Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

N is for Nicknames or what Mad Maud of the darts team calls ‘euphoniums’.

Okay you horrible lot, listen up. Granny is about to impart knowledge.

If you are a married lady of a certain age, look across the room and consider your significant other. How does he appear?

Dashing, debonair and handsome

Rough, tough and dangerous

Slightly grubby and with jam on his vest

Tidily harmless in his cardigan and carpet slippers

If he is any of the first three it’s an even bet you don’t call him  your ‘hubby’….

Also for ladies who should be old enough to know better. What do you refer to your lady bits as?

Fanny

Man Trap

Minge

Front bottom 

If it’s any of the first three you probably still have a sex life….

Are you beginning to catch my drift here? What we call things matters.

If you call a man ‘hubby’ he will grow into the neutered tom cat smugness the word suggests.

If you really do call your fanny a ‘front bottom’ the chances of it ever getting a visitor diminish with the years as the terminology becomes more and more at odds with the age and the experience of the speaker.

My late husband – god rest his OCD little soul – once referred to me as the little woman, and wondered why I didn’t come across for a month. Although I am certainly a woman, I am far from being little and the term is pejorative in the extreme. It is like so many words used about women, being designed to remind the ‘fair sex’ of its position in society.

So let’s strip the cute nicknames bare, shall we?

Fur baby. Nope. It’s a cat or a dog or whatever. It is not a baby. Gyp is a dog and he is my best mate (except when he barfs on the floor). I would no more call him a ‘fur baby’ than buy him a pink coat and have his toenails painted. He needs to be allowed to be a dog.

Your tiny daughter has baby fat in bracelets around her wrists. You decide to call her ‘chubbykins’. She has body image issues for the rest of her life.

And so on.

Words have power.

So please stop fecking about.

And if you want to neuter the old man send him to the vet. It’s quicker and more dignified 

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

***** ***** *****

Jane Jago

Down to earth advice straight from the mouth of the mystic’s moggy!

So today she (that’s Madame Pendulica to you or Dotty Doris to me) was doing this thing where she grabs a handful of polished stones (she calls them crystals) and throws them on a black cloth divided up into the houses of the zodiac and then proceeds to give her client a ‘reading’ based on which of the stones land where (“You have jasper in your first house and that is bringing optimism in your immediate future.”)Please note that he’s not the one to be optimistic, Dotty Doris is – she’s making a wad from this consultation.
Anyway, I digress, she was doing this reading for a client who was trying to decide whether or not to accept a proposal of marriage. We’d been through the background already:
“She’s perfect in every way and we are madly in love. But should I marry her?”
Madame purred in her throat (I swear she takes lessons from me).
“You are wise to seek my guidance and I shall consult the stars through their union with the earth by the power of the crystals.”
Translation; “I can see we have a gullible one here who’ll pay for at least three sessions and keep me in prosecco and the cat in tuna for a week.”
He nodded and looked grave.
“You see I know the economic and legal commitment of marriage is a serious undertaking and if I am besotted I am not going to be able to think things through clearly. So please, tell me, should I marry her?”
Oh ye gods and little fishes, what a complete asshole!
I’d had enough so put my paw in and told him that if I was his girlfriend I’d be telling him to take a hike. If he’s the sort who can’t even know his own heart and mind over whether he should marry then he’s better left on the shelf with that open packet of dried kibble that’s sat there the last six months since I refused to eat it anymore.
Unfortunately, the mad bat went on to convince him that his answer was obscured by the moon being occluded by onyx and his having obsidian falling in Scorpio so he should come back the next week to get clarification.
I really do have to admire her.
And I thought of him almost fondly when I ate my tuna that evening.

Ailuros the Mystic’s Mog predicts she will be offering more advice sometime in the future!

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

Finally, the breakthrough she had dreamed of – sometimes literally.
Two decades Geraldine had worked, yet the last piece of the equation never came into focus.
It happened late at night. She’d been going over the figures one more time and suddenly some stood out as if highlighted. A frantic hour later, she was done.
She was about to phone the team when she looked again at the projected outcome.
A cold horror slipped through her veins.
Dawn broke as Geraldine scrabbled desperately to cover up what she had found so no one else in the team would ever discover it.

E.M. Swift-Hook

A selection of rhymes by Jane Jago, made age appropriate for those for whom their second childhood is just around the corner…

There was a Little Gran

There was a little gran
In a purple campervan
Divorced from a city go-getter
Never had much fun
As a trophy wife and mum
Finding life after sixty much better!

You can find this, and other whimsical takes of life in On The Throne? a little book of contemplation from Jane Jago.

