Dear Readers,
The posts for the last three nights are re-attached below. This is because they have been eternally lost to a cyber oblivion. If you have read them you do not need to bother reading beyond the end of tonight, I have not added anything new or even bothered to correct some of the more glaring typographical errors. I just copied and pasted them, before the clever man at the Go Daddy Web Hosting office blasted them out of the cyber-universe like Captain Kirk with a rogue Dalek.
Actually on reflection that probably ought to read Klingon. It is some time since I have watched television. I liked Captain Kirk at the time although the details are now somewhat hazy in my memory. The actor who played him went into space in some exciting mega-tour for wealthy people recently, but when he came back he said he hadn’t liked it very much, which I thought was a bit sad.
Anyway, I believe my website is now fixed.
I do not know what he did to it but it took him an hour and twenty five minutes, after which my ear was so sore from having a telephone poked in it that I had to explain that I had had enough, and if anything else went wrong I would have to purchase the sort with a speaker first.
I am very pleased indeed at this development. It has been a good day in the cyber-universe.
Regrettably it has been rather less magnificent in the actual universe, or at least in that bit of it which is generally occupied by me.
It started a couple of days ago, when I decided the dogs were so revolting, greasy and smelly, not to mention hot and itchy, that I was going to clip them.
For clip read shave, actually.
It is far too early in the year to have bald dogs, the birds are not yet nesting or anything, but I have become tired of hoovering dog hair out of the carpets and so their horrible matted coats had got to go.
I started on Rosie, who was most unhappy about it, and I had just done her feet and a large patch on the back of her head and shoulders, when the clippers packed up.
Mark looked at them and said that their days were over and to put them in the dustbin, so I did, which left me with a ridiculous looking dog and no solution.
I ordered some new clippers, which arrived last night, due to Amazon’s peculiar all-night delivery systems.
Today I shaved the dogs.
They were every bit as disgusting as you might imagine. Rosie has been plunging into the frogspawn pond. They have been rolling in mud, and in seaweed, and in dead seagull and badger poo. Let us also not forget their revoltingly sticky passionate moments of the previous week. Then Mark took them with him when he went to visit some farming cousins at weekend, and the hum of vileness was complete.
Their fur stuck together in big clumps as I scraped it all off.
Then to my absolute horror, I discovered a flea.
You can perhaps imagine the appalled shock of the moment.
I might even have screamed.
After that the day became a blur of frantic action.
First I bathed the dogs and gave them some Death To Fleas tablets. They only had these a couple of weeks ago so they must have run out rather unexpectedly quickly.
I occupied all of the rest of the day hoovering and scrubbing. I boiled all their bedding, and then sprayed the carpets and sofas with some horrible noxious toxin that promised death to anything that might inhale it. The dogs were so revolted at their newly clean and poisonous beds that they wouldn’t get in them at first, but bouts of coatless shivering soon drove them to it, and they lay there, gazing at me with huge, woebegone, betrayed eyes, curling as tightly close to one another as they could get.
I had no sympathy whatsoever. They are clean with no passengers.
They are bald now, so I can tell.
When Mark came home he said they probably picked up the flea at the farm at weekend, because of sheep and hedgehogs and badgers all over the place, and probably he was right but I am of the opinion that fleas, like buses, do not travel alone.
I think probably I have fixed it now.
You can stop reading now. Everything that follows is from the last couple of days. I expect you have read it all before.
NOT ALL NUNS
I do not know if this is going to work.
I do not know if, once written, this post will post.
I have spent many more hours today on the phone to the web host who have, I understand, almost, although maybe not quite, fixed the problem.
Quite clearly it is only not quite, because no matter what I tell it, my website is entirely convinced that I am some rascal called Kevin Buckley. So far it is utterly resolutely refusing to believe that I am not him. Indeed it has been so convinced that I almost began to doubt it myself, although I think I might recollect a change of direction of such magnitude, I am not in the Scottish National Party.
However, please be assured that it is me, even if the website tells you differently, and my voice is hardly any deeper than usual, neither am I ten inches taller with an incomprehensible interest in steam trains. I am just as I ever was, just incognito.
