Let sleeping dogs have really nice sheets …

I bought some new sheets yesterday, and they are very delicious indeed. Egyptian cotton with 400 thread count in a dark coffee colour.  Lying in them, I feel like Lady Muck. The Hunter Gatherer feels like Lord Muck. This is the point at which violins should play and we should run amok – but two Mucks don’t a mickle make. Or something of that ilk. The point is, there are not many things nicer than getting into deliciously fresh sheets.

The first deliciously fresh sheets we ever owned  ($10 from Big W with a matching quilt cover and two pillowcases … bargain!) – were installed on a mattress on the floor of a little rented cottage. In those days, that was what you did. None of this credit card stuff, where you furnish your first home with all the latest crap and scorn offers of cast-off furniture from eager friends and relatives who want to offload some junk. If you were lucky enough to own more than one set of sheets, the other ones were hung in the windows while you saved up for curtains. Nobody has sheets hanging in their windows anymore because it’s trendy to be in debt to Curtains-R-Us, Tellies-R-Huge and Chairs-R-4-Sitting-On.  Where’s the fun in that?

After a few weeks of hauling ourselves from the floor in the mornings, someone offered us a bed. It was marvellously ancient and past it, and the spring base had sprung, so our trusty mattress was sucked into trenchy goodness in the middle. This was very cosy for the most part and in the depths of winter, but not so ha-ha when you happened to be pissed off with the other party. You cannot lower your guard and fall asleep because you are hanging on to the edge of the mattress like grim death in order to not roll backwards and actually bump into the offending somebody and inadvertently give the impression you are, in fact, pleased with them. In the morning, your fingers are frozen into claws and you have to explain to puzzled colleagues why you have turned up for work resembling an exhausted, and not very benevolent, bird of prey.

There followed the waterbed age of the 80s, where nobody told you it was a bad idea unless both parties had identical metabolisms. Being a cold blooded reptilian person, I’d turn my side up to Hello Sailor, while the HG preferred Mr Whippy. When I had my way, you could just about smell the barbequing flesh as we dropped into a casserolesque coma there was possibly no coming out of – and on nights when the HG triumphed, I’d wake feeling as if I’d spent a night naked on the concrete car park of Food-o-rama. Except at least they have trees and not polar bears.

Beds have come and gone through the revolving door of our boudoir since then, and dozens of sheets have ended up in the garage rag pile. We’ve gone through florals, stripes, patterned and flannelette (much hated by the HG and banned forever) – and are now in the non-frivolous and predictable Age of Plain. Hopefully there won’t be too many more beds – but if the current model should fail, there are now more choices on offer than the wonders of the breakfast menu at Mickey D’s.

Yep, they’ve thought of everything these days and you can now purchase an ensemble which should just about suit everybody. The ideal bed zippers up the middle, which means you and your partner can choose the side that suits you – hard/soft/with-or-without gangnails – and the two sides are zippered together like so – resulting in two incredibly contented people who know exactly which side their bed is buttered on. Or zippered to, as the case may be.

Clinging desperately to the side with your ageing talons is now a thing of the past. When wishing to remain incommunicado, you merely unzip the beds, haul your half to another room/house/ suburb/continent – and the other half of the equation will immediately realise there is a possibility he has done something to trouble you and he had better be very, very sorry or else. All this, without you even having to raise your voice.

Bear in mind, however, this works both ways. You might just come home one night to find he’s zippered his half to someone else’s entirely. You can only hope she has talons much, much more spiteful than yours …

.oOo.

Please let me come with you next time, Nigel …

            This is really a thank you to Jonathan Boakes – a writer of computer games which are so brilliant and so frightening you get the feeling  it’s never going to be safe to sit your arse in front of a computer again. The latest of these is a ghosthunting adventure, in which your new bestie, Nigel, is going to have to solve some spooky derring-do which is going down in a charming Cornish fishing village.

            Nigel is just lovely. He has suitably shambolic clothing, with the hems of his jeans  authentically scuffed – and he wears glasses. I like a man who wears glasses. (Will he make more passes?)  I especially like Nigel because he has no intention of listening to me when I beg him not to go somewhere. He has steel and determination. I like that in a man, too.

