Keeping cool under pressure

Our freezer has a mind of its own. And not always on the job in hand. Tonight as we're sitting watching television in the other room, the warning ding starts up on the freezer.
"You must have left the door open," I say, starting up. The noise immediately stops.
"I don't think so," Herself says, swirling the ice cubes about in her soft drink.
As soon as my bum hits the seat:
"Ding...! Ding...! Ding...!"
We go out and inspect what little there is to inspect.
The digital readout says -16C for the freezer and 1C for the fridge, like it's supposed to do. But the whole thing is ominously quiet.
I poke it. Herself moves bottles from the floor in case the feng shui is being upset. I open and close the fridge door. I open the freezer door. It has a disturbing slick look that speaks of malfunction.
"I think it's defrosting."
Immediately Herself falls back on 100,000 years of female evolution in the face of imminent calamity by asking as many questions within 60 seconds as it is possible to ask.
"What's wrong?
"Is it broken?
"Should we get another?
"Is the fuse gone in the plug?
"Shall I move another bottle?
"Should we start putting things in the other freezer?
"Is it safe to use ice that defrosted?
"Was it the weather?
"Was it the cats?
"Is it broken?
"Shall we buy another?
"Is the fuse gone in the plug?
"Why are you choking me?"
We ferry geriatric cuts of meat in their papyrus wraps to the small freezer in the ultilty room, in turn emptying from it the store of bread Herself squirelled away in there last Christmas when the snow levels meant we would obviously soon have 100 extra guests all eager for toast. In between trips, I press some buttons experimentally on the wonky freezer. It's now reading a balmy 9C in the freezer. I press a button labelled "Turbo Freeze" and a second later the motor starts to run again.

"It's fixed!"

We do a little dance then retrieve all the "we'll never finish that" stores that we just binned, plus Santa Claus's sliced pans, and shove them back onto the empty shelves. In a few moments, the temperature is 8C and we're on the way back to peaceful TV watching.

In ten minutes time, the dial indicates minus figures. Grand. Everything going in the right direction.

Half and hour later, during an ad break, Herself shouts from the kitchen:

"It's minus 25! It'll EXPLODE!"

I rush out and open the freezer door.

The Bird's Eye Polar Bear isn't so fucking chatty about the standard of my fish cakes any more. He's lying very, very still, a look of mild surprise on his clothy white face.

In fact, I didn't know that fish cakes could chatter like comedy false teeth, but the din is rattling all the salad dressing bottles in the fridge next door.

Bela Lugosi appears from the gathering white mist flowing about the kitchen, sinks his teeth into Herself's outstretched neck, then makes like a bat. I ignore the constant thumps of his dashing his head against the closed Velux ceiling windows in the dining room.

I undo the big fat freeze button and we head off to bed, content in the knowledge that the temperature is on its way back up.

I expect a tropical jungle to greet me in the morning.

The one with the waggily tail...

The young pet-shop assistant and I struggled for ten minutes or so with the wooden kennel but it wouldn't all fit into the car. The body almost fitted into the boot, but the detachable roof just wouldn't fit at all. Of course, I'd forgotten the rope that Herself said I should bring. So he did his best with some shop twine. The first bump we went over the twine snapped. The bus driver in the bus behind us tooted the horn a little as the rear door of the car was waving up and down distressingly.

"Pull over up here," I suggested. "I'll take the kennel out and you can go home for the rope."

So that's what we did.

As I'm standing there on the side of the road watching the traffic go by, drivers and passengers occasionally wondering what I'm doing beside a half-built kennel, a large woolly dog trailing a lead rushes out of a side road and into the middle of the road.

A car swerves and the one behind brakes heavily. The dog runs on in a blind panic, disappearing into the Watergate estate.

I resume my vigil by the kennel.

A red car pulls up.

"Excuse me," a man says through the open window. "Have you seen a grey dog...?"

