Tae see oursels as ithers see us.

Oh wud some pow'r the giftie gie us
Tae see oursels as ithers see us.
Some while ago, an old friend visited me together with his new French wife, Monique. After a time in my hitchen, where I was preparing a meal for my guests, Monique said "Mais, Jake, vraiment tu aimes les bibelots!"
Until that moment, I was quite unaware of my fondness for "bibelots" - toys - but she was right. On my breadbin, Rupert Bear figurines and a mini Teddy Bear clutching a big red heart, on the mantelshelf in my sitting room, a Paddington Bear, in my bathroom, a whole series of miniatures, including a Good Soldier Schweik and a woolly sheep.
And to cap it all, my boiled egg set consisted of Peter Rabbit plate and saucer and eggcup (apparently this makes me "middle-cless" according to one authority).
So, Monique was right "j'aime les bibelots".
As to why, I neither know nor care. All the bibelots in my possession have a history, and that is my history and the history of the people I have lovcd.
So there.

Plus ça change, plus ce n'est plus la même chose

The whole character of my little Cambridgeshire fen-edge village is determined by the many small farms that we have. Small farms ( we are talking 150-500 acres max) mean small fields with dividing dykes (ditches) and drains and hedges, which means abundant habitat for wildlife. Small farms also mean small farmers, families that have been in the village for generations: the Fairchilds, the Burgesses, the Freemans, the Bidwells, the Dennises, the Waddilows, the Mappledorams, and so on. The farms and the farmer' famiiles combine to give not only character, but continuity.
As an “incomer” - I have only been here 25 years - I have been accepted mainly because my surname coincides, moreorless, with another local farming family name: Alsop (They call me the posh alsop because I have a second L in my name).
But things are changing. Fast. Sons are not taking over the farms from their fathers, so, when father dies, in most cases, the farm is sold. That is to say, the land is bought by one of the mighty agribusinesses of East Anglia (the "prairie boys", as we call them), and all the dykes are piped underground and all the hedges are ripped out, and lots of little fields become one huge field. But there is another awful consequence: the homes of the small farmers – a house with some land and outbuildings within the village – are sold off for development, and another estate of soulless "desirable residences" goes up.
This blog entry is prompted by the fact that another dear good farmer friend of mine, Harold Freeman, aged 70 something, died two days ago. During the night, he complained of a pain in his chest, and by the time his wife, Vera, had come back upstairs with a cup of tea for him, he was no more. A good way to go, that's for sure, but another sad loss. His farm, in the village High Street, will no doubt become another bungaloid growth once Vera decides to sell. There are no heirs prepared to take over the farm.
Let me close on a lighter note. Another farmer in the village, who was a very close friend of Harold's, while telling me the sad news, added: “Typical of Harold to disappear just before harvest!” To make a joke like that, you really have to love somebody, The sad thing is that there is no family to harvest his crops, although I am sure the remaining village farmers will rally round. What's left of them.

It worked!

Let me ask you a question. Do you know how the internet works? Do you know who runs it? Who owns it? Come to that, do you know how a tumble dryer works? Or an electric kettle? Or a telephone?
Bugger, I don't even know how a can opener works. I have a serious dependency issue here.
All this because I can't get online right now, or to be more precise, I can get online, but I cannot access anything on the internet: no emails, no google, no blog, just a little fricking hour glass icon followed by the usual dreaded message: "You must be joking, you loser!", or worms to that effect.
Today, clearing out a drawer in my desk, I found a pencil with "Wrekin Brewery Ltd, Wellington, Salop" written on it. That was the firm my father worked for from about 1938 till he retired in 1955. It's a piece of history, and a family memento, but, more to the point, the bloody thing still works.
I could write my memoirs with that pencil, if I had any memoirs to write.
Which is more than can be said for my broadband provider, or yahoo, or google, at this moment.
If you give me your snailmail address, I might well continue this blog in Victorian copperplate, using, of course, my dad's trusty Wrekin Brewery pencil.
Now, let's see if I can get online and publish this.....

What's the big deal?

