CAMERA TRICKS

There should be a breathtaking, winter wonderland photograph of my latest walk in the park, set right here, in the middle of this page…. however, there obviously isn’t… mutter.

Instead, my recently acquired, first ever digital camera, kindly given to me by my son-in-law, is informing me that it is full to bursting (with Christmas pics) which means that all the lovely New Years photo’s I took, depicting silver white Jack Frosted trees; dogs rolling delightedly on icy white grass; people clutching for dear life onto lampposts and ducks slipping and sliding comically on frozen ponds, were not recorded at all!

Technology is still taunting me…

Ah… there appears to be a drawing of a dustbin, situated bottom left on the camera screen. So I’m assuming that’s where the ‘old’ photographs of feasting family members must be thrown…Have fortunately recently mastered camera to computer downloading or uploading (?) so Christmas 2008 is preserved for posterity – but had not realized you also have to remove the pictures from the camera afterwards, to stop it getting ‘full’. Well, well. I thought they just sort of ‘dissipated’ into some eternal memory bank, or something… but apparently not.

Right…so how to proceed? Geri’s usual m.o. when faced with a new technological challenge is to ignore the incomprehensible, geek talk ‘instructions’ and press every button in sight. And when that doesn’t work, mutter unutterable words and weep with frustration!

However this year, things will be different. Think first and then act is my new resolution. So have laid the camera carefully down, put the kettle on for a nice hot cuppa and am about to rummage for brain food: - i.e., chocolate (!).

Hey-ho, off we go then… slurp, chomp, press, click… this should only take me about a week to learn. And then of course I shall have to go and take more photographs - but by the look of it the frost will still be here! Brrr...!

Wrap up warm everyone! Unless of course you live in a hot climate, then that would be just plain daft....

DOCTOR WHO, WHAT, WHERE?

What is going on across the road I wonder…?

Awoken abruptly from restless slumber at 7.30 a.m., to the jarring thunder of heavy trucks beeping backwards and forwards just meters from my windows – and then just as suddenly they were gone again - and there it is.
What is it?

But as the sky lightens, all is revealed. It is the Time Lord himself, in his flying loo! Quite obviously the Tardis is in for a refit - and this is the good Doctor’s brilliant compromise: A pre Christmas Day shopping visit to The Netherlands, in a flying Water Closet (in ‘loo’ of his planned appearance on British Christmas Day prime time telly! Ha ha)!
Makes sense to moi. But then, I’m on strong medication.

On second thoughts, that heap of dirt just visible next to the object, could well be the first tentative step by Dutch authorities to construct The Neth’s first mountain… Wow!
Dykes we have - ahem, in all shapes and sizes – but no mountains – and this W.C. cubicle is intended to accommodate the floods of tourists, shortly to ascend and plant flags on this newest world wonder!

Oh Glory. I could open a snack bar hatch in my panoramic window – and become famous for green sludge lentil Omega Brain Revitalizing soup! There’s still a batch in the freezer, left over from July: (Ref. posting July 1, 2008. 'Omega Oh My!').

However – and more sobering - the sudden appearance of an army of workmen armed with spades and fluorescent orange coats, also suggests that the local ‘Bods That Be’, have finally decided to landscape the large muddy area between two recently renovated blocks of flats.
A week before Christmas? Ach! (Derisive dutch throat clearing sound).

Think I’ll crawl back into bed. You never know, the camera might have lied (still learning how to upload it) and this might just be another drug induced dream, from which I’ll awaken in an hour or two to the aroma of scrambled eggs, toast and coffee, prepared by Russell Crowe (or Johnny Depp), in a plastic pinny!

CRACKERS!

Well now everyone in the family is on the mend - it’s my turn!

That’s right folks, this is me, felled like a snapping twig and confined to bed from last Thursday, with pneumonia and three broken ribs! Caused, believe it or not - by coughing!!!!!!!

