Reasons why one should really make the kids take all their toys with them when they leave home

This is Rat, who has just embarked on a new career as a Travel Writer.  If you'd like to read Rat's early history before you read his first travel article (and it may be wise ....) it's here at http://ilurveenglish.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-unduck-like-looking-ducks-might.html

Here's Rat's first article, written especially for this blog.  In fact, I think he's my first guest blogger.  Don't say I don't ask the top guys.

SHORT BREAKS FOR RATS (and advice about who to avoid ...)


by Rat


I never intended to go to London for a short break via someone's coat sleeve.  Yeah, I know.  Most people travel via car or bus or train.  But coat sleeve travel is good, folks.  I recommend it.  Warm.  Cosy.  Nice and dark to snuggle down into if you get bored of watching all the green and brown and green and brown and green and brown rushing past and pretending you're loving nature but really you're bored out of your tiny mind with it, and just want a nap.

But how do you board a coat sleeve, I hear you ask?  Do you have to buy a ticket?  Which platform do you stand on?  Can you get a monthly season pass for regular coat sleeve trips?  Can you take a dog?

Well, I boarded mine while at Fran's house.  You see, Fran and I go back a long way.  She's been a great influence on me, which you may notice in a certain similarity between our writing styles - and our attitudes to nature.

I usually do live at Fran's house.  Been there a while, ever since I was bought.  She and her husband play this silly game called 'Hide the Rat in Surprising Places' - it's a kind of throwback from the days their kids were home and, yes, it's as sad as hell, but not as sad as listening to Classic FM together.

Well, Eldest Daughter came to stay for a weekend, and the Hide the Rat thing got a little out of control.  Sock drawer, knicker drawer, in a shoe, in a boot, in the cutlery drawer, down the side of a cupboard, in a very tall, thin vase (that was a tricky exit) ... it was a busy weekend.

On the Monday morning ED was leaving, Fran decided to stuff me up her coat sleeve while it was hanging on the coat rack, thinking that she'd find me when she put her arm in the sleeve to drive home.

And that's how I got to London.  Yep.  It was a warm day.  No need for coat.  Coat got slung in the back of ED's car.  In I went with it.

I was kind of okay with this.  You see, life with Fran and the Husband gets sort of tedious.  Neither of them have a great imagination, and if I had to spend one more night in a drawer full of socks or at the back of the fridge or stuffed into the top of a cereal packet, I'd eat my own tail with boredom.  And I say one night, but sometimes it was three or four if it was warm (no socks), they ate out (not much fridge) or they were into a yogurt and toast phase (no cereals).

So I ended up in ED's flat in London.

And guess what?

She has pets that look like me.


This is a degu.  Eldest Daughter has two.  You want to see the other one?  Oh, alright then.  Here it is.  But it looks no different.



Told you.

So, not only did I have a short break in London, but I learned a new language, Deguspeak.  Don't believe me?

;akjd;lakj;ldfj;lajdfkhgha;ldhghg;akhgaqpoier;anv';aldvn;adha;nvadjanljda;lijgoea;goi;gjadhg;ajdgh

This means, 'Yeah, maybe you are prettier, and maybe you are REAL, and maybe your teeth aren't quite so extreme as mine, but did no one teach you how to be polite to guests?'

You got it.  My short break in London with the degu pair was okay, but things got a bit tense.  I said to them that at least I didn't have to live in a cage.  They said they'd rather a cage than a sock drawer.  I said sock drawers were great (yeah, so I lied).  They said at least they were real pets and weren't stuffed with cotton wool and could run about, and I said, well, you'll never get the chance to get driven down the M40 in a  coat sleeve.  They didn't know what to say to that (maybe their Deguspeak wasn't brilliant either) so yah boo, Degu.  Degus.  Degues?  Deguoos?  Oh, shoot.  Plurals never were my big thing at rat school.

So what's with being stuck in the side of a bicycle pannier bag like in the picture, you're asking?  Or maybe you're not, but you're getting it anyway.

Well, after I'd been in London a few weeks, and to be honest, was hankering for a night in a fridge, leftover cauliflower cheese or no leftover cauliflower cheese, the Husband came for a short stay, and he and ED decided it was time I came home.  Husband had brought his bike with him on the train, so that's how I got to be peeking out of the pannier like that as we travelled back.  Yep, it meant looking at all the green and brown, green and brown, green and brown, green and brown, on the way home, but, hey, anything's better than a couple of stuck-up degu (you do the plural thing in your head, I'm knackered) telling me they live a charmed life and at least they never got put in a light fitting and burned.

