Gulping

Before anyone comments, it’s not a New Years resolution. I just noticed the WordPress app on my tablet thingy and then remembered the password so I decided that I may as well put some words down.

I am in a remarkably happy place at the moment. One of those long term things that one never thinks will come to fruition may just be, erm, fruiting, just in the nick of time. I’ll save that for another day though.

So then.  I’ve been doing some running.  Close on 1000 miles last year.   Not exactly Forrest Gump territory but not too bad for an overweight 50 something.   I managed a bit of cycling as well and my running buddy said that I should do a triathlon.

“I can’t swim”.

“Everyone can swim”.

“Not me”.

So she entered me in an Aquathlon and now I have to learn.   An Aquathlon is where you swim a bit and then run a bit.    I’m in what is possibly the worlds smallest event in that I have to swim 200 metres and run 4.5km.   It’s also a really difficult word to pronounce.

“Two.  Hundred.   Metres?”   I said.   That’s like 1/8 mile.   It may as well be to the moon and back.    Conveniently, running buddy is a swimming coach so she reckons it will be a doddle (she is like a dolphin in the water, she dives in and in the shake of a swimming hat she’s done two lengths).

The first lesson was about breathing.   “Turn your head, keep your ear in the water and breath”.   “No, breath in when your face is out of water, breath out when your face is in the water”.  “No” (with a slightly exasperated tone) “you have to breath out before you can breath in again”.

The second and third lessons were also about breathing.   It appears that it isn’t a talent that comes naturally to me.  We also threw in the added complication of waggling your legs whilst breathing.

Lesson four – “We are going to swim 200m today, take your time, remember your breathing, remember to kick your legs, remember to turn your head and keep your ear in the water, remember to go in a straight line rather than that ziggy zaggy thing that seems so appealing to you, remember that when you are up the other end of the pool you won’t be able to touch the bottom”.

Things didn’t start so well.   “Erm’ Rob, I think you have your trunks on backwards and why do you have your goggles on?”  “Bugger and because I’m going to swim and I can”t see without them”.   “But we are still in the changing rooms!”.

She has the patience of a saint.  After four lengths I was thinking it might just be easier to sink gently to the bottom of the pool and then someone would rescue me.  I crashed into someone on the 5th length who was very carelessly not looking where I was going.  I lost count of lengths so at 6 I thought I had finished and nearly mutinied.

I did get to my 200m mark in the end and I didn’t die.   I was even a little bit proud of myself.   Then she said “Okay, let’s do it again”.

I’m pledged to not drink in January,   I have consumed so much swimming pool that there is no room for alcohol inside me.   When you see the staff at Teddington pool scratching their heads over the lack of water, you’ll find me, looking rather like Mr Creosote, gasping in the changing rooms.

I did do it again, and I did it two minutes faster than the first time.   Practice makes perfect?    Watch out Brownlows, I’ll be after your crowns before too long.

Boom boom

I was thinking of John Lee Hooker with that title.   I was going to go with “Boom boom boom boom”, which is how the song starts, but then realised that was also the title of a Vengaboys song and I just didn’t want to go with trashy europop.  Now I’ve just remembered Basil Brush (you lot not in the UK are going to have to get on your Google) so my vaguely hip subject line has been hijacked by an irritating fox with a hand up his arse.

I happened to notice the daily post email that presumably arrives in my inbox every day and doubtless gets cleared out by my energetic spam checker.   It suggested “Clean” as suitable subject matter and it brought to mind an incident or two last week.

