Like the l*dyb*rd post I wrote about recently, I also get a slow and steady stream of comments on a post I wrote about a certain artist/walking exploitative marketing exercise I don’t happen to like very much, after a news story about him behaving badly in public which I found a bit funny. I think I also mentioned this post, recently, as an xample of angry commenter types. I cannot remember. Still, today’s comment is particularly special, so I don’t mind mentioning it again.

Now, I’ve ranted about a goodly number of things I don’t like in my time, but none of those posts have ever attracted so many comments over such a long time, for some reason. Nor quite such violent ones. And I keep the comments open because, frankly, it’s interesting to see just how viciously passionate either side of the argument feel about this man.

No one, however, as far as I remember, has felt quite as strongly about it as this hilariously cross commenter:

You people are a bunch of sick mothers let me tell you! I wish Thomas Kinc**d could turn that wang around and piss right in all your friggin faces. What kind of sick SOBs think that wholesomeness and beauty are things to be despised? I’ll tell you what I despise - the likes of you people. I’d love to see someone pump 20 bullets right through each of your skulls and then have Kink**d piss in the holes. Now that would be a thing of beauty!

Brilliant. I’m a sick motherfucker, as are all the other people who don’t happen to like this artist, his ego or his art - and to state their opinion about that - whereas you, good sir, are one of the righteous, fighting for all things wholesome and beautiful … through the medium of shooting people in the face and urinating in the bullet holes.

Genius.

Those not interested in kitten based material, look away now, I promise I’ll post some proper content later

(more…)

One is bouncing about with the occasional sneeze, one is lying very poorly in her brand new bed with cat flu, both of them, say the vet, quite sick, due to being born to a stray who hadn’t been immunised and then spending their first few weeks in home that cared very little for them.

Floppy and uncomfortable, Cat, (Widget as I am calling her while she is sick, for she is squidgy) is taking to my clumsy unfamiliar kitten-nursing as kindly as she can, while I am losing my fear of breaking her, in the sad knowledge she is already quite broken.

I am very worried. This does not do much to improve my anxiety about being unable to properly care for kittings. Or, you know, anything.

If anyone has any thing useful to say at this point - some kind of ‘Oh I knew a kitting who had flu and she was all floppy and sad but then she was fine’, that would be good. If you only have ‘Oh mine had that and then died’ stories, like the rest of the internet, please refrain, as it does not help, overly much.

[NB: this is still not becoming a catblog, but it is sort of taking up all my attention right now. Will return to other content asap, obv]

It has to go down as one of the best conversations I’ve heard on the train in ages.
But then, that’s not saying much, as I’ve only been going ON the train twice a week or so. But it’s still pretty impressive.

There was a boy of about 7, and a girl of about 8, and their father. They were sitting next to me while I was tapping away, and they’d all been talking about the two-house Christmas plans, in a jolly kind of way, and then suddenly…

Little boy: “Daddy, what I want for my birthday, I want to go to a minefield and I want to play in a minefield with all the mines that would explode while we were playing”

Daddy: “Well alright, we’ll have a look on eBay when we get home and see if we can find any mines”

And then continued for about how expensive it would be to fly the kid and five (”ten, daddy!”) ten of his friends out to somewhere where it would be easy to find a field with play-mines in just lying around, so it would be cheaper to make one at home with eBay mines. And then the conversation moved on to the prices of flights. And then back again. “And of course I’d have to go with them, because you can’t take ten children to play in a minefield unsupervised, and an adult fare is even more expensive” …

And I’m not sure whether it was more interesting thinking of what exactly, the young man might have been thinking of (it’s Minesweeper the Windows game, isn’t it?) - or how impressively deadpan his father was. And for how long.

Currently, the two tiny sibling balls of fur snoozing in a makeshift cardboard box bed in a safe cordoned off area at the back of the room as going by the work-in-progress titles of Cat and Rabbit.

The girl, who has darker markings on her tabby back and is slightly smaller, is Cat. The boy, whose tabby is more of a grey blue colour above his white stomach, is Rabbit.

There is logic, here. When we went to the pet shop to finish off buying supplies, there was only one bowl that said ‘CAT’ left on the shelf, and even if there weren’t, buying two would have led to the kind of matchingness that would not have suited us, our house, or our socks. So we walked out with one bowl that says ‘CAT’ and one bowl that says ‘RABBIT’.