February comes with snowdrops
Green spears through frost-shot soil
As reaching up through snow and ice
Their small white flags uncoil
Proud banners soon a-flying
The vanguard of the spring
They hold the first pure promise
Of what the year will bring
Like resurrected martyrs
In dresses all of white
Beneath the ground just yesterday
Then rising overnight
The ones beside my window
I look for every year
To see the modest stand return
And know that spring is near

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Sometimes we walk the edges of reality…

CHAPTER TWO: ANNIS

Annis looked narrowly at the guest who stood in her home, obviously ill at ease, and equally obviously totally bemused by finding herself an oasis of calm and cleanliness in the middle of a desert of dirt and destruction. This reaction to home would have been funny if it wasn’t sort of insulting. Why wouldn’t her place be clean and tidy? If you live with cats for company you tend not to like mess, she thought irritably. Then she laughed at herself. Why should she care what some human female thought of her. 
The woman opened her mouth to say who knew what, but Annis silenced her with a fierce look. She idly wondered how this Jessica came to be here, and why she had lied with the first words she spoke. The female knew precisely what would have happened to her at the hands of the drunken louts by the gate. She knew, and the waves of fear that rolled off her at that knowledge were what had prompted Annis to come to her aid. 
So. She’s here and you brought her here, Annis thought. Now you better talk to her.
Before she had chance to grope for the words to interact with her human visitor, two heavy thumps announced the arrival of a visitation of a feline nature. Unthinking, Annis opened the door and a matched pair of black panthers slid in.
Jessica gave a half scream.
“Not fear,” Annis managed before the cats bowled her over and started licking her with their rough, red tongues. How long that would have gone on for is open to conjecture, but the happy time was interrupted by more arrivals. Two more big cats, this pair of indeterminate breed, oozed into the room. One sat on its haunches, while the other stared inimically at Jessica. Annis wasn’t prepared to tolerate that. She growled a warning and the cat flattened its ears. 
“Cats not hurt.”
She thought perhaps she should say more, but her ears caught a faint sound at the same time as her nose was assailed by the smell of rotting flesh.
“It hunts…”
“What hunts?” Jessica’s whisper sounded only just on the right side of panic.
“Blood eater.”
Jessica opened her mouth to speak or scream, but Annis knew she could not be allowed to draw attention to herself.
“Silent.”
Greatly daring, and ignoring feline etiquette altogether, Annis leant forwards and put two fingers across the other female’s mouth.
“Must silent.”
She saw the panic being battled by something deep within the woman. Jessica’s eyes shadowed momentarily, then cleared as she found the strength needed to control her fear and swallow the questions that must be crowding her throat.
“Cats hide you,” Annis said, pushing the older woman onto the sleeping platform and arranging a black cat either side of her. Jessica looked at her in confusion, the fear was still in her eyes still and Annis smiled reassuringly.  Being unable to summon sufficient human words to explain her actions, she pinched her own nose with a finger and thumb.
“No smell. Old One comes. Blood Eater. Must not smell.”
Jessica’s face cleared and she managed a nod. Annis found herself feeling the beginnings of respect for the courage being shown by somebody who obviously knew nothing of the kind of life forms that inhabit the places humanity has abandoned. The silence came then, a cold silence, like the chilling silence that came after snow had fallen deeply. As if the world held its breath, not daring to breathe.
Then into the silence came the small sounds creeping, and slithering as every small creature fled out of the path of the Old One. Then it came. Something with multi-clawed feet and the heavy, scraping, scaly belly of the Blood Eater. Then it stopped. Silence. Cold and claustrophobic. In her mind Annis pictured the huge, ugly head she had senen before, lifting, nostrils opening and tongue sliding out to taste the air for blood.
She glanced at the bed, where the two big cats had pressed in against Jessica, their eyes, jewel bright. Jessica’s were closed and her face was white. Annis wondered if it was enough or if the living flesh of the human woman would call to the Blood Drinker despite the felines absorbing the perfume of her blood.

Part 6 of Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook will be here next week…

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

M is for Master Cooking Shows.

Hands up if you, like me, watch cookery programmes on the box.

We’re not talking about them ones where a very thin person pretends to cook and then counterfeits eating with a mouth that looks like a cat’s bumhole.

Neither are we even mildly interested the ones where a ‘celebrity’ chef ponces about putting baby vegetables on a sea of something obscene. 

I never watch either of the above – unless of course it’s Nigella, whose substitution of food for sex is to be applauded. But I digress…

Today’s exposition of emotion (okay, maybe a tiny rant) centres on competitive cooking on the telly. 

