cobblers

In ‘Sex and the city’ there is an entire episode when Carrie moans incessantly about her shoes being eaten by Pete - the dog of her amorata ‘Big Aiden’. Now don’t get me wrong, there is part of my psychological make up that is at least a Bit female and as such I can understand the draw of a Manolo, but I have to be honest: if I was having a go on John Corbett, the dog could quite happily chow down on my left leg before my ire would raise it’s ugly hackles.

These days however, I am beginning to feel the pain of hapless Ms. Bradshaw and her issues with footwear. If you talk to anyone roundabouts about their single biggest retail requirement, it will not be as I had imagined prior to arrival a Mcdonalds, tuppaware rep or Anne Summers but a cobblers. Which is strange because every week the penguin News sports a column called ‘Two minutes’ where they ask local drinking buddies of the editorial team to complete an asinine questionnaire which includes the rubric ‘If you could start a business in The Falklands, what would it be?’. Despite the fact that everyone is absolutely frigging desperate for a cobblers, no one ever suggests that they would like to open one. Normally the answers to this deeply analytical and searching poser are ‘A web based design company’ or ‘A Chinese takeaway’, which one being as far as I can tell largely dependent on how much ale has been first consumed down The Vic.

This is fairly typical of the esoteric approach to life in the Islands – something I put down largely to the fact that it is really quite a nice place to live and people are indulgent of each others need for personal expression whether it be drawing rubbish pictures of Turns using wax crayon and attempting to sell them down ‘Studio 52 to Latvian tourists for four hundred thousand pounds, or merely  dicking about in a tiny corrugated tin office with a student type CAD program and offsetting your losses by way of the FIG’s nineteen million pound surplus. I totally approve, but and this is a big but WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE OPEN A RUDDY COBBLERS!

I was watching TOWIE the other night and my face went all spastic because I had got used to dressing badly and never straightening my hair. In these islands, the definition of high maintenance is going to the extraordinary length of actually ironing your fleece. I have never watched TOWIE before and I proper loved it because all that bed hopping, hurling of abuse and dirty looks is exactly like being here. The only difference is that in Essex they wear ridiculous amounts of make-up and go for colonics. Here there is no need for a colonic, just drink a bottle of Exportation Vinto – has exactly the same effect and make up will simply get blown off your face so why bother?

The women of Essex like a stiletto shoe boot but even if they could buy such a thing locally there is no way that it would survive longer than 10 minutes. I have been conducting ‘scientific research’ and have ascertained that the average pair of boots will last approx. 12.5 days before requiring the services of a well stocked professional who can re-heel and soul in the 20 minutes it takes you to go to the bank and involve yourself in a road rage incident.

Twelve and a half days. I know you must think I lie, but tis not the case. I have a utility room full of dead shoes. The other day an islander acquaintance picked up the cowboy boots (don’t judge) I bought 23 days ago and inspected the split souls and angular ground down heels with immense gravity for over 5 minutes. He turned them this way and that as if formulating a plan of how to best make them functional again. Filled with hope I muttered ‘Can you see a way to make them useable?’

‘Aye’ muttered he. He took them outside and set fire to them. This mildly surprised me but he explained that the smoke would keep the midges at bay. There isn’t much you can say in these situations so I shrugged and went for a fag.

In the hospital Metal Kell decided enough was enough. I had arrived for a visit after a very rainy afternoon. Water had penetrated the souls and was causing a foam to rise up from the uppers like  bubble bath. It was clearly not a look, but what to do?

‘You are rubbish’, she snorted, ‘Get some Dockers. They don’t fall apart in two minutes, get them off Amazon, it’ll cost a fortune but you’ll never regret it’. Hmmmm. I spent much of my late teens in Dockers. They took forever to wear in and made me look like a not entirely heterosexual performance poet. Which come to think of it is exactly what they do for my colleague. I’ll give em a swerve, but I’m tempted to get some converse. They seem to last quite well. Until then – WELLIES. No way am I mucking up my expensive black suede FMBs just walking round Stanley. There is just enough Carrie in me to recognise that……

Borah out.

