Avast! A Sally Morgan post: Batten the hatches lest we are invaded by ‘psychics and “empathics”

I know that wally who visited here declaring her oh so special POWAH meant she was an ‘empath’ but her malapropism amused me more.

Anyhoo,

Long time so-called ‘psychic’ and all-round con-woman Sally Morgan is facing yet more opprobrium. Huzzah!

 

“Sally said no, that the message was from someone else.
“Did anyone recognise the name Tobin? I stood up to be asked why I thought it was for me. I said that my friend had been blown up diffusing a bomb, and his name was Toby. She told me that it definitely was me and that she could see him crouched down leaning over the bomb. She also mentioned about seeing a body being blasted up into the air.
“She told me how sad she felt. ‘Oh, darling I’m so sorry. What a way to die.’ I hadn’t written on my love letter that Toby Wren was a character from the BBC programme Doomwatch, who I had fallen totally in love with as a 13-year-old. He was played by Robert Powell. I cried for days when Toby was blown up defusing a bomb on a pier. He did however rise again as Jesus of Nazareth.”

Please to read. It is so very entertaining.

So, dear old Sally-kins is SO very psychic she can detect the grief of an audience member who has lost…a ficticious character in a tv show.

By golly, that is some awesome power. I am totes going to her next show to see if I can channel Lassie’s spirit and tell her/him she was a heck of a dog and I cried mightily during the Lassie Come Home film. Oh ‘psychics’, is there no level you and your ilk will not stoop to? Scratch that, of course there isn’t.

Let the special snowflake apologia begin.

Jehovah’s Witness visit? Oh and recipes please.

My word, clearly another factor I had over-looked in the pre-marathon defattening stage was the odd zen-like calm that on occasion settles on these manly shoulders. For zounds! when Jehovah Witnesses interrupted my concentration to proselytize at my door, I was calm– nay!– polite in my shooing them and their woo far away. Even when asked ‘are you religious?’ I didn’t feel like using ‘are you an alcoholic?’ as a retort.

Oh this is bad. I very rarely get a chance to sharpen my claws on actual woo intruders; to pass up such an opportunity as this can mean only one of two things, I am either getting old, or I am getting…mild mannered???

Gah.

While I ponder the horrors of middle-age, I call out to you, my brethren, for recipes. I know many of you are excellent cooks so if I am to get through the next three months being mild-mannered to god-botherers and assorted training irritations, I at least want to eat well.

No meat, very little grains, no bread. If you have anything that you know to be a winner, please do post. I appreciate it muchly.

This was mine from yesterday’s comments, it’s for shirred eggs. Delicious and very simple to make.

Monday Moaning- the defattening. SIGH!

Morning, I would say good morning but hark, what’s good about it?

Today sees the start of an upswing in training for the Edinburgh Marathon. I ran a fine 12 miles t’other week, only to awake the following morning with a hamstring tweak. It’s nothing serious and I rested it all week, but annoyingly it’s still there when I walk, not sore, but I can feel it, if you follow my drift. Anyway, I’m heading on a 4 mile training-run shortly, I’ll keep my sensors lit for any sign that it might be a tear. I cannot afford to damage it further, as I don’t have the time available to me to repair a whopping sodding tear. So there we have it. Decrepit, thy name is fatcat.

Today also sees the EQUALLY tedious task of weight dropping. It’s not rocket science to know the lighter a person is the less impact there is on the joints and bearing this in mind and the fact that the long runs are not all up in double digits, I’ve decided to knock about 14/16 pounds off my frame before May. That means a clean diet, hooch free existence, and regular training and cross training and god help me, possibly some yoga. This is tedious in the extreme, but there is no other substitute for generating leanness. WHY do I have my mother’s genes, god dammit, why can’t I be long and lean like my father with the minimum of effort. Doesn’t the universe KNOW how I like to exert the minimum of effort. Pah.

Conversely, whenever I go lean/clean I feel tremendous and worthy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I am wont to wax on tediously about how I ought to live in such a heightened state of all round wellness 100% of the time, happily cranking my belt in tighter and marveling at my clear skin and bright eyes. In short I rapidly transform into the very person other people avoid at all costs, which – alone and unbearable- keeps me on the right track. It’s win-win. The week after the marathon I am abroad in a place of sunshine, and wellness be damned,  I intend to regain about 70% of my lost body weight through the inhalation of rum, but by god I shall look awesome in a bikini as I do so.

So here we are, May 5th. Expect any manner of cranky whingeing this week as my rancid grain and sugar laden cuerpo enters the chrysalis of misery; it won’t be pretty. I should be out the other side of it by NEXT Monday, but if you want to avoid snark and brimstone I totally understand.

What do you consider romantic?

Good Ginger Day to you. You can settle a ‘discussion’ I had with my oldest and most hormonal friend ( yeah, I went there, she’s pregnant, so logic and reason are… well, they’re the same as they always were actually) on romance. Apparently – as charged– I haven’t a romantic bone in my body, and as far as I can see she has no bones in her body at all and she’s being held together by whimsy.

