Mrs Blighty, Rock Chick

The other night I went with Mr B to see his old favourite group Echo and the Bunnymen play.

When I mentioned this recently to anyone, they looked a bit blank and then said, " Oh, yes, Echo Beach."

Nooooooo! That was quite different, that was Martha and the Muffins.

The Bunnymen are a rocky, moody, sort of post punk band with a charismatic Liverpudlian lead singer called Ian McCulloch.

Their best known song is "Killing Moon", featured on the soundtrack of  the film " Donnie Darko".


Must admit, prior to the event I was not terribly enthusiastic as I knew Mr B used to go to gigs wearing a greatcoat and pointy shoes and with his hair all spiked up, and it all sounded a bit goth and gloomy to me.

In fact, it was brilliant!

It was a thrill to skip off up to London on a school night and meet up with Mr B.  And the concert was at the London Palladium, a theatre I last visited for my 8th birthday to see Cliff Richard (bless  Grandma W, she organised that for me, what a nice mummy).  So it was great to see the inside of the Palladium again and bang on to Mr B about seeing Cliff and Olivia Newton-John, while Mr B carried on a parallel monologue about last seeing the Bunnymen at the Glasgow Barrowlands in 1984..not quite sure whose anecdote had the most street cred, mmm, tricky one..

The Bunnymen were good, really good -  a very tight band - and Mr McCulloch can really sing.  And what confidence, arrogance, to sing in front of all those people !   He was a real character - he took a lot of liquid refreshment between, even during, songs, we were a long way from the stage but the bets were on Guinness, with whisky chasers... a soothing vitamin drink and mineral water.


Here's them doing The Killing Moon  back in the 80s. They did it brilliantly last night too, they just look a lot less boyish!

And now dahlings, I am off  for a cheeky nap on the sofa - it's very tiring being a rock chick at my age.

Mrs Blighty, Literary Stalker

As I mentioned in my last post, I am completely caught up in the Gus Dury novels of Tony Black - hardboiled Scottish detective novels set in Edinburgh with gritty characters and punchy dialogue.

I dropped old Tone a line, a bit cheeky, telling him how his readership included none other than Grandma Whacker (who quite frankly at her age should be reading The Lady and, maybe for a bit of excitement,  The Radio Times).

Well, look back at the penultimate comment on my last post - the author himself commented! How very nice of him. So impressed he did that.

Here is Mr Black, talking about the latest Gus Dury novel. 

Mmmmm, he's a bit of a dish, isn't he? And that accent! But I am not going to push my luck.  No more cheeky comments.  Otherwise I might get a visit from a couple of heavies...

A Worrying Pair

Dahlings, there are two members of Blighty Limited who are giving me cause for concern.

First, Boy 2.

I was prepared to overlook this (and blame it on all those wildlife programmes he watches).

Mummy: Can you stop playing now and get out of the bath?
Boy 2: OK, Mummy, the killer whale just has to finish off the seal..

I decided this was just a sign of his keen interest in History and not a warning of  Hannibal Lecter tendencies.

Excerpt from Boy 2's school report - proof that teachers do have a sense of humour or evidence of something more sinister?

But this.

Boy 1 was being particularly noisy and annoying the other evening when Boy 2 was doing his spelling homework.  I do vaguely recall Boy 2 saying something along the lines of "Mummy can't we tape his mouth over?"  It was only later I noticed he had got the electrician's tape from the toolbox in the garage...

So the youngest in the Blighty family is a worry. But so is the more senior end.

I thought Grandmas were supposed to sit serenely doing sewing and smelling of Parma violets and face powder, and for excitement might listen to The Archers.

Not so Grandma Whacker.  During her recent stay she was engrossed in these rugged detective novels set in Edinburgh,  which she has recently discovered at her local library*. 

The dialogue is, to put it mildly, quite robust.   You know you are in trouble when Grandma is reading lines like this, spoken by our hero after he has visited a very rough council estate :

WARNING, THIS IS VERY CRUDE, NOT FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED
"Later, eh. I've just escaped Deliverance territory and I'm mightily relieved not to have a length of hillbilly parked in my farter..."

Should I contact the library and ask them not to let her have any more books by this author?

Must go.  Have to hide the electrician's tape again.


