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I’m back after the usual round of visits to relatives, which were slightly complicated by the fact that our car decided to have a festive breakdown. It has been somewhat grumpy of late, but a couple of days before Christmas, it failed to start. After a phone call to my auto consultants (my Dad and brother), the consensus was that the battery might be just resting rather than dead. So I bought a charger, charged up the battery and it started the engine, though now the lights behind the instrument panel were flickering on and off. On Christmas Day, we drove across town to visit Mr. Bsag’s family, and the car was playing up again. The drive belt and/or fan belt seems to be slipping, generating a loud and highly embarrassing squealing noise. Worse, half way through our journey, the car seemed to lose a lot of power, and we could smell burning. When we stopped, smoke was pouring out of the driver’s side front wheel. It seems that the brake had stuck on, and set the brake pad smouldering. Our festive greeting to my in-laws went something like, “Happy Christmas, and can we have a bottle of water to put the fire out on our car?”

That was pretty much the last straw. There wasn’t enough time to get it fixed before we travelled to see my parents, so we booked train tickets instead. Amazingly, the train journey turned out to be pretty painless, and much less stressful than braving the motorways at Christmas. We’ve decided that the time has come to go car-less. We’ll get the problems fixed, sell the car, and revel in our freedom. We hardly use the car at all at the moment, so all the money spent on insurance, road tax and repairs is mostly wasted. We worked out that with the money we’ll save, we can hire a car on those occasions when we need to get away for a weekend, and can’t use the train, and taxis when we have a sudden emergency, and we’ll probably still have money left over.

We’re lucky that we live in an area with pretty good public transport links, so it will make very little difference to our lives to get rid of the car, but it’s amazing how people think life would be impossible without having a car sitting in the drive. “But what will you do in an emergency?” they say. Taxis are rarely more than a couple of minutes away, and anyway — because Mr. Bsag doesn’t drive — we would only be able to use the car in an emergency if I wasn’t incapacitated. Personal transport was supposed to bring us freedom, but it seems more often to be a financial and environmental millstone around our necks — another responsibility and source of worry that we don’t really need. I’m looking forward to cutting the chain and setting us free.

I got tagged with the Trivia Tag meme by Matthieu Riou, and it must be getting near Christmas because I thought, ah, why not? Let’s think of it as the blogging equivalent of having a glass of wine too many at the office Christmas party and thinking it might be funny to photocopy some hitherto hidden part of your anatomy.

So, five little-known things about me:

1. I cry every time I watch the film ET. Every flipping time. Even though I tell myself that it’s just cynical emotional manipulation on the part of Spielberg, it still invariably makes me blub like a baby.
2. My favourite smell is that given off by the feathers at the back of a barn owl’s head.
3. My right leg twists outwards slightly, prompting my Tae Kwon-Do instructor (many years ago) to ask me if I’d ever fallen off a horse and fractured my pelvis. No, I’m naturally just rather badly put together. In those idle moments when you brood about such things, I’ve speculated that if I was unfortunate enough to ever face having a leg amputated, I’d be slightly less unhappy if it was my right leg that had to go.
4. I like the combination of peanut butter (wholemeal, crunchy) and Marmite.
5. My first and last appearance on the stage (at school) was as the speaking end of Arthur the Pantomime Horse in a production of Wind in the Willows. My portrayal of Arthur owed more than a little to Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I’m supposed to tag five more people to list their five bits of Trivia, but I’m feeling lazy and rebellious (an odd combination), so I’m just going to leave it open. If anyone feels like taking up the challenge, be my guest.

It’s amazing how much difference red makes. A while ago, I bought a pair of dark blue Beach Crocs. I loved them to bits, and wore them so much (including a lot of rough terrain walking Brazil) that I eventually wore the soles out. So, it being nearly winter, I retired the Beach Crocs to garden wear, and decided to buy a pair of Endeavor [sic] Crocs, which don’t have holes for the biting British winter wind to whistle though.

I also decided to get a bright red pair, because I like red. If you’re going to wear weird and ugly shoes, they might as well be brightly-coloured weird and ugly shoes. I should have guessed that a brighter colour would make them more visible, but I think my experience proves that red is an incredibly salient colour for most humans. With the dark blue Crocs, I only got a couple of comments about them in the whole time I wore them. With the red ones, I get at least a couple of people a day commenting on them.

