Cake or Death

I was reading Mrs Jones' blog earlier tonight, and enjoying it very much. The lady can write, she has excellent taste in music, and she knows her Molesworth. I often want to slip into Molesworth mode on this blog, because I often do so in my head, but I always fear no one will get it, eheu.

Mrs Jones wrote this rather amazing post about the day she nearly died.

She asked if other people had had brushes with death. I've had a near miss, and as I started writing about it, it quickly got too long to leave as a comment. So here we are. Again.

I was 17 years old. Friends of the family were throwing their annual weekend-long garden-party, affectionately known as "Sports Day," that we'd gone to since I was about six. These friends had, and presumably still own, the most beautiful country house I've ever seen, a proper rambling old English manor with acres of land, herb garden, croquet lawn, stone-flagged kitchen, Aga stove, intricate Victorian cornicing and panelling, rugs, deep fireplaces, a stained-glass conservatory, grapevine growing above the indoor pool, a maze of stone buildings, archways, courtyards, secret staircases and passageways, everything, all hidden deep, deep in the Somerset countryside. Oh my God, that house. I've seen lots of old rambling country houses, and none can hold a candle to that one.

The year I was 17, I can't remember what the fancy-dress theme was. (There was always fancy dress, and a cabaret on the Saturday night at which guests got up and did turns, and my mother played the piano, and a quiet, genteel, tweedy, elegant man called John who was a Notting Hill antiques dealer with grown-up children and legs that went on for ever always did a glamorous and exuberant drag act.) I was dressed as Pierrot that year, in a costume I'd made from white bedsheets and black pompons, my face whited out. I remember there was a girl about my age who played endless Irish reels on the fiddle. She was brilliant at the violin, and really cool and composed while she played, and I wished I were her as I watched her. John's act involved fishnet stockings, a black Cleo wig, some feather boas and a lot of high kicks. I don't remember anything else about the cabaret that year.

There was a boy of my age who'd also been coming to Sports Days since childhood: we'd known each other, although only seeing each other at these yearly mad weekends in the country, since we were six. At that age, he knew his way from home for a mile in every direction in the countryside where he lived. I complained to my mother that this was unfair, how could he possess such knowledge, of the vast, unfathomable countryside, with just plant life for landmarks. My mother replied that I knew my way for a mile in every direction from my home in London, which would be terribly confusing to a country person. I thought about this for a moment and felt better.

We hadn't both been to Sports Day every year, and I don't think we'd seen each other for a few years, not since our friendship was one between children. Now we were 17, we caught a glint in each others' eyes. We sloped off at every opportunity over the weekend, got in trouble because he was found in my tent after lights-out, and on the Sunday afternoon, while the children at the party were doing the annual Treasure Hunt and the adults were sleeping off hangovers, we took some ancient, heavy, black, wicker-basketed bicycles from an old stone stable and went for a ride.

It was a glorious July day, and we disappeared into the surrounding maze of lanes. We stopped in a sunny cornfield, huge and wide under a thick blue sky, far away from tutting adults, and I remember thinking Yes, this is exactly the kind of thing one should do when one is young. It was a lazy, golden, buzzing afternoon in cider country. As Spike Milligan once wrote of English summer: 'Everywhere was saying bethankit.' Apples were ripe. Corn was fat. London was a hundred and forty miles away.

On the way back to the house, we were whizzing downhill along one of those narrow, high-hedged, West Country lanes, maybe six feet wide and flanked by deep green hedges at least ten feet tall: a steep, narrow tunnel of hedgerow, closed in with just the sound of ticking bicycle wheels and burbling birdsong. We were tearing along at breakneck speed, me in front, an ear-to-ear smile of exhilaration on my face.

A crossroads appeared ahead (if one single-track lane crossing another can be called a crossroads). I couldn't hear or see anything coming, of course, because the hedges were ten feet high. But what were the chances? We were in the middle of nowhere.

It was split-second timing. Whack-whack. Within the space of one second, I crossed the junction from north to south, bombing downhill at the speed of a car, and the small white car crossed from west to east. If the moment had been frozen in time I could have reached out and touched the bonnet from my saddle. I looked sideways in surprise at the white car that had appeared, right beside me, in the break in the hedge. I had an image on my retina of a woman passenger, her eyes wide behind enormous glasses, putting her hands up to her open mouth.