At the moment they are therefore called Cat and Rabbit. Also, it would have been confusing to call them both ‘Cat’, as we wouldn’t have known which one we were referring to.

We do not know what to call the kittens. We are waiting a couple of days, we think, until we know them a bit better.

Names currently under consideration:

Dame Judi Dench
Hilary
Sir Ian McKellan
Liono
Cheetara
Findus
Spaghetti
Wanda
Zola (for the boy. It’s a Chelsea thing, apparently?)
Monk
Pookie
Killer
Geraint
Rabbit
Cat

And many others. Although I might as well just stop kidding around and call them ‘Baby’ and ‘Substitute’, being, as I am, a thirty year-old woman with new kittens.

(Please note, Mac and PC are not under consideration at this time, as, apparently ‘we are not prepared to damn one of our cats to being lameass this early in life’.)

They are quite nervous at the moment, though growing more confident by the hour, and cute as hairy buttons.

But please be assured, Little Red Boat will not, and you have me on record, become a cat-blog.
Though they are two little walking balls of content, for which I am most grateful.

Yay. Kittings.

UPDATE …

For those asking for pictures - well, there will be more pictures, but Cat (although I have spent most of my time at home today calling Cat ‘Widget’, so that might be another option) has a gammy eye at the moment, so she isn’t being very pictured until we get to the vet tomorrow to find out how to fix these things and she gets a bit happier. I think she has not been very loved. Still, we can do that. That is the point.

But for just two pics:
Rabbit, and Cat(-Widget).

My beloved breathing deeply, asleep already, in less than a minute, as always. I envy him.

Outside a car is adhering to the ‘one way street’ rule by reversing as fast as it can the wrong way. As annoyed by this as I always am, I still smile.

The soft ticking of a clock in the next room.

A fan running in the bathroom downstairs, after a few minutes it will shut down, and the house will be still.

Not the street, though, because it’s kicking out time in the pubs of Brighton. And, as sometimes seems to happen, someone has ’specially sought the spot outside my window in order to shout all the way down the street.

“YEAH NO I’M JUST GONNA GO HOME AND CRASH I THINK COS I’M REALL TIRED AND JUST WANNA GO TO SLEEP. YEAH. NO I KNOW. WELL MAYBE I’LL SEE HIM TOMORROW COS RIGHT NOW I’M JUST REALLY WHACKED AND NEED TO SLEEP, REALLY. YEAH. NO, SLEEP. HAHAHA. YEAH. …”

Beside me, my beloved’s breath rises and falls heavily still - the man who can sleep through anything sleeping through it all.

The light on my clever-clever alarm clock, trying its hardest to imitate a sunset, slowly fades, and I fade with it, falling asleep to the Brighton lullaby of drunken idiots, shouting.

1) If one was thinking of entering the kitten-owning arena, and one could only have, well, one - would it be better to have a
i) Girl-kitten or ii) Boy-kitten?

2 - Is it *very* difficult to look after a very small one. If one has had a cat but not a kitten before, is it better to get a slightly grown one so you don’t kill it by mistake?

C) If you get a very little one and there are stairs between the litter tray and the rest of the house, would it be too little to deal with the up and downness of the stairs and end up shitting like a bad’un all over the rest of the house? Or would it cope with stairs? Or would one have to get some kind of slide down, miniature stair lift up arrangement fitted?

5) Are they very easy to kill accidentally? Pls?

Just in theory, like. Please don’t get misled into thinking that there is any action of a kitten nature At All going on over here, these were all Completely Hypothetical questions. That is all. But you know, do you know any of these things?

Waking to the rain and a call from the student loans company telling me that my payments have bounced, which, in my new confusing financial world, currently a chaos of invoices and commissions and things in the post, I should have realised, but have forgotten to shuffle accounts to compensate for.

Getting up and trying to frantically work something out before the rent bounces as well.

Reading email, cursing myself, falling into a paranoid fantasy that a collapse of invoicing systems is in fact due to my own lack of talent and skill at my chosen work.

My alarm goes off in the bedroom up the stairs. Running up them to turn it off, I trip.

Stomach is churning, I feel fat and awful from consuming comfort food (that I happen to be allergic to) and not making myself time to go to the gym to work it off.

Starting the day’s bout of winter weeping several hours early, to the surprise and sighs of my beloved, who consequently misses his train.

