TURNCOAT ANTI-VIRUS

The Anti-Virus program on this computer is behaving more like the viruses it is supposed to be protecting me from! Not content with suddenly flashing red warnings every time I try downloading a new website - and then 'stopping the computer till I solve the problem' - it is now chucking me off the web each time I try downloading anything from the ‘favourites’ folder!

The last (and third) time I logged on today, before being unceremoniously turfed out again, I found two thirds of the ‘favourites’ contents removed and a message telling me that if I wish to alter this state of affairs, I should go to ‘Internet Options’…. Not only that but that crazy, mad Anti-Virus is whisking every bit of mail into the spam folder – including the invoice from my Internet Provider and the latest online photos of the Grandkids… grrr..
I can forgive it chucking invoices in the bin - but don’t mess wiv de family!

I appear to have a Trojan horse virus in quarantine but that has always been there (like a stray animal that wanders in and stays) and is low risk – so why is Anti-Virus behaving like this…?
Hmm… I see that the AV subscription is due for renewal next month, so perhaps this is its unsubtle way of reminding me? If so, it is biting its viral nose off to spite it’s invisible face, because all this annoying behaviour is doing, is tempting me to buy a completely new Anti-Virus system altogether. DID YOU HEAR THAT YOU MANIPULATIVE GREMLIN??

On the other hand, I did manage (when Anti-Virus was busy attacking something else in ‘Settings and Network Connections’ and not watching me) to secretly download info’ and read up on how difficult and messy it will be to attempt to remove the thing; entailing all kinds of ‘clean up wizard’ downloads, as well as a Masters in computer programming - because it would appear that AV has wormed its insidious way into every nook and cranny of my comp’ and taken it thoroughly hostage.

Ok, Ok, I give in! I promise to renew you! Are you reading this Most Superiour Anti-Viral being?? Will you now please let me remove myself safely from ‘Word’ and log back onto the Internet long enough to sign into my blog and post this? NO? All right then…grr…I admit it, you are cleverer than me; I am a mere mortal; a nothing; you are the brain…. I grovel before you….
Sob! Please let me back in – and stop chucking me off every time I click on ‘favourites’!! I promise to have no more favourites. You will be my only one. My favourite (choke) Anti-Virus program…forever....

NOW LET ME BACK IN YOU....THING!!!

HOLIDAY CURSE

I don’t know what it is – and maybe it is nothing more than coincidence or fate – but every time I seriously consider somewhere as a potential holiday destination, whether the country of my dreams is near or far, something very unhealthy happens there!

Sudden riots, crippling strikes, terror acts, a spate of tourist kidnappings, or some kind of natural catastrophe, have all taken place within the last few years in countries on my holiday list. Now while I don’t blame myself for these happenings, it has sort of unnerved me. So my next holiday destination will remain a strict secret. In fact, even to myself I shall only refer to it as ‘that holiday place I am not going to until I get there’.

O.K. so now I am being silly – and am also surprising myself at how superstitious (and paranoid) I sound! Still, this time I am not taking any chances. So shhh… ! All I will say is that it is a volunteer project in a very faraway from Europe land and will take me a couple more years to save for the ticket (to that holiday place I am not going to…)

In the meantime, I don’t know about the rest of Europe but the sun has actually condescended to shine its haughty face on us water logged Dutch and so I shall remove the bright yellow cling film that I put on my windows and sunglasses last week to cheer myself up - and toddle off to the shops!
Happy holidays to everyone, wherever you are – and I promise not to come and join you!

THE SOUND OF JELLY

02:37 a.m. and still wide awake. Have decided to bore myself to sleep with this:-

The sound of jelly

Sounds a bit like water at first but livens up around the 2 minute mark, if you can wait that long. If not, just cheat and push the cursor-knob-thingy along a bit.....

ZZZZZ.... Aha! Did you see that? Sleep typing! I actually dropped off. Either that or this is a dream and I'll wake up in a minute with my ear stuck to something really nasty.

Just have another listen.....Eeouw (!) that is really odd......thwack...thwack....dithery whack....

Yup... it's definately jelly and I think it might be doing the trick....zzz....

G'night all!
ZZZZZZ

P.S. Oh lor' I do hope I don't dream about the horrible wobbly stuff. Puts me in mind of an ancient Tommy Cooper joke:
'Dreamed I was eating a ten pound marshmallow last night - woke up this morning and my pillow was gone!' *b'dum b'dum!*
(Can't imagine what I might find missing, dreaming about jelly......)?

PERCHANCE TO SLEEP

Insomnia is a terrible affliction and I must have tried every remedy and trick in the book... sigh... to get a good nights sleep. Everything except sleeping pills that is, which I am scared will have the same effect as the terrifying sleep paralysis I also occasionally suffer from - and warm milk, which is an abomination..!

