Strange effect of fatherhood?

There's a chap where I work whose mobile phone has the theme from 'Red Dwarf' as the ring tone. Now this should really piss me off. I should be outraged. I should be planning all sorts of nasty things. But I'm not. I may hear it two or three times a day, but I sort of like it. It's quite cheery.

What's happening to me? Is parenthood turning my brain to soft cheese?^*

My brain, yesterday.

* When I feel like this I find reading The Sun and Fox News never fails to raise a reassuring level of bile to my gullet and gets me seething once more about the idiots I have to share this (rather too small) planet with.

A year ago today...

This day a year ago Antonia gave me a most tricky task. Her favourite long black swishy coat had developed a hole in the pocket and some loose change had fallen through. There were two or three coins trapped in the lining and yours truly, as Man of The House had a duty to retrieve said coins. I had just navigated one of the coins through endless miles of lining and was aligning it with the hole, when Antonia shoved something right under my nose. I am a little long-sighted and can not focus on very close things and I was on the verge of extracting one of the errant coins; I was not best amused. I tried to hold the coat with coin in place in one hand and move the thing under my nose to a little further away with the other. I saw a white stick. With two little parallel blue lines on it. I realised at once what it was and was immediately struck by the thought that Antonia has just wee'd on it and shoved it almost into my face. This was followed by wondering if two lines meant what I thought it meant. This was quickly followed by realising I had let go of the coin which was now back at the bottom of the coat lining. Poop.

So a year has passed. I have a new name, a new job and a new, small, squeaking-gurgling-pooping thing called Esme (pronounced with a 'Mee', rather than a 'May', if you were wondering). And despite previously being the most anti-baby/anti-child person I knew, I am loving every single second of fatherhood. There is some saying or other about childhood/school days being the best years of your life, from my very rare peeps into Friends Reunited, it is obviously true for some, but I can honestly say that, since being about 21 (not a great year), last year has always been the best year of my life, and now, with Esme's arrival, it's just got even better!

Like Father, Like daughter.

Those coins are still somewhere in the lining of that long black swishy coat.

Beware the Hoover of Doom, my Cat.

Derek, our rather lovely, stately and rotund old lady cat is scared of little. When things go bump in the night and Clive ('tother cat) hides under the bed, Derek will, most often, go and investigate. When foxes put their heads through the cat flap and send Clive into a desperate tizzy, Derek will go and punch them in the nose. Not much ruffles her feathers. Not much, that is, except The Hoover Of Doom. I don't know what terrible things happened to Derek in her life before us (she was eleven when we got her) but she certainly doesn't like vacuum cleaners. Normally the first sound of one and she's off, hiding in the garden or special secret places.

This is how our vacuum cleaner appears in Derek's poor little warped brain.

So, when I started vacuuming yesterday, I wasn't surprised when Derek quickly vanished. But... When I got to the bedroom I discovered she wasn't hiding at all! No, she'd put all fear of a certain, slow, painful and lingering death to one side, and was guarding over no.1 child, Esme, in a 'Any demoniacally possessed electrical appliances that want to eat this baby are going to have to come through me first' kind of way. Now, how sweet is that? I love our cat, me. (and our baby, of course).

No one (or thing) is going to eat this baby!

Any martial artists out there will immediately recognise how Derek has assumed the 'Crouching Slug' stance, where no limbs are visible from any angle. This is the most feared and respected of the Won-Ton fighting styles.

Those crazy naked Germans...

...and their super-groovy model railways. The latest sets of model people help to provide a rather 'European' realism for your train set.
The story is here, and more photos are here .*
I especially like the heavily armed police and deeply suspicious looking foreigners.

Antonia is a very impressed as she was planning something very similar for the garden railway train set I accidently** bought last year (which is a whole other story...).

*Shamelessy lifted from TheRegister who shamelessy lifted from SpiegelOnline
**I will explain this once I've worked it out myself.

The good old BBC....

Is carrying this picture:















With the caption:
'Driving conditions are less than ideal in some of the worst-hit areas.'

Hoorah! for the BBC. We British may not be able to confront rude morons very well, but we are quite good at understatement.