*Gutted;
Loss;
Truth Lies Bleeding; and
Long Time Dead, all by Tony Black.
I have now read Gutted and must say it's excellent, and a refreshing contrast to the whimsical Corduroy Mansions of Alexander McCall Smith

Mrs Blighty Turns Over A New Leaf

Enough of this obsession with animal print fripperies.  I am a mature woman of today, I will stop yearning after silly frocks in dodgy prints. Instead I will engage in spiritually enriching activities like learning to mix up killer cocktails playing the harpsichord and pickling  -er - squirrels  pickles and reading Tolstoy in the original Russian ( note to self: take evening class in Russian for Beginners).  I will devote myself to Mr Blighty and Boys 1 and 2.  Where are they actually?  Oh I forgot, they are in the office/at school.  Well, anyway, I will make sure they always come home to piping hot underpants and a freshly laundered Chicken Kiev.

Ooh.  Look at this,  this is nice....

From Next

A couple of thoughts -
I am terrified of snaks, so would this dress give me the heebie jeebies?  Would it squeeze me tight and then swallow me whole?
Why am I looking at patterend dresses when my current uniform seems to be navy blue jumper/cardigan/trousers? yes, I have turned into Sensible Navy Blue Mummy.

LA Woman

Hello,  my name is Mrs Blighty and I am addicted to all things leopardy, and that is why I have come to Leopards Anonymous.

The shops continue to act as enablers: everywhere I look there is leopardy goodness to be had.

I bought these little leopardy numbers as I JUST HAD TO. (Note to Mr B, Head of Austerity Measures, Blighty HQ - they were from New Look and therefore Cheap as Chips, so would have been a Crime not to buy them).

And I NEEEEEEED this cardi from Pure.  Need. It. Badly.

(Note: I think the other hand in the above photo is that of the chap the model is with; at least I really hope it is...)

And look at this dress from old Toppers (TopShop).

Right.  I WILL be STRONG.  I am off for a lie down and a look at the school fees invoice.
That'll calm me down.

Mmmmm, could really do with some leopard print silk lounging pyjamas. RRRRRRRR!

Sussex-Full Weekend*

A couple of weeks ago we spent a lovely weekend with our lovely friends  in their lovely house in lovely rural Sussex (can I write for Hello magazine now please?)

Their house which dates from medieval and Tudor times is full of  interesting and eye-catching details.


Like this chimney and half-timbering.

And there are lots of beams inside.

This is the sitting room.  Our friends lived in Shanghai for a while, hence the striking Chinese art.

I love the colours of this vase.



And these tiles around the fireplace in the guest bedroom are charming.

The basins are from China too. 

This is an old bread oven.

The fireplace in the sitting room gives away our friends' past in the Royal Navy.  I used the sword to force Mr B up the aisle at our wedding Mr B and I used the sword to cut the cake at our wedding.

 

This made me laugh - on the wall in the loo.

K and S, thank you for a great weekend and thank you for letting me show bits of your home on the old blog.

*Not, Sex Full, no, that would be rude, Successful, geddit? Yes I know these puns are just ghastly but it's my blog and I'll pun if I want to.

View From My Kitchen Window

 A while ago Hostess invited other bloggers to post the view from their kitchen window.

I  like to get in on these things. So here is my view.

Complete with one of those cute but annoying muntjac deer.

Annoying, first because I can never remember how to spell their name, secondly because they chomp off bits of plants - they neatly decapitated my hostas, thank you very much.  Also late at night they sometimes go in for this weird barking to each other, sounds like a hacking cough, possibly a mating call, most unattractive to me (but then I am not a deer, or a smoker).


And this was the view from my kitchen window yesterday.

Grandma Whacker gambolling about,  trying to fly a kite.  What is she like? It was lunchtime and I was calling all children to the table and there she is, still outside playing.  She really is most wayward and Sets a Very Bad Example. She never got the memo that Grandmas should sit quietly inside reading an old copy of the Radio Times while having a little drop of sherry.

Must go. Some one needs untangling.

Mouth Guards And Other Daphnes4Boyz News

Just two days ago Boys 1 and 2 returned to the country club cunningly disguised as a school, known as Daphnes4Boyz*. Of course, now it's the weekend, so we are having a well-earned break..again..don't want to burn ourselves out too soon..