Have heard of ‘splitting your sides laughing’, but breaking your ribs coughing...? That's a new one on me. Mind you, it was and still is, a mighty powerful cough! Starting weakly at the bottom of the lungs and wheezing up with gathering force - with no respite to take breath - and ending in a rattling drawn out whoop, loud enough to shake windows from their panes and tiles from roofs. OWWW!
According to the lung specialist it is not uncommon to break ribs coughing and can even occur while sneezing…good grief!

Anyway, my diet of tomato soup, lemonade and ice lollies has now been added to with a combination of antibiotics, prednisolon, fluimucil, serotide, flixonase, paracetamol/codine and arthrotec (also a pain killer) and all of which I am very grateful and thankful for – but which is leaving me as high as a kite!

Don’t know which mischievous Christmas Elf popped the hat on during my nap – but I think it’s meant to cheer me up.

BAH - HUMBUG!!!

(No, don’t mean that. Very glad to still be here! Now pardon me while I blow me dose...)

CRANKY GRANNY

Phew..! That was scary – just met myself coming back on the train! Must have been me. I have been dashing and sleep walking hither and thither for the last few weeks (since returning from my Scottish holiday) lending a helping hand in a family (sickness) crisis. Have been returning home every 5 days or so, to check my mail and get a bit of sleep..zz.. before rushing off again.

As I mentioned to Steph of ‘the biopsy report’, who recently enquired as to ‘wherefore art I was’ (!) my main task has involved the night-shifts, caring for two little grandsons...YAWN.. and it seems that as soon as I have fed and changed the baby, rubbed Vick on his chest, sprayed salt solution up his tiny nostrils and settled the little chap down (for the umpteenth time between midnight and dawn) the 3 year old gets up needing a drink of water, a pee, a cuddle and a bit of a chat..(SCREAM!). Ah, I don't mean that. I could eat them up with a spoon really.

Seriously though, I have plumbed depths of energy and patience unplumbed for almost 40 years (since my youngest was a babe) and have battled the complexity of applying expensive, modern day elasticated paper nappies, to a tiny wriggling bottom - and having the fastening tags keep tearing off (!) Whatever was wrong with good old Terry towelling nappies(?)…. apart from having to dunk them in a bucket of cold water first, to rinse off that gooey, smelly, yellowy stuff and then having to boil, dry and air them…. Hmm. On second thoughts, I’ll master those tags!

And what about those modern day boxes of baby milk, designed to reduce Houdini to tears of frustration?! Apparently all you need to have, to open the lid, is strength, patience and double jointed index fingers and thumbs, pressing hard in sync’ at the back and front of the lid… and voila! Or in my case ‘#!!*?! It wont open’ (scream!) and reach for a knife….

But worst of all (and the stuff of which my granny nightmares are made) are those finger fumbling, technological baby appliances; such as child car seats; maxi-cosies; adjustable high-chairs; and folding pushchairs and prams - and all of them bristling with immovable levers, knobs and complicated strap fasteners, requiring the same kind of synchronized pressing, as the milk container. Only this time it is the sides of the clasp you have to press to release the fastening straps… grr.. And if you press one side out of sync’ with the other, the whole appliance gets stuck and won’t open (!) and the poor screaming baby is doomed to spend the rest of his/her days trapped in some unrelenting, brightly painted, musical, nursery rhyme singing appliance…sigh. Whatever happened to plain old buckles? How did (we) older generations manage without all this stuff?

Oh Lor’, as I said to Steph on ‘Highland Fling’ comments, I sound a right 'Moaning Minnie' now, don’t I, and I really don’t mean to be - but really, these last few (testing) weeks have set me thinking and I do wonder about the sanity of women in their sixties going off to that Italian fertility specialist for IVF...!!

Still, on the brighter side, all this baby-sitting activity has melted 5 kilos off my middle and I can actually zip and button my jeans again, without having to lay flat on the bed or floor, yippee!

Will be returning to my little charges tomorrow - but OOOOHHHH how blissfully I shall SLEEP in my own bed tonight!

HIGHLAND FLING!

