Author: basgallop

somebody mentioned Rod Stewart the other day, i met his cousin at a wedding, years ago, she was quite a hoot, similar poodle blonde hair and healthy appetites

heres a very old email tale. hum drum, tum te tum umpteen times
……
……………….
went to a scottish hippy wedding yonks ago, all tartan and dreadlocks, sarongs and grannies and lots of wafty purple. pleasantly wild!

It was in Geoffs parents garden, out in North Berwick,
right on the edge of the Firth of Forth, just below North Berwick Law,
a traditionally bleak scottish hillside, this one though had the giant jaw bone of a whale on top of it.
The house was an odd rambling, bewildering place, the 3 kids (one was called Hamish!) had built it all themselves

A great day, giddy highland reels and jigs, dancing with all the grannies,
flinging myself about the dance floor, free reeling bob dylan, endlessly guzzling malt whisky

anyway ended the night, blearily, bundled off into a bedroom, with the best woman, Nickii, shelter some sleep under a huge scrummage pile of colourful south american jumpers.
half way through the night, mouthful of wool… fell off the couch… almost woke up… head spins … ‘bleagggh, where am i’
stumbled to the loo, but somehow blundered back the wrong way in the dark,ended up in a bedroom, was it ours?

i was like harshly hoarsely whispering ‘Nickii, Nickii, you there?’
then keeping dead still, i could hear breathing….two people breathing, ooops!
yikes, my thoughts turned to escape
rattled at the door handle, couldn’t get out, somehow had become locked in, trapped!
worse gradually, the breathing pattern had changed the sleepers were now awake….

finally they flicked on the light.
There sitting up in bed, bedecked in pink nighties and pyjamas…. were the brides parents.

‘aaah good evening.how are you?’ , found the lock, threw the door open and fled!

thanks to aidan…
from the web…

Can any one tell me why we get like electric shocks or whatever
when we chew on a piece of aluminum foil (with silver fillings in a couple of teeth)?

That is exactly what you get…an electric shock. The filling is
made of an amalgam of mercury and either tin or silver. When the aluminum foil touches the filling, a galvanic cell is created in the mouth.
Aluminum is the anode, the filling is the cathode and the saliva is the electrolyte ‘salt bridge.’ The contact essentially short circuits the cell and a small amount of current flows which is sensed by the nerves in the teeth. There is the pain you feel.

matt: ‘Epic Performance Improvement Limited’ eh? Does anyone else think that we missed a trick here? If we’d called ourselves Epic Performance Improvement Co.’ then the acronym would have been EPIC! Which is also a recursive acronym in the classic style, e.g. PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), GNU (GNU is Not Unix), SAAB (Saab Automobile Aktiebolaget), VISA (Visa International Service Association) etc.

………….
i like the idea of mats recursive giddy spiralling in acronyms,
bit like that artwork in the great salt lake
spiral jetty – Robert Smithson

I enjoyed ‘my name is red’, read
ideal if you like books about murder amongst Ottoman turk miniaturist painters

anybody read any good books recently?
would be great to have some suggestions

last week, i read ‘a winter book’, the selected short stories of Tove Jannsen, you know the kooky old Finnish/Swedish woman who wrote the Moomintrolls, ‘cept stories for grown ups
first time i read the book i thought it was slight, but now on the second time through it’s quite beguiling!
kind of happy and peculiar, with lots of fear and the sea

I think it’s partly a Finnish thing as my friend Rikka was just lovely, but some days she’s get a spooked out faraway look and it really would be best to just leave her alone

Tove lived on an island in the bay of Finland, her other tale ‘The Summer Book’, is set on the island, and is just about a small girl and her grandma and their adventures. lurvely

actually prob best just to read ‘Finn Family Moomintroll’ again!

