January Archive

Thursday, January 27, 2005
Wet Patch
You know
love has lost it's lure
when the wet patch
is no longer
the romantic demonstration
of his spent love;

once it becomes
a clammy presumption
it's time
to throw in the towel.


posted by She Weevil @ 4:40 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 21, 2005
I'm watching ...
Currently I'm watching Desperate Housewives, Distant Shores and Dragon's Den. How very alliterative.

The first, obviously much hyped, was described by PH as Sex and the City with lawns. It so isn't. Don't get me wrong. I loved that extended advertisement for Manolo Blahnik but DH is somewhat different, more like Twin Peaks in the kind of Technicolor America it portrays and the titles remind me of an Angela Carter novel, which can't be bad.

Distant Shores has been rather disappointing. I suppose I shouldn't have looked for too much in an ITV drama serial but the plot seems rather predictable and hackneyed. It is however charmingly played, beautifully shot and in a stunning location - Google Craster to find out more.

Dragon's Den - what to say? A group of business angels investing their own cash in the right propositions. At times painful, the angels/dragons sometimes chew them up and spit them out or sometimes take them under their hallowed wings. The interest for me is seeing the projects that the individuals are excited about. Who'd have thunk disposable brollies would be the way to go?

Oh, and always University Challenge but it doesn't begin with D.


posted by She Weevil @ 2:38 PM 0 comments

The Slug People - Daddy Slug

I have briefly alluded to these beautiful people before. If you think about the humpty dumpty man from Dr Who. Well, what was his real name then? The one with no neck and small ears. Well, as I was saying before my nerd (hah) detector clicked in, think about the humpty dumpty man and imagine if you will the offspring of a union between him and Rick Waller and you'll kind of get the picture. He seems to spend a lot of time in sports wear (the irony) of the England football variety and when he's not off to work for Sven, he spends his time airing his underpants. Now, modern washing practises aside, including the fact that most people no-longer feel the need to air items of clothing, it was normal in days gone by to remove the garment before airing it. But no, apparently the most effective way of airing one's underpants is to sport them on the communal landing of your social housing block, stained and smelly as mentioned before - that would be the landing, not the underpants.

posted by She Weevil @ 11:02 AM 0 comments

Perplexed

Oh and while I'm momentarily not ranting into the ether, here is the other thing perplexing me at the moment: www.perplexcity.com. Good, I've passed it on like the black spot. May you have many sleepless nights pondering the imponderable.

posted by She Weevil @ 9:20 AM 0 comments

Blog off

A word of clarification. I am no-longer a single mother but I was one for five years. There seems to be some discussion today again about the easy option it is to become a single mother.

I thought that that kind of tosh had disappeared into the wilderness along with Margaret Thatcher's sanity and the integrity of that whole Tory back-to-basics brigade. This morning's report on the Today programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ seems to be reopening the whole sorry debate. The Centre for Policy Studies who have produced the study: http://www.cps.org.uk/pdf/pub/396-pr.pdf are described as right-leaning by the BBC Online news(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4192601.stm) and right wing by the today programme but are they right-minded?



posted by She Weevil @ 9:05 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 20, 2005
Headspace
Writing, whilst having to print out pictures from the Cbeebies and keep a newly two-year old genius occupied in order to stop him helping PH with the carpet fitting, is no mean feat. LJCM was two yesterday and he is no-longer a baby. Mostly sunny-natured, he is plagued by moderately severe eczema and consequently does not sleep well. In fact, it is over two years since I slept through the night and I can truly vouch for the fact that sleep deprivation is a crime against humanity, torture and just plain bloomin' horrible.

In addition to this we have two teenagers. Arty Daughter (AD) and Surrealo Son (SS) for the purpose of this journal. AD is currently in the last year of her GCSEs and SS is in year 9 (whatever that means in old money). They go to a lately infamous school and are seen as relatively high achievers despite the problems we and they have had. Apparently good, as well as bad, will out. AD has rejected the idea of Sixth Form or the local college for A levels (their school has no sixth form) in preference for a Btec at the local art college. I can be so traditional and conservative (please note the small c) it is difficult to acknowledge that this is almost certainly the right thing for her, as opposed to A levels.

She is completely focused on her artwork and is precociously talented. She also thrives on doing things well and getting praised/rewarded for it. She does not thrive on struggling or stoically continuing to do something that she has little or no interest in or talent for. She does have a rather bizarre passion for ironing which to me always requires much more stoicism than I have in order to finish more than a couple of pillowcases and a tea towel. Don't get me wrong. I have a talent for ironing and indeed, can iron to perfection but I loathe it with a passion. So no giant, guilty ironing pile for me to decry, ironing is done only on a need-to-iron basis.

SS, sorry just noticed the unfortunate combination of initials - no Prince Harry, he, is mostly mad on history, computer games and animals with oddly appealing names; marmoset and gnu to name but two. He is intense and thoughtful, usually warm and loving but with a low flash point. He is in the amusing process, for me at least, of his voice breaking. As someone with no brothers the whole thing is very odd. Sometimes it sounds like we have this odd unknown bloke in the house. He almost sounds like his father, although it's hard to remember... But his accent is very different.