Ah…less than 48 hours to go and the holiday feeling is almost upon me! Suitcase packed; passport and e-ticket in order; house tidy; spare key ready to bring to neighbour (for plant watering); contact details next to phone; etc.. etc..

O.K. and now like Geri’s esteemed ancestors, who pre-enacted their hunting strategies in red ochre on the walls of their caves, I plot my route methodically by scribbling it down in red ink on a bit of paper. Not as you may think, to pre savour the journey - but more as a precaution against getting hopelessly lost en route; if not at Schiphol/Amsterdam airport, then definitely at Gatwick/London, during transit, or Inverness airport car park.

I hate Gatwick. I have been told that it is not a large airport but I just cannot get it ordered in my mind. I'm never sure which terminal I have arrived in, let alone the one I am supposed to fly from. So getting from South to North terminal (or vice-versa) on the tube-train, with only minutes to spare to catch a connecting domestic flight, is a heart stopping nightmare… !

But this time I am cannily prepared and determined to get to my destination in one piece, complete with luggage (do you hear that BA!?).
Travel plus waiting and transfer times = a 10 hour journey from the completely flat (nether) lands of Holland, to a mountaintop in Scotland. OK, so now I have disclosed my holiday destination, hopefully it will not be jinxed – again! (ref': Holiday Curse, 14/07/08)

Plan: Lock front door and trundle suitcase, handbag and self onto tram - train - 1st plane - tube train - second plane – mountain jeep.
Note: Fill handbag with brain food: i.e., chocolate of all varieties, to help with thinking and concentration during journey.

Of course the biggest dragon on this journey for me, is that self-service check-in machine at Amsterdam airport…(gulp…shudder…). I can never work out which buttons to press and it always tells me it can’t find my booking and doesn’t recognise my passport etc.. So knowing the instant panic I shall feel at the sight of the thing, I plan to skip the hyperventilation stage - and immediately clamp myself around the knees of one of those young uniformed attendants and querulously beg her to ‘please, oh please, please, please check me in!’ (It worked last time, heh-heh..).

OK folks, that’s yours truely done for a while then! No television, computer, cell-phone, ipod. I’m off to look at wild birds, wee beasties and men in kilts; yodel from the mountaintops and try and get some fantastic photos. Probably be misty all the time I am there… no, no, be optimistic Geri. This time you will not forget to take your camera; get into any embarrassing senile situations, cause any international incidents, get lost or break any bones!

T.t.f.n. everyone. Enjoy your own holidays - and be safe xxx !

CHIP AHOY!

Wealthy Mexicans who are terrified of being kidnapped, are having themselves implanted with GPS chips…

Well I think it is a brilliant idea! We should all do it. After all, we get it done to our pets, so why not to ourselves? Not that most of us will ever get kidnapped – but there are other dangers, like walking under a ladder and getting a bucket on your head and forgetting who you are… Or getting shipwrecked and stranded on a desert island – and then just think how comforting it would be to know that whilst desperately stabbing at fish in a rock pool - with that pointy bit on your belt buckle - you are merrily ‘blipping’ away to some overhead satellite and will soon be found! (Hopefully not by pirates…)

The obvious problem though is where to go to get chipped? As far as I know, doctors in the Netherlands do not (yet) chip people. Euthanasia yes – but no chipping. So that would mean nipping off to Mexico and that’s too far – so off to the vet's it is then!

Hang on though… in which part of the anatomy would this chip be inserted…? The back of animals’ necks may be suitable for them but there is no extra skin to get hold of on mine. The upper thigh strikes me as a suitable place; however, these chip thingies are not magnetic are they? That would make no sense at all but you never know, technology can be tricky - and I would rather not find out when it is too late and I am 'stuck' to some doddery old chipped chap on the tram (‘chipped chap on the tram'… crikey, don’t say that fast with a mouth full of biscuit! Hang on, while I wipe the screen...).