I tell him it went across the road and into Watergate...

"Heading in the direction of the park," I add.

He thanks me and tries to drive out onto the main road, which is very busy. Eventually he rushes off down the road and the car goes into the estate.

Herself arrives and we wrap up everything like a B-movie heroine on a railroad line waiting for the chap to come to the rescue.

Herself drops me off and goes back out to get the roof section from the pet shop.

I muse as I struggle the big, expensive wooden crate through the house and into the cat's shed that I'm glad we don't have a dog. They're just too much trouble.

Online clothes shopping for fat men

When you weigh an ounce or two more than 20 stones (that's 280 pounds for our Western neighbours... or nearly 128 kilos for our Eastern ones), you eventually come around to the conclusion that the local Dunnes Stores just isn't going to have a good supply of summer clothing that covers your beer belly.

The "smallest" size I can wear these days in tops or teeshirts is XXXL. Now, either the news reports about the slobbering spread of obesity in the Western world isn't getting through to the store buyers, or there are a heck of a lot of slightly built, fit building workers still roaming about. I say this because any given day there is hardly room to manoeuvre around displays of S, M and L sizes in the Menswear departments.

It's like finding a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket to see an XXXL label on a teeshirt in our local shopping centres. I almost knocked Herself over a couple of weeks ago on seeing two (count them!) at the bottom of a pile of polo shirts.

So I've turned to the Internet for summer clothes. Lately I visited a UK-based site, bigteeshirt.co.uk, where I purchased the above classy number. I'll be wearing it this June Bank Holiday weekend as I tend the barbeque and no doubt shall be the life and soul of the party in it for.... oh.... two whole minutes, maybe.

Apart from the printed tees, the site supplies various coloured styles and other clothes up to 13XL sizes. (I'd like to see a label that says XXXXXXXXXXXXXL....!)

The "Anorexia" tee is available at £12.99 (€16.54) with postage and packing extra. In all I chose 5 items: "Anorexia"; the Duke Spirit Linen Mix, the Espionage Cotton tee, and two Izod Cotton Polo Shirts. The whole came to £72.95 (€93.00) inclusive of postage and packing.

By the way, €93.00 would purchase fifteen and a half summer tee shirts of good quality in my local Dunnes Stores outlet. Money sent abroad because they don't cater for my size. Think on, Department Store owners!

Everything came through in good time and good order, with the slight exception of the Izod shirts. The Website also caters for the TALL man as well as the wide, and Herself has been looking askance at me in my brightly coloured cotton dresses. I show her the maker's label and say:

"This is the style in Pakistan!"

But she isn't persuaded. So the moral of the story is to read the Sizing charts provided on the site and do as much online examination of the product as possible before placing an order. I'll definitely be shopping there again.

One might well ask why it is I'm paying for UK Sterling-priced products given the weakness of the US Dollar against the Euro. Well, the US-based sites I visited seem not to be aware of the rest of the world as a potential market. "There is no postal rate for your area" one online ordering system told me. "You'll be contacted with the details of the additional cost once your order is placed."

"One pig in a poke, please!"

Or, if they do, they equate the distance travelled in the post to be roughly equivalent to a trip from Earth to Mars, making the postage and packing rates wildly expensive.

If anyone locates a reasonably-priced US site that sells tees to places outside the USA, please let me know.

E-Bay is another place I've looked, again with mixed results. One guy had an offer of six teeshirts from his online shop for £40 Sterling and wanted another £40 p&p to send it 100 miles to Ireland!

We're not getting thinner, only poorer, it seems. I'm off now to get the garden into order for Sunday's barbie.

Have a great weekend!

The Daily Grind

So, as you know, this little old geezer accosted me back in February '08 with an announcement that I was looking at him and that he didn't like people looking at him.

I hadn't been looking at him on the bus that morning, but I sure as eggs look at him every morning ever since! He uses the same bus stop as me in the morning and I always know at what point and at what distance he is from me.

