Lazytown

I've seen it about 3 times today (well, its been on the tv, I haven't actively been watching it, you understand), and it occurs to me that its wrongly named.

Every single episode, the children on the programme (well, one child and four weird puppets) all fail to see that the strange doctor/old woman/giant carrot causing havoc is actually Robbie Rotten in a succession of not particularly convincing disguises. I mean, whatever disguise he's in, there's always the huge prosthetic chin and spats - bit of a giveaway Stephanie. Dur.



It should actually be called Stupidtown.

Top Gear

We've just been watching Top Gear and Jeremy Clarkson described Jade Goody as a "racist, pig-faced waste of blood and organs".

As Doug would say "I laughed so much I nearly shat".

Yorkshire Living

We've been here for just six months, but I have to say that I'm really rather enjoying it. Take today, for instance - we drove to Castle Howard in about 35 mins, had an enjoyable stroll around the grounds for 1 1/2 hours, a nice bowl of minestrone in the cafe, and bought some meat from their farmshop (the meat is all from livestock on their own farm, so its got food miles of about 200 yards).

And then it was back to chez nous to watch the lion's share of Chelsea v Notts Forest in the 4th Round of the FA Cup. I even managed to put the bolognese sauce (made from Castle Howard mince beef) in the slow cooker at half time.

I can't believe I lived in London for as long as I did. The place is a hole.

Rabid Rabbits

Someone bought Jacob and Sam a mix' n' match toy where you have a rabbit divided into three parts and you can give bunny boy different clothes and faces etc. This in itself is an odd concept.

But then you look at the faces of the rabbits - there isn't a single one that has a pleasant smiling face, the sort you'd associate with a child's toy.

For example:-



And:-


It must be French.

Interesting Facts

The first in an occasional series of posts relating interesting facts that I have discovered during the course of the day (and when I can't think of anything else to post).

Ok, how about this then. Arthur Ransome, the English novelist - famed for "Swallows and Amazons" and "We didn't Mean to go to Sea" - was married to Leon Trotsky's secretary.

I always like interesting facts that appear that they've stepped straight out of a Monty Python sketch, or even one involving Peter Cook and John Cleese.

5 things......

I've been tagged. And after thinking long and hard about it, I've come up with the following. I doubt anyone knows all five:-

1. One of my relations survived the sinking of the Titanic.

I'm fascinated by the Titanic disaster, not least because I'm related to someone who was there - in April 1912, Clear Annie Cameron set off from Southampton for a new life in America. Unfortunately, the ship she chose to travel on was RMS Titanic. Fortunately, at least for a 2nd Class passenger, she managed to get on a life boat - boat no 16 out a total of 18 (so it was a close run thing).

Sometime later, she married my Great Great Uncle and disappears from history.

2. I once met Shimon Peres (former Prime Minister of Israel)

I was in the Hyatt Regency at the Dead Sea waiting with a couple of extremely gay Australians for the bus to take us down to the water for the traditional dip whilst reading the Jerusalem Post. Suddenly, this rather elderly chap, surrounded by some extremely hard and dangerous looking friends/relatives (we thought), sauntered over to us and started asking whether we were enjoying our stay in Israel. After a moment or two, the penny dropped as to his identity, so we stopped looking at him as if he was some mad old geezer and started chatting. He was attending a celebrity wedding on top of Masada and was just stopping off en route, he told us. And then he sauntered off again (surrounded by what we now realised were very hard and dangerous bodyguards).

To this day, I've no idea why he chose to come over and talk to us. And having seen his bodyguards, I'm very glad I'm not palestinian.

3. I once shot my sister in the back. Or rather I persuaded my brother to do it. It was with an air pistol and a bit of rolled up paper. She still has the dent in her back to this day.

A couple of years ago, I reminded my brother about this heinous act, expecting him to be covered in shame about this act of wanton violence. He thought about it for a second and said "well, she probably deserved it".

4. Grace Jones once stood on my foot. It was at a recording of The Tube which was how I spent my early Friday evenings in the first year at college. On this occasion, they'd kept us back after the recording of the regular show to film an insert for the following week's programme - basically, Ms Jones miming to her latest single.