We missed each other by a whisker. Nobody stopped. I went over the crossroads: the car went over the crossroads: the boy behind me went over the crossroads. No one got hit: everyone carried on: everyone had the absolute living shit scared out of them. The boy said the driver's face was as white as his car. My heart was turning cartwheels, my senses on fire.

"I nearly died!" I whooped. "That was amazing! Let's do it again!"

But we went back to the house, and had cake for tea instead.

Hey Guys Let's Watch Antonia Cornwell Sitting in an Armchair for 30 Minutes

Well, I had a really bloody good weekend. It was just a home-front weekend, nothing exotic, but it was one of those good home weekends where shit gets done, old things are replaced with new and life feels happier, and there are about five blog posts in there somewhere that I'll probably never write because I'm sort of working out how to avoid them sounding like boring lists of what we did next.

Anyway! While I'm thinking about that, here's a meme I was tagged for by Keith.

This is that meme where you're meant to choose a band, and answer every question with the name of one of their songs.

I'm tweaking this meme. I'm going to answer the questions, but I'm not doing the band thing. I'm just going to answer them straight up. Because I could spend ages finding a band that had song titles that made funny or clever answers to all these questions, but all you'd have to read here today would be a list of questions and a list of song titles and I don't know about you, but I'd far rather read people's honest answers.

So anyway,

1. Are you a male or female: Female who owns more false moustaches than handbags.

2. Describe yourself: Small. Quiet. Creative. Grumpy. Kind to small creatures. Impatient as fuck with human beings.

3. How do you feel about yourself: Happy in my own company. Never bored on my own. Immensely critical of my abilities. Too quiet around other people. I wish I were a better parent.

4. Describe your parents: Fucking amazing. Not on speaking terms. Funny. Good-looking. Interrupt me and talk over me when I'm speaking. Wonderful stage presences. Impossibly hard acts to follow. One an incredible musician, the other a world-famous author nicknamed 'Britain's Storyteller'. Both a thousand times more capable and passionately driven than I will ever be. This question is making me cry so I'll move on to the next one.

5. Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriends: Tall, dark and handsome, with irritating habits.

6. Describe your current boy/girl situation: Tall, dark and handsome, with less irritating habits.

7. Describe your current location: Perched on the edge of a 1970s olive corduroy Arne Jacobsen egg chair that is mostly occupied by the large striped cat behind me, London SW9.

8. Describe where you want to be: Sitting more comfortably in a 1970s olive corduroy Arne Jacobsen egg chair with a large striped cat on my lap, London SW9. Driving through Alpine scenery. Watching the Northern Lights in Norway. In my shed with a cup of tea. Between crisp hotel sheets in Paris. Alone in Barcelona. On a scenic train to China. Driving all the way across America with my daughter when she's older. In a pub in Yorkshire. In English woodland in May. In a log cabin in Big Sur. Dancing on an earth floor in Brazil. Learning to ski. Learning to surf. Learning to fly a plane. In a New York cab. Reading in bed.

9. Your best friend(s) is/are: people I'd like to spend a long weekend in a country house with. (However, at the last minute, they'd announce they couldn't make it.) Clever. Hilarious. Interesting. Kind. Not afraid to be silly. Mostly from up north, genuinely down to earth, and willing to play me at 1. Scrabble or 2. Mah Jong.

10. Your favourite colour is: God, I don't know. Probably cocoa-brown.

11. You know that: I know that I've been trying to come up with something even slightly clever to answer this for two days, and nothing's happened.

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called: Hey Guys Let's Watch Antonia Cornwell Sitting In An Armchair For 30 Minutes

13. What is life to you: Something you only get to do once. Extraordinary. Too long. Too short. Boring. Amazing. Half full.

14. What is the best advice you have to give: Just get on with it.

Consider yourself tagged if you'd like to be. Oh! And let me know where to find your answers.

Don't say I never let you have any fun

Mexican Tit Wave

The office where Ian works is long and narrow, with a strip of desks next to a wall of windows. Nearly everyone has a window seat. Ian's is at one end.