You may remember that I’m not the best sleeper.   It’s been mentioned numerous times on here, go back and read some of my other posts for an in-depth analysis of my nocturnal misery.   I was safely ensconsed in my bed, cosy against the bitter cold of a West London winter (so not really that cold) when a rhythmic beating disturbed my slumber.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

I checked the clock.  It was just after 2am.   This is a usual time for me to wake up on my own so I was quite cross to be awoken by external influences.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

I thought perhaps somebody was trying to break in.  It wasn’t a very subtle attempt to gain access and a moments thought made me realise that any burglar worth his salt wouldn’t be so noisy.  I’ve been woken in the past by a broken gas main, or rather the chaps who decided to search for one.  They have a gadget that bashes holes in the floor, it also produces a steady and constant beat but the timbre was all wrong for that.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

The only thing to do was to investigate.   I donned the Verbal Hedge equivalent of a silk kimono and went in search of the boomer.

The boy was on the decking in his pyjamas.   The door to the decking wide open, allowing icy blasts of Twickenham air to whistle up my trouserless legs.   He was banging a football boot on the decking.   Boom, boom, boom, boom.

“What on earth are you doing?” is an approximation of what I said to him.    “Cleaning my boots before training tomorrow” was the absolutely obvious answer.   His cleaning method involves bashing the boot on the floor until all of the mud from between the studs has left the boot and landed on my (previously clean) deck.   I reached for a convenient tent peg and showed him how to do the job quietly and thought that would be the end of it.

Two nights later…

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

It was earlier, around midnight.   i was crosser, almost steaming.   I stormed down the stairs, passing the boy on the landing and getting ready to give him an earful.  Hmmm, I passed him on the landing.  What could be causing the bloomin’ booming this time?

We have a tumble dryer.   It lives under the stairs in a previously undiscovered echo chamber.   If you fill it with an entire football kit and several wet towels then the bearings in it give up.   Every rotation of the drum is heralded by a thump that is amplified by the under-the-stairs echo chamber.   After removing roughly half of the contents the thump became a sigh, so I went back to bed and listened to the tumble dryer quietly sobbing to itself for two hours.   At least it gives me something to fix that doesn’t need to be carried down to the shed.

If you click on the daily post link above then you’ll find lots more Clean tales that are far more substantial than this one.

So where were we?

Ah yes.   A very silly thing.

I did London Duathlon.   Actually, I did London half duathlon, it was 5km run, 22km cycle and then 5km run.   That second 5km was the killer.   Your legs are still expecting to be going round and round rather than up and down so one tends to stagger around like a drunken fool for the first 10 minutes of the second run.  Still, I finished.   I didn’t quite make 2 hours but I will do next time.

The Daily Post (I had forgotten about it) suggests a one word prompt of Marathon.  Being keen to improve myself and stick to what the doctor says I’ve decided to do things by half again and take on a half marathon.   I’m running on behalf of Motor Neurone Disease Association and so collecting sponsorship.   If you do feel the urge to pass on some of your hard-earned savings to a most worthy cause I’ll put a link at the end of this email, but don’t feel obliged.

We have some issues at home with regards to all of this keeping fit.   They mostly revolve around mud.   The boy is now a fully fledged football coach.  His mission is to put right the things that every other coach in the world gets wrong and to get his team of under 12’s to the top of the league (4th at the moment with two games in hand).   When I was a lad, football coaching was basically “kick the bloody ball and run over there” but it appears to have evolved since then.  There’s all sorts of kit to be carried around.  Balls, cones, markers, goalposts (honestly) and when it has been wet for a few days these items tend to get, well, wet and muddy.   If you’ve ever been in a soggy field with a bunch of pre-teenagers then you’ll probably be able to understand.

The big match this weekend (it was against a team who on average are four inches taller than “our” team) was cancelled due to a waterlogged pitch but this didn’t stop training.  I suspect that training must have borne some similarity to Sunday at Glastonbury.   Needless to say that there are a few Surrey parents  still trying to find their child who now resembles a pool of mud in the back of the 4×4.

In itself, this shouldn’t be a problem.  However, I (and I’m obviously the most important person) had been out for a training run in the park (Richmond Park, added incentive of being chased by angry deer) and so was also wet and muddy.   Wet, muddy and tired in fact.  I flung open the door of Verbal Towers expecting to be greeted by a warm glow and pristine flooring to be met with 20 football cones, 12 footballs and 22 training bibs.  Each dun coloured item either dripping or steaming, depending on its exact location in the hall.

