The eldest daughter (Lulu) is twelve today. So happy birthday to her. She’s brightened up my life in buckets and I don’t know what we’d do without her. 
Clever, beautiful, talented. What more could a parent ask… well ok it would be nice if she was rush as well but that might come in time, tho if she is just happy… what more could anyone ask.
Looking forward with trepidation to the teenage years… but with some luck we’ll work thru ok.
Here’s a picture of me and my big sis… when we were neither of us higher than a grasshoppers knee!
Gawd…. sad… innit??
Anyone who’d like a copy… or the original negative should contact “Happy Snaps”, 4 doors from the GPO, Fleet Street, Torquay. Wow… a half century ago they had to send the film all the way down there to be processed?? It’s all digital now. Not the same somehow
Here’s a little gem from 6 years ago… the youngest celebrating her second birthday in her high chair!
You might ask why she is giving the cake such an old fashioned look? Maybe she was pre-warned of my skills as a pâtissier? She’s not changed much… except maybe her hair is a little longer.
I was thinking, I really ought to load the Gallery in so I can upload a bucket load of these?? After all, the option is there so why not take advantage of it?
Who is this handsome dashing debonair devil-may-care young gadabout proudly displaying his hirsute upper lip? Moi? Well of course!! And can that really be ‘dogsbody’ on the other side of the seat?? Well I can see why I fancied her… but what the hell did she see in me? And why was Auntie Muriel sitting between us??
Hang on now… are those *muscles* I see on my forearm?? That can’t be right surely??
Just been watching some classic Captain Pugwash also sent over by the old man. This is the DVD the Sunday Times gave away free on 20th January 2008 and included the entire series of 30 ‘shorts produced during the 1970′s.
Magic stuff!!
The old man has been sending over stuff he’s found in my dear departed Aunt’s papers. Amongst the nuggets was a postcard we’d sent her just after we’d moved to London. There is nothing interesting in what we wrote, tho the card is interesting in itself being a picture of The Prince and (then) Princess of Wales and Little Willy, the heir to the throne. Of course there was no ‘spare’ at that time and James Hewitt had not yet, we assume, had his wicked way with the undernourished waif Lady Di was soon to become.
Nevertheless, even with Willy so young, you can clearly see now how unhappy and detached she had already become!!
Peculiarly and particularly I like the way Little Willy is poking his tongue out at his father. I wonder if this was a learned behaviour or an instinctive response??
I digress… the date was August 1984. The wife was about to start her degree at The City University, and I was about to discover it wasn’t easy to find work even in London. A year later, I was off to the Polytechnic of Central London… a powerful name with a proud history thrown away for a mess of pottage when it decided to become ‘The University of Westminster’ (cough, spit… ). But that was all in the future.
How times change eh?? What I find even harder to believe is that The Phantom and I will be ‘celebrating’ the twentieth year of our graduation from PCL in just a few short months. Twenty years ago we were settling down to the ongoing slog of revision and the writing of interminable projects.
I can’t recall what technology The Phantom was using at the time… carbon and graphite based I think… tho somehow I’m managed to acquire that (then) miracle of modern technology my Amstrad PCW and Joyce (i.e. LocoScript) far and away the most user friendly word processing software around for us plebs!
So… in a few months remind me to start singing “It was 20 years ago today….” etc. 
In the UK a villain has been apprehended for his heinous crime. He has been fined $500 and his criminal record will stay with him for years to come.
This depraved lawbreaker overfilled his wheelie bin by a massive 8 centimetres. How disgusting!!
Even though his bins are only emptied once every two weeks I don’t know why they didn’t simply haul him away to prison to make a real example of him. There’s really no excuse.
Just to put this in context, in the UK paragons of virtue such as shoplifters only get fined $200.
Obviously cutting down on waste is a priority for local councils running out of space to dispose of rubbish, but when fly-tippers who dump their rubbish anywhere they can find space *also* only get a $200 fine if caught! Surely this is sending the wrong message to people who have more rubbish to dispose of than most?
I often find myself running up and down the street ahead of the rubbish carts dumping my rubbish in other people’s bins in our street… I can see this happening in the UK from now on, with more serious intent and repercussions.
According to the report 45,000 people were fined last year and now live with criminal records because they failed to close their bin lids, put their rubbish out on the wrong day, or left extra black bags alongside their bins… what the hell is going on over there??
