There is a woman around the corner - her house backs onto mine - she lives in London and spends weekends here - the house is nicer than mine - has no real garden but slightly larger with red brick facing rather than render. To be fair - she's made it look very smart - she has a paved garden area at the front and it's full of plants in tubs. She's been down for a few days, has clearly just spent several hundred pounds on new plans from a nursery and giant terracotta pots. She spent part of the weekend re-potting everything into the new pots - and, here's the punch line, she took the empty pots and smashed them - we're talking giant terracotta numbers, worth about £50 each. I can't get my head around that. Around here it's quite common to see people put really good stuff out on the street with a 'please take me' note. Yesterday I saw a wardrobe and two chests of draws in really good quality antique pine, about £600 worth of bedroom furniture that I nearly appropriated for myself, outside a house down the road - there is also a very active freecycle network - but to smash them up so that nobody else could use them beggars belief. I could even use the shards, if you lay them around the shrubs it stops the animals digging them up - but I don't want to get involved or ask - she'd probably say no.
Much talk about the 'This is what a feminist looks like' T Shirts that are apparently being made in Mauritius by workers getting 64p per hour. Politicians should know better than to get involved in stunts like that - it's superficially shocking - yes, to us, 64p per hour seems obscene - but so does a £4500.00 crocodile and lambskin ipad sleeve from Smythson, the Prime Ministers wife's company. The politics and reality of global garment manufacture is a big, messy minefield - there is something remarkably arrogant and colonial about the Daily Mail's indignation. I'd leave well alone.
Talking Daily Mail - one of their top stories is -
"Katie Melua has had a spider living in her ear for some weeks - removed by a doctor after she heard rustling noises, she let it free in her garden" She thinks it may have got in there during an international flight. You could not make it up - it's only a matter of time before someone berates her for introducing a potentially catastrophic alien species into the British Countryside.
I spent yesterday working on something that is going to be totally ruined by client intervention - I'm working on it again today - through gritted teeth.
Last night, in a bid to cheer myself up - I decided to watch a mindless, big budget film. Nothing at home I fancied so I 'rented' online from 4OD the new Godzilla big budget thing. It was rubbish. I should have known better. Huge budget, huge effects, some good acting by good people, but a terrible script and almost pointless premise, I have no idea why they bothered. The trailer has been edited to make it look fantastic - the film was actually really boring. I could have watched 'Belle du Jour' for free instead. I'll know better next time.
Opened up the tumble dryer last night for the first time in about 8 months. It was full of clean, dry, forgotten socks. That's something, I suppose.
This is the (now demolished) Lee Park Estate in Liverpool in about 1991/2 - the boys have stolen some pink paving stones and are going to sell them. This is why I moved south - not because the boys were stealing, but because they had to. I had a brief conversation with someone about this image earlier - apparently the same thing happened down south - but only to the York Stone flags. That's the north/south divide in a nutshell.
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