Now you really will have to read my history, as Fran suggested, if you want to know about the light fitting incident.

Fran here  -  hope you enjoyed Rat's first travel article.  Watch out for his next piece, which should appear fairly soon and will be entitled something exciting like 'Travelling Between the Pillowcase and The DVD Drawer'.  Who needs Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson, peoples?

Evidence that a little bit of updating does nobody any harm

Some old novels need bringing up to date, methinks.

Ta-DAH!  I bring you ....  Techno-lit!

Cyber with Rosie ... in which a Gloucestershire lad in very baggy trousers strolls through a field with a young girl with plaits and a gingham dress.  The sun is out.  They can hear cows.  They discuss life at the village school, the cooking smells in his mother's kitchen, and his new Apple iMac with its 27-inch LED backlit display and widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.  They kiss.

Orange is Not the Only Fruit - A well-known mobile phone company brings out a new range of apple and banana shaped handsets which they market primarily in a depressing Northern town.  A repressed teenager with rhetorical skills honed in the Pentecostal church abandons her ambitions to go to Oxford, leaves home under a cloud, and joins the phone company as their main Northern rep.  There is a touching reconciliation with her mother after she contributes an idea for an organ music ringtone which proves surprisingly popular.

Three Men Boot Up - a trio of comic Englishman decide that as they have nothing else to do that is worthwhile, they will have a series of trivial adventures by agreeing to turn on their computers at the same pre-arranged time every day.  There are hiccups along the way, mainly because one or other of them gets involved in another activity totally unrelated to the plan and goes on about it for a hell of a long time, and sometimes a large dog with a stupid name demands attention.

Evidence that the words 'fashion' and 'sense' don't always go together so well

RSI or no RSI, I have to speak out.

I saw someone wearing a pair of these today in my local High Street ...

and I'm very sorry if it's high fashion and all that, but  ....

surely nobody who's been a mother and dealt with kids in nappies (diapers if you must ...) can see this and think anything other than what I was thinking -

Lie down on this plastic mat, dear, and we'll have you sorted in no time.

Reasons why you should try never to get repetitive repetitive repetitive repetitive strain injury

Hey, you guys.
RSI's
Gripped my arm
An' done me harm.

Too much typing
Loads of tripe in
Has caused twinges
Hence these whinges.

So, my pals -
Guys and gals.
Post I may
But much more? Nay.

For the moment
I can't coment (?)
On your own blog -
I must lone blog.

I 'pologise.

This RSI's

Come right between us.

Oh, what meanness!

If it mends
Then, sure, my friends
I'll recommence
All my COMments.

(Hope the capitalisation helped in the last line with covering up a blatant lowering of standards where rhythm and stress are concerned.)

Evidence that giving blood could leave you with little energy for entering your own competitions

I had a text earlier.  It said, THANK YOU SO MUCH, FRAN, FOR GIVING BLOOD TODAY. YOUR HELP WAS MUCH APPRECIATED.

I smiled.  I felt really virtuous, glad that I'd been able to help, happy that my sacrifice would perhaps save the life of someone else, pleased that because of me, because of my willingness to lie there and have a pint of life-giving fluid taken, because of my philanthropic ideals and my desire to help my fellow man, I could rest easy, knowing that I'd done my bit.

Then I thought ...





Hang on.  WHEN DID I GIVE BLOOD?


As far as I know, I haven't given blood today, nor have I ever.




Or ... do they know something I don't?



Have I been visited?  Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh!

Having not given blood, and therefore having plenty of energy, I feel the need to run a caption competition to accompany this picture.  There are no prizes.  Not only are there no prizes, but I am going to enter my own competition lots of times.  Here are my entries.  

1. Honestly, darling.  I told you that biting into that raw beetroot was going to end in tears.

2. Dad, I've told you again and again.  Don't turn up to fetch me from school after you've been to have your teeth sharpened.  You're SO embarrassing.

3. Look, it's no good, old boy.  I know you want a career as an opera singer - in fact, you can belt out a tune, there's no doubt - but we just don't think your facial appearance is very ... well ... to put it kindly, flexible enough.

