cake du jour

double bubble

1. Friends who say 'aye' and actually just mean 'yes' .
2. David Tennant. Oh dear: I so would.
3. Taps! That turn on! And off!
4. Showers (see above).
5. Aladdin Sane.

beat you down at cool canasta

I sent a sarcastic email last night to Talk Talk technical services, suggesting that they might like to actually read the previous mail I sent. I don't for a moment imagine that it'll make any difference, but it made me feel better to spread the ire around a bit.

In other news: Leaking roof, unplastered front bedroom, falling plaster in kitchen, thin layer of plaster dust covering the whole house, concrete monstrosity in back garden. I tell myself to just accept it all and to accept the fact that it all takes at least four times longer to fix than my patience allows for. This philosophical approach is generally effective for about a week, so I suspect I'll be banging my fists against the (crumbling) walls again by next weekend.

I do at least have taps that turn on and off now, and the damp patch that resulted from the bath not being sealed in properly doesn't seem to have grown since I re-sealed it. [Probably because I haven't been able to use the bath all week?]

The connection has dropped four times since I began writing this. Talk Talk still suck.

Talk Talk suck.

We interrupt normal services for a short rant about broadband suppliers. Or supplier, to be more precise.

If you are considering changing your broadband supplier to Talk Talk on account of their excellent fee structure, free calls and fast connection times -

Don't.

The connection is flakey (mine drops constantly, another friend has no connection for days on end) and their customer services work from a script, assuming you can get through to them. I've just spent 50 minutes trying to get through to someone (anyone!) in the technical department and in the end gave up and wrote this in an attempt to get the festering bile off my chest. Last time I managed to get through I was promised after a call back which I am still awaiting over a week later. Should you decide to attempt email communication you will eventually find a small form which you can fill in, but last time I tried it I didn't get a reply for over a week. When I did it was a form letter.

Once again: Talk Talk. Don't touch them with a bargepole.

the sound of alarms

Lime plaster is pure evile. I cannot take more than an hour or so scraping the stuff from my bedroom walls, especially if the iPod demands that singing along is in order. In addition to the respiratory abuse I wonder about once every ten minutes in a slightly panicky fashion whether I am doing the right thing; and then have to go through the process of reminding myself that a life with purple textured wallpaper is a life half lived. I can't help thinking that the whole thing is going to cost more than a couple of hundred quid, though. Without considering the £350 I've just been quoted to fix the roof. Repeat after me - I love owning my own home. I love owning my own home. I love owning my own home. (I do, though. Really.)

Still - a tip for those of you who may be lucky enough to have the plaster-stripping experience in your future. Do not undertake this task whilst wearing a low v-neck t-shirt. Plaster chips in the bra are neither comfortable nor erotic, whatever you might have heard previously.

cake du jour

touring the facilities

I sit in the garden wearing headphones and trying not to sing out loud, squeezed into a small and ever-decreasing patch of sun; drawing pictures of cake.

Mainly I am drawing the pictures of cake because I meant to be drawing something else, but the thinking about something else has unlocked the pressing need to record all the cakes I can think of; and unlike the other thing I am not having any trouble with thinking about cake. Cake and I have had a long and happy relationship. Rare are the times that cake lets you down, forgets to call, says something which touches an uncomfortable nerve. And if it does? You eat the bugger and buy another one.

I get to about 15 kinds of cake without really trying to think about it, and then add another five or six with a minimum of effort. Then I decide to do the food shopping. As I am excited by my cake-ish list I think about the drawings as I drive. I come up with a couple more kinds of cake, and then I start to add rules. I will only draw the cakes that my mother made when I was little. I will only draw cakes that I have eaten with friends. I will exclude tray-baked cakes, anything including the word 'bread', tarts of any description. Slowly, I make it harder for myself. Take something which was fun, and turn it into work. Build restrictions and traps into my creativity which are pretty much guaranteed to force boredom or failure.

Luckily; and probably for the first time, I realise what I'm doing to myself and stop. I decide instead to draw every kind of cake I can think of, eaten and uneaten, whether cooked by my Mother or Marks and Spencer, the only rule being that I fancy drawing it. Then I can put them into categories if I so desire. Or not, as the case may be. I also reserve for myself the right to stop drawing pictures of cake whenever I feel like it. It isn't work.

short skirt, long jacket

When I rang my Dad on Saturday to enquire about fixing the dripping bath taps he said 'I don't think you should do any more DIY this weekend'.

So I didn't. Instead, I mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, went to the library, did several loads of washing and drew 27 different kinds of cake. Admittedly this included jam tart, which I am not sure really counts as cake.

I have since thought of a 28th.

I am the countess of cake.

sleep tight

bedroom?
Originally uploaded by etcher67.

I suspect that there are hotels in Soho or the City where this finish on the walls is all part of the exclusive designer decor.

Probably they come without the piles of dust, though. And the gaping hole in the corner which seems strangely damp despite all that roofing work last summer.