The strange thing is, I can easily fall asleep on the settee with the telly blaring away - but once my head hits the pillow the eyes fly open and stay that way till after dawn. Every once in a while, when really overtired, I’ll drop into a coma around 4.a.m and sleep till past noon. It’s dreadful when this happens, because waking up feels as though I’m fighting my way out of a clinging, foggy syrup…where monsters hold me down in a vice like grip and sit on my chest till I can’t breathe… then at the very last moment, when I’m turning blue… they release me and let me wake up…WHEEZE…(!) shaking and sweating, to find I’ve slept half the day away. Bah!

But apparently all the evil spawn of insomnia, such as irritability, headache, forgetfulness and clumsiness - can now be beaten! An article dated 23 June 2008, in Times Online, under the title: ‘Elderly dehydrated in care homes’, is waxing lyrical at how 8 to 10 glasses of water a day, is proving a rejuvenating miracle for elderly folk!

Quoting from the article: Gary Fitzgerald, Chief Executive of Action on Elder Abuse said:

“It is amazing that something as simple and straightforward as water could have such wide benefits for care home residents, including a reduction in falls, better sleeping patterns and less agitation…..”

He also said a lot more but this was the bit that got my attention and so I decided to try it – and hal-ay-loo-ya it really is a miracle! Sloshing to the W.C. 30 times a day and night has worn me out entirely!

On the downside though, I am now frantically searching the web for articles on combating water intoxication and water retention – cuz, oo-eee, excuse me - if I suddenly laugh or sneeze….

HORSE MANURE!

I am standing outside my front door chatting to a neighbour, when the clatter of horses’ hooves draws our attention to two magnificent police horses turning into our street. Whether by accident or design the horses are a matching sandy brown and their riders sit high and haughty in the saddles, resplendent in their blue police uniforms.

‘Now that’s a fine sight…’ I begin, but as they draw abreast of us the nearest horse is obviously agitated, tossing his head and rolling a baleful eye.
‘He’s gonna crap!’ Yells my neighbour’s young son, jumping up and down with glee - and sure enough as the horse strolls past, he lets fly with endless dollops of thick, smelly yellow manure.

My neighbour clicks her tongue in disgust and shooing her delighted progeny before her, picks her way through the piles of steaming poo to their house across the road, leaving me staring after the horses. In my mind I am five years old again and back in England at my grandparent’s house. The coal man’s horse has just passed by and the cry has gone out: Horse muck! Horse muck! And at every house in the immediate vicinity, kids are scrambling to grab buckets and spades and be the first to collect the inevitable booty left by this hard working animal.

‘Just what my roses need.’ Laughs granddad, egging my cousin and I on.
‘A penny each for a bucketful!’
As the youngest by two years, I would hold the bucket, while my cousin shovelled frantically. The kids who lived next door were about our ages and competition was fierce! Still, there always seemed enough to go round and my cousin and I would struggle back to granddad with our bucket of steaming bounty, to collect our reward. A penny in those days would fill the whole of a child’s palm and I would stare down at my huge, hard earned copper coin with satisfaction. A sherbet dab, pink sugar mouse, gobstopper, thin chocolate bar wrapped in tin foil… the mouth-watering treats this coin would buy were endless!

A passing car jerks me from my reverie. There are still no children anywhere to be seen and my neighbour across the road is calling me over for a cup of tea. As we sit in her back garden my eyes are drawn to a bag of fertilizer pellets standing next to her rose bushes. Clean, efficient, no pungent odour… and the only bucket and spade to be seen are the brightly coloured plastic ones in her child’s sandpit.

As I return home the horse manure is still there but almost completely flattened and crisscrossed with the tire treads of passing cars. But all is not wasted – a couple of magpies are pecking animatedly in the remains.
‘Ah well’, I mutter. ‘Peck away. After the street sweeper car has been tomorrow there will be no trace of it at all. That’s progress for you; a clean and sanitized world – but not half as much fun!’

SHOP AND DROP!

The fully automated self-service supermarket has arrived! This remarkable new technology requires shoppers to scan the bar code on each item, before placing it onto an electronic surface, which then transports the item at high speed through strips of rubber curtain down a very long conveyor belt. Payment is made by PIN card at the beginning of the conveyor belt, in an adapted machine that also delivers a bar coded receipt. You are then free to hurry after your purchases and bag everything up in the five seconds before the next customer’s items start arriving and getting mixed up with your own! Once you are done, you can let yourself – sweating and panting - out of the area, by holding your receipt up to yet another scanner next to an electronic gate.

Long before that stage though, your blood pressure has reached danger level, because once you have scanned an item and it has gone through the rubber curtain, you can only see it if you stop what you are doing and peer around a large metal hood. The same goes for the customer facing you, on the other side of ‘your’ scanner. Both yours and their items are separated on the communal conveyor belt by a ten centimeter high divider and it is just not high enough! By the time all the items have piled up at the end of the conveyor belt, they are spilling over into each other’s side.