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Tom McCarthy – Remainder
Ever heard of him Richard?
……
ha. the shame! not being able to finish my mates book.
nearly made it to the end but stumbled at the final hurdle
It’s really good, but he does go on a bit

I shall think up some Tom in Prague tales for you

once, in a hammock, i read about 1000 pages of Keseys ‘sometimes a great notion’ only to find that the last 5 pages were ripped out! cruel
i still wonder what happened.
…….
still thinking about the hammock, on the same day, i found a cockroach in my stash of ganja cookies.
he looked a bit like a dried apricot or a date and was happily wriggling his legs
I set him free
then to compensate i drank too much mekong whiskey and must have gone for a dip…. with my passport…. as it was completely soaked the following morning

some days

……..
who remembers when wangchuk got a salad box from food for friends?
he opened it up and went ‘ugggghhh a slug’, he dashed back to the restaurant to complain
the owner plucked the offending ‘slug’ out and ate it
‘aah dried apricot’

….talking of dried fruit, that is

wood waffle

Hmm all a bit higgledy piggledy the seasons at the mo
when i was in the woods in surrey at the weekend, there were still a few lingering summer Roses, autumn yellow leaves confetti stuck onto the branches, a thin layer of ice on the surface of the ponds and strangest of all, many of the trees were in full blossom … catkins too
some birds, but mostly green parakeets flip flapping overhead
a breeding pair escaped in the seventies and have been whooping it up ever since.
Whatever next.
Pterodactyls?

any suggestions for things to entertain kids in the winters woods?

have stick sword fights
see spooky faces in long toppled over rotten tree trunks, we spotted a wooly mammoth in one
pretend your in a beatles movie
play pooh sticks
stumble stuck, squelch stagger through muddy puddles. ‘Oh Sib-é-a-l your dress!’
hug a tree, many of the trunks have a girth of 3 persons finger tip stretch. impressive
Search for dragons nests
poke a stick into holes beneath trees, rude, but who knows who or what might just pop out
break pieces of ice off from the edge of the pond, then hurl them across the ice, as they whoop holler whistle skip skiddadle out of sight.
and my favourite, run very fast down incredibly steep hills. geronimo!

……….
ah now what i actually meant to say was

we three kings of orient are
one in a taxi, one in a car
one on a scooter, beeping his hooter
smoking a fat cigar… wearing a womans bra

oh star of wonder, star of light
jesus set his pants alight
…… etc …
…..

Steiner School Christmas Bazaar
this Saturday (2nd) prob elevenish till late afternoon
Arundel Road, the far end of Kemp Town, opposite Mulberry Wines, just before the road goes up to Whitehawk
a great place to buy christmas gifts, particularly ones made from lumps of wood and other sundry hippy knick knacks
They’ll be a cafe with lots of homemade cake.. and carol singing
the perfect cure for post christmas party doldrums
………..

bump, bazaar this saturday
…
but as i’m here, may as well burble on about the steiner school as it’s the advent spiral festival today,
very sweet just for the little ones, 4 – 6 year olds

they all have to wear dark colours, blue or black and very quietly shuffle into the school hall.
It’s eerie dark, theres a fiddle playing in the background and a woman squawk singing peculiar celtic melodies
taking up most of the floor, laid out in pine needles and other greenery is a labyrinth,
the teacher bearing a lit apple candle, solemnly walks this leaf spiral in to the center, where she waits.
The first child takes an unlit apple candle, then follows the maze path (often skipping or jogging as kids do)
when they get to the middle they light their candle from the teachers candle, turn about and walk the path back out again
wherever they wish within the maze, they place the candle on the floor, then continue slowly on to the end.
child by child each does this in turn.
the effect of this is that the room starts dark, but after 40 kids have been around, the entire labyrinth and room is lit up with the comfortable flicker of candle light.
Not a word is spoken
moving

oh and i guess the symbolism malarkey is the obvious, the labyrinth is the path of life, the candle each childs immortal soul spark, the importance of choice as to where to place your candle
this season of the year is about silence, the seed nurtured within the soil, light hidden in the darkness
hippy stuff
gawd knows what the wailing singings all about!

……….
When Kafka went to see Steiner in search of enlightenment, Steiner spent the entire interview burrowing a handkerchief up his nose.

………
his first name was Rudolph
Rudolph the Red nosed Steiner

i can’t imagine that meeting would have been a barrel of laughs
crack open another bottle of bollinger Franz. nope

Freud though was a notorious coke head