I was (as is my custom) overjoyed. The route to the stairs was blocked by 50 or so training markers, originally blue and red but now brown and browner.  My solution to strip off in the hallway and scamper nimbly through the cones and up the stairs seemed like a great one until I reached the first floor and noticed the family opposite looking out of their bedroom window and into our landing with some bemusement.   You really would think that the neighbours would be used to us by now.

Now off you go, read some more Marathon posts and then click on the link below and donate everything that you’ve saved from whatever new years resolutions you have made.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Robby-Hedges

A very silly thing

Looking for a suitable quote for this little tale, I remembered that Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu had said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I checked the accuracy of this.   He is credited with the smart words (though they are sometimes attributed to Confucious) but I’ve a problem with it.   Because I can be pedantic I googled “What unit was used to measure distance in China in 500 BC”.  Guess what? they didn’t do miles.  The accepted measurement was (and still is) the Li, which is roughly about 1/3 of an imperial mile, so it’s only a 333 mile journey in reality. Modern day Li’s are 500 metres.

Do you remember this?   I decided that I not only needed to keep both legs but I needed them both attached to the same body, a couple of visits to the doctor and before you can say “Hop it” I was on a bed being flushed with iodine and then having a brace of stents fitted (kissing stents, so they tell me.  How sweet).   Blood circulation at my ankle went from 5% to 60% so I’m only 40% off perfect now.   Don’t you wish you were so close to perfect?

The doctors told me that gentle exercise would help improve things further, so I walked and walked and then decided in January to join in with a group doing couch to 5k.   This encourages one to run for 5km (3.1 miles for you over there) eventually.   I should at this stage offer a large round of applause to the Sweatshop chain of sports clothing stores and in particular to the shop in Teddington for organising regular running groups and giving encouragement to all potential runners everywhere.

I can now run 5km (3.1 miles or very roughly 10 Li).  I can’t do it quickly but this is all (apparently) going to change.   I place the blame for this very firmly at the door of my friend (who I shall call Fred because he reads this, don’t you Fred?).

Fred said “I can’t run, I’ve no ACL in my leg, I cycle instead.  Come and join me on a cycle ride”.

Fred does this.   He mentioned that he had started playing golf and we should go for a game.   He’s really good at golf.    Fred is cycling many miles a week and I have now committed to a 50 mile charity cycle with him.  Bradley Wiggins has raised an eyebrow of concern.

That’s not the very silly thing though.  Because I’m going to do a cycle ride I needed a bicycle and because I now have a bicycle I feel the urge to use it more so I have entered a duathlon.  This involves running, cycling and running again.   I’m only doing a little one, 5km-22km-5km but a brief test of pedaling followed by running reveals that it is going to be hard work.  The shared muscles are somewhere around the groin.  It’s far more painful than giving birth (apparently).

My current time for 5km is 30 minutes.  That’s just for 1, so I reckon the second one will be more like 40 minutes.   On the bicycle I reckon I can just about manage an average of 20 kmh so we are looking at around 2 hours and 15 to complete the course.  The winning time last year was 1 hour 20 minutes and the slowest was around 2:45.  I’m aiming for under 2 hours and I have 15 weeks to get to that speed.

Wish me luck.   I’ll see you all in Richmond Park on 18th September.  I’m expecting banners with “Come on Robby” and “Hurry up you fool” scattered around the course.

Bye for now.

Travelling light

Three things.

The spell checker in the editor insists that travelling should be spelt traveling.   I disagree.  Wholeheartedly.

