Wednesday 7th October 2009:
It was frosty here this morning, but dry and to my delight the drive and the lawns, both back and front, had good deposits of fallen leaves. As soon as the boyfriends left for work I was outside playing with my new toy…a Black & Decker leave vacuum shredder. I ordered it off Amazon last week as a treat for myself because I was sick of raking and bagging leaves. It came yesterday afternoon and I hid it in the shed so that Shane didn’t clock it and order me to return it before I could try it out. He’s been snippy about expenditure lately, so no doubt I’ll get my ears bent and my wrists slapped when he checks the household accounts and sees it. Hopefully I’ll win him over by pointing out that we have the tidiest autumn garden on the avenue. It’s a bloody great little gadget, much better than the dyson hoover I once used to suck up leaves and it didn’t blow up. It’s got quite a powerful motor, a bit noisy but with fantastic suction. Mind you I won’t mention that fact to Dick in case he decides to try it out, you know where, and do this houseboy out of one of his favourite duties. I’m the sucker in our house; I don’t want to risk being replaced by a machine. Besides, if Dick did use it he’d wear it out in next to no time and I wouldn’t want to be around when the bag burst either.
I haven’t spent a lot of time online lately; for one thing I’ve been under restriction. A few weeks ago I approached the neurologist with a view to reducing my meds. I didn’t tell the boyfriends I had an appointment. In the event the neurologist strongly advised against tampering with the dosages. His solution to my spots of bother was to suggest me going on a low level of antibiotics or trying a different medication, which meant doubling up on pills as he couldn’t just stop one and start another. I would have to gradually reduce one medication while gradually building up another. I declined; no way was I taking two lots of tablets. I wasn’t too pleased. In fact I was in a foul mood over it for days afterwards. Both Daddies got pretty pissed of with my attitude and Shane finally called me to account. More later, I really need to be getting on.
M, I hope your book arrived okay. I’m having a few problems with sending email at the moment, not quite sure what’s actually going out as the ‘message sent’ responses aren’t showing, must be a bug in the system. C, thanks for the early Halloween greetings, that’s quite a scary bum in more ways than one.
Sunday 18th October 2009:
It’s very silly perhaps, but I was made sad this past week by the sudden death of Boyzone’s singer Stephen Gately. I didn’t cry over it or anything and I didn’t feel the need to go on Twitter or Facebook to leave messages of condolence, but it did have an affect on me. Perhaps the fact that he was gay kindled my response to some extent and also that he was relatively young, all deaths are sad, but premature death is even sadder.
Part of my sadness is founded in the way the media reported and are continuing to report his passing. Certain portions of the press seem determined to make his death into something sordid, simply because he was gay and there were hints that he and his husband had some domestic troubles and also practiced an unconventional sex life. It seems like a calculated attempt to link being gay with being sexually and morally deviant. At a time when homophobic attacks are on the increase again this is a disturbing state of affairs.
What is obvious is that SG was very much loved by his family and friends, both straight and gay, and that he was a nice kind person and that’s all that should matter. They should be allowed to mourn a man they loved without having to hear rumours and speculation about what should be his ‘private’ life.
I was watching coverage of the funeral on TV yesterday, until Shane switched it off and then dumped my trainers in my lap announcing that we were going out for a run. My protests fell on deaf ears. He said he wasn’t having an afternoon of me getting all worked up and maudlin over somebody else’s tragedy. He’d had enough of me ranting on about it all week and getting more and more agitated and fretful in the process. Daddy had spoken. I must admit the run did me good, as did the massage that he gave me afterwards.
Shane and I had a Christmas cake fight a few weeks back. We didn’t chuck slabs of fruitcake at each other or anything like that. I’ve learned not to throw anything at Shane, or even in his close vicinity during disagreements, not if I want my cute little bum to stay a whiter shade of pale instead of a deeper shade of scarlet. It was more a war of words. I bought a load of dried fruit etc and one evening after dinner casually announced to Shane that I was baking a Chrissy cake on the morrow and therefore he could phone and tell Penny not to bother this year. I was forbidden to even think about Christmas cakes let alone bake one. My cry of ‘but I’ve bought all the stuff now’ fell on stony ground. He said that Penny looked forward to baking Christmas cakes for the family. It was something she’d done for many years and it really meant something to her. I argued that it meant something to me, but he said the only thing it meant to me was getting one over on Penny and stealing her thunder. I accused him of always taking her side against mine and he accused me of being ungracious, selfish and childish. He said that my Christmas cake shenanigans had really upset her last year and he wasn’t having it again this year. The houseboy had a Christmas cake ban slapped on him and that was that. I must admit that I retreated to huff land. Very brief re-enactment of the scene afterwards:
After silently brooding in front of the telly for some time I rose to my feet, glared at Shane and abruptly stated: “I’ll make a Christmas pudding then.”
