June 11, 1988. The Nelson Mandela Wembley concert was live on TV. Tracy Chapman was haunting. The following week an ad in the back of Time Out, advertising a trip from England to Kenya. A couple had bought an old Bedford truck and were looking for passengers.
September 21st, 1988. About twenty of us set off from their gaff at Chalfont St Peter.
Well.
Fucksie me.
Sticking my toe back in the holiday thread. So many memories. Sigh.
Richy Rich regularly took a selection of the kids camping. One time he had three of ’em, aged 6, 4 and 1.5. On the Sunday, he took them to the beach at Highcliffe, near Bournemouth. They walked down the cliff path to the beach, dumped their stuff and ran into the sea. Instantly a big wave knocked Richy’s glasses off and swept them away.
Now Richy is like Vincent van Gopher without his glasses. He can’t see squit-diddly. This is not a good situation to be in with teeny tiny kids in the sea.
LB had a friend at school for a few years. Joe H. Joe H was outrageous in the best and worst senses of the word. He was a very funny guy. LB found him hilarious and talked a lot about shooting up in the playground and smoking weed with Joe H. He left school last year and wanted to give LB his phone number but rules forbade this. Instead I had to write in the school diary to ask Joe’s mum to give me the number.
We expected a BT engineer this afternoon as our phone and internet is broken. This had particular significance for Laughing boy because of his love of watching Eddie Stobart lorries, bus and cross channel ferry videos on youtube. I felt like shite and spent the day in bed but at 1pm LB came in and asked what time the engineer was coming. “Ah”, I replied, “Anytime now. They said between 1 and 6pm, so any minute now”. “Any minute now mum?” repeated LB, bouncing off happily.
I got to the bottom of a tasty bowl of Covent Garden leek and potato soup when I saw what looked suspiciously like a bit of chicken. “EEEEEK!” I shrieked, “I’ve got a bit of chicken in my soup, Richy Rich!” “Uh? That’s outrageous”, replied Richy. Given that I ain’t knowingly* eaten meat for over 20 years, I thought that was a bit of an understatement. A lot more tasty swears came into my mind, but given that this blog has a more than healthy smattering of swearsies, I won’t include them here.
Holidays. Shudder. Even the word makes me feel queasy. Going on holiday was like taking a bunch of pups off to some new park, full of smells, the hint of the odd rabbit and plenty of trees to piss against.
Plus, of course, the real hounds who delivered their own brand of disruption effectively most trips. (Little aside here to mention the infamous time that Stan decided to have a wee on Petey’s designer sweatshirt on the beach in Pembrokeshire. Sigh).
So a gentle, informative, visual start to this new thread…
1. Find space.
That’s it.
Sunday morning in Ottawa. The workshop had finished the evening before. I’d recovered from flight outrage and pigeon dawn. My replacement room had been palatial with stunning views of demonstrations around City Hall.
Now I could check out and wander round Ottawa for the day before getting the bus to the airport for the evening flight home.
Perfect.
Just needed to get some cash as I was down to a few coins and then a day of pure pleasure, peace and relaxation. Continue reading
Laughing boy got a letter, out of the blue, towards the end of the last year. It was very official and obviously some government type letter, but it wasn’t clear who it was from. Anyway, it stated that some woman would be visiting him the following Monday morning at 10am to assess his capacity to manage his own finances once he turned 16. Well. What can I say? “What the shitfucktosswank is going on?” sprung to my mind.
Ok, starting with a hands up that I ain’t read any of the HP books or seen any of the films. I am surrounded by people who have and have (Richy Rich excluded). Anyway this (for me) very topical post came about because during a big lunchtime discussion about HP yesterday, I mentioned that one of the Hometowny ‘burb characters (see Chicken bone man) was in the first HP film. Rosie had met him ten years ago when he opened their new primary school building.
This caused some considerable disbelief around the table and led to one person, in particular, lets call him Adam, questioning the veracity of the tales I tell more generally. I’ll let a section of the long facebook discussion that followed fill in the next bit of the story;
