Email from my brother: What's pooping in his cereal bowl?

Hi Fay,

How's it going? I hope you've got over the blip with having to come off your trial drug and are feeling happier. It's a funny thing happiness I reckon. Here I am in New Zealand and it's still technically spring however the days are hotter, the grass has been cut in the fields around us and turned into hay which is lovely, bumblebees the size of two penny pieces are drifting around, the baby chicks are getting bigger and fatter, Juliette got a new job she wanted, Eva is looking forward to Christmas with their six week summer holiday and Sam's just Sam the Toddler, ever ready for random hugs and kisses. But what am I preoccupied with? What is it that's taking a poop in my breakfast bowl? Well I'm glad you asked, it's dyeing a cloak the colour green.

I wanted to make a medieval cloak so that I can wrap it around myself on cold evening in front of the camp fire at SCA events. I found some woollen blankets at the local charity shop, sewed them together, lined them, put buttons on and button holes and then had to dye the finished cloak green. I did it in the old bathtub and the results are a bit lighter than what was expected. If I wear the cloak to an event I'm going to requests to lie down on the floor so folks can have a game of Subbuteo on me. It's was like the least medieval green ever. I could wear this cloak as a high visibility jacket. So we gave the kids a bath tonight and Juliette's like "Mark, what's all this brown stuff around the bath?" and I'm like "er, it's some coffee ...", and she's like "what the hell is coffee doing in the bath?" and I'm like, "er... me and Sam were dying some, er, cloth brown." In reality I was baristaring the f*ck up in that bathtub with litres of instant coffee to stain the cloak darker. I'll find out if it's worked tomorrow. It's a real worry for me I can tell you. So erm, how's your cancer going?

That reminds me, here's a puzzler about coffee. Am I the only one that if I buy a latte from a coffee shop or what ever and add loads of sugar from those little paper tube packets and stir it all to hell it's only the last mouthful at the end that is actually sweet? It is just me isn't it. I don't have much luck with coffee. At the indoor play area where I take the kids I always get a coffee in one of those lidded paper cups and it always drips onto my jeans. I try to clean the coffee spot up with a wet wipe and end up clearing a clean patch on my jeans around the brown stain. So then it looks like I've got some sort of dirty fried egg on my leg.

Last weekend we rented a bach and went to Waihi Beach. Just for a moment I'd like you to say how you think Waihi is pronounced. If you pronounced it "why-hi" go back and try again. If you pronounced it "why-he" you'd were spot on, well done. If you're wondering that the heck a bach is it's a New Zealand term that originally meant a small beach hut. If you're wondering why my jeans are so dirty that I can clean a patch with a wet wipe you have to go back in the e-mails about six months. However things with baches have moved on and we rented a two storey three bedroom full on house for about eighty quid per night that was still termed a bach and was better than the hut we live in for the rest of the year. One theory is that bach comes from bacheolor pad and I'd love to have lived in that house as a bacheolor. Five minutes walk over some sand dunes to miles of white beach on the shores of the Pacific Ocean (yes, I did pretend to be C3PO on Tatooine while walking over the dunes - "Don't get technical with me" I said to Eva at one point just for giggles). There can't have been more than twenty or thirty people on that beach all day and we had miles of the stuff to spread out on.

We shared the holiday with Juliette's sister, brother-in-law and kids and the rest of Juliette's family popped up for a sort of day trip too. One of the the highlight of the trip was when a pod of Orca whales swam by us off shore and you could see the wave crests created by their dorsal fins and tails. Of course another name for Orca whales is "killer whales" but "Hey kids, look, Orca Whales!" induces fewer nightmares than "Hey kids, look, Killer Whales!".

Juliette's dad brought up some cheap (less than $3) plastic kites and the son-in-laws had a go at trying to fly them in lieu of the kids not giving a f*ck about them. They only had one string and tended to spiral around and hit the sand unless you got them high enough. I can say with some pride that once I got mine high enough I managed to unravel all of the light weight twine and got my kite to fly what looked like about a gazzilion miles up. Felix Baumgartner would have said it was high up. It was aces and skill. The only thing that bothered me was the design on the kite which showed the sun wearing sun glasses. I couldn't help but wonder as I unwound the Atlantic spanning length of string why the sun would wear sunglasses. To protect it's eyes from itself? It dawned on me that the only reason why the sun would wear sunglasses would be to protect itself from the nearest star to our solar system way off in Alpha Centauri. I mean that's like a tiny pin prick of light. So then it dawned on me that the kite was taking the piss out of the sun. The kite was designed to taunt the sun. I was going to get the kite to fly as close to the sun as possible like some sort of kite flying 21st century Icarus. Game on! Then Sam shat his swimming trunks for the second time that day and Juliette made me reel the kite back in and put it away. So that didn't happen in the end.

