Only in North Oxford ... #3

... do people give Ferrero Rocher to trick or treaters.

_{Well, I forgot to buy anything more suitable.}

Nuns Don't Thrill People, Rapples Do

"I seen it in a documentary on BBC2"

I am liking Mouldy Looking Stain's *bling* logo :: "like the trainer, comfortable, hard-wearing and looks good in a fight"



... points to those bizarre boys for such a chav-tastically stylish site, and quadruple points for the Speak'n'Spell picture.

In fact, all the points in the world for getting Bristol Zoo, B&Q, Zammo ("just say no") and BBC2 documentaries into one lyric. Woo Woo Woo.

3 weeks in the life

It's been a while. One day in the future I might look at this 3 week gap and ponder (probably without much commitment), hmmn, what was I up to? Well, aside from counting all the holes in Blackburn, Lancashire I've mostly been:
o go-karting. For the first time ever, fortunately with a very amiable set of folks who didn't laugh too hard at my fiercely competitive but ineffective karting efforts. I came second to last and ended up with a whopper of a bruise. Acey pacey.
o to Scotland. We spent many hours in a car with a sticky throttle. Have you ever had an accelerator cable start to unravel? How many times should one just clip off the unravelled wire? At what point does it all just stop working? Are the only people who can answer these questions dead from nasty accidents caused by overly frayed accelerator cables? (Anyway, it's all fixed now, thanks). More to the point, we went all the way to the Applecross peninsula which was wonderfully remote but still had feta cheese and caramelised onions. We stayed with a stalker (of stags, not ex-girlfriends). What a way of life. The weather was so wild and wet and windy that the people in Invergarry didn't think we'd make it (yah boo sucks to them. maybe they knew about the dodgy throttle). We spent lots of time on B-roads for fun and drank up all the scenery we'd never noticed whilst hurtling around on A-roads. And we saw family, friends and new babies and generally had a fine old time.
o experiencing a few hours of mum being on a canal boat and having a birthday. Spectacular.
o decadent. Morph got a bit older and we spent a whole weekend observing the passing of another year with as much gusto as we could muster (turns out, we can still muster quite a lot when we try). Muchos fun was had by all. I mostly remember a never-ending circle of drinking, eating, laughing, cooking, cleaning up ready for the next bout, and being gleefully irreverent to people i don't like much. Yay. Morph smiled a lot which warms the old heart.
o not going to the Frankfurt book fair, and feeling a bit odd as a result. Suffering from schnitzel abstinence. Will be hoping to attend relatively local german pub for my own birthday celebrations (perhaps) in order to eat my fill of Wienerschnitzel, Pommes and hopefully a green salad with some of that very special dressing.
o going to my uncle's funeral. My Uncle Peter was a member of the 1966 University Challenge champion team, Oriel College Oxford. I believe he answered the winning question (about cricket?) and had some sort of set-to with Bamber Gascoigne in the process. A shy man of towering intellect, whom I never really felt I knew. With his untimely death (he was 60), this man for whom so many others had so much respect is now effectively closed to me. Afterwards, Morph and I retraced our route along the M25 and discussed family relationships in the 21st century; family life is no longer what it was, ideologically, geographically, so forth, yet we have not adapted our expectations of it - nor of ourselves - accordingly. Thus I feel a sense of guilt for not fully knowing an uncle whom I rarely saw and then for minimal amounts of time. Families are no longer close, figuratively or geographically. We replace their role in our lives with friends. There has to be a limit to the number of people we can know well; we don't have the hours in the day or the mental capacity to be close to an infinite circle. I shouldn't chastise myself, but funerals bring on regrets. The sandwiches were good, though, and I ate the last mini-scotch-egg.