You and your ‘opponent’ inevitably end up in a feverish race to finish and get to the end of the conveyor belt first - but if you fumble an item, a beeper and flashing light goes off on the scanner, which means having to wait for an assistant to come and fiddle about with a key and reset it! Grrr… This only happens to you of course, never the other person (!) which means that they are out of sight and bagging their groceries before you are finished - leaving you frantically hoping they don’t pack up any of your stuff along with their own!

This happened to me only once. A packet of teabags I had scanned and paid for was gone from the end of the conveyor belt when I got there and nobody pinches my tea! I complained to the manager and I probably wasn’t the only one, because since then there have been two frazzled assistants on duty at the end of five double conveyor belts, rushing frantically backwards and forwards trying to separate and stack each customer’s purchases as they arrive.

Of course with two stackers replacing ten cashiers the supermarket is making a saving, which might help keep prices down a bit. So why am I secretly glad that the three other supermarkets in the area are still using ‘old fashioned’ cash registers? Well, shuffling along in a queue is much better for the old blood pressure and I don’t get that awful knot in the pit of my stomach. There is also the chance of a bit of conversation with other customers, whereas the only person who ever talks to me in the self-service supermarket is me (!) cursing under my breath from the moment I set foot in the place, till the moment I get to the electronic exit gate - and find I’ve packed my bar coded receipt at the bottom of the shopping bag!.... Howl!!

OMEGA OH MY!

Gleefully, I rub my hands and hover over the lentil soup pan like a witch over a cauldron. Oh this is going to be great! A huge pan of Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, bubbling away - and almost ready to reboot my ageing brain, into a quick firing neuronal miracle!

I read somewhere that Omega 3 and 6 are supposed to be good for the brain but until recently assumed they were only found in oily fish – which apparently it is not advisable to consume too much of, because of its mercury content. Now I have never eaten lentils in my life and don’t even know how I discovered that this particular foodstuff is rich in Omega fatty acids but apparently it is and I am thrilled (!) because I like vegetable soup.

One large carrot and onion, one diced potato and two vegetable bullion blocks have all been added to the mix and it is now three quarters of an hour later and my brain food is ready to taste! It is very green. All the other ingredients seem to have dissolved. Carefully, I ladle out a dishful and view it thoughtfully. It looks like dark green sludge – not aesthetically pleasing but it smells good – and what wonders it will perform! Eagerly I dip my spoon and raise it to my lips. Eyes closed – taste – savour – swallow…. not bad at all! I can almost feel those incumbent grey cells stirring….

Two dishes later and I contemplate another. It tastes all right but it is very filling… in fact, on second thoughts I decide not to eat a third dish. The other two are settling on my stomach rather like a block of cement. I also feel very thirsty and guzzle two glasses of water.

Another half hour has past and I am now feeling slightly queasy… Lord, I hope this stuff works quickly! I try a little brain exercise test: one times twelve is twelve…gurgle …, two times twelve is…burp… Ow! Really churning now. With some dismay, I glance over at the soup pan. It still contains enough green sludge for at least another ten meals…. Oh dear, a word to the wise, if you are thinking of making lentil soup, use a small pan!
Oh well, life is nothing if not suprising… at least I learned something new today....groan..

A MOTH THAT MATTERS

Insects are not a life force I usually think much about, except when swatting a pesky fly or trying to eradicate a plague of ants from the larder. But since last night, after transferring a particularly large moth from the kitchen ceiling into a glass and releasing it into the night, I have been thinking about some particular kinds of insects a lot - and wondering where on earth they are…!

It has suddenly dawned on me that I have not seen a wasp for at least eight years. There was a time that it was impossible to sit in the garden or on a restaurant terrace during summertime, without being besieged by aggressive, black and yellow would-be assassins. So where are they now? Is it just my own city corner of the planet that they (seem to) have disappeared from? Not that I miss them (!) having been chased and painfully stung by them on a number of occasions – but where are they all?

Come to think of it, I have not seen a sparrow for years either. I can remember a time when flocks of sparrows would swoop down into my garden in Amsterdam at least twice a day during the 1990s. Then almost overnight or so it seemed, they stopped coming and were replaced by blackbirds and magpies. I have recently moved to another major city but it is the same story here too.

