Life is busy again all of a sudden, and things are afoot, except our broadband connection which is just anarse.

My daughter is running around singing nursery songs in the manner of a 50-year-old lounge singer from Queens. I have no idea where she’s picked up this style but she only needs a feather boa, a gin, and a past littered with disappointment* and broken romance** and she could warble her heart-breaking, lung-bursting, Sue-Ellen-Ewing-lip-quavering way into a record-contract with the Divalicious label. They’d have to lower the microphones in the studio quite a lot. Perhaps get some Milky Buttons and apple-juice in. Some vodka, maybe; it calms her; artists of her stature (3′2″) can be very highly strung.

We’re fish-sitting too. I’ve grown fond of wee Rover this past week. He’s a Japanese Fighting Fish and he recognises the ultimate futility of everything too. I enjoy our chats in the bathroom – he has to be shut in there so the cat can’t eat him – and often sneak off for some rigourous intellectual badinage at odd points during the day. (Although he does argue the world and all its agents are merely penultimately futile and I’ve suggested he might be talking out of his tiny, tiny fish bum. Our last meeting ended with some stinging words, I’m afraid.) Still, he’s cumpnee, any road. The cat’s thick as a brick.

*

Here are some jokes:

A woman brought a very limp duck in to a veterinary surgeon. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest.

After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, “I’m so sorry, your duck has passed away.”

The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead,” he replied.

“How can you be so sure,” she protested. “I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room, and returned a few moments later with a black labrador retriever. As the duck’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table, and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the dog and took it out, and returned a few moments later with a cat. The cat jumped up on the table and also sniffed delicately at the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on it’s haunches, shook its head, meowed softly, and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100 percent certifiably, a dead duck.” Then the vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman. The duck’s owner, still in shock, took the bill.

“$150!”, she cried, “$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!!”

The vet shrugged. “I’m sorry. If you’d taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the lab report and the cat scan, it’s now $150.00.”

*

Two blondes are working on a house. One of them, who?s nailing down siding, has been reaching into her pouch, pulling out a nail, and either tossing it over her shoulder or nailing it in. The second blonde, figuring this was worth looking into, asks, “Hey?how come you?re throwing half the nails over your shoulder?”

The first blonde explains, “If I pull a nail out of my pouch and it?s pointed toward me, I throw it away because it?s defective. If it?s pointed toward the house, then I nail it in.”

“You moron!” the second blonde yells. “The nails pointed toward you aren?t defective. They?re for the other side of the house.”

*

A waiter asks a patron, ?May I take your order, sir??

?Yes,? the man replies. ?I?m just wondering, how exactly do you prepare your chickens??

?Nothing special, sir. We just tell them straight out that they?re going to die.?

*

I thought they were funny and I won’t apologise for them, no I won’t.

* I’m her mother.

** Caeden from the Green Room. He preferred blondes.

Hello, peeps. I have been having some problems with my broadband link and my connections to this here intermaweb have been fickle and few. With any luck, the next few days should see an improvement and, like a blue-balled sailor six loveless months at sea, or a purpley-complected wine-critic after a long communion service in church, I will spurt forth a pressurized backlog of drivel in a poorly-focused, unsatisfactory blob I will be calling a post. You might not agree – but it’s my blahrsted blog, blammit, and post is as post does, I always almost never say. I’ll also be around to pester people forthwith. A week is a long time in blogland. What have I missed?

Charlesina looked over at Derek, loathing him openly as her eyes ran over his face, his neck, and its open pores glistening in the floodlights and the hot, hot heat of that June night. If she strained, she could hear the sickly, treacley trickle of the sweat as it oozed from his glands out onto his hateful, sausagey skin. It sounded like maggots coming stickily out of their eggs but without the David Attenborough narration. She knew that, later that night, the nauseating sound of his sweating flesh would invade her dreams, getting louder and louder until it reached a ciccada-like crescendo she could no longer bear…and she would wake…drenched in sweat… almost panting for air beside him in the bed. She would then have to put up with his irritating ministrations, his caresses and murmurs, and the stupid flip-flop of his unfashionable slippers as he fetched her some water. God, how she detested him!

But it didn’t matter how she felt, did it? Even if he were to look right at her now – now, as every bone in her body ached to hurt him – he wouldn’t notice the millennia-worth of hate that had been stewing in her soul, her very genes – right down to her very ribosomal, messenger and transfer type RNA, for Godsakes! No. He would only see her soft-brown eyes and a spirit so shattered that its peculiar shards and jagged edges, catching the lights just so, as they did, had a tragic beauty all their own – giving the mere illusion of a whole spirit, a whole soul. He had no idea of the damage he’d done to her, and the damage she’d like to do to him.

Down through the ages – the Iron, the Dark, the Later Middle – men like him had always forced her sort into humiliating submission. Worse, he thought she was actually grateful to him for saving her from a life of uncertainty and hunger.

But maybe a small pathetic part of her was grateful. After all, look at her now! Cared for, perfumed, wanting for nothing , and here, now, at his side with diamonds at her throat and a thousand eyes on her; everyone admiring her beauty; remarking on her strong, lithe limbs and her elegant footfall.

Maybe she could put up with it. It had been a long time since she had seen her family or anyone else she loved. Where were they now? Were they even alive? How would she manage on her own? She knew Derek would never stop until he found her.

