What Do You Mean, "Was I Gone?"
Yes I most certainly was! I do have a social life (of a stunted sort) beyond the limits of the blog, you know, which can occasionally take precedence, as it did today. For the clan were going charity-shop surfing in Cheadle, including Darling Daughter and Quiet Tom. Conrad has never been to Cheadle before. Art?
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| Cheadle High Street |
Yes yes yes, why didn't I start earlier, waaaay earlier than usual, so I could post before leaving home? That was Plan A. However, when I logged on at 10:50, what greeted my eyes but this - Art?
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| Ignore the reflection! Ignore the reflection! |
My temper is all better, now, thanks for asking. Partly because of this - Art?
As you ought to know by now, Conrad is (very slowly) assembling the complete Official History of the First Unpleasantness. I already have nearly all the Military Operations texts; what you see above is one of the extremely rare "Appendices", this one being for 1918 and is still in the original dust-jacket - this is almost unheard of. I have only seen Appendices for sale twice, and the seller wanted £275 for the two Gallipolli ones. Erk!
The Haul
Well, Cheadle was a worthwhile trip for Your Humble Scribe, as I brought back 14 books, averaging a couple of pounds each. There were so many I have to show them in sequence. Art?
"Le Morte D'Arthur" is a late-fifteenth century take on the Arthurian legend, thankfully translated into Modern English. "Charles 1" concerns everyone's favourite beheaded king, a matter of interest to me at the moment. "Ghurkas" is about the technically-mercenary Nepalese troops who fight for Perfidious Albion, and the "Sparky" annual is in very good nick for being forty-seven years old. What clinched it for me was a colour strip of "I Spy". Art?
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| Like Judge Dredd, you never saw his face |
Conrad cannot remember if he's read Dickens' "Bleak House" or not. We'll find out, won't we? I have read "Rendezvous With Rama" a few years back, so the sequel will be interesting - and who is this "Gentry Lee" when he's at home? Of course I could not resist either a book with "Zombie" in the title, or a dictionary of English place names, because This Sceptred Isle has some truly peculiar ones. Westward Ho! springs to mind. And the two military history ones are thematic bookends - Britain about to be invaded in 1940 and then doing the invading herself in 1944.
That Escalated Quickly
Did you know that such things as electric flyswatters existed? Neither did Conrad. Let us see if the magic of Google can enlighten us. Art!
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| Cue tennis joke |
Great! So you can exercise whilst helping to keep your home environment cleaner. However ... Art?
"Man blows up part of house whilst chasing fly". At first Conrad wondered if the person here mentioned, an elderly French gentleman, was using something like Colin Furze's Thermite Cannon, but no -
Our hero had been sitting down to eat a meal when he was disturbed by a fly buzzing around his kitchen. Annoyed, he took after it with his electric flyswatter and must have made contact, generating sparks (and probably a horrid smell, too). Unfortunately, he also had a gas canister in his kitchen. The gas canister was leaking ...
Cue explosion that blew off the kitchen roof, leaving our protagonist a little scorched, not to mention bewildered.
I know what you're thinking - "Why didn't he smell the gas leaking?" well, Vulnavia, some of us have absolutely no sense of smell in the first place, as I suspect was the case with this chap, as the scent of fried fly cannot be pleasant.
You What?
Conrad has been reviewing and weeding some of the pictures on his mobile phone, as there are oodles on there, thanks to his habit of snapping anything that might make grist for BOOJUM! I came across several that haven't been used yet, so I deleted them, and of course they had never been loaded up to Saved Pictures. I recall that one mentioned a celebritute couple I'd never heard of having a baby, and another new headline was written in sportese, using terms I'd never heard of about people I'd never heard of, about a subject I had absolutely no interest in.
Plus, CONRAD STILL HATES ALL MUSICALS.
Thank you, that it all.
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| THIS IS NOT A MUSICAL! It is a comedy with songs |
Finally -
Once again, only a short item needed to hit the Compositional Ton. After this I intend to go put in the oven one of the interestingly-titled frozen foodstuffs we got from Heron Foods on our way home from Darling Daughter's, namely a "Hog Pudding Turnover", which looks rather like a sausage roll doing a striptease. Conrad not confident about finding a picture on Google but here goes -
Nope, no sign of 'em. You can have a picture of "Hogs Pudding" instead, which seems to be a variety of sausagemeat. Hmmm <thinks> aha, why don't we illustrate the "Turnover" part of their description? Art?
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| Quite like these, actually |
And with that we are O so very done!
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