it is now a week since I last wrote and it still hasn't stopped raining, making it officially the wettest June on record. Poor old Sheffield, my student home, is a lake, South Yorkshire itself is becoming like a Hollywood disaster movie (we can't let that dam break, goddamit!) and people have even died. So, youd' be thinking, don't start off on one Angela, you're not doing so badly.
And I'm not. Here in the People's Republic of East Anglia, we are getting off reasonably lightly - if you don't count the cryptosperidium infiltration to a couple of areas. And the endlessly flooded roads. Or the life-sapping damp. Or cold. Or the Japanese torture-like effect of having to listen to the endless rain drumming into your brain like a stroke. There haven't even been any medical emergencies of late - save for one pelvic scan (normal) to see if cysts might be the reason I'm mutating into Brian Blessed since I hit my thirties. Or account for the crippling pain of ovulating. But no. (Still, at least I can number knowing yet another area of my local hospital. Which is great - I now even know which waiting rooms have the best magazines/comfiest chairs.)
However. There is one thing. I'm talking to you, 4x4 owners. Perhaps someone could enlighten me - why is it that you buy a car specifically designed for trekking across Nepalese mountains/through lakes and yet you can't pull over on to a two-foot high bank when the weeny little country roads in Britain get a bit damp and muddy? Don't get me wrong - I was raised on a farm and I know the need for a landrover on a field or for transporting livestock, or even just to fit the dogs in when one is checking one's land. I don't mind if you have big dogs, or a horse box. But if I have to smack my head on the roof of my car while trying to manoevre my Focus so that Mrs Boden doesn't get mud on the wheels of her gargantuan Volvo one more time, I shall not be responsible for my actions. You paid for the wretched planet rapist. Now USE IT!
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Global Warming? Bring it On!
Oh, that's going to make me popular, I can tell. But let me put my case first...
It's currently the middle of June and I actually cannot remember the last time we had more than one day without rain since April, when it was freakily dry for almost an entire month. It has rained and rained and rained and rained. My lawn is like the Everglades, my roses are composting on the bush. It's rained so much that if I were an M&S advert, I'd now be breathing huskily and coming over all sotto voce and sexily Irish to tell you that 'This is not just rain, this is full-on Kenyan Bush, green-up-the-desert January monsoon rain...'. You get the picture. (And I live in South Norfolk where we still have drainage. People in Yorkshire are floating around their living rooms trying to salvage their children as I write this.)
So much for flaming June. I've barely hung anything out on the washing line and only just turned the heating off. Which means I have no way of getting anything dry without using the drier, which in turn makes me feel that I'm stamping on the planet's face with the biggest carbon Doc Martens I can find. Ironically, when it rains it's not too cold, but when it's not raining it's like February. Consequently, with all the sweat/shiver dichotomies going on, plus the wet, airless, damp classrooms/cars/offices we all cram ourselves into, viruses are breeding like rabbits. And mutating like Mixie rabbits. So everyone's ill. If it's not the flu/cough virus it's the throat or the D&V or the Lurid Running Snot bug peculiar to kids.
Now. Don't get me wrong. I know that years ago people just dealt with this. Years ago no one had tumble driers. Years ago no one was hyper-clean enough to get simple bacterial/viral bugs that didn't actually kill or disfigure you in some way. Anyone over 50 will happily tell me this. BUT. Years ago they didn't have enough clothes to warrant washing more than once a week; years ago they were begging for sanitation to wipe out childhood killer diseases, and years ago, they did not have the bloody media ramming down their necks what a great summer it was going to be.
I mean, look at it. In April, the sun shone and that was it. All the stuff on the news about how this would be the hottest summer on record (again. Can it be the hottest summer EVERY year?), how the elderly were all going to die in droves unless they watched GMTV and picked up the latest how-to-keep-cool advice, how the nation would soon be swapping good old English flowers and veg for grape vines and olives, and how taxidermy would soon be the only way we'll get to admire most British wildlife.
I even had a letter from Arthritic Son's rheumatology team informing me, due to the warning of the hottest summer ever, that the Methotrexate means we must remember to be extra Sun Safe with him. Which, should the sun ever bother to make another appearance, of course I will. It's just classic that yesterday he had a school trip and on the list of things he needed was 'wellies, a raincoat and a sun hat'.
