The Vat-Man made my head explode

Once a quarter I have to sit down with spreadsheets and invoices and other heaps of paperwork and make some sort of financial sense of what my small company has done in the preceding three months. It happened to me this weekend and meant I didn't have the time to sort through some of my recent, well, I can't call them scribblings or jottings, so let's call them rattlings.

But the blossoms are still on the trees, and new flowers are coming out as fast as old ones fade, so I've got a few photos from the previous weekend.


These are straggling over the fence from a neighbouring garden.



Insects seem to just be there whenever I point the camera. Overlooked and often loathed, if they weren't busy at this time of year we might not have flowers again.


I think this is Cranesbill. It grows everywhere and is rife outside my backdoor. It is classed as a weed.


I think this is a wild cornflower. It was hiding deep in the tangled bramble stems and nettles, as though it can't bear to be exposed to the sun.


I'm temped to say bluebells. because I've seen them in pinks and whites as well as the colour from which they get their name.


I have taken a dozen or more photos of these over the past few weeks, and up till now none of the shots have really caught this tiny flower properly.


Gorse, I think, but not in the massive clump you normally find them in.


I call these Ox-Eye Daisies, but I have been told that they are too early for them. Maybe Wiltshire flowers get up before the rest of the countyr.


I don't know what this is, it's tiny and almost invisible alongside the road.


Even nettles bloom, and I have a recipe for a wine to be made from nettle flowers and tops.


I think this is an escapee from a garden.


These, like the tiny blue flowers above, are very hard to get a decent photo of.


This cornflower was less shy than the one I found amongst the nettles, but it is so close to one of the houses I suspect it has seeded itself from their garden.


I put these lichen in for Frenchwomans Left Antenna. We tend to ignore them, but the shapes and colours can be really outlandish, and almost beg to be found in mysterious caves and grottos, not on apple trees alongside the road.


Finally, although it isn't a flower, I find some leaves to be as visually atrractive as any blossom, for shape, or colour, or pattern.

Motorway Disservices

I hate driving in the middle of the day, but on Fridays I have no choice. I have to make a brief appearance at work to tidy up the admin side of the contract. It is galling that everything I do on a Friday morning could be done remotely over broadband, except for one thing. I have to get a signature from the client to say that they are happy with the hours I intend to bill them for. Half an hour beyond the time at which I should have been out of the door I finally managed to get the signature, and set off into the drizzle of a bank holiday weekend.

Normally the motorways are a battle between lorry overtaking lorry, with cars and vans all bunching up in the third lane, (if there is one), but today the battle was between lorries overtaking caravans and slow cars. I could see I was steadily losing time, about 10 minutes in the hour, and so I pulled into the southbound services at Watford Gap. The battle started immediately, the car park was dotted with mobile homes. I tried to park in spaces alongside two of them, only to find they had each left the access steps hanging down into the adjacent space.

I got parked and went inside. I could see where the toilets where, and had a go at getting to them. Either side of the thoroughfare were large stacks of special offer boxes; DVD players and MP3 quad surround speakers. Between the two pillars of bargains, in what should have been the way through to the gents, a man and a woman were standing four feet apart having an animated discussion. The only way to and from the toilets was to dodge through the shop and the queues at the tills. Coming back out of the toilets was a little electronic sign with three faces, a scowl, a bland smile, and a happy grin, and an invitation to press the face that best suited your reaction to the toilets. Nobody had punched it, the toilets were un-crowded and unimpeded.

Back at the restaurant, I chose a chicken fajitas wrap and a bottle of lemon-flavoured mineral water. I had forgotten to take my bag of fruit with me from work. There was a large crowd around the servery, and further up, at the single till which was staffed, I slotted in between a woman who was waiting for her coffees, and a man who was paying for his meals. The woman gave me a dirty look. I didn't react, as soon as the man had paid I would be quickly through the till while her coffees were still being poured.

The lady at the till was struggling to work out how to correct a mistake she had made, and the man wasn't helping matters by asking if he could add an extra child's portion to the tray if his girl went and got it from the sweet counter. I looked at the other empty till, and at the two dozen people still waiting at the hot food point. I realised that the woman fumbling with the till was also the person who would go and pour the coffee for the irritated lady waiting to my right. There was no sign of any extra staff coming to open up the second till , or help with the queue at the servery. I took my tray back to the entrance, unloading the wrap and the water back into their places, looked briefly for a sign with three faces to punch, and left unable to vent my frustration.

