Window Refugee

YES I'M DEPORTED FROM MY ROOM WHILE a Jamaican and a Polish workman rip out my old windy window (felt like it was open on cold days even when was shut; that's how insulating it was!)... and I've removed everything from within five feet of said about-to-be-gaping-hole-in-wall! I'm hoping that by midafternoon it shall all be done and wondrous uPVC framed double glazed glass windows shall be mine... (I hope they are glass and not those dreadful plastic windows but beggars can't be choosers... ahem!)

Mother Hubbard told me it probably is happening as the result of a special council grant for a less carbon emissions house. Which perfectly makes sense. A sudden streak of generosity on Butterstein (the uber-evil uberlandlord)'s part does not...

I wish I hadn't gone quite so OTT yesterday saying I felt covered in diarrhoea in that restaurant. It sounds really ungrateful. I did have a nice time, but as I say really did feel out of place, especially in the beginning. I felt obligated to take my hat off for one thing... freeing still-damp recently shampoo'd hair. I felt wrong wrong wrong and would have gone to the loo to paranoidly stare into the mirror trying to fix it if that hadn't entailed having to walk past the maitre D who would intensely scrutinize me on my way back in .... ooer.

I never explained the significance of those two Queen of the Night arias I posted up... bit of a private joke. When I was in my teens we used to have the famously dreadful Florence Foster Jenkins version of that song on record. My brothers did not seem to realize the joke was the singer could not sing... Anyway when I did get to go to the opera many moons ago I selected The Magic flute to hear it properly sung. It's quite a famous song as it has the highest note (an F6) in all the standard repertoire of opera...

Well I must go as I'm hungry. My robos are stashed next to the sink, wrapped in a laundry bag and piled up with about 100 records on their roof to prevent nosey pokers poking them out. They pinged around all over the place when they realized something was up and they were moving. Highly entertaining beady-eyed furballs that they are. Even Yangyang came out when I dropped in birdseed and broccoli this morning. His eyes are enormous and poppy. Dark, inky hemispheres. And boy is he long! ... Like a furry freight train trundling out of his nest ... a furry eel more like ... or whatever.

I'll let you know how the windows turn out. Hopefully they don't fix them in with paper glue. O sorry I forgot it's not Evilstein and his personal dolts installing these but professional window guys. You get so used to hundredth best sometimes it's all you ever expect ...

New video of the Day:
Florence Foster Jenkins tribute (including her own famous hahahahahahahahahaargh bits of the Mozart aria) Queen of the Night!!

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Do you know beautyberries? Clickonthis and tell me whether you knew what they were before... or whether you merely thought they were just blackberries airbrushed to glamourize. Or fully Apple Macked!!!

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Nearly 2pm and ...
Man! Still windows not done!
I sneaked upstairs and found Laundretta reading a book whilst smoking a fag on her bed (only respectable thing SHE ever does on a bed... har-har... sorry I should not be vulgar...)... my room the ripping sound of tape....
I snuck downstairs and had a look of my window out the bathroom window and saw I have indeed got a luxury new bright white plastic frame!...
... unfortunately no glass in it just yet! How on earth they slide in the glass after the frame's fitted is quite beyond me ... but hey..!

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Man! I can't believe this. 3pm and windows still glassless. At least Matran and Laundretta's is too so I hope they're shivering. Man all I want to do is go home slam door have whacking great hit and fall asleep with face in chicken curry egg fly lice what's wrong with that and these dolty pompom plonkas are preventing me from crashing out I've been up since about midnight. (Was so exhausted from art gallery exploits I spent literally most of the weekend from then on sleeping. Been feeling very run down lately.) ... They'd better not be interfering with my hamsters either. Else I hope Bashful bites them. O come on man! It's cold! Even in this cybercaffe. And I just wanna go home. How long does it take to slide glass into a doubleglazing frame? There's nothing IN it yet so surely nothing's waiting to dry... come on come on come on!!

I'm too tired to deal with any of this. Just ventured up road. Saw Polish one puffing on fake Marlboro by front door. He had a desperate look on his face. What has gone wrong? This is not good ...

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While I wait I'm going to have a look at Japanorama from my Nippon blog ...

