Saturday, January 28, 2006
The Walking In The Sleep
‘Twas the night after the wedding
And nothing stirred, not even a mouse. Unless that mouse happened to be a person, and that person was the Present Mrs B.
My wife, lovely and charming as she is, has never been able to gauge her own alcohol tolerance. And it seems to be a funny tolerance. She goes from a perfectly stable “I’m fine dear, really, I’m having a lovely time” to “pfffffffffffffft, har har har har har”-thud in an excruciatingly short space of time. She never sets out to get drunk, it just sort of happens somewhere in the space of half a Long Island Iced Tea and from there onwards it’s all a bit of a mess.
And she’s quite an annoying drunk. Not raucous or even badly behaved, just… well… annoying. She’ll tell you she’s a cute drunk. At least that what she just told me. What usually happens is that we jump in the car to go home and I, stoicly, refusing to have had any beerage at all, then have to put up with the following…
“Honey, did you have a nice time ?”
“Yes dear”.
“I’m so glad you had a nice time”.
She then lapses into a near comatose state for approximately ten seconds, forgets the previous 30 seconds entirely, and then repeats the conversation over and over until she finally mumbles something about gagging for a Big Mac and subsequently pebbledashes the side of the car.
Of course at every wedding there’s a drunk bridesmaid. Unfortunately at my sister-in-law’s wedding, the drunk bridesmaid was my wife. Just like every other occasion it all started out very innocently and to all intents and purposes appeared to stay that way. There was no falling over on the dance floor, no whoops-here-comes-dinner type incidents, and I even thought for a while that I’d got away with it. Apparently not.
The first clue I had was when the fresh air hit and she pointed her head towards the starry, starry night and started swaying, arms outstretched in the breeze. Then she started the “I really miss you guys” bit with her aunt and uncle who live halfway across the country from us. Very shortly afterwards she was completely in a world of her own, probably inhabited by pixies and a purple elephant called Bruce, and there was no rescuing her.
Now this in itself wasn’t really a remarkable experience. That started when we got back to the house. My brother-in-law’s a builder and he built his own house. At the time it wasn’t quite finished so the wardrobe in the room we were staying in didn’t have any doors on it and the shelves hadn’t been put up yet : they were just lying up against the wall.
So I’m in bed all toasty and I hear a knocking from inside the door-less wardrobe, followed by a stern “A little help here please”. I turn on the light to find my wife, starkers, inside the wardrobe wrestling with the shelves. As I’m half asleep, the strangeness of the situation doesn’t register and I free the bit of shelf she’s trying to maneuver away from the rest of them, tell her to get back into bed and turn the light off.
Next thing you know, clothes on and she’s off. A quick visit to the bathroom and 2 minutes later she’s got every light in the house on and I can see her through the cracked door standing motionless in the kitchen with a huge grin on her face, holding an imaginary baking tray. Enter the mother-in-law :
MIL : “What the hell are you doing ?”
PMB : “Can you believe that my sister doesn’t believe this baking tray’s real ?!”
MIL : “For God’s sake, just go back to bed.”
PMB : Grumble, huff, etc.
She stomps back into bed, plops her head down, and that’s it, she’s off in the land of nod again.
I’ve never actually seen anyone sleepwalk before. It’s quite an experience.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Dodgy Lou
Lou was a diamond geezer, as some folks say. Some would call him by a different name but that was down to his 2 or 3 aliases courtesy of a bit of bother with the nice poll tax people. Nevertheless, despite the fact that he would quite literally respond to at least 3 names and thus had people all around him going “Lou ? Shit, I’ve been calling him Simon for the last three years”, he always bought a round and was well liked.
Lou joined a band as a singer. When they came up with a new song he was a bit stuck for lyrics so the rest of the band advised to to write about what he knew best. He was a motorbike courier. Title of the song ?
“Sign here please, can I use your phone ?”
Monday, January 23, 2006
My Beautiful Language, Buggery Of
This blogging lark is all a bit new to me, so I reserve the right to have the odd literary train wreck now and then.
Incidentally, I am a bit of a grammar nazi in real life however it seems wrong to do that in a blog. I’m drawn to the blogs which read as you expect them to sound in the writer’s head and it’s that style that interests me more than anything else so, whilst the urge to fight too much punctuation strikes me constantly, commas are meant more for a pause than to represent a clause. Therefore, Microsoft Word’s grammar checker can kiss my arse, along with that sodding paper clip. Anyway, when I’m stuck at work plodding through another proposal, why should a paper clip be so bloody happy ?