The Only Way Is Stanley

Recently I received a rather over-excited e-mail from a woman in L.A. A producer for some US version of ‘Relocation, Relocation, Relocation’, she was after people who had moved to weird places abroad to demonstrate the extreme loveliness of filling in all those damn immigration forms, arriving in foreign climes and subsequent issues with forgetting to top up you kerosene etc. Said woman had been given my horrible history by an ex-colleague in the teaching and learning game she’d met in some Vietnamese drinking den. These things don’t happen to normal people.

I considered the matter in depth for approximately 45 minutes. It was a sweet deal;- free return flight to Brize to fake me leaving home and hearth etc. I thought this presented an ideal opportunity to buy some reasonably priced tampons and go to McDonalds, but in the end I elected to demur.

The reason I don’t have a tattoo is that I don’t necessarily think, given my total inability to control my impulses that having an identifying mark would benefit me in the long term. Given this, appearing on international television is entirely at odds with my desire to remain utterly anonymous. Plus I am freakish and unpleasant in the extreme. I don’t think I would come over well.

However it got me thinking. Last week I was invited to dinner with a colleague who first arrived here in ’82 when most of Stanley was a wretched rubbish dump awash with Argentine detruis and a dirty great shell hole through his bathroom roof. Also at dinner was an entirely taciturn functionary with the British Antarctic Survey. I don’t denigrate the taciturnity as after all, conversation is not at a premium if you spend nine months of the year in total isolation removing snow from Nissan hut doorways. However after the Port came out, the assembled guests became more than conversational and yer man outlined his involvement as an an extra in the TV show ‘An Ungentlemanly Act’ a BBC film about the Argentine invasion.

‘I played a Marine in Government house one day and an Argentine conscript on Wireless Ridge the next day’ said he, which led to much debate as to whether he was able to force out a legitimate gaucho 80s tache in less than 24 hours. With the 30^th anniversary of the war imminent there are many a scheduled film crew descending our way at the moment – a fact which singularly fails to excite anyone under the age of about 25.

I began to wonder if a TV show devoted to Stanley life in general wasn’t somewhat overdue. Since moving to Alpha Phi beta, I have luxuriated in TV reception. Admittedly I only receive one channel, but any port in a storm. Consequently and rather worryingly I have become addicted to TOWIE. I no longer live in a world of endless consumer opportunities. I no longer teach orange children with hair extensions. Watching TOWIE gives me a quick fix of trash culture that is a neat antidote to frontier living.

What this woman in LA needs to pitch is a Falklander version:- The only Way is Stanley. It would spark off a whole new set of crazes. Not vajazzles – no one in their right mind would think of affixing diamonte to their bits in wind like this, but we could see a craze for mass consumption of mutton chops and wearing boiler suits and bobble hats.

I can see it now! Join the principal cast as they fraternize over tins of out of date John Smiths in Deanos. Watch the drunken excess as a bunch of people meet up in a shed to castrate livestock and drink their own weight in unbelievably strong spirits.

Girls in loadsa make up wearing size 2 clothes meeting up in wine bars to discuss the latest infidelity? Nah! In TOWIS, a bunch of massive women with horrendous haircuts will meet up wearing fleeces to knit and bitch about each other. Boys go to boot camp to lose excess poundage before hitting the colonic parlour? Nah!  Some geezers who are abnormally strong meet at the jetty and compete to see who can drink two cases of beer and unpack a shipping container using only one finger.

Shopping in the boutiques before a pedi with champagne? How about having a nice bit of cake in Jacs before mooching round the charity shop?

It would be brilliant! All the same basic elements of TOWIE – small insular community, constantly exchanging partners. Petty infighting and weird leisure activities, but with wind instead of fake tan. You could devote an entire episode to the rows and recriminations resulting from the bogging of a Land Rover. If TOWIS existed I would happily pay the subscription for the Satelite service FITV. As it doesn’t I’ll just have to stick with my worry that Lucy and Mark’s dalliance will permanently damage her hopes of moving in with Mario. Dang

Borah Out

The shocking demise of my best pants

Everyone has lucky pants, but no-one has lucky pants like mine. Tonight after some fairly unsavoury visuals involving a stupendous amount of beer and a mop and bucket, conversation up the FIDF hall raged about pants.

