Revolutionary Rants

I am feeling somewhat better today, after a couple of quite under the weather days with a nasty cough with cold combo. Nothing compared to March’s evil virus, but still not much fun.

We are wondering if David Tennant has decided to leave DW without letting it slip or whether they will weasel out of the regeneration that began on last night’s episode. Will Billie have to sacrifice herself to save the Doctor as Darlek Caan suggested? Is Martha more devoted really? Lets hope Donna proves the ex-sidekick, that’s what I say… Davros was as scary as ever and I liked Supreme Darlek, as well. Chicken predicts pride before a fall next week, we shall see.

Off over to West Buckland to Si’s for Sunday dinner so more anon…

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I am very tired, not feeling so well. It would not be at all fair to have another heavy cold/virus after the evil one I had in March, but life is about as fair as a election in Zimbabwe so I shall remain silent and just *hope*. And hope is a dangerous thing…

Ferris is chasing flies and taking puffing sniffs at the carpet. Chicken is working hard. I am.

Time to read some of The Rottweiler and  hide under the covers, methinks… Just for a bit.

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OK, so the weekends are just going really fast now. It is a fact I have to face. Ho-hum. It is one of those 10 minutes perception things - only in weekend form - where if you were stood on a platform waiting for a train ten mins would be like hours, but if you were snoozing whilst your loved one showered in the morning ten mins goes passed at light-speed. Not good, but life.

It was a nice weekend, however. It was generally spent “not doing very much” but I did get time to do some weeding yesterday and also some spare room clearing. We also went, with Si and Sarah, to the North Devon Beer Festival at Barnstaple Leisure Centre. We didn’t have high hopes, but ended up having a lovely evening. You got a half pint glass as you entered and brought token to get beer. We all got a different one each time and all tried a sip of the other’s choices. There were loads from Devon, but I tried ones from Wakefield, Maldon (my second favourite, Maldon Gold), Tyneside (my favourite, Tyneside Blonde), Glastonbury (in honour of the day it was, Solstice!) and other places. Because of the half pinters and the passing round we didn’t drink too much individually but got to  try lots of differing ales and had a nice quiet chat as well. There was hardly anyone there, to be honest, and the staff said it was the busiest night, too! We also went for a curry, afterwards. Yum.

Chicken is now sucked in to Zelda on the Wii and Ferris just got the all-clear from the vets, ten days post-op. Now he can go on his long lead again I shall take him out prior to work, so more later.

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Just headed off after my latest post to read my blogroll and found that I have been tagged! How very exciting!

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Love Is a Losing Game by Amy Winehouse. How such a messed-up human being be responsible for this beautiful song I will never know, but I keep listening to it over and over in my car. It is heartbreak in musical form…

2.  The Marriage of Figaro: Overture by Mozart. I love Mozart at all times, but this one is so uplifting it smacks of spring to me. It is my Sunday morning music, when Chicken is in his bath and I am drinking a coffee and reading stuff on the internet or doing some cooking. It reminds me of when I was a child and Mum and Dad read the papers and listened to the great one’s music.

3. Darcy’s Letter - Pride and Prejudice Soundtrack by Jean-Yves Thibaudet. I love this album and this is my favourite track from it.

4. Wonderful World by Sam Cooke. Chicken sang along to this one the other day to me. ‘Cept he does know a lot about the French he took.

5. Feeling Good by Nina Simone. Listened to this album over the weekend, it really feels like a beginning of summer song!

6. We Are All Bourgeois Now by the Manic Street Preachers. I love, love, love this cover by my favourites and I enjoy singing it with a high level of righteous rage and a grin!!! Good driving music, again.

7. 36D by the Beautiful South. Gone but not forgotten, increasingly my favourite South song, a nice feministic rant!

And I’ll tag, ohh-err, Chicken, Alex, Thursday, Viv, Kiki, Rhodri, and last but not least Stephen.

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I helped Alex and Leah move from their student home of four years to a new ‘apartment’ (i.e. flat) in Bristol on Tuesday. It was vaguely controlled madness, but we got it done and Al and I headed off to large Swedish capitalist shop to look for a bed for him. That was less successful, but we did have a nice coffee, at least. Oh, and I got some little bamboos for Mr C as a gift.