We were bored by this point and had wanted out, so were queuing to leave before she'd even finished her act. I don't think she was too impressed, as she stood on my foot as she swept past us. Bitch.

Possibly not the first time Grace Jones has been called a seven foot tranny, but almost certainly the only time she's been called it by a Goth with a lancashire accent.

5. I can pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. That's what comes from spending every summer holiday until the age of 12 on Anglesey.

Celebrity Big Brother

Whereas I don't watch the programme (reality tv is just another circle of hell that Dante didn't get around to blogging about), I've been quite interested in the racism issue that's recently become the over-riding preoccupation of the entire British media.

Now, I'm not going to talk about it at length because a) its been done to death by the media and b) I haven't seen any of the programme and commenting on something you haven't seen is the worst kind of Mary Whitehouse behaviour.

But this much I know. She might have spent a fortune on cosmetic surgery, but Jade Goody still has the face of a pig.

Fifty Things to do in Hampshire when you're Dead

Somewhere in the comments on my blog, Bob commented that he was going to be visiting Hampshire at some point in the near future and was asking what to go and see while he was there.

Unfortunately, I have to confess that my knowledge of Hampshire is sadly lacking. When I lived in London I knew that it was "south of here" in a vague sort of way. I know that Southampton is in Hampshire, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the New Forest is in Hampshire too. But that's about it.

So I've done some research (ie I've typed "things to do in hampshire" into Google) and this is what I've come up with:-

Winchester - it is very old and has King Arthur's table from Camelot somewhere in its environs. The real, actual table that the real, actual King Arthur, Lancelot and that lot all sat at when deciding on how to deal with the Knights of Ni and randy virgins with Grail-shaped beacons in their towers.

Jane Austen - stuffed and mounted somewhere in Hampshire, rather like a lot of the heroines in her novels.

HMS Victory - Nelson's flagship. Its in Portsmouth, but don't try and ask for directions or you might get the answer "I see no ships". Or worse still "Kiss Me Hardy".

Beaulieu - the National Motor Museum where you can see all sorts of makes of British car that ended up being made by the Germans or Japanese instead. And if you ask for directions, its pronounced Bewley - whoever called it Beaulieu was probably some snotty little parvenu with french pretensions aka the Earl of Southampton.

Scotland, England - this is incredibly close to Basingstoke and should be visited to buy over-priced whiskey and tartan that has absolutely no connection to your antecedents whatsoever.

And thats it. Not quite 50. Maybe go to London instead :-)

I shouldn't laugh but

Firstly, let me say that Doug needs his sleep; he's a growing lad. So, on nights when the boys have slept well (for the past three nights, in fact), I'm not too bothered about pulling the early shift and letting Doug have a bit of a lie-in.

However, the cats seem to have other ideas about allowing him to have some kip. On past occasions, they've decided to have a scrap on top of him, practice some weird cat-athon around the bedroom until he wakes up and kicks them out, or just sit on him miaowing loudly. And once awake, Doug finds it pretty much impossible to get back to sleep.

This morning Monty decided to trump all previous efforts entirely and bring him a gift of a live bird. When Doug finally managed to catch the bird and take it downstairs, Monty grabbed it out of his hands halfway down the stairs causing it to escape into the boys' room and thus continue the mad chase. Eventually, the bird was caught (not by the cat) and ejected through the front door, followed by the cat at lightning speed.

I only caught the end of this soap opera as Doug rather grumpily relayed the whole sorry tale to me in the hallway.

"So, you won't be going back to sleep then?" I asked. "!!£$?££!!!" was the response.

We have to talk about Jose

This is going to be a football post, so look away now if you're not interested in the beautiful game.

I'm getting very concerned that the wonderful, marvellous and indeed, very special Jose Mourinho (pictured above) might be about to part company with Chelsea. And by the sound of it, if he goes, it will be directly the fault of two people - Roman Abramovich and Peter Kenyon - for not backing him by giving him the money to spend on a much needed central defender in the January transfer window.

When he first arrived at the club, Jose cut the number of players in the squad saying that he didn't need a massive squad to be successful; generally speaking, this policy has worked well - he's not had to struggle with that most beloved topic of the footy journos, the rotation system ("tell me, Jose, how are X, Y and Z coping with sitting on the bench, despite having cost 3 trillion each?"). However, since the beginning of December, our talismanic captain and central defender, John Terry, has been out of action with a back injury and suddenly its all gone a bit Pete Tong.

