Life In Cold Blood

"This is a gold mine. The people who dug it didn't find any gold."

So - it's technically more of what's known as 'a big hole' then Sir David?

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Pining Away

So there we are, Christmas is officially over. The tree's down, the decorations are gone, and I'm running out of time to do something with that last half-jar of mincemeat in the fridge.

Is it just me that appears to play hide-n-seek with decorations? You think you're done, sit down, then realise there's still tinsel round the picture. So you pull the boxes out again, stuff it in and sit back down, only to spot the wind-up santa on the bookcase (which has actually been there all year, because you didn't spot it last time either).

Then it's just a question of getting the tree out into the back garden and deciding, rather like the Liberator, which way it should be pointing; all the time knowing it's a redundant question anyway, as either will see an equal number of needles shed into the carpet, clothes and the cat's bowl. The resulting hoovering up is also doubly difficult, because finding pine needles on a green carpet? I suppose I could always do it in bare feet...

Still, next Christmas? Bring it on.

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008, Licensed to post cheap innuendo

Happy, um, January? Yes, quite.

So there I am, checking my email and trying to drink enough black coffee to wake up, when there's a short loud bang at the door. It's not quite a knock-knock, and as far as I know the doorbell's working, so I assume it's one of the cats, but I go to have a look, (somewhat tentatively, as I'm only clad in dressing gown and towel).

I pull open the door to find a middle-aged balding gentleman bent down in an attempt to stuff a Yellow Pages through my cat-flap.

The Cornish Rambler : startling unsuspecting locals since 2004.

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"You cheap lousy faggot"

So after all the fuss about Radio 1 first censoring Fairytale of New York, and then deciding not to when the entire world and Radio 2 went "Eh? WTF?" they end up dubbing it after all on the Christmas TOTP2.

Now apart from the insanity of screwing with the most famous line of the most popular Christmas song ever (TM) I'll concede it was actually done in an impressively seamless way, substituting "you're drunk and you're haggard" for "you cheap lousy faggot". So if you didn't know what it was supposed to be, you wouldn't, in fact, notice. The point being, everybody does know what it's supposed to be. And everyone, with the exception of Peter "shut up I'm chewing a wasp" Tatchell, who takes offence at everything on principle and should therefore sensibly be ignored, thinks it's bonkers to change it.

Bizarrely, they left in the other line that was earmarked for dubbing, "you're an old slut on junk." Which, for the last twenty years, I have heard as "you're an old southern drunk." So the only outcome of the whole debacle is to make the song marginally more offensive than it had been in my head. A stonking result for the BBC there, then.

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And finally, to prove to Dave I'm not dead...

We left home on Friday in persistent drizzle and it took about six hours to get to Oxfordshire. I've not been through the Cotswolds before, it's very pretty countryside and has some gorgous villages. The hotel was an old coaching inn, reputedly haunted by the ghost of a highwayman - his image was everywhere, looking backwards from his horse - so you would for example open the menu and be confronted with a large horse's arse. Nice.

The room was quite comfortable, albeit with a manky old blanket and mysterious stains on the bedspread - judging by the damp patch on the ceiling, they'd had a little accident at some point.

We descended to the bar for a pre-dinner drink - over £6 for two pints. Yeeouch. Still, managed to nab a couple of armchairs in the corner with the bookcase which was full of old editions of things like Keats, and My Family And Other Animals, and so on - the volume that caught my eye (no idea why) was King Solomon's Ring. Upon examination this turned out to be some kind of naturalist's treatise, but the chapter headings made me laugh - they included Pitying Animals and Laughing At Animals. Eh?

Dinner was served by a pretty French waitress and the tallest, thinnest waiter I've ever seen. Who tried to serve us someone else's soup, much to their indignation!

To start with we had pigeon salad with bacon lardons, pine nuts and raspberry jus (which met with my approval in the definition of the word salad stakes, in that it was minimal salad and lots of bits of meat). Never had pigeon before, but it was rather nice, quite dark, bit like venison. Also, overcooked, but hey ho.

For the main course, C. had rump steak with pink peppercorn sauce (which was brown - doesn't that rather defeat the object of using pink peppercorns?) and I had salmon on wilted spinach with langoustine sauce, which was rather violent orange and quite rich - we both agreed our courses were improved for scraping off the majority of the sauce heh. Also, could have done without the standard issue 'lump of cauliflower, pile of radioactive carrots and a few beans' on the side. But still, nice enough.

The raspberry mousse I had for dessert didn't really taste of anything though, on a sad and soggy sponge base. C. had strawberries and cream in a brandy snap basket, which seemed okay, and we had coffees and a very nice bottle of wine (actually in a big silver ice bucket on a stand, which I was possibly over excited about.)