Did/do sparrows eat wasps? Has the disappearance of one caused the disappearance of the other? And what about bees? I know that the world is mystified by the disappearance of whole hives of bees and that this phenomenon presents a potentially catastrophic problem for agriculture: i.e., no bees, no pollination. Bats too, seem to be disappearing in their millions… Perhaps all the communication satellites circling our globe are disrupting bats’ sonar (?) It is all very strange…

As ‘my’ moth flew away last night, I watched her go and worried. A quadrangle of newly renovated flats across the way lit up the surrounding area with dozens of gallery lights - and to a little disorientated moth it must have looked like the moon. Shivering, even though the night was warm, I hoped fervently that she would turn and fly the other way, towards the darkened park, with its many bushes and trees and sleeping flowers…. I hoped she would hear the call of her own kind and meet a friend and thoroughly enjoy her short life!

I have never hoped for anything for a moth before, except perhaps (for both of us) that it not fly into my hair (!) but as I sit and gaze out of my window today, onto a predominance of concrete technology and bustling humanity – the survival and happiness of that one small lost moth, suddenly seems like one of the most important things in the world.

NO MEAN FEET!

Waiting for the tram yesterday morning I was struck by the diversely colourful attire of the female commuters - but what grabbed my attention the most, were not the clothes - but the ladies feet! Female toenails to be exact, in all shapes, sizes and colours, peeping out from all manner and style of sandals.

Standing between two women I recognised as neighbours from my street, my eyes were riveted by the sight of our toes. My own honey yellow offerings twinkled up at me from between red cherry to the left and deep purple plum to the right and in the ten minutes we waited for the tram, we were joined by orange fizz, green apple, black liquorice, juicy blueberry and raspberry pink!

Fascinated and amused, I nudged both neighbours - who were chattering in Dutch behind my bent head - to take a look at the multicoloured phenomenon below. Glancing down and chuckling briefly, they were about to resume their conversation when I injected an item of my own.
‘The sight of all these toes is making my mouth water!’
The neighbour on the left looked blank but the one on the right smiled nervously and shifted slightly away. Then the tram arrived and we all piled in and got separated.

As we trundled along, I mused on that ‘look’. I get this a lot in the Netherlands. Even after all the years I’ve lived here the language can still stump me. It’s no good just insinuating something the way you would in English and expect the subtlety of your wit to be understood. In Dutch you must explain yourself properly and I suddenly realised that what I should have said was: ‘The nail varnishes all have names of fruits and the thought of them is making my mouth water.’ Which if you’ve got to explain it that much has killed the whole point of saying it in the first place and it wasn’t what I meant anyway! Darn it! So now by the time the sun goes down, everyone in our street will think I’ve got a foot fetish!

Oh well, let them think what they like, I couldn’t care less, because my mouth was still watering and it was the toenails themselves causing it - but only because the sight of all those shiny, round, multicoloured little objects had given me an overwhelming craving for a bag of M and M’s!

TRIPLE TAKE!

It has been a while since I have seen identical twins - but like the bus that never comes and then three turn up at once, last week I saw three sets of monozygotic children in two days! What are the odds? At first I thought there must be a convention in town, but not so. The four little girls and two toddler boys, were shopping with their families and playing in the park and obviously at home in the area.

What fascinated me the most though, was not so much the succession of three sets of identical twin facial features – unexpected and lovely as they all were - but the fact that in this modern day and age, with its emphasis on individuality and freedom of expression, none of the children were identically dressed. Not even colour co-ordinated!

How different western society is now from the early nineteen-twenties, when my grandmother always dressed my mother and aunt - who are twins - and another aunt, just twelve months older, in identical outfits. From their underwear right up to their bonnets, coats and little white gloves, they were always dressed exactly the same - and woe betide them if they ever mismatched themselves!

Everywhere they went they were stopped and poked and exclaimed over and pinched on the cheeks - and hated it! But never more so than when all three were sitting in their identical Sunday outfits on a park bench one day, and a little lad of about seven, stopped transfixed before them.
‘Mam! Mam! Ecstatic and wild eyed with excitement he leaped up and down, choking on his aniseed ball.
‘Mam! Maaam! Hurry! C’mon, quick! Loook, look what I’ve found! Giblets!’*

(* For the non culinary - the gizzard and visceral organs of a fowl - bleugh!)

TEETHING PAINS

An elderly neighbour of mine is having difficulties with her dentures. Every time she laughs, they drop out of her mouth, which makes her laugh even more and sets the rest of us off, putting the entire floor in danger of being littered with false teeth!
Fortunately it is a predicament I have been able to avoid up until now – not having any dentures - but the whole situation puts me in mind of an event in early childhood that traumatized the living daylights out of me and preordained me never to become a dentist!

When I was about three, a neighbour of ours, a certain Mrs. R., who for some strange reason I had renamed Mrs. Football, was feeling poorly - and so mother and I stopped by on our way to the shops, to see if there was anything we could fetch for her. I remember tiptoeing after mother into a strange bedroom - and almost fainting with horror at the sight of the usually quite pretty Mrs. Football, with her mouth all sunken in - and her teeth and gums and the whole roof of her mouth in a glass beside her bed! It was beyond my infantile comprehension. She must be in agony!
But why wasn’t mother screaming as loudly as me and rushing me out of there?! Why was she pocketing Mrs. Football’s shopping list and picking me up and hanging me over the bed to kiss the poor suffering lady farewell…..oh no, no....help..help!

