Pig Sty Avenue

My consolation prize for having to endure another ten weeks in bloody Libya is a... Well, what should one call it? It's not an iPod because that's a different make. It's not really an MP3 player because it plays .wma files too. It's a Creative Zen thingummy and it's also the dog's bollocks. It's a Libya-survival device: the big problem out there is the sense of cultural isolation - one's in a society which is very alien to Europeans. Carrying around this thingummy means I've got a whole load of my culture, so far as it can be condensed into audio form, with me. The Smiths, Tom Waits, A Clockwork Orange, Under Milk Wood, Mozart... Psychic defence.

pity that the wording on the old tyne-tees steam shipping company sign isn't clearer

If you read what that malleable blighter was saying, carefully, the advice he gave on the 7th March 2003 was: "Don't be daft! You can't bomb the shit out of people just like that!" Apparently, ten days later he said "Oh, alright then." A mathematician went for an interview for some Big Cheese kind of job somewhere and the interviewer, a big cheese himself, had hit upon what he thought would be a good lateral thinking question to sort the wheat from the chaff. So the last question was: "How much is two plus two?" The mathematician thought about it from every angle, and eventually said: "four!". A philosopher went for the same job, and was hit with the same question. She eventually wrote a book and made a packet on the whole malarkey, but for our purposes her answer was "four". A lawyer was up for the same job and got the same tie-break question. He stood up to check that the door was locked; closed the blinds; then he s...

Don't go into that barn! 

Spring blossoms along by the Don 

...here's some Omaha Indian Music . Good fun, and I bet you'd struggle to buy it in the shops.

Election fever continues unabated in rain-sodden Jarrow the day. We got three more leaflets through the door, all together, this morning. The Liberal Democrat candidate is Bill Schardt . UKIP have Alan Badger (jokes about other people’s names are always foolish and unfair, but ‘Vote For A Badger!’?) We get a bit of originality with Roger Nettleship , who's standing for Safeguard the Future of the NHS! (I think that the exclamation mark is all part of it).

Well, I’ve been and gone and done it now. I emailed Bell , and spoke to the big cheese, Gregory, this morning, and I’m going back to Libya for ten weeks on 7th May. And may God have mercy on my soul.

From the fruit and veg shop in Jarrow. The lasses there called him Mr Onion Head.  

I cleaned out the cookies folder, and that solved the can't-see-my-own-blog conundrum. This afternoon, in the garden at the flat, I'm going to plant nineteen hawthorn trees, and two gorse bushes around the perimeter, which will eventually give us some privacy and do the local bird population a favour. I'm blogging this because that's what I'm going to do today, but also because planting a tree is a Significant Event: a couple of hours work of a sunday afternoon will result in birds being fed, and people taking pleasure in the may-blossoms when the bairns playing outside are grandparents.

The Election has come to Jarrow, seemingly, though blink and you'd miss it; posted through the door by the same person came leaflets from our incumbent MP, Stephen Hepburn , and the Tory hopeful, Linkson Jack . I say hopeful, because he must be an optimistic sort standing as anything other than Labour in Jarrow. On his wee brochure, there are pictures of him standing outside Cleadon Village Post Office, and looking out to sea at Marsden. Somebody might have pointed out that these attractive sites aren't actually in Jarrow, but in the next-door constituency of South Shields. There is also a picture, sans Mr Jack this time, of the Jarrow Comprehensive school which Stephen Hepburn and I both attended - as contempararies, I might add. That gives you some idea of the impossibility of the Tories' task here, and also the reason why there's negligible electioneering going on: local man, Labour... It's in the bag.

This firefox-not-letting-me-view-my-own-blog problem is really beginning to get on my nerves. I've put out a plea for help on the mozillazine forum .

...zen (or isn't he?), or a psychiatric illness or any shite like that, the little squares or ???s are just there because half of it's in Chinese and I needed to load some extra software to read it properly. Brilliant. And we're both rats! Well, there's an end to the day on a Chinese note. By the bye, I regret to say that the only Mandarin I know, taught to me by one of my students is, I gather, quite rude: "Sow Lam Peyy!" Learn Mandarin, yeah... There's a project. Hmm. Time to stp blogging tonight.