There's no question that he bosses the defence, he's not Chelsea and England captain for nothing, but without him our defence has gone missing in action. Points that should have been ours for the taking have not been won, goals galore have been let in, the gap hasn't been closed on Man Utd; I know that Hilario is a third choice keeper, but the keeper is very much a last line of defence - a decent back four shouldn't let the goalkeeper so much as sniff the BO of the opposing team's striker. And to cap it all, we've now got injuries to other defenders and suddenly, Jose is having to cobble together a defence from midfielders and fullbacks.

But, according to press reports, Jose hasn't been given the money to shore up our defences this month. And that's directly down to Kenyon and Abramovich. I really don't know what they're playing at - if they want Chelsea to win a third title, FA Cup, Champions League, whatever, they're going to have to put their hands in their pockets because without a defence, we're stuffed - our whole game plan revolves around having a defence that's pretty much watertight, and when that's not the case, we start to let in water/goals.

Is it part of some plan to get him to leave? Constructive dismissal on a grand scale? Or do they really not get it even more than usual.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very grateful to Roman and his billions. Well, partly. Part of me wishes that we were still the underdogs, coming third or fourth in the league, winning the occasional League/FA Cup, maybe even a minor European title; no russian godfather pouring millions into the club and expecting unrealistic returns for his money.

But Roman doesn't really get football. He says he does, but he doesn't. He wants Chelsea to win everything, year in year out and that just doesn't happen, not for Chelsea, not for Man U, not for Real Madrid or AC Milan. And I'm very grateful it doesn't because it would be dull beyond belief. There was a point in the 1990s when it was unbelievably boring that Man U won almost everything, and quite a relief when Arsenal started challenging them. But Roman doesn't understand this and wants some sort of all-conquering team that sweep all before them.

And Kenyon is just a nasty manc who cares nothing for the club other than making it big, bloated and profitable. As if sport was ever a profitable business.... An aquaintance of mine who is a rep for the Chelsea Supporters Club had the temerity to support a peaceful in-stadium protest and was hauled into his office and threatened for publicising the fight to get, wait for it, half price tickets for children to the matches. Hardly a russian revolution. Had she been less doughty a person, she admits that she would have been frightened by the whole experience - locked office door, presence of a couple of heavies and a solicitor. So much for Kenyon having any empathy for the fans or appreciation of their concerns; all the Fans Forum and Chelsea Supporters Club stuff is just paying lip service to this and nothing more than PR. If there was any justice in the world, Kenyon would spontaneously combust, leaving behind nothing more than a greasy little puddle. But how would we tell the difference?

Enough of my ranting. Jose will stay or he will go. But they'll never get another manager like him, and time and experience will make them realise that there's no manager that can deliver their dreams of world domination, it just doesn't work like that. And the Special One will go and be special elsewhere, and our club and the premiership will be the drabber for it.

And who will they replace him with? Dear God, if its Sven Goran Erikkson, I'm going to have to start supporting York City....

Saturday Night

Its Saturday night, and all over the UK people are out enjoying themselves. I, however, am sat on the sofa with the cat, blogging on my laptop and watching the highlights of West Ham v Fulham on Sky Sports. I can think of more exciting ways of spending a Saturday night, to be honest. But I shouldn't grumble - last Saturday, we went out to the pictures, ate fish and chips in the car and didn't get home until quarter to eleven. It felt very daring, edgy even.

We've signed up with a babysitting service and its very good, even if we've only used it twice in about three months; a new year's resolution is to go out together much more, and as its Doug's birthday in a fortnight, we're starting as we mean to go on. Its not too bad if you go out for a meal in town and a few drinks - you spend enough that it feels economical to get a sitter in. However, if you just go to the cinema, it actually costs you twice the cost of the cinema tickets to pay for the sitter -£36 for the pair of us to see Casino Royale. Almost as expensive as going to see it in London :-)

And on that note, here is an entirely unnecessary and gratuitous photo of Daniel Craig in his trunks:-



You don't get many of those to the pound.