Wait a minute though, I am not above a bit of doddering myself, so if this fellow and I were stuck on each other through no fault of our own (heh-heh) we could dodder off together and have a bit of fun - and when we were tired of each other (or just tired) we could sit down and ‘blip’ - and wait for our (worried) kids to drive out and find us and take us home!
(Just when did I get so decadent and daft...?)

Anyway, here it is: Wealthy Mexicans getting chipped.

HOUSE GHOST

Practically everyone in our family seems to have a ‘house ghost’ of the common-or-garden variety: i.e., opening doors and blowing draughts down your neck - just when you’ve got comfy in front of the telly; hiding your specs, shoes, door keys; souring the milk and causing the tap to drip in the middle of the night…etc. But all of this is minor stuff compared to the antics of my auntie’s house spook...

Eons ago, whilst still a teenager, I was visiting my aunt when she suddenly exclaimed that her cup of tea had disappeared. Thinking that she might have walked into the kitchen with it, we searched there and even checked the cupboards to make sure she hadn’t absentmindedly finished the tea and rinsed the cup and saucer and put them away... but no luck.

‘Perhaps you took your cuppa up the garden with you when we went to admire the runner beans’, I ventured.
And so we searched the whole garden and even looked in the dustbin, thinking that she might have drank the tea and (again) absentmindedly thrown the empty cup and saucer away - but all to no avail. Cup, contents and saucer were gone - apparently vanished into a parallel universe(!)

A few years later, after I had moved to The Netherlands, a Dutch relative by marriage, went to England on business for a few days and stayed with my aunt, in her big old spooky house. But on returning home, he told me he would never stay there again!

Me: Oh, why on earth not?

Him: Well…on the first night, I was almost asleep when I heard the coins I’d put on the dressing table being moved. Not toppling over, but being methodically moved- you know - one by one… I thought it might be a mouse…

Me: Haha! A mathematical mouse? Ahem. Sorry, what did you do?

Him: I put the light on - but there was nothing there. Then on the second night, I woke up suddenly to hear the bedroom door handle rattling, so I leaped out of bed and rushed over and grabbed the handle and pulled, but the door wouldn’t budge. It felt as if someone was holding it, so I gave it a big yank and there was suddenly no resistance and I rushed out onto the landing – but there was no one there!

Me: A suction draught perhaps? From open windows..?

Him: There weren’t any windows open… But then on the third night, I was laying in bed listening to your auntie snoring when I heard the stairs creaking, one by one, from top to bottom… (shiver).

Me: Well perhaps Auntie was sleep walking?

Him: No. The snores were coming from her room. I checked. But when I was back in bed the creaking started again and there was a rustling noise like someone going through the coat pockets in the hallway downstairs. So I rushed downstairs to look and even called out – but once again, there was no one and nothing there....

Me: More mice…. perhaps? (Said without conviction).

Him: (Pale faced by now). No. Then on the fourth and last night, after I’d put the light out in my room, I saw a shadowy figure standing by the window (!) but when I put the light on again, it wasn’t there. Might have been the fall of the curtain…but I…er… (sheepishly) left the light on all night.....

Me: (Even paler). Oo-er….Did you tell my aunt all this?

Him: Yes, just before I left.

Me: And….?

Him: Well she didn’t laugh at me or anything, in fact she was seriously interested, staring intently at my face all the time - although by the time I had finished I was sure she was mocking me!

Me: Why?

Him: Well, after telling her all that - and feeling like a right fool, all she said was:
'Tell me my dear - was that shadowy figure by any chance carrying a cup of tea?’

A, E, I, O, U

Fnlly gt th cmpter fxd - nd nw th kybrd's 'n th blnk!

S**m t hv lst th vwls..... Hd thm lst wk, bt tht ws bfr tkng th lttrs 'ff t' cln th d*rn thng...

Frst th m**s* f'll t bts - 'nd ' cldn't pt 't bck tgthr gn. Ws 2 wks wtht hlp, bt hpply, Sn-n-lw fnlly fxd 't... bt nw ths.......

Whr.. r.. my..vwls?!!

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!