Did parenting stop being a thing?

I am hosting two young men (one is nearly 30) neither has been taught basic life skills:

the younger one used the washing machine yesterday, I showed him the first time but forgot to demonstrate the exact amount of laundry liquid to be used for one machine load - he used one whole litre

the older one is tiring of KFC, he did use the kitchen once, placing a raw chicken in the oven - but then unsure what else was supposed to happen, he has now subscribed to a scheme that sends him meals by post

It's hammock-crazy around here

Community hammock at the bottom of our road. 

Hammock-for-human-beans at the bottom of our garden.  

My household currently contains two adolescent boys*, one is in his teens and the other is nearly 30, each of them consumes enough cans of pop to fill a bathtub daily.  Neither of these boys owns a coat and I am reminded of the Finnish boy who stayed a few years ago

In other news

I have embarked on 'The Great Floor Polishing' this involves much shifting of furniture and then sweeping, scrubbing and scraping before the oily polish can be laid down in thin thin coats. After the oiling, people must skate around on tea towels so it polishes up nice and shiny. Last time I did this I had spilt tea on my computer and lost the use of the letter 'i'

*the boy-in-a-hammock is not one of the resident pop-drinking boys, he is a visiting-boy

lunch with eleven women

in a sun-drenched-wisteria-ridden garden,  a laburnum tree burgeoning with yellow flowers took up most of the air above us, tiny bits of cobalt sky peeped through the blooms. We ate salmon in dill sauce with Jersey Royal potatoes then summer pudding with cream and raspberry cream roulade with extra cream. We were celebrating a scratch-card win.

Our host is an undertaker, four of the guests were either undertakers or 'in the business'. The host didn't want the lunch to become 'too-death-ey' and kept trying to introduce other topics of conversation but death and it's complications are too much fun; one guest had been asked to bury a large man in a wardrobe - there was a problem getting the body into the chapel, another guest was in the process of converting an ex-Carphone Warehouse into a mortuary ...

in other news

French Boy lodger has found his culinary groove - breakfast is fizzy pop and chocolate biscuits. For supper he has found a never-ending supply of reconstituted chicken-in-breadcrumbs, he fries as many nuggets as will fit on a big plate every single evening, I'm hoping he gets home to his mother before scurvy sets in.

We headed out to a Greek Island

it was out-of-season-closed-down so no-one else was there, the spring flowers ran riot in abundance and the weather was out-of-season mad, wild winds, then calm, mostly sun but some blustery black skies and a bit stormy sometimes.

We stayed in a white white cottage on the edge of a tiny bay where a grumpy old shepherd brought his flock of maggotty old sheep to nibble at the grass edges, the sheep liked to go in the water which made the shepherd furious, if I went down to the sea when the sheep were trying to swim to freedom they would come out of the water to see if they could come home with me - which made the shepherd doubly furious.

The local tavern had no inside, a bit of clear polythene was wrapped around one of the sides of the open air terrace - giving pale shelter from raging winds, we double-wrapped up for our daily fried-cheese-and-chips-with-Greek-beer visits.

The sea cottage was owned by someone in Athens who sent daily messages to remind me what is forbidden:

DON"T USE THE BBQ!!!

DON'T TURN ON LIGHTS AND HEAT AT SAME TIME!

DON'T DRINK WATER!

DON'T FEED ANIMALS!

DON'T LEAVE DOORS OPEN, ANIMALS WANT TO COME IN!


Around the house, drawings of massive mice with big crosses over them are pinned to the doors

A few scraggy cats came by but most had read the notices and didn't stay except for the gray-and-white one who took up residence on the outside mat.

We got home at the end of last week and now a very young French Boy is living with us, FB wears glasses, from the front he is brainy-looking, when he turns around we see the design carved into his almost-shaved hair, this might be the 21st century equivalent of a mullet.*

*business out front, party round the back!

The new boy from Iceland

looks as though he has stepped out from that painting.

He is raw and green as a newly hatched cabbage. Nothing makes any sense to him; not how to make a padlock work on a gate, or what things constitute food. His luggage was a toothbrush and a bike, he doesn't own a coat and he has had to go and buy himself some stouter shoes -  I have a bet on how long the bike will last (less than one week) because he secures it with a rubber band and forgets to bring it in behind that gate he must learn to lock and unlock.

I don't know how much of this is about the difference between our countries and how much is about him being twenty years old but I daily resist the urge to put him into a brown paper bag with a banana to ripen a bit more.