Happy Saturday ! (for me anyway)

I love Saturdays !

It's like when you were a kid & you sat around in your jarmies
watching TISWAS.

They all go off to hockey at 0850 & don't return til about 1pm so I get the house
to myself & peeeace & quiet. Fabulous.

This morning we had the usual before leaving.

Innes whistling one note over & over again in a breathy, highly irritating manner.
He can sustain this for as much as 30 minutes.
He should make a world-champion free-diver.

Lizzie & Genevieve fighting

'She's kicking me' (adopt, nasal, high-pitched whine)
'Am not'
'Are too' ad nauseam

The girls names here are interchangable, there are always at
least 2, poss three fighting at any one time.

Mix this with

'Where's my stick/gumshield/boots/socks ?'

and

'He/She has stolen my stick/gumshield/boots/socks'

and you are close.

Finally, with much revving of the engine & shouting of

'Come on you guys - where are you ?'

they depart, re-arranging the gravel.

And breathe ...

It's at this point I creep from my bed, having been awake since 0730 listening
and go to the kitchen to survey the damage.

Luckily, this being Saturday, I don't have to touch any of it - hurrah.

The only thing I do is to take the covers off the horses & feed them.

I shouldn't do this either but being a nice kind of person I can't watch the neds sweat their bits off in rugs on a sunny day just because the kids aren't organised enough to do it before leaving.

Right - enough complaining, for now.

Today is lovely & sunny again, I am going to clean my room, e-mail some of you guys, do some washing (my own for a change) & then sit in the sun doing absolutely nothing other than reading a book. I am currently on my 3rd Bill Bryson since arriving. I have been able to do a phenomenal amount of reading since arriving. About a book every 3 days & since Trish has an exhaustive library with all the classics (Mum-you would approve) as well as some great contemporary stuff I should have plenty to keep me entertained.

This evening it's the All-Blacks versus the Frogs. It wil be the 1st time I have rooted for the AB's since getting here. My evening plans include Sky at Mal's, Export Gold & another stonkingly good KFC (I'm a classy date)

Whilst I remember I want to share a passage with you from Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a small island' which is about his 7 week journey around the UK.

I am sorry to harp on about him but he is laugh-out-loud funny & should be the benchmark for travel-writers. If you have read him already you will know what I mean, if not - go buy a book now.


This is Bill explaining the problems he has with arcade games ..

"With the exception of penny falls & those crane things that give you three microseconds to try to snatch a stuffed animal and in which the controls don't actually correspond to the movements of the grabber bucket, I don't understand arcade games at all. Generally, I cant even figure out where to insert the money, or once inserted, how to make the game start. If, by some miracle, I can surmount these two obstacles, I invariably fail to recognise that the game has come to life and that I am wasting precious seconds feeling in remote coin-return slots and searching for a button that says 'Start'. Then I have thirty confused seconds of being immersed in some frantic mayhem without having the faintest idea what's going on , while my children shout 'You've just blown up Princess Leia you stupid shit!' and then it says 'Game Over'.

Or, further on in the book, Bill leaving a pub after drinking copious amounts (something he does regularly) This piece of descriptive writing had me snorting & snuffling & blowing snot bubbles (I am poorly, in case I hadn't mentioned it)

" Now the second rule of excessive drinking (the first of course, is don't take a shine to any woman larger than Hoss Cartwright) is never to drink in a place on a steep slope. I walked down the hill on unfamiliar legs that seemed to snap out in front of me like whipped lengths of rope. The Adelphi, glowing beckoningly at the foot of the hill, managed the interesting trick of being both near by & astonishingly distant. It was like looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope - a sensation somewhat enhanced by the fact that my head was a good 6 or 7 feet behind my manically flopping appendages. I followed them helplessly, and by a kind of miracle they hurtled me down the hill, safely across the road and up the steps to the entrance to the Adelphi, where I celebrated my arrival my making a complete circuit in the revolving door so that I emerged into the open air once again


He goes on ...

"I went to the grand staircase and managed - I know not how - to fall up them in a manner uncannily reminiscent of a motion picture run in reverse"

It has been a good week this week, not only did my very clever friend Di pass her board to do sneaky-beaky surveillance type stuff (are you swotting compass points as I type ?) but I had a lesson on Honey which didn't end up with me being glad to get off rather than be thrown off. There was the lamb-stuff (more to follow) and also, I haven't mentioned it much up to now because I have a wide & ethnically diverse bunch of chums but now I feel I am justified in saying

THE RUGBY - FANTASTIC OR WHAT ??????

NZ is a country rightly proud of its rugby & what a fantastic time to be in the Southern Hemisphere when we have just pasted Australia. Up until then the press & the locals were saying England were expected to beat the Maoris, lucky to win against the All-Blacks & would get put in their place by the Wallabies. Wannabet ?

At last weekends show Paddy informed me we were lucky to win against all 3 teams. I told him that with that amount of luck we could surely win the World Cup ?

I know it's a few months away & I know England have a reputation for folding at the World Cups but the sense of anticipation of being a Pom, in NZ, when your team has whupped everybody is fantastic.

Sorry - gloating over, it's not polite is it.

Much better to be 'plucky Brits' like our tennis starts ie. crap & always losing.

As I had threatened to do, I sent Grant Ingersoll (truck driving instructor-remember ?) a condolences card with some abuse inside. The front showed a yacht sailing into the sunset (I didn't want to chose anything too morbid in case he didn't see the funny side) The words on the front read "At this diffucult time" and inside I had written 'of having your backsides kicked by a bunch of public-school nancy-boys" (his words to describe the English pack during my course)

I posted it & forgot about it.

A couple of days later Chris shouted 'Fone for you ...'

Grant's first words were 'You're a cheeky little s*** aren't you ?'

Thought I had better censor, this entry will play havoc with the job's firewall if any of you are still allowed to read it at work after their recent clamp-downs ?