The cereal runs out half way up the bowl.

The milk is on the turn.

My morning vitamins give me burps that taste of fish offal. The hiccups of crying taste the same. And also of milk on the edge of its turn.

Laying out the things I need to do today unable to put anything in order or perspective, and I know I have forgotten so many things, and I cannot remember, predictably, any of the things I have forgotten.

I realise I have used my precious VAT certificate as a coaster for a bowl of borscht.

Thursday so far. I want to know if I can rewind it and start again. Or just rewind it and stay asleep this time.

Until about March.

I’ve been carrying this around in my diary for the longest time with the intention of posting it up here. It’s a letter I tore out of one of the free London Newspapers, and, for me, a perfect of using an argument to the point that it loses its resonance.

“I’m reading yesterday’s article about the horrific M25 coach crash.
But isn’t it just a miniature version of what is happening daily in Iraq following our disastrous invasion of their country?”
Disgusted of East Dulwich

To which I always would like to say “No”.

No, it isn’t. There are very bad things happening in Iraq, yes. There are suicide bombers, and kidnappings and beheadings and all manner of things under the name of the occupation, and civil unrest, and all sorts of general badness that I think most people would agree with you are wrong, yes. They are things that people should be made aware of, and things that can be actively brought into the media in many different ways. But surely if you just go around comparing it to EVERYTHING that happens, then perhaps people will stop listening.
Maybe.
That is all.

Because there aren’t a whole lot of double decker coaches with drunk drivers falling over in Iraq every day. There just aren’t. As far as I know. And maybe if you make it sound as if there are, you belittle the actual point you’re trying to make.

Maybe. Just saying.

I know I don’t often do this here - to the extent that this isn’t the first of these I’ve done, and there’s certainly a lot of stuff elsewhere that I never point to, etc etc etc…

But I did the full TV review thing today, and it’s ok, and quite recognisable and littleredboaty in style, so I thought I should link it. It’s also in the paper, should you ever read that. The Guardian, sorry. “The paper” indeed. What a wanky thing to say. Like there’s only one paper.

But I have always wanted to do these things. I love television, and television criticism is one of my favourite reading matter, and yes, I know that many f you won’t have televisions - people who find out what I do always love telling me that (more of that at a later date) - but this is something I am a little proud of, and I’m just going to shut up now. Anyway… Oooh! Look! Over there! Is it a badger?!

Update

Actually, on the subject of badgers, if anyone’s arrived here from some Thing I was speaking on some panel at (terrible sentence, forgive, pls) then go and look at that right hand side bar, it’s full of links and things to posts that might be good and a fuckbunch of archives, which are more Russian rouletteish, except you won’t die. Thanks.

… bring me a cliche, will you? No, on second thoughts, make it a cliche spritzer.

I still don’t care about shoes, don’t get me wrong; eyeliner is a terrifying and offensive weapon, and I don’t know my Dior from a door. But as I progress through life, I am developing certain weaknesses.

It is a matter for the record, then, that if you took me on a polar bear watching expedition in the middle of the arctic wastes and sat me on a bench with nothing to be seen for miles and miles around but ice, snow, and far away polar bears, you could turn your back for two minutes, and turn back to find me sitting with a brand new bag. It won’t be expensive, it won’t be a fancy label, it won’t be one of your girliest of handbags. It’ll be brightly coloured, most probably a satchel, a shoulder bag or some such, and almost certainly completely extraneous to my needs. But it will be, as sure as sure can be, a new bag.

And I won’t generally remember wanting to buy it either. Nor the new chunky plastic bracelet that is sitting on my wrist. But I’ll be terribly, terribly pleased with myself.

I still don’t love shoes, though.

I’m just saying that because I was looking through some old posts for some reason, and concentrating on ones that were written some pre-anniversary of today. And found that I’m generally on a sun-finding holiday somewhere else, which was depressing for a start, but then I found one of the only things available before that was a firm dismissal of everything girly. Though mainly shoes and handbags. I still don’t care much about shoes. I’m hanging on to that.

Shopping for tiny family members of siblings, I happened to come across a nest of tiny, perfect woolly hats. I had to buy two, because while one will suit most cutely the tiniest family member it will adorn, I picked up and then knew I wouldn’t be able to hand over the other.