            When Nigel arrives in the aforementioned village and finds the only available accommodation (surprise!) is a derelict waterfront cottage, anybody with less steel and determination would have gone home. Especially as villagers were making cryptic comments such as; ‘ooh, the fens, lad!’ and suggesting Nigel’s new place of residence might be a bit suss altogether. Because Nigel didn’t seem fazed by any of this, I attempted walking him back through the fens t’railway … but the bugger wouldn’t go. He informed me he had ‘things to do in the village’.  He also kept shrugging and saying, ‘Nothing ventured …’ Well, Nigel – if you really must.

             I generally like to have the lights off when I play creepy stuff on the computer. Mistake. If you don’t mind crapping yourself, be my guest – but I’m ashamed to say I had to do a dash through the house flicking on every available light and making sure the doors were double-locked. Even kicked the fridge a few times to make it hum.  When I got back to the computer, wouldn’t you know it, Nige was patiently standing there waiting for me. He suggested we might like to do a recce of the museum at night. Excuse me? Could we not just go to bed? I tried double-clicking him onto his bed, but no cigar. Nige insisted he couldn’t possibly sleep until he’d stuck his nose into some more awful stuff which really wasn’t any of his business. Oh, okay then. Let’s break into the museum, virtually crap ourselves, and THEN can we go home to bed? Oh no we don’t. After the museum thing, Nige decided we really ought to take our sorry arses to the cemetery. As you do. *sigh* Nothing ventured …

            All this was pretty horrifying and heart-hammeringly ghastly – but there was far worse to come. I finally managed to double-click Nige to sleep (he had the most gorgeous eyelashes) – and was rather hoping that would be the end of it and we’d somehow get through until morning without further unpleasantness. Ah … no. I don’t think Nige got much sleep before he was awakened by a terrible thumping coming from downstairs. I clicked like mad, trying to make him stay put and just ignore it. But my man of steel and determination (with glasses) was having none of that, either. We had to creep down the darkened stairs, into the darkened passage, where the bathroom door (which had previously been open), was now closed. This is where the thumping was coming from – and naturally, my man couldn’t stay away! He informed me he was going to look through the keyhole. THAT was when I crapped myself. And having seen something ghastly pass across the room on the other side, naturally Nige then had to go in. With moi, of course. I can’t begin to describe how horrible it was. That would be telling.

            A nice part of the game (it’s always about the food) was that Nigel’s landlady felt pretty crap about making him stay in a horrible, haunted cottage with an unusable kitchen – and had organised with a local cafe for him to eat there whenever he pleased. Naturally (because it IS all about the food), I made Nige go in and out of the cafe as often as possible just so’s I could click in his inventory to see what he’d scored. Sometimes there was excellent booty, such as big wodges of chicken and mushroom pie. Or nice iced cakes. Or vegetarian samosas, even! After a while (or a few whiles, anyway), Nige only managed to score a stale lump of bread. (That’s when I realised I was seriously pissing him off, and I’d better let him get back to the ghostbusting.)

            So, PLEASE, Mr Boakes, can Nige go on another incredible adventure soonest? And can I come too? That game was the most fun I’ve ever had on a computer without a credit card and the Gluttons-R-Us website open in front of me. I can hardly wait for the next time!

            What was that, Nigel? Yeah, I know. Nothing ventured …

.oOo.

Sleepless incognito …

            Well, I can just lie here all night with my eyes closed or I can check out the ceiling and note that the crack which looked like a teensy little dinosaur last week now looks like the Gates of Mordor and is probably going to open up and swallow me whole. Note also that the dinky little spiderwebs which were softly fluttering in the breeze this morning have now taken on a more menacing appearance altogether and might just fall on my face and suffocate me. I can check out the night sky for the millionth thrilling time. Full moon, no moon, Swiss cheese, green cheese … la de da de dum.

            Wriggle the toes, the knees, the elbows. Think about maybe one day cooking something from scratch. Or climbing Everest and bungeeing off it. In the nude. Because let’s face it – some nights are just plain boring.

            I never had insomnia when I used to read in bed. What is it about men that they can’t stand one weeny little bedside lamp with a five watt bulb? People have been reading in bed for centuries and no-one ever died. Not that the HG ever actually SAYS anything. He just shifts position and grunts a lot. Every time he grunts there’s a little aura of ‘quelle inconvenient’ wafting around the room. Sometimes it’s ignorable. Sometimes I just turn the light off and hope he has nightmares of being squashed under a falling library.