Apparently some girl proposed to her boyfriend at some sporting event or other during the week. I didn’t see it, I care nothing at all about it, but both she and Ivan Yates seem determined to get some sort of response out of me.

‘Yeah,’ sez I, ‘Feckin’ eegit. Could you imagine if he’d said no?”

‘Oh COME ON!’ she said. ‘That’s so romantic!’

‘It’s cringe worthy.’

‘Oh right, I’d forgotten you’re too cool for school.’

‘I’m not, I just don’t find grande gestures romantic, it’s showboating of the highest order.’

‘It’s not, it’s sweet.’

‘If you say so. I’m not going to argue with you, you outweigh me by twenty pounds.’

‘Shut up you. Are you telling me that if the paramour got on his knees in front of a crowd of thousands and proposed you’d say ‘cringe’.’

‘I’d say, ‘Will you get up you feckin’ eegit!’ Hypothetically of course as it would never happen. He wouldn’t embarrass us that way.’

And it’s true, he wouldn’t. He’d know I’d hate it, and he doesn’t DO grande gestures. What he does do is act in a way that is beyond thoughtful and considerate and that’s far more romantic to me than walking in the rain or dropping to one knee in public.

Maybe Little Miss Bucket of Hormones – who confessed to WEEPING at an advert moments later– is correct, maybe I am unromantic. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about jewels,  neither of us ever recall our anniversary, or any other significant dates in our time line.  I don’t find red roses once a year romantic (I like it that he buys flowers regularly, for no particular reason other than he thinks I might like them). Seriously, there was nothing funnier to me than the panicked herd of men gathered around the flower section in Superquinn on Valentine’s day.

Meh, feh, bleh. Romance is the runt of the emotional litter; treat me well all year and I’ll return the favour. And if that makes me unromantic I shall wear my badge of sourpuss with pride.

 

So what say you? Are you romantic? Or do you wanna join me on the cynical bench of the too cool for schoolers? ( I’ve got the good coffee and the dry eyes)

 

( Leap Year, where grown ass women can make eegits of themselves because of an extra day in the calendar year, hurrah or something)

 

 

 

 

Humans are strange

As the week of inexorable tedium drags its malignant reeking corpse slowly onwards, I am heartened to know that mankind remains as odd as ever.

 

50 grand (!) on printer ink? Someone is having ze leetle joke, no?

Electricity scam?

Say, did any of you hear a mention on the radio yesterday that the ESB are going to CHARGE/FINE people for low usage of electricity? I thought I heard it in passing, but was so unrelentingly flat-out yesterday I forgot about it and can’t actually locate a story about it today.

Is it true?

Or was I hearing things?

And if I was not hearing things…

WTF?

How can a company – that makes a profit– CHARGE people extra for NOT using much of its product?

This speaks to my soul*

 

I’m so farking busy today I can scarcely breathe but when I got this in my in box I laughed so – as I am a thoughtful person– I feel I ought to share.

 

* does not believe in souls.

Afraid of big spiders? They might not be that big.

Happy Ginger day to you all. The weather has warmed slightly, which naturally leads me towards spring cleaning and this involves chasing the spiders from my office and taking down the MASSIVE orb webs from the shed ( I do it every year after winter, they rebuild of course, but that’s okay, I don’t mind SHARING the space, just as long as it’s even Stephen, not the espeeders 80/Fat cat 20 sort of dealio we currently have going on)

My oldest friend is arachnophobic to such a degree that I can’t even have this conversation with her without her feeling slightly faint. How she lives out in the countryside is beyond me, surrounded by fields and woods, espeeder land if ever there was one, although this time of year is not so bad, September October is bad when the big guys decide it is high-time to head in from the cold, that’s bad.

Not for me, I used to be scared of espeeders to a certain degree until I moved to spain, then, between snakes lizards, cockroaches, and the various other indigenous monsters I battled daily, I began to look rather fondly on espeeders and my tolerance of them bloomed to such a degree that I remain practically benevolent towards them. I leave various ones in situ, I catch the big fellows and put them outside, I provide safe haven for the shed ones year in and out and when Elvira’s babies hatched I removed them from my office, all eleventy billion of them, to the shed too.

Naturally my friend thinks I need to go see someone to talk it over.  OR to put it in her actual words, ‘Urgh honey, you’re fucking mad to go near them…shudder shudder.’

But it is interesting the reactions to espeeeders. I don’t mind looking at them, but I do not like it when they scuttle across my hand and while moving boxes the other week, a rather massive one scuttled, alarmed from the huge bloody web it had constructed over December, to escape, the very first thing it did was run right over my wrist, causing me to perform Swan Lake in my hall while singing Don Giovanni. Once I had finished my gran jeté avec cadenza and staggered to the kitchen to locate the ‘catchin’ glass’, it occurred to me that this must me how my friend feels every time she open a cupboard or put her shoe on. Ghastly.