I have managed to tweak my back out, however (Alex’s room was in the attic room of their old house and their new flat is three flights up with the lift miles away). Hence I missed my volunteering yesterday because I was a bit fearful of driving with said back… It was quite rubbish weather yesterday, too, so I could even de-slug the allotment, which as highly annoying; especially as Chicken came in from the pre-bed Ferris trotting to tell me there were at least four or five snails on our front steps… Argh. My lettuces will probably have not survived…

Well, I am in to work early today so I had better sort out the house-hold bits and bobs before I go.

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The NHS is sixty. Wow. That seems so recent, somehow. The greatest political decision made in this country was only made sixty years ago. Still, I suppose the worst decision politically was made even more recently, in 1979…

Ferris had the snip on Friday, along with the addition to his person of a chip, which will hopefully mean he can come on holiday with us next year to France. I spent a highly stressed out day on Friday, trying to keep busy and stop crying, after I had to sign the vet’s contract which said that I understood the ‘operation might not be successful’. But it was, and he came home at about 17:00, woozy and a little spaced out but fine. He now has a cone round his head, but otherwise seems to be recovering well.

We didn’t do much over the weekend as we thought long walks were out. We joined the National Trust, I weeded and planted carrots on my allotment, Chicken did stuff with a metering system and we both caught up on our sleep.

Tomorrow, having been able to fill up the Wagon R, I will go up to Bristol to help Alex and Leah move. My first solo-motorway driving. How grown-up.

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Oh yeah, one other strange thing to have happened this week. On Tuesday night I left work at 17:30 and headed off to meet Chicken where he picks me up at a small retail park across the river Taw (he starts earlier than me, so he takes the car and I get the bus in and then we return together, y’see).

A couple of lads were a bit merry on cider and larking about on the old Long Bridge over the river. Suddenly they were looking over the edge. ‘You dare me? You dare me? In to which bit?’ says one, the other points below. Off comes number one’s top and up he goes on to the bridge edge. Bare in mind that the tide is out and you can see the bottom of the river, full of debris and mulchy muck…

I tough he would never actually jump.But the chuffer did. He emerged from the tiny amount of water he’d jumped in to, but I didn’t see him stand.

Someone had tried to kill themselves off the same bridge last week and had broken their ankle and injured their back…

This summer sun, it does odd stuff to people.

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Argh. How S’Alan managed to employ two people as competent as Margaret and Nick I will never know. I now fear that somewhere out there there are two even better Margaret and Nicks, who were turned down by the Sugar corporation…

It was another Ruth Badger over again, as Lee ‘4 months at Thames Valley University, but I have a good dinosaur impression’ McQueen won The Apprentice. I was still celebrating Alex going - and enjoying him weeping in the taxi - when S’Alan hired Lee. I couldn’t believe it; ‘is the bearded loon serious?’, I thought.  He was. He does it every year, much as I hated Christina Grimes, she was a better candidate that Simon, surely? Badger was obviously better, as well. Claire was and is a better business person than Lee. S’Alan likes to pick blokes, he may like ‘a lady’s view’ at times, but he always seems to go for the bloke when it is a one female, one male situation. He also seems to let lying pass, look at Michael and now Lee. It is fien to lie as long as you don’t say you can’t talk to people about football because you like culture.

And was anyone surprised that Lee dropped in to the dinner conversation that he supported dirty Spurs? No, me neither…

Elsewhere I love this article in today’s Guardian Woman. When I did my presentation on pornography and free speech at York the discussion mostly descended in to a debate about my statement that ‘Sex and the City has done far more damage to women and feminism than pornography in recent years’, so it is a subject close to my heart. And as for Pretty Woman. I had a big fight with a - decidedly weird, admittedly - house mate at University (Huddersfield this time) who’s favourite films were Dirty Dancing (the one film I hate more than Pretty Woman) and the said tale about a prostitute being saved from her life on the street by a rich man and some nice frocks. I said it gave a false impression of prostitution, of ‘punters’ to that profession, of how women should aspire to behave and be treated and she said ‘it is just a great film and Richard Gear is sexy, you think too much’. Strange how many times I’ve had that one thrown at me over the years ‘you think too much’…

