Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

"I suppose if you were whiling away time..."

My mother, the woman who refutes any claim that she's constantly critical. The topic was Flickr. You know, that thing I'd kept hidden from her because it was nice to have something beyond the withering realm (and because it shares the name with something else. Hello non-existent people!). She appeared to be complaining that there was any text accompanying the photographs. You know that stuff that explains context and makes the image identifiable and retrievable. The bit that implies I give a damn and am not just dumping the contents of my hard drive. Yep, that's all a complete waste of time. And this from the woman who when wanting to comment on images says which row of search results it was in (and then complains I've moved things).

I can't think why I didn't let her know about it sooner. Unpunctured praise can be very damaging. You wouldn't want to catch an ego, would you?

I probably ought to have pointed out that it's been spread over 5 years, but suspect she wouldn't see that as a good thing.

Woah, 5 years? That's a long time. Um, and this thing here is older isn't it? Oh. Golly. How soon before it learns cursive?

Arylnuo-,

[That's what it looks like when I write it]

PS. Because I've yet to post this I can keep adding to it. The latest was being given permission to leave the house despite not being in her house or her presence. House-point for the first to work out the scenario which lead to that.

Will Obama let America be disliked?

Sorry, wrong page. Particle image velocimetry is also wrong too. As is the bit that might say Brunel or Brunch.