Shane said: ‘you do that, my darling, I’ll look forward to it.”
Me: “Good. I’ll go and look out some recipes.” Giving Dick, who was grinning from ear to ear, a very cold look I exited the lounge with dignity.
I haven’t actually made my pudding yet. I want to make it really special and traditional by putting some silver charms in it. There’s a cook shop in York that stocks silver charms for puds, so I might see if Eileen fancies a trip there one day this week.
Well, I’d better go and wash up. The kitchen looks like someone has lobbed in a couple of hand grenades. There’s debris everywhere. Leo joined us for Sunday lunch today and I always feel I have to pull out all the stops in order to produce an impressive lunch when he comes over. I made my own stuffing for the chicken. What a faff on, making breadcrumbs and chopping up sage and onions. I ended up wishing I’d just bought a packet of Paxo. It was worth the effort though and everyone enjoyed it. It was full points for the houseboy. The men folk and Leo are playing Risk in the lounge at the moment. I declined to join in, no way am I playing a world domination game with three Tops. I’d stand no chance. Besides, Dick sulks if you take one of his territories. He claims he doesn’t, but he does. He hates losing any kind of game. I just hope he manages to take over the world this afternoon or he’ll be buffing his nails to a high shine well into the evening.
Friday 23rd October 2009:
The men folk are attending a Masonic dinner tonight, business rather than social, no wives, partners or gf’s allowed. I’m planning on slumming it with a dinner of fish fingers, oven chips with a dollop of baked beans on the side plus a smothering of ketchup. Common perhaps, but I don’t care. Mind you fish fingers can no longer be classified as cheap food, the real ones, the ones that have actual cod or haddock in them cost a fortune. The poor cousins, the ones that I would be living on if I were still in my basement bedsit, are made up of some gut-churning component referred to on the packet as ‘minced white fish’ only when you look, its more grey than white. It’s probably mechanically re-covered from fish heads, bones and then supplemented with shark bogeys.
I went to York yesterday with Eileen. We made a day of it. We took the train because it’s easier than parking in the city. I didn’t get my Christmas pudding charms, the shop that I thought stocked them no longer does. I was most put out and considered staging a sit down protest on the shop floor until they re-stocked them, but the manger looked like a gorilla in a man suit and I decided against it. We had a nice lunch in an Italian Bistro. I don’t know what it is about York but it has loads of Italian bistros, cafes and restaurants. We then had a poke around the shops. Eileen has a penchant for charity shops and York has its fair share. We did Mind, Oxfam, The British Heart Foundation, PDSA and Help The Aged. It was in the latter that I suffered a moment of almost heart stopping embarrassment. I was browsing the books and Eileen was happily perusing the bric-a-brac shelves. She suddenly called my name and I turned round to see her standing there with a smile of pleasure on her face and an object in her hand that almost made my eyes start from my head. She called it an unusual ‘darning mushroom.’ I don’t really know what a darning mushroom looks like, I can guess, but I have never seen one. However, I might never have seen a darning mushroom, but I have seen plenty of butt plugs and what Eileen had in her hand was definitely a butt plug, one of the biggest I have ever seen. Thank God Dick wasn’t in the shop. He’d have had me in the changing room as quick as you could blink and I’d have spent the rest of the day walking with a very strange gait. I suffered a blush of cataclysmic proportions. I didn’t know where to put myself. The lady who was serving in the shop got in on the act saying what nice smooth wood it was made from, silky almost, it must have a special coating on it and commented on its size. She then struck up a conversation with Eileen on the subject of darning mushrooms in general and how no one darned holes in socks and things anymore. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the ‘mushroom’ they were passing between them had probably been crammed into many a hole, but not in a sock. Thank God, Eileen didn’t buy it. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at nights thinking of her darning holes in her tights with a mammoth anal dildo. Who the fuck gives a second hand butt plug to a charity shop? I bet there’s a story behind that. Dick and Shane thought it was hysterical when I told them.
I haven’t been journaling a lot lately, but I have been writing. I’ve been working on turning my diary for 2007 into book form. I’m enjoying the process of looking back. I’m expanding on things that I skimmed over and I’ve managed to complete a couple of memoir chapters that I had lying around. One of them is about what happened when I got my illicit extra piercings. I mentioned it in the diary that year, but never got round to telling the full story.
Well, I’ve got shirts to iron. They’ll be home soon and they’ll expect to find everything laid out ready for them. Gillibran Brown, houseboy and valet signing out.