Management was obviously having a bad day at the Southbound Watford Gap services, probably locked firmly in their office dealing with staff timesheets that needed signatures, oblivious to the fact that on a bank holiday Friday slightly more customers than usual would be turning up.

Ten miles further south I pulled off again into another services, the same franchise, the same internal layout, the same chicken fajitas wrap and bottle of lemon water, at the same price of £5.98 (which is more than I pay for my weekly fruit ration), but thankfully twice the number of staff to serve food and man the two tills.

And you wonder why there are road-rage incidents?

I would like to see a panel at the entrance to the Southbound Watford Gap Services, with a photograph of the facilities manager, and some sort of means to summarise your overall impression of your visit there. A boxing glove, or a straw dummy and a rack of Kendo sticks might be a better idea than the electronic sign, and some of the visitors might leave the site feeling a little bit less tense than when they arrived.

Exile on the Beach

My breakfast soup releases the tangy smell of seaweed as I prise the lid off, and if I close my eyes I can imagine the eerie call of the gulls. Wherever we were on the salty green ocean there was always a bird to fly alongside between the masthead and the sparkling wavetops. We kept each other company, men and birds, all of us far from a safe shore and a solid perch. We fed them with our catches, we followed them to the shore when the equipment failed us.

I've been away from the sea too long, did she send me off in disgrace or did I run and hide? The last ship whose deck I trod upon was a ferry between Malta and Gozo, and I paused by the door to the engine room as I caught the scent of hot oil and heard the murmur of the rumbling diesels. I sailed a small yacht around for a few years, but it didn't have the same thrill, even though the fear was just as strong. A vessel with a single sailor is an empty vessel.

This is a monotonous world where nothing rises and falls, and nothing slides slowly across the tabletops to tumble playfully to the floor, and nothing is what I feel about the flat earth that promises it will never take me by surprise. When I get too old to be allowed to continue to trudge around the paths and pavements will I see a quayside in front of me, and a ship tied up with the gangplank quivering, and hear a call from the bridge to get my ass aboard smartly if I please?

Well then, let that be it; if I have to go at all, I would like to go in an old familar way.

Flowers in the Forest

Thank you for the pleasing comments on the blossom post; since I take quite a lot of photos of the hedgerows I'm happy to share some of them on a regular basis.

I'm going to restrict myself mostly to wild flowers and plants, because I feel that they deserve more attention; gardens are looked after, tended, and shown off; the plants in the fields and hedgerows have to fight their own battles against other plants, pesticides, poor soil, intermittent rain, and clumsy-footed bloggers armed with a camera and a bicycle. I have a soft spot for beauty in the wild.

The flat fenland and Humber plains produce different plants to the rolling Wiltshire hills. Perhaps there is less shelter from bitter winds, but I do not find so many species thriving in the North. Or maybe they'll come out later, and I can enjoy a glorious summer.



A few spring poppies were fluttering gaily in the wind as I cycled past, so I stopped for a while. Only one of them was strong enough to hold still against the wind for long enough to not look blurred in the final photos, but as it was the first one I photographed I think I picked it out of the dozen or so in the field for a special reason. An omen, perhaps, telling me to trust what my heart picks upon.



Near to the small patch of poppies was a clump of low-growing plants that I do not recognise.



I haven't seen this type of blossom in Wiltshire, but the field hedges were full of it.



And I'm guessing this is a celandine, but do feel free to put me in the know.



A couple of miles further on I found purple and white bell-shaped flowers growing in the grass beside the road, but the wind was driving them into a wild frenzy and I couldn't get anything other than blurred shots. Nearby was a smaller plant that had the sense to hide from the wind.



And this has to be an escapee from a garden, but since it is growing untended I acknowledge it has a right to be in my collection. You'll see I wasn't the only one attracted by the colour.



The woods themselves are a mixture of firs and beeches, and are almost devoid of anything other than these.

And so on to the mystery:



At a crossroads of muddy tracks I came upon this strange scene.



There was a little heap of fircones beside one of the pots, and the tree is a beech tree with no conifers of any type near to it. A message? I have passed this spot many times in the past few weeks and this is the first time I have noticed anything unusual.

So what's the story here? I searched the bark on the tree for 'XX loves YY' carvings, but if this is a chromosomic shrine they preferred to remain anonymous. Is it in memory of a love? Or a death? Is a favourite pet buried nearby beneath the cool silent trees, where it loved to play and frolic?

