I was on the phone to the Dramaturg this afternoon — we don’t usually put stories not actually generated by ourselves on the blog, but this one was too good to pass up. The Dramaturg’s brother, some years ago, went to New Zealand to learn about bee-keeping — following which, for financial reasons, he spent […]
The Tropical Godfather (see response to previous blog) is quite right; the Gamekeeper, with his chest-high rubber waders, is just what is needed. Or a dear little BOAT. It is unbelievably wet here; it has rained with such grim persistence that we have a leak in the spare bedroom; all the defenses are being tested […]
Yes, here we are again, worrying about the ****ing damn. Gale-force winds have been tearing branches off trees, one such is lodged in the outflow pipe, the water, thick with mud, is right up to the top of the dam, six inches above the pipe itself, and we can’t see what we’re doing. […]
It is one of those mornings when the animal community seems to have been possessed by demons. Miss Dog crapped on the rug in the hall, Miss Kit piddled on a towel, even Miss Best Friend, who is a good old thing, was sick on the carpet. The weather is absolutely vile, which may have […]
The Dogs would doubtless take it as an index of the coarseness and flabby moral tone of the household that the most important event of the year has gone unblogged for days. Some time back, I rang up what turned out to be a somewhat eccentric Australian lady who advertised herself (in the back of […]
It has happened again: the vertiginous certainty of having for a moment ceased to inhabit reality and having moved instead into a fiction by a specific writer. Memorious readers will recall the visit to the public school of the Man from Maryport and the epiphanic certainty there that the Vicar was an impostor and that […]
Spiro and Agnew have headed off on the first stage of their odyssey towards kebabhood. The imperturbable farmer Pat, who has been the hero of not a few of our ventures in animal husbandry, has taken them off to be sent to the abattoir with some of his own beasts. Am I sorry? Not exactly. […]
I was in the bath a few minutes ago, idly contemplating various bottles of shampoos and soapless cleaning agents of one kind or another, and it struck me that in the world of advertising in particular, clean (verb) and cleanse (verb) have achieved quite different meanings. Kitchen floors and worktops are cleaned. It is […]
We had a late visit from Miss T this evening: she had some homework which required the use of the internet, and the computer up the road has been banjaxed by her big brother, the Apparitional Gamekeeper — he had been downloading music tracks and too impatient to use the virus scan, with the result […]
We have just spent a strenuous afternoon engaged in one of those seasonal middleaged sort of things, viz. planting bulbs. This always takes the same course; a huge box arrives from Peter Nyssen and we stare into it appalled; there is a hundred of this, two hundred of that. It is the busiest time of […]
Part of the ongoing saga of the sheep Spiro and Agnew, as some readers may remember, is that their enormous fleeces were bundled into bags and taken to the local weavers for them to exercise their mystery upon, on the grounds that Waste is Wicked. The wool is of quite coarse quality, but we […]
Mesdames the Dogs are once more telling us that they are about to leave home. Their hearts are broken. Just when they’d started getting things nice … Basically, yesterday a nice smiley man turned up with a very, very large machine and steam-cleaned the carpets. This was not the work of moments. Mysterious […]
A post from Ed Burra world; something I put together in the course of today. Foujita was a painter of Japanese origins working in a European mode in Paris. Here is a description of one of his better-known works, Youki: Snow Goddess: ‘his sensuous, white nude is … displayed among the hills and […]
Miss Kitten is on the whole being rather a credit. She and the dogs are being left together rather a lot, which is causing a certain amount of bonding. When I send the dogs out to pee at night, she always goes too. This morning we had rather an early start, so I took the […]