Anyway, when it’s gloomy, grey and raining, I just look down at my Red Shoes and smile.

In the latest of a series of on-going plumbing problems, our shower has broken, so we’re having to take baths instead. Bathing rather than showering is annoying because it takes so much longer and wastes a lot of water, but it is really quite excellent when you’re very tired from your first day back at work after six weeks of sick leave, and even better when I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is on the radio at the same time.

We have a shower (i.e. splash-proof) radio, but it’s difficult to hear when the water’s running. So it’s a real pleasure to lie back in lovely warm water, while it’s chucking it down with rain outside and blowing a gale outside, and relish the surreal experience of the words of Uptown Top Ranking to the tune of ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’.

…in a dream, of course.

I was standing watching some kind of fireworks display outside. Morrissey came along and, smiling, said “Hello Woman”. I smiled back and replied “Hello Man”. In the dream it was clear that we were friends and this was our little ritual, a private joke. He stood behind me, wrapped his arms around me, and we watched the fireworks. He was wearing a big old woollen ex-military overcoat, and as I leaned back against it, it was slightly scratchy and musty smelling, but comforting. And that was more or less that. We watched the fireworks for a few minutes, then he said good-bye and left.

I have some vague memory that I read somewhere that Morrissey is one of the most dreamed-about people, along with more obvious icons like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. I tried a quick Google to see if I could locate the survey, but didn’t have any luck.

A week or so ago, I had a email via flickr from Schmap Guides to tell me that my shortlisted photograph (of the inside of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) had been selected for the Oxford Guide. Yay! The Schmap Guides are apparently free, downloadable guides with maps, photographs, reviews and so on for places in the UK and beyond. I say ‘apparently’ because at the moment the viewer is Windows only, so I can’t take a look. Anyway, if you have a Windows PC you can download the Oxford guide here if you’re interested. If you do, can you send me a screenshot of the page with my photograph on?

We flew to Brazil via Zurich airport, and I was amazed by the place. It’s like stepping into a clean and shiny future, where people speak with gentle, calm voices, and everybody can afford Rolex watches and Mont Blanc pens. Even the smoking rooms looked stylish (from the outside). Most airports seem to have a variety of cafés and shops, ranging from the downmarket to the upmarket, but everything at Zurich seems to be at the very upper end of the scale. There are champagne and caviar bars, endless shops selling designer goods, and glossy black temples stocking ruinously expensive Mont Blanc pens and accessories. Plush sports cars and motorbikes casually litter the concourse. The architecture is sleek and modernist, and even the lighting manages to convey luxury. If you can imagine someone translating a black MacBook into a building, that’s Zurich airport.

Given that none of us had any money to speak of, it was just as well that we didn’t have any time to shop. We just wandered scruffily through, goggling at everything like a bunch of yokels, drooling slightly as we went.

So, I’m back home again, after what feels like a very long three weeks. Brazil is (and continues to be) a wonderful, exciting country with truly lovely people, but what with one thing and another (none of which I really want to go into), it has been an exhausting period, and I’m glad to be back home. After a long, tough time away from home, there really is nothing more wonderful than your own bed, not to mention your own husband beside you in the bed¹.

I’ve had a couple of days of trying to wade through the vast pile of email, real mail and other work that has accumulated in the time I’ve been away, and I’m beginning to feel that I might soon be able to catch glimpses of the carpet underneath the pile.

Mr. Bsag has also been busy during my absence, and has painted the living room, repainted three walls of my office on which we made a big colour mistake (and also cleaned up my sloppy brushwork around the edges), cut back some rampant laurel bushes in the garden and started treating the fences with wood preservative. The place looks much lighter, brighter and tidier than when I left.

I’ll be back with tales of bats, giant flattened spiders and food impaled on swords in due course, but if you’ll excuse me, there’s a duvet I need to snuggle under.

¹ By which I mean, of course, that I’ve slept alone, not that I’ve been sleeping beside someone else’s husband. Just so that’s clear. ↑

I’m off to Brazil to work for three weeks tomorrow. What with my slightly dodgy health situation, and leaving our new house just when I’m settling in, I can’t say that I’m as excited as I might be about going. It’s also a long time to be away from Mr. Bsag. At least this year, we got to celebrate our Wedding Anniversary together (it’s today).

