Boogie Nite

11th May
I was a bit late arriving at the village bar on Friday night and walked into a scene straight out of a David Lynch movie, tables of retired army-types played dominoes, a tall, skinny man stood at the end of the room picking out gloomy tunes on a guitar, the Andrews Sisters sang over the speakers.

Brenda hosted the evening, she's seventy and had a lot of surgical enhancement in the days when they used to just pull your face up and tie it behind your ears, heaven knows what her chest is packed with. Her cigarette constantly on the go Brenda has never been known to surface before midday - possibly due to the fact that she is quite tiny and it's probably quite hard to overcome the gravitational pull of pre-war implants.

By the time I got to the bar Brenda, her wig awry, had clearly been on the electric soup. Wearing a long and shiny halter-neck dress, her breasts looked as though two cannon balls had been stuffed to the ends of a pair of tights, she waved a big Tupperware box of cheese straws at me and passed me a Pina Colada that she'd decided was one too many for her.

I had a go at the dominoes but it’s never really been my game and the old buffer opposite was nowhere near as funny as he thought he was. So I let him win quickly and settled on a bar stool for the rest of the evening with Brenda, her stories are relentlessly tragic but delivered with dry wit and the bleakest of black humour, she told me how she’d been in the process of buying a cocktail bar in Marbella but got waylaid by a fleeting affair with a young and muscled rogue who wanted to go to France it was the saddest story in the world - but strangely compelling. If you’ve never watched Coronation Street here’s a clip;

Fish and Cabbage

10th May
A comment on my last post from Mr Dilo in Romania indicated that I might not have explained the butterfly/cabbage thing adequately. Earlier this year I started a vegetable patch so that we would have a context to film some of our insects, I planted all the usual stuff including some flouncy green cabbages, I kept a few of the plants in pots - they don’t like being confined. The butterflies may well turn their noses up at my pathetic cabbage stubs but if there is no other option, they might lay their bright yellow eggs on the leaves. (I nicked the egg pic from here, where there are also some nice shots of the young hatching and a Cabbage White pupa)


Fishing on Friday didn’t go down well, none of us have wielded a rod (and to be frank, I've never seen the point of all that standing around) but there is a lake on the land that we rent and it is teeming with fish, fishing is the sort of thing a father does with his son ergo etc...

The chaps came back after less than an hour in a state of distress - a fish had responded to the baited hook with such gusto that it entirely swallowed the hook, it all ended very messily, the fish not being the sort of size to bother eating.

The fish are very friendly, they will come if I call them because they know that I have bread. My neighbours have dug a reservoir and want to stock it with these fish so yesterday I went to the lake, and once they were feeding I just dipped a bucket and Hey Presto!





My favourite fishing method is to creep up on the herons, they catch the big fish by stabbing them, if I surprise the birds just as they have made a catch they usually drop the fish as they fly off.








You've probably been irredeemably traumatised by that vision of my unmanicured toes, tomorrow, unless otherwise distracted, I'll tell you about Brenda's party.

Brenda Steps In

5th May
Since our village bar was sold last year it has languished in an ever-deepening Vale of Tears. A British couple called Strange bought it for tuppence from a lady desperate to make a quick sale, Mrs Strange thought that a bar would be a nice retirement hobby for her husband but after a few months they suddenly needed to disappear, leaving their eldest son in charge. Kurt The Goth spent the winter emptying the bar’s bank account ... then he also needed to leave, he persuaded his brother Shane The Fascist to come to the village and take over...


Shane is the only member of the Strange family who speaks French, he is an angry young man with a long list of dislikes; top of the list are British people, women and anyone over thirty. He doesn’t drive - for his first few weeks in the village Shane relied solely on the kindness of elderly British women to take him shopping. One day Shane's lovely and extremely camp friend Zizi arrived to help run the bar and do the driving.

Mrs Strange only discovered that Shane replaced Kurt a couple of weeks ago, she has returned and Zizi has gone. I was told that Zizi’s girlfriend was unhappy about him working at the bar - so he’s had to leave - unfortunately.

There is a bright spot on the horizon however – Brenda* has decided to liven things up. While seated at the bar listening to the update of this story my eye wandered over to a pile of bright flyers written in English and using the full array of jokey fonts currently available:

Friday Nite is Brenda’s Nite
For Fun, Frolics and Mayhem
Bring an instrument and a song
At the *** ***** Bar
8 til late

* Brenda is a Liverpudlian septuagenarian, chain smoker, owner of many wigs and recipient of some very large implants.

An Offer I Can’t Refuse

25th March
After yesterday’s Ada holiday , I’m back on track in the World of Weird that is this little filming project, I’ll catch you up on the insect and cat news later, but I’ve been champing at the bit to unburden myself of a recent adventure:

I had a swift response to Friday’s canvassing for garden-related stuff, the following afternoon a battered Mercedes scrunched into our driveway. M. Mullet got out, swaggered round to the car boot and opened it with a flourish to reveal a pile of ceramic flower pots and plastic seed trays. I thanked him and said that I’d be happy to buy them.

Oh no, they’re just sitting there taking up space in our garage, they are a gift

M. Mullet has a wolfy leer about him, clearly this was not going to be the end of it, his eyes were scanning the property over my shoulder, taking note that no other car was in view, he finally asked if I was on my own (I was).

Goodness me no, my husband is filming behind the house – shall I call him?

He didn’t call my bluff and headed off, but the following day his wife knocked on our front door and asked me if I would like to have an aperitif with her that evening, I said that would be lovely thank you
then she said Good you will join my home maintenance party

She saw my puzzled look and explained that she was hosting a party for housewives where we would be introduced to some house cleaning products, I wanted to laugh, my idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

The penny dropped - this was how I had to pay for the car-load of pots

The Mullet’s place was easy to spot due to the broken lorry blocking the road outside, but then I had to negotiate quite a lot of big car parts and dog poo before I got to the front door, M. Mullet opened the door and there was  a tussle to stop the dogs savaging me. The 'party’ was going to be run by a large severe-looking lady in a tight suit, M.Mullet left for the bar and we were all given catalogues, there were 5 other 'guests', all French except for Brenda*, I was the only non-smoker in the room.

Brenda hissed at me that she’d tried to decline her invitation by saying that there’d be no point as she didn’t understand French, They told me you were coming to translate – why didn’t you say no?

I hissed back: Why didn’t you?

We were then treated to the Stanhome Experience which is exclusively directed at women and emphasizes their responsibility to provide family security through cleanliness. The Tight-suited Lady stood and lectured us, pausing now and again while I turned to Brenda and rendered her words into English.

There is nothing that will remove as many stains as Spunkoff, here are my husband’s white cricket trousers, they were covered with sperm and grass stains, see how new they look now

Mme Mullet was to receive a commission from the sales, she told us that she hoped to reach a target that would win her the bonus prize, I asked her what that would be

A magic squeegee**

Finally order forms were passed around, I selected a cleaning sponge and some hand cream at the sort of price I would pay for good Champagne and smoked salmon. Everyone else placed their order and went home but Mme Mullet had insisted that Brenda and I stay for aperitifs, we waited while the evening’s sales were totalled.

The squeegee target was not reached, Tight-suit lady handed us all a Stanhome-branded coaster and left. M. Mullet came back from the bar, poured us some warm whiskey and tried to comfort his distraught wife about her tight-fisted friends. It was an uncomfortable evening on every level.

* Brenda is great value - a chain-smoking septuagenarian party girl from Liverpool, recipient of multiple implants and facelifts

** Obviously if I could’ve just bought her the mop as an exchange for the pots I would have happily done so – but mere money won’t buy such a glorious thing.