Warty
This little guy was on the pavement this morning. I think it's a toad. Not quite cute enough and too large to be a frog. Well, maybe seven eighth of a toad, with his right arm missing and all. I crouched next to him and asked: 'toad, how are you feeling?'. Either it wasn't a toad after all, or he lacked the energy to croak. The pavement clearly wasn't the best surroundings for seven eighth of a toad, so I scooped him up and installed him in the garden. I hope that if the cats make a meal out of him they don't do it remaining limb by remaining limb. I suppose that if I find the dead remains of a toad later on, I can bury him in the hole left by the hungry foxes when they dug out the daffodil bulbs to eat them.

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Update on Toad.
I went to check and he was still there, huddled in a corner under a bush; I wasn't sure he was still alive, so I poked him gently in the eye and he jumped, proving thereby that he still was. So I named him Herman. I'm probably getting too attached. It's always the same problem with me.

Hiatus
I haven’t blogged today, and I feel something is missing.
Is that really sad? Should I worry that it’s turning into an addiction? A crutch? I’ll keep the laptop on the spare pillow tonight, in case I wake up and feel the sudden urge to discuss my new colour obsession or what items of tableware I have broken recently. People of blogland, friends, mom, good night.

It all happens so fast
This morning I overslept by 7 minutes, meaning that my carefully planned out system was severely out of synch, so I had to feed the cat while brushing my teeth while dry blowing my hair while putting my boots on, and that wasn’t zen at all. The whole day went accordingly; after the sadistic car driver and puddle incident, there was me trying to multi task, all Goddess Shiva-like in the face of adversity, all the while remaining approachable and responsible and helpful and patient and NICE, GODDAMNIT. (Breathe. Ok. Now take yourself out for coffee and just watch the people walk past, that’ll soothe you.) Right, I said to myself, if within the next 15 minutes you count more than 6 ponchos, you get a chocolate brownie. So I counted : 12 ponchos in varied colours, yay! as well as 8 pairs of stupidly high heels clearly very awkward to walk in, and only 3 of those velour trouser suits with ‘bling bling’ or ‘bitch’ written across the arse. (My advice: when looking to buy a velour trouser suit thing, just.. stop.) The winning combination of greasy bottle blond hooker hair, giant gold loop earrings and sportswear, a fine example of the tribal dress code of chavs, (the new ruling class of Britain) is not so common around my place of work; there are better places to score high on the chav stakes. Still, I was well entertained, and got a chocolate brownie.
Tomorrow, internet, friends, kind and possibly distant readers, mom, I might post pictures of what chavs look like, in case you feel the anthropologist stir within you and enquire. But for now I shall go and stand on my head as a way of relieving today’s tension; or maybe just re-read “The loved ones” by Evelyn Waugh. I finished watching series 2 of Six Feet under, and I miss the atmosphere of the funeral home. Thank you for stopping by.

Soudain un inconnu vous offre des fleurs.
In the commercial, it happened like this: moving shot: a young, beautiful, smiling woman (you) is walking down the street, her golden mane of hair making ripples in the sun. Heads turn. Close up: an equally young and beautiful man, but with short hair, obviously taken by the stranger’s scintillating beauty, charisma and man-killing hips. In a split second, because air time costs, he knows what to do: he rushes into the nearest flower shop, buys a bunch of red roses, and risks his life catching up with the blonde wonder. Who doesn’t freak when he forces a bunch of flowers on her. Cut. Slogan: Impulse: suddenly, a stranger gives you flowers. The end.
Well. Tonight as I was leisurely walking down the street, a smiling stranger offered me a brand-new roll of gift-wrapping paper. Either she liked me, had seen the ad and thought that all the flower shops would be closed at this time, or she really hated her wrapping paper.
It’s rather nice, actually.

Skegness :the most depressing place I have ever visited. 

Who knows why it all suddenly came back to me today; maybe it was the purely apocalyptic feel of the day, the leaden skies, the mud.. here goes the repressed memory:
Many years ago, when I was an unsuspecting Modern Foreign Language assistant in the Northern Regions of this beautiful country, I was sent to Skegness.
I hadn't done anything wrong that I can remember, or at least they couldn't prove anything, so the exile was unrelated to any shenanigans. I was simply rounded up, like a score or so of fellow MFLAs, packed onto a bus and sent to trailer-town as a huge favour to the Local Education people: provide the local kids with a virtual French town, happily recreated in the deserted resort of Skegness-on-sea. In November.
Skegness is bad enough in the summer: hundreds and hundreds of 'luxury' trailers all lined up along the beach, providing holiday accommodation for the economically challenged. Fish and chips and beer and arcade games. And the wind on the Northern sea.
We slept in unheated trailers and lived on fish and chips and milky PG tips tea. We painted signs, wrote out roleplays, prepared creative activities. When the time came for the brats to appear, I had to don a custom officer uniform and board the first coach, and intimidate hyperactive 12-year-olds into presenting their (fake)passports.
It was false, cheap, tacky, and utterly humiliating.
I can safely that none of us enjoyed the experience.
That's all.