Some research has provided a few details into who this fellah is. It seems he once sold charity gaming cards door to door in the area and was plagued by the attentions of children who (being children) used to get a rise out of him for the sake of being chased. I think he isn't the full shilling to begin with, but the story of the kids pestering him explains some of the more peculiar behaviour I've observed in him recently.

One morning as I hauled myself up the road on the way to another blessed day of being told by the telephoning public how useless I am, I spied yer man shuffling across the green area to my left. He dresses in a kind of shabby brown canvas jacket and is continually blowing his nose into a great white handkerchief, peering over it suspiciously through his black rimmed spectacles at anyone who might be about. He increased his pace on seeing me and walked ahead, shoulders in their customary hunch, his face down. Instead of turning left at the top of the road for the bus stop, he went right disappearing into the next line of semi-dees. He turned up about five minutes later at the stop. I figured he must have been calling into someone's house on the other road.

Then a few days after, I was a little later in leaving the house and saw him ahead of me, hunching along with his hands in his coat pockets. He stopped suddenly and stared straight ahead where a car on a school run had reversed out of a driveway a couple of houses up. He took two steps to the right and hid for a moment behind a hedge. The car paused halfway across the road as seatbelts and schoolbags and the usual morning chaos were sorted. He stepped out and seeing it was still there, stepped quickly back in again. When it pulled away he resumed his shuffle up the road, head lowered, handkerchief dabbing at his nose.

I saw him from afar another morning walking by the shop units in the local centre, heading for the bus. A schoolboy about twelve or thirteen years of age was coming in the opposite direction, not heeding him at all. Our fellow did a quick turn to the left to face into a shop front until the youngster passed by.

When the bus pulled in, he did his usual morning barge past everyone in the loose queue, flashed a pass at the driver and went up the bus slamming windows closed, keeping the outside world at bay.

More Postcards from Second Life

Crocks

"Arrrgh!" I say.
"What wrong with you? " Herself asks.
"My feckin' sciatica is playing up."
I clutch at the right cheek of my arse and hobble about. The pain shoots down to my ankle and back up again.
"I think my uterus is pressing into my sciatic nerve. I read that on Wikipedia."
Herself would normally laugh at this, but her knee is giving her trouble today.
"Are we still on for lunch at Captain America's?" I say.
"Oh yes. It's our anniversary, after all."
Sixteen years. We've been together sixteen years for about the past five years, because we lost count and have to keep asking Herself's daughter what year she moved out so we can count it up again. This year in 2008 we're absolutely certain we're together sixteen years, although that leaves the age of the cat a little doubtful. She's been sixteen for about the past five years as well, we think.
We get in the car with many moans and groans and head up to The Square, park up and then head across the new civic plaza (still under construction) to Captain America's.
Herself limps along with her wonky knee. I stick my beer belly out and try to lean backwards without having to grab a piece of my buttock.
"You know something?" I say.
"What?"
"People will think we're real mountainy people walking like this. Each with one leg shorter than the other for walking across hills."
Captain A's was good, but the tables were smaller than I remember. We ate and limped back to the car with our various bits draggling along behind us.

Heat...! At last...!

I received a very welcome text today from Herself, saying that the plumber had rung her at work and said that the heating system had finally been hooked up and was working.

It's been quite cold over the past couple of days with the wind direction swung around to the north-east. So the weekend was promising to be a chilly one, which our stop-gap electric heaters probably wouldn't have suited.

A blast of heat greeted me as I stumbled in the door. It was WONDERFUL!

Now we're heating every room to drive out the cold from the fabric of the building, which has aided the mould growth I've referred to in a previous post. The two "outdoor" cats have been most impressed; the indoor pussycat has fallen in love with the notion of continuous heat.

We'll ease off on the burning of the gas after the weekend. For now we're enjoying the luxury.

