Salt and corrosion

I offer you this sentence from today's local paper:

Defence counsel Glenn Casement said ... after a raid by fisheries officers, Robinson’s wife left him and his client realised he had no future in the fishing industry.

Anyone wanting to write a tragedy, there's a story for you.

Walking to work this morning, I passed a man with a clipboard saying to a group of teenagers standing around him, "Look at this junction box placed so close to that one over there. That means that the street has been modified at some point." I was tempted to stay and find out what else I could learn about the street, but they moved around the corner.

Last night I saw an episode of one of the Law and Orders (Laws and Orders?). There were three men on trial for an especially heinous crime, and while giving evidence, one of the witnesses confessed to also being involved. So at the end of the episode, the lawyers were having their little chat about the case, and revealed that the three accused were found guilty and sentenced to however many years, and the witness who confessed got one year. That's not how it works, is it? You can't just confess to a crime you haven't been charged with, then get sentenced. Wouldn't the witness have to go through his own process?

I finally packed up the cat bowls, toys and brushes in a box last night and stored them in the cat carrier in the garage. I haven't had the heart to do it before. My mum is taking all the tins and unopened bags of dry food to one of her friends (for her cat, presumably, not herself), and I'm soaking a handful of the opened dry food in water each night and leaving it out for the birds. I thought that was the end of it, but I had an email from my friendly local supermarket this morning. They thought I might be interested to know that some of the things I buy often are on sale this week. First, toilet paper... yes, I'll own up to buying that on a regular basis. Second, Dijon mustard... well, I suppose. Do I really buy that much Dijon mustard, Coles? So much that your system has me down as some sort of Dijon mustard freak? Okay then. And third, Kangaroo Snackers Cat Treats. Oh no, Coles, not any more.

Someone on Downton Abbey just said, 'I'll get Mrs Patmore to organise refreshment for the Village People.' That seems unlikely, I must say.

Over summer, my mother had some of her trees trimmed and mulched, and this weekend I have been helping her spread it around her garden. Shovel, shovel, shovel. And now my shoulder's sore. Hmph.

While doing all that shovelling, I got to hear all about my mother's ongoing battle with her arch-enemy, also known as her Bosch CombiTrim whipper-snipper (which some of you may know as a line trimmer or a strimmer, I believe). It's... oh, it's a long story. It's unsatisfactory, is one way to put it. She's been taking comfort in reading one-star reviews of it online, which is something she came up with doing all by herself. That is also something I enjoy. It's a bit disconcerting to find that it's genetic.

When I first arrived at my mother's I had to wait before turning into the driveway while she moved her car and the trailer full of mulch out of the way. Only then another car came along the narrow little road, and I had to go past the driveway entrance to let it pass. And then, right, I had to do a three-point turn so I could get back to where I had to be, and it was perfect. PERFECT. I don't often have to do three-point turns, and when I do it's more of a twenty-point turn, but not this one. I almost wished I was doing a driving test, because I would have got top marks. And no-one was around to see me do it, so I thought I would record it here for posterity.

She'll have to go faster than everyone else if she wants to win this race.

I don't know much about winter sports, but I think had a fairly good grasp of the above principle without being told, thank you, Mr Commentator. I later heard a different commentator give a history of snowboarding, including this claim:

Of course, back in 1965, it started out as snurfing.

I think Grandpa Simpson might have written that script.

Today I received my work's IT consultant bill. I just have to pay it, but I like to flick through and see what problems people have been reporting. Today the best one was this:

Jo Anne has accidentally renamed her Outlook mailbox 'Vicki' and cannot change it back.

I'd like to know how that happened.

Why are television police stations so poorly lit? I am watching Whitechapel, and I am just wishing that someone would turn on a light in their office. It's a safety hazard, the dim light they're working in. Where's OH&S when you need them?

I have learnt two things today. One I looked up, and one I sort of stumbled upon. The first thing was that I thought to look up something that happens to me when I go to sleep most nights. Just as I'm about to drop off, I get this one whole body tic that wakes me up, then I can go to sleep. And that, it turns out, is called generally a myoclonic jerk, and when it relates to falling asleep, a hypnic jerk. So there we go.

The thing I stumbled upon was Morton's toe, which is what it's called when your second toe is longer than your big toe. This is my foot! Both of them, even. I have never previously considered that this was notable, and certainly not worthy of having a name. Apparently the Statue of Liberty has the same.

'I'll be in town Wednesday, so I'll come round for dinner,' said my mother to me on the phone. 'I'm having a mastectomy in the afternoon.'

'What?'

'No, a mammogram. Hahaha. I hope they don't make the same mistake on the day.'

Quite.