The gaping, sunken mouth slobbered over my cheek and… the rest is lost within the black and bottomless depths of a part of my psyche that is still three years old and getting dragged back across the road to change her ‘disgusting, wet knickers’ and have a cold wet cloth slapped on the back of her neck…

Toothless people don’t scare me anymore now of course – but if I ever have to give up what natural teeth I have left, I vow - on the memory of poor Mrs. Football - that I will never, never, never let my young grandchildren see me without my dentures in! Although of course, they are growing up in a completely different world to the one I grew up in and might think I look hilarious (?!) Still, it would probably be better not to chance it – there is after all a chronic shortage of dentists nowadays…

A TRUE STORY

Once upon a time, an elderly lady decided to start a blog. Every article she wrote was an original, true depiction of an event and/or circumstance relating to her own life and devoid of any kind of malicious intent. Confined often to her house by ill health the elderly lady was pleased to have a new hobby and decided to share her new blog with the world by submitting it to various online mediums to attract more traffic and make online friends.

Everything went well and having successfully submitted her happy little blog to various established and excellent blog directories the elderly lady decided to entrust it once more to a relatively new up and coming venue, of apparent good reputation. The venue was pleased to accept the elderly lady’s blog – they said so in a welcoming email - and both parties were happy. Unfortunately for the elderly lady, not long after she had installed the venue’s widget to her blog, she accidentally deleted it again. Alarmed by this the elderly lady immediately typed the password given to her by the venue, into the ‘members’ section of the venue’s website, to get another widget - but the members section didn’t work. Instead, there was a message saying that the members section was being repaired and would be ready on a date that was already long past (?). Confused the elderly lady then emailed the venue’s ‘support’ forum at an email address supplied in their welcoming email, to ask them what to do. The elderly lady’s email came back as undeliverable and stating that the delivery service had given up trying.

Days later and still unable to login with the password the venue had sent to her the elderly lady decided to request that the venue delete her blog from their website - and sent a polite message to that effect, to the venue’s ‘administration’ and ‘customer service’ email addresses, as set out in their TOA. These emails also came back within 48 hours as undeliverable.

Determined not to give up the elderly lady then discovered a ‘member support forum’ under a different name, on the venue’s site. After being requested to think up and enter another username and password to register for this forum the elderly lady was eventually able to place a question asking why none of the contact emails worked. Her question was answered by a predated general announcement, that due to too much spam all the venue’s contact email accounts were not used anymore. Following the advice given to another member also asking (at an earlier date) how he could remove his blog from the venue's website the elderly lady contacted one of the online administrators in a private email on the forum and asked politely - using words like ‘please’ and ‘with respect’ and ‘at your earliest convenience’, that her blog be removed from the venue. Within 24 hours the elderly lady received a copy of her own polite email back again, with a short one line announcement underneath it saying that her blog had been removed from the venue and not to try submitting it again. (No comment...!)

A couple of days later the elderly lady went online and typed the title name of her blog into her browser to see where it was in two major search engines. Happily the elderly lady’s blog was depicted on page one in both search engines, in no less than three different positions (places). Imagine then her surprise, to see that one of those positions was a ‘black listing’, by the same venue that had tersely agreed to delete her blog - announcing that they had removed the elderly lady’s blog for being an ‘inappropriate blog' and following this announcement with a list of criteria pertaining to what constitutes an inappropriate blog: i.e., junk blogs, ones containing pornographic and racial content, profanity, homophobia, plagiarized material, hacking.. etc…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm..... a big dose of ‘sour grapes’ on the part of the venue? A moot point anyway - because lets face it, if 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' , then 'the quality of the blog is in its content' - and truth will always out!

BAD SMELL

There is an awful ‘pong’ hanging over our part of the city.
It has been growing in intensity all day long and there is a distinct yellow tinge to the atmosphere.

It is a mysterious odour, quite unlike the usual 'niff' that wafts occasionally over our suburbs, from the vehicle choked city center. This is obviously much more serious and neighbours gather in consternation, clutching their noses. Blame is soon directed at the bustling seaport of Rotterdam, situated ‘half an hour down south’, with its major league industry terrains and warehouses.

Wad de yer dink dat stink is?
Don’t doe.
Its cubbing over from Dotterdam harbour.
D’yer dink zo?
Smells like sulphur…’n smoke!
Sloke? Oh doe! Not sloke!
Anudder warehouse or container on fire, or mebbe a ship?
A ship? Hope not, dat’ll go up like a bum!
Bum?
Yeah...you doe, BOOM!