Or is this where a child was conceived? I could bother to find out, but I have learned that truth is sometimes a destroying revelation. I shall let this memory remain a mystery.

I like the idea of adding music to these posts to try and share my mood with you, so here's something that seems to fit in with my feelings on this episode.

Kitchenfloorough


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The Craster Kipper Caper

We flew from Bristol to Newcastle. The queue for our check-in desk was as long as the queue for the Malaga flights. All passports were being checked, and all baggage was being examined.

"Good morning, Sir. Is this your bag?"
"Did you pack it yourself? Has anyone else had access to it?"
(I had to resist my little quip about the Filipino maids doing nothing but their nails nowadays).
"And the purpose of your visit?"
(Geordie-baiting).
"Have a nice flight, Sir".

I love proper kippers for breakfast, and was not disappointed with the first breakfast at our hotel in Chollerford. The next morning, I ordered them again, but was denied. "We're temporarily out of kippers". Later that day we sped up the coast and stopped off for half an hour at Craster, legendary home of North Sea kippering. I was tempted to buy some in the smokehouse shop but Wor Lass vetoed the idea. "Nyet, they'll stink out the car, and our room at the hotel". She reassured me that the hotel would soon restock with kippers and I would have my breakfast treats for the rest of the holiday.

But it was not to be. Each morning I ordered kippers, and each morning was told that the kipper-pond was dry. It seemed that they only got their kipper orders in once a week. I planned a quick dash up the coast again to Craster, so that next morning when the kipper order was declined I could whip a whopper out of my pocket and slap it on the plate with a request to "warm this one up please, and if the chef's interested, I've got a few more for sale". But again, "Nyet, they'll throw us out.". Not if they want the bill paying, they won't. But nyet is non-negotiable, and I never saw the smokehouse again.

We flew back home at the end of a 6-day break, with my having eaten only one kipper. We flew there and back, I'll add, for less than it cost to park the car in Bristol Airport's long stay car park, and less than it would have cost in petrol to drive to and from Newcastle. Don't bother looking up the train price to see how that would have compared, I could insure my collection of cars for less. A few days later, when we went shopping at a local supermarket, I stopped in front of the fishy section of the delicatessen counter, and there, in a dish, was a selection of Craster Kippers. Even more amazing was the price - less than I would have paid for them if I had bought my planned pocketful from the smokehouse in the harbour. But at least the mystery of my kipper-less northern holiday was explained. Buyers for Waitrose had cornered the Craster Kipper market, leaving the local hotels to get by on what few fish were left after the smoking catch was shipped south.

Looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised. A fisherman myself once, I remember sailing from Lowestoft out into the North Sea, where for two or three weeks our trawlers would plod around in company with fishing boats from all around Europe. Once full, back in Lowestoft we would land our catch on the fish market in neatly packed baskets of ice. The Dutch boats, which had also been dragging their trawls alongside ours, would return to their harbours, and soon a container-lorry would cross the North Sea by ferry, drive to Lowestoft fish market, and put fully-filleted plaice alongside our own catch, for a lower asking price than we could afford to drop to. The Dutch Government subsidised the fuel bills of their industry. Well, if you 'owned' half of Shell wouldn't you be tempted? Not surprisingly, our fishing industry went into a decline and I found myself looking for another future.

So who, I now wondered, was subsiding the Craster Kipper Caper, and to what end? Before even considering the why were they doing it, I found myself pondering the how did they do it? How was it possible for someone to sell Craster kippers in Dorset for less than the shop price beneath the smokehouse where they were cured? The answer came to me when petrol prices started to rise again, and I jokingly remarked it would be cheaper for me to get work in Newcastle and fly there and back than continue driving to and from Swindon. I saw it all in a flash - someone was using the network of cut-price airlines to transport kippers at sub-freight costs. Redundant call-centre workers and computer programmers whose jobs had been outsourced to India were being recruited by adverts promising "a future in sales combined with travel and good food" ,and becoming kipper-carriers.

The ability to deal with officialdom and think quickly must be a major asset in such a career.

"Good morning Sir. Is this your bag?"
"Did you pack it yourself?"
"Has anyone else had access to it?"
"Would you mind opening it please?"

