Stuipid Tuesday

BEEN SLEEPING ALL DAY: reason? A mild sore throat. Boo-hoo! Or maybe it has something to do with the long bank holiday forcing everyone (especially my landlord) to take time off. His not banging in and out of my house all day until 6pm probably made me relax so much I was unconscious.

By the way, regarding the Sound of Music, which I saw half an hour of yesterday before falling asleep I don't remember ever seeing it all the way through ... Although it does hark back to an innocent age that probably never really existed, the music reminds me of my childhood when my Dad had the Sound of Music songbook and used to tinkle out those Rogers & Hammerstein classics on the piano. My favourites being Climb Every Mountain and You are Sixteen Going On Seventeen ... I really had a thing about the second of these when I was about six (going on seven...(!)). I don't know why ...

I saw Mother Hubbard today. She is looking after her friend's daughter who was whizzing up the road on rollerskates. How skates have changed since my day!! The first pair I ever had literally strapped on to my shoes, had four wheels in two groups of two and no stoppers and made a tinny "skashhh-skkashhh" noise as I ambled up the road. Then in the very early 80s at some time my nagging finally paid off and I got roller boots, again in the two sets of two format with stoppers on the front. Me and my brother used to go down the roller disco every other weekend when our Mum had us. The best thing, apart from the disco itself, was that in the canteen they had a video jukebox. I hadn't seen one of these and hadn't seen many since. Bear in mind this was a good fifteen years before MTV ever took off in this country. Being able to (wait until somebody else paid!!) 50p for two tracks, I think it was which was extortion at that time ... wow I felt so pop-culturally privileged and musically immersed ... (so to speak). To put it another way, none of my friends knew the videos but we did so being about 10 and 12 we felt really superior/hip 'n' trendy/in with the bands on the "hit parade". I remember spraying my wheels with WD40 beforehand for extra whizzzz...

Anyway the kids of today skate on four wheels all in a row like roller ice-skates. Whith the stopper at the back ...! I would like to go ice skating one of these days. I have never been in my life, would you believe it, though it was something I always always wanted to do ... Don't know how adept I really would be at skating on knives ...

Must go as I have a chicken kebab getting cold and if I get grease on these keys I might get executed ...

OK I had said kebab. It was way too salty. Why do industrial food manufacturers pour such masses of salt into everything they conjure. E.g. the elephant's leg lamb and chicken doner "thing that he cooks on a glorified gas fire then takes a knife to". We saw a nature program earlier about an Aussie couple called Ron & Valerie Taylor (or something) and their obsession with sharks. They made a chainmail outfit and encouraged and succeeded in getting numerous types of shark to grab Val's arm and attemptedly savage it. When it came to the great white they wisely used a dummy dressed in chainmail (bear in mind that every other big type of shark had done attempted savagery on this chainmail suit and left it undented. Their bites didn't even bruise her arm ...) The great white went nuts on this tethered dummy. They dragged it out of the water. And lo and behold! Said suit was full of bloody great holes!!