It's a little tight in here

Myself and the local Rector are not quite people you might say are in need of a good feed. So it is a little uncomfortable at the moment showing him the latest updates to the parish website with the computer table shoved into a tight corner. My knees are jammed at a kind of 45 degree angle to the desk so my back isn't crunked against the dining room table behind me. He has to sit on a chair a little off to one side craning his neck and peering over the top of the printer. But we manage. Just.

The reason for the hardship is, of course, the imminent arrival of workmen to install our new heating system. We have ear-marked certain walls for radiators and so have cleared some space to let the workmen work. So the junk we usually spread out a bit is now piled in corners or on any surface on which it might be put until the men are gone.

My first work desk was in the box room of my parents' house and consisted, quite adequately, of a piece of offcut plywood assembled to two other pieces of plywood in a kind of orange-crate imitation. My father so wanted to make something -- anything, in fact -- from that offcut of plywood. But no. I had seen it first in the pile of random things he had brought home from somewhere. He asked me and asked me for it until I finally painted it a kind of off white colour. Then he didn't ask me any more.

The box room is the room in a two-storey house where a space has been cut out of the floor to allow the stairs to come up. The ceiling of the floor below slants up into the room (usually the smallest room in the house, perhaps bar the one with the facilities) and is boxed off with plasterboard. The result is sometimes a room with about one quarter of wasted space. This was the one I had. A bed (made by me out of more offcut timbers, this time, I think, from an old drop-leaf table), was jammed in crossways behind me. I actually had a decent amount of leg room, once I clambered over stuff and got sitting at the desk.

The first writing tool I bought was a manual typewriter. It had a carrying case and handle, which meant that although it weighed about 8 pounds it was actually portable. I was working as a nightwatchman and the typewriter would clack away for an hour or two in the dead of night in the Portacabin on the site where I guarded the construction machinery and kept the pumps going and tried not to look too scared and lonely. When the job finished, the typewriter clacked and cursed away back home, much to the discomfiture of my parents who had to listen to it whacking away through the wooden desk and the wooden floor beneath.

I changed to an electric model when one or two pieces sold and made a bit of money. Where the manual clacked, this one kind of thumped. It also introduced me to the idea of consumables. Where the manual had a good old-fashioned ribbon, that worked until you could see through it, this yoke tended to run out of print at inopportune times necessitating a walk to Tallaght Village for a replacement.

I had books around me and LPs and a stereo system with big padded 80s headphones. A big print calendar marked the days when a manuscript would go away in the post and when one came back. I even acquired a filing cabinet and filled the one remaining corner. My father complains the cabinet's still there. He's blind to his own junk, of course. But "that cabinet" is still there. So is the old off-white home made desk.

I've been thinking that I need some work space again and have been looking at the empty place Herself's old dressing table took up in our bedroom. I think I'll go the flat-packed self-assembly route this time, though. I don't hink she'd put up with a makey-up one somehow.

Silent Running

So the plumber announces he has had a job letdown which means he's starting to install the new central heating next week. That's despite the fact that Bord Gáis haven't found a shovel yet and connected us to the yellow fuse... I mean the gas supply. We also haven't mentioned that a bank loan we've not even applied for yet will pay for the central heating, so that should be good.

Tomorrow, I need to demolish a built-in wardrobe and manhandle the whole lot out the window, fix a no-go attic space, uncover a wall in the dining room presently hidden by would-be kitcheny bits, and generally do the plumbing equivalent of cleaning up before the cleaning lady arrives. Bugger me.

Tonight, the house was so cold and damp that I started up two electric radiators in the hall and in the living room. I had to fix the cat's food by the light of a side lamp and leave the computer off. We're church-mouse poor ahead of these renovations and can't afford the electricity, at least at never more than partially-completed showhouse level. All fur coat and no knickers -- that's us.

Hopefully won't need them when the heating goes in though....

Did I say, Bugger me...?

Into the outdoors....

