w.atching the w.orld unw.ind

The whole team here went out for a pool and darts evening. Amazingly, it was the only time we could all get together, before the office christmas meal, which will be, er,at Christmas. But necking large glasses of red wine on a school night is not necessarily a great idea.

And I wuz robbed, on a black ball finish.

Enjoy your weekends.

Hey, days are busy lately, and I have been known to forget about the odd task or chore.

But glancing idly at a fellow passenger's notepad this morning, I saw he'd written at the top of the page: "List of things I need to do today".

Now given that he knew he was about to write an aide-memoire, it was clearly going to become a "list".

And unless it was to remind him to get someone else to do something, the listed things would, perforce, be for him to do?

So was a title really necessary?

The Mount Doom-like sunrise seeped and bled its way into the eastern sky.

Overhead, a jet from one of Gatwick’s fleets climbed to meet the burgeoning pinks, winking and flashing from its extremities. Silently shedding the slipknots of gravity, its silver belly caught the reflected reds so that, perversely, it looked like the heatshield of a returning spacecraft, as it jinked right, flying off to wherever..

I'd've liked to have been aboard. Maybe John Peel's soul was? What I would have done to share some quality time with that champion of music.

Elton John – "I’m still standing" (because you won’t give up your seat, you should have more respect for your elders, you young people don’t know what we went through for you)

The cloud I blogged yesterday was on the local tv last night..

Apparently, it was “a prime example of ice crystal-bearing cumulus". Which presumably was why its liquescence allowed it to change colour differently to all of the other clouds. There was even a passable portrait photo of it.

And I’d blogged it.

Now call me an occluded front* if you like, but now that Mick the Fish has hung up his umbrella, there must be a vacuum? So I’m off to apply for the position of heaven-gazer.

Meanwhile, I was shuffling with the others to escape the carriage this morning and the guy in front was sporting a rucksack with the logo “Fitness First”. The nanosecond he stepped off the train, he lit up a cigarette. I had to smile.

Great weekend, y’all.

* Cockney rhyming slang used in the Met (Office).

The rhomboid-shaped mass of cloud in the far West uniquely caught the first radiation from the strengthening, autumn-weak sun, blushing pink like an embarrassed child.

As it raced toward our rapidly receding carriage, and with the sun climbing slowly higher in the eastern sky, the block managed to maintain its differential from other clouds, becoming a chunk of vanilla ice-cream alongside the dull greys of its inferior neighbours.

I’m between books. Can’t you tell?

Seen at a mainly German tourist resort...

In the biography of Billy Connolly I’m reading, his wife (the author) reveals the extent of abuse he suffered as a child. Almost inevitably, he countered it with humour and she explains that one of his early songs was a parody of the Crystals’ “And then he kissed me” but re-titled as “And then he kicked me”.

At the very moment I was reading that, the Hollywood Brats’ version launched in my ears, from the compilation of “Stiff” label artists I was listening to. It ends with a highly camp “Mmwwaah” that never fails to make me smile.

But how bizarre a coincidence was that?

Crossing London Bridge this morning, free Financial Times were being handed out. I just thought it was a bit odd that a paper that reports on the business industry was actually giving away its own product?

Oh. So it’s just me, then…

Colleagues are visiting my home town, Portsmouth, today and I'll be visiting me Ma tomorrow, so "Today's Lyrics" prompted some memories of home.

As a kid, I always harboured a desire to join the Royal Navy, called the "Senior Service" because it was the first of the three military formations.

I was in the Sea Cadets when a friend's dad died very prematurely. He was in the Navy and apparently had expressed his wish to be buried at sea, when the time came. The poor b@stard just didn't expect it to happen quite that soon.

So we took his body out on our harbour launch and dropped his flag-draped coffin into a pitching sea, complete with padre intoning the requiem service.

That was possibly one of the most moving moments of my life, yet I'd forgotten completely about it until today. In retrospect, it's not a bad way to be seen off, though I expect there are all sorts of regulations forbidding it nowadays.

But it'd do for me.

/Sombreness

Enjoy your weekends.

Because of the much-overdue amount of time, effort and, yes, money we’ve been pouring into the house of late, there is little relief or respite at the weekend from the paid labour which comprises our working week. So there’s little to inspire for posting purposes. “All work and no play” never seemed a greater truism.

And I vowed not to post just for the sake of it. Let’s face it – when you start these blogs, you tell yourself it’s by you, for you. In reality though, without the interaction from and between your Commenters, there’s no buzz. As BW once said (before I sussed out how to add the function into the template) a blog without comments is just a website.

So I’m going to cheat a bit this week and re-cycle some postings I originally contributed to Mike’s Guest Week last year. Incidentally, if you’ve never read Troubled hyphen Diva, I thoroughly recommend a visit. His content and quality of output is excellent and he has an eye (and an ear) for detail which makes his blog a daily must-read for me. In fact, it was Mike who coined my Blogtitle, in a comment on one of my earliest postings on his site:
"God, now there's a word for me. You know, if I were ever to start a brand new weblog from scratch, I think that's the word I might choose. Aprosexic.com. Oh yes."

