At least I have my health

Following on from cheesy dreams and toothache, I found myself on Monday suffering with stomach ache. And when a stomach the size of mine aches, that's a BIG ache!

There's a gastro- bug going around at the moment and I seem to have got a version. It seemed in my case to only exhibit cramps rather than resolving into anything messier. All the same, I was in bed shivering like a jelly by 9.30 and though I went to work yesterday feeling only a little sore, I decided to take today off to chase off the very last of the bug.

Update on the seagulls: Three of us were looking out the window at the puzzling seagulls on Monday when a small brown blob of fluff on webbed feet scuttled across the roof tiles! The pair evidently have at least one chick, possibly two. Yesterday the parents spent quite a long time away but came back in the late afternoon. I suppose they were out shopping.

Home baking

"Have you ever eaten one of my sponge cakes?" Herself asks me, the other evening, as we are watching television.
"Nope," I say, swigging my beer.
"Didn't you know me when I used to bake sponge cakes and butterfly buns and flans and maringues?"
"Er... no."
"I shall make us a sponge cake at the weekend."

Come the weekend there was a crisis of ounces verses grams. I was entertaining my father in the other room and so I couldn't help much.

"Look it up on the Internet," I said.

An hour later I was eating.... something.... sponge-like....

"Do you like it?"
"Er... yes...."

I chewed at the lump of fruit-topped, cream-filled yellowish stuff. Having to chew or gnaw at a sponge cake is probably an indication that it hasn't come out right.

"I think I didn't get the measurements right," she said. "And I think there was something about folding the mixture rather than beating it."

I seprated my upper teeth from my lower ones with an effort, long enough to say:

"No, babe. It's fine, really."

There was a definite clunk when a piece of leftover spong hit the bottom of the kitchen bin. I could feel strange protestations starting up in my gut.

Herself Googled for sponge cake recipes.

"I know what went wrong!" she shouted in to the other room. "I'll make you a proper one tomorrow!"

So, today, I'm eating a wafer-thin sponge-cake that hasn't turned out either. But it is lighter than yesterday's.

"I know where I went wrong. I'll make another one tomorrow that will be right this time. I promise."

My gut is thanking Heaven that we're back at work on Tuesday. It might not have survived an extra day of sponge making.

"You can write about it," Herself said. "On condition you write a sequel when it turns out...."

Watch this space.

I didn't know a nose got indigestion

Fellah on the bus in front of me with long legs looks at the generous amount of space for the legs between the seat in front of me and the seat in front of him, decides, like me, that the back of the seat in front of me is obviously broken which is why it is leaning back on me, sits down and squashes my patient leg.

A patient leg, by the way, is the leg you have to have when you know you are too lazy to move to another seat and you have only started your journey, so its better to stay patient when a long-legged fellah is inadvertantly pushing the back of his seat into your kneecap. Eventually, I managed to crab the leg sideways into a kind of deformed Elvis on stage position which meant *no-one* was likely to sit beside me, although, to be fair, a kind of scarecrow female person (an I.T. student) did sit down briefly on my outside before she figured out a window seat was available elsewhere and moved.

So Daddly Long Legs turns out to have a hair treatment on which, when combined with the fumes from the open window, smells exactly like raw hamburger. A very raw hamburger, bloody and fresh. My nostrils sucked it all up as I sat in my contorted state on my seat.

(Lately, I am beginning to think that the part of my brain which deals with my sense of smell has been entirely overcome with alcohol. I have strange tastes and smells at different times of the day which to me is a reasonable indication of some kind of brain damage.)

To get back to the tale, I actually *like* the smell of raw hamburger, although I would not choose it as a variety of cologne, worn in the hair or otherwise.

It was no surprise to find four Dunnes stores hamburgers defrosting in a microwave oven when I got home then.

But, alas, one at least is trying to make its way back up my neck as I type this. Perhaps it was the association with the bus and the scarecrow person and the hair treatment, because I enjoyed the cooking and eating of my share this evening. Dunnes Stores hamburgers tend not to lodge in my throat, so this is something of a surprise.

I may revisit said burgers later in the night. I hope not.

In any case, I think I may have some colourful dreams because of them. On Sunday night last I ate some cheese before bed and dreamt I (and many people I work with) was called up to serve in an army unit in some kind of national emergency. I liked the camouflage gear and the hand-held electronic device that didn't seem to do anything. I had no idea who the enemy was and when I woke up I found I still don't. Not so much a dream as a general observation then.

I'm off to see what state my sleeping mind is in in the circumstances.

Bodily functions that get old and leathery

My eyesight was once so good that my parents would call me to ask whether or not there was someone standing at the so-called middle gate to our tenant farmhouse. The post and milk would be left there, about 100 metres from the house, which was built in a fenced-off compound in the middle of a field of grazing cows.

Milkmen tend to avoid free roaming cows, ironically enough. Postmen do too. So my father fixed a recycled metal electricity meter box to a pole and we'd quite literally meet them halfway. The cavernous box would contain either milk bottles or post or bottles of milk, depending on the time of day.

The fact that the lane it lived in was haunted by one of the several spirits that lived in or near the house didn't help, because it tended to form into a man shape and trick the eye. So I'd be called in to settle the argument. Was that a man? If so, trundle down and get the mail or the milk. If not, back to playing Begger My Neighbour by the fire.

By the 1980s, I was fairly blind. Not in a clinical sense, I suppose, but my myopia meant that I could only tell the number on a bus at about fifty feet. People would think I was being standoffish when while passing on the other side of the road I wouldn't even say hello. Truth was, I couldn't see them well enough to recognise them.

My father, in his old age, was and is quite hard of hearing, like his mother before him. I persuaded him once that he could get a hearing aid on the Social Welfare and he did so, because the thing was for free.

"It's not that you're deaf," the sour nurse in the clinic shouted at him. "It's because people don't speak properly, isn't it?"

My father agreed as if someone finally understood. Of course, he hadn't worked out that the cow was taking the piss out of him. People like that shouldn't work in professions. I've had a lifetime of smarmy teachers and bastards with a little power over a queue of people. Fuckers.

Anyhow, now that I can see again (provided I wear the specs, which I do, rather than fall into unseen holes in the ground, etc), I've tried to make use of my father's aural experience with my artificially-enhanced eyesight, with mixed results. Take lip-reading, for instance. I can make out a few syllables if I try, and presumably that's how lip-reading is learned anyhow. Watch the lips and make out what's being said.

On the 75 bus the other day, our African driver was a little over-enthusiastic at the Tallaght Hospital roundabout and cut off a car driver who was exiting towards the Whitestown direction. I had a clear view through the car driver's windscreen as he braked, leaned heavily on the car horn and shouted something. To my shaky lip-reading it looked like:

"Black mustard."

When the first batteries wore out in my father's hearing aid, he put the thing away as a bad job. We were back to loud televisions and shouting at him.

Maybe he was right. It's not a great idea to expect too much.