You see I am grieving the sudden, unexpected and completely unnecessary demise of my lucky pants, which while still extant in The Alpha Phi Beta house currently are only really having a lying in state before I go in for a ceremonial funeral pyre in the chicken run tomorrow morning, load ‘em up on a small boat and shove em off into the South Atlantic with an ache in my heart and a droplet of moisture on the end of my nose.

My drinking muckers this evening felt my pain, but they didn’t really UNDERSTAND. Simon muttered on about having pants he had at uni. His missis poo-pood this claim but she herself has been known to affect a leopard print thong so at least she was involved in the debate. When I explained that my pants were 28 years old, I received many an askance glance and felt it best to draw a veil, but it doesn’t matter how I try and put the terrible loss to the back of my mind, the empty black knot of suffering in my stomach is still there. So forgive me for indulging in a eulogy to my pants.

It was April of 1984 and as per I was loitering about in Stratford On Avon  eating smoked salmon and cheesy wotsits before an evening performance of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’. Being an excitable sort of 14 year old who had just read Zola’s Nana for the first (though alack – not the last) time, I felt the need for a cami knicker and lo! Out of the green mists of M&S they called to me siren-like;- a navy satin, be-sprigged with pink roses. £4.99 down and my pants and I became one.

Over the intervening two and a half decades my pants and I have seen life in all its rich variety. They have, being somewhat sizable, multiple uses. Shorts in the summer, pulling pants, half an outfit during my days of gurning on the dance floor of Heaven, the regular holder up of corner shop rubbish tights and indeed, in the days when I had a massive permanent wave that made me resemble Captain Caveman – a head band/snood affair.

The pants have experienced the dark times too. There was the hellish embarrassment of their revelation when the frock got caught down the back while I was returning from the lavvy and sauntered seductively across the Savoy Grill to join my Gentleman-style date at table. Tumbleweed moment. No second date. Blast those massive pants!

I wore them the afternoon my waters broke with the Heir, they were stolen briefly by horrible children when I went skinny dipping in Sutton park when I was 16 (try explaining that one to the driver of the 110 bus back to Tamworth when you are clad only in palm fronds). Sitting comfortably on my harris they saw in my 21^st, 30^th, 40^th and the ruddy millennium. They have witnessed the fall of The Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union. They have travelled to many an exotic location including New York, Magaluf and Guildford-city-of-sin. Those pants have had experiences mere mortals can only dream of

There was also the 74 hours spent wearing them on a Greyhound bus half of which time I was suffering the after-effects of a dubiously constructed BLT ‘Torpedo’. They withstood the ensuing boil wash without any difficulty, but could they withstand the inhuman strength of a Falklander Islander? Could they arse.

Now I don’t mind a bit of physical strength in a gentleman. The ability to punch a horse into a coma is something I find mildly arousing but there has to be limits – my personal limit being DO NOT RIP MY 28 YEAR OLD PANTS IN HALF. Particularly when I am still wearing them. I’ve got a mark on my person that no amount of Germolene will stop the chafing of. I wouldn’t mind, but time has certainly proven the tensile strength of those pants. I have a feeling they made the outer skin of the Apollo Luna Excursion Module out of the same material. Which leads me to wonder how strong you have to be to tear them in the first place.

My recommendation? Don’t bet in a fight with this geezer…..

The body beautiful?

The other day, me colleague and I were having a quick ‘departmental meeting’ round the back of the Leisure Centre. The agenda was proving difficult to get through as neither of us had thought to bring a lighter, but we are a resourceful pair and soon we were in deep analytical discussion about  our recent failings.

As previously mentioned m’colleague is a badge wearing heard core metal bitch and as you know I am not given to anything wholesome by nature, yet recently we have both spent a considerable amount of time engaged in what can only be described as P.E.

M’colleague at least is on a promise in Peru come Yule, but I have no excuse. Peru? I hear you cry – surely it’s a bit of a trek for a birrov hows-yer-father? I have learnt not to question m’colleagues labyrinthine entanglements and suggest you follow suit and lets not forget, Peru isn't that far away relatively speaking. Or to look at it another way everywhere is a bloody long way away so you may as well push the boat out.

