canny granny

Clothes Pegs lost, stolen or strayed

When I went to hang up my twinset and smalls today, I discovered all of my clothes pegs had vanished from the line. Gone! Completely gone!

Where do they go to? Perhaps they’ve teamed up with the safety pins and taken off for a dirty weekend. Or are the possums stealing them?

So I hiked off to buy more pegs only to find out that I simply cannot get wooden clothes pegs. Not for love or money. I went to three shops and all that was on offer were plastic things, the ones that snap if you hang out your bed socks.

Wooden pegs, on the other hand, are more durable. Once upon a time when it used to rain more than six days a year, you could get rusty stripes from the spring in the pegs, but these days you can leave your washing out for a month to get sun bleached if you’re too lazy to bring it in.

Doesn’t anyone make wooden pegs anymore? The ancient craft must have been superseded by the plastic stamping press and the venerable peg-makers gone the way of the Felt Hatters and the Lamplighters.

Gypsies used to make them once, things of beauty that were handed down from mother to daughter, but it looks like China has cornered the market now.

I knew my cat was dippy

More than half of all cats over age 15 are bloody senile!

I knew my old moggy was a bit dippy, he’s taken to stealing my fish oil capsules. It’s enough to make me screw the top on my sherry bottle tighter.

Lock up your livestock

Beryl, who goes to Bingo with me, firmly believes in the recent sightings of Blessed Virgin Mary, but she’s worried that her framed velvet Mary art and hot pink plastic rosaries won’t save her budgerigars from the Chupacabra.

Granted, the reports of mysterious Goatsuckers in my neighbourhood are few and far between, but all the same I intend to keep my Border Collie inside at night.

Dreadful attacks have been perpetrated by the Chupacabra, which always involve slain livestock with telltale marks on their necks. The victims, most often goats and chickens, are reportedly drained of all their blood, but are otherwise left intact.

I tried to tell Beryl that these creatures only plague various regions of Puerto Rico and other faraway places of a similar rural nature, but she says the Chupacabra has kangaroo-like qualities, so they must be local.

I may borrow a set of rosaries myself.

Summer is i- cumen in. Lhude sing blowfly

Summer is i-cumen in –/ Lhude sing, blowfly!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, blowfly!

Today I heard the first blow-fly of Summer.

While people in other climes use swallows to signify the warmer season, here we know the date by the humblie blowie. Ugly though this creature is, it signifies all of the delights that bound in with Summer.

Members of this unattractive family are known as bluebottles, clusterflies, greenbottles, and (in Britain and Australia) as blue-arsed flies. The name blow-fly comes from an older English term for meat that had eggs laid on it, which was said to be fly blown. (maggotty)

If you really need to know, the eggs are yellowish or white, and when laid, look like rice balls. The female blow-fly typically lays around 2,000 eggs during the course of her life. Watch out for little rice balls in your lamb sandwich.

Apparently the natural life history of the blowflies remains a largely untapped body of research. I hope it stays that way.