had played a major part in assisting the party through the Cash for Honours debacle which is in fact Party Funding for a Specific Purpose. Party donations via a third party are illegal. Peter held positions involving legal and financial compliance before promotion to Gen-Sec.

The party clearly hopes that by this act of self-sacrifice the matter might be brought to a neat conclusion and its wish might yet be fulfilled. The party is relying on us being stupid or complaisant or both.

Diane Haytter's name does not appear in the paper at all this morning. The story itself is buried inside and the Tories are staying clear miles clear of it for fear of bringing their own funding arrangements under the spotlight.

Come the revolution only names will change.

Establishing ground rules, etc

How good am I at procrastination?

This morning I have cleared three loads of washing, scrubbed the kitchen floor, cleaned the bathroom, changed the beds vacuumed and sorted my knicker drawer. The ovens are drenched in some potent chemical combo that is cleaning them and the stripping the back of my throat.

That's how good.

That's that - I've done it

About three years ago I stumbled across National Novel Writing Month while taking a break from vacant staring into space and other forms of uber-passive procrastination. I toyed with the idea of taking part in 2005 and again last year only more so.

This year I gave myself a stern talking to and then when that had no effect I signed myself up anyway.

Then I told nobody about it this side of the ether-wall, though the temptation to be indiscreet was enormous and the suspicion existed that to remain silent was to leave myself safe ground to which I would retreat when the going got tough.

I also lacked resolution as the time approached to begin writing on the question of which story line from among those I've mentally sketched I would pick up and 'run' with. In the end as the last days passed all too rapidly I hit upon an unlikely genre and scenario and the thing clicked. The drawback of this approach is that writing has exposed all the flaws in the structure I set out with.

Partly as a consequence of this the quality of the output is patchy at best, though some passages probably will remain after all the re-writing now to be undertaken.

Having never considered gothic horror as a genre in which I might comfortably function the thing came together alarmingly naturally. The end is delightfully ambiguous.

I don't feel triumphant but I do feel a deliciously warm glow. In fact I might enjoy a quiet smirk or two over the course of day now. I think I have a 6:00am start tomorrow morning, so I shall be smirking on the other side of my face in twenty-four hours time.

What next?

To redraft, of course. I am bad at knuckling down, worse and really knuckling down to the tedium of taking my 'perfect' work and squaring up to the reality of all its flaws. I have too many first drafts under my belt and not nearly enough polished work. Therein my next big challenge.

I think I've been Bar-Wicked

Brian has a moustache that makes him look like a fool. Under that circumstance a wise man would take particular care not to supply the world with the conclusive proof. But the honourable thing isn't to deflect culpability in the fool-stakes.

While preparing the chook for the oven this evening I happened to express puzzlement that in the vast amount of time which has passed since the job of England manager became available the name of Gerard Houllier hasn't been bandied by anyone.

Hanson might choke on his Haggis at the mention of the man's name but is he really a less plausible candidate than the Handsome One's partner in punditry crime on MOTD? Does his track record not stand up to comparison with those of most if not virtually all the names on the fantasy future England manager list?

Now it turns out I was being foolish beyond belief and proving (if needed) that I am a girlie and therefore know absolutely nothing about football: Houllier's name is on the FAE's shortlist. After saying one more thing about football, and fantasy future England football managers, I am going to shut up on the subject - at least until there is something more I want to say.

If I was being all girlie on the subject of the England manager I would have a shortlist of one and a half and it would comprise Jose Mourinho and Big Phil and most definitely not M. Houllier or the neurotic Spaniard who took over from him at Anfield. Clear?

PS. When Jose arrived at Chelsea after the departure of that rather sweet little Italian the old Sports song Black Stockings for Chelsea acquired a new and very special resonance. I shall go off and listen to it again, now, I think.

Creepy Kev and the New Model Army

Just about the only good thing about Saturday was the fairly clinical and certainly emphatic removal of Little Jonny from power. He has been a disgrace and I'm still not convinced that he was given a sufficient hammering by the electorate.

The amusing departure of Peter Costello who ran like a yellow dog when faced with the prospect of being in charge in opposition hasn't enraged me or disappointed me as it did Jeff Kennett. Right now the Liberals need the catharsis of tearing themselves apart and in all probability the next Liberal Prime Minister is not yet a member of the federal parliament or in any way visible as a contender.

Turnbull is a smart-arse filthy rich merchant wanker who stinks of the glossy side of Sydney, Tony Abbott is insane and Brendon Nelson is deeply weird.

Quite how the leadership contest will play out is something I don't particularly care about, except that who ever wins will clearly be stupid and distasteful enough to deflect from Creepy Kev some of the intense scrutiny which is his due as Prime Minister, whether he likes it or not. At some point in the future The Creep will be pinned to the wall by a journaslist and made to explain himself. And that won't take long. Because the Creep exists in what otherwise is a vacuum. He doesn't represent much except a blander milder version of the outgoing Prime Minster.

Some prescient souls took one look at Tony Blair and thought yuk. We've been joined since by a lot of others who've come to appreciate that beneath the emollient surface lay a void. The fact that the emollient surface also served to disguise the nasty truth the truth at Fat Gordy is inept is quite beside the point.

Who's got my bank details Gordy?