To keep us poor befuddled parents on our toes there have been a few changes:
The Library is now the Drama room/second dining hall;
The Drama studio is the now the Library;
The School Uniform Shop is now the Geography Room;
The Store Cupboard is now the School Uniform Shop;
The Headmaster has swapped offices with the Bursar;
The Bursar is now a man**;
No motor vehicles*** are allowed to drive through the school, except the school minibus which will bear down on you unexpectedly just as you are bending down to tie up Boy 1's laces;
Mr Gummage the Science Master's hair has changed colour., to darkish brown with alarming gingery undertones.

Other things remain the same:
the Changing Rooms remain on an entirely different Time Zone to the rest of the school - 5 minutes inside their humid portals equals 1hour 10 minutes in the outside world; for example, Boy 1 "pops in" to collect his kit mid-September and comes out just in time for Christmas...
the amount of kit required by each boy equals body weight of boy x 5 kilos + 2 bricks + weight of one medium sized classmate gagged, bound and shoved in bag but deduct engine size of Range Rover or other deluxe 4x4  but add on weight of  1 cement mixer if you walk home..

Here at Blighty HQ we have been thrown into despair and dismay by the non-fitting of Boy 2's fancy schmancy bespoke mouth guard****, needed for that violent mudfest called Rugby. The mouth guards arrived, moulds having been taken of small boys' mouths - quite which small boys I know not..  Cue application of boiling water (to mouth guard of course), attempts at remoulding (mouth guard, not Boy 2), wailing, shrieks of agony, predictions of thwarted rugby glory etc.


Never mind.  Another change is that there is now a MAP, yes a MAP of  the playing fields which will be written up to allow parents to work out exactly which pitch their son is playing on.

No longer will I have to wander around the entire playing field trying to spot my offspring - let's face it, they all look the same in the mud, all arms and legs and pinky-white and jiggling about...

Damnation!  I can no longer claim to having arrived on time for the match but to have been terribly delayed by  not being able to locate the exact pitch..





*formerly known as Daphnes4Boy$ but rebranded over the summer hols due to the US debt crisis and the loss of that country's AAA credit rating, payment of school fees can now be made in gold or copper.
** result of new appointment, not gender reassignment.
*** legacy of Archgate - when delivery lorry over-optimistic about height of arch linking school buildings so took a few important bits of the arch with it on its way through.
****it seems this blog is in danger of turning into an outpost of the British Dental Association.

Mrs B Armed And Ready To Save The World

The other day I dropped by Lisa at  Privilege and read a post on something mysterious called an Arm Party.  I got the wrong end of the stick and thought it meant you had actually to get together with friends and all show off and clank your bangles and bracelets and other arm accoutrements  - handcuffs, electronic tags, blood pressure monitors. bits of string off the Sunday joint (roast meat, ok) etc.. I was a bit worried about the Elf and Safety implications of such a gathering - what if I got over-excited mid-conversation, swept my hand back theatrically (as I am wont to do), and knocked out the teeth of the person next to me with an arm bulked up with bits of metal, leather, spikes and painted enamel? .... But, as Lisa explains, Arm Party is  a term invented by a feisty young New York fashion blogger called the Man Repeller http://www.manrepeller.com/.  And it simply means having lots of jewellery decorating your wrists, in an artful and eclectic manner.

Lots of the bloggy fashion girls seem to go in for arm parties.  For some, the party never stops and I applaud their ability to get out the house on time and to get through airport security unmolested.

Here is Miss Atlantic-Pacific.

Here is Miss Sterling Style

Having read Lisa's post, I knew that the world would not be safe until I had really got to grips with the whole Arm Party concept...and you know me, so selfless...so I spent a  lovely half hour or so saving the  Universe looking at bingly bangles on the internet...

I saw this,

TopShop bracelet

 And this.

TopShop bangle

 And this

TopShop charm bracelet - guess which website I was on!

In the end I bought this, I mean I did not want to, but the entire galaxy was at stake. It reminded me of those Hermes ones but was just a little bit cheaper. (And as it's just going to get covered in Nutella and toothpaste anyway....)

TopShop imitation leather bracelet £8.50

Hermes leather bracelet, a bit more than £8.50

Another Hermes leather bracelet

Phew, the world was a safe place again.

And now I know why Wonder Woman wore those cuffs.

Fangs Are Not What They Used To Be

Boy 1 is losing teeth at an alarming rate.

In the space of a fortnight  he has lost 3 teeth.

He lost 2, 2 days in a row.