Anyway her quest for a bikini body notwithstanding, we are engaging in physical exercise in a way we both find faintly alarming and fascist. This is because we are English teachers and as such are repelled by the idea that the physical is more important than the metaphysical. We have read our Shakespeare, our Milton and ‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin – we know we are but grains of sand destined to shine ever so briefly and pointlessly before guttering into the maw. Going for a PB on the free weights is something we consider both hideous hubris and faintly noxious.

As far as memory serves I have never worked with another English teacher who  went at it with a Badminton racket or any other implement of anti-intellectual tomfoolery. The exception that proves the rule being of course me late lamented Guv’s affection for Aikido. This caused him some terrible attacks of gout, a broken collarbone and endless piss taking from yours truly. Never has a man so brazenly indulged his mid-life crisis. ‘Buy a sports car!’ I railed, ‘develop an addiction to online porn! But dear God, do not betray your calling with this nebulous approach to health and fitness’. My entreaties fell on deaf ears I fear. He is still, no doubt doing himself a frightful damage every week in his on-going attempts at the esoteric business of grading. Grim stuff indeed.

But now, I must eat my harsh words as three times a week I am attempting to better my PB of 50 lengths of the pool. Come pay day, I am actually going to part with £90 of my hard earned to get full membership of the leisure centre so I can use the gym, squash courts et al. M’colleague has already written her check and throws herself regularly into the fray wearing an odd assortment of Tour T- shirts some stuff with studs on – like me she is a stranger to the clothing section of JJB…

Behind the Leisure Centre she bemoaned this horror that has befallen us. ‘I’ve always hated the kind of people who join the gym,’ muttered she.

‘Ar! And me’ I agreed exhaling foul vapour towards the abattoir.

‘If I told my mother she’d die of shock. Don’t tell anyone I know, I ‘d never be able to show my face at the next Vaginal Croutons gig’

I concurred. Only I have the sort of friends who think this is a GOOD THING. Perhaps I need get away from my Miles Davis and embrace the world of scary noises. But the big question remains – WHY?

Well it’s not quantum theory. To be frank there is bugger all else to do. No TV, no cinema, no mall. You can only go to the pub so many times. We’ve done felting, candle making, spinners and weavers, huge evenings out, rover rally and piddling about looking for porpoise, but these are all one off things. Short of going home every evening and doing your marking, availing yourself of the facilities next to our classrooms is about it.

And so my bingo wings are disappearing, my chronic back ache is cured and I can actually walk upstairs without having an aneurysm. It’s an ill-wind I suppose and it does have its bonuses – the gym has a public viewing gallery. Ordinarily I would turn in disgust from such a gladiatorial affectation, but the other night having left the pool, I wandered up to poke fun at m’colleague while she sweated her cobs off on the treadmill. The smile was quickly wiped from me gob however when I was confronted by The Narrows Adonis wearing what can only be described as a body stocking lying prone over one of those ludicrous gym balls and rocking gently back and forth.

‘Why is he doing that, mommy?’ enquired the heir.

‘Who gives a fridge? Let’s go and get some cake,’ I snorted

Which we did as in life, all things must balance.

Borah out….

You shall go to the ball!

In ‘Pretty in Pink’ the diminutive record shop owner and mentor to Molly Ringwald’s poverty stricken aspirational teen with appalling taste in men (Ducky woman! Choose Ducky! What’s wrong with you!?) tells ginger Moll

‘You have to go to prom. If you don’t you’ll spend the rest of your life feeling as if you’ve forgotten something’.

Molly isn’t going to the Prom you see because she has no frock and all the posh girls have been giving her pony because she’s dating a posh lad. In the end she takes the very nice 50s prom dress owned by said record shop owner and in a fine example of turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear, buggers about with it and turns up alone at Prom in what can only be described as an envelope.

As a teenager I took this as a pertinent lesson in ‘if it ain’t broke,,,’ Not that it was a really relevant lesson as in my day we didn’t have Proms. When I left school, my chums and I bunked off last lesson and went to The Pretty Pigs where we had scampi in a basket before wandering off into sullen adulthood. So much for a right of passage. Indeed, in my day there were precious few formal occasions and I was 19 before it became necessary for me to buy evening wear. A shatung silk red number from Monsoon as I recall for the National Youth Theatre fundraising ball. The dress was pure 80s and would not have looked out of place in the final scene of ‘Footloose’ as would have my dance moves, but the less said about them the better.