And this is looking the other way on. Oh my God! It's spelt "Tilley's"! 

As promised. From outside Tilly's. 

This feels a bit like talking with a blindfold on, and a diminishing sense of reality, as if you'd just swallowed a load of some psilocybin species of fungus. And the reason for this is, I can't view my blog in Firefox OR Explorer. Fuck knows why: fault at blogspot? Some weird kind of trojan or virus or what the fuck? I can view the dashboard and posts and comments (thanks, Laoha, by the way), and could even change the template, if I'd a mind. But I can't view my own fucking blog! It's as if one entered one's own home and became suddenly blind and deaf. Repeatedly. And some. 'Scuse the bad language. Anyhow. Tonight we went for a buffet meal in Newcastle's Chinatown. Lau's was recommended (though Fiona had some unsubstantiated anecdote involving Environmental Health officials). But there was a queue right out of the door, so we went across the road to a place whose name I unforgivably didn't make a mental note of [I'll find it out and...

hmm... 

Something weird's happening here: this page is my home page, but whenever I try to load it on firefox, I get sent to the blogspot start site. I've tried it on IE, and there's no trouble there... So what's going on? All my browsing and blogging was easy and seamless and now it's fucked up. I suspect those shites at MicroShite. However, whilst I'm here: We got a scanner today, so I'll post the scan of the Advancing Piglet taken a couple of weeks ago. Mind you, it's a right parlour game, trying to make out the various bits. At 14 weeks, a foetus is ET anyway. More real when you see the wee blighter moving, mind, but they don't supply AVI files at the hospital.

...what the...?

See? I knew somebody would be for making Benedict 16th into 'gloria olivae' . And that led me onto this , which pitches us right into the Book of Revelation and the Whole Nine flipping Yards. What's truly scary is that a lot of the Top Knobs in the States are Born Again Dumb All Overs , and actual world events are perhaps being dragged into this framework. Today we got the results of some important blood tests vis a vis the Approaching Piglet, and all's well, thank God. The mysterious virus, or whatever it's been, is abating somewhat:- I'm feeling elderly today, rather than geriatric, as I felt yesterday; so I'm hoping to get back to allotmenteering tomorrow. And comfort myself that I have five years yet to get it into full production, before the Great Famine , that is. Better get on with the cabbages, then.

I shouldn't have used such a jocular tone, and swear-words, talking about the papal election: I've been stricken down with something that's kept me in bed all day, my joints aching, my eyes feeling like they'd been washed in sand. Ugh. How long afore someone connects Cardinal R with Glorious Olives? - if I had the strength I'd go surfing for an answer, but I haven't so I won't.

The Papal-election/Malachy-prophecy malarkey continues. Internet chatter seems to be saying that The Glory of The Olives is the French Cardinal, Jean Marie Lustiger. This is because he was born Jewish, and converted to Catholicism in his early teens. His mam was murdered in Auschwitz. Links are being made with his erstwhile jewishness and ‘gloriae olivae’, but I’m not too impressed with the logic. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=8203362&type=worldNews"> Reuters has him as a favourite in the election, apparently on this basis alone. This passes the time, I suppose. Unlike our own General Election, wherein nothing controversial, inspiring or even mildly interesting is being said or done.

See, the trouble is, when you go to the pub of an afternoon to watch football, and drink several Guinness’s, you naturally need to sleep it off when you get home, so you have a too-long siesta, and then you’re up late and surfing and oh my god! So I thought I’d engage with the wider world for a bit and got to wondering about Who Will Be The New Pope. That got me remembering about St Malachy , and so I went in search of him. By jingo, there’s a lot of craziness in cyberspace when you touch on this subject, eh? To summarise, though, Malachy was a 12th century mystic who allegedly gave a list of popes from his time to the End of the World, awarding each of them a two or three word tag. These tags tie up with each pope’s background or attributes; this is where it gets decidedly dodgy because you can see all kind of meaning in a couple of words in Latin. For example, John Paul II was “worker in the sun”, and that’s because, they say, he came from the east, was born during a solar ecl...