            One night, salvation came – with the extraordinary discovery there’s a whole world out there in the airwaves. While you are sleeping, life is going on. And going off. There are thousands of other insomniacs out there; calling chat shows, quiz shows, talk shows  - and they’re all barking mad!

            Yessiree folks – plug in those earphones and mentally head for the hills! With all the other nightcritters whose husbands and wives get pissed off about a little old lamp glowing on the outsides of their closed eyelids while they’re trying to snore.  Because that’s the great thing – the other nightcritters are mostly certified nutters – and the later the hour, the stranger they get. They hang around on the other end of a phone line for hours and hours, just to tell a perfectly strange radio jock stuff you wouldn’t tell your gynaecologist if he was blind, deaf and you were in a darkened confessional box. They say bizarre things in a conspirational voice like; ‘I’m in the NUDE, you know …’ As if we all care. Most of us are probably in the nude – given we’re in bed.

            Being a genuinely interested person (a sticky beak) – I find all this totally fascinating. With a really small radio, two AAA batteries will last you at least a fortnight. Going all night. This is good value, considering all the stuff you are soaking up whilst you’re out of it. Yep – it’s the subliminal learning thing. Remember those tapes which promised you’d wake up being able to speak fluent Yiddish if you listened to them during your sleep? It’s quite amazing. I was astounded at myself when I found I could do that!

            ‘What does she want?’ asked one of the Right Hons at the breakfast table, puzzled at the rubbish spouting forth. ‘Kosher cornflakes, I think,’ I told them proudly. ‘In a bagel.’

            Because the scary thing is, the brain is taking in all this crap whilst you’re asleep. You don’t even know that you know what you know. You hear yourself butting into people’s conversations with snippets of useless trivia, and you think , ‘Woo – how ‘bout that? How very good am I?’ Some mornings after a night absorbing medical advice, I’m convinced I could pick up a scalpel and have a go at Uncle Mort’s gall bladder. And maybe it’s not beyond the realms of possibility I might be able to actually boil an egg one day!

            It’s like having a Pandora’s box in your head, full of stuff you don’t know is there. If you could run a printout, you’d be absolutely stunned to find you could speak five languages, understand quantum physics and know exactly what to do with that random collection of 70s Tupperware which is breeding in the back of the kitchen cupboards. (Or maybe that last part’s a little fanciful.)

            There is, as ever, a downside. As you doze in and out of consciousness, you catch discombobulated bits of conversations which have no meaning. And the beginning of book readings and bits of terrific poetry you’d love to know the author of – except you snoozed off in the middle of the third verse. And one night, I woke to hear the shock jock say in a trembling voice, ‘… and THAT’S the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard in my life …’ WHAT WAS? Can you run that by us again, dammit?! It’s a bit disconcerting to realise there’s something really horrible inside my head. Something scary and awful festering away in there, just waiting for an opportunity to go BOO.

            It got quite bad the other morning, and I actually woke in a state of total panic and thought I had died. Well, there’s nothing quite like getting your earphones tangled around your neck …

.oOo.

Nero fiddled – and it’s none of your business …

 