"Could you tell me why your bag is full of kippers?"
"Oh, I understand. I've been trying the Atkins diet, but I can't seem to stick to it. Have a nice flight, Sir"

I had put the Craster Kipper Caper out of my mind for a few months, when I caught sight of a newspaper headline. The National Health Service, (allegedly), is planning to send all the samples it currently tests here out to India for testing. It is, it seems, cheaper to fly blood and urine halfway round the world and back again, than to send it up the road to a laboratory in England.

(At this point may I make it perfectly clear that the word allegedly is not intended to be applied to the preceding words National Health Service, but to the following portion of the sentence. Any suggestion that the National Health Service exists more for the benefit of foreigners than it does for the paying citizens is accidental and unintended. Likewise, any suggestion that the National Health Service is actually a collection of regional authorities in a desperate competition against each other to meet government targets, instead of actively cooperating with each other to ensure the health and wealth of the nation, is grossly disingenuous ).

Back to the issue at hand:

"Good morning Sir, nice to see you again. How is the fish diet?"
"I'm not surprised, I wouldn't have been able to stick it either. So, what have we in the bag today, then?"

"Sir, these seem to be samples of some description. Have you declared them under the section headed 'Gifts, merchandise, or samples'?"
"Really? But if they are not samples, what are they then?"
"Oh, I see, specimens. Can I just ask why you have so many of them?"
"Ah yes, one of my Aunts is a hypochondriac, too. I hope you get cured soon, Sir".

The headline "India to test our NHS samples, now they're taking the p*ss!" is a single-source item of dubious intelligence, probably wrong for sensational reasons. Sadly, though, it is exactly the sort of information that a government would use as a reason for going to war against the NHS. But, tax and insurance contributions have dropped somewhat as jobs go abroad, and either taxes must rise to make good the shortfall, or costs must be cut. No sensible government puts up taxes when there is a perfectly good alternative, so I predict we are going to see much more of this drive to outsource anything that we, as a nation, can do perfectly well ourselves, to other countries eager to maximise their use of cut-price air travel.

There could even be a benefit to us, as motorists, when the Shire Councils realise the way to reduce their highway maintenance expenditure is to stop the never ending cycle of "resurface the road, dig up the road, patch the road again, deal with the complaints about potholes, resurface the road ...", and, yes, I can tell you're right there with me, outsource the road-mending process to India. No longer will half a mile of road be single-laned to mend and resurface a few potholes. Instead, they'll be shipping out standard-sized metre-square chunks of pot-holed road and receiving back patched and resurfaced pieces to be slotted back into place again, without all that unnecessary expense of paying wages and Employers National Health contributions.

"Good morning Sir, nice to see you again. My, that is a large bag, I am sorry to see your hypochondria is getting worse."
"Cured, you say? Oh, I am glad for you. So then, what is in the bag today, Sir?"

"What are these large pieces of black stuff with holes in them?"
"Your collection? What are you collecting. Sir?"
"Oh, modern art. Well, I prefer classical sculpture myself, but it takes all sorts, as they say. Have a nice flight, Sir".

Changing Faces

There is a company in Berkshire for whom I have worked on several contracts, on and off, over the last ten years. There is a friend who still works there, she was there when I first turned up, and for all I know will carry on there until she retires. I flit from company to company, contract to contract, a moth to the brightest candle, while she flies sedately in the meadows, an eternal butterfly with just one favourite flower.

When I turned up at this place last time, I caught sight of her as I crossed the atrium, and she saw me from the corner of her eye. We both back-tracked until we were side by side, did a ritual circling dance around each other, and said, simultaneously, “You haven’t changed a bit”. But we had, I certainly knew I was fatter, lazier, more of a slob, and I could see that she had rounded out in several places, albeit nicely. Yet we each knew just by looking that the central core to each of us, the part that each other liked and communicated with, was unchanged. How, I don’t know, it must be one of these mysteries that is shown to you in the last few seconds of existence, as your life replays the triumphs and tragedies one final time.

And now I’m throwing my old self away, sending the comfortable old knight’s steed to the knackers’ yard, letting my old dreams unravel in the winds of fate. What if she liked the old rumpled well-rounded person I was, would she mourn his going?

I get my photograph taken about once every two years, that’s about the time it takes me to complete one contract, relax for a month or two, panic for another month or two, and then walk through another door and into another security department for a new identity card. Each new photo shows a fatter face, a more dishevelled appearance, a wider grin. I have taken a perverse pleasure in the way the years have battered and beaten at my appearance, gained a quiet satisfaction from the fact that I no longer need to look smart or appealing, or do the ironing thing.