So the Mantaster notes (I travelled coach, which is this case is not American for Economy, so found myself with a long time to fill, hence the notes):
- Sequin Scrunchie. I'm not sure adding more words can better express the concept. I was stuck waiting for the coach to get round to picking us up (but I ran, I took the Tube in the rush hour with luggage to avoid being late [the buses having just not come] and this is how you repay me?). It caught my attention. Along with some hair.
- More beards than a folk festival including two bigger than the heads bearing them. Again not much explanation needed.
- V. tempted to mist up the window and write "Let the train take the strain". Not sure the rest of the M1 would appreciate it though.
- When your live's in a mess. Never could remember which was life and which live. Did get to use it later.
- Plan: Bus-Walk-Coach-Bus. Actual: Wait-Run-Tube-Wait-Coach-Walk. Now even less of a fan of buses than I used to be.
- When did curvy lorries happen? I think they're M&S's. It's odd how simple, reasonable changes can seem so, well, odd. Though I still find it weird that they're no longer called artics because they nearly all are articulated.
- Golly, lorries go slowly, by which I mean they take a hell of a long time to sidle past on the inside.
- Is the toilet sign negative or positive? Lit when available? Or does red mean it's in use? [It turns out that despite displaying the male and female symbols for a loo when lit this means that it is not currently available. So red is the coded indicator. Heaven help the colourblind].
- Where the hell is Gulliver's Land? Though it is illustrated with a drawing of a Houyhnhnm, albeit impaled on a pole.
- [I think we can skip the lorry driver beard scoring section. Equus.pl seem to be winning].
- Star's Horror in Bookshop. Headline across the aisle. Suspect correct response is not does not begin "Ooh, is it the new...".
- Toilet is colour not symbol.
- Pentagon building corrugated, j N of M1 Welcome Break with glazed footbridge (S of Northampton Serv). It seemed interesting at the time; wasn't much else to do.
- Trains don't have seat belts. Maybe they ought to but I'm used to sitting side-saddle due to the whole legs thing. That and it's eroding my neck.
- Food & Drink roundel in Winnatrice Station not a clock not matter how hard you squint. I was running through it late and wanted to how.
- Pimped aisle. It had many blue LEDs.
- Autumn's gothy curse. Although gothy could also by grotty. Or apathy. Write like a prescription (ay-oh way-oh).
- Jacket made out of bar towels; useful in the rain. Across the aisle from me. National-Expressers have different sensibilities.
- Temporary speed restrictions on M6 toll. Kinda defeats the point of having a road how they all used to be. How depressing that I can remember the other.
- Muslim woman swathed in scarves, looks like a nun.
- iPhone in front: "starbucks price", "calories costa", "vegetarian falafel". I stopped reading over her shoulder at this point. She had an underfed bone structure (think retroussé cheekbones on a platter of "in the morning I'll be sober") and copy of a Twilight sequel.
- About as confrontational as his images. Of a Flickrite. I'll let you choose which one. But if you draw a 3x3 grid and colour most of the squares in blue and the middle square of the bottom row in pink (Flickr colours) you'll be somewhere near the right answer.
- Offensive (on the, occasionally verging on the outright). Ditto.
- So much Freudian analysis one wonders if he's related.
[And because I was doing stuff and not quite so bored the notes skip to the return]
- GBH Newsagents. Down the road from He Who Queues.
- Mere Monstrosities. The houses of.
- Anyhoo is in historic Canutesford with a Japanese woman of uncertain age nodding on his shoulder. [Guess who doesn't see the point in paying to tell people via Twitter or Facebook how bored I am IRT]
- Anyhoo is in historic Canutesford counting the grey hairs of the guy in the seat in front (5).
- Anyhoo is on a coach lost in historic Canutesford.
- Anyhoo has found Cranford (in historic Canutesford).
- Why is a weekend away odd? Ooh, 200 miles. I was bemused by the bewilderment that repeatedly greeted the idea than one could travel from Loldom to one of the Loldoms of the North for a single event.
- Anyhoo is on a coach with a [illegible] coach driver who can't read road signs
- [Anyhoo needs to improve his handwriting.]
- Anyhoo has Japanese woman again.
- HWQ: sun trousers comment. I think I'd best leave HWQ to explain this one.
- Anyhoo can see the Red Sea (of lights).
- St George's cross badge on lapel of hideously white second-leg driver - National Express customers = ? [Am I wrong in my assumptions? It's just patriotism does seem very American]
- Anyhoo is, after one-hour-and-twenty-minutes of travel, on a road heading towards Batten Park and Mantaster.
- Decorative Garden Centre (?)
- Anyhoo is travelling back in the right direction (finally covering the roundabout [something] like the sign for one [it was dark by this stage, hence the wonky writing]).
- Not a Christian ([something that looks a bit like 'or'] another ['interest' or 'anti[something'}... Oh, figured it out now. It's meant to read "Not a Christian (on another continent '...or European')". The terms in this context being synonymous (equally euphemistic).
- Takes one to know one. Thus spake the ex-teacher.
- Anyhoo voyeurs. Except that sounds like polished metal brushing past concrete, so clearly I could never have written it.
- LDA (Long Distance Awkwardness. Coined through an inappropriate use of LOL, but strangely fitting of about a third of the interactions with HWQ).
- As Chamberlain said to Hitler. Nicked from a book of Victoria Wood sketches (I was waiting post-party for others to emerge and I'd already done the washing up). the line before it was something like "Look, we're both reasonably intelligent adults, we should be able to solve this".
- Mobiles as torches. The Imperial War Museum of the North, or whatever it's called, turns the lights off repeatedly while they show some son-et-lumière, thus meaning all the blurb on the walls, which actually be more informative than the rumbling vox-pops from above, is legible only by the light of a cameraphone set to shoot negative images. Just think how much quicker some bits of the Crystal Maze would have been if they'd had a phone.
- IDing film of 5-greys (not sure yet). 20s hats [something that looks like 'melon claiming']. Looks French, no subtitles, .
- Needed to flirt with pilot more (at all) to get non-coach means of getting home.
- Teh Building. Having seen assorted building site hoardings with varying degrees of techspeak, txtspk and yootspeek I just wondered how long it will be before there is a building somewhere which includes 'Teh' in its name. Or possibly "O HAI!" on the front doors.
- Lowery light, lowering light. Much the same thing. Damp layered greys with the odd block of red. Mantaster gets it way before Loldom.
- NX hand-drier would.
- The second driver turned the coach into the school bus, via the medium of radio playing unheard-of seventies pop. Possibly bus drivers are the only people in the country to still use AM.
- Streets paved with gold [outside the probation office]. Photographic evidence to Flickr sometime in 2010 probably.
- I [heart] MCR. Official slogan.
- I [heart] MAN. More likely to sell, possibly more likely to be understood.
- I [heart] MEN. Best arena name ever.
- Turned to God because no one else would have them [more previous encounters than any current example].
- Warnings [I can't read this bit].
- Few things cannot be improved by sultanas, although this does move anything un-cake-like in to the category of curry.