Still, I’ve got several tonnes of equipment crammed in a suitcase with some clothes filling the gaps, checked my hand baggage repeatedly for any deadly liquids, gels or creams (aaarghh! lip salve!), and I have a big roll of gaffer tape to fix anything that needs fixing, and to effect emergency surgical repairs. Gaffer tape can hold anything together, right?

See you all when I get back, and have a great September.

Our new house is on the same train line that I used to commute to work on, but on the other side of the University. This means that I arrive at (and leave) the University on the opposite platform to the one I’m used to. It’s going to feel quite weird until I’m used to it, and lends a kind of ‘Alice Through The Looking-Glass’ feel to my mornings, particularly when I’m not quite awake. Human auto-pilot is a surprisingly powerful thing.

Living—-as we have until now—-in rented property we’ve never really collected a great deal of tools, other than those needed to repair and maintain bicycles. But we’re hoping to be able to do some work on our new house, so we thought it was about time to buy a drill. After helpful advice from DIY-experienced friends (which boiled down to “don’t buy Black and Decker, whatever you do”), we’ve invested in a nice Makita cordless drill, which we got a great deal on at an online store. We got a free spare battery and an 102-piece set of bits, hole-cutters, screwdriver and socket bits (the drill also acts as a power screwdriver). There’s even an allen key bit the exact size of the Ikea allen key, which will be immensely useful in the next few days.

The set of bits came in a separate hard case, which was packaged opened up flat (so that you could gaze adoringly at the titanium-tipped, steel-clad goodies within), with a transparent plastic cover over the top to stop everything falling out in transit. All very well, but the plastic cover was held on by no fewer than 28 tiny little screws, rather than being glued or taped on. But wait! Hold your variable torque horses! I’ve just bought a drill that’s also a fancy-pants, all-singing, all-dancing powered screwdriver—-I can save myself no end of time by using that to remove all those screws. So I just need to get into the accessory kit to get the screwdriver bits… Oh.

It was too hot to sleep last night. It’s funny how the weather mimics your mood sometimes. We’re supposed to be completing on our new house purchase tomorrow, and then moving, so we’re in limbo, just waiting.

At about midnight, we temporarily gave up on sleep and sat on the patio in our pyjamas, enjoying the cooler air outside and watching the lightning from a distant storm flash on the horizon. We could hear the voices of our neighbours, also too hot to sleep. Everyone was waiting for the storm, the cool rain and that gorgeous sharp smell of storm rain on dry ground. But the rain never came, and we’re still feeling that oppressive pressure of waiting. I’ll be glad when the next week is over.

I’m in the middle of a huge grant application right now, as well as trying to organise the (hopefully!) final stages of our house move which seems to have gone at a tectonic pace. So I’m much busier than I’d like to be, and longing for a time—-about a month and half from now, with any luck—-when it might be all over and I can relax. A bit.

So this post is intended as a big, fat apology for the lack of any interesting content in these parts right now. Normal service will (eventually) be resumed.

It has been a tough week. In consideration for my poor, tired brain, I will just comment on a couple of more than usually inconsequential things that crossed my mind today.

1. Is there anything more frustrating than an unopened (or only very slightly open) roasted pistachio nut? I would add unopened mussels to that list, but when they don’t open after cooking, it usually means they’re dead and would give you no end of gastro-intestinal distress if you ate them. Pistachios just do it out of spite.
2. Young man! Yes, you on the 50cc moped styled to look almost, but not entirely unlike¹ a Harley. You’re fooling no-one with that riled wasp engine note. Get a Vespa and salvage some dignity and self-respect, for pity’s sake.

¹ Thank you, Douglas Adams, for that wonderful phrase. ↑

I heard a wonderful piece on Home Truths this morning about Anthea Hanscombe who is in her eighties and is passionately interested in steam engines of all kinds. Quite apart from anything else, she had the most wonderful, infectious laugh, and she had me chuckling along just because it was such a pleasure to hear her laugh.

It seems that Anthea has been interested in steam engines since she was a girl, and used to run out into the street when she heard a steam roller and breathe in the tarry fumes. Her interest developed during the war when she was a Land Girl, and she now has a very technical understanding of steam engines in all their forms, but is particularly fond of locomotives.

Anthea has obviously been doing the geekgirl thing for very long time, in times when it was even rarer for women to express an interest in machinery and other technical things. So, Sister, I salute you. May you ride the footplate with an oily rag in your hand for the rest of your days.