Counting from 1st January 2015, can you guess what the most popular search term used to find The Verbal Hedge was?  It was not “Verbal Hedge”, it was not (rather disappointingly) “Slasher Rhino Porn” although that did feature a couple of times.   It was “Demis Roussos height”.   How can that be?   I have just tried a Google search and of the three pages returned, I didn’t get a mention.   Almost 50% of the recognised search terms this year leading to my little blog have related to the height of the much missed kaftan clad crooner.   Please if you are the searcher, tell me how you found me.

The compere in a club last night introduced the session with a speech that was almost word for word the fourth paragraph of my last post.   I’ll have a credit and a pint on the house next time please.

One thing.

The daily post asks who you would chose to write the story of your life.    I am going to cheat a little and just have the story of the first week in June 2015 and I pick Ted Simon (I hope you don’t mind me linking to your site Mr Simon) because since reading Jupiters Travels I’ve longed to go on such an adventure.  Sadly I am far too wimpy to set off on such a trip but I am going to take my own Triumph Tiger on a much smaller scale adventure and tour around the wild and dangerous land of Scotland.  Ted’s Tiger was a 1973 model I think.   Mine is a 2014 one and should have no problems with the 2000 miles or so I will be travelling (with two l’s) but the question is, what to take?

I have my tent and a sleeping bag.   That should be all I need for accommodation.   I reckon I can put the tent up in three minutes and it is a sturdy thing so even the most voracious storm will not threaten me.   I have a cooker the size of a deck of cards and a collapsible kettle.   The cooker, for all that it is tiny, sounds akin to a hot air balloon taking off.  I shall probably end up making tea for everyone within a 5 mile vicinity.   Mother always told me to make sure that I had dry socks, clean pants and a handkerchief.   I reckon two out of three aren’t bad and one of the two can cover for the third in a real crisis.   I have been collecting those little coffee and sugar sachets from hotels all year and hiding them in various pockets of my motorcycle coat, so making a brew won’t be a problem (providing I remember a cup).

Guide book?  Map?    I know roughly where I am going, north for a couple of days and then follow the coast after that.   There can’t be that many roads to get lost on and I’m told that I can’t take the bike off-road beyond the border.

Clothing is a challenge.  The weather may be glorious or it may be snowing.   I shall layer about four deep and that should cover every eventuality.   My running tights can double as long johns in a push.  The last pair of proper long johns I owned were dyed orange as part of a fancy dress costume.  I used to dread coming to grief and having a paramedic cut open my leathers to find me festooned with dayglo orange bloomers.

I’ve earmarked some small tools and a puncture repair kit but my most useful tool is made of plastic and called visa.   I’m hoping that I don’t need any of them but better safe than sorry.

A torch.  I’ve camped in the dark before and remember thinking “A torch, a torch, my kingdom for a torch”.  I don’t have much of a kingdom to give away so I better remember a torch.  I shall christen it Lucifer (now there’s a curious juxtaposition).

I remember the boy coming home from school one day, must have been in the early ’90’s and he would have been in one of the early years classes.  He had something important to tell me.  “Matches matches do not touch, they will hurt you very much”.   I’ll need something to light the cooker (henceforward known as Montgolfiere) and they will also double as handy toothpicks after I have cooked my freshly caught haggis.  In one of the comics of my youth, either The Dandy or the Beano, the haggis had long legs on one side and short legs on the other side to help them get around the mountain.   The simple way to capture them was to get them to run in the opposite direction so they became unbalanced and fell over.

Can you tickle Salmon?   Not Alex Salmond, I wouldn’t want to tickle him.  Do you have to be named after a fish to be leader of the SNP?   Was it founded by John Stickleback?   I digress.  I shall stand in a stream like a bear and toss me a salmon onto the riverbank for dinner.   I bet it is not illegal to go salmon tossing without a license.

If you can think of anything else I need then let me know.   Four weeks today and I’m off.

 

 

The island that music did not forget

I stopped.    Twelve months ago.    I thought “Nobody reads this, why do I do it?”.

