So after a brief trauma of escapee guinea fowl and pet cats ( more about this later) I organised the ingredients to make mince pies, stamped all of my non Welsh Christmas Cards, posted them with Jenny at the Post Office, dug out the Christmas decorations from under the bed, and then went Christmas shopping.
I am a whizz at Christmas shopping, I have a mental list of what I need to buy, and without distraction I go and buy them, it is swift, painless and as precise as an attack by an Exocet missile!
This year I am going for a Little Women type of Christmas wrapping paper.....yes all very American civil war....plain and classic.......Susan Sarandon would be proud as punch. (don't worry I know the gifts look a little austere...I will be decorating them tastefully with some pine cones!)- go on Nige....say something!
Now, back to the guinea fowl trauma. Just before I left with my gingham shopping basket there was a knock at the kitchen window. It turned out to be one of the ladies that took part on my last Chicken course, she had seen two baby guinea fowl sat on our garden wall and wondered if they were mine!
I couldn't believe it, I had left the shed door open for the chicks to get some air and two had somehow escaped their cage and had made a bid for freedom. Far too young to be left outside, as they were still poor flyers I galloped outside to find the two babies now walking nervously towards the main road.
The kind lady ( I couldn't remember her name!) got into the spirit of the chase and left her kids, sitting quietly in the back of her 4 x 4, to head the babies off at the pass, and like two demented dinosaurs we lumbered around the lane with the now completely hysterical chicks bouncing like ping pong balls off the Church wall in their effort to escape us.
It took an age to catch them, but catch them we did, and with her Laura Ashley pearls clinking merrily around her rather flushed face, the lady triumphantly brandished the final chick above her head and as she passed it over to me, we were interrupted by a very loud catty miaow and a bang! I couldn't quite believe it as Albert suddenly tumbled out of the bathroom window, and landed square in the centre of a large potted bamboo plant on the patio. The bamboo collapsed towards us and the yummy Mummy good Samaritan suddenly lost her middle class composure and shouted "What the fuck was that?" as Albert shot passed obviously uninjured....
Never a dull moment..
I know, it's always something with the critters.
ReplyDelete"go on Nige....say something!
ReplyDeleteHmm. This takes us back to the conversation you, me and Chris had on Saturday night. We were discussing the M&S Christmas advertisement (that I described as “shallow and crass”) and the Iceland supermarket advertisement featuring Kerry Katona (that I described as “sophisticated”). You felt the opposite was true, and Chris (aghast, perhaps, with the level to which the conversation had sunk after a glass of wine and a slice of cake) thoughtfully supported my assertion (thanks, Chris). Of course, the debate centred on what we both understood “sophisticated” to mean.
Certainly, I was not being deliberately contentious (who, me?). What the M&S and Iceland advertisements illustrated neatly was how social class carries with it different aesthetic performances. This is obvious, of course. But what interests me most is how and why these aesthetics are polarized in certain ways, equating muted colours and unpolished lustre with the ‘middle classes’, and bold, primary colours equating with the ‘lower classes’. Why this way around, in our time? I find this seemingly arbitrary configuration fascinating.
This brings me back to your Christmas wrapping paper, and the aesthetics of Christmas performances. Your cheeky trips around the local housing estate - seeking out the environment-damaging excesses of Christmas décor - contrast sharply with the brown paper and twine of your own Christmas parcels. I’ve done the same in the past (I too adopted brown paper and twine last Christmas, you might recall). Either way, the both of us were perhaps appealing to a middle-class, hair-shirt aesthetic. Of course, brown paper is cheaper than ‘quality’ wrapping paper, but gaudy wrapping paper from the low-cost stores is cheaper still.
But pine cones? I am strongly tempted to send you a kitschy pot of glitter and primary-coloured silvery ribbon to help you complete the ‘look’ in the best Northern tradition.
Yes, I know, I do need to get out more.
Nx
O those ghouls hanging out on the other side of the fence must have such giggles at your antics - me too, peace
ReplyDeleteOMG!! Now that's animal drama!
ReplyDelete