Over the intervening years I have been forced into buying many black ball gowns for me role as the Doyen of the Opera but they were all notoriously foul as I had to be able to perform a de-rig and get out in them. It wasn’t until I got into the Teaching and learning game that the year long quest for the perfect Prom frock became an annual obsession. All my teenage fantasies about being Ally Sheedy in a sheer lip gloss finally getting noticed by Emilio Estevez (or preferably his muckier brother) raised their ugly head as, pushing 40, I attended my first Prom.

Kids nowadays don’t know they’re born! They have proms! And Chinese sweat shops that produce made to measure red carpet copies for under a tonne on e-bay. All I had was a John Hughes dream and some scampi in a plastic basket. As a result I go a bit over the top when it comes to formal do’s. I’ve been known to attend school functions commando so the line isn’t interrupted. This is not appropriate. I have also, more recently spent a fortune on Spanx and forgotton that with my fulsome chest a wonderbra is not only moot but harrowing for adolescents. Two years ago at prom my bosom entered the ballroom approximately 20 minutes before the rest of me. I have learnt to my cost that a halter-neck is not a good idea. You know you’re onto a loser when year 11 boys ask you to jump up and down. Trying to have a full on Prom experience whilst maintaining your professional dignity is something I have wrestled with for many a year but finally I think I may be at peace regarding this particular difficulty of modern life.

Friday is The conservation Ball – the first big event of the year and anyone who is anyone will be dragging glad rags under their fleece’s and tottering up to the FIDF hall for a three courser, auction and dancing. All the kids are having a sleep over in the Primary school (gawd bless em! First they had to deal with APP and now this!) leaving the adults to get amongst it right royally which is all very well but I haven’t any access to a TK Maxx and things are getting desperate!

Ordinarily around February me and me colleagues would start stalking prom frocks and accessoroies but frankly I don’t think a small branch of Peacocks is going to come good for this one. I bought my fail safe prom frock with me you understand – the one which doesn’t require structural engineering underwear and with which you can happily wear comedy socks, but it turns out that the wind, the walking and the absence of dial-a-meal has led to something of a spectacular de-biff.

Which is all very well and groovy if you have access to a River Island. I do not and my frock fell off when I tried it on. Thus it was that I went to see neighbour lady. It appears we are all in the same sartorial boat. She, a victim of the Stanley Stone has gone the other way. I, as she reasonably pointed out, have a narrow back. Neither of us have any clothes that fit.

Thus we spent a traumatic but largely hysterical evening in her bedroom in our scrungies trying on each others clothes trying to prevent men folk young and old from walking in when we were at our most vulnerable. We failed. Just as you are flattening your top hamper and easing it through a tight empire line, it is inevitable a man will walk in and witness the true horror of ‘Nam.

As a single person I do not appreciate this. I am not used to men seeing my flippy-floppies contorted into a size twelve and I think it most indecorous that I have no opportunity to giggle and point at their love handles in return. I will have my revenge I assure you. My poor eyesight often means I mistake the signs on changing room doors….

Anyhoo, me and the neighbor are now tooled up with fockage and accessories. The kids are taken care of and the tickets purchased. All that remains is the necessity to pamper that such an illustrious occasion requires. Amid the lust and locker-room talk that Friday night at The Narrows always entails, discussion raged about where one might indulge in a depilatory session. The men snorted with merriment:

‘Dunno if the West Store Salon do a back, sack and crack!’

We would have retaliated were it not for the sudden appearance of the help from the kitchen wearing a tight vest. After temporarily forgetting where we were, we returned to the important matters at hand. Should we go to the bother of having an up-do and a wax? I mused over these matters whilst supping my Exportation and considered that I would hold back on a decision until the western union transfer had come through.

This evening I took a look in the mirror, not something I would generally encourage. In a month I have neglected, shall we say my toilette. My eyebrows could induce panic in the avareage beauty therapist. Not shaving my legs in six weeks  has rendered the need for tights superfluous. I may need an angle grinder rather than a Venus wet ‘n’ dry. And as for my feet! Ye gods! Where are those ruddy ravenous fish when you need ‘em?

I think it’s safe to say that some major upholstery will be taking place at the newly re-Christened ‘Jamaica Inn’ this week. ( frankly Blenheim wasn’t windy enough). I hope the good people of Stanley appreciate these efforts, I’ll let you know….

