Best before....

This evening, I unzipped a tin of something comestible to go with the rest of the baby new potatoes and the sprouts, and made the mistake of reading what it said on the tin. "Best before end February 2011", it said.
Bugger, I thought, that's probably true of me too. So, may I advise those of you who still lust after my fading parts to make the most of me while you can, and definitely before end February 2011.

"Oh to be in England now that sprouts are here!"

This morning, I spent nearly two hours in the dentist's chair. He attacked Upper Left 5 for the third time (the first two attempts having yielded no result), and gouged out an enormous filling from Lower Left 5, refilled, fitted a temporary crown and sent me on my way, trembling.
Which is why I want to talk to you about sprouts. For the benefit of our North American readers - how are you both? - I should explain that I am talking about Brussel Sprouts, not that curious stuff you call sprouts, which has the texture of wire netting and the aroma of stale silage.
In my country - I love that phrase! - in my country, sprouts come into their own in autumn, preparing themselves for the BIG DAY, ie, Christmas Day, when they can snuggle up to a turkey and a stack of roast potatoes.
We all believe that sprouts only taste good once they have had the first frost in them. Well, given that London had snow yesterday, the first October snow since 1932, and given that my brass monkey has applied to the Sudanese Embassy for asylum, I think the sprouts are ready for eating.
I used to watch my mother preparing sprouts. She would cut the base of the sprout, peel off any nasty outer leaves, and then cut a criss-cross in the stalk, presumably to help to soften it.
So I do the same. Inherited characteristics, or what? I can imagine this practice going back through generations of the France family. I can imagine Imogene de France preparing sprouts for the longbowmen at Agincourt. I bet that helped us win: flatulence can be a powerful weapon.
So, what has this to do with Upper Left 5 and Lower Left 5? Well, I have a weakness for RAW sprouts, despite the gaseous implications, but tonight, I decided to forgo that pleasure. Just this once - don't want to disengage the temporary filling in UL5.

Watch out for the real bastards

Whatever I write in this blog, you, my good friends, can read it. The same is no longer true for our friends in Turkey, where the government has imposed an embargo on a whole suite of websites, including blogspot, u-tube and many others***. China and other repressive regimes like North Korea and Saudi Arabia have been doing this for years, but we turn a blind eye to it for all sorts of convenient geopolitical reasaons.
But Turkey, for God's sake, is an applicant for membership of the EU. I think this latest move on the part of the Fundamentalist Islamic Government of Turkey exposes their hypocrisy: they pay lip service to membership of the EU, but their true agenda is to break the power of the military in Turkey, which is traditionally the guardian of Ataturkism, ie, the secular state.
By all means rail at the political leaders you don't like, Gordon Brown, George Bush, Sarkozy, whoever, but when you have to decide which side of the barricades you are on, think carefully where you place yourself. There are some real BASTARDS out there that you wouldn't want to associate yourself with.
""" Don't take my word for it. Check out THIS site and THIS one.

"Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser"

I have just read the obituary of Geoffrey Lewis. I am sorry he has gone, such men deserve to be immortal. Let me explain by starting somewhere else.
There is a publishing house called "English University Press" that published*** books in a series called "Teach Yourself....", and it covered a wide variety of topics: academic, arts and crafts, sociopolitical, and so on. The EUP Teach Yourself books had striking yellow dustjackets with text in blue, and just to peruse a shelf-ful of them in a bookshop was almost as exciting for me as getting a glimpse of Cynthia Brown's knickers when she played netball. And I fell in love, of course, well, ok, with Cynthia Brown, but also with the language books in the EUP series.
I started with Teach Yourself German, which I bought with the proceeds of a few nights' carol singing in the December of, I think, 1950. Then I bought Teach Yourself Spanish by Norman Scarlyn-Wilson for no particular reason that I can remember, but I just LOVED the conjugations of Spanish verbs. By this time, I had (almost) forgotten Cynthia Brown. Then, at University, spurred by envy that so many of my fellow undergraduates had done Russian during National Service, I bought Teach Yourself Russian, which was, in fact, a terrible book. Fortunately, I was recommended Anna Semeonova's Russian Grammar, an amazing book, and one of the few language books I know that can give an impressionable young man an erection.
The other was "Teach Yourself Turkish" by Geoffrey Lewis.
My wife bought Professor Lewis's book for me as a Christmas present in 1961, and I dabbled for a while, and then forgot about it till I started to make regular visits to Turkey in the 1990s. I bought the revised edition of the book, and also Lewis's amazing Turkish Grammar, which almost caused me the same excitements as Semeonova's Russian Grammar all those years ago.
And now, out of the blue, I find myself reading Geoffrey Lewis's obituary. I didn't know he was an undergraduate at St John's, Oxford. Just so you know St John's has produced some very special people, including Dean Acheson, Tony Blair, Sadik AlMahdi, Takeo Iguchi, Kingsley Amis, and me, though this last is best regarded as an aberration.

***EUP is still going strong, but the covers are much jazzier now, and much less erotic from my point of view.

Mrs Trellis enters the fray

Dear Mr McCain, she writes, forgive me, I had no idea you were also a prodigal writer of books, I thought you were just one of those politicians who spends his time trying to look pretty on TV. I am so glad to read that you have written a book on Pink Bras, was it?, and I am sure that your running mate, Sarah Palin, the one with the huge mouth, made a valuable contribution to it, when she had time off from shooting black bears, etc.
Mr Trellis, my late husband, had literal pretensions too, bless him, but being obscure and Welsh, ie very short, he never really rose to the occasion, apart from one poem that made a hit at the 1982 Eisteddfod. Here it is, in case you would like to use it in your campaign to become Queen of the Untied States:
Mae gen i iâr sy'n hedfan
Yn gyflym fel y gwynt,
Mae gen i sgidiau rhedeg
A gostiodd chwe chan punt.
Mae gen i gôt sy'n sychu
Yng nghanol storom law,
Mae gen i frawd sy'n gallu
Lladd teigr ag un llaw.
Mae gen i beiriant adref
y'n chwarae mil CD,
Mae gen i gi
Alsesian Sydd nawr yn gant a thri.
Mae gen i gath sy'n nofio, A hynny rownd y byd...
Mae gen i feddwl hefyd
Sy'n gelwydd noeth i gyd!

It's a real giggle, isn't it, specially that naughty bit in line six?!
With best wishes, etc, Blodwen Trellis, Mrs, Widow

Ads, nothing to do with me!

May I remind readers once again that I am not responsible for the ads that appear on my blog page. Look at it now: "Women's Underwear", "Looking for a pink bra" and "Sale at fashion world". What possible interest could I have in such matters? Why did they pick on me? Have I ever written or said anything that could lead people to think that I ...........
Sorry, cancel this line of argument.

Collective nouns revisited

Just as we talk about "a gaggle of geese" or "a herd of deer" or "a pod of whales", I heard today that the collective noun for bankers is "A wunch..."