Then I sent an email and the recipient said “God, I live your writing”. I figured it was either a typo or an anagram.  “God, I evil your writing” just didn’t scan so I assume my corespondent loves my writing.  Let us live in hope (and the self translation of keyboard errors).

There is an island (there are many, my tale concerns just one) in the Thames.  It is called  Eel Pie Island.  One can only assume that it was once a fine place to purchase pie made from eels.  Allowing that it is on the Thames then that is a reasonable assumption.

In the ’60’s there was a venue there.  It’s a fair argument that the London sound of the decade (as opposed to the Mersey sound) developed in West London with Eel Pie Island and The Crawdaddy (just upriver in Richmond) being the home of English rhythm and blues.   We had The Beatles on the northern river and The Rolling Stones on the southern one.  Gerry and the Pacemakers were Ferrying across the Mersey whilst the Kinks were appreciating a Waterloo sunset.

The Eel Pie venue was in a hotel (famed amongst other things for a sprung dance floor) and whilst access was ostensibly by a footbridge it was not unknown for intrepid music lovers to row there.   By all accounts, the return journeys were generally considered more precarious than the outgoing trip.     The hotel fell on hard times and after a brief resurgence in the late ’60’s (Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and a host of other rock bands of the time appeared there) it fell into disrepair and was destroyed by an unexplained fire in 1971 (at the time it was the home to the largest hippie commune in the UK).

All well and good you may cry.   Now get on and tell us a tale.

Although Eel Pie island is now the home of artists and wealthy bohemians, the spirit of 1960’s rhythm and blues has stayed alive and well in the area and has migrated to the cleverly titled Eel Pie Club.   I wonder where they got that name from?   The Eel Pie Club meet once in a while (usually on a Thursday) in a room the same shape as Italy (although not as big or with such interesting politics).   Keep that image in your head.   There is a bar that runs roughly along the coast from Rome to Naples (the till is in Mondragone) and the stage is in the bit of Ionian Sea between the heel and the toe.  The dressing rooms are somewhere over in Calabria and there’s a nice relaxing area somewhere up near Milan.   Curiously, if you continue this geographic exploration then the toilets are just off the coast of Albania.

I have been popping in occasionally over the last few years.   Enough to be on nodding terms with the regulars but not frequently enough to be invited to weddings or funerals (of the members, not of the club.  I think it is still unattached).    Last week was a significant anniversary and the place was heaving.   I took some time to people watch.

Generally I am one of the younger patrons.   Generally there is a plethora of loud check shirts.  This night was different.   We had  everybody there.   The hipsters with their groomed but over-exuberant beards.   The lithe and writhing twenty-somethings in spray on jeans and killer heels.   Parents, perhaps escaping from kiddy duty for the first time in a month.   Overdressed, over-lubricated and occasionally over-balancing.  Pashminas cast wantonly to one side and polished loafers  tapping out a long forgotten beat, mustard chinos hiding knees unused to dancing.    Then there’s the originals.   Dress shirts untucked and uncuffed and sporting a silk bandana.   Predecessors to Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen but emitting the haphazard elegance that can only come from not knowing any other way.

The feature band started as a foursome and ended as (I think) a nine piece, complete with a brass section.   The CV’s of each member covering the entire spectrum of music from the last half century.   Old pros who are too good to dismiss and having too much fun to stop.

I’d invite you along, it is a brilliant venue and the music and performers are legendary.   The problem is, I like it as a tiny club.   I like being able to get to the bar when I want to and I enjoy the fact that it is normally a secret for just a handful of us.

Note that since writing this The Eel Pie club has relocated to Brigadoon.   Performances are generally every other Thursday and this week brings The Others to the little stage in the Ionian Sea.

If I knew you were coming…

I love cakes.   I think cakes are the best.   The things I would do for a fresh cream horn don’t bear mentioning.  If there was a danish pastry 100 metres away and I was standing next to Usain Bolt then I’d get there before him (and probably be licking the crumbs from my fingers before he arrived).  Did I say that I like cakes?

