Approaching normality.

Well, I am home. Holiday is over. The sky is just as I left it, slate grey with no features at all. Currently it’s charcoal grey, that normally means it’s night time but that’s not a guarantee, it might just be about to rain even more than usual. There’ll be no more moon pictures for a while, we don’t often have celestial objects here. If the sky turns blue, everyone blames Thatcher.

All plants are alive but all have made disappointing progress. Even the grass has barely managed to show any enthusiasm and the tobacco plants are paltry compared to this time last year. Even in the greenhouse, my tomato plants are half the height they had reached by the beginning of last August. The gooseberries are thriving, the blueberries might almost produce a handful but the rest of the plants have taken to hanging around street corners, drinking, smoking and whistling at passing dandelions.

Those red lily beetles have done horrible things to the white and yellow lilies but seem to have largely left the red ones alone. Tomorrow I will oil up the Gat and look out my .177 pellets. The holes I’ll make in the leaves won’t make any difference now.

The sparrows have eaten most of the raspberries (which is only fair because they planted them), the slugs have been at most other things and a baby seagull had taken charge of the garden. This was, on my return, busy adding a coat of white to the patio but at least it scared away every other bird (and all the cats too). I fed it a broken-up fat-ball then shooed it out of the back gate. It can’t get enough of a run-up to take off in my garden. I don’t think it needs to worry about cats. It’s bigger than almost all of the local ones and it could make most of the local dogs think twice.

So, normality is almost here. Once I make a dent in this bottle of Highland Park, I expect everything will resume just where it left off – deep in the arms of chaos.

I’ll resume eBaying tomorrow. The finances don’t really need it yet but I have the bug now and want to get some practice in before the run-up to Christmas. I think I have decided to take up most of the N gauge layout but leave a single track around the attic with a passing loop at one end. Then have OO gauge in the foreground but have N gauge long trains in the background. I only need to keep a coal train and one rake of coaches, a couple of engines and no N gauge scenery. If I get it right it will look far away. If I don’t get it right, well tough, it’s in the attic so nobody else will ever see it anyway.

I found something interesting in Prestwick (West coast Scotland, below Glasgow, just north of Ayr). A pub called the Prestwick Pioneer, selling the Penderyn! I’m going to have to investigate the local pubs here to see if they’ve heard of it. it wasn’t a proper pub, it was a Wetherspoons but we have one of those here too. I have never entered, but will soon test the extent of their standardisation.

Had many chats with excluded smokers, passed out many, many seeds, found a lovely little sheltered glade where nobody goes and spilled my seed upon the ground (fnarr), have some addresses to send out more seeds, told lots of people about sites like Nothing2Declare and Frank and Junican and Dick Puddlecote and more. Almost every smoker I met moaned that there was no organisation among smokers. There is, they just didn’t know about it. They do now, and I was only able to remember a small part of it all. What I need to do is to set up a page here with links and descriptions, and attach a tiny URL to that page. Then I can hand that out on a card (nicely printed, obviously) whenever I hear ‘Oh, smokers never bother fighting back against all the crap’.

I also noted a few interesting things on the way home. Near Glasgow, there was a statue of a four-armed mermaid that appears to be made out of squashed and polished Tennents’ cans. At the roundabout at Perth, there was a huge wire-frame bird. So, while councils cut back on frontline services, it seems they are quite happy to spend money to baffle future archaeologists with mysterious idols.

It made me wonder about things like the Sphinx. Was it really some kind of worship thing, or did the Council put it there? Did ancient Egyptians pass it and think ‘What the hell is that thing, and how much did it cost? I suppose it’s a bit more interesting than all those modern art pointy-triangle things they’ve stuck up lately.’

Perhaps the Coliseum in Rome was a multi-storey chariot park and Angkor Wat was a proto-Wetherspoons. I must find an archaeologist soon and upset them. Preferably an antismoking archaeologist for a double blast of disturbing imagery.

Anyhow, normality is fast approaching. Soon I will open the Daily Mail website and then the blood pressure will exceed my daily blood pressure allowance for sure…