We frown and choke and hurry home to slam windows and bring in washing.
There are no birds in the trees and no breeze disturbs the heavy, yellowish air.
My eyes are smarting and I hurry back with a neighbour to her house to turn on the local television channel. There is no mention of anything amiss and so we phone the local fire station and the council in search of an explanation. Our wheezing anxiety is met with assurances that 'dere is nudding to worry about’ – which of course means that there is.

The fetid air is with us all day and well into the evening and impossible to keep out of our homes. Like many others, I gasp and choke my way through dinner and divert myself with thinking back to the past - and the years I lived in the farming Dutch countryside, with its continuous stench of bovine excrement….(ugh…). I can honestly say with hand on heart, that given the choice between an occasional dose of burning sulphur and a daily infusion of stinking cow poo…...dere’s doe contest!

STRICTLY FOR THE BIRDS?

Birds of a feather are all of a dither! A recent television program revealed a male osprey flying back to the nest with his prey and proceeding to tear strips of it and feed them to his young. So what’s wrong with that? Well, that’s what I thought but the commentator almost fell out of his tree! This is obviously big news. Evolution gone haywire.

Apparently male ospreys just don’t do that sort of thing. His job is strictly to bring back the prey, dump it, screech at the wife how wonderful he is - and then fly off and hunt for more.
In her turn, Mrs. O. will screech back at him that he’s nothing special, fluff herself up a bit and proceed to stuff bits of fish down her children’s monstrous throats. And now here she is, this poor creature, all ruffled and perplexed and out of a job! Cast aside like last year’s feather duster.

I strongly suspect the hand of human technology - as in the human birth control pill - in this evolutionary quandary. In my opinion ‘the pill’ has finally polluted the ground water to the extent that the evolutionary perfected Mr. Osprey, has been tipped over the edge into his feminine side!

This is just the beginning. Mark my words. I would not be at all surprised if one day all male birds are behaving like Mr. O. - and from there, it is just a short evolutionary step to male birds with moobs*.

In fact that future scenario might not even be ‘strictly for the birds’. As ground water everywhere becomes even more contaminated with estrogen, it might be that eventually all species will become androgynous …? Caw! (I mean Cor!) The mind boggles....

Think I’ll leave further discussion on that topic to the experts.
I’m off to feed the ducks.... and drakes.

* male boobs.

BROWBEATEN BEAUTY

The shop was closing and everyone was impatient to go home but as I hovered over the make-up counter, I was transported briefly back to the sixties. Ah…the ‘groovy’ sixties and we - the ‘fab’ lasses - with our pale pink bee-stung lips, pancake foundation and Cathy McGowan fringes hanging over permanently charcoaled rimmed eyes!

Fond memories…and being a teenager during that era, I still feel naked if I venture out without make-up, even though these days it is just a touch of powder, soft red lipstick and a light grey eyebrow pencil. It was an eyebrow pencil that I wanted to buy and as the shop assistant began pointedly closing the door, I made my purchase and hurried apologetically out.

Seven o’clock next morning and I was up and raring to go! I had been invited out for the day and after squinting into the mirror and skillfully working away the ravages of time, I was pleased with the result and confident to face the world.
Surprisingly, even the rush hour commuters seemed cheerful that morning, nodding and smiling at me and at each other and offering me a seat. The ticket inspector too was in rare good form, winking as he clipped my ticket and whistling and grinning his way through the packed compartment. I don’t think I have ever had such a pleasant train journey and the hour it took seemed no time at all.

Stepping out at my destination I found a bench and waited. I was being met and had a couple of minutes to tidy my appearance. The compact mirror showed everything still in place, right up from my soft red lips and lightly powdered cheeks to my jade green eyebrows.
My what…?! Uncomprehending, I fumbled in my bag for the new eyebrow pencil… and there it was. Jade green! I had picked up the wrong colour and had not even noticed, in that awful neon lighting and in my rush to get out of the shop. Not only that but with no window in my bathroom and only another small neon to see by, grey and green looked the same there too - aagghh!

Oh the horror…. all those people on the train grinning - and me thinking it was because of my infectious cheery charm - and all the time it was because they thought I was some dingbat pensioner let loose with a crayon box!
Frantically, I spat on a tissue. My ride was sweeping up to the station and with one last despairing glance at my newly ‘naked’ eyes, I decided that the lipstick was too much by itself and wiped that away as well - along with my very last drop of self-confidence.....!

‘Hi Mam!” My daughter’s greeting was warm and cheery and we planted kisses on each other’s cheeks.
Stepping backwards she smiled appreciatively ‘…and what have you been doing to yourself? You look different - sort of fresh and nice – and no, not nice, you look absolutely great!’