Actually I've got to tell you that before I tried to taunt the sun I had offered everyone a chance to fly the kite (as in "look how awesomely high I've flown this $3 kite, want a go?") and Juliette's mum said she had never flown a kite ever. I passed her the plastic handle, she asked if she had to do anything, I said no and then we waited about five seconds and she passed the plastic handle back to me with a curt nod. Awesome.

After the holiday on the way back we men dropped the wives and kids off at the Goldfields Railway. This is a restored charitable railway which runs between Waihi and Waikino along the Ohinemuri River. We had to drop them off and pick them up at the other because we had the two cars and it was a one way journey. So we dropped them off at the Waihi station then in the car park we debated long and hard about doing a runner but eventually drove round to the Waikino station and picked them up at the other end. The kids loved it as this was the first time they had been on a railway train. I joked that at the other end I was then going to then show other old time stuff like a a vinyl record player, a VHS recorder, a cathode ray tube television set, a rotary dial telephone and corporal punishment. The looks I got seem to suggest I had suddenly morphed into Phil Harding from Time Team and had suggested we all do some flint knapping. Up in the Maungakawa Reserve by us is an old outbuilding that's had people graffiting it for the last hundred odd years. Some of it says stuff like "Dave and Sue, Sep 1994", but some is from 1947 and the like so you kind of respect it. My favourite quote on it is "Nothing is as old as yesterday." Think about that one for a moment... nothing is as old as yesterday. That is deep. I'm going up there later to add "except the day before yesterday obviously. Mark 2012".

It also occurs to me that nowadays you post something now on an internet forum or what ever and chances are there's some sort of ratings system for it. So every now and again you can't but help pop back and check out if anyone thought what you said was any good. Usually it's "Likes" or green thumbs up or red thumbs down but there's nothing like that for graffiti at all. From now on I'm going to go into public toilets and mark each statement with random green thumbs up and red thumbs down. So you'd see "I have climbed highest mountains, I have run through the fields, Only to be with you, Only to be with you. I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, These city walls, Only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for." (add six green thumbs up, four red thumbs down.) And then underneath someone could have written: "Have you tried taking your sunglasses off before you look Bono?" (add five green thumbs up, one red thumb down).

I think I'm in bit of a funny mood because my hands are still dyed green from the cloak (gives self two green thumbs up) so I'll say cheery bye for now. Speak to you next week.

Love Mark xxx



 

Email from my brother: Question - what's the most popular colour for shower gel?

Hi Fay,





How is it going? Bet you’re saving a few bob on shampoo. Then there’s conditioner too. Yep, it all adds up. Kerching!

Just when Sam was born nearly two years ago I was working in local supermarket stacking shelves of an evening. Not because we needed the money but because stacking shelves is such great fun of course. The best bit was near the end of a shift you had to go down an aisle, bring all the produce to the front of the shelf and turn it so that all the labels faced the right way. That way in the morning it looked like the supermarket was fully stocked, neat and tidy. We all loved doing that especially when the store was still open and customers could reach in and destroy your work because they wanted a single tin of diced tomatoes and had the light delicate touch of the Incredible Hulk.



The supermarket chain I worked in was called “Countdown” and in New Zealand is on par with Asda. (In case you’re wondering I stopped making the Channel Four Countdown clock music to anyone who would listen to me about twenty minutes into my first shift.) I always wondered if at night with the name “Countdown” lit up in glowing letters on the front they had a special back up generator just for the letter “o” so as to avoid corporate embarrassment. Countd wn? No, I meant the other “o”.