I feel I am being SHOWERED with teeth.

Every time I look in my purse, there is a tooth....

Some thoughts on this:

• If he carries on at this pace, I will have to sell the car just to finance the "Tooth Fairy"
• Could he be pulling them out himself?
• Are they in fact his teeth?*

*note to self: check Boy 2 dental situation

Mrs B Manages To Mention Her Pants Again

So the other day I was banging on about my holiday reading.

The book that kept me sane on the plane was Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith.  Light and frothy, with short chapters, so you can dip in and out,  in between handing out chewy sweeties to small boys and sighing loudly as the man on the other side of you digs you in the ribs as he reorganises his trousers...

So I was lucky enough to scoop up the next two Corduroy Mansions books from the library, The Dog Who Came In From the Cold and A Conspiracy Of Friends.




However, I must confess to have been distracted from Mr McCall Smith by a very wicked man called Roger Lewis and his "Seasonal Suicide Notes". A comic diary - very rude, very funny, not for the easily offended.

And, I also grabbed a pristine copy of September's Harpers Bazaar (when did they stop calling it Harpers and Queens?  And why?  No, don't answer that)

I adore the gloosy ads but look what they have done to Helena Bonham-Carter.

She is such a beautiful woman.  (WARNING: PATHETIC CELEB SIGHTING ANECDOTE COMING UP.   Years ago I saw her at a film opening, my friend went to say hi to her as she had been at school with her; and Helena was really, really beautiful, just enchanting; I of course stood there gawking like the village idiot.)

And in this pic she looks like the indomitable Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.  And she seems to have a teacake on her head.  But what do I know about fashion?  Apparently it's all about Old Lady Chic now.  Hooray, at last my big Mummy pants and broken veins will come into their own!

Abolish the Polish?

Dahlings, something deeply traumatic happened to me recently, of which I hardly dare speak..

Oh ok, then...here goes..

I just couldn't get the interest up to paint my nails....(quivering voice, loud sobbing, hiccuppy noises, honking of nose etc.)

If this were a nail polish blog, I would caption this as: "OPI Flower to Flower from their 2009 Summer Collection, 2 coats, with topcoat",  but it's not a nail blog and I can't actually remember exactly, though it is OPI

It just seemed soooo unimportant, trivial, needlessly time consuming, pointless....

For a couple of days (WARNING: EXPLICIT DETAILS COMING UP) my nails were bare.  Unpolished.  Au naturel.

This is my lovely friend D totally rocking red nails in her elegant French way

Above Barry M (I know because it says so on the bottle) and below some OPI which I think is called Catch Me InYour Net or it could be Take Me To The Vet, you know how they love their weird names...

But then I realised something really cathartic.  And profound:
Painting your nails IS unimportant, trivial, needlessly time consuming and pointless.

Some Nails Inc bluey/purple which Lovely B gave me, and just look at how my paw is clamped onto the choccie box

And that is what makes it such an enjoyable, worthwhile and therapeutic activity.

Here I am showing how your polish can match random household objets ..or am I about to throw the vase at Mr B???

Also, I realised my OPI Conquistadorable Colour matched my new hot lips top....

Hot Lips top from H&M, not in any way suitable for a woman of my age which is of course why I had to buy it..

Mrs Blighty, philosopher extraordinaire.

Eat your heart out, Bernard-Henri Levy*.



* As I am sure you all know already BHL is a French philosopher, recently rumoured to have been dating Daphne Guinness; I just had a most interesting read of Wikipedia where I was most amused to see he had once used the works of one Botul to refute the arguments of Kant; it turns out Botul is a spoof, cooked up by some French wag; the giveway is that his philosophy is know as Botulism...

Mrs Blighty Does A Spot of De-Cluttering

It seems de-cluttering is all the rage at the moment, and apparently it's not just a one off thing, it's a journey.  So I thought I'd take a trip.

Just look at what I found lurking in my cupboards.

Now I have to assess each article and ask myself some key questions:

Do I love it?
Will I wear it?
Does it suit me?
Why are there always at least 3 Christmas puddings in my cupboards at any given time?
How much bouillon does a girl really need?
How many years past a Use By date can you go?
What on earth is that white stuff in the plastic sachet?

I think the blue of the breadcrumb packet really brings out the blue in my eyes..

Please do NOT send in suggestions on what to do with the stuffing..