Teetering on the edge

Ann's mother Olive loved that attraction in an amusement arcade where you roll pennies down a ramp and they build up close to a ledge until they provoke a fall and you collect your reward. 

I am still here, the lead penny on a trembling bridge of pennies jutting out , by some fluke over the abyss.  I don't really want to be. My mother and my grandmother died at 82 so that is something to look forward to.

I am obsessively recording the ons and the offs of the central heating system which I suspect is developing a malevolent intelligence.

Come the Spring I will get an engineer in to strong arm it into obeying me or face the consequences. 

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough...

Saturday 8th February and in my final year , I hope. I would like to see the sun though, but however warm the sun might be I don't really think it is going to work even briefly in bringing me back . I feel or sense that I am not going to have to do something , that the Earth will be hit by a passing asteroid  or some moronic politician will press a button and do the same job. I don't care. This blog is like a derelict school on a 1960's London bomb site I once wandered through. There are bits here and there that might mean something but overall its abandoned , empty and waiting final destruction. 'Swarm over death'

Still here....

But  down to my last Monkee. They started off with 4 and are down to 1. I think of them as a kind of alternative time scale to my life. I have returned to this fossil I have created to prod it  in order to give it  the appearance of life and maybe delay Google from expunging it entirely for a while longer.

Attended wedding at Crag y Nos on Valentines day. Woke oppressively hot. Got up. Put on dismally dimmed bathroom lights not to wake Ann. Great sultry gloom descended on me. Felt I was in an M R James short story.  Returned to bed.  Laid down but started upright as I saw the shape of a great head like in the Munch painting but with no facial features. My spine really did tingle and this occurred 4 or 5 times before I got to sleep. just before thatI did  I noticed the room was now cold.
I claim nothing for this encounter which may have been between me and  a couple of bottles of red  except that it was real.

Morris round about life number 3

I remember tales of Morris’s earlier lives and the one I liked was when Morris’s owner’s daughter was coming back on the school bus when she noticed their beloved pet mowed down in the gutter. Worse than that, those evil Gudsell boys, the ones who used the Church clock for target practice when their stupid parents thought fit to arm them with firearms, the ones that bent Anns Church warden pole with the brass cross on the top by throwing it about in Church and wrote obscene comments in the visitor’s register, those malevenant little sh..s were prodding the lifeless body of Morris with a stick like some dreadful re-enactment of Aslan’s torment. . The lifeless body was respectfully recovered in plastic bag and taken home by the girl and placed in the garage.
Later in the evening she returned to the garage and was like Lucy genuinely awestruck to meet Morris/Aslan nonchalently strolling back to the house for his evening meal.
Wrong big dead ginger cat.
That is why there are 4 cat graves at Morris’s house even though only three cats have ever lived there

Back but for how long?

I see it is 3 years since my last confession.
Well let me just start off back with the minimum of words.
Here is the cheese song from the recent twinning trip of Brecon to Gouesnou.

Ent

Spotted near Llangoed 11th november

Bird Shit

Here is a picture of me today sitting on a beach in Tenby. Yesterday I was looking at some photographs taken by my facebook friend Vikash among which was was his picture of a piece of bird shit on a wall which he entitled 'Guano'.
Here on the beach in Tenby I am trying to work out how I might comment on this picture that is to say I am actually thinking about Guano. Would you believe it that 10 seconds later a large dollop of the stuff landed on trousers from a passing gull. Of course I immediately bought a lottery ticket.

Vive la France

Just had a visit from the Breton town with which Brecon is twinned and our guest told us the following.

“the lady Mayoress (she came with them) … ..her father he is ill and she tell them if anything happen to Papa put him in the cold room until the weekend.”

Oh the humanity..

Today I left the house and crossed the road into the field opposite and began climbing up the side of a hill. For the next hour and twenty minutes I didn’t meet or see another human being . Here is a snap about 2/3rds up.



I remember in the sixties there was chap called Stan , who like the Rev Dr Donald Soper used to appear regularly at Tower Hill not far from the Tigers Head. Stan would loudly sing ‘Joy, Joy , my heart is full of Joy’ as if it really were and hand out Christian tracts to the unbelievers.
Not seeing another human for more than an hour gave me an inkling of old Stan’s ecstatic state. Last week on another walk I came across a house on the corner, in the village of ‘Three Cocks’. When I was 16 and came by bus from London to visit Ann you had to change buses at Cheltenham and finally get off at Three Cocks. The bus continued its long journey to Tenby. I was trying to find the right bus and asked one of the drivers wandering about the depot.. He called across to his mate “Hey Dai there’s a bloke here wants three cocks!” and no useful information was possible until they had both stopped laughing.
This house on the corner in Three Cocks had a skull and crossbones above the porch and written beneath it was ‘Go Away’ . Much better than a welcome mat I thought.