We had an election on Saturday. I'm not thrilled with the result, but, eh, the sun still rises. By coincidence, I had theatre tickets for Saturday night, so I didn't have to watch the results in real time. I think it was good to be out of the house for that. I went to see The 39 Steps. I must have read the book at some stage, as some of it seemed very familiar*, but I know I haven't seen the Hitchcock film. I can't imagine it was anything like this though, seeing as this was a comedy. One actor played the lead all the way through, with three other actors playing all the other roles. One scene had one actor playing a train conductor, a passenger and a policeman having a conversation, all just by changing his hat. Also, dodgy accents, ahoy. Good stuff, and much more entertaining than election night TV when the results go the wrong way.

We have two houses of parliament, being the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Reps is where the local members do their thing; the Senate is for state members. The Senate ballot paper, being for the whole state, is enormous. There were ninety-seven candidates listed on a metre-long ballot paper. So that was fun. There are two ways to vote for Senators. There's a line across the paper, with the parties that the candidates belong to listed above the line and each candidate listed below it. So, if you're lazy like me, you can vote 'above the line' by simply putting a 1 in the box for your preferred party, or, if you're up for it, you can vote 'below the line' by numbering each candidate from 1 to 97. My mother, bless her, insists that democracy can only be served by voting below the line. She gives it lot of thought, too. 'If they're anti-anything, I put them last,' she told me. 'I don't mind them being for things, but just being anti is too negative. So I put Stop the Greens at ninety-seven.'

'What if there was a party that was anti something bad?' I asked. 'Would you put the Anti-Racism Party last?'

There was a pause.

'I'll have to re-think that.'

What else? Oh, play the Great Language Game! I scored 600. If I'm honest, it should have only been 500 because I got two questions right purely by luck. And one was a bonus because the dialogue included the word Bratislava when the language options were Urdu and Slovak, so I made an educated guess.



* I haven't read it, I realise, having looked it up on Wikipedia. I saw a TV version starring Rupert Penry-Jones.

Last year I bought some cat thyme. I thought it might be a little treat for Percy. Was it ever. Even one little leaf of it turns him into a wild-eyed, tree-climbing loon. Potent stuff.

Because it was so tiny, I put it in a little terracotta pot and put it on top of the washing machine (which gets the sun) for a few days. Percy doesn't spend any time in the laundry as a general rule, but he knew that poor little plant was there. I spent a weekend lifting him off the washing machine and repotting the plant where he'd pulled it out. Monday morning, I thought, I can't leave him alone in the house with it, so I moved it outside. And moved it when he found it again. And moved it again. I finally found somewhere safe for it by hiding the terracotta pot in the middle of an overgrown parsley plant, and it has spent a few months recovering.

It rained heavily yesterday, so I brought all my little pot-plants in under the patio, including the cat thyme. This morning, it is on the ground, the pot is shattered and the plant is chewed. I can't blame Percy this time, because he was asleep on my foot all night, although he did work himself into a sniffing and rolling frenzy in the dirt when I was trying to re-pot the plant this morning. Poor little plant. So potent it lures passing cats in the night.

What else? Oh, television. My mother and John were in for dinner last night. My mother generally limits her television viewing to things that have the words 'Midsomer' and 'Murders' in the title, but every now and then she will get sucked in to watching something else. Right now it is a terrible, terrible show called A Place to Call Home. Even she says it's terrible, but she can't stop, and she made me watch it last night too. And it was terrible, yet weirdly addictive. It's set in rural Australia in the 1950s, about a wealthy family whose troubles are almost entirely of their own making and who talk in some of the most stilted dialogue I've ever heard. The most sympathetic characters were Gay Grandson and English Wife*, who wants to get away from the family (I hear you, English Wife); he doesn't want to leave the family home, but then he finds himself attracted to Hunky Farmhand who likes to lift bales of hay while not wearing a shirt, so he agrees to move away to avoid cheating on his wife. So she says, 'Let's go to Sydney!' and he's all, good idea, there won't be any hunky men there! I feel there is a flaw in this plan. But those were the two characters I liked most, so I will cut them some slack.

The worst characters were the two lady villains, who were villainous for very low stakes. These were not villains that you could watch and say, 'Oh, good point, lady villain, I admire your magnificent style.' One was annoying, the other one was horrible. The annoying one was the family matriarch, Controlling Biddy. She seems to be against anything she doesn't think of first. She was clearly meant to be impressive, but she was just a pest. She was more impressive than the other lady villain, though, who is some sort of old friend staying with the family. She wants to marry Widowed Son against Controlling Biddy's wishes, although Controlling Biddy is also against Widowed Son's relationship with Nice Nurse, the woman he is in love with. Now, a different, more subtle, show would make this an interesting development: will he marry Family Friend, or Nice Nurse? This is not that show. No. Nice Nurse is a Holocaust survivor; Family Friend marches right up to her and spews out an anti-Semitic diatribe, leaving us in no doubt as to whose side we should be on. It ended with Controlling Biddy telling Widowed Son that she would change her will to disinherit him and leave everything to Gay Grandson if he doesn't break up with Nice Nurse. He immediately rushed to the hospital to find Nice Nurse and asked her to marry him. Cliffhanger! (Actually, now I think about it, Widowed Son and Nice Nurse were also sympathetic characters; I think I was more drawn to Gay Grandson and English Wife because they didn't spend any time with Controlling Biddy and Family Friend.)