I caught the monster and set him on the lawn outside. He clumped off, possible muttering under his breath, into the night, and thus harmony and heartbeat were restored to normal.

The next time I saw her I gleefully told  my friend, who is horrified by such talk, all about it. By the time I had finished she was paler than the moon and my large house espeeder was– in her mind– something like this ( by the way, these are not actually espeeders, but no matter) when in fact it was more like – this

Curious about all things arachnid, I was delighted to come across the following article this morning in my customary perusal of all things scientific.

“The more afraid a person is of a spider, the bigger that individual perceives the spider to be, new research suggests.

In the context of a fear of spiders, this warped perception doesn’t necessarily interfere with daily living. But for individuals who are afraid of needles, for example, the conviction that needles are larger than they really are could lead people who fear injections to avoid getting the health care they need.”

The rest of the article can be found here.

Makes a kind so sense does it not? the more we fear something the greater and more terrifying it becomes. I dislike heights, I am  convinced  if I am too near a ledge I will faint, then roll clean off it to my death. because of this I make sure I climb Glendalough at least twice a year, where I gallop over the Spinx, heart in my ears, knees close to buckling so that I may descend again on the other side triumphant and unlike my mother. I know it’s kind of pathetic, but one cannot be bested by one’s fears, that way leads to Lilac…Mordor. NO!

In the spirit of scientific sharing, I read the article to my friend this morning and suggested we trap one of the orb weavers in the shed and observe it. She laughed and then said in a very serious voice. ‘No, just no. I’ll kill you.’

‘How bout we start off with something smaller then?”

‘No.’

‘Earwig?’

‘NO!’

‘Daddy long legs, they’re harmless.’

‘I’m hanging up now.’

‘You know you’ll need to get shit out from under your stairs some day.’

‘No I won’t,’  she said. FIRMLY.

She will you know, and I’m not driving to Wicklow to do it for her. But enough about espeeders, let us gaze on some real beauty. Oh Carrot Top, I would totes be your bunny any day. XX

Funeral attire and etiquette.

Maybe I’m making something out of nothing, but bear with me here and see if you agree or not. Yesterday I could not help notice quite a number of people at the funeral I attended arrived wearing runners, jeans, hoodies and so forth. These were not people grabbing a quick hour from work to attend either.

When attending a funeral, I would wear a dark colour, black or navy, and be as smartly turned out as possible. To me this is showing a certain level of respect both for the departed and, more importantly, for the family of the departed.

Is this not the norm?

People also stood outside smoking during the service, some people left before the family and the coffin, and a NUMBER of phones went off during the same service ( don’t even get me started about the service itself, the most inappropriate homily I’ve ever heard, bashing humanist services and talking about Whitney Houston??). My friend, who were there with me, also found it all rather depressing.

Are we that blasé about funerals these days that we forego etiquette? Everyone here knows I’ve an atheist, yet, while I did not pray yesterday, I stood, kneeled and acted with polite deference as I was in a church, and it behooves me to behave accordingly.

 

Maybe, as I said, I’m making a thing out of nothing and it’s enough to turn up and be supportive. But I don’t know, it’s not that hard to put on a clean shirt and a pair of shoes or whatever either. Again, it could just be me being old-fashioned, but what do you think?

I hate my wardrobe.

I must away most of today to various things, all of them involving me being smartly dressed. This is not a problem, my wardrobe teams with smart clothing, going to meet potential employers/funeral/lecture garb I have aplenty, what I DON’T seem capable of doing is buying smart/casual no I didn’t fall out of a hedge backwards thank you, clothing.

I don’t know how other women do it. They pair casual trousers with a nice shirt or blouse and hey presto chango they look like the stepped off the set of some white woman of privilege show.  I have developed a Idée fixe about it. I look at wardrobes in magazines, where crisp white shirts hang against pale delicate wools and floaty dresses and think ‘where is the bloody fleece? Where are the countless shapeless t-shirts from Dunnes/Pennys? The collection of tights, some ancient, some still in packets? The jeans that are falling apart they’ve been worn so often? Where’s all the sports clothes? The going out clothes? The clothes people give you that you’re afraid to throw out in case they ever ask why you never wear it, so you keep it in terror of offending them? Where’s all that crap?

Rolling as I am towards 40, I feel ought to do SOMETHING about this state of affairs. But god damn it, I do so hate to be uncomfortable in any way when I work. But I also hate looking like a hobo.

I’m going to have to do a cull, a vicious clothing cull. I will throw out shit, I will stop hoarding useless unwearable tat. I WILL buy a dainty cardigan or two, more fitted shirts. PANTS! I will buy Pants!

No doubt when I have accrued all this,  I will promptly put my jeans and a fleece on and admire my wardrobe, before closing the doors, sighing in relief.

SIGH.