I have thought hard and long about the male obsession with the female bosom. Indeed, so dedicated am I to understanding this peculiar phenomomenon that I take every opportunity to visit nearby towns in order to study the object of the obsession, and to try to understand what is involved.
I am sorry, but I cannot see what is so exciting about the mammary glands of the human female. Well, with the possible exception of Nigella Lawson, and certain ladies on tractors. Mind you, I AM a child of the 60s....
And now, if you will excuse me, I will get back to Moby Dick.

Oh my god, it's getting bigger!

Ladies reading this, I have little knowledge of your gyne problems as you get older: cervical erosion, mild incontinence, suspicious lumps, IBS, prolapsis, well, that's more than enough.
So, you can leave now, because I an going to talk about the problems that afflict males as they get older.
When I was fifty, I stood next to a Chinese man in a urinal, and admired the force of his act of micturition, compared to which mine was a dribble. So I visited my doctor, who with a practised finger in my rectum announced that I had an enlarged prostate gland which was constricting the neck of my bladder.
Hold on, this is nothing morbid. Stay with me, guys.
So, Mr Bullock, a gentle man, cored my prostate and solved my problem. After that I could pee like a Chinee.
"Will it recur?" I ask.
"Probably, but at least twenty years from now, so don't worry, "says the gentle Bullock.
Twenty-two years on, and in the context of the recent Olympic Games, I think I am once again in serious competition with the Chinese.
Ah yes, I hear you ask (including the ladies who did not have the good sense to stop reading), but what does the prostate gland actually DO? And what have you been doing to enlarge it again?
I think it is a great shame that the British do not have a written constitution, because, if we did, I would at this moment take the Fifth...

"Can I do you now, sir?"

Mrs Mopp was a character in a popular wartime radio show called ITMA ("It's That Man Again). A cleaning lady as cheerful as a cockney sparrer, she would go into the boss's premises wanting to get on with the cleaning. Her catchphrase was "Can I do you now, sir?"
It's quite a long time since I had a char to do me now, sir, and I have struggled to keep the house a few notches above pigsty.
Today, my tiled kitchen floor, which I have mopped a few times in a desultory fashion, looked up at me accusingly. So (you know how craven I am when faced with the otherness of inanimate objects) I got down on my knees with a bucket of sudsy hot water and a scouring pad, and scrubbed every single tile, all seventy or so of them.
My kitchen floor now SPARKLES. I hadn't realised that what I thought was patterning on the tiles was in fact dirt. Abso-bloody-lutely a-bloody-mazing, if you will forgive my tmesis.
But it leaves me with a problem: it is so beautiful, I daren't walk on it. I can't get to the fridge or the food cupboard or the microwave or the cooker or the kettle. I could easily starve to death or die of thirst here, and that, bence, meinetwegen, al mio paree and a mon avis, is too high a price to pay for beauty.
On the other hand, if I decide to re-employ a cleaning lady to do me now, sir, I will have six days in any week to mess the floor up, knowing that she will restore it on the seventh.
Did I tell you about the cartoon in Punch where a char is standing on the steps of a posh house. A very elegantly-dressed duchess-type has opened the door. The caption gives the char's words: "Are you the woman who advertised for a cleaning lady?" Funny lot, the English.

Rejected

Listen, i miei prodi, the East Cambridgeshire District Council Annual Canvass of Electors 2008/9 has stabbed me in the back. Among the clauses I found in the small print is the following: People aged 70 and over cannot sit on a jury.
Just as peers of the realm, lunatics and criminals may not vote in elections, Old Scrotes are deemed unfit to sit in judgment on their fellow persons. It's outrageous. And a waste. Here you have, in me, someone who over the decades has honed his prejudices to the point where I can argue convincingly against minorities (except jazz fans), majorities (except oenophiles) and people who have fluff in their navels.
As I say, what a waste. With crime on the increase, the country - and I say this in all modesty - needs someone like me to demand life sentences with hard labour for speeding motorists, unmarried mothers, tobacconists, the glottal stop, Osmagalians and other antisocial elements. Damn. What a waste.