While they were all working today, a woman with utterly amazing breasts walked past the windows. After Ian had turned to look, he noticed that as she walked along, a ripple effect happened in the office as every male employee rose from his seat and swivelled his head to look at her boobs.

"Did you notice the Mexican wave?" Ian later asked Chris, one of his colleagues.

"When?"

"When that woman with the cracking norks walked by. Everyone stood up to look, it was really funny."

"Oh!" said Chris. "Was she wearing a green top?"

There was a pause.

"I don't know," said Ian.

Should Mexican Tit Wave be the name of a dance, an album or a migration pattern in small North American birds? I can't decide.

At the Zoo

Esme: I need a penguin!
Us: Here are the penguins!
Esme: I need a tiger!
Us: Here's the tiger!
Esme: I need a monkeys!
Us: Here are the monkeys!
Esme: I need a pig!
Us: But you hate pigs. You're afraid of them.
Esme: I need a pig! Pig! I need a pig!
Us: Okay! Here are the pigs!
Esme: Don't want it.

You know it's Spring when women in their 30s start taking photos of trees

Ian understands the female need for Spring tree photos, and he respects it completely.

Just Another Day at RRRRROCK SOLICITORS!

This is where I put my feet up

Lent is nearly finished, everybody! You can all start smoking crack again soon. Yippee!

Clearly it's been over forty days since the start of Lent: what I didn't realise is that Sundays don't count. Tits! I could have had Sundays off, gone to bed early and spent more time lying awake and listening to my upstairs neighbour burrowing into the floor with a rusty spoon.

What I also didn't realise until just now is that the end of Lent depends on which side of the Church you bat for. Christians like to stick it out until Holy Saturday (which is THIS SATURDAY, so I hope you all have your holy stuff in ready for that). Roman Catholics, though, pack it in on Maundy Thursday, which is today.

Today!

Of course, in this family we are all strict Roman Catholic cardinals, as you know.

So I've decided to stop my daily posting today, because I'm acutely aware of the old quality/quantity factor, and I'm amazed there's anyone left still reading this drivel after I've been exhaustedly coughing it out for six weeks. Oh but we laughed, didn't we? We laughed, and we named that tune, and we learned about why wanking is bad.

So that's that, and it's time for Easter, and I hope you all have a splendid time. We get a four-day weekend here, and I expect Ian will spend all of it in his dressing-gown, waiting for his nuts to dry in their own sweet hairy time.

Sorry, yes, that probably was too much information.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

When I put Esme to bed this evening, I nearly nodded off in the chair during our cuddle after story-time.

"I shall have an early night," I thought. "I shall go downstairs and write today's blog post NOW, not leave it until nearly midnight. An early night would be fantastic."

I put Esme gently in her cot, covered her with her little blanket and left her sleeping peacefully, cuddling her baby doll.

As I came downstairs, a van turned the corner onto our little street and drew to a halt outside our house. Its lights went out as its engine shuddered to silence. In the darkness, passers-by could make out the letters ELEPHANTS-U-LIKE painted on its side.

A man got out of the van. He wore deep-sea diving-boots, and only had one finger on each hand. He walked heavily up the steps to our front door, and rang the doorbell for the flat above ours.

Upstairs, the neighbour heard the doorbell. He made a face of annoyance, because he was busy watching the 2009 Bulgarian Arguing Championships on TV while scraping the floor with a fork. He stood up, put on his deep-sea diving-boots and clomped down the stairs to open the front door.

"Hello," said the van driver. "I've brought your elephant."

"Fantastic," said our upstairs neighbour. "Could you bring it in?"

"Yes," said the van driver. "Wait here."

So our neighbour waited in the hall, idly dropping a bowling-ball a few times to make sure gravity was still working.

The van driver came back. He had a baby elephant in his arms.

"Are you upstairs?" he asked.

"Yes."

And our neighbour led the way up the stairs in his deep-sea diving-boots, followed by the van driver, who was carrying the baby elephant and wearing deep-sea diving-boots as well.

"I see you wear deep-sea diving-boots too," said our neighbour.

"Yes! I like the stomping noise they make," said the van driver.

"Like this?" asked our neighbour, and stomped extra-hard up the stairs.

"Yes!" said the driver, joining in.

Suddenly, the van driver dropped the baby elephant, because he only had one finger on each hand.

