Happy Birthday Vancouver Brother

Eamon..., originally uploaded by NellyMoser.

I hope you had a great day. Don't be working too hard now. See you at the next wedding.

Advice

On meeting Ed….

Don’t flatter him – it makes him uncomfortable.

Mention Jeremy Clarkson – he likes Jeremy Clarkson & comics & serious talk about Big Brother (No! Not that Big Brother)

The West Wing? Movies? Perfidy of government? General lad stuff? All good.

Dimples? What dimples?

Wild At Heart

Harry de Cat has just sauntered past with a fine, fat and dead rabbit in his jaws. Swisser is appalled.

Bert you are going to have to let that cat go. He is totally wild. He'll be going for the hens next.

Despite my bad night I've had a very enjoyable afternoon in the company of certain bloggers. There'll be more about it later. Right now I have a poem to write.....

Pukerama

So, after a particularly hideous, stressful and tiring shift in Tinkerton, I thought I'd have an early night. Up I went at 11.30pm, only to wake again around oneish with a very sore belly. I couldn't get back to sleep and spent the hours between two and five in occasional vomiting. Very unpleasant but each bout did result in a reduction of the gripes so I suppose it was worthwhile. Bert didn't hear a thing and his sympathetic response this morning hardly registered on the symposcale.

Some points to remember for the future

• Don't eat curry chips from the Doury Fryer.
• Don't eat the supper Bert cooked when you're not hungry just because you want to encourage him to cook occasionally.
• If you haven't got that caring someone to hold your hair back when you are vomiting get your hair cut short.
• Wear glasses when vomiting to avoid splashback in the eye.

Happy Birthday

Matty, originally uploaded by NellyMoser.

My Three Girls

You shouldn’t have favourites. Everyone knows that. But I cannot help myself. I have a favourite.

My big girl – she’s a bit standoffish, a bit aloof. Some might say she’s shy. All I know is she’ll run a mile if you try to pick her up. But she’s industrious and loyal and very, very pretty.

My little girl – what a scruffy tyke she is. You never saw such a bedraggled girl. But she’s also brave, adventurous and generous and is rarely parted from my big girl.

But my middle girl – I cannot help myself. I like her the best. She walks like a duck and is the greediest girl ever. She loves to eat slugs and she lets me cuddle her whenever I want. Yes. Patsy is, without doubt, my very favourite hen.

In Praise Of Jeeves

I decided to check the oil and water of my motor but as usual I forgot how to open the bonnet. Yeah. Go on. Laugh. Bert is not here so I couldn’t ask him. I’ve been trying for about half an hour and I give up and started to look for the manual but I couldn’t find that either.

Then I thought – the internet! All knowledge resides there if you know how to ask. I tried Google but all I got there was manuals on Ebay. Then I remembered AskJeeves. So I AskedJeeves how do I open a Ford Fiesta bonnet and got this…

Northlondon - 18 Jul 2004 20:23 GMT
How do I open the goddammed bonnet??

pottsy - 19 Jul 2004 18:19 GMT
unmissable bright orange handle on the underneath of the steering column.

And there it was. Totally unmissable. Writing this post will ensure that I never forget again. I’ll think, now how do I open this again? Oh yes. Unmissable bright orange handle. Thanks Jeeves & thanks pottsy.

The Kidnapping Of Matty

It's Matty's birthday on Friday. It's a big special birthay with a nought on the end and all and for months now we've been pondering how it should be celebrated. Big party? Small party? Ceilidh? We couldn't decide. Matty put her oar in. She didn't want any fuss. Did she mean it? She did. The dilemma continued. How to mark a special birthday when the birthday girl doesn't want any fuss? And what would the neighbours say?

Dilemma solved. Matty has been kidnapped and taken to a secret location on the Dingle Peninsula. There she will be attended by a select band of Mafia-type kidnapper daughters who are obviously after her money.

Bon voyage Matty!

And Sleep....To Wake Up In A Cold Sweat After Yet Another Nightmare

Last night I had a vivid dream in which Bert forcibly cut my hair.

Then I dreamed that my late & lovely father-in-law was obsessively searching out and taking in wayward teenage girls in a Gladstonian frame of mind. These rescued girls then shared premises with my daughters, bullied them and stole from them.

Then I dreamed that a family member had decided (on a whim) to move to Australia leaving her immediate family in utter turmoil. This action brought lots of issues from the past to life and put me in turmoil also.

I'm waking up in the mornings more tired than when I went to bed.

Not A Tattooed Granny To Be Seen

Dan Tobin has been looking at his wacky internet search terms so I thought I’d do likewise. Mine are a bit boring but then I haven’t got a site like this one.

