Anyone remember the spitting image song?
Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
Paint your left knee green
Then extract your wisdom teeth
Form a string quartet
And pretend your name is Keith
Skin yourself alive
Learn to speak Arapahoe
Climb inside a dog
And behead an eskimo
Eat a Renault Four with salami in your ears
Casserole your gran
Disembowel yourself with spears
Now you’ve heard it once
Your brain will spring a leak
And though you hate this song
You’ll be humming it for weeks…
I have been humming it all day… hopefully not for weeks or I might end up in a padded cell. Sadly I am definitely not allowed to explain why or I really will be drummed out of the Brownies. I might explain if you ask me offline.
It may just be that mild hysteria is setting in. There were a total of seven children including mine trashing the house for most of the afternoon. I finally shut the door on the last of the invaders while simultaneously posting my own into a bath at 8 o’clock. We do have an open door policy in general, and I do like having kids in, if the truth be known. When we first arrived here we used to get quite a lot of visits from the local primary aged kids; old enough to be out on their own, but young enough not to have learnt to hide their curiosity about how the English people live and whether they might have anything interesting in their house. Once our novelty value faded it has been pretty quiet on the marauding children front for the last couple of years, but now of course Joni is at school, so there are a new crop of visitors coming to play with him. In an ideal world it would probably be easier to referee if they arrived one at a time, but “this is my friend, and this is his brother, and that’s my brother, and that’s his friend…” and really where could I have drawn the line to say you’re in and you can wait outside? So there we all were.
Fortunately Joni’s getting better at helping to clear up. And now they’re all asleep like little angels. Until tomorrow.
I have come to the conclusion that I am definitely superstitious despite supposedly being a full-time-Christian-worker (whatever one of those might be). So I fear if I tell you this then I may bring a bad outcome upon myself. At the same time if I do tell you then you might pray. The question is, will your prayer be effective enough to counter the negative effects of my superstition? Well, don’t tell anyone I said anything, but there’s a guy in the University in Santa Fe who has taken all the paperwork (copies of, obviously) relating to my qualifications, and he thinks he might be able to help me. He’s had it for the last two days and I didn’t get a response yet. In fairness there is quite a lot of it and a third of it is in English, a third of it is the Spanish translations of the English and the other third are the certificates legalising the translations as genuine, so it might taken him a few days to figure out how it all relates to each other before he even gets as far as reading it. It is so hard not to get excited about this even though I know from the many many experiences so far that the most likely conclusion is nothing at all. So I’m drumming my finger nails on the desk and humming a little tune… hold a chicken in the air stick a deckchair up your nose….