There's an unpleasantly disappointing facet of this: the way Australians have been beguiled just as Brits have seen off the Oily Creep and his ferociously peculiar wife, to spend more of their time in the company of a geriatric german in a long frock in Rome. If it takes the good folk as long to despatch Creepy Kev, who spent his first day as PM-elect on his knees in a bet-hedging act of god-bothering at a Mass at an Anglican church, they'll have had a good few chances and failed the sense test.

Phut the Idiot

Today was marked down in the mental diary as Last Drafting day. In the time from tomorrow to submission I would fart about and generally tart things up in a very preliminary and superficial manner. Not to be.

The Idiot has been thinking for quite some time that an allotment would be a Splendid idea for a couple of obvious reasons. As anyone who has strolled past one on a balmy summer's evening could tell you they are obviously a bounteous source of the fruit of the land, and an Elysian corner where a man can put his feet up, lager can in one hand, fag in t'other and survey this miraculous bounty. And further more all the overflowing milk and honey surplus produce can be flogged for simply oodles of dosh (having labelled 'organic') at the local farmers' market.

Hm. This idea took root (sorry) about the time his best mate secured an allotment as an excuse to get out of the house and away from the missus for an hour or three per day between late spring and early autumn (which in these parts and in recent years has been a singularly Un-dull fortnight at the Start of September after the brats have all gone back to prison school).

I've pandered, since pandering is much less stressful on both of us than telling the truth and not as soul-destroying as barefaced lying. It is also the one of the three I'm now best practiced at. For example I suggested he tidy his room before Christmas, and he sulked for a good hour and a half, and refused to eat his breakfast. I feel like a single mother of two children. My novel feels neglected.

He put his name down on the waiting list with the Allotment Association which is a confederation of toothless and witless long serving and troublingly inbred dribblers. Yesterday the call came through; and so instead him taking the offspring or their regular fortnightly visit to his mother I had them under my feet. We treked to the allotments and inspected the vacant 10 rods. He wanted it so he handed over a bit of cash and it is now 'ours'.

Quite how he will turn 10 rods of weed infested swamp into a productive patch of ground is a mystery to me and, also I suspect, a mystery to him. Clearing the weeds won't instantly produce spectacular potato and onion crops. I don't think he understands this, or weeding or watering or seed beds or planting on or watering or fertilizer or tying up or digging up or netting or watering or crop rotation or weeding or watering or ... hard work.

He just knows he will be able to vie with his best mate for Badgers Ate My Corn Crop story of the year and he thinks no bugger will observe him with his feet up, lager can in one hand, fag in the other while the weeds reach for the sky and know better.

Non-ode to fallible technology

Truth is very few news stories however major lend themselves to the rolling-news style offered by a dedicated vehicle now provided by most big media organisations.

Elections are one notable exception though the Brits do manage to make a potentially fascinating evening achingly dull by gathering up all the votes in an electorate, transporting them to a central counting station and then counting them all before letting we the voters on our sofas at home know anything about how things are going - the first we know is the pompous middle aged bloke or woman who never could get on in local politics any other way but was rewarded for persistence with the job gets up on his or her hind legs, candidates ranged as a backdrop and ponderously declares the votes declared.

Also, the Brits do First Past The Post rather than Single Transferable Vote and their system might have some moral force but (a) politics is an odd and uncomfortable place for moral force or moral anything else and (b) it is a voting system that is no FUN!, even when the Raving Loonies are part of the electoral landscape.

The way things are done back home, with each station counting and transmitting the vote is inherently safe (what happens to all those votes in transit, remember what they did to all our bank details last week?), cost effective (security doesn't come cheap, when it is used at all - remember what happened last week!) and environmentally sound (how are those votes transported?).

But the most powerful arguments of all are the dull one - it adds a local interest to what is only meaningful when a local process, and the important one - it adds to the FUN!

Which polling did that absurd count come from? surely that's the sheep shearer vote counted just wait until some of the more metropolitan votes come in? that's a very high turn out for the greens suggesting we're getting returns from that pocket of middle-class neurotics who now live in a normally working class western suburb!

A glorious rolling maul of an election result, with running commentary supplied by a motley cast of political has-beens you mostly thought had died since the last election, and a token blonde to keep the blokes awake when during the turgid middle bit between the writing appearing on the wall and the concession speech.

Dutifully I fell out of bed this morning though it be only minus 2 outside and kicked the 'puter. Sadly in the half hour since then the ABCs streaming media have both collapsed under the weight of a zillion expats trying to listen in. Bugger. Things are lookin good in that Howard looks to be on his way in but bad in that Little Kev's missus is packing her bags and preparing to move into the Prime Minsterial Mansion.

Look at me

It is a very scary possibilty that the recent display of public disorder by a very small and probably excrutiatingly polite rabble of about 20 objectors to anyone debating the possibility of considering raising the question removing the requirement for priestly celibacy in the Roman Catholic set up is the most exciting thing to happen inside or round about the Camberwell Civic Centre since ... the year I did my HSC and had to dig my blazer out and put it on to attend one last long dreary Speech Night.

I can't remember a word anyone said at us last night, but such is the impact of the poisonous environment I can still, after all these years, murder the school anthem with great gusto, lyrical accuracy and all the tunelessness one would expect of the tone-deaf.

It isn't a very exciting part of the world.