canny granny

Petropavlosk Kamchatsky

I had another little look at the Clust’r Map in the right hand column over there, and found that there was someone in Petropavlosk Kamchatsky reading this.

Of course I had to look up where Petropavlosk Kamchatsky is. In my day that was ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ and you would be blasted by a lightning bolt if you even looked it up on an atlas.

My school atlas didn’t even have regions marked in those days, just a big fearful red blotch of colour behind the Iron Curtain. But times have changed and we are now allowed to look at the Soviet countries, talk to the people in them, sell them dodgy hamburgers, move next door and marry their daughters.

The world is very small up there isn’t it? You don’t realise how crammed together those places are, everyone is crowded in a little circle around the North Pole, you could take a canoe around with no trouble.

It’s a wonder they aren’t better neighbours being so close, but that might be the problem. Living too squashed together causes outbreaks of name-calling and petty insults, you know what the High Rise are like.

Going shopping? Take your rubber gloves

Shopping trolleys and me don’t get on. I always get one that wants to trundle along the baby foods aisle when I want to go the other way to the cereals (high fibre). It makes you wonder if they really did put a man on the moon if they can’t design a working shopping trolley with wheels that turn in more than direction.

But it get’s worse. Shopping Trolleys are full of Germs with 1,100 colony forming units of bacteria per 10 sq cm (1.55 sq inches) !! These days it’s scarcely safe to step outside.

Fortunately I have a large supply of pink rubber gloves. Next time I’m in the supermarket I’ll whip them out before I tackle a truculent trolley.

Pyschedelia Nostalgia

This renting blogs is like a lucky dip, isn’t it? You don’t know what you’re going to pull out.

My Council Home Help girl helped me choose my renter Incogblogo this week, and I know why. It’s got this weird device that allows you to change colours anytime you wish. You can read one post in blue, another in purple, another in green and so on.

Why anyone would want to do such a thing is beyond me, I became quite giddy watching the whirling colours while I tried to answer the question “What budding disco icon manged only to shout “Blasphemer! Blasphemer!” in his first film role as a satanic priest in Devil’s Rain?”

I had to have a little sit-down with my shoes off and a small glass of sherry. There is a time and a place for colours in this world, unless you happen to pine for the psychedelic years.

Perhaps the young lass who writes the blog was brought up in one of those free love communes and she’s recapturing her nursery years. She would be better off with a small sherry

The Perils of Spinach

My Council Home Help girl gave me a book today. She’s supposed to be dusting and running the vac over the rug, but she gave me a discourse on the benefits of spinach and a cookbook with over 300 recipes of the vile stuff.

The author, who probably wears hairshirts as well, calls her book I Love Spinach!

Can you imagine? Spinach! Typical of my Council Home Help girl, sticking her nose in people’s private gastric affairs. (I strongly suspect she is an ageing hippie, always in the garden with those funny herbs and things)

“There’s an old French Proverb” she said, “Spinach is the broom of the stomach.”

That’s one way of putting it, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it