About Time...

... well, we're over the Excitement That Was Nancy Sinatra. No, it hasn't taken me that long to recover, but life... well, it just gets In The Way sometimes doesn't it.

A brief snippette of recent things then...
The Trashsparkle Household have been having two weeks off work and school. There have been visits to cities, clothes shopping involving me spending Quite A Bit on new clothes FOR ME for a change - including this luvverly rockabillyesque little black cardi with Bloody Big Day Of The Dead Skulls on it




 - and a little (rail)road trip to family in the south. Oh, and buying some more Pixies and Yeah Yeah Yeah cds...

But for now, I'll just mention the recent 24 hours:

• gorgeous green Kent countryside, oast houses, sheep, horses, drinking gallons of tea with my lovely cousin at her house
• finally buying the Duchess of Windsor biography by Anne Sebba. Page 18 so far, and its Very Good.
• catching up on facebook, eating late-night chunky soup with the kids then chocolate mini rolls and watching Muriel's Wedding. All at the same time....  
• switching over to BBC2 and accidentally catching this incredible, amazing Werner Herzog documentary  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Dieter_Needs_to_Fly  Dieter survived capture in Vietnam, and this is the story of how he came to be there, from Germany where his grandfather was the only person in his town not to vote for Hitler and was subsequently persecuted by the Nazis, of what Dieter went through as a prisoner and of his escape and recovery afterwards... Amazing.

Red Sky At Night...

 ... don't get all excited; we're not getting a heatwave tomorrow - this was last night's sky. The 12 year old is getting into keeping a photographic diary (including evidence of the mutilation of his hand in an art lesson...)

An Inappropriate Piece Of Television

My morning has been scarred! Its all my own fault. Last night I was watching Escape To The Country. Purely for geographical research purposes*, as my distant rellies come from Ceredigion. Learning to say and spell that is very celtic indeed. OK, thats enough ooh la la; the ancestors were, allegedly, from Aberystwyth. I say allegedly as the trail goes cold in South London, with a David Jones. Haystack, needle anyone? For all I know I could share dna with Tom, Gethin and Steve. What a deeply disturbing thought...

So, back to this morning... the 12 year old kicked me off blog-perusal as his computer was doing some Important Technical Stuff, and feeling a bit screen-deprived I swanned off into the front room and switched the tv on. Totally forgetting about which channel I'd left it on last night. I got a short, sharp burst of Groundforce. With it being cable it was before the infamous hissy fit from Alan Titchmarsh which preceded his departure from the series. Which meant it was back in the days before a stylist made him and dopey-but-loveable Tommy have Big Boy Haircuts, with gel and everything; they were still sporting their pre-fame Village Idiot haircuts.

Anyhows, better pick myself up from that untasty encounter and brave the women who will pinpoint my slovenly ways as being at the root of the teenage recluse's chaotic lifestyle




* though that Jules Hudson, with his clean little face and pink cheeks, is a bit of a fitty. Not my usual type at all.

A Day In The Life...

Various things over the past few days have brought me to revisit what I am doing with my life, what did I think It was all going to be like, etc. So far this morning I have come up with 3 "certainties" that my teenage self decided would definitely happen. 1. To be an Amnesty member, 2. To trace my Dad's family, and 3. That I would live in a 3-storey house. Ok, its not a stucco'd Eaton Square des res, but 3 storey it is (Ten Storey Love Song jingling on the cerebral jukebox), four if you count the cellar. Which is at odds with how to hoover a multi-staired abode. Currently, infrequently. Oh to invest in the technology where a vacuum hose can be pulled from the wall at various points of convenience. Until then, I'd better get down to Argos for one of those dinky car cleaning gadgets. When I was at primary school and we were all looking forward to being grown-up in The Year 2000, wearing silver lame and knocking back food pills, I wanted tv that would let you watch whatever was on that day but when you wanted to watch it. And now we have... but instead of food pills they gave us Gordon Ramsay. Can't have everything, as they say.

The family history has been a doddle. Found the cad who abandoned my dad, but he hadn't died in the 1930's, he died in 1965 in South Kensington. I took a photo of the building he lived in, and had a drink in his local this summer. We've decided to bury the past and not to tell my Dad that it wasn't how he'd been led to believe.

Amnesty soothes my conscience at living in such a barbaric, mad, mad, world. I email and write and annoy dignitaries, but its a small drop in the ocean. And then blog a bit more about buying new earrings...

The rest of my life is largely like it was when I was 17, but with less cider, 100% control over my finances, and without the bulimia, and the suicide attempts my mum and stepfather were prone to.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old is dancing round the kitchen to the Stone Roses.