Please help me! I’m trapped in an episode of Masterpiece Theater
What are these, you say? I’m glad you asked. They’re CHESTNUTS. ROASTING ON AN OPEN bloody FIRE!
Yes. Yes, they were very nice. That’s not the point.
January 3, 2008 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 36
Three old coots and a big hole
About three months ago, the old coot on the left, whose family owned Badger House once upon a time, met up with the old coot on the right, who lived in it during the war. You know, The War. They fell to talking, as coots are wont, and Coot #2 asked who was living up at the old Badger place and whether anybody had “found the machine gun.”
!
Seems Coot the Second, who was a teenager during the war, watched an American Dakota bomber go down in the field behind the house, then crept out and nicked one of its machine guns. He balanced the barrel against our back fence and popped a few rounds across the field, to make sure it was in good working order, then wrapped the whole business in an oilcloth bag and buried it beside the hedge.
I shit you not.
Given the heartbreak of Tulsarama, I wasn’t hopeful there would be anything left, but I’m damned if I’ll wantonly crush the dreams of old coots. So we invited them both ’round for tea and hole digging.
No, we didn’t find it. Not yet, anyway. My nice new metal detector was no use at all; the whole yard lights up like a Christmas tree when I ask it to find iron. That’s what four centuries of tossing stuff out the back will do. An experienced bloke with a bigger metal detector and awesome hole-digging skills is coming out next.
Still, we had merry tales of the old days. At the turn of the (Nineteenth to the Twentieth) Century, Badger House was so derelict the shepherds refused to stay in it. It was nearly knocked down, but somebody driving by spotted it and offered Coot #1’s dad £200 for it. By WWII, the house still had no electricity or indoor plumbing (the tall roof is to maximize collection of rainwater). It sounds as though it has stood empty and overgrown much of the time. We’ll have a lot of tightening up to do.
Coot #3 is, of course, Uncle B…who stands just off camera, shamed by the hole-digging prowess of Coot #2. And you would be, too, if an 81 year old coot KICKED YOUR ASS.
EDIT: Uncle B says the Dakota was a transport plane. The bomber that went down in the lower forty was a Boston. Also, he adds that he is wounded in the arm, so there!
January 2, 2008 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 72
Balls!
Here, Uncle Badger holds out the traditional New Year’s Day Balls of…oh, screw it, I forgot to post something, didn’t I? Hope y’all had a splendid first day of 2008. We spent ours as we mean to go on: sleeping, eating and a-drinking of alcoholic beverages.
We slunk down to the Adolph and Eva Memorial Recycling Center with our empties after dark tonight, and it took both of us to lift the box. Hooray for the noble mustelids!
And tomorrow afternoon, if all goes according to plan, several elderly persons of the district are coming to help us exhume a fifty year old veteran from the back garden.
Sweet dreams!
January 1, 2008 — 7:05 pm
Comments: 23
Gimme a ‘T’!
Traditionally, I take one last photograph of the very last sunset of the year, just as the light goes out on New Year’s Eve. Tonight I was putting away the groceries and…ummm …forgot (but, on the up side, Asda had fountain pens for 79p each! w00t!).
So this is a photo of the penultimate sundown of 2007, shot yesterday during a sprightly walk along the Channel. The big T is a navigation aid of some kind. <shrug>
New Year’s Eve is a time for looking back on the old year — because, let’s face it, coming up with bullet lists is a hell of a lot easier than pulling original content out of your ass before Champagne Time. Me, I didn’t actually get around to compiling my lists, but here are some topics I considered posting about:
· The ten vilest smells of 2007
· Killing adorable small animals wounded by my cats; a retrospective
· The top seven remarks I blurted out and then instantly regretted
· What hurts: a musculoskeletal year in review
· 2007: Be fair, it sucked less than 2006
· Movies, music, television, books: things I didn’t pay the slightest attention to this year
I could go on, but then I wouldn’t be drinking, would I? Forty five minutes to the new year in Jollye Olde. Happy 2008, Minions!
December 31, 2007 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 29
Saturday? I overslept!
Last Weekend Weasel of the year, and I nearly forgot. Okay, I did remember last night…but by that time, I was sprawled in front of a big fire with a glass of cava balanced on my stomach full of a boozy joie de vivre. Photoshop? I don’t think so…
December 29, 2007 — 1:46 pm
Comments: 28
A dyer dying here has died and thus dyed for the last time
The military ones are the BEST. Here’s Mark Steyn recalling a few of his favorites:
Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Sanders, who accepted an invitation to lunch from the same Waziri tribesman who a few days earlier had blown him up and cost him his right arm; Bunny Roger, the Mayfair “aesthete” who marched through German lines brandishing a rolled-up copy of Vogue; Warrant Officer “Muscles” Strong, who interrupted his Chinese captors’ lectures on western imperialism with cries of “Bollocks!”; Sir “Honker” Henniker, Bt., an Indian Army brigadier who enjoyed being saluted by his elephants; Charles Upham, the New Zealander who charged two German machine-gun nests singlehanded and is one of only three men in history to be awarded two Victoria Crosses. When my wife’s uncle died, the paper noted that, before leaving for Normandy by glider on D-Day to seize the bridges over the River Orne, he purchased a newsboy’s entire supply of the first edition of the London Evening Standard so that the men who’d landed before dawn would be able to read press accounts of their exploits on the very same day. The Telegraph’s anthologies of military obituaries (edited by David Twiston-Davies) are highly recommended, and a very moving parade of astonishing courage punctuated by dotty elan.