4. I says to 'im, Jim, I says, if you make that face when the wind's blowin', you'll stay like that.  An' would 'e listen?  Would 'e listen?  Would 'e 'eck as like.

5. Percy was finding that, although he enjoyed dressing up in fine clothing at the weekends, the make-up he was using contained allergens to which he was not reacting well.  

6. You too can discover the advantages of starching your collars so stiffly that it pushes your face into impossible contortions.

7. Sweetheart, are you sure you checked out that Botox clinic before you had the treatment?

8. Martin had put his profile picture on 'Find your Match.com' and was awaiting replies.  Unfortunately, he had been a-waiting now for twenty-three years.

9. Sharon's new date seemed to find her jokes extremely funny.  She only wished he did not need to be attached to her neck to appreciate them.

10. School report: 'Dracula has behaved extremely well this year and excels in Carpentry, although his choice of project (large rectangular boxes with lids) has perhaps proved unchallenging considering his abilities. 

Evidence that you should make sure you have the right animal in your title before being published

Beoslug – A breathtakingly exciting Anglo-Saxon tale in which a creature slithers from the earth, after undergoing some 'be an instant literary hero' training, and silently creeps up on a green monster, who then slips on Beoslug and brains himself on the edge of a table made from real oak, measuring forty feet by eighty feet and holding thirteen pigs with apples in their mouths and some tankards made from Celts' teeth and thigh bones.  Beoslug is rewarded for his endeavours by firstly being scraped up by a buxom maiden (although he is not in a state to notice this) and then being immortalised in a long, long poem in a form of English no one can understand but which doesn't stop everyone from swearing blind they've read the whole thing from start to finish.

Lord of the Wasps – a group of boys land on a desert island and immediately begin to hate each other.  One of the reasons for this is that some of the littluns swear they’ve seen a man in a yellow and black striped jumper fall from the sky and land in a tree.  They go and look.  When they don’t come back from their explorations, there’s a buzz of excitement, and in the chaos, someone who thinks he knows what the yellow and black thing is runs down the hill to tell everyone but is beaten to death with a pair of glasses.  In the end, they are all stung by the giant wasp, just before the ship arrives to rescue them all, so when the man in the white uniform arrives on the beach and says, ‘Boys will be boys’, he is talking only to himself and the wasp, who turns out to be less interested in polite conversation than in stinging to death a patronising geezer who went to Eton.

The Duck Of the Baskervilles – a horrific tale in which a duck haunts the moors of Devon, terrorising the neighbourhood with its beak of dripping flame and tendency to make a lot of noise at night.  A man dies of shock after seeing the Baskerville Duck, as well he might.  Beside the body is found one solitary webbed footprint (and then another one close by – ducks aren’t brilliant at balancing on one leg just so’s a writer can get a more chilling effect).  The Baskerville Duck is slain by Mr Sherlock Holmes and is now the name of a popular dish in a local Devonian gastropub.  It comes served with a tiny pile of rice formed in an eggcup and a raspberry jus.  Then, when you've finished, still hungry, you get the bill.

Things I learned about why you should just ask a neighbour for help in the first place

1. When a smoke alarm's battery has gone, and it starts to beep loudly at intervals of 23 seconds, while you are nicely settled in front of the TV, there is no point hoping that it will stop.  It will not.  This is the point.  You are supposed to change the battery immediately because, if you don't, it will be that night that an inferno begins in your wardrobe.  (Don't ask ME why.  But it MIGHT.)

2.  A sans-battery smoke alarm beeps surprisingly loudly, considering.

3. Common sense tells you that the beeps can't possibly be getting louder and louder and louder and louder and louder, so there's really no point getting irritated.  But stuff common sense.

4. A smoke alarm's favourite time to run out of battery is precisely one hour after the person who is tall and brave enough to reach it has left the house for a Northern city.

5. There is no point wishing that smoke alarms were positioned conveniently half-way up a wall so that you could change its battery more easily.  This may suit you, if you're short, but being short is not an inconvenience compared to being a pile of ash, which is not very tall either.

6. Taking instructions from the tall and brave one about where the batteries are, how to use the ladder, and how to change the smoke alarm's battery, is not easy over a dodgy mobile phone connection when the tall and brave one is standing on a railway station and the man on the tannoy announcing the imminent arrival of the 3.49 to Manchester appears to be intimately involved in your phone call.

