Inspired by my ‘cockchafer’ experience, I thought I’d give you some more wonderful names for insects.
(Please be aware I’ve made these up)
Choffcaker
Spotted milf
Lesser-warbling dangleberry
Cummfly
Spanito bi-winged oven-skimmer
Blue-ended barnclimber
Acoustic spineweasel
Subcutaneous Dwindling Dive Beetle
Purple Sweller
Nether Regional Dancing Dampfly
I’ll leave it there, but I’m pretty sure ‘Lesser Warbling’ and ‘Dangleberry’ are villages close to each other in Derbyshire.
RC 31-5-17
This infernal muggy heat has led to an unusual encounter with some wildlife. We’ve been sleeping with the window open, and last night I was woken by Philippa screaming and slapping her own face as she said “There’s a f***ing bat in here!”
It wasn’t a bat, but it was an incredibly large and heavy insect that looked like it had crawled into the house from the set of a Godzilla movie. I did the heroic thing and trapped it in a glass before releasing it outside, and then instantly went online to look up what the Hell it was.
I was expecting it to say “Chernobyl Death Beetle” but actually it was something called a Cockchafer.
I swear I am not making this up.
They used to be plentiful in the UK, then they nearly got wiped out completely by pesticides, and now they’re making a bit of a comeback. They turn up at this time of year and live for five to seven weeks, during which time they mate and lay up to 80 eggs. (thank you Wikipedia)
They are also known by each of these names: bracken clock, bummler, chovy, cob-worm, dorrs, dumbledarey, humbuz, June bug, kittywitch, billy witch, may-bittle, midsummer dor, mitchamador, oak-wib, rookworm, snartlegog, spang beetle, tom beedel and, in Wales, chwilen y bwm.
Interesting nom-de-plumes I’m sure you’ll agree.
But ‘cockchafer’ still takes some beating.
RC 30-5-17
If, like me, you have fallen in love with the new Coconut & Raisin Weetabix and if, like me, you resent paying more than three quid for a box, then I have a little ‘life hack’ that you might be interested in:
Just buy the supermarket own brand version of Weetabix (they’ll be called ‘Wheat Bics’ or ‘Bixies’ or something similar, depending on your supermarket of choice.) Then sprinkle them with the cheapest desiccated coconut you can get your hands on, and mash them in with some Value brand raisins from the bakery section. Use your staff discount card to get an extra 10% off everything, and you’ll get it at a total cost of about a third of the amount you’d have spent on the proper stuff.
Job done.
(And if you don’t have a staff discount card, you can feel free to borrow mine. Please form an orderly queue at the filling station)
RC 28-5-17
E-mail awaiting me on arrival at work this morning: “Management visit cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. Please call on Tuesday to re-arrange.”
Bastards.
RC 26-5-17
I’ve changed my hours of work today so I can help give the garage a clean before the senior management bots arrive tomorrow morning. Philippa is out playing badminton tonight so it’s not as if it’s messing up our home life. All I’m missing out on is a microwave meal and maybe some drumming. My plan was to clear away all the odd bits of paper on my desk, hoover and polish everything, then go and help Val give the till area a thorough wiping. So far I’ve been doing NFL quizzes on Sporcle, looking at possible holiday destinations and having a chat with Mac, my mentor. It’ll get done, eventually. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll just take the Head Office bods over to the café for a chat so they don’t even get to see inside my sanctum. Then I could pile stuff up in it to make the rest of the garage look tidy… No! This is lazy, procrastination thinking and it must stop NOW!
Excuse me while I reach for a duster….
RC 25-5-17
Another Bank Holiday on the way and another one that I’ll be working. Mustn’t moan too much as I’ll only be there til 2pm, and it’s not like my days in the supermarket side of the business when every holiday was just a normal day and you worked normal hours for normal pay and all that slave-driving money-driven corporate-minded bollocks I used to put up with.
My memory exercises are going well. Today I managed to learn our entire staffing rota for June, including the changes due to holiday cover and the odd days off for the dentist. Admittedly, it’s quite an easy one to get into your mind, but every exercise is building the right muscles and firing the right neurons and it’s important not to get too ambitious too quickly. You can’t run a marathon without breaking eggs, after all. If I try to tackle something too substantial too quickly I could set myself back and then damage my chances of success. The strain of it all might even make me forget things I’ve known all my life. Who’s to say that overdoing it might not set me back a decade or so? I could spend all day Monday trying to memorise all of Suffolks bus routes, only to wake up on Tuesday and forget that I’m married. And just think what sort of problems THAT might lead to???!!!???
Okay, the science behind all that might be a bit shaky, but is it worth the risk? In my opinion - no. So I shall continue taking small steps and learning small things and gradually building it up and we’ll get there in the end if we’re meant to.
Is it obvious I’ve drunk a lot of coffee today?