"Oh no!" said the van driver.

The baby elephant ran down the stairs. The van driver ran after it, in his deep-sea diving-boots. The upstairs neighbour ran after them both in his deep-sea diving-boots, too.

"Maybe we can herd it up the stairs," suggested our neighbour.

So the van driver and the upstairs neighbour herded the baby elephant up the stairs, and eventually into the flat above ours, where it began to jump up and down.

"Oh no," said our neighbour. "This isn't the right elephant."

"No?" asked the van driver.

"No," said our neighbour. "It doesn't quite match the sofa."

"Well, it was dark out there in the van," said the driver, "so I must have picked the wrong one. Let me take this one back to the van and try one of the 32 others I've got down there."

"Do you want some help?" asked our neighbour.

"No, it's okay," said the driver.

Our neighbour waited upstairs, watching the remainder of the 2009 Bulgarian Arguing Championships on TV. To further pass the time, he collected armfuls of cricket-balls and dropped them onto the bare floorboards, just to make sure gravity was still working. He worries about it a lot.

Meanwhile, the van driver shooed the baby elephant down all the stairs and back out to the van.

The good news, and happy ending, is that the right baby elephant was in the van all along, and they only had to try out 26 of the 32 before they found him.

That's what it sounded like, anyway.

A shriveled-up nut in a bag of earth worms

"I'm going to do today's post about our book collections."

"Do we have book collections?"

"Yes! You collect leather-bound Victorian books full of ill-informed medical advice and I collect books with rude titles."

"Oh yes!"

It has been several years since either of us added to our respective collections. Having a child really fucks about with your hobbies.

"Do you want to come and have your photo taken in front of your collection?"

"Would you like me to?"

"Yes please. It'll add some life to the photo."

"Shall I just preen my moustache?"

"Aren't you worried I'll take a photo of you doing that - " [Click] "and tell the Internet you preened it especially?"

"Do! Then they'll know I made the effort to look nice for them."

"Okay."

Here is Ian's book collection, in the shelves on the right. To get to it, you must be over six feet tall and able to fight your way through well-developed cheese plants. It is watched over by Dolores, the inflatable and frequently saggy shark.

Ian collects nineteenth-century medical encyclopaeaediaeaeae. The book I scanned the other day, with the remedy for sweaty canaries, is one of these. He likes them because they are written with absolute authority on the basis of total bollocks.

"For ailing eyesight, apply three drops molten lead and tincture of laudanum. The entire head to be boiled in horse's milk, then the patient to be left in a cold draught for a week until improvement is shown."

I made that up because it was quicker than finding an actual funny bit. But look here!

Ian has found me a bit that really is all bollocks: the section on Testicles from Common Sense Medical Adviser, 1883.

"Fig 190 shows a healthy testicle. It is round, full and plump, like an egg, with only sufficient vessels to supply it with blood, and to carry off its secretion. Fig 191 shows a shrunken, or wasted testicle, having the appearance of a shriveled-up nut in a bag of earth worms. This condition is not an uncommon result of masturbation or self-abuse.

"...In health, the testicle should feel full, firm and plump, and should round out the scrotum, which should also present a full, plump, well-contracted, or drawn up appearance, instead of allowing the testicles to hang low and pendulous, like the weights of a clock when run down."

I think the author really threw himself into writing that bit.

Most of Ian's medical books are united in their stance against masturbation, which they claim reduced the healthy man on the right to the dried-up wanked-out husk you see on the left.

I don't know how he got himself into that state, as this was actually in the days before penises, when all they had was bollocks and leaves.

And I'm not going to explain these at all:

My book collection is quite different to Ian's: its theme and appeal lie on a far shallower level. Also, it lives in the toilet.

"Do you want me to take photos of you, now, sitting on the loo and reading your books?"

"No, not really. My hair looks like shit."

But he did anyway.

One day about ten years ago, I was sitting around stoned, and thought it would be funny to collect books whose titles were double entendres. The very next day, I began. I went into a charity shop in York, to see what they had, and within a few minutes I found this book:

Then I knew this collection was meant to be.

Here I am trying to locate Back Crack Boy while Ian photographs another prominent conversation-piece in our loo: The Poo Shelf. I could explain it now, but it's late and I'm tired. All you need to know for now is, that's not real poo.