"The grass needs mowing," Herself says. "I suppose I could manage to get it done when I finish the breakfast, the ironing, the washing of the kitchen floor, the hoovering...."

"No it doesn't," I say from behind the safety of the television remote control. "It was only done three weeks ago."

"One of the cats got lost in it yesterday."

"That cat always had a poor sense of direction."

"And it's going to rain. If it rains, the grass will be a foot taller in a few days and then I'll have to mow it when I finish the breakfast, the ironing, the washing of the kitchen floor, the hoovering..."

And so I find myself in the savana that is our back garden, pootling about with a faulty electrical hover mower. Every time it goes over a blade of grass that has the audacity to stand upright, the little plastic disposable blade thingy breaks and I have to stop and fit another one.

Oh, and I really hate electric strimmers. It's now official. No matter how I try to wind the replacement cord on, it becomes entangled and unusable. Or it unwinds completely into a deadly, flying weapon that puts cats and me to flight.

"I'm never using that again," I sulk, stomping by with the mower past Herself, who is making progress with a steam iron through a mini-Mount Everest of wrinkled shirts while hoovering with the other hand.

In the front garden, it begins to rain. I am on the grass verge by the road, overlooked by dry neighbours drinking tea and standing smugly in their living rooms looking out. They mowed their grass yesterday, or course, when the weather forecast rightly predicted dry weather. So, I can't stop now. It will only satisfy the neighbours.

The clouds make a noise like a toilet flushing. I mow on.

Sheets of water pass vertically before my eyes, some of them on the way back up having bounced off the ground. There is a hammering sound on the outside of my cap, which is now a lot closer to my head than when I started out. Small blue sparks are rising from the mower. From time to time its "Errr-uhh...!" noise fails and drops to a sputtering gurgle.

I mow on.

I can't see out of my glasses any more, so they dangle precariously from the tip of my nose where a cataract flows from the peak of my cap.

At last, as grey smoke begins to rise from the extension lead, I grab the mower, wind up the flex as best I can, and gallop for the house.

"Is it raining?" Herself asks sweetly.

"Grumph!" I say, squelching towards the garden shed with the dripping mower. I throw it bodily through the doorway and slouch back into the house, drenched to the skin. I dry off, change my clothes and get to sit down at the computer.

Five minutes later a voice comes from the kitchen:

"You wouldn't just sweep the grass off the path, would you?"

Just popping out then.

I may be some time...

Number games and dragging knuckles home

Yesterday was a fine day for walking short distances, so I naturally chose to walk a fairly long one. I thought brownie points would surely be in the offing if I bought the correct drill bit to make those round holes for hinges on non-standard cupboard doors and if the end result was another door in the integrated kitchen... this time a door on the washing machine. I was right on the idea of the brownie points, but boy was I dog tired when I finally got home the long way via the DIY store.

"One!" somebody shouted up above in the building site which is the Arena by the Tower Hotel in Tallaght.

"Two!" someone shouted back.

"Three!"
"Four!"
"Five"
"Six!"
"Seven!"

I have no idea what was going on, but the two gurriers walking in front of me did what any self-respecting mischief-maker would do in the circumstances: one of them shouted:

"Eight!"

"What?" came the reply from Number One.

"Eight!" shouted the gurrier pretending to be walking lamely along on the crutches. Answering calls came from Numbers Two to Seven until the whole lot were in a babble of constructional confusion somewhere in the lofty heights of the partly-glazed building. Finally, someone shouted:

"One!"

and the whole lot of them resumed their collective task. Whatever it was.

On the new Firhouse Road I was struggling. It was a hot day anyway, but walking the type of road that has no bloody turning is bad at the best of times. I had pictures in my head of walking from town in the days when the last bus left at 11.00pm and the beer was still unfinished. Then that long road by the Spawell, which one hit just as the three-hour walking fatigue was setting in, looked endless.

