I have a new diet

Obviously it is not that one. No. It is called "eating things out of the garden".

So far it is going OK: from this lot, I made an asparagus and teeny tiny baby garlic tart and some stewed rhubarb, which was super. (Rhubarb in your porridge is quite delicious, I think.)

Last night, our gaping maws chewed upon salad out of seeds we bought in  San Fransisco; I have thinned it since this photograph where you can see it when it was a tiny baby (it grows about 2 inches a day).  If I let it get too dense, ear-wigs grow in it and make me scream. I hate ear-wigs. 

We also had more asparagus last night, which also seems to grow about a foot a day.  My wee smells like the very devil. 

There are also flowers, including some strangely-coloured tulips smuggled in from Amsterdam, and a great deal of lovely Lily of the Valley, which makes me feel like a dusty old Yardley lady.


















It is all awfully nice, I must admit, and there is a great deal more to come, coaxed from the earth by the animal-friendly hands of the French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist with whom I live - runner beans, peas, green beans, endamame beans, two types of beetroot, tomatoes (of which more another day; I ordered heirloom tomato seeds from some people with beards in California and I am growing them with my tiny little monkey hands), carrots, garlic, apples, plums, pears, apricots, raspberries, redcurrants, gooseberries, blueberries, rhubarb, peonies and many, many strawberries. (NB: this is all dependent on the birds and slugs not getting there first with their greedy mouths).

At the moment, the vegetable patch looks like this, but not for long.  Yes. After 6 months of -25 and snow, the Canadian earth (and climate) bestows magic properties upon the things that grow, and they shoot up at a rate that is quite alarming.

















That is all for today. I am up to no good, but cannot talk about it - a sentence that, I realise, is one of the most irritating in the world, other than "I was going to ... no, forget it, it's not important".

Pip pip!

NWM

I confirm my film-making genius with the release of my latest Bad Boss Blockbuster

Regular readers will know that although my career as cinematographer, scriptwriter, director, editor and producer launched only a few short weeks ago, my body of work already puts me "up there" with some of the greats.  As time passes,  I am beginning to see myself as a sort of cross between Gerald Thomas, Steven Spielberg, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, producing the kind of work that manages to entertain, amuse, enthral and disgust at one and the same time.

In this, my latest masterpiece, I turn the cracked fluorescent light of scrutiny upon the silliness that is corporate chit-chat.  So great is the amount of nonsense talked in offices nowadays that the original film was over three days long, and although most of my energy went into sifting through hours of masterful footage to produce the three-minute delight you are about to view below,  I would not be surprised if a sequel might not be in the offing.

Yet again, I remain confident when I say: I know you will like it a lot.



(Should you wish to compare this to my earlier work, you may see them all here.)

I offer you a glimpse inside the minds of my adoring readers and/or fans

In July, this excellent web-blog will be four (4) years old. Over the years, one thing has become abundantly clear: my adoring readers and/or fans (and other people that read it) have very good taste, are very good looking, good at doing ironic jazz-hands, clever, nimble, etc.

Trying to understand what goes on in their minds is, however, nearly impossible. "Why is this thing?", I hear you cry. I will tell you why. If you look at the list of topics that gets them excited (in a non-sexy way), you will see that they include music, not working, possible stardom, recipes for pancakes, gigantic cocks, Take That and my neighbour's poo, which makes - if you think about it objectively - almost no sense at all. (I am not giving up, though - no doubt a pattern will appear in a dream later this evening.)

How do I know this? I will tell you how. I went back over nearly 1,500 piss-poor posts to see which ones had had the most comments, prompted in part by a post on Tired Dad's web-blog that received 55 comments, which I thought was VERY high, even for him.

Anyway, here they are. It is the Top 19.  I have not edited the ones in which I was still doing this very Annoying Random Capitalisation to emphasise Points I Wanted To Make, despite the fact that it makes my teeth hurt in the way that eating cold pineapple whilst listening to the music of Sting, King of the Cockmonkeys, makes my teeth hurt.

Here goes. Number of comments is at the beginning of each thing; the first two particularly are worth reading for the comments, most of which are stuffed to the gills with interesting stuff.

72. All about the songs of my childhood, in which everyone else remembers theirs, too. 

68. Theory of how to do a compilation CD. 

40. Yes, it's the definition of non-workingness. It needs a light revision, but ... well, you'll get the gist.

39. I had completely forgotten about this, but am still very glad I didn't do it: someone writes to me asking if I want to be in a documentary.  

