Category: epic posts

do you know the very narrow lane, twitten, twixt the black lion and the cricketers?
apparently back in Stuart times when Charles was making his escape to France,
he was getting a piggy back along there, he didn’t wish to get muck on his winkle pickers, doublet and hose.
He met a rather portly Fish wife coming the other way, she was rather flustered and too wide to reverse, so they had to bowl her over and step over her as she lay on the ground.
With Royal manners like that, little wonder they chopped his dads ‘ead orf!

oh and later there was a famous race, where a tubby fella bet he could bet a renowned athlete he could beat him in a race, so long as he had a 10 yard headstart and could choose the course.
they raced along that alley and the athlete couldn’t get past him! genius

….response to a post

tomatoes are brilliant, dead easy and the taste is umpteen times better than the shop rubbish

Jonny has an allotment, he’d know

holy smoke as seen on the Kent Police website

…response to a post

East Dean!
I took the kids there last summer and it was brilliant, a hidden valley in the heart of the South Downs, surrounded by beech forest. Gerronimo Rope Swings

Extremely Cheap. No loos

New House Farm East Dean Chichester West Sussex

…………….
Those pesky ponies in the New Forest tho’
when i was about 5 my family went for a picnic there we were attacked by them, my sister was kicked by a stallion
she still has a lucky horseshoe hoofprint mark on her leg (some sorta stigmata!)
my mum whisked me and my younger sister away to safety, whilst my dad somehow hoiked the back seat out of the car and fought the stallion off, by this time the horse was rearing up like billyo. Hi Ho Silver!
Kemo Sabe Tonto
Dads are SuperHeros
Somehow amidst the meleé and kerfuffle my 2 year old brother was completely overlooked and stayed cheerfully playing on the picnic rug.

…answer to a post

don’t bash the gnasher! He’s a hero!
I have a furry Gnasher badge with wobbly eyes amongst my desktop clutter collection of shells, marbles and feathers.
Actually he only has 1 eye as the other wobbled off.
It’s a proper members badge, which i ‘borrowed’ off Finn a year ago, he hasn’t noticed it’s missing

as well as Gnasher Dennis had a pet pig called… Rasher!

the bash st kids are the best tho’

…answer to a post….

i have neglected to have my tuppeny haporth worth of opinion!

hmmm if he’s after an sas style macho ‘eagle eyes, fuzzy felt hair’ action man book i’d recommend ‘Into Thin Air’, by John Krakatoa.
it’s a real life story, by a bloke who was on the expedition, of people dying on Everest

Theres some poor project leader fellow, trapped just below the summit, on the radio, he gets patched through by the internet to have a last conversation with his wife
…gives me the goose bump heebee geebies
a story of hubris really, doesn’t matter how good a climber you are, if the mountain is going to get you, it will.

………..
this year tho’, i’ve been having a spate of reading books by Neil Jordan and recommending them to everybody!
‘Shade’ and ‘Sunrise with Seamonster’
he’s the irish film director who did ‘the company of wolves’ and ‘the crying game’
admittedly his characterisation is a bit patchy and plotwise the wheels come off the waggon, but i think he’s brilliant.
lyrical, written with great personal warmth and an exuberance of language, incredibly poetic
and he’s writing about places in Ireland i know quite well

…………………….
also

…… lauras uncles book sounds good too!
spare a thought for my scriptwriter brother, who lives in Salt Dean, he’s currently doing a Scott of the Antartic adaption, apparently Scotts last letters are ‘not inspiring’ at all, very little self awareness
Scott spends most of the time blaming people ‘we would have made it if we could have left the sick behind’.
The derr-brain doesn’t seem to consider that it was his fault they didn’t take any huskies! barking

My brov reckons they pretty much forced Captain Oates out into the snow ‘i’m going outside now, i may be sometime’.
The only other thing known of note about Oates is that before he left for antartica, he made a woman pregnant, she was 12… those Victorians, mind boggling.

Anyway my brother finds it tricky writing about Antartica in this heatwave.
I’ve suggested he sit in the bath surrounded by ice cubes, slurping a blueberry slush puppy, from there he can glimpse the white cliffs, if you squint they look like Iceberg glaciers!
and my nephew johnny is only 2, so he waddles about in convincing penguin fashion!