When I flumphed into the driveway the black cat flattened himself on the top of the wall and looked at me with inky black eyes. I couldn't be bothered. He only recognises me if I follow his rules and I was not in any humour to play.

The door fitted well in the wind up. I suppose the mere stiffness in my legs this morning can be credited to crawling about on hands and knees on a kitchen floor looking for dropped screws: one way of coming down gently from exercise. This morning I was a pound and a half down. It occurs to me that if I wish to avoid the diet pills now, then the only way to lose weight is to exercise along that kind of scale. Bugger that. I gladly accepted a lift from a workmate today.

What to do and why to worry anyway?

I'm off to bed.

Goodnight.

What is "Cheer Up Card" etiquette?

Herself and I were wandering around a local shopping centre a few days ago and in one of the greeting card and general souvenir sections I spied, in passing, a "Cheer Up" card.

I was so surprised (and was on my way out of the shop in the next moment to viewing it), that I didn't actually get too close a look at the card. I think it mentioned that the recipient's Guardian Angel was going to arrange for nice things to happen in the next little while. It didn't explain how the person sending the card knew this. Nor did it seem to reveal exactly what the etiquette for sending a "Cheer Up" card was.

Would you send a "Cheer Up... they can do great things with plastic surgery these days" message?

Or "Cheer Up... you still have a second one" card?

Or maybe "Cheer Up... the insurance will probably cover it"?

The mind boggles.

Cheese before bedtime

"Excuse me!" I said over the garden wall. "Excuse me!"

The waiter didn't reappear. I was furious.

In the background, the cats jumped around a pair of chattering magpies that fluttered about in pibald circles on the lawn. I left them to dance and stepped back in through the back door into the crowded kitchen.

"Babe," I said. "That fellow is ripping you off!"

The waiter had peered over the garden wall in his white shirt and black waistcoat and told Herself that there had been too much salt used with the meal. It would cost another €1 on top of the bill.

He had already charged €0.90c for the same reason on our previous bill. If it happened again, I was going to challenge it. And it had.

"Where's the bill?" I asked. Herself handed me a booklet that fell in fan-folds onto the floor as I fumbled with it.

"Look!" I said. "They charge so much already that they can give you a whole waiter's book as a bill!"

I flicked through the white pages and came to a multi-coloured one which listed the menu and the accompanying prices. The menu clearly stated that the prices already included the cost of salt.

"I knew it!"

I pulled a salt cellar from the counter and tried to explain.

"This is our salt cellar," I said. "How are they supposed to know how much salt we've used anyhow? Do they weigh it beforehand? Do they?"

The crowd milled about and I lost sight of Herself. She was somewhere to the front of the house, speaking with someone at the open front door.

I went out the back door and looked fruitlessly over the wall for the waiter. My father's neighbour, Billy D, gazed out over his shoulder through next door's kitchen window at the melee of cats and magpies.

I awoke to Herself sitting on the side of the bed.

"I'm glad we turned that mattress yesterday," she said. "I didn't move the whole night."

I groaned, thinking about the cheese sandwiches I had had before bed. Always a good idea at the time, but always the cause of the strangest dreams. I told Herself about the salt.

"I didn't move either," I said. "I was weighed down by a block of cheese."

None can compare with the cliffs of.... Tallaght?

Tallaght Town Centre and two large gulls appear to have made a home recently on top of one of the pitched rooftops. I can see one of them from my office window, on the north face of the clock tower of County Hall, one sitting in the niche of a louvred ventilator. When its mate appears, the two greet each other with many "Shree! Shree! Shree!" calls that remind one of being at the seaside.

Someone speculates that perhaps the sitter is one of this year's young, still being fed by a dutiful parent.

I don't know enough about them to judge, but it looks to me like they're considering nesting on the rooftop. It is sheltered from the prevailing wind. It overlooks a courtyard that isn't accessible to the public. There are several fast-food restaurants in the area from which an enterprising gull might, conceivably, glean enough discarded food to raise a chick.