More pictures of the snow in New York State here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6348947.stm

Mrs Daily-Mail buys her morning coffee

In the lobby of the building where I work there is a little coffee and snack stall. It is usually run by a chap, but sometimes, like today, by an always polite but not overly confident Asian lady.

I ordered a small black coffee shortly after a middle-aged, well-dressed woman ordered a large latte. Despite the large latte being started first, not surprisingly my small black coffee had finished first, so the woman serving started to hand it to me. The following exchange then ensued:

'I think I ordered my coffee first.'

'Yes....'

'Excuse me, but I was first.'

'Yes, but...'

'Why are you serving them out of order?'

'I was...'

'In this country we have a long tradition of queuing and doing things in order, it's the way we do things here.'

'I...'

'I don't want to be waiting around while people who came after me get
served first... The usual man never serves people out of turn.'

By this time the latte had finished making itself and was given to the woman. By now it should have been pretty obvious that the only reason my coffee was given to me first was that it was finished first.

You might have thought the silly woman would apologise or at least shut up. The the server was obviously a more than little upset by the misunderstanding, but no...

'I don't want to make you feel bad. But these things are important...'

Then as she pushed two pound coins a crossed the counter,
'Now you have to give me twenty pence'.

Sadly I just stood there, I tried to bring words to mouth a couple of times, but couldn't think of anything. Afterwards I realised that a stern 'Shut up, you stupid, patronising cow.' was probably the most appropriate (well, actually, getting her in a half nelson, making her apologise and then shoving her coffee up her arse was the most appropriate (but sadly illegal) action), but I came over all British and did nothing except to try to apologise for the twat after she left. Bah!

Anyway that's quite enough moaning from me. I promise my next post will be one both joyous and uplifting.

Folk Music

Tonight is Wednesday night which is folk night on the wireless (we only have one radio station here at Cornwell Towers). Tonight is their annual awards night, and listening to it has brought home to me just how much I hate Folk Music. Now I have very broad music taste. I like all sorts of music but Traditional British Folk (or Fulk as one old friend insists on pronouncing it) music stands out as the most offensive of all. Worse even than squeaky opera.
The awful warbling racket accompanied by squeeze boxes, fiddles, mandolins and the like is really quite unbearable. Now, many, many years ago when I was a student I would sometimes to go to folk night at the Ye Olde Ackhorne Inn, in York, and that didn't seem so bad, but I was young and would experiment with anything (something to do with grass, beer and girls, I expect). During my Rock And Roll Years, when I was a free range sound engineer for hire I worked with a lot of folk music. Indeed I regularly worked for one of the most highly regarded (and smallest) folk venues in the country, and worked with some of the country's finest folk musicians, and I didn't mind that to much, though some of the evenings did seem to drag on forever. I found when you're working every day with live music you enjoy working with good musicians, in good venues with good audiences even if the music itself isn't your cup of tea.

I don't actually mind some of the more contemporary stuff (A little Ralph McTell never hurt anyone, but I do mean a little), but the traditional foll-de-doll, finger in the ear, cat-a-wailing about bad harvests, shire horses, lost loves, dying of plagues and taking pigs to markets. Euuurrrrghhh! just the thought of it makes me go all a bit funny. All those badly home knitted jumpers, warm flat cider, overly sensible shoes and straggly beards. I know that an awful lot of the music I like has its roots in folk, but that's only because things tend to evolve and folk came first. There is a reason why all the later styles came about: to replace folk music.

Nowadays we have Fender Stratocasters, Roland 303s, drum kits and Stylophones. Is time to put down the hurdy-gurdy, remove fingers from ears and let Folk Music go. It's like a 17 year old, farting, arthritic, deaf and blind Labrador with bad breath and bed sores. It's has a good innings, but it's time to move on. If you have to live in the past, then please, do it without singing.

Don't let Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon and Marc Bolan (or even Kurt Cobain) die in vain; they died so you wouldn't have to listen to whining ballads about a less than bountiful barley crop in 1452.

There. I feel much better now that's off my chest.

My Baby Got No Teeth, So My Baby Done Got The Blues.