My mother patiently picked out the coriander leaves from her dessert, I noticed, and we never got around to the roast vegetables. But as our first effort in entertaining in a long time, it went well enough. Much wine was consumed. At two o’clock I took my hangover to the Boldon Lad to watch the match. Don’t Get Me Started on bloody Newcastle U-bloody-nited this season. This was, as the commentator put it, the Last Chance Saloon for them, and they were thrown out . By Manchester U-fucking-nited, who, as I passionately explained to a man at the bar, represent everything that’s bad about football, the bastards. Apparently, the fans of that ‘club’ are worried about an American capitalist getting a controlling interest. Well, pity for them: that’s capitalism for you, and what goes around comes around: if you want to play in a world of big money, it’s unreasonable to whinge when that world’s predators come sniffing your arse. The fact that the Toon got beat four one hasn’t fuelled m...

that's the boldon lad 

On my forty second birthday we were living in Malvern. There’d been a bereavement in Herself’s family, and she was away in Ayrshire. On my forty third, we were living in Glasgow (that’s a long story, Don’t Get Me Started), and, incredibly, yet another relative on that side thought to play Is There A God? Last year, I was in Janzur, 10 miles west of Tripoli, horribly sober and alone. That was when I thought: my next birthday, I’ll be at home, there will be people; living ones, preferably. So tonight we're having a wee dinner party. A boned shoulder of pork, Scottish beef, Cumberland sausage, roast veg (all cold). Salad. A lot of cheese. Different kinds of bread and crackers. Strawberries and yoghurt with coriander and honey. A great deal of wine. (I made the decision about the pork and wine that lonely last birthday in bloody Libya). It’ll be cold so that I can prepare it now and not get stressed tonight.

am drunk: barely single finger...

Birthdays generally have a depressing effect, once you’re past forty anyhow; and I’m forty-bloody-five today. :-(

This Wild About Gardens is a great idea, although at first blush the site could have had more detailed information and links. “Our” garden at the flat has become almost entirely wild since the woman in the flat upstairs told me that she considers it a shared garden; legally, she might be right, but anyone in the garden could look straight into our windows, and I was just about to renovate it. So I said “bollocks to it” and left it wild last year. There are a lot of nettles and docks now. A goldfinch has been here nearly every day to feed on the old thistles' seed pods – they are perhaps the most beautiful British bird. And I’ll continue planting the hedge I started two years ago; there are nineteen hawthorns, four sea buckthorn and two gorse to go in; the alders and dog roses already there are doing well. Next year, if I’m spared, I’ll fill up any gaps from the elder cuttings I’ve planted at the allotment. Speaking of which, I put off going to the allotment this morning for...

Have we met before? 

they're getting fed - check it out

This might be promising... The 'next blog' button turns up some corkers, mind. And then, after a week or so, you think, Ah fuck it. I'm hoping little gwion will lighten up and tell us what he[?]'s doing in Guadalope, fuck's sake, and maybe write some prose for a change. ??? is still at it, and has an astonishingly cute bairn (cute bairns are something pregnant fathers notice: one thinks: Hmm... Mine'll be cuter).

This bloody “Open Evening” was at the Bede Centre, Durham Road on the outskirts of bloody Sunderland. So I had to get a metro from our place then a bus. When I got on the bus I realised that I’ve got that uncomfortable feeling I get in Sunderland: it’s only down the road – ten minutes on the metro – but they have a different accent to us; and that fucking football team they’ve got… Then I get to the Bede Centre, which was perhaps once a Victorian school building, big and rambling. I ask the receptionist where the “Recruitment Event” is, and she says that “unfortunately” it’s the queue over there. I join the queue. Way ahead of me, I can glimpse a big hall with hundreds of people filling in forms, or staring into space. I go back to the receptionist and double check. Yes, this is the Protocol Recruitment Open Evening, so I rejoin the bloody queue and it doesn’t move much. After about twenty minutes a pleasant but gormless young woman in a suit tells my part of the queue that we’...