Because it had little red boats all around it. Real ones. Like the ones I drew, just over there (points right).
So I’m keeping it.
Now, I don’t think that bringing new life into the world just as the stand for a hat is the right thing to do; but it feels wrong giving it away, also.

Maybe I should frame it…. Yes. Frame it. Going to IKEA is so much more easy than having children. Apart from the dreadful queues. And the people. And the lighting. And the music. The baubles. Oh God, I was right at first instinct: I should just have children rather than brave the shops. Fucking Christmas. Well babies it is then. Do they deliver?

Wow, people always said it was a difficult decision to make - I never realised they meant ‘interior-decor/hat-wise’

I should just mention here that before anyone conjectures that I’m building up to a declaration of uptheduffness, I’m not, and I’m not.

I just have a thing for things with little red boats on. And baby hats.

Thank you.

Sorry, just getting there before someone else does.

More later at some point - in the week, not ‘tonight’, because I am the typing dead as we speak, and have been since about midafternoon (except then I was the ‘walking dead’, and then the ‘ticket-purchasing dead’ and then the ’sitting on a train dead’, but those don’t sound anywhere near as poetic.

Still: things that I have done over the last few days:

1) Hit lots of small coloured balls with sticks on a ‘driving range’, and thought that it was lucky no one was driving on it at the time, as I would have had their windscreen in. If they’d been driving about three metres away and really low to the ground.

2) Been punched by a monk. More on this at a later date. It was more ‘pummelled’, I suppose.

3) Managed to avoid being unnecessarily naked with strangers.

4) Until unexpectedly finding myself being vigourously rubbed down with sour cream and sea salt (yes, yes, just like a Pringle, yes) by a lovely short hairy man with little English, while wearing only some disposable paper undernufties. The monk, now I think of it, was also short. I wonder what attracts short men to massagery. Table height?

5) Been viciously attacked by an angry rampaging horse. Where ‘viciously attacked by’ means ‘graciously accommodated by’ and ‘angry rampaging etc’ means ‘horse who let me sit on it’.
But BOY it hurts today. Vicious, I tell you.

6) Visited my least favourite airport in the world, twice, and crossed rush hour commuter-central London with a suitcase, walking against the flow of angry commuters.

7) Eaten. Some.

8) Made up several good fart gags. I still have to work out where I can use them. Austrian spas clearly good for the fart-gag thinking process, though. There is a tip.

9) realised I literally (in the true sense of the word) do not recognise a single celebrity on charity-reality show ‘Celebrity Scissorhands’. Not one. And I watch these thing For A Living. How do these things qualify to carry the label ‘celebrity’, I am thinking?

9 and a half) Some other stuff that I have forgotten.

Seriously, my brain is mush. My mind is mince. My body is like the Panini sticker book for the ‘Ow, That’s Really Hurty’ collection, and I’m reckoning with swapsies, I have at least half the complete set. I can still talk, but I’m smalltalked out, and you’re only going to get outpourings or guff.

Hello, anyway.
What’s happened on YOUR Tuesday that I missed? One thing. You can make it up if you like. No, maybe you can’t. But you can if you can’t think of one tiny tiny little thing. Sure you can. So. Tuesday. What happened?

What day is it today? Wednesday? Thursday. Oh, yes, then, I meant Tuesday. What happened Tuesday, pls? I know what happened to me, because I have noted above some of the things, I just meant … see? rambling. I rambling. bednow.

Austria

1) It is, in parts, very, very flat.

2) Health spas remain powerfully popular in the country, and particularly in the retired community. Which would be the male retired community, I suppose, as according to official figures, 70% of Austrian women don’t work. So retired Austrian men and their still-working (in-the-sense-of homekeeping, I’m guessing) wives. Very popular with all of them, anyway.

3) In some parts of health spas, being naked is not only a comfortable option, it is Mandatory. This does not include, so far as I have yet noticed, the bar, restaurants or lifts.

4) According to this here Lonely Planet Guide to Austria:
“Austrians love to hike, and many of them are literally born on skis”
[my emphasis]
This represents my favourite use of the word ‘literally’ in the sense of ‘not even slightly literally’.

5) It is currently snowing. Quite hard.

6) They show television programmes I like watching, though perversely, they show them all in German, with funny voices. It is still worth watching, given the alternative.

7) It is the politest country I have ever visited.