Cobwebs on my letterbox

The postpersons, employees of the Royal Mail, are going on strike tomorrow. For a week. Just think:a whole week without junk mail! Hurrah!
Of course, this will also be the last nail in the coffin of the Royal Mail, so that, instead of the 10,000 job losses, which is what the postpersons fear, there will be 40,000 job losses, ie, the entire workforce.
But that's cool. The private sector, poised to benefit from this daft strike, will re-employ most of them, and, with a bit of luck, this could also be the nail in the coffin of junk bloody mail.
But I doubt it.

What beanz meanz

Two disparate things happened to me today that I now believe to be conjoined.
First, at 10.30 a.m, in the lovely cathedral city of Ely, Mrs Barker invited me into a dimly-lit room, sat me down and looked into my eyes. At one bizarre moment, she asked me to read a line of letters that spelled out the name of a suburb in Peking, or so it seemed to me. But I didn't demur, I just allowed her to have her way with me, in the way that we allow opticians to do. She decided in the end that my sight had not deteriorated, although I was having a little more difficulty with close reading of small print than heretofore, hitherto and hencewithal.
Second, this evening I ate a concoction, pre-prepared by ole Uncle Sam Tesco, called "Bean Chilli and Wholegrain Rice". How DOES he think up these enticing names? After eating it, I idly read the small print on the back of the wrapper. My god! It's outrageous! Every ingredient is totally natural, healthy, veggie-approved, life-affirming.
If only I had persuaded Mrs Barker to prescribe stronger reading glasses, I could have avoided this dish and gone for my normal meaty, MSG-rich, e-number-laden crap, the stuff that my digestive system has grown used to.
It's my own fault. Put a pretty woman in front of me, and I just go to pieces.

Let's hear it for Saint Pancreas!

Talking of the liver, I had a head-to-toe medical the last time I was in Turkey, and was pleased with the outcome. Everything was as normal as can be expected for a man of my years: heart, blood pressure, kidneys, pancreas (what the hell does that do?), thyroid, bladder, anus (what DO they find up there to check out?), etc. In fact, I have the cardio-vascular system of a 95-year-old, a testimony to the efficacy of my habit of parking at a great distance from my wine merchant's and walking the last 300 metres to his front door.
The only thing - these bloody medics have to find ONE thing to scare you with, don't they? - was that my liver was at Stage Two. Apparently, there is only one more Stage, namely, - oh, ok, you are ahead of me as usual - Stage Three, at which point, I will have more suet round my liver than is currently hanging from my bird table. His advice? Give up the wine.
Of course, he is right. Apart from being young, fit and rich, he is right. And I tried to explain to him the extent of my ABSTINENCES in the interests of continuing health:
1 To avoid worry, I have given up politics and newspapers.
2 To avoid stress, I have given up work.
3 To avoid std, I have given up sex (Well, more accurately, sex has given me up)
4 To avoid hernias, I only lift very slim women.
5 To avoid obesity, I have given up dieting.
6 To avoid anxiety, I no longer open mail or answer telephones.
7 To avoid eczema, I have given up rolling naked in beds of nettles.
8 To avoid surges of blood pressure, I no longer watch Jodie Foster movies
9 To avoid skin cancer, I keep my shirt on in California.
10 And now, to avoid the suet round my liver, it seems I have to give up wine.

Well, the hell with it. I think 9 out of 10 isn't such a bad score.

Bra unburnt

Mrs Trellis ventures into European politics:
Dear Herr Merkel, she writes, it must be galling for you to have to make your own supper and iron your own shirts etc while your wife messes about running Germany.
The late Mr Trellis made it perfectly clear that HE was the breadwinner and my job was to create a home for him and the children (not that we had any children). I did flirt briefly with Women's Lib, but they met on Tuesdays which clashed with my pottery classes, so Mr T was spared any of that trauma, and I was spared the inconvenience of burning my brassieres, if you will pardon the impropriety.
My advice to you, Your Herr, is to get Mrs M back to what we Primitive Methodists call "family values", ie, being there of an evening to sauer your kraut, etc, when you come home exhausted from whatever you do. It's better than having her out in the street burning her lingerie, squatting naked and bringing the country to its knees in the process.
Yours mit Verstaendnis
Blodwen Trellis, Mrs, Widow, unreconstructed.

Dissection update

I know that your hooks have been on the tenter waiting for further news of Clare's barn owl pellet dissection, but I am not sure you are really ready for all the details. Oh well, you can always stop reading if it gets too gory.
She has identified moreorless ALL the bones of short-tailed field vole, wood mouse, common and pigmy shrew and an unidentified bird.
She has extracted two large skulls of, probably, brown rat and water vole.
Her next project is to lay out a complete skeleton of a short-tailed field vole.
How many 12-year-old girls do you know who would do this? Not only this, but she is building a collection of spiders and catching midges and other morsels to feed them. Not only this, but she is collecting the wriggly larvae from the barn owl pellets to rear them on to chrysalis and imago stage (They will turn into clothes moths, so don't tell mum, ok?).

What is your image of such a girl? Plain, spotty, scruffy? WRONG! I can tell you that she is pretty, she is well-groomed and she dresses very smartly. We have the makings of a really telegenic presenter of nature programmes here: the next Kate Humble in fact.
And she's beginning to be better at moth identification than me, so my admiration is not entirely unalloyed................

Living Will

Last night, my friend and I were sitting in the living room and I said to her:
"I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug."
She got up, unplugged the TV, and threw out my wine.
She's such a bitch.....

I am indebted to my Anatolian confidante for the above. In fact, I wrote a living will, but my son dissuaded me from making it "official" on the grounds that it might encourage doctors to finish me off before I was really ready. Somehow, that doesn't bother me. They can have my bits, just as long as they don't throw out my wine before I've emptied the last drop from the bottle.
Amen

A complete list of the Kings of Israel

Today I received a poignant crise de foie from my most loyal blog fan. OK, I know that should be cri de coeur, but in his case a crise de foie (crisis of the liver) is much more likely. So, I wish to apologise to him, and to my other fan, for my recent silence. It has been occasioned by my total preoccupation with finishing The Book and coping with the terrible moodshifts that accompany it, moods which veer from the merely anxious to the deeply desperate.
So, to make up for my silence, here is a complete list of the Kings of Israel. Well, not really, but a friend of mine, who was at a religious-foundation university doing chemistry, but where theology was a compulsory subject, answered his first-year theology examination paper by writing "I have no idea how to answer these questions, but here is a list of the Kings of Israel." The examiners failed him, just as their imagination failed them. Today, he is a very rich plumber.
My forlorn fan is suffering from a boss who delights in sending out deeply meaningless memos designed to "motivate" the workforce. These memos consist of ready-made phrases which substitute admirably for thought, and give the impression of a man who has raised diarrhea to an artform. Here is a sample:
We recognize the incredible market development efforts going on all over the world, and we committed to taking the necessary steps to globalize our brand, product, and channel development efforts to improve information sharing, benefit from common platforms, and accelerate growth. We realized the importance of sound processes to better attack the market opportunity and to better link market needs to production planning, and we committed to develop a more robust, more multi-functional product development process and to utilize our newly-launched planning process to enhance product innovation and customer service.
Personally, I would rather read a list of the Kings of Israel.