Other British brands that will never, ever make it in the States
January 2, 2009 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 8
Swan upping new year
I usually post a picture of the last light of the year on New Year’s Eve, but there wasn’t much of it today. Instead, I offer you these swans, which I photographed as I walked into town to buy a loaf of bread. (Get me! I’m olde worlde!).
The field across the road is sown in rape (it’s a cinch nobody consulted a PR before naming it “rape”, isn’t it?) and for several weeks, the new crop has been home to a flock of swans. Mute swans. Cygnus olor. Dozens and dozens of them. I don’t know why the farmer doesn’t shoo them off; perhaps foraging swans are protected.
Wild, unmarked mute swans have been the property of the crown since the 12th Century, but Her Maj only claims the ones on the Thames these days. She graciously shares ownership with the Companies of Vintners and Dyers. Once a year, the Queen’s Swan Marker and the Swan Uppers of the Vintners and Dyers dress up in little red suits, climb into six little red skiffs and spend five days rowing the Thames upping swans.
How dost up a swan? Carefully, I prithee! Ho ho ho!
Swan upping: the Worshipful Company of etcetera paddle about on the river, shout “all up!” when they spot a brood of baby swans, circle the boats, lift the cygnets out of the water, weigh them, check them, tag them, count them and let them go again. When this gay party passes Windsor Castle, they stand up in the boats, raise oars, and salute Her Majesty, Queen of the Swans.
Weasel doesn’t make this shit up, you know.
As luck would have it, the bottle of shampoo next up in the booze rotation was my favorite. And it’s kosher! Soon, my beauty. Happy New Year, y’all!
December 31, 2008 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 19
For you, my friends…
Tesco’s roasted monkey nuts. Roasted monkey nuts. Say it with me: roasted monkey nuts.
Yeah. It’s what they call peanuts.
This isn’t my picture, though. I slung my camera off my shoulder in Tesco’s to snap a stealth photo, and my battery died.
So I nicked a pic off this person‘s Flickr stream. I tried to log into Flickr to leave a comment confessing, but I fell into Corporate Consolidation Hell.
Turns out my new ISP — British Telecom — uses Yahoo webmail, Yahoo owns Flickr and I can’t be logged into more than one. Can’t remember my Flickr or Yahoo details, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t tell Yahoo my real birfday or anything, so I’m stuck. Here’s my account for historical purposes, anyhow. Everybody wave to it.
Feh. Roasted monkey nuts.
December 29, 2008 — 8:48 pm
Comments: 33
Loot! Plunder! Swag!
This? A British Airways place setting…from the Concorde. This is just the sort of brilliant, clever gift-giving Uncle B excels at and I…do not. I made him circle shit he wanted in a gardening catalogue. I’m pretty darned sure this is the first time in my life I’ve ever bought anyone vermiculite for Christmas.
We’ve just polished off the champagne…the turkey is in the oven…it has been an good Christmas. Hope yours was, too!
See you on Boxing Day! (Don’t ask).
December 25, 2008 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 36
It’s that time of year again!
The time when Stoaty risks detention by serruptitiously taking picture of the most expensive unbought turkey on the shelf. This fat boy weighs in at £96.58, in money. That’s $142.31 by today’s exchange rate, making it a few dollars cheaper than last year’s winner. If we were still working on last year’s exchange rate, though, it would win easily at $191.65. Currency is magic!
Of course, last year’s bird had the charm of looking like proctology waiting to happen.
Appledore is a town in East Sussex. Bronze is a variety. We had a bronze breast (or ‘crown’) last year, and I thought it was vile. Gamey, like it was all dark meat.
But hark! What is that I hear? The tinkling of…booze glasses? Quick, minions — time to get falling-down drunk or Sandy Claws won’t come!
December 24, 2008 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 22
Every 16th Century farmhouse…
…needs a 40″ widescreen TV.
Okay, this isn’t quite the act of aesthetic vandalism it looks. Instead of having a big glommy tube television perched like a shrine in the focal point of the room, this will fold flat against the wall when we aren’t watching it. And…display a slideshow of classic Tudor portraits, or some shit.
And it isn’t quite the act of devil-may-care profligacy it looks, either. Uncle B’s been saving for quite some time. It’s amazing the sweet deals you can get in the teeth of a global financial meltdown!
Me, I played this one just right. “A widescreen TV?” I yawned, languidly flashing a full set of gleaming weaselfangs, “oh, I guess that would be okay. I guess.”
Hahaha! Stoopit badger! I’m a Namerican! The moment he hit the ON switch, I *pwned* that sucker. My eyeballs stuck to that big boy like duct tape sticks to duct tape. Eet ees so verra verra beeeg and shiiiiiiny!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to watch the latest installment of CSI:Pulaski. Or the Wheelbarrow Channel. Or…whatever. Does it fucking matter?
December 22, 2008 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 25
Smoochies!
Britain has been inching toward a semi-official two weeks off at Christmas and New Year’s in recent years — and, okay, nothing gets done Christmas week and New Year’s week; it does make a sort of sense — but, actually, everybody buggered off TODAY. I think taking the Friday before is pushing it, don’t you?
Poor old Uncle B was trying to get a little last-minute work done, and nobody was answering phone. So we said a merry “screw it!” and began our holidays, too.