Also, all the male characters on this show looked alike. Widowed Son and Gay Grandson are meant to be father and son, so that's good casting, but Hunky Farmhand, Alcoholic Doctor and Italian Neighbour all looked like them too. It was as though a plague of chin dimples swept across rural Australia, and no man was safe.





* I didn't understand why Gay Grandson is married to English Wife, but my mother said that Controlling Biddy forced him to marry her (English Wife) when she (Controlling Biddy) realised that he was in love with English Wife's brother. English Wife only found out about this after the wedding.

The thing about the Olympics is that it's not just athletes who go. It's also our most irritating television personalities, so, unless you live in the host nation, you can wander the streets safe in the knowledge that [insert your own most irritating television personality] is out of the country. On the downside, it means that if you want to watch the Olympics, you can't get away from them.

I don't normally watch breakfast television, but this morning I thought it might be nice to see if anything interesting happened, Olympically speaking, overnight. Apparently, some Australian swimmers didn't swim as fast as some other countries' swimmers, so I was treated to an interview with one of these slow swimmers, and the incredibly irritating interviewer said to him, 'So... what happened? We were expecting a medal.'

To his credit, the slow swimmer didn't hurl a cushion at her and shout, 'You think it's so easy? You have a go, then!' Honestly, stupid woman. They don't get a medal just for turning up, no matter how good they are on paper.

And that's why I don't normally watch breakfast television.

Then I read this, which is about a different variety of stupid person.

Here are some photos of the inside of hot air balloons. I love hot air balloons. I would like to live in one.

Also, here is an albino echidna, which is the cutest thing I've seen all day.

My mother was delighted when I spoke to her on the phone the other night. She said she was waiting for Downton Abbey to start the other day when she saw a promo for Dancing with the Stars. 'They're going to do a tribute to the Bee Gees!' she told me. 'Do you think it would be tactless to include Stayin' Alive?'

I said that would be a tribute to just Barry Gibb, surely, and she laughed and laughed and laughed.

I'm still reading Lady Audley's Secret. I'll report more when I finish part two, but today I came across a baffling concept. To set the scene, Robert Audley has taken custody of George Talboys' six-year-old son, and has asked him if he would like some lunch:

The boy burst out laughing.

'Lunch!' he cried. 'Why, it's afternoon, and I've had my dinner.'

Robert Audley felt himself brought to a standstill. What refreshment could he possibly provide for a boy who called it afternoon at three o'clock?

I'm with Georgy here. Three o'clock is smack bang in the middle of the afternoon as far as I'm concerned, so I don't understand what Robert thinks it is. Mid-morning? Then again, in the previous chapter Robert sat in his easy chair to smoke a pipe, then wheeled it to the other side of the room, which, I mean, what is that? A wheeled armchair? It is a strange world that Robert lives in, so I'm not surprised he doesn't know what an afternoon is.

If you have been waiting on tenterhooks to find out about the man on MasterChef who was having trouble getting a can he was using as stuffing out of his roast chicken, well, wait no more. It was on last night. The can contained cider. I'm guessing they made him put it in a clean peach tin because a can of cider would have a (non-sponsor's) logo on it. And that would also explain why he was having trouble getting it out, since the peach tin would be slightly wider than a cider can. So... not as exciting as I expected. But tonight's episode introduced the concept of mussel custard. That was two words I had not previously considered together, and never want to consider together again.

I was reminded today of something I watched on TV last year. Basically, a man found a painting on the side of the road near a rubbish tip, liked it and took it home. Twenty years later, his daughter took it to be valued on Antiques Roadshow, where she found it was quite valuable. So she tried to sell it at auction, only to have the original owners stop the sale because they'd only just discovered it was missing. At the end of the program, the painting was in safekeeping at the auction house and the lawyers had joined the fray. It was a battle of good versus evil in that the woman selling the painting was painted (ha) as a plucky battler and the original owner who took two decades to notice his painting was missing was so odious you couldn't help but want him to be in the wrong. Odious or not, though, I do think he was in the wrong. Anyway, as I said, I was reminded of it today, and started wondering how it ended up. After a bit of searching I can say: it still seems to be undecided. So that was an anti-climax.

Tonight I watched that Stephen Fry on language thing, the episode about swearing and other taboos. He interviewed a nurse, who said that if somebody died on the ward, staff will ring the porters and say, 'We have a gentleman to go to Rose Cottage,' thus not upsetting anyone overhearing this with mention of bodies and morgues. I looked at my mother with raised eyebrows. She understood the implied question.

'We would ring and say, "Bring the trolley up",' she said. Not quite as subtle, that.

I have been trying f.lux on my computer the last few days. The first couple of evenings, I found it a bit strange when the screen changed colour, but I've decided I like it. So there we go.