I’d hate to live in the UK these days, there is a vein of total bureaucratic insanity running through society.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=561037&in_page_id=1770
Yet again my back is killing me and yesterday and I was reduced to walking with a stick for the first time! I didn’t even do that while the toe was broken. In fact if this keeps up I’ll be going to the docs and ask him to sign a form for me to get a ‘disability sticker’ so I can park close to the shops etc.
Ok I’ve been doing it anyway because we still have the one we got when my mother was living here… but I’ve avoided getting one for myself, but I think I just have to accept it isn’t ever going to get better and just go with the flow.
Irritating though… and the pain makes me *very* grumpy with the kids.
This is what comes of letting myself grow old! I *knew* I should have stayed at age 40 instead of adding those years as the annual birth-date comes round. Too late now… but the rest of you out there… be warned!!
Youth is wasted on the young.
Been raining again. I commented to my eldest daughter just yesterday that it’s probably rained more over the past few months than at any other time in her entire life. It has hardly stopped in 6 months! Good for the dams yes… but can get on the nerves a bit.
One way it ‘irritates’ is when the kids are on holiday… like now. The youngest has a friend over and the pair of them are bored rigid. They’re playing on the computer, playing Dvds and making paper dresses for paper dolls… and are arguing over each and every thing they try. Right now they can’t play Ratatouille (the PC game).
Tomorrow they are both off to an educational day at Taronga Zoo which should be fun for them… and peaceful for me. Today was going to be peaceful as well because I was going to drop the youngest over at a friends house for an overnighter. Unfortunately for my plan, the friend’s mother needed to go shopping for a dress for an upcoming interview and asked if they could stay *here* til 2:00 p.m.. Well of course they could. Then she rang as said she might be arriving a bit later… so now I’ve got them both til 7:30 p.m.
Not complaining really, the family are all nice people and the daughter is a nice little kid and quite assertive when she needs to be… as is my youngest… which is probably why they fight so much.
In the meantime the eldest has gone into work with the wife again. She went in yesterday as well but I think might be less pleased with the day because the wife will be in meetings for a lot of the time she’s there. Still, it might give her an eye-opener into the ‘wonderful world of work’… gee alliteration! Whatever next?
While they are occupied I’m trying to clear up a little. Two weeks of cold and misery have left the place looking really messy again… an ideal state for times when friends pop around – not. Of course the mornings work has left me with a sore back… again… so I might not be able to finish all that needs to be done. But at least I’m trying.
Very trying as the wife often responds when I say that.
You might remember a few weeks back me rambling on about a mouse the cat had brought in and released. The cat caught it once more, but after being scolded by the visitors it released the mouse to roam free again in the house… seemingly with a charmed life as from then on neither we nor the cat could catch it.
Times change of course but not a cat’s hunting skills… and we no longer have a moose loose aboot the hoose!
Mid-morning yesterday I was sitting reading something and heard a noise behind me. The cat was standing next to the water cooler poking around on the shelf alongside… suddenly there was a lot of scrabbling and things falling off the shelf and down came the cat… with the mouse in its mouth.
In line with the usual behaviour for a cat it dropped it with the obvious intention of batting it about a bit until she decided it was ready to kill and eat. I got up to ‘intercept’ and hopefully catch the mouse before it ran off and hid.. again. This time however the thing gave just a couple of twitches before the cat picked it up again and stalked off. Maybe being chomped three times finally gave it a heart attack – can’t tell but it seems likely. I’m sure being carried off by a lion or tiger three times would have finished me off!!
Anyway, by the time I’d picked up a box and persuaded the cat to drop it the mouse was definitely ‘nailed to its perch’, an ex-mouse… it had ‘ceased to be’ etc.
So with due reverence… I picked it up… and walked off to throw it out.
I’ve pointed out on here how little intelligence our cat has, even by the limited expectations one usually has of cat intellect… but occasionally I wonder if ours has any sense at all. Despite *watching me* collect the corpse of the mouse, instead of following me as a dog would do, it remained sniffing around where it last saw the thing, perhaps in the hope it might spring out of some hiding place?
For ‘completeness’ I went back and picked up the cat who of course struggled violently until it realised the dead mouse was in the box three inches from its nose… whereupon it went quiet. Stupid animal.
The dead mouse got thrown onto the patio and the cat got thrown after it. I assume she collected it and disposed of it in the usual way but I really didn’t feel like staying to watch. Either way a few minutes later neither were anywhere to be seen.
The end result… we are at last mouseless! Sad for the mouse, but much better for us… probably.
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