Ah bless her. XXXXXX!

MORE WIDGET WOE!

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Something is happening...

BE BACK IN A JIFFY...

Oh 'eck, something's gone wrong again. Have just claimed my blog at Technorati and everything went like a dream (which should have warned me!) and then I came to the part that offered me a wonderful new widget, showing rank, photo, links, tag cloud etc., and so I edited and saved my choices and copied the code - and tried to place it in the sidebar with an Add an Element Javascript thingy - but my lovely new widget didn't appear. So I've removed the Javascript sidebar Element I pasted it into - and am now wondering if I am supposed to insert the widget code into the actual HTML template....and if so, where exactly?

Oh lord, off we go again! Looks as though I'll be trawling all of Technorati's FAQ pages, as well as posting SOS's out all over the web for the rest of the day..HELP!..

If there is one thing I've learned though since starting this blog, it is that preparation is nine tenths of success, so I've put the kettle on for a large pot of very strong tanin and am about to nip out and stock up on brain food: i.e., chocolate (!) - what else?! See ya!

DOWNLOAD DANGER!

‘Join a social networking site and be welcomed by hundreds – nay thousands - of likeminded sharing folk, all wanting to link hands around the world with you and line up in droves to visit your website/blog.’ Or words to that effect.

Lovely! Should be easy. Lets see… Click the ‘sign up now’ bar.
Choose a Username: *****
Fill in email: Done.
Think of a password: ***** Confirm password. *****.
Submit.
‘This program can potentially harm your computer’.
Oh…er…shall I go on…? A little wary but all right – carry on.
‘Click to add tags to your toolbar’.
Toolbar? I thought I was going to be presented with a bit of code to copy and paste a cute little button onto my sidebar? Shall I go on? … Might as well - have come this far.
O.K. click on ‘Add Tags’. A box appears with instructions to click ‘Open’.
Computer whines loudly! What’s happening? The screen is now showing my hard disc…(I think) and good lord (!) it wants me to download 70 killer(?)bites of software?
What on earth for? All I want to do is join a little club of happy people and play virtual ‘pat-a-cake-pat-a-cake’ and it’s looking more like Geri’s going to ‘atishoo-atishoo’ and fall down on her virtual arse!
No no no, this is not what I expected.
Click out of this social networking site - and forget it!
Read email instead.
Ten minutes later…what’s this? An email from the social networking site, is beckoning me with subliminal chanting to finish the process of entering their golden portal.
Shall I? Shan’t I? Oh g’waan! Stop being a dithering old mardy cat. Take a chance – walk on the wild side! Pull on the crampons and dig in the axe!
O.K. I click on a blue link in the email.
A box appears. Do I want to ‘Run’ or ‘Save’? Er…Run, I think – but what's this bit underneath? A red shield announcing that this software program has no license?
Oh no, I am not going on. This is too complicated. Perhaps this is a hack site, masquerading as the real one and if I let it in it will spam my computer, molest googlebot, corrupt antivirus and assimilate what’s left of my mind!
Quick! Click on ‘cancel’ and close the site. Go back and delete the email. Go to start/ settings/control panel, to remove the social networking site – if it got that far. Ah good, it didn’t. Seems I stopped it just in time. Phew! So much for social networking clubs!

Perhaps I should try a senior citizen’s blogging forum instead? One with lots of old folks sitting around farting and chewing the fat. Armchair politics. Sex after sixty. The pros and cons of complete body makeovers. Sounds good!
Now lets see… Click into Forum Homepage…choose a Username… and fight off that little computer gremlin called Deja Vu….

SLUGGED!

I cannot kill a slug. Once by accident, I rode over a particularly fat and juicy one that squelched out into a revolting gooey mess all over the front tyre of my bike and for the life of me and I don’t know why, I felt like a cold blooded killer! Cold and green, like the slug’s remains.

I know it is probably downright loony to feel guilty about committing slugicide - but I can’t help it. Just moments before that particular slug ended up on my tyre, it had been a slug someone. A slug of substance, with an evolutionary line dating back to primeval crud. A slug with family and connections all over the world. In fact at my last 'gound floor flat with garden out back', most of its relations seemed to live there, in the garden - demolishing plants and wolfing the cats’ food and leaving slimey trails – but if you are a slug, it’s what you do. It’s your job.

So, to atone for my earlier crime, I became a slug crusader. You have probably noticed that touching a slug will cause it to draw in its little antlers and curl up into a sticky, gungy lump and so every time I found one, I would pick it up with newspaper, to prevent ten minutes of yukky finger dee-slime-ing…! Then, after pottering around the garden and collecting a plant pot full of slugs, I would re-house them to the long grass by the canal at the end of the road. A harmless pastime that amused the local kids, causing them to trail after me chanting:
‘Slugs! Slugs! Eeouw, slugs!’
Yes indeed, I was and on occasion still am - ‘Slug Woman’!!
I even wrote a poem about slugs once:

Having no perception of up and down,
Of space and distance and light,
When the rock was moved,
The slug rolled out
And promptly died of fright!