I suppose what I'm really saying is that with all this stuff going on it is difficult to focus on writing and I should just give myself a bit of a break. Like most single mothers I have little sympathy for the Father 4 Justice lot. http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/comment/0,1074,1305607,00.html. Most mothers left with care do not have the disposable income to run around the country dressed as batman and if they disturbed the peace in the way that these men may or may not have justification for doing would almost certainly be investigated by social services.


posted by She Weevil @ 1:12 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 14, 2005
Oh ... and don't be afraid to stop and say hi
Otherwise this is just like one hand clapping or a tree falling over in the wilderness.


posted by She Weevil @ 5:06 PM 0 comments

Link to my old blog and the tale of an Elizabethan Scrubber
This will take anyone who cares to look back to the old She Weevil blog.


posted by She Weevil @ 2:38 PM 0 comments

My Darling Clementine
Lived a miner, 49er and his daughter Clementine.
Not that this has much relation to anything. My state of woe seems to have abated for the time being although I am still stuck in this giant rut with no obvious means of escape.

A degree seemed once to be the answer but options open to mature students are not the same as the ones open to conventional milk-rounders.

Suffice it to say, and without the wish to bring everybody else down to the same state of depression that I have been in, I have not, in the eight years since I graduated, done anything that I couldn't have done before. Indeed the process has left me feeling as if the whole degree thing was a complete waste of time and money for the lack of opportunity and financial gain it has actually produced.

Last year I actually took a job as a cleaner in an old people's home and for awhile I was able to get on with my work without the problem of people being threatened by me or my degree. This was mostly due to the fact that I worked at a time when none of the management staff was at work. However, I changed jobs and worked at the same time as everyone else including the boss (think Max Clifford's corpulent brother) and the trouble started. It all came to blows at the end of the summer, after they had used me, my goodwill and my hard work to get them over a crisis and then decided to dispense with my services and ask me if I wanted to go back to cleaning.

It wasn't the cleaning I objected to, just the manner in which they were getting rid of me.

Well I haven't worked since. As you will realise if you read on down, the second part of last year was just a write off. I am just about managing to fend off the depression which is a big problem in my life. I am truly dogged by it. But as I say I'm just about managing to hold it at arms length.

Where do I go from here?


posted by She Weevil @ 2:11 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Stop it, stop it now
Have resolved to stop whingeing into the web. Am feeling more upbeat today don't know why. I have a raging hangover as a result of me and DH draining a box of wine. Stupid. Stupid.

It would be fair to say that the transition to the flat has not been an easy one for the cats. We have five. They were used to a garden and an alley with easy access provided by a noisy cat flap or a back door that was rarely shut.

Now they have become house cats and reverting back to using a tray is taking some getting used to. So at times the place smells like we have five cats and this is not something that I am particularly pleased about. We talked about contacting the local rescue centre but I decided last night that I don't want to let them go. Once the weather gets better and they get used to being here it maybe that we can let them out and rig up some way for them to get back in. If not, well we'll have to cross that bridge when we've burned it, as they say.

Pissy old cat woman is not really the image I am trying to project of myself into cyberspace but it is marginally better than being one of the slug people that live downstairs.


posted by She Weevil @ 10:58 AM 0 comments

Monday, January 10, 2005
Doom and gloom
Maybe it's the weather; maybe it's the time of year; perhaps it's the constant diet of sadness and despair on the television news but for one reason or another I feel completely miserable.

I have reached something of a crossroads and I don't know which way to turn. Ten years ago everything seemed so simple. I was in the middle of my degree, studying as a fairly young mature student, and it was going to be the answer. Well the closest I can say it came was to being an answer, not the answer I was looking for.

Sure, I met DH and now we have LJCM and I wouldn't want to be without them, but I feel lost: like I'm wallowing through treacle and getting nowhere fast. At the same time, Time seems to be whizzing past at a million miles an hour. I feel trapped in my own worst dreams.

I have no confidence, no convictions and no connections to the outside world.


posted by She Weevil @ 9:23 PM 0 comments

Saturday, January 08, 2005
BBC Collective

BlogThis!I have to say that all this activity is probably a kind of New Year's zeal and will last probably into the beginning of next week but I have just joined BBC Collective:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/U976008

Now all I have to do is read/watch/listen or see something to review. I feel a fish coming on.

posted by She Weevil @ 12:53 PM 0 comments

Wind

I am just trying out this email blog submission thing. The wind has been very strong over night but nowhere near as strong as further north. And nothing like October 87 or January 1990.
In October 87 I was in the Wrens, living just outside Portsmouth. We had been out for the evening and coming back, slightly the worse for wear in a cab, the first thing that made us really conscious of the weather were the several large trees down on the main drive.
We had to get out of the taxi and walk. At the time the wardroom was being refitted and extended upwards (allegedly to accommodate Prince Andrew and his new wife when he came on a course). The next morning the shrouding around the building was in tatters and pieces of aluminium sheeting that were being used for something in the build process were whirling across the parade ground like weird cartoon scythes.
The electricity at the camp was out for almost a week while the Buffer's Party helped the local authorities re-establish power and tidy and clear the local village.



posted by She Weevil @ 9:45 AM 0 comments

Friday, January 07, 2005
Bananas and Monkfish tied up in string ...
... these are a few of my favourite things. Click the link at the side to visit an interesting new blog.


posted by She Weevil @ 5:03 PM 0 comments

Happy bloody New Year
Well, it seems my mood has not improved. What with the tragedy in the Indian Ocean, the weather and the typical post-Christmas brassickness I am feeling decidedly cheesed-off.

Am dipping a tentative toe into the muddy puddle that is ARG and in particular Perplex City coming, I am assured, sometime soon. I'm a real virgin to it all and the forum (http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=73&sid=9982fa9c82b877865395c32ebe583efa) would have every right to think I'm something of a balmpot (how do you spell that?).

On top of all this my mum is no-longer talking to me because of a cyber gaff.

Happy New Year one and all.

Just throw the bloody thing out of the window.

posted by She Weevil @ 4:38 PM 0 comments