There is going to be yet another seminar on past lives. Great, eh? Everyone comes home happy and proud, with the knowledge they were once Cleopatra or Marco Polo. It’s interesting how nobody was ever Hitler. Or the woman who took care of Caesar’s dirty underpants. Well, you probably wouldn’t hand over your money if they told you THAT, hmm?             No – everyone was Cleopatra. Especially those with ASPirations. Or Joan of Arc, if you’ve had heartburn all your life and nobody could find out why.             Apparently, when you find out who you once were, it can explain why you do a lot of the things you do. Karma being what it is, you now have a chance to put things right in the cosmic scheme of things. Or you can lie around in baths of ass’s milk all day and watch Better Pyramids of Our Lives.             Personally, I don’t care who I was. And anyway, there’s every chance this might be my first time around. In a few thousand years, some poor devil will go to a psychic and find out they were once me. There will be stunned silence, followed by the gnashing of teeth and frenzied sampling of Mars Bars. Why would God even want to bother arsing about with celestial recycling?             What I can’t understand is why people want to know all this crap in the first place. It’s far more information than is necessary. Isn’t this life hard enough? Aren’t there enough challenges without taking on someone else’s? And the past notwithstanding, why in hell would you want to know what was going to happen in the future? Apparently, according to those who’ve been, psychics won’t tell you if something really bad is going to happen. It’s unethical or something. Comforting, eh? So presumably, if you’re sitting there and Madame Nutcase has her mouth clamped shut, you can pretty well figure out there’s a No.10 bus heading down the highway right about now with your name on it – due to arrive just in time to ram your sorry arse as you walk across the road to meet the tall, dark handsome stranger, who will turn out to be the intern in Casualty. The travel over water will be when the ambulance hits the rain-filled pothole on its way into the hospital grounds. It won’t even have its sirens on, because it’s probably too late. After all, didn’t Mme Nutcase say you were headed for brighter and better things?             Anyway, it’s better not to know. Every year, you pass what will be the anniversary of your death and don’t even celebrate because you don’t even know. This is definitely the way it should be. Why this obsession with finding out things we are better off not knowing? What if Mme Nutcase came good and said, ‘Okay luvvy … you’re heading for a myocardial infarction on January 1 next year.’ What do you do then? Blame a computer virus for stuffing up the heart monitor? The only consolation is, you won’t have to worry about stockpiling all those tins of beans and you can damn well cancel the order for the rainwater tank. Did Nero really come all this way to be fooled by a computerised piece of man-made medical equipment? He spent his whole life worrying about how well the wheels were fastened to his chariot, never dreaming for a minute he would be ultimately let down by the idiosyncrasies of the microchip.             Take my advice, it’s better to worry about whether the toilet’s clean (in case of visitors) and whether you have the ingredients in your pantry to whip up a quick batch of scones and a salmon and ricotta quiche (in case the bastards want to be fed, too).             You can’t do anything about the past. And ultimately, you’ll only shorten the present by worrying about the future. Just live for the asparagus quiche – easier on your stress levels and everyone thinks you’re a marvelous hostess.             The person I feel really sorry for is Cleopatra. How would she have felt if someone had told her she would end up as a 90s housewife with a sagging bottom and Gravox stains down the front of her chenille bathrobe? That’d be a real bummer, dude …           .oOo.

 

Rocco’s mother does a bad, bad thing …

Once upon a time there was a perfectly respectable couple who wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything illegal, offensive or immoral. But they had to spoil everything by having a child.             From the beginning, the parents did everything by the book. Everything – from eating spinach and offal before conception to not screaming for drugs on the delivery table. The mumma struggled with the breastfeeding business because ‘it’s nature’s way and gives bubby the best start in life,’ even though nosy old cows in pink towelling tracksuits constantly approached her in the street to inform her, ‘you probably don’t have enough milk, dearie,’ just because the baby was howling his head off and hurling plush ferrets at gawking bystanders. The daddy put up with the mumma having a headache every night, not realising this state of affairs would probably continue for another 20 years, after which time she’d probably be wishing she was dead.             Both parents diligently taught Rocco right from wrong. He was well aware he should wash his hands after visiting the bathroom and knew it wasn’t nice to drink milk straight from the carton. Mumma made sure he could say ‘aitch’ without the ‘h’ on the front. The parents thought they had all bases covered.             Then Rocco starts school. He is now capable of choosing the people he wishes to associate with, and it’s not lovely Nigel from No.23 in the home-knitted argyle cardigan, either. Dream on. His chosen playmate is Shayne, who teaches him on the first day how to rip great chunks out of his new grey trousers by sliding across the school carpark on his knees, and how you can pierce your own eyebrow before morning recess. Rocco is a willing student. By home time he also remembers the pronunciation of the f-bomb, the p-word and a few interesting variations of the s-word, which can hitherto be used when his meal is placed in front of him and mumma has not done the right thing. After the first day he will no longer take his lunch to school in the Tupperware box with his name written on Elastoplast on the lid – and his Globite schoolbag is smashed to pieces and hurled under the house, together with the poofy legionnaire’s cap sporting the school crest.             Long before he reaches high school, Rocco knows policemen are to be referred to as animals of the pink and grunting variety and that ‘mother’ is only half a word. The contents of the family cutlery drawer are strapped around his thigh at all times, even under his Anarchy Rules OK pyjama trousers, and daddy’s new Stihl chainsaw sometimes goes missing for weeks on end.             More often than not, the police come to make routine enquiries on Saturday mornings. At first, it was just to check Rocco’s waste paper basket for alleged Cadbury wrappers after he’d allegedly been seen removing the said alleged chocolate bars from the alleged corner store. In later years they brought a pantechnicon with them in order to remove the alleged plasma screens from where they were allegedly stashed under tarpaulins in the back of daddy’s toolshed.             Mumma started to think it might have been better in the long run to have turned a blind eye to Rocco drinking milk from the carton and to have allowed him to say ‘haitch’ every now and then. You do not, after all, end up in Pentridge from bad grammar alone.             Nigel’s mother however, is very smug. She tells Rocco’s mumma that Nigel is taking an accountancy course at TAFE in his spare time and is doing really well working part time at McDonald’s. According to the manager, Nigel’s burgers always have just the right amount of ketchup and he never forgets to include the pickle. Furthermore, when he was on his way to his accordion lesson, Nigel saw Rocco piddling over the railway bridge on to the roof of the 9.45 from Central.             Rocco’s mumma, in her sweetest and most controlled voice, calls Nigel’s mother the other half of the word of which mother is only half. She also informs her there isn’t much call for accordion players anymore and it’s a well known fact most people throw away the pickle from their Big Mac.             Then, with a ‘proud mother’ flourish, she pulls the Stihl out of her handbag. .oOo.