• photos of feral children

• magpie traps larson

• mcilhatton

• fortieth birthday greetings

• st sithney

• piebald ponies

• stags horn sumach

That’s all I can manage for now because I’m feeling very stressed. I had to send my car home at the weekend, as the situation surrounding the workplace was looking dodgy. Both my shifts were with agency workers I’d not met before and I slept badly between shifts.

Eating His Greens

Bert said to me last night,

I've started to eat everything I see when I'm weeding in that garden.

What do you mean? You nibble on radishes and stuff?

No. I eat greenfly.

What do they taste like?

If they're on lettuce they taste of lettuce and if they're on beans they taste of beans. I was going to have a feed of those caterpillars we found on the cabbages but I couldn't because Raymond was standing watching me.

Sure the hens won't even eat those. They're probably bitter.

Maybe. I'd like to try them.

Would you eat slugs?

No. I draw the line at slugs. Unless they were cooked.

I'm Your Fan

When I first started reading Ed’s blog there were very few female commenters. It was, and still is, a blokish blog but for me that was part of its charm. I also liked his impeccable grasp of grammar although I noticed his spelling occasionally let him down. No doubt those errors occurred because he was frenziedly key bashing to get his impassioned rants out there.

Now I find Ed is building up a bit of a female following.

There is Toast, there is Sandra and there is The Swearing Lady

As I’ve been here the longest and am Ed’s oldest* female fan I bags the post of CatchThat Fan Club Secretary. I might be able to arrange a supply of signed photographs of the man himself. Can’t make any promises though.

*Seven years off pension age. So yahboo to the rest of you who will probably have to work until you are eighty.

Too Hot To Blog

Two shifts in Mingerton completed and I'm tired enough to die of tiredness. It's so hot I cannot even tolerate a lunchtime walk. I've no car to get away from the dirty hole that is Tinkerton/Mingerton and anyway my feet stick to the asphalt. It's too hot to work, to blog and to cook.

This morning I was wakened at quarter to six by the roar of silage cutters. It is all lies about the countryside being quiet. It is loud, it is lethally dangerous* and it is smelly. Cattle reek in hot weather, sheep are rank and the pungent stench of last season's silage would knock you on your back.

Taking washing to the line this morning I met Harry de Cat hurrying towards the house with a freshly killed rabbit in his jaws. On my return from work I found the half devoured and disembowelled corpse resting beside my verbenas. So Nellybert decided to have a barbecue.

Harry de Cat with his bellyful of rabbit

Harry's leftovers

Swear to God we had sausages and chicken and a delicious green salad washed down with some cheap cider. Eat Harry's leftovers? I should think not. Maybe next month when I'm not spending any money we'll be sharing Harry's kills and eating Mag Pie.

*Consider Bert and his .22 missing the magpies and hitting God know's what.

Who'd A Thought It?

I posted a true story the other day about Chep pallets. It amused me because Chep phone-torture us almost daily about the amount of pallets we have (about six) and to arrange their (hardly ever) collection. You’d think we were Mr Sainsbury or Mr Tesco, with millions of the bloody things, to hear them go on. Then you see them stacked in their thousands on eleventh night bonfires just waiting to go up in smoke at about a cost of £7 a unit to the likes of Bert, Mr Sainsbury, Mr B&Q and the rest. You get your £7+ back when the pallets are returned but what if they’re not returned due to being used as kindling to burn the toxic tyres which culminate in the burning of the tricolour, Pope Benedict, Gerry Adams, Monica Digney effigy or whatever demon of the day is currently in vogue… lots of 7 quids up in smoke.

These bonfires are an expensive business for all of us and not just the users of the blue pallet handling service. And that was my well-disguised point.

But despite my beautiful photographs none of you regular readers commented so I thought the whole thing had fallen flat - until today when my hits spiked. Someone from this site had posted a link to Nelly’s Garden on the forum. Who’d have thought there would be a site dedicated to people working in the pallet industry? But then again, knowing the Internet, it would have been far odder if there weren’t one.

Natives and Aliens in South Tyrone

Bert holds signal crayfish (alien)

From left red fox (native), river otter (native) and mink (alien)

We saw all of these in the Blackwater valley. Sightings of the otter and mink were very brief but we spent an enjoyable ten minutes watching Foxy attempt to cross a field of cattle. The cattle kept chasing him off. Next morning Paddy and Rosie went off on the scunge to dig him out of his foxhole. As usual they did not succeed.

Thanks to Jaffs I now know a lot more about crayfish than ever before. The specimens we found in the Blackwater at Annaghroe Bridge are signal crayfish. They're aliens brought in from the USA to farm and, as is often the case, made their escape to the wild. They threaten the native white-clawed crayfish and the river environment too.