Work in Progress III. I suppose it's almost intangible to the non-allotmenteer. 

Here’s a link to a webcam in San Fransisco showing a peregrine falcon’s nest; the story is, the eggs are about to hatch. Today I’m officially a doley: I’d put off signing-on in the hope that Something Would Turn Up, but unfortunately Something’s off sick and Nothing’s been sent in his place. As the PW seems to be doing ok, we’ve even thought about another 10 weeks in bloody Libya. The horror, the horror… Tonight I’m off to a “Recruitment Event” for an agency which employs all of the part time lecturers in the area for FE colleges. I’d love to get even a few hours a week, teaching immigrants perhaps. And there’s the allotment. Making slow and steady progress with the digging. Everything’s so late though. Apparently, gardeners tend to live longish because they always look forward to next year, when, of course they’ll do things better.

I should explain about the blue plaque picture. It’s fixed above Grieves’ butcher’s shop, on the corner of Albert Road and Bede Burn Road in Jarrow. The recitation of accomplishments has always fascinated me. Here’s an outline of John S’s life. What a guy. I particularly like the story about his curing Lenin’s sick dog. All of the gardening is so late this year. Well into spring now, and I’m only just starting to stratify a load of seeds, which means they won’t even be sown until summer… But it can’t be helped now, and they’re all perennial or biennials anyway, so all will be well. My favourite tree is Cedar of Lebanon ; the shape is so aesthetically pleasing. I remember seeing a magnificent one in Winchester. There aren’t any in Jarrow, so far as I know, so I’ve bought fifteen seeds; I’ll stratify them in the fridge for a month, and then sow them in the greenhouse, keeping them in pots until I find homes for them. That’ll be the fun part because they can grow so big, and no one...

"John S. Clarke (1885 - 1959) Seaman, Lion-tamer, Socialist Pioneer, Antiquary and Labour MP for Maryhill, Glasgow, was born in this street at number 66 on 4th February" 

My unglamourous form is now recovering from two days of extreme gardening, and the Pregnant Wifey [hereinafter the PW; she doesn’t want me to post her name or photos on the web ‘in case nutters see them’; hmm…], is busy studying, so I’m listening to music and surfing. There’s something endearing about this Canadian woman , if you ignore the cat-photos. I loved her description of her in-laws at Easter, and the picture of her 1st thing in the morning. Indeed, that’s something about which I’ve been thinking: the blog as Real Life. That might sound like a contradiction, this is cyberspace after all, but the fact that blogs are done without the authorities telling people what they can or can’t write about means you’re getting close(ish) to the way people are. Sincerity’s a great virtue. And for fun there’s Magical Trevor I and II . And the same site has an updated, football-based badgers ; unfortunately, I can’t find the link to the original badgers animation. There’s an election on, someb...

All I’ve done is a bit of gardening. But I feel as if I’d gone 12 rounds with Mike ‘Iron Man’ Tyson, when he was still really scary. It’s an indication of how unfit I am. Ah well… The allotment will be my gym over the next few weeks; no pain no gain, and all that bollocks. The situation wasn’t helped by the old man lending me an incredibly heavy fork, which he admitted with a chuckle this afternoon was really meant for road building, not gardening. It reminds me of that story about the Roman legionaries being given double weight swords in training, so that in due course the real ones would feel light as sticks. Hmm.

R3's brilliant late at night: the only place anywhere you're going to get some seriously unusual and wonderful music. Today we watched a heron getting mobbed by sea gulls, and ten minutes later it was viciously assaulted by a sparrow hawk. What's all that about then? Herons don't bother any body but frogs, minnows and toads. Saw a pair of coal tits. And a dunnock sang like an angel. Things that happen when you're digging, eh?

