Transformations!

Helllooooo! I seem to have palmed you lovely readers off with my manky dead flower photos and wotnot and not actually written anything for aaaaaages...... life's been full-on lately...

I've just read Patti Smith's Just Kids - as it came out last year it'll have been blogged to death elsewhere, but it was Totally Fantastic And Absorbing. I spent a happy week staying up til the small hours reading huge chunks, playing her tunes, and looking up dead French poets, and so forth, and wishing I could have at least two lives: one now, and one in late 60s and early 70s New York. Oddly enough, Patti discovered Rimbaud by reading about Modigliani. The week before reading Patti's book, guess which artist I'd been researching... To "come down" from the book, I played PJ Harvey and The Doors. Am now reading Kristin Hersh's Rat Girl.... loving that too.

And then The Brits happened. Luckily it was on pancake day, so I was able to spend much of the show in the kitchen, far, far from the likes of weedy li'l Ed Sheeran and Brit-pap. BUT BLUR WERE ON, so the 12 year old was giving me shouts when it was safe to be in the same room as the tv. And they were FABULOUS (albeit the timing meant the Adele-cut-short-and-middle-finger-episode, but she was FABULOUS TOO).... so most of their back catalogue was on the cd player for the next day or so.... Phwoar - Damon is looking Quite Fit these days. And afterwards I watched No Distance Left To Run, which is brilliant. Graham is extremely chameleon-like, isn't he...

I have also had the bathroom redone..... my version being upgrading the shower from a one-minute-freezing-next-minute-lobsterising dribble to va va voom that could easily jetwash a large horse, should I care to try to wedge one into the bath... plus new washbasin (aka potential horse trough) and new loo. And posh taps! The original woebegone shebang was inherited with the house 11 years ago - wish I had "before" photos from that long ago, but if I describe it as being decorated by Jayne Mansfield on acid you'll get the picture. Apricot decor and frills - those went Very Quickly Indeed, but the chipped and eventually-no-longer-working fittings lingered on...

teeny preview of the new non-Jayne taps

The only hitch is that the plasterboard lining the exterior wall* came away bigtime with the old washbasin -  obviously Sensible People would have known that could happen and would have stripped out the room, had the walls redone and then put the basin in. Oh no, not me. I'm looking at a lot of filler, and possibly a crazy mosaic affair to disguise it... There's also a Worrying Hole through to the outside, where the plumber ripped out a pipe - am going to rummage through what he chucked in the bin bag to find it and wedge it back in, otherwise I think there'll be wasps wanting to get themselves between the outside wall and the plasterboard. *Boring construction details now over with;)

Transformation part two is that I am machine-dying a naff pale mint green dress and a bright pink shirt this morning. Am using a Dylon Wash And Dye sachet in Denim Blue - sooooo easy and clean to use; a far cry from the last time I machine-dyed when it was shake the packet, which went everywhere, and add salt. This sachet is all ready-to-go - perfect for a lazybones like me. The colour looked ok when the dye cycle had been done; just waiting now for the wash-and-rinse stage to be done. Then it'll be off to the flea market in search of some more cracker rings. I need a purple one I think...

Ballroom Dancing, Blur and Bad School

A while ago I kept banging on about the Pixies, since when I don't think I've mentioned music much. One of the things that gets me to put a cd* on is to drown out the awareness of the low-level noise coming from our neighbours. The random amateur carpentry games their 4 year old plays, the accelerating vocalisms of their baby. Not the shouty lady who rants at her husband, who we recently discovered has taken to peppering his gujarati with "fuck off". 50 years in this country, and the local dialect is rubbing off on him... No, we are blessed not only to live in a terrace, but one in which the party walls** on either side are Very Thin. So I'm listening to Think Tank, the massively vermillion-fabric'd cd Blur did about 9 years back. Damon Albarn and Kristin Hersh's voices are always good to re-tilt the axis in a mad day...

Because it has been one of those. Back in the swing of the World of Work, with a morning where the recent training actually came in useful in a fairly heavy situation, and where I'd got the 14 year old off to school. By bus for the first time. All good so far. And then his school sent an automated text that he'd got a detention to do that lunchtime... no explanation. And possibly the best way to ensure his continued enthusiasm to attend, with a less than 50% attendance so far this month.

No one at the end of the phone knew anymore than it was for "failing to follow instructions". Yes, that's why he's not been at school for the past year, etc, etc, and why he's under their monitoring... By now already late for the afternoon session I was working in, I got hold of someone who was able to tell me he'd walked out of school 2 hours previously. Although fairly confident his homing instinct, and desire for a quiet spot with his computer, would guarantee he'd be at home, I excused myself and went straight home to see what was what. After which I calmed myself down by catching the tail end of a programme about the coachload of ballroom dancers who'd been called in to be in the Magical Mystery Tour film.






* Too old to be trained to use an iPod. That's for when I'm 80. And I usually forget about 6Music.

** To non-Brit readers, that's a technical term for the bricks 'twixt you and the neighbours. Not a wall covered in lurex, Twister mats and balloons.