Photos

I've finally recovered the thingy from Doug's office, which means I can now put some photos up. So I'll put some up of the christmas cake.

Here it is in its 22nd December state:-


And here it is in its 5th January state:-


And here is a close-up of one of the little snowmen:-


I think next year I'll buy some more cake decorations. Make it even cheesier :-)

Milk Bottles cont.

Well, we've bought the new cup for him to drink his warm milk out of. And guess what - its too heavy. And other assorted excuses for not drinking from it.

I bought a smaller version of the cup for Sam and gave him that this morning, but he doesn't want it out of that either. Not heavy enough, presumably.

Oh well, early days. At least he's sleeping better - apart from coming in to our bedroom this morning at 5am to get into bed with us. He doesn't want to go to sleep when he gets in, he just wants to tell us both about how windy it is outside and what Bumble is up to.

When Doug put him back in his own bed, he woke Sam up with his protestations, so Doug has been up since 5.30am this morning and none too happy about it. Jacob, on the other hand, went back to sleep and didn't wake up until 8am.......

He's Behind You!!

Much better night with Jacob last night. He woke up once asking for milk, but went back to sleep without too much protest.

The funny thing was that when I went in to see why he was crying I didn't bother to put my glasses on; I was busily tucking in what I thought was Jacob when I heard a little voice go "Mummy" just behind me - I jumped a mile! I've taken his bed guard off, so he gets in and out v easily these days and had got out of bed before I came into the room.

We're heading off into Acomb after lunch to buy Jacob a cup to drink his milk from. I've told him that he gets to choose which cup it is and that it will be his very special cup that only he drinks from. His response to this was the frown, wag his finger at me and say "milk in a bottle".

We shall see.

My Name is Nigel

We're being plagued by the Men from Mumbai. At around 7.30pm every night, the phone starts to ring and on answering, I hear a very strongly accented voice going "Hello, my name is Nigel and I'm calling from [insert company name here]". At this point, I know that if I stay on the line "Nigel" is going to attempt to get me to transfer my phone service to that provided by the company he represents and so I just hang up. We had several calls last night, the last ending with Doug swearing at the person on the other end and then feeling very bad about having done so.

Now these sales calls bug the hell out of me. We get them on and off throughout the evening and as they come from outside the UK, my understanding is that we can't stop them from calling us (we're on the telephone preference list for sales companies within the UK). What really really bugs me is not that they're trying to sell me something, but that they start the conversation with a complete and utter lie.

"My name is Nigel", "My name is Catherine", "My name is Ian". No its bloody well not your name! You're called Ashok/Prianka/Ashif and you live in bloody Mumbai. Arghhhhhhhhhhh

Bad Habits

We've started to try and break Jacob of two of his more entrenched habits - drinking his milk warm from a baby bottle and waking up several times during the night demanding same.

The latter habit is a relatively recently acquired one - ever since we put him and Sam in the same room, he's become an easily disturbed sleeper, requiring warm milk (in a bottle) to get him back to sleep. If memory serves, he got into this rut before, in Aug 2005 after a really bad teething session when it would take warm milk and calpol to get him back to sleep. This time, I guess I've been so worried about him crying on being denied milk, thus waking up Sam and then Doug, and consequently the whole house having no sleep, that I've given in far too easily.

What this means in practice is that I've been up at, say, 12.30am, 2.30am, 4am and 5am night after night, getting no appreciable sleep. I've been running on empty for a few months now.

However, I've noticed recently that Sam hardly stirs at night and doesn't require being picked up to go back to sleep. He mostly sleeps through Jacob's occasional nightmares and vomiting, so I've decided that the time is now to break Jacob of the milk habit. The other reason for wanting Jacob to stop drinking at night is that we're in the early stages of potty training and he can't be expected to stay dry through the night if he's got a bladder full of milk.

The other habit we're trying to break him of is drinking his milk out of an avent bottle and teat. I have tried numerous times to get him to stop this - I know that its bad for his teeth and I also think he's too big a boy to be doing something so babyish. However, in Jacob's world view, milk is drunk from a bottle and juice is drunk from a cup and ne'er the two shall meet.