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First of all, I’d like to link you to this; the latest from Hugh F-W’s ‘Chicken Out!’ campaigne. I have tried to herrang my own eldest brother (who works for said evil captialist shop and therefor has some shares) to allow Hugh to speak on his behalf at the AGM, but perhaps now I can do my bit by bidding on sommat. The problem we have is that this particular evil capitalist shop never seems to have enough free range hens. Now, we’ve - or I should say Chicken - have only brought free-range since, well, since we met in 2003 but since the Chicken Out! programmes we have found it increasingly difficult to get free range hens from the one beginning with ‘T’ and ending with evil captilaist shop…

Another gripe - why don’t they do skimmed organic milk in the bigger tub size? It is really rather annoying, when I have my hippyfied musli breakfast and Mr C his Special K or bran flakes, plus coffee/tea every morning and we have to go and get extra tubs of milk constantly…

Yes, yes, I know. Farmers markets, veganism, farmers markets, shop local, shut-up. But surely if I want to follow my own moral standard and do it in this way I should be able to? All that crap about the proles being conscious when they rebel and so forth.

Incidently, my spell checker has died, so please excuse the awful semi-dyslexic bits, please.

The weekend was spent swiftly and happily caked in factor 30 sunblock. On Friday I worked a couple of hours and walked Ferris down by the estury, then C and I got lunch at the Jack Russell and collected the kids from school. Saturday we were up bright and sparkley - Chicken had ordered me a Guardian, which is now to be delivered every Saturday to my door in our effort to keep our local post office open; how romantic of him, I must say! - and both worked a couple of hours in the morning. We then walked Ferris up over Dennington hill, not the usual route but right up the side of the hill to the top via a public footpath. We could see all the way to the shimmering blue sea from the top and were reminded once again what an amazing privilage it is to live here. In the afternoon I spent nearly four hours on the allotment, first with Dad’s assistance and then with Si and Sarah. We gave Si’s carrots up as a lost cause and dug over their bed. I weeded my - scarce - beetroots, onions, spinarch, runners and the pumpkins and swore at whatever had walked right down my newly planted row of lettuces! In the evening I watched The Dreamers which seemed to be a vechical for the beautiful Eva Green to walk around naked and little else.

Yesterday we visited Nan, I planted another row of beetroots, tidy round the house and cooked (unsuccessful ‘iced raspberry mousse’).

The sun has now succeeded in burning off the mist we’ve had here first thing, Ferris has been for a nice long walk and we’re all doing fine. Oh, and Chicken’s blog isn’t dead, it is just hibernating…

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Yesterday was rather an historic one. The Democrats finally chose their Presidential candidate and it is Barack Obama, a person of ethnic background. I must admit, being a feminist, I had rather hoped Hillary would win (OK, I know, she’s bloody awful, but so is anyone in power, so…) but now I am hoping equally that John McCain will not be elected President. I think he will be, but I hope not.

I am really peeved about The Apprentice. It is hard to see how someone who currently earns over £100,000 a year on contract jobs can be less employable than someone who is caught out lying about their education on a CV. Or someone who has very little to say about themselves other than ‘at my age, which is by the way TWENTY-FOUR. Did I mention I am TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD?’ and gets hugely tetchy whenever anyone suggests he might not have a “good” education. ‘I’VE BEEN AT PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR FOURTEEN OF MY TWENTY-FOUR YEARS’ he cries, afterwards twitching his lips irritably…

Once again S’Alan was caught up by the token sob story! He said he didn’t want to hear it, told Helene for two weeks in a row he ‘doesn’t know that she’s about’ and then fires Lucinda saying all the remaining candidates ‘have something about them’. Yes, two alcoholic parents and a ‘hard start in life’, apparently.

Another thing that annoyed me was all the going on about spelling. Like that indicates intelligence. OK, so intelligence does dictate the use of a spell-check or someone who can spell to check over one’s CV, but I cannot spell either… Looking at some ghastly business person taking great pleasure from pointing out spelling mistakes - especially when he read out a whole sentence and then said ‘I can’t understand that, it is incomprehensible’; ell how come you just read it all then?!!? - is really boring and bullying.

Bullying. The bi-word for this year’s series, in my view. First Nicholas De Lacy Brown got ganged up on by the TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD and Lee (after all, stupid though he was, he DID say I think lobsters are more expensive than that and left the final decision on pricing to 24YR-OLD, didn’t he?). Then it was Sara. Alongside both has been Lucinda, who has been targeted by the whole group since the off. Mainly, it seems because she is a bit different.

Oh well, if you earn £100,000 a year, wear what you like and don’t have to work for S’Alan, I’d say viva difference, myself…

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