Ancestor-hunting? There's no rush ..

.. Well is there? They're a' deid.
Reading Jill's bit about getting on the bus, counting her Euros & then not knowing what parish she was after reminds me of my visit to the rather splendidly named Dundee Eastern Necropolis.
This was when I still hed a Kiwi eccent, as well as a load of ancestor-info 'to hand'. I knew the number of the Lair I was after (Plot, pour les Anglais) because I have the receipt. It's 3 wide & you could be buried 3 deep, which accounts, when you think about it, for the way stones lean. I also had a photo of the stone, tattoed from head to foot with details of who & when, from the 1970's so I had an idea of what to expect.
What I hadn't expected was that the 2 cute little bushes flanking this stone were now enormous, socking great bushes, behind which the very top of the stone could just be made out.
What the nice Dundee Council Parks lad accompanying the Kiwi tourist hadn't expected was that she'd burst out laughing. His honest little face had paled when he realised she'd travelled 12000 miles & wasn't able to see a damn thing, & the other bloke had the chainsaw & he was off somewhere in the van, and - so I did my best to explain that it was funny, really, & that the bushes had been protecting the stone & if he could trim them a bit I'd be back tomorrow. His shoulders went back down & he was relieved & happy.
What I hadn't expected, on my return, was that he'd located the chainsaw & gone to it with a right good will - straight down the middle of both of them. The stone was exposed & squinting in the unaccustomed light. I hope the bushes survived. It probably wouldn't have happened if my accent hadn't made such an effort & come all that way.

Poulston is travelling tonight on a plane

poulston.blogspot.com this is the http thing for Jill. I have put it in so it is a link I think & thus we can entre nous perhaps work towards getting lots of comments & stuff on our blogs. Otherwise I suspect the whole thing is a bit of a pointless exercise; better than facebook because on a blog you can go on & on & on whereas with facebook the edit-pixies in those little hand-luggage sized comments boxes just suddenly cease to move. Maybe it's their way of indicating boredom.
This is in different colours in memory of Jill's clothes. When I met her in York station last year she was wearing a blouse with power shoulders in a hue that could be seen across a crowded house.
In Paris she had a test card type cardigan, the main justification for which was as an early version of something that would later become known as High-vis. I suspect a earlier conversation ... 'Here, take this,' said Joseph carelessly, 'I'm not using it at present.'

It was all very well her telling me it was so I could see her easily. Whether or not I would wish to remain seen with her was a topic upon which we did not dwell.
What she did say was that it was wool - & that was because of me too. Apparently I'd once relayed info handed down by my father, who had invented Crimplene, regarding the composition & relative merits of man-made & natural fibres. There can't be many 3 year olds who know that the composition of, for example, a sock can easily be told by setting fire to it; and that the reason why you smell in manmade gear is because wool, under a microscope, looks like a stack of plantpots. You could never accuse him of being ageist.
Not that I ever thought anyone else would remember this stuff. It just goes to show.
Which it did.
As you can voyez..

Now this next bit is complete change of subject. Its subject, at least initially, is Martin Curtis, an ex-Pom now Kiwi folkie who turned up at the Dolphin folk club in Robin Hoods Bay last month.
Why am I pasting this in? Because Jill is going back to NZ as we are speak; because that made me think of this; because it's 2am. & I Can ...

I haven't seen hide nor hair of Martin for about - ooh, 20 years. The blink of an eye, really. He was playing in a bush band at a dance in a village hall (tin shed) at the other end of Lake Wakatipu from the far more trendy & overblown Queenstown; Glenorchy I think it was.

I was in tow because I was hitching a ride over the Pass which he could only give me the next day.

It was a fair turnout & as Joni Mitchell would say, the local were up kicking & dancing on the floor. Everyone usually turns out to these things, but in this case nearly everyone seemed to be a teenager wearing a black, Megadeath-type T-shirt - not your usual ceilidh demographic - and the benches round the walls were festooned with what in NZ are known as Rugrats, ie nappy-wearing babies.

I went outside to ponder this & to get some fresh air - rolled meself a restorative ciggy & looked up at my surroundings.

They were nothing short of stunning.

Behind me, the place was heaving like a chrysalis.

Outside, it was very cold, starry night. There was a range of mountains across the lake & every gully & jagged peak was sharply delineated in the moonlight, all in black & white like a kid's drawing.

