At the crematorium for the happily offbeat funeral of a Liverpool supporting acquaintance, whose ashes are to be scattered at Anfield, I had listened contentedly to Hey Jude, Let it be, Imagine, and We’ll never walk Alone, crashing out of the disco sized speakers; and I was just settling down to absorb the nugget strewn ‘readings’ from various family members when I was horrified to hear, during a particularly quiet, pensive moment, the tinny sound of the William Tell overture ringing out from some idiot’s mobile phone.

Mortified to realise the noise was coming from somewhere within the folds of the heavy, sombre coat I was wearing to cover up the fact that my best and only suit trousers had been eaten by moths, it took me long, agonising moments of perspiration inducing self-loathing to extract the offending article from a squashed inner pocket and stab the switch off buttons.

In a Larry David nightmare I would of course have answered the phone in a loud voice and said that although I was at a funeral I was all ears and couldn’t wait to hear whatever the caller wanted to tell me. As it was, I had to shut my eyes for the next five minutes and simply pretend I was somewhere else.

Although this was a moment of sheer horror, as somebody said afterwards, the man in the coffin would have loved it!

Wow! Rio would love that! Looks like great fun – more than we had when we went sledging with Sharna at christmas. What does minion think?

Jul – I feel for you. I remember those interviews well. They darken my dreams from time to time. We were prepared and briefed though – non of this ghastry spontanious stuff. Makes me break out in a cold sweat just thinking of it. Though that is the kind of thing you have to do in class from time to time. When the carefully planned lesson you slaved over last night goes horribly wrong and the whole class are staring at you as if you are something they scraped off their shoe, you have to think quick – testing on the nerves I can tell you. Geoff suggests cutting your hair and frequenting the bussines world rather than joining the hippy convention. He feels that the hair may provoke a preconseption that you will doss around and do as little work as possible! hey hum – the rest sounds like fun, though i can almost hear the money pouring out of the coffers. why not go for some other jobs as well?

Snow at the homestead!

The most snow we’ve seen here for a while. Perfect snowball and snowman snow, but perhaps less good for sledging…

 

Mama

A plant

Another plant

Cedric the Snowman

Han and Cedric

“Snow Minion” by Han

Glad you’ve been having fun Jul but it sounds like it been pretty arduous and painful trying to get work. I think we should make you World Leader, you could create a world in your image. That way everyone would be chilled and everything would just flow effortlessly. Julios for El Presidente!

Nicky, that contraption looks as if it was first used several hundred years ago to brand slaves with the union jack so no Yank could claim them as one of theirs. Perhaps during the Victorian era they started using them to make toasted cheese sandwiches – it might be worth a few bob.

Maybe you shouldn’t blame the dry cleaners. I think I know what happened to your suit. Was it a sweet, sickly, musky kind of odour? Repellent but not rancid? Rank but not acidic?

Difficult to wash out, etc, etc.

The answer is: the Minion pissed on it!!!!!!!!!

If it was left flat in Tan’s old room, the mystery is solved. She pissed on our duvet in there and sundry other things.

She’s now an outdoor cat.

We found this in the kitchen. I feel I ought to know what it is.