Unless of course they get ‘slugged’ by a bike first, then they get put on a blog…. ‘A blogged slug, a slogged blug’ – say that fast! Oops. Now there’s spit all over the computer screen. Ah but that’s pretty! Lots of rainbow lights shining through the droplets…wonderful! Go on, try it…
Uhhhhh - I must get a life…

ONE DROP TOO MANY

It was just another routine visit to the lung specialist.
‘Got a cold?’ He asked jocularly, whilst writing my usual inhaler prescription.
‘Just the same old sniff. You know, the one I've had for years.’
‘Ah yes.’ He beamed. ‘Anything else?’
‘No, except for a twinge in my left temple. Would aspirin help do you think? Can’t lay on that side without it hurting.’
‘Really?’ He was bolt upright now. ‘You’d better see the internal medical specialist.’

3 months later:
‘Pain in the left temple is it?’ Asks the IMS. ‘You had better have a C.T. scan. Anything else troubling you?’
‘Well… I have had a dodgy stomach for a couple of years now.’
‘Really? Better have a colonoscopy as well then.’
‘Huh?’
‘Just to be on the safe side.’

1 month later:
‘The results of the colonoscopy are fine,' chirps the IMS and I sigh with relief...
'However the C.T. scan results are not good. The left sinuses are very narrow and distorted and bunged up. I’ll give you a letter for an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist.

2 months later:
The ENT specialist is convinced I am someone else entirely and is cross when I insist I am not! His computer is not even turned on and he huffily ignores the IMS’s written request to diagnose my C.T. scan. Instead, he shines a light up my right nostril from about a meter away and tells me I have hay fever.
‘Hay fever? In one side of my nose?’ I ask. ‘And besides doctor, you are looking up the wrong nostril.’
Crossly, he shines the light up the other nostril and tells me I am a typical hyperactive English person (!) Grrr…So I ask if he is referring to my Anglo/Celtic character - which he does not know - or to some mysterious sinus anomaly, unique to Brits in general? Ha! However the man couldn’t care less and dismisses me with a prescription for one small bottle of nose spray, with instructions to squirt it up both nostrils for the rest of my life; ‘because we don’t want to get polyps now do we?’ Fuming, I am back out in the corridor within five minutes, feeling as though I have just left the Twilight Zone!

By now another six months have passed and I return to the lung specialist – and tell him all! Frowning mightily, he downloads my C.T. scan, poo-poos the ENT specialist’s nose spray and prescribes new nose drops he nicknames ‘bombs’. Apparently these are ampules of a burning substance that should chemically ‘blow everything wide open’ and if that doesn’t work, I will need an operation. Though he hastens to reassure me that another ENT specialist will perform it. Too right mate!

Back home again, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Within the last six months, I have had my head stuck in a radioactive ‘oven’; had a 2 meter hose with a camera and lamp on the end of it shoved up my backside; been neglected and insulted by someone I went to in good faith; and am now on my knees with my head on the floor, squirting a ‘burning bomb’ up my left nostril! Not only that but I have exceeded my medical insurance ‘own risk’ for 2008 – and that ENT specialist got nearly half of it!

And the twinge in my left temple that started it all? Oh that’s still there – complete with a brand new nervous tic in the left eyelid....bah!
Wish I'd just taken that aspirin.........tic...

RUBBISH!

Last night after nine o’clock, I put my wheelie bin out for the rubbish collectors. It was the simplest of tasks to trundle the bin out from behind the front wall and park it at the street curb for early morning collection. Not a muscle twisting task and literally 'no sweat'!

This routine exercise would not normally be a topic I’d think of mentioning but it contrasts so radically with the plight of another elderly person I read about recently, that I feel compelled to rant! An online news article dated four days ago, tells of how an 80-year-old British lady is forced to drag her wheelie bin over half a mile down a steep hill to have it emptied – while paying over 2,000 British pounds a year in council tax!

The article's photographs have to be seen to be believed (!) and hence this brain-struggle on my part, with internet/computer technology, to learn how to link to it from here…

Fingers crossed. O.K… deep breath… Would you believe it, my mouth is actually dry?! Anyway here goes. Frail pensioner must drag wheelie bin half a mile.

Has it worked? I think it has... Phew! O.K. folks - read and fume! Unless of course your own rubbish disposal plight is even worse than this one - and that might be the case if you live in Naples. Or have they solved it? But that's another link... hang on....

No, on second thoughts I couldn't stand the strain! I'm off to make a cuppa tea to loosen my tongue from the roof of my mouth...