Monday 8 June 2009

Monday 08/06/09

Overheard in the caravan:

The Chairman looks up from his paper and spots Hayley in the act of weighing a shoe on a set of scales in the kitchen.

Chairman: “What on earth are you doing?”
Hay: “I’ve sold a pair of shoes on e-Bay and need to know the weight for postage.”
Chairman: “Thank God for that. I thought we’d run out of meat for dinner and you were perhaps being a bit experimental with the ingredients. Well, either that or you’d gone stark raving bonkers.”

I’ve deleted my Twitter account. It’s a total waste of time and as much use as a blind Formula 1 driver. Basically it’s a solution looking for a problem to solve, and I don’t think the problem will emerge for another 10 years. It could possibly be a solution on instant, on-line polls for the government, but little else. There’s absolutely nothing being broadcast by others that I’m even vaguely interested in.

140 characters simply aren’t enough to flesh out an idea and get the point across, so I’ll stick to the blog. The word blog is itself an onomatopoeic rendering of the medium – slow, ponderous, multi-layered, rich, sonorous, full-fat; whereas Twitter is the onomatopoeic equivalent of a non-dairy skinny latte.

There’s a story currently in the news about insurers who try to pressurise car crash victims into settling just hours following an accident. Wish to hell they’d approach me – my car was wrecked on the 18th May, and I’m still in possession of a courtesy car and no bugger has yet deigned to contact me to tell me what’s happening next with my own motor. I’m not complaining though, as I get to drive a nice, new, shiny 2 litre VW turbo diesel in the interim, saving myself a shed load of money on fuel in the process.

You know how you occasionally see what appear to be fully grown men on tiny kids’ BMX bicycles and think: “WTF? Grow up man!” Well, yesterday I discovered who they are; they’re fathers who have obtained a free bike for their kid on Freecycle, only to discover it won’t fit in their car (or may scratch the hire car if carriage is attempted) and hence they have to ride it all the way back home themselves, looking like total plonkers in the process. Did it yesterday; got a perfectly serviceable BMX that’s worth spending a few quid on having tarted up and the brake cables replaced.

Cut the new lawn in the field again yesterday and also fenced in the build plot, as we’re expecting some sheep at the end of the week and we don’t want them falling into the trenches that will be dug and becoming part of the foundations.


The caravan will be hauled some two lengths into the newly shaved lawn area, providing it doesn’t collapse in half en route.


The Heath-Robinson gate in the new fence was Hay’s idea, so plant and machinery can still gain access to the build plot from the lane to the right. The top end will be fenced off later this week, as we ran out of fence posts (having originally intended to merely halve the field athwartships, but then changing our minds and including some longitudinal separation to give the sheep more to eat).

Last night we had dinner at the Caravans’ and during the washing up activities Caravan Mummy (as Hay calls her) inadvertently solved one of the deepest mysteries of physics – the shape of the universe. She was fiddling with a roll of cling-film and said: “I can never find the end of these rolls of cling-film,” thus adding the weight of observational evidence to the ‘roll of cling-film shaped universe’ theory, which states that in its quantum state, the universe has no beginning or end, which means that it has no edges or boundaries in space-time – just like a roll of cling-film.

4 comments:

kapgaf said...

I'm disappointed that Hay wasn't about to prepare her very own version of sole meunière.

The building works are taking an interesting turn. Fingers crossed about the caravan staying in one piece (seeing as how you seem to have a not very good insurance company....)

Chairman Bill said...

Kapgaf: ...or whole roast mule.

Jinksy said...

Love the cling film universe concept...

Belle said...

I told you you were a twit for joining Twitter. Love Kapgaf's comment - sole meuniere indeed.