This one is a particular favourite personal anecdote and if it gives you a giggle, that’s good enough for me. Comments are neither sought nor necessary…

‘Mindlessly awaiting my turn in the barbers, I recalled a queue-related incident which this medium makes it somehow easier to share. You’ll understand. And your gender will determine your reaction…

Some years ago, Mrs.D. was temporarily between two regimes of contraception and I was advised to ‘take precautions’.

So, a nostalgic pilgrimage to the chemists then, where a plethora of old ladies had swarmed, to get prescriptions filled, each discussing several ailments with the very patient pharmacist etc. In MY lunch hour.

Nearing the head of the queue, I resolved to avoid future wastes of my valuable time by buying more than the usual ‘packet of 3’. Hell, I could’ve got through 2 of them in the 10 minutes I’d been there!

And so, eventually arriving at the counter, I manfully demanded a box of Durex.

“What size?” asked the harridan assistant.

“I. Er. Um. I. Um. (pre-empting Gareth Gates by some years).

She let me sweat. Hours passed. Someone behind me muttered “C’mon big boy, I’m on me lunch hour”.

“What size box?”. “25? 50?”. As if there could have been any other answer!

“Oh, 25 is fine” I gushed. “please, take all of this money, and keep the change”.

I legged it. I still redden thinking about it.

When we arranged for my brother-in-law to do a major refurb for us, we decided to move him into our bedroom and we’d relocate to the dining room, so that, as we tend to retire later, we could crash whenever we liked.

Today, he goes home after nearly five weeks with us (having done a phenomenal amount of work) so at the weekend, we’ll restore our bed to its rightful place and wake up to the familiar ceiling patterns.

It’ll be strange…

Question for the weekend:
What do pr0n actors wear on dress-down days at work?

Have a great weekend, y’all.

Scuba diving in Hawai'i last year, this beauty woke up as we passed overhead and swam up to circle us three times before flapping soundlessly away.

It was only later that we were told there is a hefty fine for 'harassing' this protected specie.

More like it was us being checked out!

Off to S6 today for meetings.

Might get back in time to see if Scaryduck's taking nominations for Friday's story...

The world seems to have gone overnight from t-shirts to overcoats – all blacks and greys and dull.

As my personal thermostat is always faulty, I’m still commuting in wearing my trademark short-sleeved white shirt, with today’s suit jacket slung casually over my left, crooked arm – a vision of sartorial elegance, eh what?

Someone was actually wearing gloves today. FFS, it’s barely October…

* wonders in an unstalking way what clobber Elsie's got on today *

Now don’t ask me how I know this, but in the pr0n industry, there is apparently a convention that in scenes involving double penetration (I’m really not sure about this posting, but here goes) there is a tacit agreement that there must be no testicular contact between the two male actors. It's known as "DP etiquette". Though I doubt you'd find anything about it in the social guides of yore).

Presumably, in such an animalistic ‘act’ (the word being used in both of its senses) there must be no inference of homosexuality? Or maybe it just disturbs the rhythm? Oh dear, I’m really, really not sure about this.

So the agreement is that the lesser well-endowed actor gets the ‘top job’ while the one with big cojones gets the sh!t end of the stick. As it were.

Now there can presumably be few physical secrets among the actors in this particular branch of the industry, but I wondered how they actually decide who gets what. Is there some sort of scaled-down measuring jug which is used to determine position?

Oh, and apparently, at the pr0n equivalent of the Oscars, the lady who got Best Actress said in her Thankyou speech: “This is great. I’m very touched.”

Well – she would say that, wouldn’t she.

I might just pull this post – that’d be a first…

The weather's just too disgusting to post today.

Oops.

As I rarely post at the weekends, I’m going to treat today as my first Blogday.

I first got into this medium via a visit to Tinka’s blogsite. Considering she’s a Dane, her output in her second language is flawless and a daily, must-read for me. Give it a try.

Following a few months of random commenting, I then had the honour and privilege to be among the contributors to Mike’s first Guest week and found myself thoroughly enjoying the postings.

Returning from a stay with friends on their coffee plantation in Hawai’I last year, we discovered that one of them had been diagnosed with cancer (though is making great recovery). The shock drove me to setting up my own blogsite, using Blogger, (since when I’ve dropped the “blogspot” element) and provided the inspiration for my first of my 154 subsequent postings.

I’ve posted more than I thought I would – inevitably it’s trivial stuff (other than recording Number One Daughter’s First in her degree in Human Psychology – no mean feat, that!) but I’ve tried not to post just for the sake of it.

I hope my “Daily Lyric” has reminded some of the near 3,000 visitors (admission of vanity, a site-meter) of songs that they’d possibly forgotten.

Stuart suggested a feeling of Carpe Diem about my first post – a phrase I had to look up. I hope a lot of diems have been carped since 2nd October 2003.

Mahalo (Hawai'ian for Thankyou.