Anyway the point was that I’ve put out a fair few packs of shampoo, conditioner and soap and they’re not cheap. Also I noticed that half of all shower gel is blue. Have you noticed that? Some are clear, some are green, some are creamy but around about half are blue. Now I like to soap myself up in blue and pretend I’m Mystique from the X-Men like most people but I can’t because where does the blue go? Think about all the colours in your shower products, they’re there in the bottle but as soon as it’s smeared properly across your flesh the colour disappears. They need to put that colour technology in ice lollies pronto because it’s high time eating a raspberry or orange flavoured iceblock didn’t make your mouth look like you’ve borrowed it from a Star Trek alien.



Anyway I’m just padding this e-mail because nothing much has happened this week. The only exciting thing for me was receiving a parcel in the mail from Germany containing some more medieval armour. They were leg greaves and knee cops (plate knee covers with lower leg plates like cricket pads) which Sam helped me clean all the grease off before I strapped them onto my legs to try them out. Sam then insisted on dragging me round the paddocks looking for chicken eggs while I clanked and tottered around like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz. I still retain enough self awareness that if anyone were to come to the house I'd look a proper weirdo.

Sam does that sort of stuff on purpose I reckon. Sometimes we’ll be watching TV with him on my knee and under my peripheral vision he’ll insert a bogey loaded chubby index finger into the corner of my mouth. Other times I’ll be peeing and he’ll dart around from behind me to push the toilet seat and lid down in one go. Slam! I’m pretty ripped in the pelvic muscle region by now. When it comes to ablutions and the such you don’t really get much privacy with little kids. The other day it was number twos, I was stood after the first wipe and was dropping the paper into the bowl and Sam appeared there like a miniature shopkeeper from Mr Ben. He was dipping the toilet brush into the bowl,both of his little arms were pumping away and he looked up at me with a crinkle nosed expression that said “I’ve got another sixteen bowls like this one before lunchtime, so can you hurry the f*ck up?”



Anyway, take care, hopefully something exciting will happen to me next week so I can write to you about it. Oh yes, it’s the first week of school holidays here next week and Eva and Sam get on like cats and dogs. I’m soooo looking forward to it.

Love Mark xxx

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nothing interesting has happened and you can still make me laugh. You are a genius. As always I....

 

Email from my brother: How many calories in a kiwi fruit?

Hi Fay


So the boy racer that crashed into Maurice and Valerie’s culvert died this week. Sad for his family, but thankfully he was the only one who paid the price for his stupidity. I mean anyone of us could have been using that driveway when he A-Teamed his car into it and where would we be then?



The headline in the newspaper was “Highway for Hoons” based on a quote from a more irate neighbour. Maurice and Valerie came round for dinner last Saturday & Valerie wasn’t aware that she was using the word “Coon” for “Hoon” until we pointed it out. She hadn’t heard of either word before and was very embarrassed when we told her what it meant. “Highway for Coons” as a headline would’ve swung the focus of the story in a totally different direction don’t you think? So on with the good news …



This week, for the first time ever, I’m trying a diet. It’s a sea food diet. Whenever I sea food … hang on that joke doesn’t work in print. When we first applied to come to New Zealand we had to go through a proper medical that included blood tests and X-rays and eye tests and everything. From these tests we both found out that we had non-alcoholic fatty livers but recent blood tests for life insurance have shown we’ve sorted that one out mainly with a firm application of ignoring it. Ignoring it worked! Result! That hardly ever works. (Our diets did change after our move here so there is that.)



However I do know I’m over weight. I know this because the specialist I saw about my liver three years ago got out a height to weight chart that was colour coded in bands of green, yellow and red. When I told him my weight and height he ran his fingers through the colours, tapped the red band and just turned to me with raised eyebrows. Cheeky b*stard.



So back in 2009 we had a fancy set of scales that you program your sex, height and age and it shoot electric currents through you and works out percentage body fat. First time I programed my stats in I found out I was 33% fat. That’s why I think yellow suits me best. I’m a walking tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. Unsurprisingly 33% fat is outside the healthy range for me so I sat back and did nothing about it again. F*ck all. Skip forward to 2012 and we’ve still got the scales and I’m still the same body fat percentage.



So we decided to try this 5:2 diet where by two days a week we limit our food consumption to 600 calories and the other days we eat normally. The idea is that’s kind of how our ancestors ate, fasting when there wasn’t food and feasting when there was. We’ve never done any sort of diet before but the upshot was we’ve decided to try it for three weeks to see if it’s any good (i.e. if we lose weight at all). So far we’ve done a week and it’s a bloody horrible diet. I’ve never done so much maths. Well apart from when I did my A-level in maths. What grade did I get? Oh yes, a U. So again, I’ve never done so much maths.