I was having a discussion about cakes recently, one of those abstract conversations that tend to happen when you’ve been driving too long without human contact and so you pounce on the first caller.   After meandering through the jam donuts and the gaily coloured Battenburg we finally alighted on the ultimate piece of food, the fruit cake.

Not any fruit cake but the booze riddled, iced, marzipanned behemoth that masquerades as a wedding/Christmas cake.

There is a tradition in the UK (this may be true everywhere) that the top layer of the wedding cake is kept back and not cut until the christening of the firstborn child.    I thought here that I would provide a handy little statistic saying that the average time a cake lays waiting is x years, but the internet has failed me.   In fact, the average age for a woman to give birth to her first child is 29 and the average age of a woman getting married is 32.5, so the cake would be -2.5 years old.   I think it might have to be called an uncake.

Never mind.  It is still tradition and we can pretend that the top layer of cake is going to be in a tin under the bed for at least 12 months (even if you are the most rapid christener in christendom).     This got us thinking.   Whilst your cake is waiting to be consumed could there be other uses for it?

My first thought was that the cake could be used to fashion an emergency exit in case of fire.   My type of  fruit cake has a density similar to that of a small sun.    Kept on a window ledge it would be a simple thing to cast the cake through the window (or wall for that matter) and hey presto you have a cake shaped hole ready for egress.

If you were thinking that you may be having twins as your first born then you may well plan ahead and have two top layers of the cake.   With a bit of lateral thinking, these would make fantastic book ends that are also a lasting memento of your big day.  You could have the little plastic bride at one end and the little plastic groom at the other.   Once the twins are born your married life will have gone to pot anyway so you will be glad to get rid of the bloody things at the christening.

Bits of fruit cake could easily be fashioned into brake blocks for a bicycle.    This would actually have two benefits.  Aside from the undoubted additional stopping power achieved, every time you slowed down there would be a lovely smell of re-cooking cake to assuage your hunger.   Carrying spare cakebrake blocks (as I think they should be called) would mean you also had an emergency supply of high energy food should you get stuck up a mountain with no patisserie nearby.

My recipe for Christmas cake involves starting cooking just after we come back from the summer holidays.   The recipe seems to have been written on parchment with a quill by what I fondly imagine to be an old and slightly befuddled cook from around the time of Robin Hood.     The best part of it is that I have to feed the cake with Brandy every week.   We all know that drinking alone leads to all sorts of problems so it is essential for the health of the cake that I join it with a glass.

Just as an aside.  The only English monarch ever to be given the epithet of “The Great” is also the only English monarch who is associated with cakes.   That can’t be coincidence (although there is an argument that after burning the cakes he should have been Alfred The Grate).

There are some good superstitions that go with cake.   My personal favourite is that of the burial cake.   Again this should be a mighty monster of a cake and it is kept near to the head of the dearly departed.  Those who come to pay their last respects should keep a piece of cake in their mouth whilst viewing the deceased.   I would like to state now that any cake found near my body is mine and should be buried with me.

The daily prompt today asks what is our guilty pleasure.   Need I say more?

 

 

Getting on with it

“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done”.

That’s what Buddha said.  He said a lot of wise things but I’m not putting that one at the top of my list.   I’m quite happy to see what has been done.  Let’s rephrase that.  I’m sometimes astonished at what has been done (an not necessarily in a good way).

The daily prompt asks what is our favourite daily ritual.  I reckon anybody who says anything other than “going to bed” is having a laugh.   Can there possibly be anything more delightful than climbing into bed after a long day of doing stuff (and seeing what has been done)?

I love my bed.   I climb in and lay back and review the day.   If I followed the example of Buddha and thought about what was to be done tomorrow then I’d still be awake when it is time to get up (although regular visitors  may remember this) and that would never do.   The problem is that during my slumbery (I know, it’s not a word yet.   It will be one day) recollections I remember the bad bits rather than the good bits.   I never close my eyes and think “I did a bloody good job there”, it’s more a case of “Oh lordy, why on earth did I say that?”.   It is ridiculous.   It is the mental equivalent of recording a really good film on TV and then fast forwarding through everything except the adverts.