Also, I do my bit for the planet (yes, actually, I do - I am a 4-bin woman, a recycling queen and I'd give anything for abusing 4x4s and the drivers of to be made legal) but I can't help thinking that the planet does do a bit of its own thing anyway. I mean, I live in Norfolk and once upon a time it used to home to woolly mammoths. Before that, volcanoes. I was alive in 1976 when the entire country turned savannah, and stranded by the summer floods eight years ago - the reason I bought my first ever mobile phone.
So, is it me?
It's currently the middle of June and I actually cannot remember the last time we had more than one day without rain since April, when it was freakily dry for almost an entire month. It has rained and rained and rained and rained. My lawn is like the Everglades, my roses are composting on the bush. It's rained so much that if I were an M&S advert, I'd now be breathing huskily and coming over all sotto voce and sexily Irish to tell you that 'This is not just rain, this is full-on Kenyan Bush, green-up-the-desert January monsoon rain...'. You get the picture. (And I live in South Norfolk where we still have drainage. People in Yorkshire are floating around their living rooms trying to salvage their children as I write this.)
So much for flaming June. I've barely hung anything out on the washing line and only just turned the heating off. Which means I have no way of getting anything dry without using the drier, which in turn makes me feel that I'm stamping on the planet's face with the biggest carbon Doc Martens I can find. Ironically, when it rains it's not too cold, but when it's not raining it's like February. Consequently, with all the sweat/shiver dichotomies going on, plus the wet, airless, damp classrooms/cars/offices we all cram ourselves into, viruses are breeding like rabbits. And mutating like Mixie rabbits. So everyone's ill. If it's not the flu/cough virus it's the throat or the D&V or the Lurid Running Snot bug peculiar to kids.
Now. Don't get me wrong. I know that years ago people just dealt with this. Years ago no one had tumble driers. Years ago no one was hyper-clean enough to get simple bacterial/viral bugs that didn't actually kill or disfigure you in some way. Anyone over 50 will happily tell me this. BUT. Years ago they didn't have enough clothes to warrant washing more than once a week; years ago they were begging for sanitation to wipe out childhood killer diseases, and years ago, they did not have the bloody media ramming down their necks what a great summer it was going to be.
I mean, look at it. In April, the sun shone and that was it. All the stuff on the news about how this would be the hottest summer on record (again. Can it be the hottest summer EVERY year?), how the elderly were all going to die in droves unless they watched GMTV and picked up the latest how-to-keep-cool advice, how the nation would soon be swapping good old English flowers and veg for grape vines and olives, and how taxidermy would soon be the only way we'll get to admire most British wildlife.
I even had a letter from Arthritic Son's rheumatology team informing me, due to the warning of the hottest summer ever, that the Methotrexate means we must remember to be extra Sun Safe with him. Which, should the sun ever bother to make another appearance, of course I will. It's just classic that yesterday he had a school trip and on the list of things he needed was 'wellies, a raincoat and a sun hat'.
Also, I do my bit for the planet (yes, actually, I do - I am a 4-bin woman, a recycling queen and I'd give anything for abusing 4x4s and the drivers of to be made legal) but I can't help thinking that the planet does do a bit of its own thing anyway. I mean, I live in Norfolk and once upon a time it used to home to woolly mammoths. Before that, volcanoes. I was alive in 1976 when the entire country turned savannah, and stranded by the summer floods eight years ago - the reason I bought my first ever mobile phone.
So, is it me?
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Why Can't I be a Time Lord?
Seriously. OK, so I've OD'd on Dr Who recently, what with both sons suffering some kind of OCD about the programme and all related merchandise, but It would solve all my immediate problems.
Having survived the onslaught at the start of the year, and with The Husband Formerly Known as Sick now plain old Husband again, you'd think life would be getting sooo much easier. In many ways it is and you'd be forgiven for thinking that I really ought to stop moaning.
So, I won't even go there with trying to fill in on what's been happening since last blogging, like summer half term. (Sorry, did I say 'sumemr half term', those words that conjure up lazy sunny mornings and easy, time-slack, fun'n'sun-filled days? I do apologise. What I really meant was the abject torture that was a week of freezing rain – boiler blew up just before the bank holiday - bored, fighting kids and a national snot infestation). Nor will I inflict the details of my anemia on you. Or the cold from Hell. Or the Candida. No. I'll spare you that.