That’s Old Skullcrusher draped in misteltoe, in case it isn’t immediately obvious. He’s the main housebeam, and that’s the front hall now — but we’re pretty sure he was once outside the house and that was an animal run, ending in what was an open-air stable and is now the kitchen. It may have been enclosed as recently as the 1970s, which is when the front door was built in its present location. It’s a whole forensic dealie, trying to work out the many phases of Badger House.
Anyhow, here come the holidays — Merry Preemptive Christmas, minions!
December 19, 2008 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 21
Set Weasel on KILL!
Margaret Calvert is still alive, but only because I haven’t found her yet. When I heard her interviewed on Radio 4, it’s the first I learned her name, but I had been looking for her for years. By her works I knew her.
Margaret and her boss, Jock Kinneir, undertook a much-needed redesign of British road signage in the middle 1950s and introduced thereunto previously unknown levels of suck and stink.
Weasel exaggerates? You decide. Let’s start with this here. The previous ‘school crossing’ sign was a charming little boy in a cap with a satchel leading a littler girl. As Margaret describes it, “It was quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton, and very grammar-schooly. I wanted to make it more inclusive, because comprehensives were starting up, and I didn’t want it to have a social class feel.”
So she smashed it to bits. Class warfare, feminism AND it looks like ass! Trifecta! Margaret later confessed that the little girl was based on a photograph of herself as a child. Yup. She had a model for this glommy piece of shit. Boggles the mind, don’t it?
She’s a Kiwi South African. Did I mention that? She emigrated all the way from far-flung colonies to screw over the mother country’s signage. Speaking on behalf of resident aliens everywhere: naughty, NAUGHTY immigrant!
But I don’t hate her for the School Crossing sign. I hate her for a sign I’m not even positive she designed. IT IS THIS ONE. Can you spot why this sign makes Weasel shiver and foam at the mouth? WELL, CAN YOU?! (Hint: say yes, or I’ll fucking come over there and hurt you).
Yes. Yes, that’s right. In order for a skidding car to make these tracks, the left front tire would have to detach itself, cross over and land on the right rear while the right front tire correspondingly travels diagonally over and does the other thing.
COULD. NOT. HAPPEN. This is suck writ huge. A graphical “ain’t got no” — times the tens of thousands of them jammed by the side of the roadall over Britain. How many people signed off on this abomination? How many bovine visual illiterates drive past it every day without a second glance?
I have one of my ‘funny spells’ whenever we pass one. It hurtssss ussssss. And oh…OH!!! There’s one at the end of the driveway!! MY DRIVEWAY!!!! I took one look and I thought, “Right! That’s how it’s going to be?”
So you can understand, when the vicar came at me waving a page of Miz Calvert’s best work and asking me to choose which three best typified my future life, I was like, “ZOMG! Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker’s father!!!!!” and hid under the sofa.
Two more sessions to go!
December 18, 2008 — 6:10 pm
Comments: 32
AIIIIII!!! geddidOFFAme!
I can’t believe I did that…I CAN’T believe I DID that. Uncle B and I just got back from seeing the vicar about the…THING. That legal thing. That…ugh…let’s back up a second.
You can’t get married just anywhere in the UK. They’re stuffy about civil ceremonies — outside the church, only licensed venues in your area are allowed to do the deed. The Town Hall would’ve done me fine. For an extra £50, a wheezy old git in a tricornered hat and kneesocks will walk ahead of the happy couple through town ringing a handbell and going, “hear ye, hear ye!” Nay, a-shitting of thee I am not.
Uncle B wasn’t happy with the idea. The Hall is pretty shabby and downmarket and all the worst people get married there. I’m like, “but it’s so old!” and he’s like, “pff! No it’s not — it’s 18th Century!”
Oh, how we laughed.
We had never even considered the church option, because — duh. But then he met the local vicar and was taken with her (her! Lady vicar! Oi! Clue!). Our little community outside the town has its own ancient church, which — like so many ancient churches in little communities — is struggling to survive. And so in time it grew to seem a neighborly good deed, this propping up our local House of Saint Mustelid.
The vicar said she would certainly consider (!) marrying us…provided we come in for several counselling sessions (!!!) beforehand.
And that’s where we have been this night. First thing, we were each handed a mimeographed page of British road signs and asked to circle the three which most typified our idea of marriage. And so naturally I gave the vicar a lecture on Margaret Calvert — the New Zealand woman who redesigned most British road signage in the 1950s and a parTICularly violent hate object of mine — including several diagrams drawn on the spot to explain why Calvert’s graphic design skills are totally Teh Sux0r.
Yeah. I think that went well.
December 17, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 53
Dis-graceful
Okay. I confess. The general lateness and lameness of posts lately? I’ve been…
…umm…
…asleep. And that’s not a metaphor for hot, hot mustelid sex or anything. Uncle B and I have passed out comatose a minimum of ten hours a day since I got here, snoring and farting like livestock.
Seriously, it’s whack. It’s Britain-induced narcolepsy. Turbojetlag. Even the cat can barely lift her head off the pillow to cadge Friskies. I knew I had some catching up to do after a year of low drama and high anxiety, but this is stupid. We haven’t spent eight hours awake in a row since November 26.
Tonight, I struggled awake to the sound of, “oh my god…it’s ten o’clock!”
And I go, “I dreamed I was having lunch with Mrs Rockefeller and Bette Davis.” And I really was.
And he goes, “I dreamed I was watching the Prime Minister put on a conjuring act.” And he really was.
Well. We’re a well-matched pair, I guess.
Surprisingly, that’s not as happy a thought as you might imagine.
December 16, 2008 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 25