Saturday was the day of the track thing. We started out with the breakfast buffet, where you can basically have whatever you want from huge trays of sausages and bacon and eggs and all sorts, or cereals, or fruit, or even danish pastries. I'd quite like a day in that room, actually...Oh, and the second tallest, thinnest waiter I've ever seen. I think they must be breeding them specially. This one looked like Egon from the Ghostbusters, and I kept expecting him to burst out of the kitchen with a powerpack on his back and Slimer wrapped round his head...

Anyway.

We eventually found the right airfield entrance, after bothering a big American security guard at the wrong one - please don't shoot us sir - and the airfield was ace, full of miles of creepy old deserted hangars. Just begging for an episode of the Avengers. The U Drive track day people were all together, so there were people waiting not only to drive the Caterham and Lotus that C. was booked in for, but also two red Ferraris, silver and yellow Porsches, and Subaru and Mitsubishi rally cars. The Lotus was the prettiest, but boy did the Ferrari make the best noise. If ever there was a noise that could be described as knicker-elastic-snapping, that would be it.

It was misty and cold and windy, but not actually raining which was good. C. went in the Lotus first and then the Caterham, for which he had to take off one of his shoes because the pedals are so close together! He was ranked 83% and 88% respectively, and did not stall (unlike one guy in the Porsche) or drive over the cones (like one guy in the Ferrarri) although he did get lost in the Lotus and get an extra lap out of it...

Afterwards we made our chilly way to Woodstock, and had a steak sandwich in the Marlborough Arms, having managed to bag the leather sofa in front of the log fire. Ahh....We had a walk round afterwards, it's an intensely pretty town full of shops selling shiny things at the price of small council houses. We were going to go into the grounds of Blenhiem Palace, but it was £7.50 for the privelege, so we decided bugger that and went instead to see the Rollrights Stone Circle which was amazing - such weird stones, all pitted and knarled. The sun was setting in a wintry sky (it was only about 3pm at this point!) and it was very peacful, we had the circle to ourselves, despite there having been other people milling about in the layby. We walked around the edge of the field to see the Whispering Knights, and then back over the road to see the King's Stone - very odd shape, gives the impression it's spinning, everything's at an odd angle.

Stopped off in Chipping Norton for a hot chocolate pitstop, then back to the hotel briefly before going in search of dinner. The original intention was to see if we could eat in the place we'd originially been booked ion to stay, as the menu had sounded good, but we couldn't find it in the dark, so follwing my beer radar, we ended up at the Crown and Tuns in Deddington, which is a pub that specialised in pies! It had a log fire, and decent beer (Old Hooky) and I had beef and ale pie. And chips. Mission successful.

Sunday - more breakfast buffet joy (and Egon) and then the trip back, mostly in the pouring rain - although Oxfordshire saw us out in style by snowing on us!!

Oh, and we parked next to an Aston Vantage in Exeter services...

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AA website directions

• At T-junction, turn right onto the A44
• Bear left on the A44
• At mini-roundabout, turn left onto the A44
  

Eh?

So - is that like really small slices, or oriental?

Perusing the web for accommodation for an upcoming jaunt to Oxfordshire, I've just discovered one place offers on its menu "Beef and Ale Pie - chinks of beef in rich sauce with crusty puff pastry top."

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Meh.

Is this a cold I see before me? Actually, it appears to be more like tonsilitis, and I consequently spent about four days lying on the sofa occasionally whimpering pitifully if it looked like being of any use.

(On day one, I put the duvet on the sofa, inserted a hot water bottle, arranged a couple of cushions. Left the room to make something to eat, came back, and the cat had inserted herself under the duvet at the hot water bottle end. Hmph.)

Anyway, went back to work when the alternative was being dragged kicking and scraming to the doctor.

So what else is new and exciting? Well, went to the Trengilly Wartha for dinner with some friends last Saturday, lamb shank and mash, very nice too. The downside being the table of hoorays across from us that found themselves hysterical.

Why is it some people just cannot talk quietly? What makes them think the entire bar is interested in their conversation? Also, there were halogen lights on runners above us, and they decided they didn't like the spotlight on them. Fair enough, but they swung it round so it was pointing directly into my face. And when I said "yeah, thanks for that," holding up my hands to avoid blindness, they moved it away with very bad grace. When the waitress came to see if she could help, they said "We can't point it that way because she doesn't like it," pointing at me. You do that again sweetcheeks, I'll bite it off.

In other news, I have grated my thumb knuckle. Ow.

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