Developers win again

A huge Chinese Developer has finally won and defeated little home owner, pensioner Wu Pin.

For more than 3 years this home has been stuck in the middle of a construction site in a pit in Chongqing city.

The developers want to turn the area into a $40m ‘Broadway’ square, including apartments and a shopping mall, and there’s no room for an ordinary house in there. They sued Mrs. Wu and pleaded for the court to issue an order to bulldoze the house. Finally the judge at Chongqing Jiulongpo district court decided that Mrs Wu must leave her villa, and it’s now been demolished. I would have put up a longer fight but who can ever win against those bloody developers?

Such a neat little cottage too, a bit like mine really, but with a better view. Mind you, it’s a lot easier for me to get to my local shop for a bottle of milk.

Thoroughly Modern Queenie

I’ve joined the modern age at last. I have a mobile phone, a DVD player and now a microwave oven.

I resisted the oven for years. All those microwaves flying loose about the house, who knows what damage they could be doing and what awful consequences of random radiation?

Would it reverse the air conditioning? Turn on the garden sprinklers? Give the budgie a brain tumour?

But my Council Home Help Girl insists the oven is safe and it wouldn’t matter if I became suddenly sterile anyway. So I now have this white box on my kitchen bench and the Girl is bringing me a little bag of wheat that you pop into the microwave, enter a PIN number or something and there you have it — a sort of waterless hot water bottle.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Summer is i- cumen in. Lhude sing blowfly

Summer is i-cumen in –/ Lhude sing, blowfly!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, blowfly!

Today I heard the first blow-fly of Summer.

While people in other climes use swallows to signify the warmer season, here we know the date by the humblie blowie. Ugly though this creature is, it signifies all of the delights that bound in with Summer.

Members of this unattractive family are known as bluebottles, clusterflies, greenbottles, and (in Britain and Australia) as blue-arsed flies. The name blow-fly comes from an older English term for meat that had eggs laid on it, which was said to be fly blown. (maggotty)

If you really need to know, the eggs are yellowish or white, and when laid, look like rice balls. The female blow-fly typically lays around 2,000 eggs during the course of her life. Watch out for little rice balls in your lamb sandwich.

Apparently the natural life history of the blowflies remains a largely untapped body of research. I hope it stays that way.

The truth about safety pins

Absolutely anything could be inside your kitchen drawers, I had a good look inside mine this morning. For 10 seconds. That was quite enough, thank you very much. I can live with the mothballs and the old cat collars, but it’s the safety pins that concern me.

I have a theory about the safety pins but I’m jumpy in case my Council Home Help Girl gets wind of it and reports me to the District Nurse as slipping into dementia. (She interferes like this all the time).

My theory is that safety pins breed in my drawers. Believe me, this actually happens. The common or garden safety pin is the larval stage of the coat hanger!

For years I wondered why I would have a drawer full of safety pins and nothing to hang my cardigans on, then, seemingly overnight, the safety pins would disappear and my wardrobe would be full of coat hangers.

Check it for yourself. Have a look in your own drawers.

Virgin Mary in my kitchen

I noticed this morning that I have two old kitchen towels hanging on the door of my oven which often resemble the Virgin Mary. (The towels, not the oven) If I crouch down and look sideways with one eye shut and slowly scrunch my neck, I can even see a Bleeding Heart of Jesus. Or maybe that’s the beetroot stain.

In any case, my Council Home Help girl is coming today and I must ask her to take a photo with her dirigible camera. Then I will post them for everyone to share.

I have to sit down with a small drop of sherry and think about the possible commercial aspects of manifestation. 

Is it Autumn already?

The amaryllis is coming up in my garden. Do my garden bulbs know more than I do about the seasons? Golly, it was 33 celsius today, that’s over 91 degrees in the old measurement. And my garden thinks the Summer is over?

In any case, I should be putting in my bulbs for Spring. You know what a bulb is? It’s a potential flower buried in Autumn, never to be seen again.

I’ve got these daffodils to go in, on the packet they’re described as “Carefree” and “Grandma’s Favourite”. Carefree usually refers more to the plant’s attitude than to my workload, and Grandma’s Favourite were the bulbs she planted until she discovered the free-flowering, disease-resistant hybrids.

Ah well, this is the time of year I remember that I have knees. (Knee: a device for finding rocks in your garden)

Foreigners have visited me

My neighbour put this little map in here. See it? Clust’r maps, in the right column there.

It shows me all these foreign lands with people who came here and looked at my diary. It gave me quite a turn! I had to sit down with an asprin and a small glass of sweet sherry to recover.

You would think these people had nothing better to do. Would you voluntarily choose to read an old lady’s diary? But I suppose foreigners have a different way of spending their time. When they have any time left over from growing their strange foreign vegetables.

They must get very tired speaking a foreign language too, it takes a lot out of you. I know what it’s like, a simple stroll to get a pint of milk from the corner shop can be exhausting.

With a bongiorno and a bella gianata to Mrs DiBenedetto and Mrs Poggioreale, a kalimera to Mrs Karayannis and a buenos dias to Mrs Ramirez, by the time I reach the corner I have to stop for a little rest. Fortunately Mrs Nguen speaks English.

The map shows people from USA have been here, I think they speak mainly English, a type of English at any rate, at least as understandable as Danish. Although I don’t think they actually grow any strange foreign vegetables or any vegetables at all for that matter. I’ve seen them on the telly, their vegetables come in packets.

It takes all types I suppose.

DIY hurts

I have had a blinding flash of revelation

DIY is an opportunity to add new injuries to your collection. There is the chance to aggravate existing conditions, or, if you overcompensate with fully functioning limbs, you can damage them instead.

My very own Life in Paradise on a Beach Somewhere

Well here it is, my own backyard beach. All it took was a couple of tins of paint and a few hours making a mess with a paintbrush and a spraycan on the brick wall. (Although I ruined a perfectly good pair of slippers).

Now I have my own Life in Paradise on a Beach Somewhere. It was worth putting up with the two hours I lost yesterday afternoon when I leaned over to smell the paint. Left me with a headache too.

I’m sure I don’t understand why all these poor Juvenile Delinquents from broken homes who suffered traumatic toilet training go around sniffing things of this nature from paper bags. It’s not a pleasant experience.

Give me a couple of Bex powders, an asprin in a glass of coca-cola, a strong cup of tea and a good afternoon nap and I’m ready for anything. I’ll take the old-fashioned drugs anytime. With a small glass of sweet sherry.

Life is too short

If life is too short to ice a cake, then it’s too short to hold a grudge.

So I swallowed my pride and some aspro and returned to the hardware store for more paint. I even found the same young man to help me, and this time I was quite quick in choosing the exact shade of brown, not too dark, some tan, a bit of orange but not too much, a sort of dullish yet warm brown with an undercurrent of earthy tones yet with a lightness to it. It took me only a little over an hour.

As I was leaving, I noticed the young man had made a mistake, I wanted one gallon, he gave me two. I tried to give him the other gallon back, he refused to take it! Extraordinary.

He absolutely insisted that I should take double what I needed, he told me that he didn’t want me to trouble myself by coming back to his shop again.

What a charming young chap. Now that’s good manners.