RC 24-5-17
I think I’d like to go back to Tunisia. Philippa isn’t keen because there’s been a terror attack since we were there, but if we’re going to limit our destinations to places that have never been touched by terrorism, we’ll end up having a holiday in Swindon. I just feel like booking a holiday. It doesn’t bother me when the weather is nice and we’re living in a beautiful part of the country, but the weather HASN’T been nice. We’ve been drenched rather than sun-drenched and cooler than an ice sculpture of an icicle. Yes - today has been lovely but all that’s done is help to highlight how shite the rest of the Spring has been. So my mind is drifting abroad and my fingers are searching travel company websites for possible places to visit. I’d still like to see Mexico, but I don’t fancy the long flight. It needs to be somewhere warm, inexpensive, friendly to the British and not too busy, so I’ve given us quite a narrow field to play with. Maybe I’ll just let Philippa pick somewhere and go along with whatever she suggests. Her ideas tend to be more sensible than mine, and it would do me good to relinquish control for a change. Well…. let me rephrase….. It would do me good to relinquish the ILLUSION of control that I sometimes convince myself I have. In reality I have as much control over our decisions as a leaf has over the wind. Me trying to control Philippa would be like an ant trying to control a gorilla. And I’m NOT comparing my wife to a large primate, before any of you write to complain….
RC 23-5-17
Life is such a weird thing, isn’t it?
Two people have a conversation, and one of them goes away thinking they’d been talking about relationships, while the other is convinced the chat was based around weather. Such is the manner of our interactions with fellow humans.
I don’t even trust my own memory. I’m sure sometimes I remember things clearly, only to have it shown to me by other peoples evidence that I was wrong. Happened this week with an e-mail exchange between myself and Head Office. I would swear on the Bible and the life of my future children that we’d agreed to a senior management site visit in July, only to later have it pointed out that they were coming to see us in May. May the twenty-sixth to be exact. So I now have four days to prepare for something that I thought we had six weeks to get ready for. It’s only a follow-up visit to see how the overnight opening is going, so it’s not a big check-up on performance or something I need to worry about, but reports will have to be prepared and we’ll have to have a tidy-up. I’m glad it’s happening sooner than expected, if I’m honest. Everyone wins. We can get it out of the way and not have to think about it anymore, while senior management get to have a day out on the Friday going into a bank holiday weekend. Everyone’s a winner.
RC 22-5-17
Been doing quite a bit of cycling this week, in between the rain showers that I promise not to mention. Everything looks gorgeous now. Full hedgerows, trees a-bloomed, lots of wildlife. Magical time of year. I’m sill not fit enough to ride around for miles and hours and take a lot of it in, but at least I’m getting out-and-about and seeing more than I do when I’m stuck in the office at work. I was chatting to someone down a footpath yesterday evening and he said a wonderful quote that I wholeheartedly agree with. We were discussing the light evenings and the beautiful sunsets and he said “Wouldn’t it be great if we could pause time and rewind it, so we could just keep re-living May and June over and over again throughout the year?”
Yes it would. As long as it wasn’t THIS May, as we’ve had more cloud than sunshine and more rainfall than rays, but I promised not to mention all that….
RC 21-5-17
Rooms of silence
A house of blank, expressionless stares
Too scared to lift eyes from screen
For fear of losing perspective
Of facing reality
Of being
RC 17-5-17
2200 BST
18 degrees Celsius today but loads of drizzle. We’re not allowed to have a dry, bright, warm day are we? There always has to be a pay-off somewhere and only one or two of the three can appear simultaneously.
To get off the topic of weather, I shall share a salubrious nugget of human expression that I had passed my way by a customer today: “This tonsillitis is driving me crazy. I’ve got a throat like a hookers chimney.”
RC 17-5-17
I’ve decided to try and teach myself to memorise a pack of cards in five minutes. I know, I know… it’s just my latest little obsessive distraction from the everyday traumas of being me, but I don’t care. I’m gonna do it anyway. I’ve looked up loads of information about how professional memory athletes do it and I’ve already started doing the mental exercises that should lead me to being able to hold tons of useless information for a short amount of time. Perfect for showing off at parties, or possibly to help me win a fortune at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. I’m not sure yet, I haven’t decided how far to take it. There is a scenario I can envisage where I convince Philippa to have a belated extra honeymoon in Monaco and I become the first person to successfully card-count and break a casino without in turn having most of his extremities removed in a dark-suited onslaught of vengeance from the owners. There is also another more likely scenario where I get bored of all this in about two weeks and never see it through to completion.
RC 16-5-17
I got into an interesting conflict/confrontation at work today. I was covering the till while someone was out on their lunch break, and the guy I was serving took offence when he felt the customer behind him was standing too close and might be trying to see his PIN number. I won’t dignify what he said by repeating it in this posting, but it had racial undertones, mentioned sexual violence, and left the young woman close to tears. I threw his credit card at him, called him a malignant turd and told him if he ever sets foot inside the garage again I’ll report him to the police for a hate crime, using CCTV footage as evidence and calling everyone within earshot as a witness. He looked at me as if he wanted to rip my throat out with his fingers, then grunted and walked back to his Nissan. I got a round of applause from the other four people in the shop and a big hug from the lady he’d assaulted.