Firstly, cooking is not a bloody competition. It’s the means whereby something earthy and boring like a potato becomes a delicious calorie filled treat like a chip. 
Secondly, watching capable people cook isn’t interesting (Nigella aside).
Which leaves us with why.

An educated guess suggests economic pressures with a side order of sadism.
These cookery competitions must be as cheap as chips to produce and the prizes are crap too. A wooden spoon with a bow in it and a kiss from an oleaginous presenter are scarcely gonna break the production company bank.

And the sadism? You really haven’t noticed the delight the producers take in fallen soufflés, burns, cuts, meltdowns, and tears? 

The winner usually appears very little because she/he is busy being boring and efficient, while Edna from Liverpool who is obviously only there because she was pissed one night and entered for a laugh is far more fun to watch.
So…. 

Given that if the competitors all produced well-cooked examples of whatever and neither failed disastrously nor had loud meltdowns in the public eye the programmes would be about as interesting as watching your nail polish dry, there has to be a catch someplace.
Something has to be done to glue viewers to the screen.

And what have they done?
They have set up the rules to ensure failure…
Don’t look at me like that. They bloody have.

One show never gives the competitors quite enough time to get the required dish done.
Another encourages rank amateurs to attempt recipes a Michelin starred chef only cooks with the aid of three sous chefs and a kitchen porter.
A third has some scary bloke patrolling the place to scare the cooks shitless.
And so on.

And that’s why we watch.
Schadenfreude.

And the hope that in some galaxy far far away a person in a creepy apron will so far lose it as to twat one of the supercilious presenters – for preference with a half-iced strawberry gateau.

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

***** ***** *****

Jane Jago

Namaste you wonderful, desirable and aspiring individual! This bijou blog is here to help you achieve your best ever ‘you’ in this new year. Here, I offer my help and assistance in reshaping your shape and doctoring your decor internally and externally, to bring your lifestyle into line with your aspirations.

Rites of Passage

It has been shown that celebrating rites of passage, such as entering teenage, leaving school, starting to drive and so on has a profound and healthy effect on the psyche. It enables the individual to recognise themselves and their place in their community and facilitates the community in recognising the individual and their transition from one stage of life to another.
Rites of passage have an outward, external, community oriented side and an inner, transformative and profoundly personal side.
They are good for you and good for those around you.
Having established that, it is time to consider how you can add to the rites of passage at present practiced and so reap an even greater harvest of benefit from them. What other profound and meaningful transitions occur in your life that you can use as pivot points in your personal and social growth?
In many ways the best approach is to make your own list. After all you know yourself what these meaningful moments might be better than anyone else. But here are a couple of suggestions for rites of passage we could all adopt more widely in the modern world.

Ordering a first take-out
This is a truly life-altering moment for any growing individual. It carries with it the awareness that from now on one is no longer tied to the apron strings of home provision. One is now free to sally forth and hungryly devour the entire world of exotic food. I will assume if you are reading this you have already crossed this threshold, but here is advice for any you might be inducting into this stage of their life.
How to mark the moment: Make sure the moment is perfect by ensuring the candidate approaches it with virginal purity. Do not allow them to so much as peek at a site prior to the event Invite at least half a dozen of your young postulants chosen companions to attend the event. They should all sit in a circle and chant their chosen order whilst the celebratee sits in the middle with their phone app and has to get every order right before they can order their own.
It will be one of the most memorable events of their life!

The first major relationship argument
We are all left battered – yet bettered, by this transformational moment. When we realise the most adored life-partner with whom we are soul to soul, has in fact some major imperfection that has led to a major crisis between you.
How to mark the moment: Embrace that it has happened and once the dust has settled summon your closest and most individually partisan friends and family.
Whilst the principles are withdrawn, individually and apart, to better focus on regenerating the acrimony that spurred the real event, be sure that everyone has a good glass of their preferred alcoholic beverage inside them and one in hand. Then when all is ready, have the assembled companions draw to either side of the room, to stand behind the individual to whom they are most closely aligned.
Then the couple should act out the events again, being sure to not neglect even the most hurtful and hateful things said so they can be purified and transmuted by the rite of passage into a new energy each will take forward with them in life. The gathered supporters can cheer and boo to make the reenactment even more potent.
At the end there will be an utter catharsis and a truly life changing resolution!

You begin, I am sure, to see the many promising and poignant possible prospects for such rites of passage and can create your own to celebrate graduating my ‘New Year New You’ course today!

Namaste!
Lucida the Liminal Lifestyle Coach