Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Twitter - Shitter more like
Shopping at Christmas
Thursday, 18 December 2008
Losing my trousers in my lunch hour
The tragedy of disappearing food
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Ironic Driving
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Living with a hedgehog
However, the Boy Wonder reliably informs me that our hedgehog smells, which is unsurprising given that he is used to outdoor life in the country where pretty much everything smells, and anyway there's enough air to make smells go away quite quickly unless it's a really big area of poo in a field. I didn't really realise how much the country smells until I moved to some country, and bearing in mind that I can only smell, at a guess, two thirds of the smells available to me, it must really smell to everyone else. On the plus side, we do live near a tannery which is another surprisingly smelly business and having limited olfactory ability is definitely a blessing when it comes to the once or twice a month when they do whatever they do that smells so bad.
Another useful thing to know about living with a hedgehog is that they eat REALLY loudly. Not just quite loudly like you might think when someone says a small creature eats really loudly, but seriously loudly, to the point where you can hear our hedgehog eating in a box downstairs from our bedroom upstairs - not a huge distance, but certainly further than you would expect to hear a hedgehog eating over. (Or, to be more pedantic, a distance over which you would not expect to hear a hedgehog eating.) There are a few other interesting things about living with a hedgehog to do with an apparent fondness for burrowing into towels, a cheeky way of pretending to be on the verge of death one minute by breathing all oddly and then getting up, running about and eating some food the next minute just to keep you on your toes.
Another hedgehog fact, further to a conversation with our local hedgehog hospital, is that our hedgehog now has pets of his own. I bought him wax worms, which are little caterpillar kind of things which will turn into wax moths if left for too long. Hopefully our hog will eat them all before it comes to that as the Boy Wonder hates moths and being as he is the one who is enduring most of the smells, it seems a bit unfair to inflict a live moth farm on him too.
To his immense credit, the Boy Wonder is really very understanding and even came with me to take the Hog to the vet yesterday - he makes some pretty weird noises and because he spends most of the time hiding, sleeping and waiting until we go to bed before getting up and stampeding around his box it's hard to tell whether the noises are symptoms of some kind of illness or just normal noises for a hedgehog to make. Our vet is a very nice man - I took Mogbad, our stolen cat to him, and even when he fell out of the scales and weed on the table, nice French vet man was overwhelmed by his attempts to get attention and joined me in wondering how anyone could abandon him (more on Mogbad at some point). So I wasn't entirely surprised when nice French vet man was very nice to Hoggle, describing him as 'very sweet' and giving me props for taking him on.
However, nothing quite prepared me for the sight of nice French vet man trying to listen to Hoggle's chest through a stethoscope pressed to his spines - it looks about as ridiculous as you would imagine such an endeavour would look, and I was very glad to be there to witness it, particularly when the lovely vet turned to me and said 'I cannot really 'ear anything' with an admirably Gallic shrug. As it turns out, so long as he is eating, defecating (medical terminology for the vast and unholy deposits he seems determined to leave in his water bowl) and curling up when poked, that's about all the signs you can hope for from a healthy hedgehog and I am now reassured about his health, meaning that I won't have to mute the TV every 10 minutes to attempt to engage the Boy Wonder in yet another thrilling game of "cough, sneeze or grunt".
All in all, whilst it is quite fun to have a hedgehog in the house, don't let the fact that they seem to do all right in the wild fool you - as soon as they know you care, they need a constant temperature of 20 degrees, insects and live worms to eat to keep their teeth healthy, a never-ending supply of places to poo and people who don't mind waking up at 5 in the morning whispering 'was that a burglar or the hedgehog?'. Oh, and you have to keep them until after the last frost of the spring, so he's living with us till April now.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Dreams reflect life...
Saturday, 13 December 2008
What do I really need to know about the Corn Laws?
Friday, 12 December 2008
I'll tell you what's really Ironic, Alanis...
Thursday, 11 December 2008
5 Books I definitely do not love (part 5)
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
I am America and So Can You
5 Books I definitely do not love (part 4)
Monday, 8 December 2008
5 Books I definitely do not love (part 3)
5 Books I definitely do not love (part 2)
Friday, 5 December 2008
5 Books I definitely do not love
Thursday, 4 December 2008
The Colbert Report
5 books I love (part 5)
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
5 books I love (part 4)
5 books I love (part 3)
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
5 Books I love (part 2)
5 Books I love (part 1)
1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
OK, so this is technically a trilogy in five parts, meaning it would have to be all of my top five books, although it was originally a radio series maybe it shouldn’t be any of them, but I am glad that it is now available in a series of other formats, including (so Wikipedia tells me) two series of towels. I have been a fan since listening to the radio series, courtesy of my step-dad’s possibly illegal home taping of them, as a smallish child to keep me entertained on long car journeys. I consider it to be one of the most influential introductions made in my life, because it instilled in me a life-long (so far) love of Douglas Adams and hours and hours worth of conversation with my brother which few others can understand.
To me, there are few things more satisfying than calling someone a ‘hoopy’ or a ‘frood’ and them understanding it, not least because it’s quite a compliment and if you have gone to the effort of complimenting someone in a language you hope they will understand, it’s gratifying to be met with enthusiasm rather than a slightly askance look and an attempt to disengage from the conversation altogether.
There is something joyful about these books – there are not only no rules, but the ones made up to fit the story don’t apply when the plot makes them inconvenient, yet Douglas Adams avoids falling into the trap so many ‘sci-fi’ (I’m using the term broadly) books do of either making everything so completely ‘other’ that I can’t really get into it, or of creating such fantastic scenarios that it all ends up being contrived and complicated in an attempt to come up with a meaningful ending to the storyline.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide, however, combines the confused curmudgeonliness of Arthur Dent with the worldly optimism of Ford Prefect. Then in case they weren’t polar enough for you, you also get Marvin the Paranoid Android, who out-curmudgeons Arthur Dent without any of the confusion, and Zaphod Beeblebrox who out everythings everyone pretty much.
The thing I love most about the Hitchhiker’s Guide books though is the fact that having done some basic fact-checking whilst writing this, I have been inspired to read the books all again as soon as I have finished Robinson Crusoe…
Monday, 1 December 2008
The thing I wish I’d known
The thing I wish I had known was that it’s much easier to be happy than to be anything else. I spent years feeling as though I had missed something that everyone else was aware of, or that I was the one who was not in on a universally understood secret. I wanted to be popular but didn’t really have much in common with the people I thought I wanted to be friends with. I wanted to be one of the girls that the boys fancied, but I didn’t actually fancy any of those boys. The things I thought I wanted turned out not to be the things I really wanted. I thought life should come to be and invite me to join in rather than realising that if I wanted something I had to go and get it, and nobody would be feeling sorry for me if I decided to stay in at the weekend because nobody had called me rather than just calling someone and asking what they were doing.
I would also have liked to know that I was good at things which could be made into a career – I was so aimless at school, and then for another three years at university, and then for another couple of years before I found a job that I actually enjoy doing and am keen to learn about. Careers advice seemed uncannily tailored to the jobs which I claimed I wanted to do – journalist, child psychologist etc – regardless of the fact that I wasn’t really cut out for any of them. I wish I’d known about jobs other than nurse, teacher and ‘something in an office’, although I can’t complain that there is anything I would change about my life now (although, obviously, pots of money would make things easier and there would be less frustrating days at work).
On a lighter note, I also wish I’d known that a terrible nostalgia would descend as I approach my 30s – had I known how much I would regret it 15 years later, I would never have given away my Ramona Books.