I think I broke a few company rules, and I’m pretty sure he’ll complain about me, but I couldn’t give a flying fanny fart.
RC 15-5-17
My legs were still hurting today so we had a gentle walk to get them moving again and then relaxed at home. Nice to take it easy and enjoy each others company, sitting in the garden with a bottle of wine. Much better than wasting time at work, or charging around the Suffolk footpaths on a bicycle wallowing in lactic acid and adrenalin.
The joy of this time of year is that however bad the morning weather there is still time for improvement later and the day can always be rescued. An inauspicious start gave way to a glorious afternoon of sunshine and I feel buoyant, optimistic and refreshed. But still a little sore in the thigh department.
Now there are 15 hours of daylight we can have three different climates in a day. I awoke to the sound of drumming rain, took a walk with my beloved in a brisk wind, then sat in the garden fearing sunburn. It started like February; ended like June. The delight of the Vitamin D almost made me forget the lingering post-cycle leg pain.
RC 14-5-17
True to form, and following previous patterns, I’ve gone from ‘no cycling’ to ‘full-on cycling’ far too quickly and buggered myself up as a result. After the rain stopped falling at lunchtime today it got out really quite nicely, so I decided to do the senseless thing and take a ride in the countryside before I’d even recovered from my efforts of the other day. It hurt at first, but I forced myself to push through the pain, and once the adrenalin kicked in it was a lot easier. Until it wasn’t….
I’ve iced my knees and had a soothing hot bath and now I’m laying on the sofa. And Philippa has absolutely no sympathy whatsoever. And she’s absolutely right to be that way.
I’m a dick.
RC 13-5-17
Philippa was out after work badmintoning so I took advantage of the glorious weather and had a post-work, pre-food trip-around-about on my velociped. Felt so good to be enjoying a gentle cycle in the countryside without a shitty backbreaking Winter wind ripping me in half as I pedalled. Is it so much to ask for to expect a bit of warmth and brightness in May? Rather than the dank, dark Winter freeze we’ve been struggling through for what feels like decades?
Anyway - let me not destroy the good mood of the day by slipping into sarcasm, bitterness or weather snipes. Let me rather regale you with small details of my delightful journey on the cycle path…..
I rode straight for a bit. Then I turned left. Then I carried on. Then I turned right, down towards the stream, then joined the circular route that is popular with riders from the nearby horsey place.
Okay, maybe those small details are a bit too small to be interesting, but the point is it was nice and lovely and peaceful and natural and I feel great as a result of the effort. My jacket potato with beans and cheese, accompanied by a southern fried breadcrumb-coated chicken breast and a bit of rocket, tasted wonderful on my return. I swear food tastes better when you’ve exercised and feel you deserve it.
For those of you keeping an eye on grammar, etc, I’m pretty sure the words ‘badmintoning’ and ‘horsey’ are not correct English, but screw it. Maybe now I’ve used them they’ll enter the common vocab and be more frequently used. Or maybe not. Who cares? It’s petty and pathetic and pointless to worry of such things when Spring is here AT LAST!!!!
I bet it pisses down tomorrow.
RC 11-5-17
A day of sunshine and non-Winter weather and my mood has lifted and I feel alive! Amazing what a bit of bright sky and a rise in temperature can do to a man. (well - this man)
At this point I’m tempted to say that this new-found optimism and enjoyment will lead to a return to more regularly blogging; but I’m pretty sure that if I said that, I wouldn’t be able to back it up, so I’d best not say it at all.
RC 10-5-17
I know how I’m going to die.
I’m going to choke to death on an olive that I throw into my mouth with too much enthusiasm.
My final minute of life will involve clutching my throat and desperately throwing myself onto the backs of chairs to try and force the air out of my lungs, while tears streak down my cheeks and blood dribbles from my mouth where I’ve bitten my cheeks with the futile effort of it all. Then I’ll go dizzy and die.
So much to look forward to…
RC 8-5-17
It is my recent experience that if you stop fighting a bad mood and just give into it, it tends to dissipate more quickly.
March going into April vis-à-vis this blog was a real feast giving way to famine. 29 blogs one month followed by 12 the month after? What kind of dedication and commitment is that? Did I think I could take it easy for a few weeks after posting so much in March? The honest answer is no. Truth be told I was enjoying the brighter evenings and fell out of the habit of regular posting. Then I got a depressed by the cold spell, then I got sidetracked by a bit of hay fever; next thing I knew we were waving goodbye to April. How is it that Spring months seem to evaporate while Winter ones linger on the table like a festering stain? Studies should be done and investments should be made, and I’d bet you a pound against a pillow that we’d still be none the wiser.
Hope some of this is making sense. It’ll take me a few days to get back into the swing of things. Until that happens, please feel free to re-read some older blogs from a time when I was more on top of my game.
It’s good to be back.
RC 2-5-17