About ten weeks ago I had a new identity card. Same old show, different theatre, but I know my part so well I ad-lib just to keep the act alive. I didn’t even bother with the skewed half-knotted tie revealing an unbuttoned collar. The grin was even more lopsided. The lady taking the photograph in the induction centre checked it, and asked me if I would like her to have another go. I settled for take-one, I know things would only get worse if I start trying to look better than I really was.

Three days ago, I completed a course that allowed me to roam through the dangerous parts of the processes with the full knowledge that going astray would be both horrible to contemplate, and ultimately my fault. I signed the card, glanced once at the photo, and sat down again. It was not me. I was staring at a stranger’s face, lean and mean. Where was the sympathetic twinkle in the eyes? Why was there no wry grin? A part of me is disturbed by the change, the loss of what I felt was warmth, wits, and jollity.

Is this the last dying gasp of a part of me that wanted to be overweight, free from the burden of having to keep up an appearance, the part of the psyche that sees itself as the jolly parent? Is it still fighting a desperate rearguard action, clinging to the last remaining fat around me, begging me to reconsider before it is too late? I never thought getting fit again would be like this. If I am lucky, the mean look is just another manifestation of the poor artistic qualities of security and training staff. If I am unlucky, there's a bastard on the way out. A part of me is frightened that my friend will see me next time, and not like this stranger that she has never seen before.

So, is this a stranger emerging into the light as the fat falls away, or is my older self returning to the world once more from a fifteen-year slumber?


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Oh, bother the flowers that bloom in the spring

I never managed to post anything yesterday, circumstances got the better of me and I crossed the border into Dorset in response to the plaintive wail of a Damsel in Distress. “Oi, Dragon, get your arse here now”. Some of these Knights have no sense of the game anymore. But today’s post is mostly visual.




I had to take the car up for a service on Friday, and little petal was away, so I had to walk the four miles back home while my car was prodded and poked and topped up. I went by the fields and footpath.




A lot of our ‘wild’ hedgerow plants now are escapees from gardens, I can’t decide whether they are immigrants or emigrants




Spring has come late this year, perhaps it waited until I was back with a chance to enjoy it.



And our front steps are surrounded by as fierce a tangle as you’d find in the nearby hedges.

Bad habits make for better lifestyles

I'm slipping into a different routine at my new location. I've broken the old habit of going out for an evening walk and then spending an hour in the pub with a couple of bottles of Newcastle Brown and a meal. I managed to do this by creating a new habit, going out for ninety minutes cycling and exercising, followed by a brief snack and a collapse into a hot bath. However, the exhaustion persists beyond the bath; I am now spending the remainder of the evening sprawled on the bed watching the least offensive rubbish I can find on the television. This part of the new habit is going to have to go. TV can be fun in short spells if you watch something you actually enjoy, but letting the world of the tube wash in and out of your mind when it is in a non-critical mood is slow death.

I know what I would rather do, but I don't have an internet connection. I like to talk by email, and not about what I've just watched on the box. I need a way to get back on the web, without paying my mobile phone company a fortune. Sadly, the only way that I can come up with at the moment would have me back on a diet of junk food; the MacDonalds near to my workplace is a WiFi hotspot. One good thing about realising you have bad habits is knowing when you are likely to fall into them again. At the moment I have a great temptation that almost justifies my slipping back into a diet of junk food, but I know my weaknesses. There will be another way, soon, I hope. Technology will save me from the very indolence that it induces in my lifestyle, if I'm canny enough.

Twenty years ago, I bought my first laptop, although if you saw it today you'd laugh at it. I paid a lot of money for a Tandy Model 100. It was an A4-sized block of two-tone ABS plastic, with an LCD screen showing 8 lines of 80 characters. It had a word-processor, an address book, terminal software, and Microsoft Basic as the programming language. All of the chips in it were CMOS technology, meaning that they used very little current, and so it would run for ages on a few small batteries. The downside of all this was that it didn't have colours, or even shades of grey, and it wouldn't play any 'real' games. But since I didn't play games, (at least, not with computers), I didn't care.

I took it into work, where the MoD were complaining about the lack of detail in some equipment failure reports the big IBM mainframe was churning out, and downloaded a chunk of information from the Database. That night, I wrote some lines of code to get a new set of figures out from the data. Back at work next morning, I temporarily unplugged a line printer from the server, put the plug into the priunter port of my Model 100, and printed out the report. I left it on the Quality Manager's desk. The MoD got their copy of it two days later, and I was asked back to see the Quality Manager. The report was very well liked. But could it be altered to do someting else as well? (Of course it could, did they think I was going to sing all my songs in one burst and not keep anything for an encore?) And so it was that I ceased being a filing clerk and once more called myself an engineer.