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Ten minutes to four.
Just walked up road. Irritatedly craned neck to Laundretta's window. Wow! Viridescence reflecting from the sky! Upon closer look it was indeed a PVCu window but not as bad as the worst I've seen (you know, windows so bowed out and warped they're like the window version of the fairground hall-of-freaky-mirrirs...
I crept upstairs as silently as Itchy when she's escaped... a workman was there. So I hid in the toilet and craned my neck out. Wow! A brand new teletubby window was in place of my drafty old one. It looks so tiny and small and cute! Then one of the men started coming downstairs so I bolted out the front door.
Q: Are you a man or a mouse?
A: A hamster!
Not in the mood for making bright workman chat today, know what I mean. Anyway I'm sure Laundretta's "accidentally" falling open dressing gown's kept them more than "amused"...

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6:20pm I wasn't in too much of a good mood earlier. Very tired. I've been sleeping excessively; exhausted excessively. Don't know quite why ...

Anyway a while after four I went back to the house and spoke to the Polish fitter: "have you finished?" I said. "O yeah; have a look." I did and it's wonderful. NOT PVCu - I take that back! These are real glass and I get such a good view. (Probably the old view was so bad because those old windows were so exceedingly dirty!!) I did eat chicken curry egg fried rice. Sat in the shop looking up "chicken" and "curry" and "egg" and "fry/fried" and "rice" in my Japanese dictionary. Some fantastic characters came up. Egg was particularly entertaining - 卵 - because you can see two ovular things in it ... you need an overactive imagination for Chinese-derived characters but you get to learn the little motifs that make them up! An oblong, for example, represents a mouth (口) and so appears in language (言語), talk (を話す), word (単語), shouting (を叫ぶ) etc ... (in shouting the mouth goes sideways: 叫, see). What an entertaining language the Japanese have.

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10:21pm and I've just had a massive fix!... of Her Majesty the Queen!! In the latest instalment of the BBC1 docu Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work... (Same programme I was ranting on about this time last week although it was a disappointing half hour shorter this week...) Buckingham Palace looks lovely from the inside... like a particularly plush hotel. Though I'd have to say if I lived there I wouldn't go running around those long corridors like everybody else. I'd go about on scooters or rollerskates. Ma'am seemed particularly irritable at times this week. Perhaps the BBC consider it more fittingly "modern" to have an exasperated Queen with a bit of attitude. Maybe she was really getting rather miffed at having all those cameras following her about every day for nearly a year!

I'm still enchanted by my marvellous new window. I've been gazing out of it and opening and closing it. It even has a lock with a key. How posh is that. I bet Her Majesty the Queen doesn't have double glazing at Buck House!

In a minute I have to go out and disinterr my robos (poor man's corgis (the Queen's favourite dogs)) - they do have a couple of things in common with corgis 1. they're all very mischievious and 2. all being a light sandy colour with identical markings they're exactly the "same" in appearance. I can only tell the three apart by degrees of tubbiness. And Spherical might have a slightly lighter coat than Bashful... They're hidden behind a chest of drawers, layers of bedsheets, and a tartan washing bag under a stack of 100 oldfashioned huge vinyl records!

Well I had better say goodnight now.

***{And I'm giving a little royal wave...}***

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PS:
The BBC World Service have been doing a radioplaywriting competition for people from all over the world, open to all ... they've been playing the six or ten best ones ... anyway a play came on the other night ... I was asleep when it first came on so it kind of melded into my dreams at first, then I came to clear consciousness and realized how fantastically good this piece of drama really was. Surely a new talent of world standing had been discovered. They'd even persuaded Clive Swift (best known as Hyacinth Bucket's longsuffering husband in Keeping Up Appearances) and Prunella Scales (best known as Basil Fawlty's longsuffering/tormenting wife in Fawlty Towers but likely seen nowadays playing posh old widows in Jane Austenny costume drama... to take starring roles. Something I'm sure they'd not have done for any old bit of tripe ...
Well anyway, turns out the play is called The Rocking Horse and it's NOT by some young struggling playwrite but by Arnold Wesker who's 75 and along with Harrold Pinter a leading light of modern British drama. And it's brand new and was specially written for radio. If you're lacking some entertainment do clickonit and you can play it through the computer. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

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Great pictures from Slavonic Central Europe!
http://trunko.blogspot.com