I sometimes read.   Reading relaxes the troubled soul (I bet Mark Twain or someone similar has a great quote along those lines if only I could expend enough energy to go and look in my Oxford book of famous quotations).    I like a book.  I did try reading on my remarkable tablet thingy but it just doesn’t work for me.    With a book I can gradually nod off and let the literature tumble to the floor.    The tablet is certainly robust enough to cope with cascading off the bed but it tends to fall instead onto my chest.  It has this thing whereby it watches your eyes to see if you are looking at it and it senses movement as well.   A very clever idea but what actually happens is I wake up, roll over and the tablet thinks we are ready to go another few chapters so it wakes up as well.   As it has frequently managed to work its way under some part of the bedding (or on one unfortunate occasion the cat) there suddenly appears a ghostly glow and I have to seek it out and turn it off.   It was quite funny when it lit up the cat though.   You haven’t lived until you have seen an illuminated cat anus.

If a book isn’t to hand then a magazine will do.   The Sunday papers come with enough stock to keep me in late evening reading for most of the week.   There’s a problem with this as well though.   I will read part way through an interesting article on something like how Kim Kardashian is liberating children caught up in war torn Syria and doze off.   When I decide to return to the piece later on the magazine has gone.   Honestly, you would imagine that anything lying on my side of the bed was my property until returned to the proper place but it seems that this isn’t the case and half-read papers are fair game to be removed somewhere else.

Never mind though.   I love going to bed.   It is absolutely the best part of day.   Curiously, the second best part of the day is getting up in the morning.   If I could only learn to love the bits in between then I would be a very happy man.

I’ve got those email blues.

My morning routine has not changed for several years.   At 6:4o there is the pad, pad, thud of the cat coming up the stairs (the thud is because she only has three legs and her back end is rather more ungainly than that of the average cat) followed by the duvet being dragged down as she scrambles onto the bed.   She potters towards the pillows and sits gently on my head, indicating that it is time she was fed.

At 6:45 the alarm goes off (followed by the cat as she leaps to safety) and I reach to turn the alarm off and grab my phone to check the news, email and how poorly I am doing in my latest game of scrabble against a colonial cousin.

I’ve a new phone.   I abandoned the apple flavoured one as it was spending more time on the phone charger than off it.   I now have “HTC one (M8)”.   I thought the M8 might be text speak for the phone being the ultimate best buddy but it turns out that it’s just the one after M7.

New phone is showing that I sent several emails around 1:30 last night.   I don’t remember sending any emails at all.  Certainly not at that time of night, after all, it’s a work night and I think I was fast asleep by that time.    Confused, I checked the contents of the sent emails.   They were all different but along the same lines.   An example of a couple, word for word are.

“Well you might say that, but is it a bad thing? Here I’d a choice: I’m ravaged by illness and I shall be spending my life struggling to breath and will need somebody to help me to the toilet for”

and

“The Soviet presence is probably s fake.   When they landed on the moon they didn’t expect the consequences and so they only took”

The curious thing about both of the above examples are the mistakes.   I have been struggling with the predictive text on the keyboard.  I have frequently sent “I’d” instead of “I’ve” and I am constantly typing “s” instead of “a”, so I suspect that I have, in the middle of night, sleep-typed emails to random acquaintances.   Not only have I sent these emails but the contents are of a somewhat dubious nature.

That’s not the most worrying thing though.   I (or the phantom email writer) has also deleted all of the text messages from the phone.   Every single one of them.    I have phone contacts going back years, both business and personal.   There are about 500 mobile phone numbers stored and there’s just a small chance that I may have sent equally random text messages to random people and then deleted them so now I have a dilemma.   Do I send a text to everybody on my phone saying “Sorry if you got a weird message from me last night” or is that going to be seen as even weirder by anybody who didn’t get a text?