It is a point of pride with me that I am able to earn money with any computer I can get my hands on, providing that it is working. If only it could be by writing, rather than just by sorting out problems. When I became interested in cycling I came across an article about a journalist in the USA who had a Model 100, some solar panels, and a recumbent bicycle. He cycled around the USA from story site to story site, composing his articles on the little Tandy, powering it from batteries charged up both by the solar panel and the dynamo on his bike, and then sending the stories in to his editor by a modem with an acoustic coupler that allowed the handset of a normal phone to accept a set of warbling notes and transmit them to the destination. The modem he used was almost as large as the Tandy.

One day, I will be doing that. Well, not on a recumbent bike, but I like the idea of being a roving correspondent. Is there a warm friendly place out there that wants its hills and valleys exploring? I promise to protect your anonymity. Really, I do, you can trust me, I'm not a professional.

The Grim Electric Reaper

I hate mowing grass. I hate it because it's a tedious chore that makes too much noise to let me listen to music. I hate it because it's unnatural, and destructive. Where I live at the moment has no grass. I repeat, not one blade. It has plenty of Shepherd's Purse and Dandelion plants growing out of gaping cracks, and I have found that they make excellent additions to salads, (not the gaping cracks, please, just the leaves).

I have only ever owned one house that had grass. I lived there for barely three years, because after the third week of moving in I discovered that I hated it, and it then took me that long to escape. It was a maisonette, which was the first reason I hated it. I had neighbours either side of me and above me. There was never any peace; if I wasn't annoying them with something I was doing, then one or more of them would start annoying me, either in return for something I had already done, or as a sort of deposit in life's bitch-bank for the future.

But mostly, I annoyed them, and the major way in which I annoyed them was not by doing something that got on their nerves, but it was by not doing something. There are sins of commission, (I do a few of those), sins of emission, (not to my knowledge, apart from belching), and sins of ommission, (mea culpa gigantic-whatever the latin ending should be).
I didn't mow my back garden.

There was a front garden, which was all grass and path, but that rarely needed mowing because we lived beside a large lake in Woodley, and the swans would bring their cygnets round the houses begging for food. In order to signal their arrival and hunger, they would settle on a piece of grass and steadily rip it down blade by blade until a frantic owner rushed out with handfulls of bread and chased them away. I didn't have the heart to stuff them full of starchy white cardboard, so I let them savage the lawn as often as they felt like it. They must have viewed me as the ultimate challange, because no matter how much bread was flung at them by the other residents, they always ended up on my front lawn.

But, after nearly three years of living in this twenty-year old uninspiring block of four-square rooms, the chance came to get out and live in a rambling brick building over one hundred and fifty years old, where nothing was straight or level. It was the worst time to sell, and I accepted that I would lose nearly a fifth of what I paid to buy the place even if I got the best possible price for my maisonette, but I would still be able to afford the new place. I went with it, took the advice of the estate agents, and smartened up the property. Including the garden, they had stressed the need to make the place look as much like the neighbouring plots of land as I could.

So I bought an electric hovering mower, plugged it in, and got to work. The grass was so long that I ended up swinging the thing around in huge sweeping arcs as if it was a giant scythe, and then coming back in for a more normal cut to get the grass down to a normal level. Several times I felt the blades strike what felt like stones, and saw little brown shapes fly up. I assumed that my neighbours had tossed the unwanted pebbles and bits of wood over the fence to keep their gardens clean and make their point about my non-conformist approach to cultivating nature. But as I went around with my second purchase, a rake, cleaning up the cuttings, I found I was wrong. The small brown shapes clattering out from the mower had been frogs and toads.

My garden must have been a sanctuary for them, a place where they could hide from the heat of the sun, a place that always had moist cool spots, and was full of insects and slugs and other things nutritious to amphibious life. For three years they had clustered there and thrived, and then I had visited a catastrophe upon them that was as deadly as the asteroid strikes which allegedly killed the dinosaurs. I picked up a dozen mangled little bodies, and found just three still living. Two had amputated limbs, and one was intact, though obviously bruised and cut.

