Being Me

A friend saw the photograph of me I have on my blog (see the sidebar) and said, 'You look as though you have a neck problem.' And there was I, trying to look engaging and light-hearted. 'The blue tee-shirt looks nice, though,' he added, to compensate for suggesting I looked as though I had cervical spondylosis. I'm proud of knowing terms such as cervical spondylosis. It's all down to having trained as a medical secretary when I was eighteen. We had to learn medical terms with all the Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes so that we knew the difference between hypothermia and hyperthermia and didn't condemn someone to an early grave by getting it wrong on the doctor's letter. When I first trained in the late 1970s, we didn't even have audio typing, let alone computers.  I went into the doctor's office and took the letters down in shorthand on a spiral notepad before decoding my scribbles and typing them up. Fran kept her fingers on the

We've weevils. I'm only writing this blog post because I wanted to write that first sentence. Now I have to think of how to carry on and write an interesting post about the weevils who are weaving their evil weevily way through our flour and cereals and sugar. Firstly, then, while I'm thinking, here's a picture of a flour weevil. I've had to get it off Google because when I asked our weevils to pose for a photo, they went all coy on me and said if they'd wanted to become famous they'd have auditioned for X Factor, thank you very much. Fran the judge said 'It's a no from me.' Fortunately, that picture is not life-size. If it were, we might have spotted Weevil Number 1 when it first arrived in our house, most likely in a bag of flour from the supermarket, to start its colonisation of our kitchen. I know my eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I think I'd have noticed it lurking in my fruit scone mixture, doing a very poor impr

According to the Chinese Zodiac, 2015 is the Year of the Sheep, but I beg to differ. For me, it will be the Year of the Scarf. I have suffered a bare, cold neck for 52 years, thinking scarves didn't suit me, and endured an 'on-off-on-off-on-off' relationship with my husband husband's attitude to the central heating all that time, too. Those of you who live with someone who has a different temperature gauge to your own will know EXACTLY what I mean by that. Something has to change. And as my husband makes a mean rice pudding and pulls the sofa out when he vacuums the house, I think I'll try scarves rather than divorce. I wrote about scarves in February this year - I was clearly warming up to my dramatic conversion - and I gave you a link to a wet-your-pants-comedy   deadly-serious and illuminating video which demonstrates 25 different ways to wear a scarf. Here's a link back to that post.  February's anxieties about scarf-wearing So, I went shopping for