Sorry, but the old grey matter* does get a bit active in the evening, after having all day to simmer and conjure up blog-worthy material. For example - let us review that phrase " - faster than a scalded cat", which is a proverbial way of describing a person moving at speed.
Excuse me? For this to have become a proverb, there must have been many instances of cats being scalded. How would such an event occur? After all, boiling water and cats are not commonly associated. Food left lying around, rotting offal in an insecure bin, dead rodents in the back yard - yes. All firmly associated with cats. And at the time this proverb began to accrue, water would be boiled over a fire or on an oven fired with coal or wood, neither of which flammable substance exerts any fascination for cats - you can't eat coal or wood, you can't make a bed out of it and it won't pet you.
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| A Cat not eating either wood or coal |
So. We must be talking about scalding due to steam, and thus the steam engine. Where do you find steam engines? On trains. Does it all become clear now?
Yes, the "Jubilee" class 5XP 0-6-4 "Kolhapur" rolls into Platform 6 at Dibden Parva, the noise scattering a party of trackside rats in all directions. Mafeking, the officially-appointed station mouser (a ginger tom) darts at the nearest - only to recoil and shoot off in the opposite direction as the Kolhapur vents steam about itself.
'Did you see that!' snorts the driver to the guard. 'I've yet to see anything move faster!'
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| Capable of Mach 3, but not very good at catching mice. Still, it won't nick your lunchtime snack. |
Moving From Late Victorian To The Present Day
Of course that would never happen now, as we are far less tolerant of mischievous behaviour in regards animals. Conrad believes that Edexcel have re-jigged part of the nursery rhymes now taught to small, impressionable children. Let me recap one of them:
"Mary had a little lamb
And it was always grunting
She tied it to a five-bar gate -
And was prosecuted by the RSPCA for animal cruelty"
The Booty Of Bardsley
Bardsley Car Boot Sale, that it. Not as big as Bowlee, but the sellers are less mercenary and professional. Conrad was sorely disappointed at one stall where he saw Volume II of "The Great War" edited by Mumby, and picked it up to ask how much?
"That's not for sale!" hissed the husband, directing a venomous glance at his wife. "I sorted out the ones for sale, and that shouldn't be there!"
Clearly there had been some miscommunication here, and it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall when this couple got home.
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| War, cartoons and history - Conrad's three favourite things |
The cartoonist book was given away by the stall owner for free; Conrad intends it for Darling Daughter and if she displays anything less than intense interest, why it will simply become one of Conrad's books.
Death Of A Lemon Tart
Actually the tart was less forbidding and stodgy than it first appeared, so Conrad might have been able to post it last night, except he'd posted two long blogs and - obviously! - there are only so many high-quality blog posts that a person can squeeze into a single day.
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| "I can defy everything!" declared the tart |
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| "Okay, I'm a little broken up" |
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| "Not half gone" |
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| "Please! Give me quarter!" |
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| "The lights are growing dim ..." |
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| "Oh Mother!" |
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| Lemon Tart 21st June 2014. RIP |
Against The Day
Conrad is now officially 1/3 through the novel - 340 pages. And, true to type, it has once again switched focus, this time onto Dally and Katie and Foley and Scarsdale Vibe. It's not wise to leave too long between readings as the characters get mixed up and you lose the plot, which is now dealing with Dally and her incipient acting career in New York, after a whistle-stop tour of Nikolai Tesla and some of his more esoteric work**.
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| An anagram of "Seat Grills", which might apply to the photo below. But only in a good way |
The Mansion's Outside Furniture
The annexe to the backyard is a real suntrap, catching deadly lethal infra-red rays sunshine and keeping the wind off. Conrad was perusing his book on civil*** engineering yesterday, enjoying the light and warmth, and a stein of Old Golden Hen. There was a fair breeze up, but on the chairs it didn't even flutter the pages.
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| "How fascinating - "Falsework" is the supporting temporary structure erected in order to allow -" <Mister Hand intervenes to move the blog along> |
* More compact than writing "grey matter augmented with inlaid monowire filament, picroprocessors and aerials"
** You know, mind-control rays, planet-busting beams, reality-erasing projectors, all the basic Mad Scientist gadgets
*** "Civil" engineering? What, there's a "Rude Engineering"? Or perhaps an "Extremely Coarse Engineering"?
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