I put the three survivors on an old plate in a cool spot beneath the Forsythia bushes that flanked the kitchen window. Flanked is a generous way of describing the matted tangle that had occurred when two bushes decided to grow towards each other and were left uncut for three years. But there was a tunnel into which I could crawl and place the plate against the cool of the kitchen wall, near to the dripping overflow pipe.

I phoned up the local vets and explained what I had done. I am sure I heard muffled laughter while I waited for the lady who had answered the phone to come back with an answer from those who knew more about amphibious reptiles, but her reply was not good news for the frogs. It would be kindest to just kill them.

I baulked at that, I had already slaughtered nine, and felt that the only way to ease my conscience would be to keep the survivors alive. But over the next two days, despite my leaving handfulls of slugs, flies, spiders and dandelion leaves on the plate, the two who had suffered amputations died. I was left with one toad, warty, bruised, but with slowly healing cuts, and I made it my mission in life to ensure it survived.

I came back from work one evening, and crawled into the tunnel to check on how he was faring, and my heart leapt when I saw the plate was empty. He had recovered enough to move away, possibly to a spot that was more suitable to a recuperating toad. Excited and eager, I backed out of the tunnel to start looking for him, and felt an ominous crunching squelch beneath my knee. Oh God no, I thought, hurriedly shifting my weight, but it was too late. He hadn't moved very far, and I had just made sure that he would never again have to fear the heat of the sun or the chill of the night.

I buried him beneath the bushes that had been his hospital for the last few days of his life, completed the sale, and swore that I would never again mow grass, no matter what the inducement might be.

Those whom the Gods would preserve, they first ferment

The gods sent us not one gift but two beginning with F. Fire we all know, but what about fermentation? What would life be without this little wonder? And what other gifts beginning with F have they sent us? Forget fishing, fisting, or frotting; the idea is that a gift is something that does not immediately look useful, or takes some time before the benefit becomes apparent. I've chosen flatulence, because it could be our personal solution to the dichotomy of green power and global warming. Flatulence features in Frenchwoman’s Left Antenna’s most recent post.

It could be that nature's flatulence is our gain, but our flatulence is nature's misfortune. I don’t know, maybe our gaseous gifts are appreciated. But methane is one of the big three greenhouse gases, and two of the biggest producers of it are cows, (no surprise there), and termites. One species of termite is ecologically sound though, it has learnt how to rub its back legs together to produce enough heat to be able to light the farts. This has given it a real advantage in life; it is able to burn its way through obstacles with a micro-, no, nano-blowtorch cutter. And, of course, it doesn't produce anything like the normal quantity of methane that other living species do, it simply generates lots of water vapour and carbon-dioxide. If only we could breed millions of these little wonders and use their generated heat to power boilers that would generate steam and make electricity for us.

But Gillian ‘let-me-sniff-your-shit-on-television’ has a cure for flatulence on her website. It must be a drawback of high-fibre diets, together with floating turds that just will not go away. It (the cure), is my old favourite, miso soup. Miso is a fermentation of various things, soya beans, barley, always vegetable however, so this following recipe is aimed at you all out there, belching and farting uncontrollably on your green diets.

I used to look forward to my lunchtime meal every day in Japan; a pre-packed affair couriered in on the back of a Honda 50. Inside a beautifully lacquered box would be a selection of sushi bits or udon noodles, or maybe some tempura, and always a fascinating little mini-wok containing miso soup. Lunchtime miso soup always differed from breakfast soup, it had less cloudiness, and always had chopped bean-curd cubes and a small hard-boiled egg in it.

I found packets of miso soup in a supermarket back in England, one variety was sealed sachets of miso paste and seaweed, the other was a freeze-dried powder which had an unfortunate burnt taste to it. Sadly, the freeze-dried variety is the only one I have regularly found. Recently, in Waitrose, I found a plastic Noodle Wok on sale, full of dried noodles. I bought one, got rid of the noodles as soon as I decently could, and found that my local health food shop sold bags of miso paste, and dried seaweed.

So here is today’s hot tip – DIY miso soup to flatten your flatulence.

Step one, get one of these.


















It’s a two-part plastic container that is filled with hot liquid. As it cools, the vacuum that is created draws the two halves together, sealing the lid tightly. I wouldn’t suggest that it could be inverted, but it certainly holds tightly against accidental spillage.















So, first put a teaspoon of miso paste into the bottom, pour in boiling water, and add some dried seaweed.