The nesting theory gained a little ground yesterday when the sitting gull maintained its position even during the worst of a number of thunderstorms that swept the area.

We are quite a way from the sea, though, and I wonder if nesting is a viable option. I shall bring my binoculars tomorrow. If nothing else, it should worry my colleagues in the opposite side of the building as I peer out the window and focus in one something unseen over their heads.

[Pic by User:Dschwen at Wikipedia Commons. Republished under terms of GNU Free Documentation Licence]

Early rising 4.00am

Toothache woke me up this morning at 4.00am and I lay there in bed trying to find a comfortable place to put myself until five.

I tried covering my head with a duvet to keep the side of my face warm that was trying to thump on out through my cheek. I fluffed up a pillow and lay my puss on it. I even went to the last resort of draping the soft, cotton fabric of my housecoat -- a sure-fire cure for everything insomniac -- across my head without success.

I have three stumps of teeth that need to be uprooted. Two quite happily attack me from time to time but have been soundly whipped through the careful application of antibiotic treatments and horsepills. The third has, until last night, rested rottenly in peace in my upper mandible somewhere beneath my right eye with only an occasionally inconvenient habit of catching a piece of food in its gory depths. Then this weekend came the feast of sugary drinks, wines, spirits, beers, cakes, buns, biscuits, ice creams, syrups, chocolates and puddings that obviously had it throw in the proverbial towel and start throbbing like a good thing.

This evening, though feeling sleep deprived, I am somewhat more comfortable, back as I am on the pills diet and nicely swaddled in codeine.

If I come by money I shall ask the dentist to apply a gallon of stump killer. Until then, I am not looking forward to my bed.

Does a brownie point outweigh a "You're-Dead" point?

"There is something," I say to myself, as I hear the first hailstones start to pound off the windows, "That I should have done a few minutes back. Now what was it?"

I peer through the slats of the vertical blinds at the darkened back garden. A tabby cat, stung by the first hail, rushes out from under the hedge and after a false start finds in a panic the cat flap in the shed and jumps inside.

I grin.

Then I see the washing hanging on the line.

"Okay. I'm dead."

Then I realise that it is mostly made up of a wash that *I* put into the machine yesterday evening. Yes, I actually turned a dial and pushed a button. Must have earned at least one brownie point for that, eh?

Nope. I'm only fooling myself. I'm still dead.

Pass me back the gazebo, missus

Ding dong!

My father and I are discussing the plan for meeting my second cousin from Canada when my neighbour pokes the doorbell this Saturday morning.

"Hello," I say.

"Hello. Your canopy is...." She motions with a finger in a spiral, up-in-the-air kind of shape. "It's gone over."

"Has it?" I say. And idiotically go to the back window to confirm its absense from the back garden. There is definitely a gazebo shaped hole in the scenery.

The neighbour heads out in her car and my father and I trudge next door where the gazebo is in a comical, four-legs-in-the-air kind of position.

"Good job I tied it down, eh?"

"You did?"

"Well, with one rope anyway."

We dismantle and toss tubular bits back over the wall. The one rope and next door's washing line saved it from becoming a Wizard of Oz event. Only just.

Note to self: Tie the buggering thing down PROPERLY next time.

I have a picture in my head of my father and I sitting under the gazebo drinking tea when it takes off. Would have enjoyed that.

Related Post: B&Q Gazebo instructions

Pass me the Gazebo, missus

A little bit of sunshine has ensued and it hasn't rained much to speak of on the east coast for the past week or so. The Home section of Dunnes Stores is playing a blinder selling garden furniture, barbeques and gazebos. I could see burly husbands marching boxes of them out to parked cars in The Square yesterday. The wives were following up with shopping trolleys laden with bedding plants.