I think I shall just keep my head down.   I think I shall probably turn the phone off tonight and leave it locked in a cupboard somewhere, just in case.

The daily prompt today refers to the worst case scenario, I can’t possibly imagine what the comeback from the wraith of the phone will be, but if you did get a message form me last night.   Can you tell me what it said please?

Changes

Have I got you singing?    Inside your head is there a little voice going “ch ch ch ch changes”?.

As a schoolboy I had a friend who believed that every single line of song that David Bowie wrote had a second and deeper meaning.   We played along with him for sometime but eventually he just became too pretentious for his own good so we asked him to provide a detailed assessment of the hidden thoughts behind The Laughing Gnome.  It probably ruined his life.

I am not overly fond of changes.   The daily prompt has changed its format and while I can see it has many benefits and looks a lot sexier it took me a while to find what I was looking for.   To be fair, this is probably a reflection on me rather than the new look as the phrase “Have you never been mellow” was staring out at me in 40 point font size (Arial I think, or something very close to it).

The prompt is wondering how we wind down after a hard day at work or at school (or perhaps both if you are a teacher, it doesn’t mention that).    I think if it was rephrased to ask “how do your friends think you wind down…” then there would be a unanimous shout from around the UK.   In fact, let’s try it.

Hey everyone.   How does Robby wind down?  What does he do to chill out when he’s not at work?

 

Did you hear it?  They all shouted “GIN”.

 

Nothing could be further from the truth of course.    Whilst it is fair to say that I enjoy a very small beaker of Mr Hendrick’s finest occasionally I don’t constantly totter around with a bottle of Tanqueray No. Ten at my lips. No, no, no.   I sometimes have a glass of sherry instead.

Relaxing is one of those things that I occasionally excel at.   If I thought I could get away with it I’d put it on my CV.  “In my spare time I sit around and do nothing” but it’s probably not a wise thing to do, I haven’t updated my CV in years mind, I think on the part where I suggest my salary requirements they are listed in pounds, shillings and pence.

Thinking about it, I don’t actually do nothing.   I’m always doing something even when it looks like I’m ready for embalming.    I may be reading a book or I may be sketching a picture (usually in my head, the pictures that I draw in my head are invariably  better than the ones that come out on paper, although whilst sketching a tree in the park recently a very kind -and possibly blind- old dear asked me if I would mind submitting a drawing to a charity auction).

The one thing that I will always be doing is listening to music.   It fascinates me.   I don’t mean classical music, pop for want of a better word.   Almost any pop at all.    It takes me away, it soothes my soul and mends my broken bits.   Regular readers will know that after an unfortunate encounter with an asparagus fern my music centre ceased to function and for a brief while I was singing with no accompaniment.    This is the one area where change has been good, change has been spectacular in fact.   The purchase of a tablet thingy and a healthy investment in some blue tooth speakers has brought Spotify to my kitchen.  I now have all of the music in the world and it is all on a little device smaller than an A4 piece of paper.

The only slight downfall of having all of the music in the world in the palm of your hand is choosing.   With the CD’s you just look at what you have and think “Yup, I’ll listen to S Club Seven’s greatest hits” or “Today won’t be complete until I hear Barry Manilow singing Mandy”.   Where do you start?

I’ve started with Motown.   I think I shall work geographically around the world but what better place to start than Detroit.   This means that whilst you have been singing ch ch ch changes through my little blog I have been Gladys Knight.  Or more accurately I have been The Pips.  There is surely no better thing in all the world than to sing the backing vocals to “Midnight Train to Georgia”, find a copy of the song, get a copy of the lyrics and just sing the words in brackets.   You’ll sing  “Guess who’s gonna be right by his side” and know that you have the glorious “Whoo whoo” coming up soon and a little bit of you will thank me for giving you such joy.