On further search, though, it turns out the one I remember best wasn’t an obit at all. It’s an excerpt from the journal of Capt Robert McLaren, who operated behind Japanese lines in the second World War, and it appeared in the health section under do-it-yourself-appendectomy:
“Made incision through skin, spread the muscle layers with the end of the spoon, bared the appendix, tied off and buried the stump. Healed in three days. Japs pushed in. Took to the hills.”
Some people make you feel like a COMPLETE waste of human skin,
don’t they?
December 28, 2007 — 9:56 am
Comments: 9
Being a foreigner: harder than it looks
Uncle B and I were out grocery shopping today and I noticed something I guess I’m going to have to get used to. At the sound of my foreign accent, people start and turn to look at me (if nothing else, that tells you how far out of London we are).
It’s not so bad; when they realize what they just did, most people give me a sheepish smile.
I work with a man who is missing the littlest two fingers of his right hand. I didn’t know it until I shook his hand and then — it was completely involuntary — I started and stared down at our handshake. It felt so indefinably…wrong. He must get tired of that look, day after day. Me, I just get grinned at.
Many and high-larious are the zany miscommunications between Weasel and Badger. Like this here thing. The sign up there. It was part of my Christmas loot.
B: It’s Chinese, I guess.
S: What?
B: Weasel zhing.
S: You’re pulling my leg, right?
B: Well, I thought it might be pronounced Weasel ching, but I looked up all the variations I could think of and didn’t find it.
He thought it was a slogan, like “grrl power” or “ban the bomb” or “weasels rule, badgers drool.” Poor bastard; he’ll buy me anything with a weasel on it. Most of which seems to come from California.
For the record, they spell it out here: Crossing. It’s all part of their “use more stuff than strictly necessary on signage” campaign. Way Out for Exit. Give Way for Yield.
December 27, 2007 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 15
Happy Boxing Day!
Happy Boxing Day, everyone! I was all excited until Uncle Badger told me Boxing Day doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
Huh. That’s what he thinks.
December 26, 2007 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 13
Loot. Swag. Plunder. Booty. STUFF!
Do you know why Christmas is so all-consuming crazy-making to your typical seven year old? Because a seven year old might — just might — find the thing he wants most in all the world tucked under the tree on Christmas morning.
Imagine for a moment you could have come down stairs this morning to find Santa Claus had paid off your mortgage, or left you a villa in the South of France, or fixed your teeth or made you a rock star or…you know, brought about world peace or some junk. Yeah, you bet you’d’ve been up at the crack of dawn today, pissing yourself with excitement.
You didn’t outgrow the magic; your wish-list simply got unreasonable.
This holiday time of year, when our society is battered from the right and the left (respectively) for its irreligion and shallow commercialism, please join me in remembering what Christmas is really all about: it’s about the STUFF, man! It’s about the swag, the booty, the sweet treats under the tree. It’s about giving each other useless toys and silly gadgets and some very nice things we can’t really afford, too. It’s about eating things that are costly and bad for us and having a dram or five of the good stuff from the back of the liquor cabinet. It’s about self-indulgence.
You know I’m right.
We’re in a happy, astonishing time and place, the first of our kind to be free of the constant grubby preoccupation with mere survival. We are scouts, explorers in this new world of post-evolutionary luxury, and this is the one day a year we give ourselves over to it utterly. Don’t feel ashamed. Don’t — on this day of all days — feel guilt.
Stand with Uncle Badger and me and say “fuck it — it’s Christmas!”
And have one more slice of something roasted in lard.
December 25, 2007 — 5:59 pm
Comments: 26
Melly Clismouse
Oh, sure, it looks cute.
When the weather turned this Fall, a plague of cold mice descended on Badger House. Uncle B found them in the trap, roughly one rodent per day. Dead, if he was lucky. Otherwise, he had an unpleasant deal of mouse-dispatchin’ to do.
The Maternal B — his mum — bought him this festive holiday rodent to commemorate all his festive holiday rodent skull-smashing.
That’s not the good part. This is the good part. It’s the song he sings when you press his belly.
I’ll bet you a shiny new penny that’s We Wish You a Merry Christmas sung by a Chinese woman who doesn’t speak a word of English.
Melly Clistmas, minions!
December 24, 2007 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 16