Our B&Q gazebo was unpacked from winter hibernation this morning. My father, who had called to show me his shiny new seven-year-old car, watched as I poked lightweight metal tubes together and made the magic of the summertime appear amidst bags of recycling drinks tins and plastic bottles which is our back garden.

The black cat put in an astonished appearance only briefly. Although he is becoming less wary of visitors if they are in the back garden (more room for him to escape if they should turn on him) he is still unhappy to see old men. The old man next door has had reason enough to chase our cats out of his shed in the past which I think is the source of Black Cat's phobia.

A note left on the counter this morning reads:

"If you have time, could you clean the litter trays?"

My work is cut out for me. At least I shall have a gazabo to relax in later today. I also have a new gas-fired barbeque, so if you hear sirens and see flashing blue lights this afternoon, you'll know what's happened.

No work til Monday.

Related Post: B&Q Gazebo instructions

At the pharmacy

"Hello," I say.
"Hello," says the pharmacist.
"Do you have any paediatric Benelyn cough syrup, by any chance?"
"Yes," he says. "How old is the child?"
"Fourteen."
"Okay. Should she not be on regular Benelyn cough syrup at fourteen?"
"No, thank you. She is rather small."
"What are the symptoms?"
"Well, she has a bad cough."
"Is it a tickly cough or a chesty cough?"
"I'm not sure. It's kind of like a permanent head cold."
"I see. Is she bringing up any phlegm?"
"Yes. There is a lot of sneezing and coughing."
"Then you probably need an expectorant. It would be a bad idea to use the other type as this might lead to the phlegm lodging around the lungs."
"I understand. Give me a bottle of the expectorant type then. And can I also have a syringe, please, to deliver the medicine? I don't want to get it all over her fur."

In the background, I hear the other staff looking up the record of my recent medication on the computer. One of them is also looking for the telephone number of my G.P.

Cats. Who'd have them?

Malodorous passengers make for blue-faced bus journeys

I was on the 49 bus one Saturday morning heading into town and sitting behind a chap who, unfortunately, stank to high Heaven. This wasn't just the sweat of a long night's work, either. It was the stench of maybe weeks, possibly months, of not washing. Bad enough, but there were no other seats on the bus vacant (except for one beside him). My eyes started to tear with the smell and I was thinking about whether or not to get off the bus and catch another one when this girl in her early twenties sat down beside him. I was fascinated, because she busied herself getting a few small items sorted in her handbag, then sat back to enjoy the view through the upper deck windscreen without apparently realising that she was becoming harder to see in the cloud emanating from her fellow passenger. Even worse (I still shudder when I think of it), when yer man got up in Terenure to leave the bus (a cloud of noxious fumes making everyone he passed cough wretchedly), the girl stood up and flopped gratefully into the window seat he had just vacated.

Maybe she had an appointment with an ear nose and throat doctor.

On the 76 the other evening a small family of husband, wife and daughter got on board. The husband, God be good to him, smelled like a cross between a rotten potato and a dead mouse. I swear I held my breath for 40 minutes. I never prayed as much in the past ten years as I did over that journey, asking the Lord to make the next bus stop the one this guy was going to. Finally, in Firhouse, three stops before I was going to bale out, they all departed. I doubt it was to take a bath.

What struck me about these two men was that they were both reasonably, if casually well-dressed. Their hair was shorn very short. From upwind, one would imagine they were quite careful in their hygiene habits.

Obversely (and quite amusing to me) a heavy metal fan got on the bus one afternoon when I was travelling. He had the obligatory black gear on and the long hair and a beard, and you could tell that despite the carefully-fostered "dirty" rebellious look that he had Timoteied and Lynxed most carefully before setting out. His beard was shaggy but clean. His hair was sun-lightened and silky.

Not everyone has heard of the uses of a bar of soap, it seems. Or are there medical conditions out there I've not heard of which reproduce the spud-mouse rot odour? If there's a fund for research I'll send them money.