 

Midnight train to an underwear emporium …

I had this nightmare the other night, and I’ve had to make a very strong cup of coffee indeed.             It basically boiled down to being on a crowded train (pretty ordinary at the best of times), wearing a nightie. This could have been an acceptable scenario, given today’s dress code, had the nightie been of the satin variety, or even the starched and spotless genre – but naturally it was not. It was the one I’d gone to bed in, which happened to have birdpoo on it, as well as cruddy dried blobs of Patented Babybird Handfeeding Porridge. In addition, I had no shoes, knickers, handbag – and worst of all, my hair was not brushed.             The cruelty of nightmares is mindboggling. The only thing I did have (apart from the parrot-crap encrusted nightie which was supposed to be hidden under the privacy of my own bedsheets), was a peculiar red woolly scarf thing around my neck. I’d never seen it before in my life and hadn’t the faintest clue what it had to do with anything. I spent a few kilometres wondering whether I could fashion it into a sort of loincloth, but it seemed a bit of an exhibitionist thing to stand up and do.             Anyway, it was the messy hair bit which was really upsetting. You don’t feel right if you’re not well groomed. With nice hair, you can sit there confidently in your nightie on any old train, even the city commuter – and snub your nose at the world, basically. People will look at you and think you have nice hair. If you haven’t, you leave yourself wide open for them to notice all the other anomalies, which in this case were legion.             After a couple of hours sitting on the train, with various subplots (too complicated to be bothered going into) unfolding around me, I eventually realised (because in nightmares these things take a bit longer), I had better get off at the next station and attempt to return to whence I’d started – which was not going to be a doddle without money, or identification even.             The last thing I remember was standing in front of the ticket office trying to explain I needed to go back the way I’d come. The ticket man in the nightmare was just like ticket men everywhere, which was reassuring. He stared at me blankly because he evidently had no command of English and kept saying ‘Bosnia’. At that point, I woke up.             I’ve never been more ecstatic to be in my own bed, I can tell you. I groped around for the red woolly scarf thingie, but it hadn’t crossed the barrier between the phantom train station and the doona.             I woke the Hunter-Gatherer. I said, ‘How could you abandon me on a train without any knickers?’ He was understandably baffled, and pretty annoyed I’d shamed the family by being seen at a railway station in the birdpoo nightie.             The thing is, what does it all mean? There is a fair chance it indicates I was running away from something without being properly prepared. The train meant I didn’t have the ability to drive that far, and the incoherent ticket man meant it’s hard to get good help these days.             What’s scary is, I don’t particularly want to go to sleep tonight in case there’s more to come. I keep wondering if I wear trousers and a jumper to bed, will I be better covered – and will a wallet and hairbrush tucked under the pillow make any difference? How can your subconscious betray you, when you’ve purposely decided not to be a drug addict or alcoholic so you can keep control of all your faculties? What good are your faculties anyway, when you’re not even awake enough to use them?             Anyway, I’m going to sit up all night, fully dressed. I don’t much like the thought of Episode 2 – Barefoot Escape to Bosnia. It has the potential to be worse than Episode 1 – Knickerless in a Non-Smoking Compartment.             If I do drop off though, this time I’m hanging on to that red scarf thing. It was cheerful and soft – and rather appealed.   .oOo.