…mine was 78/79 Rose Royce at the Cornwall Colliseum in St Austel
my sisters very kindly took me
a Disco Funk, slushy ballards band. They were just fantastic.
we sang along to all the classics ‘Love don’t live here anymore’, oh and ‘Car Wash’!

…more posts….

Dozza… I saw Chumbawumba a couple of times in the late 80’s early nineties, they were such zealots, possibly the least likely band ever to have a hit record.
saw them once in Prague, they played in u Zoufastou (or somfink, the name meant club despair), which was in a basement, cellar firetrap place just of the old town sq, a big pistachio mozart baroque building up top… and a punk club below.

It was an odd place, every time you went back it was twice the size as they’d found knocked down a couple of cellar walls and found a few extra rooms

when i turned up the place was rammed with hundreds of young polish punks.
quirkily Chumbawumba were big in Krakow!
What was her name, alice nutter? came out dressed as a nun and the whole place went bonkers
afterwards half the punks came back to stay, i know it’s a terrible thing to say, but they were so sweet, polite and smiley.
i was tempted to give them lessons in sneering. gurcha.

we had a huge loft, 50 or so of them could kip up there, i suspect some of themn are still up there, like Japanese Prisoners of war, you know, in the jungle on small melanesian islands??!

once i was staying in a hostel in Barcelona, big old mixed dorm room with lots of bunk beds, everyone had been out drinking and was in a boisterous mood.
got woken half way thro’ the night by some oaf stumbling about, looking for the loo. He was clearly a bit drunk and a lot sleep walking.
He stopped and p*ssed all over the poor bloke sleeping in the lower bunk!
Once finished he clambered back into bed, straight to sleep.
Half the dorm was awake by now, flabberghasted, but the bloke he weed on snored through the entire thing.
The next day nobody had sufficient gumption to tell him what had happened. how can you?!

Reminds me of the first cub camp i ever went on, Jeremey Rudge who was in our tent peed in his brand new sleeping bag. Unfortunately the dye wasn’t fast, so the next morning he emerged from his damp, sleeping bag cocoon… and he was bright blue from head to toe!

last weekend my brother and i went with our gaggle of kids away to the jugs in Kingston, theres a play park for the little ones, a lovely 12th Century church and even the chance of pintage
we were flying kites, a stunt kite (fantastic, but a bit of a palaver of rope and string), and our trusty rainbow kite, with the merest puff of wind this one merrily spools away, cloudwards
Sofia whose only 4, accidentally let go of the rainbow kite, yikes!
away it flew , but luckily the handle became snagged in a tree.
rescues and derring do!
my brov hopped up into the tree, but couldn’t reach. A passing local type, very kindly ran off and got a fishing rod. So my brothers got the long long pole and prodding recklessly at the kite handle
I’m on the ground comforting a couple of crying little ones, the melodrama!, but also simultaneously thinking, ‘the branch will never hold his weight’ and remembering a Seamus Heaney poem.

My brother is fishing in the river of the wind that flows through the branches of the trees

Finally the kite is prodded free, zoom it’s off over the roof tops, heading for the downs
I’m hot hoof after it, a Kite runner, well Kite plodder at any rate, getting bogged down on a muddy footpath, then hopping a barbed wire fence into a field.
Then theres the kite, right in the middle of the field, multicoloured wreckage. I stride over to it, feeling much like a world war 1 flying ace whose just crash landed
The kites been rescued by a couple of 10 year old boys, they were suitably amazed, ‘we were sitting in our house, and this thing just flew over’
Together we bore it back in the triumph of rescue!

oh the snippet of heaney (scribbled on a scrap of paper in my wallet)

The Riverbed, dried up, half full of leaves

Us, listenning to a River in the Trees 

what glamorous weather!
yester eve i watched the sunset from the marina wall
the sun dunked in the ocean, a perfect plonk, complete with sizzle
supple colours, a mood of modulation twixt turquoise and tangerine

praise god for dappled things