How many calories in a kiwi fruit? How many in a cup of brown rice? What about a banana? Is it a big banana, a medium banana or a small banana? Look it up and then convert kilojoules to calories, convert them back again, dived the total by two, multiply by tablespoons and eat it at the rate of six dolphins per fortnight. Why is nothing ever simple?



The thing is I went and weighed myself again and this time I actually picked the scales up to look at the little icons. I had to scratch off a blob of cheese, flick away some rice-crispy cake and wipe away the remnants of some splashed full fat mochachino from the display but I did find that I’d had my profile set on female instead of male. This had been set like that for four years and only now I’d realised my mistake. So now I find out I’m 19% body fat which is in the healthy range. I had been wondering how doing three hours of pushing a lawn mover around per week, digging ditches, shifting logs for hours, splitting wood and shooting a 119lb longbow still meant I medically had the body of Humpty Dumpty. Mystery solved! I had the brains of Humpty Dumpty. I think there’s 83 calories in a Humpty Dumpty. Mmmmmm, Cadburys Cream Humpty Dumpty…. It’s going to be a long three weeks.



Take care,

Love Mark xxx

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As always Mark

Email from my Brother: Flooding Alert!!

Hi Fay,

I’ll start off by congratulating you on your sponsored walk.  I’m so used to taking the car now that if I walked seven miles there’d be severe chaffing going on in places where chaffage doesn’t need to happen.  I am good at wading though as this week’s drama will soon show.

So our property in New Zealand is bordered on the north by the road.  On the east side the boundary is a drainage ditch.  It’s a big ditch as it’s the main one for the valley and is about six feet wide and six feet deep. The ditch runs north and goes under the road to the north through a concrete pipe. On the south and west sides are the wide open fields owned by our farmer neighbour.  Incidentally over the ditch is more fields until the ground starts rising up towards Mangakawa Reserve.  Got that in your head?  If not Google Map our house.

So a couple of nights ago I finally decide to go out to the garage to get the rat trap.  Did you know we’ve got rats?  I may have mentioned it once or twice.  The rain had been heavy but it appeared to have eased off so I thought that this was the best time to hop on out and get the darn thing.  Anyway I stepped out and looked towards our garage which is usually a pitch black scene seeing as we’re in the country.

I was momentarily taken surprise by what seemed to be multiple water reflections from house lights from up the hill.  It seemed that I was staring across Torbay Harbour rather than empty fields which clearly wasn’t right.  There followed  a slight pause where I wondered where I was and I realised what it must be like to be senile.  Maybe I was really in my nineties and had been reliving the golden age with my young family back in the 2010s but was in fact now stepping outside the sea side old folks home in the 2050s and that I’d been a dribbling resident there for some time.  Was this a rare moment of clarity or a common moment of madness?  Did they have a fish and chip shop in this unfamiliar seaside town?  Did they have a pub?  Why had I been reliving painting the new bathroom when I could have skipped right over that shit?

Then I heard an alpaca bleat and the sound of water being kicked around in the darkness and I realised that (a) I was not mad - the ditch had burst it’s banks in the heavy rain and (b) the alpacas were up to their knees in flood water because I’d moved them into the car park paddock and archery paddock the day before.  To add to this the Guinea Pig hutch was now submerged because the flood water was half way up the garden, but thanks to the fact that the Guinea Pig hutch was a two storey jobby the Guinea Pigs (Bubbles and Goldie Looking Horn) had retreated up their ramp like Chewbacca and Han Solo boarding the Millennium Falcon.  You’ve got to love those furry little guys.  They’ve got mites, they’ve cost four times their worth in vet fees so far but they know what to do in a flooding emergency. i.e. not drown and break Eva's little heart.

So it was time to assess the situation.  This starts by banging on the kitchen window to get Juliette to come out.  No point panicking in the dark alone.  The garage was well under water.  I had a brief flash of flood scenes from James Cameron’s Titanic but in a shed rather than a ship.  One of our cars that was parked on the grass was in danger of being flooded so I knew that would have to be moved. But it was time to prioritise, cars can be fixed so first the alpacas because alpacas cost hundreds of dollars where as Guinea Pigs cost six bucks each.

