Author: basgallop

botched up spelling botticelli
or something similar

Ker-splash!
I jumped in the sea on Christmas day.
wakes you up.
It’s the local tradition at the forty foot swimming place in Dublin, just below James Joyces Martello tower
(‘stately plump buck mulligan’), hundreds of folk take the plunge, many in fancy dress, a great festive occasion.

A couple of years ago i managed to swear at pams mum, a good catholic woman
Just as i was getting out she asked ‘how was it?’, to which i naturally replied ‘f***ing freezing!!!’

This year, there was a seal swimming about too, guess he was curious about the kerfuffle?
It’s not that cold when your in, but afterwards the wind chill really gets you, my goosebumps had goosebumps!

Afterwards i wore a towel turban wrapped about my head and slurped a sizeable glass of brandy, teeth cha-t-t-ering against the rim
I asked Finn, who had his new christmas camera at the ready, ‘did you get a picture of me jumping in?’
‘aww Dad, your going to have to do it again. Spiderman jumped in just before you, so i took a picture of him instead’

hrrumphh
……..

goodness no! I’m not one of those mexican cliff diving tarzan types,
I reckon it was about a 10ft drop max, i guess the 40ft is similar to the possibly slightly spurious length of an irish mile?
forty foot is the name of the place

the water in the Irish sea is alledgedly warmer due to Sellafield (springfield. doh) Nuclear power station

‘the snot green, scrotum tightenning sea’
as Joyce, echoing the ‘wine dark’ sea of the oddyssey calls it.

yep i’ll be in come the summer, me, David Walliams and Moby Dick, your welcome to join us Ed

I helped bring down the Berlin wall, mostly it was Gorby, me and David Hasselhoff
I was there a few months after it happened, the main tourist attraction at the time was getting a hammer and bashing slabs off of it
It was brilliant destructive fun, even better than jumping on sandcastles
All the way along the wall, there were ladders you could climb, so i felt like a bit like Kiki the frog, from Hectors house… or going up the ladder was like, in the old days, bunking over the fence at Glastonbury!

Once up the top, you could heave ho, bash out all your angst, biff bosh heartily away at it.

I had a small paleontologists hammer, so it was more dinosaur hunting at Lyme Regis than the crumbling edifice of communism
Viva Zapata! Long live Trotsky! should have borrowed his ice pick…
the last piece i knocked down with my juggling club (sigh. idiot!)

At home somewhere my lumpen proleteriat piece of the wall looks a little like moon rock, ‘cept from concrete, with a few daubs of graffiti spray colour.
I’m not as proud of it as my piece of the West Pier, from the day it burned down, this sits proudly on my computer, looking like a very charred piece of toast
or even of the piece of turf from QPR when they….

…. I guess the answer as to where to stay in Berlin or Barcelona is nope! not a breeze
If the question was Berlin or Barcelona, then Barcelona is just a zillion times better

frog mouse monsoon rescue

‘Lord won’ t you buy me a mercedes benz, my friends all have porsches, i must make amends…’
as mz joplin would have it

…………
………………..
I got an overnight lift once in a merc… though it was on the back of a trailer and was sorta being smuggled into the Czech Republic.
I was hitching home to Prague from Slovenia and had wangled a lift from a Slovenian cycle team, upside down bikes on the top of the car and air horns!
afterwards i got completely marooned on the austrian/czech border, but was befriended by a Russian fellow, who was waiting to pick up a trailer load of mercedes and felt like some company to help him drink his vodka
It was one of those bottles, with just a foil lid, like a milk bottle!
He dropped me off, a bit hungover , in the center of old town prague, first thing next morning.. and it was my birthday!

Russian season, as at the time, for a few weeks, i was sharing a room with a Russian, curiously, called Ivan, he had been a paratrooper in Afghanistan and spoke almost no English
Every morning he’d say ‘Vakky ooop! Vakky oop!’
took me a while to work out he was saying ‘wake up, wake up!’
His other snippet of english was ‘Maggot Tatcher’.
Margaret Thatcher!

and this is what the mercedes museum looks like!

when i was younger there was a great indie song ‘i was only a prawn in whitby’, which somewhat bewildered me

are there lots of prawns there? as well as being an epic programmer/ tester spawning ground

The Long Man of Wilmington!
the other week we were up on the hill above it.
having wheelbarrow races over the neolithic long barrows
‘cept Sherbailey managed to put her hand in some cow muck
what would you rather do?
run a mile
jump a stile
or eat a country pancake?

to distract her i explained there was a Princess buried below and that she had once ruled all the land that we could see, from that hill over there, all the way to the rustle silver sea.
Well and good, but the kids are nowadays suspicious of such stories, possibly on account of me telling the exact same tale once in Salt Dean Park
My brother rather cruelly pointed out that, the mound i had claimed as a long barrow, was in fact a grown over bunker from a long lost pitch and putt course!
Still Celtic Princess, a golden torc, dem Bones, burried ‘neath the bunker on the 17th green
seems quite Romantic to me!

here are the four separate riddles from the katie morag stories
a red haired scottish lass, who lives on the isle of Struay

four stiff standers
four dilly danders
two lookers
two crookers
and a wig wag

a wee, wee man
In a dark red coat
a staff in my hand
and a a stone in my throat
who am I?

the land was white
the seed was black
it will take me a good scholar
to riddle me that

as round as an apple
as deep as a pail
it never cries out
till it’s caught by it’s tail

………
can’t sleep! try valerian and the cha cha cha… no that was another fred
i’ll tell you by end of the day

oops nearly forgot!
the answers were:
a cow
a cherry
a book
and a bell