Some favourites:

The Horn
Hairline Cracks
The Pale Sergeant
Fanny
Wagner's Ring (from Helena)
Free Willy
Coming From Behind
Le Petit Soldat
Flicka
Giving and Receiving
A Wild Ride Up The Cupboards (an inspired gift from Ian's brother Stuart)
The Mottled Lizard (because after a while, everything sounds filthy)
Discovering Lost Canals

There's one I really want to steal from the church hall where Esme goes to playgroup, but I can't bring myself to do something so immoral. It's called The King is Coming. I shall do the decent thing and find it on Amazon, like I did for this:

I first saw a copy of this one on a shelf at my grandfather's 80th birthday party. I'd only met my grandfather for the first time a couple of days beforehand, along with all this other long-lost family I never thought I'd meet, so it was this big touching family thing and suddenly OH MY GOD RIDE THE PINK HORSE! I briefly considered explaining my book collection to my new-found uncles, aunts and cousins, then thought ... No.

The pride of my collection is Forging The Tortilla Curtain. Ian bought it for me and it's never been unwrapped, although Esme is desperate to tear off the clingfilm.

Top of my wishlist these days is Helmet of Flesh. Just so you know.

Riveting post about the garden

In the last few days, I've fobbed you off with a picture of the cat and a list of my favourite records. Can you tell how seriously I'm running out of steam towards the end of this posting every day of Lent business? In case you can't, I have some PHOTOS OF SHRUBS, you lucky people.

I have a couple of really funny blog posts in my head, but making them real requires Ian's free time and co-operation plus some vacant office space. I've been promised it'll happen this weekend. But in the meantime, you have to put up with shrubs, because all I did today was tidy the garden for seven and a half hours, turning it from an unkempt thatch into a neat Brazilian landing-strip. Then I had a cup of tea and fell over.

Behold the Before:

The Shit-Heap of stuff it took me all day to hack down, cut up and throw in a pile:

And the After.

Here is a little bit of rediscovered railway track!

Yes! A railway! It runs all the way up one side of the garden. Ian has several trains for it that fill the precious little cupboard space in this house.

It is thanks to the garden railway that Esme is alive today. Ian loves model railways, and I love him anyway, and because I love him and show an interest in his hobbies if I can stand it, I encouraged him to buy a garden railway set and a few little trains.

"Hooray!" he said. "Now we can be one of those old childless couples who have a model railway instead of a family."

I had a vision of us both, older, saggier, with grey hair squashed flat under matching stationmasters' caps. In my vision, Ian was blowing a whistle and writing enthusiastically in a notebook, mumbling numbers to himself. I was staring blankly, all passion for life drained from my face.

"No," I said, "no."

"What?"

"If you want to set up this railway, we have to have a child."

"But - "

"No."

I showed Esme the railway-track today, and she thought it was exciting, but I could tell she didn't really understand what it was for. When we next run some trains down the garden she's going to squeal until she pops.

Yay! It's tidy! Jesus, I ache.

I also tried to take some garden photos that showed the real essence of it, the way in which we've shaped it and made it our own.

Eagle-eyed readers may enjoy trying to spot the following:

1. Waste-paper basket, abandoned outdoors for last six months
2. Plastic owl
3. Compressor, abandoned near top of concrete steps as tripping hazard
4. Single wellington boot, abandoned outside for quite possibly over a year
5. Blue sack of building-rubble, to be taken to the tip "soon"

Here is the plant we put outside to help it perk up a bit:

Here is a pile of assorted crap that has lain unmoved since last year:

And here is a photo of just outside our kitchen door. Eagle-eyed readers may enjoy trying to spot the full-size bath that's been there for several months.

Ian is going to measure the bath "soon" to see if it needs to be cut into two or three pieces to fit in the back of the car. Then, "after that", he plans to take an angle-grinder to it and cut it onto those two or three pieces. "Then", it will go into the car and be taken to the tip.

I'll take a photo of it this time next year so you can all see how it's doing.

The music I can't live without

In no particular order:

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

I don't listen to a lot of classical music, but I have a few pieces I've fallen for with all my heart and soul and this is one of them. When I hear it I can almost smell autumn leaves in beautiful English countryside. I don't dare listen to it away from England for fear of falling to pieces.