7. Retrieving a ladder from a downstairs cupboard, carrying it through the house and up the stairs, when the ladder is two feet taller than you are, burns off 13,092 calories and requires a stronger anti-perspirant than the one you're using.

8. The sticker saying, 'The safety lock must be engaged before you climb the ladder' probably means that it's best to find out how to engage the safety lock.  THIS is when you go for the neighbour, not at point 13.

9.  A career as a writer will end very quickly if you climb a ladder a) without finding out how to engage the safety lock; b) with your fingers in a position where they will be cut off by a sharp edge if the ladder collapses.

10. On a collapsing ladder with your fingers trapped is not nearly as nice a place to be as Tenby beach.

11. It is at the point at which your fingers are about to be separated from the rest of your body that you need to find a way to stop this happening.  This is because typing with your ears is not easy.  The book signings are also going to be awkward.  And if your writing career tends to rest on pointing at people and laughing, you are going to have to switch genre.

12. The moments immediately after you rescue your fingers and jump off a ladder are good moments.  Tenby beach doesn't even come near.  And, suddenly, you don't notice the beeps.

13. Feeling your own heart, trying to escape from its cavity, is a bit like having a private Oasis concert going on in your chest.

14. It's best to wait for your breathing and heart rate to settle before landing on the neighbour's doorstep to ask for help.  He may be confused by your sudden deterioration in communication skills, when you were perfectly lucid over the Christmas mince pies just a few months ago.

15. If you have writer's bottom, let the neighbour go up the stairs first.

16. The fact that a neighbour can set up a ladder, climb up it, take out an old battery and change it for a new one in precisely thirteen seconds without collapsing the ladder, losing his fingers or having to jump off the ladder from a height in an emergency should not be a matter for shame, but strangely, it is.

17. If you have a strange kink in your hair at the back, let the neighbour go down the stairs first.

18. The realisation that you still have fingers may make you want to hold something, just to prove that you still can.  A wine glass, in this situation, is the ideal shape.

Reasons to get a good dictionary if you want to set the literary world on fire

Welcome to the world of homophone literature.  A homophone is a word which sounds the same as another word but which is spelled differently, like 'bear' and 'bare'. 


So, homophone literature is what could have happened had some famous authors (or their editors) had spelling problems.  We might have had ...

Grate Expectations … in which a young, orphaned boy visits an old lady still dressed in her wedding clothes who makes him clean out her fireplace and, because he doesn’t do it properly, forces him to re-do it many times until he gets it perfect.  The novel ends with him hand in hand with a young lady called Estella, although she is hesitant because of his blackened fingernails and grimy palms, forcing a somewhat ambiguous ending.

Around the World in Eighty Daze … in which an octogenarian, confused and reeling from the fact that he has reached such an advanced age, embarks on a world tour, spurred on by a wager from his gentleman’s club.  He does complete the journey, but being in such a vacant and puzzled state, notices hardly anything and comes back with his wrinkles tanned but little else of interest.

Mole Flanders … in which a flighty young nocturnal mammal packs into her small life twelve years as a whore, five husbands (one her own brother) and twelve years as a petty thief.  She draws attention to herself because of this, not least because she can’t see a thing and has therefore done well.  She is eventually sentenced to transportation to Virginia where she picks up an unusual accent for a mole and dies repentant, albeit confused, and with a reputation for sleeping in the daytime.

Scents and Sensibility – in which two young ladies, both wearing dresses hard to sit down in, are shown to be of opposite character, one being obsessed with different smells, and the other being a serious type, although capable of hidden passions.  Trouble begins when the aromaholic meets a man of dubious character who promises her a whole perfumery of her own if she runs away with him, even though there is a perfectly decent old codger willing to have her who knows that the perfumery thing is just a way to get her pregnant.  The old codger gets her eventually, although he does find the continual sniffing noises unbearable.

The Picture of Dorian: Grey – in which a handsome young Victorian gets his portrait painted – a colourful, vibrant picture of himself which he values highly and puts up on his wall.  He decides to hire a painter to decorate the room’s walls in White with a Hint of Gentle Dove so that the painting is shown off to best effect.  However, what he doesn’t realise is that the painter currently suffers from a weeping eye condition.  Thus, while painting the walls, he doesn’t notice the picture and paints straight over it.  Dorian is horrified, when he sees this, but it is all made much worse when he catches sight of himself in a mirror and notes that he now looks like John Major.  