Borah out

small town boy...

Tonight I have dug out my collection of CDs from ‘back in the day’ and am listening to Bronski Beat cos that’s how I roll, plus I have been thoroughly obsessed all week with ‘Brokeback Mountain’ which I put down to the simultaneous delivery of ‘Of Mice and Men’ to two year groups . There are parallels – honest.

Naturally enough this got me a-ponderin’ and a –ruminatin’.  In my four plus decades I have been about a bit what with one thing and another  - usually escaping from the scene of some kind of horrible misunderstanding as you might imagine, but on my travels I have garnered many a truism about life, so much so, that were I a gentlemen I would probably feel the need right now to grow a massive legitimate beard and write a novel like ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’. Fortunately I am not a geezer, so no undergraduate will ever be forced to perplex themselves at the foot of my moribund yearnings.

Suffice to say, that one of the truisms I have been forced to accept is this; If you go to a small community, there will always be a man in it who disturbs ordinarily quite sanguine women-folk. He will be inordinately and contextually speaking outrageously pretty. He will be in a position where the normal traffic of existence will make it hard to avoid him. Due to the nature of all other reverse Darwinism males in the vicinity he will take on a level of import that is truly Zeus like. And perhaps most significant of all, while he may well be aware of this, he will not use  this knowledge to his loiny advantage.

We have such a specimen hither and there is nary a woman between the age of 9 and 90 who doesn’t get a far away look in her eyes, giggle when he speaks to her or mutters to her mates what revolting things she would do to him given 20 minutes alone etc ad inf. I cannot help thinking this must be a terrible burden to the poor lad, but he looks quite well on it all things being equal.

Friday night is family night at The Narrows, which is a wonderful opportunity for grown ups to get thoroughly munted while their offspring run about like dervishes wielding pool cues about their heads. Yet by the 6^th dubious Chilean cocktail you can bet your wages the women will drop all pretence and start tarting with the help. It’s not our fault – he will insist on vaulting over the bar in athletic manly fashion, his lean tanned form displaying every rippling muscle adorned with high class tattage. The heir went googly eyed tonight muttering ‘Look at the pretty pictures on his arms’. We women exchanged a glance and discussed when might be an opportune time to deliver the ‘Talk’ to my 9 year old daughter.

But  not for long, because then he was supplicating his Chippendale taut ass before us to hand over cutlery. We all cleared our throats, breathed deeply and maintained our outwardly cool exteriors. Next he sidled up with a twinkling eye and a bottle of ketchup.

‘Sauce?’ he enquired his Latin dark eyes flashing with surpressed, barely, libidinously high sperm count. We couldn’t help ourselves. We giggled. Horrible.

I thought I’d escaped all this nonsense when the English department had an impromptu development meeting on the smoking deck, but OH no. Out comes the Falklands answer to Enrique proffering his massive zippo flame and interesting Spanish inflection. The normally highly ebullient pair immediately fell to taciturn sheepishness.

‘You know,’ say he ‘Deborah in Spanish has another meaning.

Sensibly, I kept quiet. I know, I’ve been had this way before. M’colleague though, being an excitable hard core metal bitch up for life’s experience said;

‘What’s that then?’

He violently mimed eating a kebab. Sounds horrible I know but both The English department had to hold each other vertical to forgo lust-inspired fainting.

‘Deborah me. It means eat me. You know, with real hunger’.

The junior member of the department fell into a sort of catatonic reverie. The silence needed to be broken. I swallowed down the five litres of drool and lisped with great difficulty,

‘So it may be taken as an insult or an erotic come-on?’

The Latin Love-a-rama raised his beautiful head and exhaled fragrant smoke into the brilliantly star covered heavens. Behind him a pub full of women sighed audibly. I kicked m’colleague visciously while he was not paying attention. She snorted and came back to herself with an irritated burst of profanity.

‘exxxxxxaaaaaactly’ he breathed, before smiling a smile that would encourage a nun to sell her soul to Bapometh and wandered back inside.

‘Bugger me!’ said m’colleague, ‘it’s illegal innit? I wouldn’t mind half an hour on that!’

‘Hmmmm….’ I replied unconvinced.

