Being Me

My son has just moved, with his family, to Ham in South-West London.  I have sent them this poem in their 'Happy New Home' card. Our future is in Ham. We're feeling fine. (I'm not, said Mr Pig, 'Cause so is mine.) I'm always jealous when people move house, because I love new starts.  We lived in the same house for 25 years before we moved to the Midlands and, in lieu of moving house, I would change the furniture around on a regular basis instead.  Many of our conversations with our grown-up children begin, 'You know the year we had the piano at the bay window end ...' or 'That was when we used the back bedroom as a music room'. There are disadvantages to doing this, though.  Here are some. 1. You get those deep holes in the carpets where the piano was and they never recover. 2. If you come downstairs in the night, you stub your toe on an unexpected chair leg. 3. There's always one piece of electrical equipment that is no longer...

We've just got back from our holiday in the Cotswolds.  I learned some things on an afternoon out and the advice may be helpful to you should you also attempt such a bus journey. 1. What you think is an ice cream van pulling up at a country bus stop may in fact be your bus.  Keep your reactions to yourself.   2. Before buying your £6 return ticket to a Cotswolds town you'd like to have lunch in and then explore, check that the timings of the bus will enable you to spend more than fifty minutes there. 3. When you find out that in fact you are on a tiny bus to a Cotswolds town in which you will be spending only fifty minutes, make the most of the hour-long journey.  You have paid £6 to view all that green and brown.  And appreciate each sheep you see in a field.  Wheat can get tedious. 4. When you are eating your £1.20 cold cheese scone in the street for lunch while trying to make the most of your fifty minutes in the town, remember that sitting in a ...

Sad news about Robin Williams.   Today I watched an episode of 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' to which he brings chaos and disorder and hilarity like an untrained puppy, refusing to follow the instructions given and appearing behind desks and in front of cameras at unplanned moments. Then I watched some clips of him ad-libbing in 'Good Morning Vietnam'.  How did he do that stuff? His brain was as quick as electricity and I don't know how his mouth kept up. Another clip, from 'The Dead Poets Society' has him, in the role of John Keating, ordering the students to tear out a page of 'excrement' from a book on poetry in which the editor rambles on about how to measure a poem using a graph.  'Rip it out!' he cries, and the boys fall to the task with abandon, apart from one who uses a ruler to make sure he does it in a straight line.  One senses that the poor boy is having trouble taking on these anarchic ideas. All this reminded me of somethin...

Never mind 'What did I come upstairs for?'  This morning, I put styling mousse on my hair twice within three minutes, having forgotten the first application.  It's beginning to dry now, as stiff as rigor mortis with knobs on, and if I got my hairdryer out, I think I could style it any way I wanted and it would stay like that until September.  Maybe like this .... with its obvious advantage ... Fran had found another excellent hiding place for the chocolates her husband didn't know she'd bought Or like this ....  'Will people think I look silly with this dog collar on?' he thought.  'I hate to stand out.' Or this one?.....  Fran walked into her classroom and the kids said, 'Uh oh.  Bad mood day.  Spit your gum out, guys.'  I've used hair mousse to 'big up' my short hair since I was a teenager, always having been self-conscious about the paucity of it.  That means I've used eno...