Hair and lime plaster really is horrible stuff. I expect it's animal hair, but I can't help the fleeting suspiscion that little girls in the workhouse were shorn of their tresses in order to make my bedroom walls...

best foot forward

The Unreliable One returns. It's quite a story: go and see.

rip it up

In a moment of Wednesday-evening insanity I decide to begin stripping my bedroom wallpaper. The second plasterer who came said he couldn't give me a proper quote until the wallpaper was off and the wardrobes removed, and I've had a fierce-looking wallpaper stripper standing by my bed for a week or so now, since the first plasterer came around. It was only a matter of time.

I slip the blade into the hideous purple textured wallpaper, and give it a little push. A spectacularly small piece of wallpaper comes away. I push a little more vigorously and a sucession of little bits come off. Most of the lower layers of wallpaper stay stubbornly attatched to the wall.

I push the blade under the lower layers of paper, determined to do a proper job. I doubt that plasterers will skim papery walls. A long strip of wallpaper peels away easily, and as it does so a little shower of something hits my head. Plaster. I have just pulled a six-inch wide strip of plaster off my wall, still attatched to the wallpaper. It seems that the wallpaper glue is stronger than the plaster underneath it. It is at this point I remember that wallpaper stripping is not amongst my favourite activities.

I take a deep breath, count to ten, and resign myself to stripping the plaster from my walls. I also decide that if I finish the bedroom this weekend, I'll start on the bathroom.

Then I might begin training as a plasterer.

sugar in my bowl

When I am super-tired, because I have been burning the candle at both ends, simple things begin to take on enormous significance. The brain fixates on things that happen all the time, every day, and I notice them for seemingly the first time.

I stand in the kitchen looking at the cup I have just poured boiling water into. The tea I have made is steaming. Does it always steam like that? There seems to be a lot of steam. The water was boiling - that's obviously why it's steaming. Gosh, look at all that steam. If I pour in milk will it stop? Pour in milk. It's still quite steamy. Better leave it for a bit.

while there's moonlight and music and love and romance

I go back to work, and suddenly I have nothing to say. This may well be because when I am at work I spend ALL DAY saying things. Telling him this, asking her that, answering a question, answering it again...answering it again...answering it again.

And then again: just for luck.

By the end of the working day my brain is a fuzzy mess, filled with mental static.

Bzzzzzt.

passing round the ready rub

It is traditional at the beginning of the school year to spend a couple of nights tossing and turning and staring balefully at the light on the alarm clock whilst the little hours click past. This ensures that one returns to school feeling almost as tired and stressed as you did at the end of term, though without the sleep debt that made it almost impossible to think a happy thought about anyone or anything other than spending a week in bed eating cake.

Fortunately staff meetings involving the term's dates go some way towards righting the debt, if you can remember to treat them as a meditation session and not listen too hard. The stains on the carpet make a good mandela if doodling isn't your thing and you can't quite see out of the window. I lifted my head briefly to look around at the vacant stares in mine this morning and could have sworn that everyone had died. They all stood up at the end, so it appears that it was only the death of freedom from managerial bullshit we were communally celebrating.

I'd broken my no bitching resolution by 10am. I think that's a record; though actually one of the things that struck me today was how much I really like some of the people that I work with. Thank goodness for mercies such as that.

don't come the cowboy with me, sonny jim

The front gardens of the houses down my street mainly have a low Edwardian wall with a wide concrete cap, and cemented-in holes where the iron railings used to be. Mine has an ugly 1980's-ish textured monstrosity which needs tying in before it drops onto and kills a passing daschund, another job which I'm currently steadfastly ignoring. About once every time I walk up the road or down to the Co-Op I wish that I had the nice low wall.

I just found two-and-a-half foot of the original cap at the bottom of my (empty, concrete, doomed) pond. Which I can't lift. Well, not without breaking myself, and I have done enough damage already today from shifting the soil that's in it. I strongly suspect that the cap-in-the-pond is about to become a feature of my garden. Luckily the ivy which grows through the cracks in the walls and floor will soon grow up and make it look (slightly?) more picturesque.

In other news, the top end of my pond seems to be mainly constructed from the tiles which once surrounded my front door (or a fire surround, as another bit appears to be a glomerate ex-hearthstone), and now exist only in about three of the houses up the street. They are mustard yellow, and victoria green, and heavily embossed. The cement they've been stuck together with has reacted with the original clay and they are also completely and utterly buggered.

Some days I'd like to get hold of the previous owner of this house and shake him firmly by the throat. I can live with his useless chipboard kitchen, and his bohemian bordello bathroom, have already obliterated his broomstick bannisters and his pub-lite living room and I have murderous schemes afoot for his fitted wardrobes; but he's still he's torturing me long distance. Laughing at me across the decades through the medium of rubble, fucked-up features, artex and suspended ceilings. Fuckwit.

stuck like glue

So, what did you do with your summer?

Um...What did I do with my summer, exactly?

Oh dear. I don't think I actually did anything. I have finally got around to washing the kitchen floor: does that count? A thousand half-started resolutions, this summer has been. I feel bad about it. I have been wasting my time, frittering the days away when I ought to have been doing something constructive, like conquering the world or finding the inner artist, who seems to have ducked out for the moment. Again. Not doing any drawing, not collecting my materials from the studio, not writing that second story....not falling in love, not stripping the wallpaper, not losing any weight. Not stopping writing vaguely self-pitying posts on my blog.

I fixed the bathroom taps yesterday?