...and deflate

Once again I have slipped the surly bounds of obesity and am now well ensconced in the land of the ‘moderately overweight’ . Thus in the words of a group that may perhaps once have been known as ‘10 fluid ounces ‘
I'm not obese
So don’t forget it
It’s just a silly pie I am working through

www.insuranceage.com

From the Brokers Forum
Tue 13 Jan 2009 @ 19:33 I dont believe it... Post #1

Douglas Mcleod
Alan Johnston once said that I read more and more like Victor Meldrew - I fear he could be right.
This morning I went to get my eyes tested and by this afternoon I had received the following letter by email.

Dear Mr McLeod

Unfortunately, during the course of your recent appointment with me, I consider that the patient/practitioner relationship was irretrievably broken down and I felt unable to continue with that examination. Without mutual trust, it is impossible for me to fulfil my role as your optometrist.


Accordingly, therefore, I would suggest that it is in your best interests to seek your optometric care with another practitioner. I will be happy to forward copies of your records to any optometrist of your choice.



To which I replied Dear Mr Round,

Thanks for the advice to go to Specsavers. They were able to see me the same afternoon. This gave me time enough to upload my photograph to their website and try out 100’s of different frames. I was able to buy two pairs of varifocal spectacles for the price of one!!

Thanks again I would never have thought of them without you.


Nothing to do with insurance of course but its nearly Friday, well its Tuesday anyway and these days thats nearly Friday to me.




IP : Logged

Posts : 626 This author :


Wed 14 Jan 2009 @ 9:28 Re: I dont believe it... Post #2



alan johnston

Unfortunately, during the course of your recent appointment with me, I consider that the patient/practitioner relationship was irretrievably broken down and I felt unable to continue with that examination. Without mutual trust, it is impossible for me to fulfil my role as your optometrist.

i can only imagine the level of indignant abuse you must have dished out to be sacked as a customer of an optician.
domestic confusion leads douglas to seek new gregories:



...Probably the Best Insurance Broker in Hamilton.


IP : Logged | Edited: Wed 14 Jan 2009 @ 9:28

Posts : 754 This author :

Kent News

The Rev Canon James Tipp, 63, received the life-long ban after abandoning his wife and his Snodland parish in February 2008 to set up home with Elaine Northern, 54.

Northern was given a 12-year ban for her part in the scandal, which left the congregation at Christ Church stunned.

At a disciplinary hearing, Mr Tipp, who was also Rural Dean of Cobham, received the life ban because of his higher level of responsibility.

The father-of-two has hit out at the ban, citing the case of Rev Teresa Davies who was barred for just 12 years after holding church services while drunk and having sexual intercourse with strangers.


One can imagine the Reverend Davies after the service.
“so did you like the shervice service ?..shorry.. sorry about that little buishness , bishness, business with the wine – tell me are you just passing through?”

feets too big

The Wye at lunchtime today frozen over by the Horseshoe Bend. Today I was walking round Boughrood Brest to 'Heroes of British Jazz' and particularly liked Kenny Balls rendition of 'Your feets too big'. "....your pedal extremities are colossal, they always remind me of some old fossil"

...to all my readers

Une danseuse de tecktonik ultra-rapide

Understanding Shakespear

Yesterday 22nd November with heavy snow predicted for London I understood perfectly the line in the sonnet But thy eternal summer shall not fade. Ann made me mow the grass. Perhaps he could have added If I've got anything to do with it just to make it crystal clear.
Erica , who is 89, was telling us about a pig from her childhood called Horace and how intelligent he was but they still ate him. I couldn't resist 'Alas poor Horace they chewed him well'
Went to Cardiff last Wednesday we were going to see Haley Westenra but it was cancelled This big wheel was quite impressive though.

Cila

Absolutely nothing to do - pretended to do something in a notebook for the last hour of the day in the hope I wouldnt get spotted.
Tomorrow I might try,
'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' a few thousand times. Perhaps I could take an axe to work in my briefcase

I curse Freecell you mouse the X and scream silently dive , dive, dive but another window pops up and asks if you are sure you realy want to move the bloody game off the screen!.
I dont think they saw it though.

Even tried to start a novel last Friday. All I managed was two small paragraphs that I might include somewhere in something. Notice I say 'a novel' and not 'the novel'

Rocky Whelk

High above the Wye on the way to Builth Wells just beyond Erwood there are some very small quarry like cuts into the exposed rock. Break off a piece of this and you will find it contains a fossilised seabed which is now several hundred feet above the river valley twisting below. Here you will find some Silurian whelk intact after a brief and uninteresting life on the seabed 400 million years ago. However I cant find any evidence of the lives of my own parents beyond the barest essentials. Those who research their own family history penetrate a few years into the past and at best come up with a ‘history’ that has all the appeal of a telephone directory. This ancient creature slimes his way across some prehistoric sea bottom and is immortalised in stone.
I found this journal by somebody called Mrs J N Noakes containing details of two holidays she had in 1961 and 62 by coach to Denmark and Italy. They are not very interesting although there are plenty of photographs, equally unexciting. Nevertheless I think I will use them to build a website and try and give Mrs J N Noakes, whoever she is/was a little bit of Rocky the Whelks longevity and the website building should be a useful exercise. So I am giving up blogging.

bog standard

I cant get into the office toilet at present because there is a resident rat which has not yet moved on.
Why cant I get a job at Google