I decided a while ago that once Sam is one in Feb and has no need for sterilised bottles or formula then he'll drink his milk from a cup. Having talked it over last night, we've decided that when that happens, we'll throw all the avent bottles out and that both of them will have to start drinking milk from a cup. That'll mean that Sam will have to get out of his bottle of milk at night habit, as well as Jacob - I know this is going to make life difficult for a while, but hopefully it'll be better in the long run.

I'll be telling myself that today as I struggle to keep awake - we denied Jacob his night-time milk last night and had three hours of him weeping and wailing in the small hours and occasionally getting up and coming into our room to plead his case in person. He did eventually get off to sleep, but I was so stressed after listening to him ("oh mummy, please, please") that it took me ages to get off to sleep.

Last time he got himself into this rut, we decided that we'd have to break him of it before Sam's birth; but just as we'd decided this, he sorted it out for himself and started sleeping through. I'm going to hope for similar miracles, but pragmatism tells me that it ain't going to happen.

Baubles

One of my baubles has broken. Not just any old bauble, but one of a very nice pair of Murano baubles bought on holiday to Venice a few years ago before we had kids. In fact, we bought seven in a variety of colours; Doug wanted to give them all to our next door neighbours who were feeding the cats while we were away, but as I scroogeishly exclaimed "that's seventy pounds, I could have hired a professional cat sitter for less", so we kept two back.

Its survived three Christmases with Jacob and one with Sam, but when I put it on the kitchen counter earlier with a view to stashing it away in a high cupboard out of the way of small destructive fingers, I noticed that it didn't make its usual bell-like noise. A small hairline crack is running around the surface, and while its still holding its shape, I'm not sure I want to risk it back on the tree next year.

Any ideas on repairing it?

Le Christmas Cake C'est Finis

Mosh had the last bit, although I did send a slice to Adrian yesterday which he was planning to have for his afternoon tea today. No idea if he ate it or not.

Anyway, for a cake that finally entered service on Christmas Day, lasting until 5th Jan isn't a bad innings.

I've taken a photo of the remains, and when I've got round to hunting down our photo transfer USB thingy* I'll put the photos up on here.

*technical term. It does have a name but thingy is a catch-all term for all computer gadgets that Doug purchases. My grasp as to what they do is tenuous at best, so thingy imparts the correct amount of ignorance and stops people from thinking that I know what I'm talking about.

The insanity of Montgomery

Doug and I disagree on many things. One of these is the stupidness of our cats. Doug pretends merely to suffer their presence and is vociferous in the opinion that in a stupidity contest with Jade Goody and Paris Hilton, they'd be runaway winners. I think that they're as smart as paint and would probably beat Doug hands down at Trivial Pursuit; that said, Jade Goody and Paris Hilton could probably beat Doug at Trivial Pursuit.

However, I've decided that Doug might have a point. Not only that, but that Monty has actually passed beyond mere stupidity and has moved on to actual insanity.

It only ever happens when I'm making up Sam's formula at night but the moment the steriliser comes out of the microwave he is up on the counter in the blink of an eye, through my arms and trying to dive head first in to the bottles. Its as if he pushed really hard on the bottle neck he'd succeed in getting his head into the bottle like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon. I could understand it if it was actual formula he was trying to get at as he loves all milky/creamy food and drink, but he does this before any of the powder has gone in. Thus my two minute task of making up a couple of bottles ends up as a ten minute exercise in cat wrestling.

Perhaps he's some sort of feline genie, trying to get back into his bottle. Although I'd not have pegged a scratched Avent 9oz bottle as a suitable home for such a magical creature. But again, he manages to make cat sick mysteriously disappear with hardly a mark on the carpet on which he deposited it....

A sobering thought

I'm just tidying up after our New Years Day party - surprisingly little food left, and had Andy not been ill, we would have had none left so well done me for estimating how much to buy.

Anyway, I got talking to Rich who was bemoaning the fact that he was "the oldest man alive". Turns out he's three weeks younger than me..... But as we talked about being old and infirm, swapping amusing stories about catheters and steradent tablets, I pointed out to him that now its 2007, we can both say that we'll be 40 next year. Excuse me while I take my false teeth out and go and sob into my sanatogen vitamin drink.