'That's The Remarkables,' I was informed by a kindred spirit, lured out into the cold in search of a light & some respite from the sweatily bouncing floorboards & the beat of the lagerphone. 'Some explorer named them, back in the 1800's.'

We stared at them reflectively.

'Lucky they were discovered then & not by that mob inside,' I opined. 'Just imagine - The Fucking Amazings.'

'You're not wrong,' he agreed & stubbing out our fags we went back inside to warm up.

Turned out it was less an appreciation of Natural Wonders than an urgent desire to be left alone that had impelled these teenagers to take up residence in the back of beyond. As solo mums, the girls were eligible for the DPB (Domestic Purposes Benefit) & had effectively formed a little community out where there was nothing to waste their money on & a conspicuous absence of Social Workers. Normally they provided each other with babysitters but on this particular night all the babysitters were at the dance, so all their charges were there too - if a rugrat toppled over or filled its nappy, someone was on hand to deal with it & the dance went on, far into the wee hours, when we all spilled out & dispersed to our native haunts.

The band & I were billetted at a sheep station run by a mountaineer & his wife, who ran Merinos on the hills out the back. As I recall, we passed a roadsign that indicated we were equidistant between Glenorchy & Paradise.

'Halfway to Paradise eh,' I mused, with John Prine springing to mind, 'You're not wrong.'

And as for a Lagerphone -

1. Drink bottled beer (ok - lager).

2. Save tops.

3. Pair up same with the insides together & nail to board.

3a.Muck about with spacers etc to own satisfaction. Tops should remain close to each other but not so tightly that vibration is impeded.

4. Repeat 1-3a until board is full.

5. Nail board to one end of broomhandle.

6. Locate handy stick.

7. Offer services as percussionist to local bushband.

8. Practice banging broomstick on the ground with one hand & hitting it with a stick held in the other to produce a more or less steady rhythm.

NB; 7&8 may be performed in reverse order.

9. Develop Best Practice of having a pocketful of nails handy, for running repairs. Also a hammer & elastoplasts.

10. Customise broomhandle by adding serrations, gaffertape, etc.

**************************

Scary Blue

Scary Blue; ow I ad forgotten the inflight blandishments comparing the relative merits of death v Elizabeth Arden.
Also the excitement & relief afforded by the possibility of saving 45p on a £6 sarny, after a trip to Paris. Bollocks Ainsley, I've got a baguette.
Also the New Inflight Food - honestly - Porridge!

'Omigod I forgot to save 45p...'

Further captions are invited, in the spirit of inviting further captions.
Naturellement Jill & I had fun playing with the pencils & filling out the questionnaires about the flight. I made particular mention of the Complimentary Magazine; anything suggesting I was gorgeous & looking even partially radiant after negotiating le Metro (see previous bit) was to be encouraged.
Mind you I'd quite like to take on a Grumpy magazine, that'd keep me occupied for hours. Maybe they're only for the longhaul flights. Jill prodded the laminated info sheet on the back of the seat in front of us & opined that she didn't think much of these individual TVs.