Fun alpaca facts – alpacas don’t like water, they do like alpaca pellets, they are always hungry, they will follow the Alpaca Beelzebub into the depths of hell if he has alpaca pellets, alpaca pellets make a nice noise if you shake them in a plastic container, alpacas love alpaca pellets  and alpacas love alpaca pellets.  Juliette and I lead all four of them up to a dry paddock in the dark no problem.  It was easy and apart from Dougal having a bit of a cough the next day they were none the worse for wear.  I dragged the Guinea Pig cage up to dry land and put in some food for them, backed the car that was in danger of being flooded up to the dry bit feeling like James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me and finally checked on Tom cat.  He’d been asleep in front of the fire the whole time.

Next morning the water had dropped down and it looked like nothing had happened. The garage hadn't been flooded, the water had risen right up to the level of the floor but no further.   If I hadn’t gone outside when I had chances are apart from some pissed off alpacas, two dead Guinea Pigs, a flooded car and load of fire wood scattered all over the paddocks I’d have been left scratching my head.  The farmer says the ditch bursts it’s banks about once every ten to fifteen years when it rains this hard.  Brilliant.  If it doesn’t happen again next week what am I going to write to you about next time?

Take care,

Mark xxx

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sure you'd find something! Welcome to my blog, that's me trying to work out something to write about! 

As always Mark I ....

Email from my Brother: poo and mice this week!

Hi  Fay,

How are things going in your part of the world?  I’m writing to you moments after finding out that our fencing guy may have driven a gate post through the pipe that links our house to our septic tank.  How do we know this?  There’s a suspiciously large puddle forming a few metres away from the back door.  It doesn’t yet have any turds floating in it because they’ll apparently come up in the brand new shower tray in our brand new bathroom.  Yay us!

And we paid extra for a low profile shower tray.  There’s no lip on that mutha and it’s near flush with the floor. I’m ruing the day we decided on that.  It’s going to be poops ahoy as they wash over the Italian floor tiles and lap up against the free standing vanity unit.  Do you remember that scene from “The Shining” where the lift doors open and gallons of blood wash out into the hotel corridor?  I’m thinking that but with frappéd shit.

After going so long without a bathroom there has been a certain pleasure in taking long hot showers.  Not anymore.  Now it’s a gamble of how quick can you shower before you realise you’re paddling in sewage.  I’m thinking that maybe we should get the pipe fixed.

Juliette’s dad says I should dig down and find out where the break is then dig a run off trench to another part of the paddock to take the shitty water to.  Then I can call in some drain layers to but in a new bit of pipe.  I’m dry retching just thinking about how bad that’s going to be.  I’m thinking full Hazmat suit, the ones with those unnecessarily large and really fragile looking head pieces.  You know the ones, they’re yellow rubber, all tight fitting around the wellies and gloves but come the helmet bit it looks like it was designed to fit over the head of a It’s A Knockout foam novelty character.  They also have what looks like a vacuum cleaner pipe coming out of the back of the head piece for you to breathe through and that hooks up to a backpack full of potpourri or something.  No doubt I’ll just have to dig it out in jeans and a hoodie though.

We also have a bit of a mouse problem.  Just the one mouse I think.  I’d seen it skirting around the place out of the corner of my eye for a couple of weeks now.  It’s tiny, about the size of my thumb.  It’s a little brown field mouse.  Tom caught it last Saturday in an amazing display of speed and dexterity (he actually caught it about five times because he kept letting it go just to give the poor creature a bit of a chance).  Juliette had to take the mouse off Tom and she dropped it outside the back door.  Usually you’d want to take it off somewhere a bit further but it was cold, dark and raining.

So last night I’m asleep, deep asleep, Inception dream Level 3 at least, and Juliette wakes me up to tell me that a mouse has run across her back and was walking along the headboard.  No this is true, mice do this because there was this one time in Jersey when a mouse tried to make a nest in Juliette’s hair three times in one night.  So I switch on the lights and make a show of looking for a tiny mouse that I'm never going to see without my contact lenses in before I flop back into bed and going back to sleep.  I’m just drifting off when I hear the scritching sound of tiny mouse feet running across the top of the headboard for myself.  So I leap up, switch the light on and there’s the mouse, in mid pose, ready to leap into Juliette’s hair for the second time.  Not really.  I heard the mouse but just went back to sleep.  