But these thoughts were just last minute jitters, she reasoned, the same thoughts that had stopped her breaking free before. She shook her head to clear the thought as if her brain was a lumpy, moist Etch-A-Sketch. Now was her moment! Now was her chance! She could almost taste the meat of victory already. She knew she had to leave Derek tonight. Her eye twitched slightly, and then the announcer called their names.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please put your hands together for Mr. Derek Mayberry and Charlesina Grayling Blaze, a full-blood greyhound and last year’s overall winner of the Pedigree Chum Dog Show, Ullapool Chapter. We hope to see them progressing to the regional finals in Inverness tonight as this little lass has plenty of potential. Her main – and indeed only competition – Callie Munroe’s greyhound, Sheena, is out with worms this year.”

The following moment’s events seemed to Charlesina to happen in slow motion. She felt her powerful rear haunches gather and bunch and spring her forward, as her jaws opened wide and she flew through the air towards Derek’s bum. Sinking her teeth into it, she was momentarily reminded of a stringy ham-hock she’d once been given, but then her tongue curled around a sudden spurt of blood. Her jaws snapped tight shut. So this was what human blood was like! No wonder it was taboo! It hit her system like a freight-train. Electricity surged through her body and something newly awoken and primal was coursing through her blood.

She dropped onto all fours, and fixing her eye steadily on the exit door of the arena she ran. She ran as she’d never run before, hearing nothing but the blood pounding in her ears, feeling nothing but raw exhilaration and the wind in her ears. If they hadn’t taken her tail she’d have wagged it so hard she knew she could have flown.

As she neared the door she had to slow down and, all of a sudden, she heard the roar of the crowd come crashing around her ears.

“Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” she begged herself. “You’re too close now!”

But something had happened in her brain and she knew she’d lost hold of the moment – the ancient call of the wild was slipping through her mind like an old, writhing eel that she just couldn’t keep a hold of with her modern instincts. She knew if she left Derek she would never again get what the wild hills of Scotland, for all their freedoms and rabbit-chasing, just couldn’t give her. A tummy rub. God, could she live without a twice-daily tummy rub?

Turning, she saw Derek, crumpled on the ground, clutching his bum and gazing right at her with a new light in his eyes – a light of dawning recognition. At last he could see her! The whole her, the noble animal and companion she really was – not just a pretty plaything to get him out and about and meeting young ladies again (as his mother had advised, after the time in prison for drowning Miranda), but a fellow sentient being, a fellow traveller on the journey.

She ran to him. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes and gently fondled her ears, wincing with the pain in his bottom as he did so.

“I’m sorry, girl,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

I’ve been tagged to do some memes, most recently by by Eryl and Foots. I’ve done memes before here and there so I don’t do them often, but I’ve been off-blog for a while so I thought I’d get back into the way of it by responding, albeit tardily, to their tags.

So then, 7 autobiographical things and an aspiration.

1. When I was pregnant with the twins I craved liquorice, my granny’s mince and potatoes and Heinz Cream of Tomato soup. When my children were born they were black, brown, white and orange. I don’t think this is a coincidence although around the time of conception I did have several lovers: a black man, a brown man, a white man and an LA weatherman.
2. I favour blue toothbrushes but, when I’m travelling and have forgotten my own, I will use an aqua-marine one in a pinch. Flexibility is not a gift everyone has, so I’m lucky to have been blessed that way.
3. I don’t know where I stand on the whole, heated pyjamas vs. nightie debate. I eschew electric blankets though. I eschew them right off the bed, through the doorway, down the stairs and back in the box from the catalogue.
4. I talk too much.
5. I talk too little.
6. WWII national stereotypes were slow to disappear in the Lewis of my youth. As a small girl, I thought that the way that germs killed you was by standing inside your tummy or crouching behind your liver shooting at your heart. I imagined whole battalions of tiny German soldiers blasting cannons and stuff in the bellies of the ill and the thought terrified me. When I was sick in bed sometimes, I would see their ineluctable forces scaling my ribs to bayonet my heart and finish me off for good. This sprung directly from my mother telling me to wash my hands before eating in case of Germans. I was also told the Japanese were inscrutable but that intimated we were therefore scrutable, which sounded a whole lot worse to me somehow.
7. I think that it is appropriate that children are scared sometimes and not coddled too much. Stuff is scary – the more times you can get a reassuring hug from your mammy about it the better. To this end I have decorated the girls’ bedroom with a really realistic cemetery-of-the-damned-at-night theme, and I regularly dangle them by one leg from second storey windows. At night I prowl the hall outside their room wailing like an anguished soul and rattling chains. Often I’ll fling the severed heads of dear wee puppies at them yelling “Catch!” But then afterwards I always make sure to comfort them/mop up their hysterical tears/inject sedatives as only a mother can. Several people have accused me of suffering from Poxy Munchkin’s Disease but then, everyone’s an expert, these days, aren’t they. There are far too many faddish parental styles, in my view. They only divide us, as adults, which is what the children want, see. Make no mistake about it, parenting is a looming battle to be fought and won and, believe me, children have no scruples on the battle-field. They already have us over a barrel with their impossible cuteness and millennia of triggering the Nurture reflex in us, damn them! But seriously, our role is to prepare them for life – to be the first objects of their fledgling attempts at dissembling and deceit, to mould their inchoate fears into proper grown-up suspicion and paranoia and the many, many isms, so that they may grow to be successful adults.
8. Eryl’s meme required an ambition, goal or aspiration. My ambitions oscillate like a donkey’s doodas but I do have some very firm aspirations: “k” “p” “t” “sh”, “th”.