Below is a picture of some tubes. They are at Charles de Gaulle Airport & way back, was it in the 70's, Jacques Tati, alias M. Hulot, featured them in une filme de the ridiculous & dehumanising effects of Modern Life. His earlier films include Jour de Fete, les vacances de M. Hulot & Traffic. Darned if I can remember the title of the tubes one but when I surfaced into them I had a sense of deja vu & felt I was not exactly in the film but certainly not in quite the reality I'd been concentrating on.
Thrilling, eh.
Thing is nowadays you don't notice them - which is what he thought would happen.
H'm.
To be fair I'd had an intimation of his presence a few hundred yards earlier, at the passport control bit. Firstly, having been caught out by this myself, I was amused to watch others in the snake queue, controlled meekly by little webbing cordons, amusing themselves by watching newcomers realising the possibilities for bucking le system & joining the shorter queue, which turned out to be for EEC passports only. And having to cover their mistake & rejoin the queue somehow, somewhere .. there's a place for us .. yeh but not in front of Me, pal. Or Us. Or - er - harumph. I fear G. Bretagne et les Royaumes Unis ne sont pas in the Common Market yet, as far as passports are concerned. Arf.
Any road up, as they say in Yorkshire, here's one of M. le Badger being good, ostensibly, & wearing his seabelt.
We asked the lady in the nice clothes shop in le Marais Qu'est-ce que c'est badger in francais? She didn't know, & we couldn't understand what she was saying, so she pinched her nose & pointed to him. Non - il n'est pas Skunk. Il est - oh never mind.
Turns out it's Blaireau. Sorry I will not bring myself to call him that.
However the French have 2 verbs to badger; Harceler, ie to Hassle & Tarabuster, to - well, Badger.
Have you been tarabusted recently?
I will tarabust. You are tarabusted. Having been tarabusted etc.
M. le Badger is no stranger to international travel. We first met on the Tasman Sea, as vomitous, vertiginous crew, shipmates on HMB Endeavour. Having completed her circumnavigation of the globe & endured a week of complete meteorological shite, we sailed back into Sydney. Some months later, his work being done, his fate wasn't looking good; either he was to be Archived, or, more possibly, disembowelled & nailed to a topmast. Nasty.
But there was to be a 3rd possibility that they had not counted upon, & that was that he was almost forgotten. Until he was spotted on a pile of timber, on a wharf elsewhere in Sydney, alongside which was The Southern Man - a freighter bound for Brisbane, thence Eastwards, passing Cape Reinga, bound for Auckland.
Casually, he confided that he was intending a spot of ringbolting - only he needed some assistance with the gangplank & it looked as though this was going to be hauled aboard any minute.
His bucko messmate was also due on board this vessel, in fact had been for some months. A gaggle of her crew, orange boiler-suited Sri Lankans, lounged about, taking advantage of the last few moments before she cast off & their services would be required. They watched impassively as said mate raised herself from the warm timbers & shouldered her pack. They were silent, shifting their weight as she approached the gangway & ran their gauntlet. As she strode up it, they made way for her to pass. Finally, one of them spoke, breaking the tension.
'You're late,' he said. And collapsed into helpless giggles.
But that was in another country ...

Post cards from the Wretch - the companion volume to Dr Red Shoe's adventures ...

Post cards from the wretch - the companion volume to Dr Red Shoe's picaresque adventures, loosely set in Paris (France)





It's true. Could she get hold of me? Could I make contact with her? Was she muttering as many imprecations/m2 as I was?
The mark of a true friendship is that you afford the other the same privileges, rights & ability to make random fuckups as you hope they're extending in your direction. Thus all is even - when she didn't turn up I reckoned I hadn't turned up either so we were both big girls & would wander off & do our own things til we got hungry & tired & would then meet at the hostel. Which is what happened.
In the meantime reread the bit about hunger, tiredness & an all too human need to wee turning humans towards home.
I have a theory that life is organised backwards & I had ample time to revisit this idea whilst trapped in the Paris Metro. It wasn't a good time for philosophy & there were no loos. My idea is Why should it be hardest at the start? By the time we were heading for the airport we were on familiar terms with the lady in the ticket office & could assure her truly avec some nonchalance that we were au fait, fine in fact, with how to work it. God is a git. And we're going to have to go back in order to use all this otherwise arcane knowledge.
There now follow some random images of Paris.
The one above is from a fruit & veg shop in le Marais whence emanates the Platonic Idea of strawberries. Arguably the best 5 bloody quid I ever spent in terms of sheer pleasure. The display also featured Veritable Asperge.
Don't French asparagus growers have a syndrome named after them?

This one on the right isn't very likely but then a lot of things aren't & at least these poor cows can't read.

Were you to take a step back from this bucolic image you would be off le trottoir & in the gutter, looking at a small photo in an amusing little shop somewhere in Clichy, round the back of the local Communist HQ ... ...& a garage with fabulous doors.









Clichy is not that big a blob on the tourist map apart from the fact that it has an auberge de jeunesse, whence flow fleets of busses full of screaming children with inordinately huge suitcases.
Don't French YHA people share their job title with eggplants?

Credit where it's due - which is the working caption of the photo below, of not only the architect's but also the entrepreneur's names on a building, spotted initially by la Grande Pamplemousse soi-meme & thereafter by us both all over the place. Good on them.