38. I still think this could be a whole book of the kind you would buy at the till at Christmas for $1.99: the philosophy of song (i.e., what you can learn about stuff from listening to song lyrics). 

37. I discover that many of my readers are in from academic institutions.  

36. I make American pancakes and post the recipe - then everyone else does theirs too. I love this - it is brilliant because everyone is very generous. Pancake lover heaven. Yes. 

36. I discover I am losing readers and ask for help (which as usual I probably ignore).  

35. Perennial classic, in which my eyes pop out on stalks at the sight of a gigantic cock.

34. I buy Take That’s new single.

34. The drains block and I am forced to touch my idiotic upstairs neighbour's poo 

32. A lot of chat about toast racks, which a lot of people find funny (if they are not from England). I do not find them funny at all. 

31. A collection of vacuous twattery 

30. I come across an aquatic chicken  

29. I count up my Facebook friends. Obviously I've got more now. Loads more. Millions, in fact.  

28. I give serious thought to starting up a sex blog . I seem to remember being quite cross when I wrote this. 

28. In which I write a letter to an imaginary publisher, pitching my brilliant book idea 

27. Some of the things I do that I am ashamed of (but not all of them) 

27. Favourable consideration of being non-working again.

Did you ever do a post that got squillions of comments? You do not have to write a 1000 word essay on why you think it was (unless it's a really, really good story), but do a bit of linkeage if you can be arsed.  I'd like to see we can extrapolate any fake data on the kind of things that people like to comment about, from which I will make some PowerPoint slides. (The only proper use from PowerPoint, if you ask me.)

Finally, to all of you that read and comment: I am not a bloody wetsy but - thank you all your various generosities of useful information, jokes and encouragements.  You all seem to be really rather nice.

That's quite enough of that.

Pip pip!

NWM

I hate Harley owners

Oddly enough, I am not even talking about the gangs of Harley drivers with enormous beards and mirrored sunglasses. I don't mind them; at least they keep themselves to themselves, and anyway they're scary; you don't want to fuck with them.

No. I am talking about the middle aged, tiny-dicked wankers with mutton-dressed-as-lamb wives and girlfriends who buy a fucking Harley and spend Saturday afternoons polishing it with chamois leather until they can see their pasty, asinine little faces in their chrome exhaust pipes, all the better to straddle it in cheap leather trousers and drive it up and down the otherwise quiet country road where we live on Sunday afternoons.

When the weather's good,  one drives past every five minutes or so.  They come here because it's pretty and the roads are nice: they go up and down and all around (which is why squads of silent cyclists also come out here at weekends), and there are apple trees and lambs and houses that you would imagine if you thought of a Canadian house; sort of like this, but without the snow:

I don't hate them for buying a Harley - if they want to piss their money up the wall on a bit of machinery that announces to the world that they're an arsehole, that's their look-out: I hate them because they're selfish.

It's quiet here, and people live here. That's obvious, because there are a lot of houses not too far back form the road (look at the house above: you don't want to be digging yourself out of too much of that every morning in the winter).  But do you know what these fuckers do? Most of them remove their muffler(s) so that their bike makes as much noise as possible. Even better, when they're putting aside the money they've earned being a middle-manager in a suburb somewhere to support their Harley-hobby, they put aside a wodge to pay for the fines that they'll get for having removed them.

Bref (as they say in some French-speaking countries), they consciously configure their bike to make as much noise as possible. They then get on it and drive it around where people live, on Sunday afternoons, making as much noise as possible.  And worse, some of them have music: I was driven inside to write this post by a gigantic Harley pumping out "Burn Baby Burn" at top volume.   I could deal (just) with the noise if I didn't know that it was being generated on purpose, but what makes me so cross (and makes me think about invisible wires suspended across the road, pellet guns, weeing in their soup, etc) is the fact that they don't give a shit about anyone else.

I once asked the French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist, a.k.a my 'husband', what he would do if he won the lottery. "I would buy all the motorbikes in the world, make a big pile out of them, and then set them on fire". I disagreed for a while, thinking that the money might be better spent on sweets, crisps and hats, but as time passes and the days become warmer, I have to say I am agreeing with him!!!

Pip pip!

NWM

I am about to order lunch

IMG_0601, originally uploaded by Non-workingmonkey2010.