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.

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.

Bag of Pixies

Feel very lucky today - have had double-day-off time this week, so all very chilled and trying to be focussed. On sorting my life out a bit more. Bigger. Better. Faster. Go....

Of course, I had to have a few Pixies tracks to start today off, but am playing Frank Black to get more of his vocals, while figuring out a faster way to sell my vintage stuff. I am hopelessly undisciplined at listing stuff, the photos-in-a-good-light and the description malarkey, but its easy-peasy really. But imagine how brilliant it would be to have an app like in the tesco advert, but sort of in reverse. You scan your phone over a mid-century coffeepot, and 3 seconds later, its on eBay, beautifully photographed, accurately described.... Oh, please someone, invent it now.

Have been in to town for coffee and cake and was intending to try out some perfumes, but waylaid by the sale rail of acrylic goodies elsewhere I felt too bag ladyish and lost my nerve. Not sure what scent a bag lady should wear, but the one squirt of O' de Lancome I sneaked before backing out of Boots is not quite it.

Doolittle. Again

Now that we are in February we'll have a bit of colour here. These are the tulips from last week.  

This week's flowers are as kitsch-as-hell. Coasters, in perfect nick. They smell just like they've been at the back of someone's sideboard for 50 years....

I think the parenting skills inspection went well. If that's how you can describe a psychologist clutching at straws. I'd hidden all the Tizer leftover from Christmas, and the empty pot noodle cartons anyway. They basically think he'll go back into a school somewhere, but not the current one, in his own sweet time. So, no problem there then. Apparently.

Last night's online grocery shop was a fail, as I was drawn instead to checking out a blog of old film and tv stills. This meant The Supermarket. Again. So, I put the blinkers on, got myself banned from the jewellery aisle, and managed a well-disciplined haul. Although the super-sized, stubby 720g jar of Branston was chosen for vase-potential so a swift decanting will need to be actioned.

Swift and action are words that are going to have to enter my vocabulary, replacing sofa-time and laissez-faire. Slapdash and slack are not getting me anywhere fast. In fact, I would like my life to be wireless, streamlined, less messy. But in the meantime I can't stop playing the Pixies....

...and uploading the odd photo of glorious buildings.



Strange Sunday

By jeez, its a strange morning. Just me and The Pixies (the ones with superb bass, not the ones at the end of the garden). The boys are still asleep. Blogland is quiet too. I'm starting to wonder whether I've slipped into some parallel universe during the night, thinking I'm here all alone at 11.06, when in truth nothing of the sort is actually true. Dreaming that I'd been sacked and had to find somewhere to live in Germany and become a nurse, all by Thursday, was a layer of surrealism too far.