Close the lid, and let it cook for a few minutes. The nori seaweed softens immediately, but the wakame needs about five minutes to soften to a wonderfully chewy texture.

To open it, gently press in two sides of the lid to crack the vacuum seal, and then enjoy.



By the way, miso soup should be stirred, not shaken. Staring at the swirling patterns of the sediment can induce a wonderfully contemplative mood. Perfect if you want to ignore that irritating person with the loud voice at the hotel breakfast. Alternatively, forget about the miso soup and just fart or belch loudly.

I was riding on a Lesbian bike

It must be a May-day thing, because while Taiga was getting her new toy, so was I, on May-day just after I finished work. (Thank god for the rules that allow shops to still open late on Bank-holidays if they want to).

I've got back onto two wheels again with a brand-new mountain bike. It was surprisingly cheap, in fact what I paid for the bike, a pump, and a crash-helmet is what I would have spent on meals and beer in three or so weeks in the pub. That might suggest I eat and drink a lot, and I won't deny it, but it does also show just how expensive eating out has become lately. I don't have much choice about it, because I live away from home during the week, and up until now I had used the evening meal as a treat to make up for the lack of cats to stroke and keyboards to tickle. Being honest, I actually miss being able to get online and share myself with you all more than anything else.

But I have to stick this contract out to the bitter end, and I also have to regain some of my former fettle. Fat man on a bicycle is not a title I would choose willingly, or even answer to. Walking is pleasant, but oh so slow, and I have always been a speedy one. Cycling was my great discovery of the eighties, it transformed living and working in London from a dreary grind of tubes into a sparkling rush of lights and sounds and smells.

I did try to get back onto a pair of pedals three years ago. On an impulse I bought a mountain bike from a garage clearance sale that we happened upon. It was a nice enough bike, only just too small for me, but it was a ladies bike. I should have known there'd be trouble, I read "The Third Policeman" all those years ago, and remember the stern admonishments that the Sergeant delivered on the outcome of uncontrolled cross-cycle concupiscience. I changed the saddle for a male one, but the bike steadfastly resisted my efforts to fuse it and I into a joyous union. No matter how often I mounted it (her?), there was always the feeling of resistance, of lessons un-learned, of a desire to fight and bite and scratch. And then, as if to say that if I wouldn't change to that which she desired me to be, I could not have her, she hid. For nearly a year I couldn't find the female bike. Her bell finally gave her away when I was tumbling large empty carboard boxes around the store, and one of them slid down behind a car and forced a plaintive tingle from her.

I dragged her back out into the light, squeezed her front and rear and pumped them up until I felt a determined resistance, spanked her saddle several times to warm it up, and then wheeled her outside for mounting. But this was not to be a joyous re-union. Along the road I tried in vain to make her tyres sing with delight, but all I could hear where sullen moans.
"What is it?" I pleaded with her, "what do I have to do to make you feel pleasure?"
"Try getting off me and floundering around on something less delicate."
"Is there no way we can be together like normal man and bike? Is there nothing I can do to bring back the love and lust into your life?"
"You could give me away to someone else, hopefully much lighter, and preferably a woman."

So that was the end of my experiments, I had unwisely fallen for a lesbian bicycle, and nothing short of a sex change was going to make her ring her bell for me. I was once again forced to spin my own wheels and make tingling noises in my own imaginary spokes.

My new acquisition is a total change, the tyres purr with pleasure as we glide along the tarmac, rising to a loud contented hum when a following wind or downhill stretch gives us more speed. Only the saddle has given me some cause for concern. I stopped in the woods for a breather, and found to my horror that I was neuter. There was no feeling at all between my legs, not even pins and needles. When I cupped my hands around the poor shrivelled trio of walnuts they felt unfamilar, disconnected. I dropped my trousers and stood in the rays of the evening sun, waiting for a little warmth, and gradually felt myself come back to life. Was this a last jealous act of vindictiveness on the part of my female bicycle? I had no spanners with me, but a desperate wrench tilted the saddle downwards a notch or two and I managed to complete the rest of the journey without any more unmanly moments.

And so my new challenge is to design a bicycle saddle for men, with a recess or perhaps a billiard table-like pocket, so that my prime qualifications, (two O-levels and a budgerigar) can ride with me in the style and comfort they deserve.

The title of this post derives from the Jonathan Richman song 'I was dancing in a Lesbian Bar', which hopefully can be found at this link (halfway down the page is a wmv file). If not, then I'll have to upload my copy to a myspace account.