Some of Paris is quite posh & nearly all of it is named after war & battles & the Yanks that saved the place in WW2. When a full bladder is threatening its owner with incipient renal failure & the attendant grumpiness, this & the culpable lack of public loos strike one as about as absurd as London statues, which are mainly of seriously wild eyed men on fat arsed oats-fed horses. I think there's a case for statues of nearly anything else, to redress the balance; although the one in the Louvre does seem to be the Before part of a campaign for buttons, zips & velcro on outdoor clothing.. 'Damn these blankets..'
It did not escape our attention, having gazed in awe at the roller bladers outside, that most of the statues in the courtyard of the Louvre are also of men & that the only ones of women are those with their tits out, inadequately disguised as goddesses, presumably so men could legitimise looking at ladies with their kit at least partially off by claiming it was Art or Culture or summat their wives would think was OK.
Have you ever watched a dog secretly hiding a stolen bone, then nipped out, dug it up & reburied it, and observed the dog's strangulated attempts to appear casual when you ask it, sweetly, 'Everything alright dear? Have you lost something? You look stressed. Can I help?' Imagine the Mona Lisa ... Lol, comme on dit. We thought the Louvre was one big erection. You couldn't get round it in a day, that's for sure.

There was a fabulous piece of Modern Performance Art happening in one corner; a street cleaning machine-like monster, with tentacles & grabbers apparently having a stand-off with a fish sliding down a lamp post.
Like I say, stranger things have happened & it seemed about as likely as a king riding off to war clad only in blankets, on a horse with no reins & later being commemorated as having done so in bronze.
Didn't Neil Young write a song about the dangers of bolting straight through the pudding like this? 'I came through the dessert on a horse with no reins..' ? Maybe he just missed the silver. Heigh Ho ... away ... lucky, really.
'Mon Dieu,' thought Jill pensively, 'I think I'm getting a chip on my shoulder.'

This is a sheep. She is wreathed in glory & goosegrass and it seems to sit well with her position in life, which is eating her way through stuff higher than her head, in a graveyard. She is happy in her pelt and has no problem with self-image & knows no fear and is expecting some nuts from the human whose outline she recognises. I think if she were human she'd wear pearls to do the hoovering & would eat cake for breakfast and buy supermarket birthday cakes at random for people who just liked the candles & the jellytots but were too hung up on only-doing-that-on-your-birthday to have that fun more than once a year. Because. She would also be quite determined. Slight autistic spectrum there, then. Saintly in a mild sort of way. Cool auntie.
I started this because I stumbled not on melons but on a random blog from someone on the other side of the world. She was going on about food & what it meant to her to cook for people she loved in varying degrees. I found this at variance with what I knew of her. The last time I think I saw her she was in a cupboard on the other side of the world, crowing absentmindedly like a chicken, with an aversion to anything food-like & an un-nerving ability to do that French Lieutenant's Chick- sorry, Woman pose, with immense poise, if anyone said 'Rosie - come out of that cupboard Right Now, d'y'hear?'
B'gark. How times do change. We made up for it by having an entire intercontinental phonecall the other week in chicken. b'oorrhh - Tuk - Tuk - - - - B'gArk -. And understood each other perfectly.
There was a poem about a man with a wooden tongue who spent most of his well pissed off because noone could understand him, which was a double bind. He solved it by vanishing from the haunts of men & ending up in a swamp where the frogs understood him 'and with that he was content.' He coulda done worse. Happiness is not intelligent. Not waving but

time for another picture.
This is of an old church and some daffodils. In another few months the sheep will be in laying waste to shoulder-high nettles, which they won't eat 1st because of the other yummy stuff like goosegrass and herb robert and queen anne's lace. Neither will they apply their bony little palates to the thistles, until someone cuts up their food for them with a scythe. In Yorkshire that's called a Lye (true) and it's better than a strimmer, which is noisy & heavy & you have to keep replacing the string, especially working between the stones. The trick, as I was told, is to keep th'arse down. Works for me.
I suppose in some parts of the world it's coming on autumn. Back end. I know this because I get messages on Christmas Day from friends (I use the term loosely) who are txting me from the beach at New Zealand & are getting sunstroke (bastards) whilst I'm there at midnight with the wind whistling in from the Urals, safely gathered in with me hotty. Just for them, here's a picture from another time. And perversely, I Like this one, though the daffs are jolly & uplifting, right enough -
but this one is chilly and it's Going to get Worse tonight, when those fluffy pink clouds come in.
And the sheep & her mates will be living in something looking like the Somme, being foddered with mud everywhere & the occasional tooth & bugger all else to eat except the dessicated remains of last summer.
I meantime am going to saunter off, trailing clouds of glory, in search of a cup of tea. Perhaps tonight I shall go to sleep with my boots on, in bed with my feet sticking out between the rails. Tiddly widdly Mrs Tittlemouse. Oh Ribby - I am distracted. B'gArk.