Anyway, it all irks me a little, this grammar-spelling stuff. When I was a kid I got one third of my 3 R’s either from newspapers, magazines or books. Now you could always count on those publications to be correctly edited and all the spelling mistakes would have been weeded out. Not so on that there interweb. In fact it seems that a substantial percentage of the English-speaking world’s population are barely literate.
We’ve all seen it… websight, “to” when there should be a “too”, and my favourite of all, the extremely-long-sentence-with-no-punctuation-whatsoever-and-good-Lord-not-a-capital-letter-in-sight-either. Is it a paragraph or is it a sentence ? Could I speak the entire thing without a pause or would I pass out ? Nobody has the right to butcher my beautiful language in such a fashion.
So what’s going to happen with all the kids that are now about 11 or 12 and are surfing the internet ? Will the dictionary change to officially recognize (bloody American spellchecker, that word has a ‘s’ in it !) websights, or will every CV I read in the future be such a mishmash of hacked up spellings that job candidates won’t even get through to an interview ?
Incidentally, to combat the rise of Singlish, a pidgin mix of a Chinese dialect and English, the Singapore Government have created the “Speak Good English” campaign. Nice one.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Flursday Evening
Tonight I am confused.
I've turned on the TV but am not seeing quite what I expected to see. I have also consulted the handy-dandy interactive TV guide, and I am still quite non-plussed.
There's no Law and Order on.
Apparently someone has invented an 8th day of the week and neglected to inform NBC.
Monday, January 16, 2006
It's a Funny Old (New) World
I have long been aware I don't fit here. Probably something to do with my dogged insistence not to drink the fizzy, yellow water they call beer (it's lager, and not even decent stuff at that), or else maybe my utter distain at the lack of ordinary sausages at the grocery. Italian sausage, sir ? Chorizo ? Bratwurst, knockwurst, cheesewurst with a cherry on top ? I shall pass.
In my late twenties I used to get some amusement out of it as the checkout girls at the local supermarket went gooey over my accent (it must have been my accent, it certainly wasn't any other part of me), however lately it's all become a bit of a drag. The hand-over-mouth-giggles at the local Sainsbury equivalent are no more, and as I fight the urge to become completely americanised (see, I spelled it without a ‘z’, not there yet) I find myself kind of lost, without a country.
Whilst ensconced here I have finally found possibly the final, most despicable of all American traits : the attempt at a British accent. They’ve ranged from the obscure - “I’m in a play, we’re doing the Christmas Carol"; recites line an awful high pitched quasi-anglicised squawk - to the faintly post-colonial, and potentially offensive in the wrong hands, “Flying from Seattle at 2 this afternoon ? Guess you won’t be home in time for high tea then”. All of them however have made Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like a regular in East Enders.
I do of course realise that it’s a semi-term of endearment – a way to reach out to a stranger and find some common ground on which to appeal to each other. In general I think the Americans like the English, even if a large portion of the US populace do tend to treat us with the faintly condescending attention shown to a small puppy. Slightly retarded are we, dear ? It’s ok, I’m sure a nice cup of tea will make it all better.
The PMB has long since stopped attempting it. Once upon a time it used to be a party piece (“narridge” spoken by an American sounds exactly like the real Norfolk-accent pronunciation of “Norwich”), and BBC America showed a particular trailer for The Royal Family so often that she could elocute “He’s gonna need changin’, in’t ‘ee?” parrot fashion in perfect Scouse, but the talent seems to have left her shores since and she’s more interested in nurturing a talent for being clucky. I must say she’s becoming very good at it.
There are the exceptions, course. Gwynneth Paltrow does a cracker of an English accent, and Squinty Zellweger has a fairly good stab at it. Once upon a time John Lithgow came pretty close and, to be fair, for many years I though all of Spinal Tap were genuinely British. But overall it’s a fairly miserable experience.
On the whole I think Americans should drop the whole English accent thing and stick to something they’re good at. Invading small countries seems to be a cracker of an idea these days.
Why, oh why, oh why must the BBC...
Why blog ? No idea. Perhaps it’s an outlet for the “NO NO NO GOD NO I’M ALREADY IN MY EARLY THIRTIES” which is filling the void which in my twenties used to be occupied by Playstation.
Maybe it’s to meander aimlessly through pointless rants about the various things which tick me off.
Maybe it’s some narcissistic, electronic field trip for the random nonsense that wanders through my mind.
Perhaps it’s because I’m an ex-pat Brit living in America and I still miss my home and all the people that went with it.
Maybe it’s to tell some funny jokes about the Present Mrs B.
Can you tell I’m having difficulties starting ?