The whole thing reminded me of when I took the ladies of year 11 on a trip to that London and we inadvertently ran into the pretty half of ‘One Direction’ in an off licence. The ancients write about the horror of unbridled female sexuality quite effectively and I have witnessed it in the raw when a young lady who never failed to submit her homework  on time fell to her knees keening like an eighteenth century Latvian peasant and licking a minor pop celebrity. If you’ve seen that sort of thing, you never really recover. The mind is set on a different axis and will never see the world as quite right again.

Fortunately I have never been devastatingly attractive to the opposite sex apart from about 3 months when I was 22. And in fairness I don’t think that was me per se but a combination of Rigby and Pellar and a fishnet body stocking. I can honestly say that this is has never been a cause for distress. I have had some truly gorgeous friends and had the pleasure of having my dance card filled, if you will  by some seriously hot trouser and I always thought they carried an additional burden.

It is quite clear that if the purveyor of sauce had a phD in quantum relatively, the only impact this would have on women would be to make their ovaries rattle even louder when he walked past as clearly this would make him even more of a stud-muffin.

To be lusted after by half the populace must be awfully tiring and must seem particularly ironic if you have recurrent gout or trapped wind. The truly pretty have their human fallibility ripped from them like the thin cotton dress of a 70s porn queen. I for one thank the Lord for my intrinsic ability to be not sexy, however hard I try. The thought of having the science department all a quiver when I walk past would be truly terrifying….

Borah out

Craft wars

I have just received an e-mail from the Bodleian library which has confirmed my worst fears. I have indeed, as I previously suspected read every book on Everest ever published. So if any of you know of anyone who wrote one in pencil on scraps of paper,  then died horribly of cerebral oedema before they could get to a publisher do let me know. In the meantime I am going to have to find a way of filling in the down-time I have when I’m not otherwise encumbered by delivering Quality Teaching and Learning, parenting ineffectually, writing rubbish, drinking crap wine or threatening legal action. A girl needs a hobby.

Fortunately these fair Isles are full of useful pursuits and groups which peruse them. Some of them may even be undertaken whilst simultaneously smoking and lying down so I’m onto a winner. But I must be careful because hobbies are taken seriously hereabouts and I do not wish to offend by being half hearted in my approach which is going to be difficult. Half-hearted is my default setting ordinarily.

The annual craft fair has been advertised in The Penguin news since at least February so the excitement was tangible way before I arrived. The venue was school and as I have a key, I availed myself of a bottle of Exportation, let myself in a 2am and had a private viewing. Marvellous stuff. Though according to all, not as much submitted as last year for reasons people are only muttering about in dark corners. It matters not to me, though I knew something was afoot when the heir and Spare’s Sunday play date insisted through gritted teeth we put down the DS’s and ‘Make something’. Hmmm. I came 8000 miles with two children and a 21” suitcase. Crafting equipment wasn’t part of my payload. Still I managed to find cereal boxes and wool and if you’ve got those the possibilities are endless, as it would appear are the awards and Laurels.

All weekend, the town was a seething mass of rumour, conjecture and unrivalled bitterness as the prize winners were announced and cab drivers rang each other mid-job to discover whether each others taxidermical efforts had garnered a rosette. Such blue air when they discovered they were only highly commended! Ugly scenes!

As if all this excitement wasn’t enough, as we left the public viewing for a gentle stroll home along the harbour in the sun, the still skies on Stanley were rent asunder by the horrific cacophony of helicopter engines. 20 feet away on the school field a Sea king and 14 seater  hovered ominously churning a morass of goose poo and gorse bush into the air where it mingled with the crisp bags tossed carelessly by year 8, became a swirling mass of debris which immediately flew into the eyes, cleavage and wellies of all present. The spare being a small person keeled over in the force of the down draft and seemed pinned to the ground by some oddity of gravity. As I looked around, many other people were starring as if insensible as their pre-tween children lay flat on the tarmac. The helis landed and everyone wandered off spitting vitriol about the vile miscarriage of justice that was the judging of the felting.

Having peeled the boy off the floor I too wandered off considering as per that my skills are just not up to this sort of thing. Craft looks too full on for my liking. I may have to look into prime-time radio broadcasting instead…..

Borah Out