Anyway, I am pleased to be back after our long separation, if I am back, we will have to see, although I am sorry to tell you that nothing of particular note has happened in my absence. The most exciting thing has been the purchase, and subsequent arrival, of our new sheets, which have been carefully laid on the bed for the first time tonight. I am very excited about this. The bottom sheet is called Apple Green, although it is not much like any apples I have ever eaten, being a tranquil soothing colour reminiscent of an over-ripe Golden Delicious, with not a worm hole or brownish bruised bit in sight.
The top duvet bit is utterly spectacular, being magnificent patterns in all available colours, and it is truly astonishing after our previous bedding, which has always been an imprudent shade of white. This is delightfully fresh and lovely until the dogs get anywhere near it, and for true practicality I should have chosen a pattern of paw prints, but this one was divine and irresistible.
It is quite surprising how dark it has made the bedroom. Obviously the white must have reflected an awful lot of the light from our little lamp. Mark laughed and said it was going to be like sleeping in a Bedouin tent, not that I have ever slept in a Bedouin tent, but it did remind me very much of visits to carpet sellers when we were in Morocco.
I am excited about going to bed. This is something of a turn up for the books. Usually once one is past the age of thirty, such emotions are starting to fade into comfortable obscurity, but tonight it will be an Adventure. We will be sleeping under an exciting new quilt cover without a single patch anywhere.
I am not going to leave it much longer, I can tell you.
In other news, I am deep into the composition of my latest assignment, which is to write a piece for performance. This could be either a screenplay, stage play or radio play. I was contemplating this last week when some tiresome demon whispered in my ear that it might be really interesting to write a play about nuns. The silent sort. You know, the cloistered ones that don’t talk.
I am in the middle of it now, and although the demon was quite right, it is really interesting, it failed to point out that it might be also quite difficult, which in the event it has turned out to be.
Hence I am occupying all of my waking hours sighing and scowling, and trying to find out everything I can about nuns, after which I am trying to compose the information into a comprehensible but silent script to be performed on the radio.
I told the tutor about it today and I could practically hear him rolling his eyes in the email.
There is a lot to find out about nuns. I have found a lot of it out. I made Mark watch a film about nuns with me tonight, it was called a Day In The Life Of A Silent Nunnery.
He went to sleep, and really I didn’t exactly blame him.
I am going to go and do that right now.
2 COMMENTS
LYNN MINCKLER3
Your duvet is quite lovely!
PETER HODGSON2 DAYS AGO EDITREPLY
A silent play for radio is a superb idea, and will go down very well with those people who like to listen to the radio whilst in bed. You’ll probably get the Booker prize or something.
P.S. How will you know when it is over?
SEPARATION ANXIETY
It seems that I still have a website, although not as much of one as I ought to have, and it still keeps addressing me as Kevin. Hi, Kevin, it keeps saying. I am quite charmed by this, perhaps it is part of the appeal of becoming one of the Trans people about whom they keep going on and on in the august Daily Telegraph. I could change my name and become completely incognito, there is a certain interesting anonymity about the whole thing.
I have occupied my day, again, writing my radio play about nuns for my next assignment. This is due at weekend and I am beginning to panic. I had a horrible dream last night in which I was staying in a beautiful hotel. I was supposed to be checking out of it at eleven and I had filled our room with so much junk that there was simply no way I could clear it all up and pack it in time. I know that this is a message from my subconscious, although what it might be saying is not exactly clear. Mark said that it is telling me I need to book another night.
I am getting frustrated, because I know a very great deal about nuns now, and I just can’t get it all in. The bibliography for the critical analysis already runs to two pages, and I haven’t even started writing that bit properly yet. It is very difficult to explain nuns in a half-hour radio play as well as getting all the other things right, like a murder in the first sentence, a character arc and the five-act plot structure. We have been taught that all of these things are vital for the success of a narrative.
I have been intrigued and enchanted by the difficulty of nun-ness. It seems a lot more complicated than you might think. We think about nuns getting themselves in a tizz because of not having men to share their living quarters. To be quite honest, they have got so many other things to think about they wouldn’t have time in the first place. Nuns are busy thinking about all sorts of other things, from having custody of their eyes to not being singularised, and very difficult it all seems to be.