Three rows of tatties; sage and garlic mustard planted along the path edge; barrow loads of soil moved; plastic cover removed; a load of digging. Not bad, eh?

Work in progress II 

Mr Sun's shining and the 2nd earlies need planting.

This calendar comes into its own every seven years or so; 2005 is one of its years. 

Work in progress. Watch this space. 

You know how it is: it feels like january outdoors, so today’s a good day to spring clean the spare room. But I’ll just have a wee surf first… and the morning starts to drift away. Hitting the ‘next blog’ can get you into some weird situations. This Erica woman actually made me blush . I say “this Erica woman” and skim reading her adventures one gets an impression of, say, a thirty something, quite attractive and most certainly broadminded female; but this is the internet and “Erica” could just as well be a wee man in his sixties called Rod, unshaven, with acute halitosis, tugging his tadger over a PC from Cash Converters, in the bedroom of the house he shares with his geriatric mother in Gateshead. Then I came across Hopping Doon the Pavement , which might just be a cry for help, but let’s give him a few days to come up with something interesting. And then there’s this . I can’t decide if it’s zen or a psychiatric disorder. ***** In the last week I’ve managed to cut two of the signi...

Rain! Cold, wintery rain too. So, no allotment this morning. Mind you, it was with mixed feelings that I looked out and saw the wet garden: on the one hand, I’ve a lot to do; on the other, yesterday afternoon was the first opportunity I’d had for any real work on the allotment this gardening year, and this morning my muscles were crying out. The Old Man came to help me out – between us we got all the old putty from the built but still glassless greenhouse; levelled a load of ground, getting the bindweed roots out of it; I planted a lot more hardwood blackcurrant cuttings, and elder ditto; and we put in the First Early potatoes, ‘Vanessa’. The spuds and the cuttings will appreciate the rain.

A most excellent day. To the hospital this morning for F.’s first scan. As she had it: now we know it’s a baby, not just some kind of blockage. Literally amazing to see this tiny wee thing moving and being. It’s real, and all, apparently, is well.

Ivie Anderson had the most amazing voice... And I like this picture of her and Duke. 

As Dr Evil said to his son: “You just don’t get it, do ya?” Irony, never mind post-irony, is lost on many people. Indeed, humour’s lost on many people. Mostly the people who seem to spend an awful lot of time on line. Perhaps swotting up on the proper uses of apostrophes would be a start on the path to a less tortured existence. Alexander and I went to the Boldon Lad to see a band called Tadpole Pie . They played all the right notes in all the right places. Just rock covers, mind. And I’m sorry about the shite links, but that’s what got googled. Back home, and dotting about in cyberspace, Alex steered me in the direction of John Frusciante , who, he says, is a bigger influence than Tom – and that’s saying something. I’ve never been into RHCP myself, but that’s for no particular reason. So he’s pointed me that way, and I’ve pointed him Tom’s way, and sometimes it’s great being a dad. AND I took a picture of a heron in Jarra today. What larks, eh?

"Say cheese!" "You're nicked mate!" 

you like tequila? hashish? girl? 

... but I bought a new one today; £3.95! Hurrah!

We were in that John Lewis’s in Newcastle today, and waiting for an assistant to be free to tell us all about the latest news in PC speakers… I should explain that John Lewis’s is a proper shop, wherein the Sales Assistants are actually trained, polite and really do their job, which is telling you about stuff before you buy it. Anyway, we noticed this fella, about our age, with a tiny baby in a really cool looking pram. So I ask him if the pram would later become a pushchair and he looked at me with a gleam in his eye. It’s a pram, a car seat with double strap, and later it’s a pushchair. Ages one to three. Then it turned into a real fellas’ kind of conversation. He pointed out this vehicle’s tyres: ‘like a jeep of the pram world’, and I’m warming to this bloke by now. He showed me its disc brake at the front. And, the clincher for him, I could see, was that it was a rare pram in that it had a fully independent front wheel, which is really important around busy streets – it could clear...