I heard it a few times in my teens, and thought Oh!, and never managed to find out what it was. (Of course, this was before the days of the Internet, where one can write these things out on paper for clever readers to give them names.) After hearing it again in 2002, when the bastard swine radio announcer didn't tell us what it was, I didn't find out what it was until 2006, when Ian and I were on the Isle of Wight on the day of Will & Lucy's wedding, shopping for a brass plaque to finish the weasel on a motorbike we'd lovingly hand-crafted for them. It was playing in a shop on Classic FM, and because the bastard swine announcer didn't say what it was AGAIN we had to wait until we got home to check the playlist on their website. When I finally got it on CD and listened to the whole thing, I wept for joy.

Jimi Hendrix: Hey Joe

This is my favourite song. In terms of harmony, it has the simplicity and grace of a Bach chorale, and the story is so straightforward, and so sad, and it makes me cry most times I hear it, which can be terribly inconvenient in company or when driving at 80mph along the M1.

Ministry: Jesus Built My Hotrod

Because when I'm tense, or bored, or seriously fed up, I just want to ding-a ding-dang my dang-a-long ling-long. Don't you? (Yours, not mine.)

This record always makes me smile the biggest, Cheshire-cat, ear-to-ear smile, no matter how boring a week I've had. And if you're picking desert island discs, you may as well choose records you want to play REALLY FUCKING LOUD.

Pink Floyd: Comfortably Numb

This is another one that has made me cry at an inconvenient point on the M1 while driving at high speed, and made me realise, while wiping my eyes, that compiling a driving CD of my favourite music was a really stupid idea that could end up killing us all.

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 2 in C Minor

First classical piece I fell in love with, age 15. Once upon a time, when I had all the time in the world for piano practice, I learned to play the second movement, badly.

System 7: Alpha Wave (System 7 2000 remix)

Just my favourite techno tune ever. You were either into techno in the 90s, or you weren't, and if you weren't, I won't try to make you understand my love for music that goes Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang and lets you shout and jump and whoop for joy and lose yourself and all the nagging, self-doubting voices in your twenty-something head. Nor will I try to convince you that one noise that goes Bang Bang Bang Bang is better constructed than any other. Just take my word for it. Bang.

Stevie Wonder: I Believe

This made me cry the first time I even heard it. I was four months pregnant, which obviously had something to do with that. I'd been on a weekend in the country with girlfriends, and Ian had been away too and had come to sort of pick me up on the way home, except we were driving separate cars: he in the Land Rover, me in my little MGF hairdryer convertible.

Someone had left a Stevie Wonder CD behind that weekend, so I stuck it on the car because I was bored of my stuff, and when this song came on, oh my God. It was a beautiful BEAUTIFUL early-summer day in the Sussex countryside, the kind of day that makes England the closest place to Paradise, all fluffy green hedgerows, sweet-smelling air, butterflies, birdsong, and blossom. Ian was fifty yards ahead, puttering along in the Land Rover, which was looking splendid and flying along beautifully in the warm sunshine, and the chorus of the song kicked in - "I believe when I fall in love with you it will be for ever," and I was looking at Ian up ahead, and we'd finally got together after being friends and pretending not to fancy each other for ten years, and I was having his child, and I knew that the words of the song were true, and I burst into tears. No other piece of music has ever made me cry on first hearing.

Were all of those songs just songs that make me cry? Oh no, there was the techno, and the filthy Ministry track. Oh good.

Lent finishes later this week! I won't have to end every day thinking SHIT FUCK I HAVEN'T POSTED and I can't wait!

What are the songs you can't live without?

Old Mother Cornwell's Household Remedies

For a toddler that will not sleep through the night

1. Keep toddler outside, running around in the fresh air, for seven and a half relentless, consecutive hours

2. Dinner

3. Warm bath

4. Put warm, clean, exhausted toddler into warm, clean pyjamas. Read three pages of bedtime story, then carry zonked-out toddler to bed, where it will remain asleep ALL NIGHT

For Adult Insomnia

1. Spend seven and a half hours outdoors in fresh air

2. Go to cocktail bar

3. Have a cocktail

4. Have another one

5. Go to bed; sleep ALL NIGHT

For Avoiding Hangovers

Before bed:

1. Drink volume of water equal to volume of alcohol consumed

2. Eat two Nurofen Plus and one big fat multi-vitamin pill

3. On waking, make strong coffee

For Sweaty Canaries

(From Home Remedies for All Diseases in Man or Beast, Davis & Jefferis, 1891)

Wash the hen in salt water, and dry rapidly.