Evidence that I too can write about Nature.

Living the wild life in Tenby


Wild life in Tenby


Wildlife in Tenby

Many of you fellow bloggers compose beautiful posts about trees or your cats or your horses or the plants in your garden, all of which enrich the souls of your readers.  You include photos, vibrant-coloured and demonstrating the startling beauty of the natural world.  You are true nature-lovers, and plebs like me, who think a long walk is going to the corner shop for a can of Pepsi, and who prefer libraries to lilacs and fish and chips to floral gardens, cannot hope to compete.

But I can at least try.  I'd hate you to think I had no appreciation of nature at all.


So here is an account of an encounter with the fascinating and uplifting world of nature which I had in Tenby.










THE DEAD MICE

The dead mice in the picture above are not actually the ones we saw in Tenby, but are a special type of mice called 'Miceus Googlus Imagus'.  They are, I have to be frank, very untidily arranged.

Unlike them, the dead mice we saw in Tenby were lined up, first one head up, second one tail up, third one head up, etc, economically, like boots in a shoebox, or like sardines in a tin only not in tomato sauce.

Regular readers will be relieved to know that we did not see these dead mice in the Tenby icecream shop, Tenby Library, or on a Tenby bus, but in a Tenby Reptile House we visited (oh yes, oh yes, we know how to party).

Here is a picture of some sardines in a tin, just to illustrate what I mean about the tidiness of the dead mice we saw.  Look at the picture, and try your hardest to think mice.

Yes, I know it's difficult, but you're just not trying hard enough.

Look again.

That's better.  (Honestly.  Some people.)


Now, it's one thing to KNOW that reptiles are fed with dead mice.  It's another thing to see them arranged in rows on the top of the reptile's cage, conveniently at hand, as though they were just nice little pink cupcakes or peanut butter sandwiches cut into triangles.  It gave me a big shock, and took a hell of a lot of rum and raisin icecream to get over.

Dead mice as food, even tidied up, is one of those things you are aware of, but would prefer were kept quiet.


Other things I would prefer were kept quiet ....... (in case you don't recognise it, this is called a digression)

1. The 'basil between your teeth' thing when someone says at a social function, 'Do you realise that, for three hours now, you have had a bit of basil stuck in between your front teeth?'  It's not that I don't WANT to be told about the basil, but three hours after the meal, when I've been cracking (what I think are) my best jokes all evening, is not the time to find out.

2. The 'dessert on your shirt' thing  I once taught an after-lunch English lesson for an hour and ten minutes and it was only at the end of the lesson that the kids pointed out that, just below the first button of my white shirt, there was a giant blob of blackberry crumble and custard, stuck to my chest.  When I say 'was' I mean 'was' in the 'had been for the whole lesson' kind of 'was'.  No wonder they'd found my explanation of iambic pentameter so amusing.

3. Opera singers.  


4. Snoring train passengers.  


5. Babies who gulp loudly like this - 'n-guh n-guh n-guh' - while breastfeeding in quiet Italian restaurants.  (Sorry, sorry, sorry, breastfeeding mums, but ravioli in cream sauce just doesn't seem the same in such circumstances.)








Anyway, back to the mice.  I did wonder whether there was a seamless link I could make between the n-guh babies and the dead mice, but I'd better not.

Here is the picture of the mice again, just to get you back on track.

Hah!  That was a test!  If you saw mice, give yourself a round of applause.  If you saw sardines, give yourself a slap.  If you saw flying saucers/pink elephants/your dead auntie, give yourself another pill.


I've been to Reptile Houses many times before ('My name is Fran and I'm an iguanaholic ...') but I've never seen their mousey dinners laid out quite so explicitly before without so much as a warning sign.

And I think it just goes to show how much our world is changing.  I suppose, just as it's now acceptable for Britney Spears to appear on prime-time TV dressed in a belt, two earrings and some eyeliner, and just as it's now acceptable to sell a computer game to a child with more blood in it than a donor bank, dead mice in a neat row on the top of a boa constrictor's cage which give a middle-aged Englishwoman palpitations is fine.

Maybe it's just that modern reptiles are really demanding.  Just as the modern teenager wants microwave French Fries within minus 0.3 seconds, the modern iguana wants his McMice or KFM as soon as he's hungry.

Here's that picture again, just in case you haven't quite got the hang of it yet.

Ha ha!  Got you!