In any case I am not sure that it would be such a disadvantage. I looked at some pictures of nunneries, and not a single one of them had a garden filled with bits of exhaust, a stack of spare wheels that looked as if they might come in useful if ever we bought a truck, an inexplicable barrel for some nuclear fission project, a broken chainsaw and an axe. None of the nuns mentioned the tiresomeness of picking screws out of the bottom of the washing machine, and every single nuntook her boots off before walking all over the kitchen floor.
It is not possible to explain everything interesting about nuns in one short radio play, most especially one about silent nuns, it is not a documentary with David Attenborough breathing heavily and going on about them being forced to eat plastic. Hence I am having to try and hint at it in between the non-existent dialogue. It is all very difficult I can tell you, and I thought the Moors Murders was an effort to write.
I shall keep plugging away, there are still a few days to go, it does seem to have come round remarkably quickly, it only seems five minutes since I was flapping about the last one.
In other news, I had a message from Oliver this morning telling me that he is going to lunch with Joanna Lumley at some unspecified time in the near future. I was both surprised and impressed, either his charm capacity has massively exceeded my expectations since he became a teenager, or perhaps it is not just a belated Valentines’ Day meeting and there will be other people there as well.
I am not privy to the details, but it all sounds remarkably exciting.
Perhaps he will be able to get a signed photograph for Grandad, who remembers the New Avengers, and whose appreciation of Joanna Lumley is therefore rather better established than Oliver’s own.
I will tell you more when the details come my way.
PREVARICATION
I am thoroughly enjoying Mr. Hancock’s Lockdown Diaries as published in the august Daily Telegraph today. Well, not exactly diaries, that is the name of his presumably entertaining memoir which so far I have not read. At the moment I am simply appreciating his jovial little messages to his colleagues during the pandemic and basking in the satisfaction of having thought he was a muppet even at the time.
How lovely it is to be proved right, if for no other reason than his colossal stupidity at having given complete and unabridged access to his mobile phone to a journalist, even if she was blonde and pretty. I have never done anything interesting in my entire life from a journalistic point of view, but I would not even begin to entertain handing my entire history of communications over to one of that breed. It would be like leaving a steak sandwich on the floor beside a Rottweiler.
He does not seem to have done anything interesting at all during the pandemic. My own pandemic diaries consisted of our activities in moving the kitchen from one end of the house to the other, a very lot of going for happy walks over the fells, and some unsuccessfully creative attempts at haircutting. All Mr. Hancock seems to have done so far is bring the entire country to its knees and be unfaithful to his wife in a stationery cupboard.
I have been reading all of this because as you know I have got a last-minute deadline for an assignment and I have got all of the usual difficulties that always occur at that time. Today I have emptied our wardrobe and thrown away anything elderly, too small or tasteless. Well, not the tasteless things, it would have been empty if I had done that. I have cleared some space in the wardrobe in the loft by disposing of the children’s outgrown clothes and removed our occasional-wear garments up there. Please remind me of this. I will come to need my dry-clean-only satin and silk party dresses one day, by which time I will have entirely forgotten what I have done with them.
I was not quite sure what do do with them anyway. Smart clothes are so uncompromisingly uncomfortable that I very nearly hoofed them all into the dustbin anyway and resigned myself to a life as a scarecrow, but reason prevailed, and I knew there would one day come a time when I would need to wear scratchy things.
I tried on the dress I wore to Number One Daughter’s wedding. This was years ago, because Ritalin Boy is eleven now, nearly twelve, actually, better remember that, it’s a couple of weeks after their wedding anniversary in a few days. To my surprise the dress actually fitted, although with a sheath-like intensity that I would have preferred to have avoided. Getting it off was something of an event, think about snakes abandoning their previous skins. All the same it would not take very much dieting before it was a perfect fit, so I must have been fairly portly then as well.
I hung all of our clothes back in the wardrobe and spaced them tidily along the rail with bits cut from a tube of foam pipe lagging which Mark will never miss. Our shirts and trousers will no longer become creased due to being squashed up one against another. Then I tidied our drawers and cupboards.
Eventually I knew that I could avoid it no longer, and sat down at the computer. I was sorely tempted by a longing to check the Inland Revenue pages to see what National Insurance we have paid to date, and whether or not we will get a pension. This seemed to have a level of urgency I ought not to ignore, but in the end I gave way.
Time for reading Matt Hancock, I thought.
The assignment is due this weekend.
I had better get on with it.
Maybe after I have checked our pensions tomorrow.