Incidentally Annaghroe Bridge where we camped doesn't actually cross the river. Bert said that when he stayed in Caledon (remember this was during the Troubles) the British Army kept blowing it up. The locals would patch it and then the Army would blow it up again. Annaghroe and Knockaginney Bridges are the only two of 104 border crossings closed during the Troubles that remain closed to this day. Both should cross the Blackwater. There's a well-used sheep bridge at Knockaginney but no vehicle access. Questions have been asked in parliament but despite extensive lobbying, the NIO continue to refuse to complete rebuilding at the two sites on the grounds that the budget allocated for reopening border roads has already been exceeded (An Phoblact, February 2000)

It's hard on the farmers who have land on either side of the border. But the foxes and otters and minks and crayfish don't care one bit.

Return to Brokeback Mountain

The first place we visited on our recent camping trip was the historic village of Caledon in County Tyrone. Caledon is a border town abutting on to the counties Armagh (Northern Ireland) and Monaghan (Eire). What I didn't know before we went there was that Bert was making a return visit to the area.

Sometime in the early 80s Bert took a summer job with the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation. His role was to assist in a survey of birds in the area of the Blackwater river valley. He and Philip (an ecologist) spent four months living in a forester's hut just outside Caledon village. It was at the height of the Troubles. We drove to the site where the hut had stood.

We slept there on the floor of the hut. Every morning we'd cook breakfast on an old wood-burning stove. It was my Brokeback Mountain summer.

Oh really? Was there sex?

No sex.

Was there sheep?

No sheep.

Stands to reason I suppose. The sheep would have been the sex.

Pretty Pictures

I'm a bit shattered myself. The picture shows part of what happened during last night's riot in Mingerton. Being work related I cannot say too much but it was not a pleasant experience for anyone. I don't know who lobbed the stone that smashed my rear window but I'd bet a week's wages* he/she was a child. A feral child.

What kind of parents allow children (some as young as four) to be out when things like that are going on? And they must have known there was a situation going on in the estate for the riot police were out in force.

After the PSNI removed a couple of key characters (for their own safety) I was able to get Bert in to drive my car home to the safety of Cully. I wish he could have taken me home to safety too.

Back on the home front - Harry de Cat 1 Rats 0

Nellybert and the dogs are going camping now so we'll have some proper pretty pictures to post later.

*As if I could afford to bet a week's wages. It'll take that to fix the back window of the Fiesta.

Plumbing Emergency

Bert 3 Magpies 2

Bert is still waiting for that post (in-house sniper, Tinkerton) to come up and yesterday, to keep his hand in, sent another magpie to oblivion. But the brutes are undeterred. Just now he set his sights on another of the feathered fiends. And. Missed. The Magpie. And. Hit. A Water Pipe.

Now he has to race down to Cully for a jointer. And all the magpies are sitting on the byre roof laughing at him.

CHEP Calling

"CHEP issues ready-for-use pallets and containers from its CHEP service centers to manufacturers and growers. The manufacturers and growers load their goods and ship their products through the supply chain using a CHEP pallet or container. At the end of the supply chain, the receiving retailer or distributor off-loads the goods and returns the CHEP pallets or containers to the nearest CHEP service center. CHEP inspects the pallet or container and ensures it meets our quality standards for the next customer use. The ready-for-use pallet or container is then issued to the next customer for its customized use and movement through the supply chain. This system, where high quality pallets and containers are constantly maintained, controlled, tracked and reused to benefit the entire supply chain is the CHEP pooling services. "


GoodmorningthisisCHEPpalletscallingdoyouhaveanybluepalletsforcollection?

Yes. There are about six lying out at the back of the shed.

Canwegetaccesswitha40foottrailertocollectthepallets?

Aye. Probably. But yerman might have a bit of bother getting them pulled out of the nettle patch that has grown up around them in the past 18 months.

Pardon?

I mean they've been there like forever and you people phone up at least twice a week and then you never send anybody to collect them.

Pardon?

You'll have a lot less to be bothering yourselves about after the other night won't you? Did you see the size of some of those bonfires? Your blue pallets are worth about £7.65 each. Isn't that right? Dear kindling.

Click. Silence.

Bert! The bugger's hung up!

No Hangover

No breakages, no fights, no fisticuffs, no sexual shenanigans, no live music, no fireworks, no guns, no Orangemen, nobody died. Not even a magpie.

That has to have been one of the tamest Twelfth barbecues ever. I was in bed before midnight! Even the Wee Manny behaved himself!