If a mouse can climb up onto our headboard and run along it in the dark he’s obviously up to something more awesome than just hanging around in the kitchen looking for crumbs.  I want to see what this mouse is doing.  I suspect he’s going for Juliette’s jewellery  tree.  Just one more job and he can finally retire to Rio.

We could of course just let Tom the cat sleep in the house at night and let him catch the mouse but if there’s just one thing Tom and Jerry cartoons have taught us it’s that as soon as you leave a cat in all night they’ll be playing Jazz records with their zoot suited cat buddies and breaking the place up quicker than you can say "Hey Toots!".  So Tom stays out.

Take care,

Love,

Mark xxx

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey you, as always

E-mail from my Brother : Meh......

Hi Fay,

How is it going?  Nothing much has happened this week unfortunately.  I haven’t been trying to catch any more rats, there haven’t been any workmen around to put in any bathrooms or put up any fences and I’ve largely spent my week trying to keep my sanity while winter rages outside and Sam rages inside.

I bought a backpack weed sprayer today that cost a small fortune.  It straps onto your back and make you look like a Ghostbuster.

The weed sprayer was made in Spain and had an exploded diagram of all the component parts labelled 1 to 292 with the information “Step 1: attach part 182 to 131”, “Step 2: Pump handle and use sprayer.”

I spent ten minutes trying to figure out which part was which and made the mistake of having music playing on Windows Media Player while I unpacked it.  It was mistake because the songs were on random and started playing a track from the 2004 film King Arthur.  

The instrumental was part of the score that started slowly and ramped up the tense music to reflect the tense and dangerous battle that was going on in the film.  For me that music just made me feel like finding Part 182 and attaching it to Part 131 was something from a Hollywood bomb disposal scene.  Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, where’s the part!?  Where’s the part!? He doesn’t know!  Teeeeeeeee-ension!  Dum, dum, DUM!  DUM, DUM, DUM, DUM!  Where’s the f*cking part!?  De dur!  Dum, dum, dum!  DUM!  DUM!  DUM, DUM, DUM, DUM! Violins!  

Part 182 was a hose, part 131 was the handle.  They’d over complicated the whole thing.

I went into the store and had asked for some advice on the actual weed killer.  I had been looking at the garden week killer stuff but on finding out that we had a bit more land the salesman took me out to the professional farmers section.  “This is the one you want,” he said gesturing to a shelf full of tiny plastic bottles.  One little bottle of Merlin’s Magic Plant Killy Potion cost $160 dollars.  I looked carefully at the bottle but could find no evidence of it being made from solid gold or that it had rubies studded in the cap of the bottle.  “Make sure you don’t put more that six millilitres per litre of water,” he said, “otherwise it’ll kill everything including the grass.”  Oh, so that tiny bottle would actually make up a swimming pool size of weed killer?  Cool.  But then I wondered on how I’m going to measure this stuff accurately into the water.  Six mills isn’t a lot.  Maybe I’ll just guess…

I’ve got my yearly eye check up tomorrow.  I hate those things but they won’t re-order my contact lenses unless I get them rechecked.  I hate them in the same way I hate having my haircut.   I don’t like someone invading my personal space and having some stranger shine a light into my eye and tell me not to blink just seems unnecessarily cruel.  I also find myself holding by breath when they lean in close to look down my optical nerve or what ever it is they feel the need to get so close to do.  I have this fear that I’ll breathe out and the optometrist will back off gagging at my fetid garlic fug.  It’s an irrational fear I know because I’ve trained myself up to breath out of my perforated ear drum.  Sure my ears are waggling when I do it, but I think it’s better than drawing attention to myself.

As I say, nothing much has been happening this week.  About this time during winter in the northern hemisphere there’s be some sort of mid-winter festival to cheer folks up.  Some people call it Christmas.  Down here there’s nothing.  Nothing until spring comes along.  Imagine a winter without a Christmas and that’s what it’s like at the moment.  Short days, long nights, cold, fog and drizzle.  The occasional weed killer backpack bomb disposal exercise for sure, but mostly it’s “meh”.

Love Mark,

xxx

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meh, eh? About right for my week too!

As always ........