Friday 26 October 2012

So SAD

It's cold and miserable and I feel cheated.

Outside it's raining, there's a north-easterly wind (never a good thing) and it's all very grey.  When the clocks go back on Sunday I shall probably put the heating on.

I feel cheated because we haven't had a proper summer this year, so there's no sense of crops harvested, gathered in ready for the winter.  There's no sigh of satisfaction.

There's a deficiency of SUNSHINE.

Hibernation, anyone?



Wednesday 17 October 2012

To continue the chicken theme ...

Living in Bristol, we get a fair amount of traffic news relating to motorways, but today it reached a new high/low/level of bizarreness(is that a word?  Should it be bizarrity, or something?)

To the north of us we have the M4 with important people travelling east (towards London) and people travelling west, getting away from it all (into Wales, albeit at a cost - the Severn bridges cost going west). 

And then to the left of us (well, if you look at a map it is on the left) we have the M5.  There are those (misguidedly) going north, ready to encounter the motorway system around Birmingham, Spaghetti Junction and all - this is a really shitty bit of road system.  And then there are those going south.  Apart from usual motorway traffic, these are all holidaymakers. 

It's usually pretty obvious when something has blocked the M5 as the alternative route (the A38) is at the bottom of our road.

But today, the excuse was a little out of the ordinary ...

"M5 at standstill due to 1,000 chickens on road"

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/M5-standstill-1-000-chickens-road/story-17089930-detail/story.html


(I'm sorry, the link should have been under the headline, as it were, but Blogger's playing up and won't display anything other than the actual link - technology, d'oh!)



Monday 8 October 2012

Sorry, who did you say you are?

On Saturday I went to the library and on the way there I met a friend of one of my children, accompanied by her boyfriend. 

"Hello, what are you doing here?", I asked as I thought she should have been at uni and it seemed a bit early in the term for coming home for the weekend.

She launched into a detailed description of their plans for the day and I began to think I was not talking to who I thought I was. 

But it was only when she said "it's dad's birthday today" I realised that I was talking to C, a contemporary of my elder son, who's just lost her adoptive mother recently to cancer and not A, my daughter's friend who has never known her father (coming from a family of six children, all with different fathers - well apart from the twins, that is).

It occurred to me that it was interesting that both girls look so alike, both are pretty and lively and very intelligent, and they come from such vastly different backgrounds.

Still, luckily I don't think she realised that I thought she was someone else.