But I digress. If I were a Time Lord, I could scoot off into the future and come back with a cure for the above ailments instead of turning my kitchen into some kind of I-can-make-you-better-honest snake spleen dispensary and my body into an experimental fungal battlefield. If I were a Time Lord, I could find a way to take my oldest to school for 9, wait half an hour before the youngest starts his morning, get home at 10, go back at 12, come home and go back again at 3 and not lose the will to live. If I were a Time Lord, I could don an pinny, sod off into the future (say at the point both kids are in full time school), cook like a fiend a la Nigella (it really is time I moved on from my inner Gordon Ramsay...) and come back with a freezer full of healthy home-made ready meals.
The Doctor must be pretty moral, really. He talks of not upsetting the space-time continuum in case it affects adversely some poor Little People here on earth. However, The Doctor has no kids and spends his life having a whole pile of fun with no one else to think about. He can't even commit to the string of beauties virtually fellating him. Which means The Doctor cannot possibly understand what it's like to spend a grim June morning wondering when Global Warming's going to kick in (bring it on!), scrubbing wee off the toilet floor (they call mothers of boys 'Smug' for a reason) and wondering if the highlight of your day will be a visit to the new Co-op.
Top this with an email from an old pal who is blissfully childless and spends his and his (not even 30) girlfriend's time/money when they're not working (in the jobs they love, naturally) doing such things as "off-roading in the Sahara", "sailing round the West Indies as part of the crew on a tall ship", "skating in Central Park" etc. Now tell me even the Dr wouldn't develop a little tic around the eye and an evil leer as he contemplated a little visitette into the future to check the progress of the hormonal time-bomb dormant in that girlfriend's body. Will it be a dud, or will it explode and mug her with shrapnel like all ours did?
We live in hope.
Having survived the onslaught at the start of the year, and with The Husband Formerly Known as Sick now plain old Husband again, you'd think life would be getting sooo much easier. In many ways it is and you'd be forgiven for thinking that I really ought to stop moaning.
So, I won't even go there with trying to fill in on what's been happening since last blogging, like summer half term. (Sorry, did I say 'sumemr half term', those words that conjure up lazy sunny mornings and easy, time-slack, fun'n'sun-filled days? I do apologise. What I really meant was the abject torture that was a week of freezing rain – boiler blew up just before the bank holiday - bored, fighting kids and a national snot infestation). Nor will I inflict the details of my anemia on you. Or the cold from Hell. Or the Candida. No. I'll spare you that.
But I digress. If I were a Time Lord, I could scoot off into the future and come back with a cure for the above ailments instead of turning my kitchen into some kind of I-can-make-you-better-honest snake spleen dispensary and my body into an experimental fungal battlefield. If I were a Time Lord, I could find a way to take my oldest to school for 9, wait half an hour before the youngest starts his morning, get home at 10, go back at 12, come home and go back again at 3 and not lose the will to live. If I were a Time Lord, I could don an pinny, sod off into the future (say at the point both kids are in full time school), cook like a fiend a la Nigella (it really is time I moved on from my inner Gordon Ramsay...) and come back with a freezer full of healthy home-made ready meals.
The Doctor must be pretty moral, really. He talks of not upsetting the space-time continuum in case it affects adversely some poor Little People here on earth. However, The Doctor has no kids and spends his life having a whole pile of fun with no one else to think about. He can't even commit to the string of beauties virtually fellating him. Which means The Doctor cannot possibly understand what it's like to spend a grim June morning wondering when Global Warming's going to kick in (bring it on!), scrubbing wee off the toilet floor (they call mothers of boys 'Smug' for a reason) and wondering if the highlight of your day will be a visit to the new Co-op.
Top this with an email from an old pal who is blissfully childless and spends his and his (not even 30) girlfriend's time/money when they're not working (in the jobs they love, naturally) doing such things as "off-roading in the Sahara", "sailing round the West Indies as part of the crew on a tall ship", "skating in Central Park" etc. Now tell me even the Dr wouldn't develop a little tic around the eye and an evil leer as he contemplated a little visitette into the future to check the progress of the hormonal time-bomb dormant in that girlfriend's body. Will it be a dud, or will it explode and mug her with shrapnel like all ours did?
We live in hope.
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