SOUTHAMPTON: “Forty years ago, while the world was to be my oyster, I wasn’t aboard the QE2,” reminisces a doleful Payton L. Inkletter: “Neyok Neyok!”

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

In other news…

02^nd May 2009:

Saturday: Another paradisiacal day, and another one spent asleep till almost dark, excepting tinkle breaks. Oh, it’s Sarrerdi! And we love Sarrerdis here at the Inkletter non-condominium! About five I awoke, and due to that knowingness that despite great weariness sleep will not return, I lay in the boudoir doing mind exercises, and trembling in fear of when I would hear the rumble of the Swift pull up outside the boudoir window, knowing it would contain the frilly knickered and hoary old lizards. This did happen about six, and Janny found I was awake, and I invited her to unload the many frustrations of the afternoon, for she had taken Pa pree shopping for hours upon hours, and then to top off everything, the local chemist gave her a massive runaround over the latest set of prescriptions, for me mainly, but as it turned out they had stuffed things up badly. Missus InklesI’vehadabloodynuffoftheidiots vowed to not go there on a Saturday again. She had dropped the scripts off early, and returned two and half hours later, only to be kept waiting another forty minutes while they made bungle after stuff up after blunder. Janny might have been getting close to laying Ernie the Pringle out…; his inexperienced weekend staff were most of the problem though.

So I surfaced about half six to tackle my ablutions, and was finally ready to face the fearsomes in time for My Beloved, and the usual peanut gallery comments that bear no pragmatic correspondence to reality that always flow in my direction, prompted by the news stories, with the added problem of the impossibility of safe mature discussion of the many shades of grey I discern rather than the black and white relief claimed to only be there. Such is the loneliness of the long distance thinker…

I remained for half an hour of the delightful ‘Spy Kids’ on free to air, which I’ve not seen before. I imagine children would love it. Having finished my after-vittles moccers coffee, I excused myself from the presence of the delinquents, and retreated to the blessed refuge of the back room, and got writing and posting my ‘Doidge City’ headlined post of the first of May. A little after nine the nasty natterer kindly drove Pa pree home, saving me the job, and when she returned I shared with her that at ten I would like to watch Foyle’s War with her on Aunty, and that I would like a big plate of sliced Fuji apples and shavings of cheddar cheese, but that I didn’t think I’d know how to do that… The dastardly dragon didn’t budge… I repeated my predicament, this time with the edge of near tears, and she broke! Hurrah! So at ten, I joined her to watch Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks entertain us as they do so well in that fine British drama, Foyle’s War, and I got my plate of sliced Fuji apples, shavings of cheddar cheese, and for good measure, slices of pear! There! I have long called it subtle domestic violence, perpetrated against me. “What did he die from, Mister Coroner?” “Kindess, oodles and oodles of kindness; bitch knew it’d do him in, and there’d be no trace…”

Missus Inkledeadonherfeet,evensitting dozed through the program, being so tired, so I put her to bed after it finished, powdered her bottom, and gave her some percussion massage with the Homedics unit on her bad leg. Back to the poota, then I attended to the alleviation of some health issues, before embarking on a late walk on this cool night, as still as a grave. So many of the nights this past month have not had a puff of breeze, as is late autumn’s habit here. As usual, the amount of rubbish folk drop everywhere is a wonder, and I can but pick up a fraction of it as I walk, filling plastic bags with litter.

I knuckled down on my return from my walk and did an eleven month tally of the hours we’ve done with Bob, and in the two and a half hour process I tidied up some of the accumulating paperwork on top of the printer at the poota. I have a terrible habit when it comes to filing: I don’t. I did a smidgeon more writing at the poota, then tackled a big kitchen clean up, and before I knew where I was it was well and truly daylight. It wasn’t till after nine that I joined the irritable iguana in the cot.

+paytontedwithlove+