Skip to main content

Mystic Mog.


My wife made an illustrative prediction of the scene she’d come home to when she finished work yesterday evening, which was unsurprisingly spot-on.

A Study of Man with Cat (© 2017 ‘Her Indoors’)
 
We have a running joke between us based on the episode of The Simpsons when Bart gives a drawing to Lisa in a sealed envelope, prophesizing the carnage they’d stumble on when they returned home from a Sunday drive with Marge, while Homer cleaned out the garage.

“Time to open the envelope I gave you”, Bart says as they pull up to find Homer being repeatedly crushed by the garage door; Lisa does so to reveal a perfect representation of the scene with ‘THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN’ scrawled across the bottom of it.

Thankfully, the situation my wife expects to walk into is a lot less catastrophic, though it does involve a cat. Pretty much every day, about an hour before my wife's due to get back, our cat Millie decides to wake up from the armchair by the window, which she’s claimed as her own - and doesn’t move from during business hours - to relocate to the sofa and, more specifically, my lap.

Her body clock is impressively accurate, though the timing is often inconvenient, as her desire to show affection (or steal my warmth; delete where appropriate) coincides perfectly with the moment I’d like to do some last-minute household chores, like washing up or hiding my drugs stash. If I were being sneaky I'd use this as an excuse to do nothing, but I wouldn’t really want to as having my wife come home to an untidy flat makes me feel back-footed and anxious; it also affects the nature of our evening, as it’s much nicer to settle down in front of the telly and / or think about dinner, without having to negotiate your way around the endless stream of mugs that accumulate with alarming speed for a flat that houses two.

While my wife's drawing was reasonably accurate, there were a few discrepancies. For one, I don’t tend to sit with my feet in first position with my hands concealed up sleeves. I don't style my hair like Rowan Atkinson in The Black Adder and my beard isn’t pubey, but you can’t have everything.

Popular posts from this blog

Shakerpuppetmaker.

Have Parker from Thunderbirds and Noel Gallagher ever been seen in the same room? The resemblance is uncanny. So much so, I think something’s afoot. If my suspicions are correct, I've stumbled across a secret that will blow the music and puppet industry wide apart. In the mid-60s / mid-90s at least. It doesn’t take long to see the signposts. There’s the similarity between the name of Oasis’ first single, Supersonic, and Supermarianation, Gerry Anderson’s puppetry technique. The Gallagher brothers would often wear Parkas . Live Forever was clearly a reference to Captain Scarlet and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to the size difference between Noel and his bandmates. The more you think about it, the more brazen it gets. It’s fishier than Area 51, Paul is Dead and JFK's assassination put together. The only glitch to the theory is scale . According to Wikipedia, Anderson’s marionettes were 1’10” and Gallagher is 5’8”. How does he maintain an illusion of avera...

'...I'm Gonna Look at You 'til My Eyes Go Blind."

Over the past week or two, I’ve been on a bit of a Sheryl Crow kick, largely thanks to rediscovering her cover of one of my most-liked Bob Dylan songs. She has one of my favourite female voices, yet despite this, I only own one CD and that’s just a single (her '97 release ‘Hard to Make a Stand’); on that basis, you can only imagine how much of her back catalogue I’d own if I hated her (it would fall into minus-figures). Dylan, conversely, takes up more of my collection than anyone else, save The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work. He’s one of those artists who, when you get him, you really get him - and once I’d tuned into his style as a student, I'd time and again be blown away by his lyrics; he’ll have more jaw-dropping imagery in one track than other people fit in a whole career. These days, I mostly listen to music in the morning when getting ready, and more often than not, this will consist of a suggested YouTube playlist when I’m in the bath, r...

Stevenage: A (Tiny) River Runs Through it.

If ever a river was mis-sold, it’s the Roaring Meg in Stevenage. I just walked past it on my way to the retail park that has taken its name. They’re similarly uninspiring. The river is less of a roar and more of a dribble; cystitis sufferers produce greater flow. The retail park is soulless. What was once a thriving enterprise is nearly devoid of atmosphere, save an underlying essence of emptiness and despair. With a Toys R Us. When it was first built I was excited. Back then, the thought of a bowling alley, an ice rink, a Harvester and a Blockbuster Video within a small surface area was enticing. I celebrated many birthdays on site. There was an indoor cricket pitch there for a while where I once had a joint party with a friend. Why someone with an almost pathological fear of sport would agree to such a venture is beyond me, but I did it. Now, there’s very little at the Roaring Meg of note. The river would be a metaphor for the shopping ce...