Popular wisdom, my white arse.
I know that you weren’t born in 1933, Internet. Neither was I, I hasten to add, just to balance out the times when I do sound like a grumpy old fart.
But we both know this: when Adolph H was triumphantly elected in 1933, it was what the people wanted. Don’t we have footage documenting the delirium? His election was greeted positively in most European countries, and even in the US; and many conservative commentators argued that it just wasn’t democratic to question the people’s choice. We know where the people's choice led us.

Do y’all have bunkers in the US?

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homophobia, garden variety
About once a year I get political and write to some mayor. Remember? I forgot to add that Monsieur le Maire answered me. So that made me feel all fluffy inside, even though it was probably penned by some perky PA whose job description is ‘answer all the mail that doesn’t contain bits of bog roll or smeared dog shit.’ Because that’s what poor Noel Mamère got: a torrent of hatred, over 4000 epistles of stinking concentrate of homophobia.
Different registers are explored: nostalgic (if Hitler was still around he’s have you and that scum burned up), martial, and scatological, like those literally dipped in shit, just to, oh so subtly, illustrate the fact that’s what the gays really enjoy about being gay. You know.
But the scariest thing about it is that most of those letters are signed; in most people’s mind, being homophobic is still something to be proud of.
Because rugby players are less likely to be called faggots, one of them collected all those letters and made a book. It’s called, duh!, ‘Homophobie France 2004’, by Serge Simon, and it’s published by Editions Le bord de l’eau. I say yay!

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It’s Saturday, therefore I’m off to socialise and buy something orange.

1000 mg
I’m trying to figure out why, over the past month and a half, I’ve been having this strange, sudden compulsion for the colour orange. This is an ex-goth writing this, internet. My bedroom at home used to be a extravaganza of black drapes, black walls, and fake cobwebs, complete with plastic spiders. Even these days, my closet doors open on a sea of black garments. Fabric-coordinated.
And now, this craving for orange. Orange, for the sake of Pete!
Should I see some deep symbolism in this?
Or should I assume that I’m developing scurvy and that I need a strong dose of vitamin C?

404 and Rioja as the path to oblivion
Google ‘miserable failure’ and look at the top result.
Alternatively, Google ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and click on ‘I’m feeling lucky’.

I know, these have been around for a while; anything to feel a bit better, really.
Besides a whole Cassoulet (that’s posh sausage and beans.) and half a bottle of wine for dinner.

Oh, and read this, too.

The real ordeal
Tonight, internet, I had to stand up and make a speech in front of two hundred people. Strangers and colleagues.
Before I walked onto to the stage, I spared a thought for the brave, brave soul in my (past) life who once had a shot at stand up comedy. At least, I didn’t have to be funny. Except funny to look at, perhaps.
Surprisingly, all went well; I heard my voice lift up, clearer and stronger than I expected. Some faces even lit up as I was delivering my totally non-prepared spiel. I’m being proud, Internet!
Next time though, I have to remember to not eat figs before a speech. You see, internet, dried fruit makes me fart, so I had to clench my bum throughout the whole thing. That was the real ordeal.
I’m in such a poetic mood tonight.

In hell it’s Christmas every day.
Internet, you don’t need me to puke all over Christmas; it’s been done before. It makes teenagers feel cool, and grown ups look more clued up about this shitconsumeristsociety.
So let’s quote Loudon Wainwright III instead, why not:

Suddenly it's Christmas,
The longest holiday.
The season is upon us;
A pox, it won't go away.
It's a season, it's a marathon,
Retail eternity.
It's not over till it's over
And you throw away the tree.

I think I used to like Christmas; but my liking of all things Christmassy went away along with frozen food, the year Oxford Street’s decorations were sponsored by Bird’s eye : a mile-long shimmering tunnel of orange Bird’s eye logos. Christmas has to start early to keep the punters busy; over here, we don’t have Halloween and Thanksgiving to tide us over. Halloween in the uk is but a cheap mess, since Brits don’t like each other enough for it to turn into a big warm gushing feast of neighbourness. (And some psychos put gross stuff on doorbells to put the kids off anyway.) As to Thanksgiving, it does sound like a nice idea now that I’ve understood that no, it’s not just pigging out to celebrate the fact that a bunch of white blokes nicked the land from some brown ones after a merry slaughter. No, it’s not! I know better now, you see, Internet. One day I was on Ignorant Foreigner mode, I questioned the nature of Thanksgiving, that exotic notion. An explosion ensued: did I really want to shred (or was it tear? rip? surely not disembowel? my memory fails me) every possible joy in her life? Did I? DID I?
Hell, no; malevolent and wicked I may be- or I wouldn’t be able to do the job I do; but one should draw the line at asking questions about Thanksgiving. So I grabbed my keys, shut my big foreign trap and retreated.
Internet, I’m not sceptical anymore about it, now that I’ve had the (calm) rationale behind it; in fact I can think of worse things that the prospect of pigging out with the people I love. All three of them. On the other hand, I am seriously not looking forward to Christmas: it’s my family’s favoured time of year for funerals. Wait, we also do April.
So what as my point: oh yeah, I’m a grumpy cunt today. Thank you for listening.