And that's it for the notes. All that's missing is the art, the art of cakes, the art of war, the art of hammockery and the traditional Mosh Slide Saturday night entertainment of breaking into a car (declining the neighbour's knowledgeable offers of help. All one needs is a wire coat hanger, a curtain pole and some paper plates).

Oh and watching District 9 (good, though pre-LOTR murder while listening to the Archers work shows). And Die Hard 4.0 with an earnest warning for viewers of a sensitive disposition (I was good and squelched the scathing sarcasm).

And HWQ still hasn't sent me the carrot cake recipe. Or the muffins one.

Anyway, need to go now as much, much later and I'm late for a late lunch.

Anyhoo,

Writing down the name. Doodling a heart around it. That's what people in love do. That's what I'll do. Write her name repeatedly. Endless lines of "I love Pomona Strand"; the after-school punishment of the unaware. Of course it was daft, copying the shape of the movement, but what else was I to do. What others had, or said they did, I didn't. The standard was void. I was broken, like SuperTed, waiting for some fey stranger to come and sprinkle sparkling dust over me.

Noticing that Aladdin was good looking (don't point out that he's an animation and were he real would be a severe aberration). I don't remember the woman's name. I think she wore green.

A life-time of looking at the wrong part of the screen.

Was always accused of being gay, so always denied it, in much the same way I denied being a virgin in year seven because I couldn't remember what it meant. Actually not knowing what it meant probably did apply. What prototypes were there? None I was allowed to know about. I remember reading a book my mother had left in the bathroom (I learnt to read on whodunnits)
the heat and fury, the wrongness, the otherness, the elusiveness; the pages felt like they'd stain me.

The information didn't so much sink the battleship as move the sea upwards.
I discovered years later reading a borrowed copy of Tales of the City that this was the incendiary tome. Yet now it's just a slightly dated weak pamphlet. It ought to have been the point where I realised there were other people like me, except I didn't realise it was meant to be me in the book. I spent a huge chunk of my life being Tinkerbell; only existing when other people chose to define me.

One can never tell if the closet's made of mirror-glass or just glass. It's an inverse Emperor's new clothes.

Instead I spent much of my life not knowing, not quite knowing, while waiting for a straight guy to make the first move, to break the ice, the walls I didn't notice building, to take me through the looking-glass and to point out that the other world is the illusory.

No straight guy ever did. Instead, by some round-about route, I got there, flung against the mirror, impaling myself on it. Does one pull out the shards and risk bleeding to death, or leave them be and hope it heals?

I still haven't got them all out. Deep in the scars of that other world things grate, grinding painfully, slicing deep within me, wounds only I know, feel.

But everyone goes through a windscreen, falls out of a tree, or even builds their own cross to collapse on top of them. Enlightenment means, makes disillusionment; the improbable is easier to see dimly. Such is life. It always is just whatever it is, has been. The only variable is to be, but there's little leeway in that.

I would apologise for being maudlin, but I'm not quite sure I am. Intro-, retrospective. But even hindsight is only through dropped binoculars.

Anyhoo,

Audience participation time again. Someone's just asked if I do Christmas cards. "Yes, soon" I think the reply current is. So if you can think of something suitable on my Flickr account let me know through email of tagging it something suitable (currently using Christmasable, but the selection was basically anything I can think of that might fit and currently includes repetitions as I edit and tweak format for printing (and then realise it looked better before the edit)).

And if you still haven't done the general non-Christmas cards voting then please do so [starting point?], again either emailing me with the links of those you like or by tagging them yourself with something along the lines of "cardyXXX", where you are the XXX (and the y means 'yes'). Yes, I am of course assuming this is nowhere near popular enough that people chose the same tagging codes, but it's a risk I'm going to have to tolerate.

In other news I need to look up when the next Grand Prix is on because I want to find out if Firefox is really managing more crashes per hour than F1. I would have defected to Chrome by now had Google endangered their revenue stream by encouraging ad-blocking on it.

Oh, and this needs to be read (scroll to the bottom), if only to remind you not to read the original. He manages to make Dan Brown sound like Tolstoy (well, War and Peace went on for ages after the story finished while the author propounded through characters and it had a lot of pointless stuff involving Masons in it too).

Anyhoo,