Either only hens get sweaty, or they weren't allowed to print the words sweaty cock in 1891. If anyone knows a traditional remedy for such, I'd be interested to hear it.

Whoops

I am 13 minutes too late to write a Friday post. What would Jesus do if he were in the desert and realised what time it was? I think he would write a blog post as quickly as possible.

Dear Internet,

I have been in this desert for 38 days now. I really want a cigarette but I only passed one 7-11 and it was shut.

I was more fortunate than Jesus tonight, and I had four naughty cigarettes. I only smoke at weddings, on holidays and on special occasions, and tonight was Andre's birthday, a dear friend who lives two streets away and yet who I have not seen since his birthday last year. The further away from me you live, the more frequently I keep in touch with you. So I couldn't miss his birthday and let another year go by before I saw him again.

I had vague hopes of getting home in time to write a blog post for Friday, but just as I was about to leave the cocktail bar, Andre told me excitedly about the Edwardian chairs he bought on Clapham High Street, at the shop where we MUST go browsing soon.

"They were marked as £7 each. Seven pounds. But they wouldn't sell them to me for £7. I say, 'What, you think I put that price tag on?' And there was a big scene with the management. Eventually they say £35 for them. I buy them anyway."

Andre is my height and my age, and he also has a boyfriend named Ian. He is from rural Brazil, and he is an exceptional samba and salsa dancer. He lives two doors away from Joanna Lumley, in a flat that looks like a palace because the last occupants left chandeliers and silk curtains hanging and they were too splendid to take down. When one goes round there it is difficult not to stray to the silk-draped windows and idly hope to catch a glimpse of La Lumley.

("That is her Smart Car there," Andre pointed out, "but sometimes a man come and pick her up in a posh.")

I have had two Kir Royales, and am blogging drunk again. I really have to go to bed, because thanks to Esme's cough I have had an average of three hours' sleep a night this week and I could do with a bit more than that tonight. I shall return, more coherent, tomorrow.

All you get today is a photo of the cat

Squawk

In 1951, so the urban legend goes, during filming of 'The African Queen' at Shepperton, the film studio brought in a load of rose-ringed parakeets to make their film set look more exotic than a sleepy rural patch of green-belt London.

During filming, so the legend goes, those parakeets flew away, and moved into some nearby trees to have sex.

In the 60s, so another legend goes, Jimi Hendrix released a pair of parakeets into the air in Carnaby Street.

In 1987, so ANOTHER legend goes, some parakeets escaped from an aviary during the Great Storm.

SOMEHOW, at any rate, there are now an estimated 30,000 of the shrill green things living in London, spreading gradually from the south-west across the entire city. I first saw one in Richmond Park in 2002, and of course I was on my own, so the following weekend I made Ian and Alix come with me and stay there going "Brrrr" in wellies until we saw another one to prove I wasn't going mad. Eventually we saw a whole bunch of them (that's how they grow, like bananas) and I allowed us all to return home.

Over the next few years, we saw them spread. Some flew through a summer barbecue in Streatham in 2006. More were on Clapham Common in 2007. Last year, I could have sworn I saw one flash overhead in our garden, but I wasn't sure.

This year, we definitely have one, and after hearing him go TWEET TWEET TWEET all week I managed to get a photo of him just now. See:

Crystal clear! I should have been a wildlife photographer.

It turns out you have to be quick to spot him, because shortly after he starts going TWEET TWEET TWEET one of the resident magpies tells him to turn it down, flash bastard.

Ian and I have a favourite recurrent theme of conversation, which is: the appropriate trap to set out when trying to catch specific birds and beasts. For example:

And if you want a parakeet to stay in one place long enough for you to fetch your zoom lens, the correct trap to set involves a Bucks Fizz or mimosa and a copy of Hello!