Goats

I like to think of farm animals as a kind of Bloomsbury Group or Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Studio 54 - a collection of artists, all in their own way contributing great things to society.

Sheep are the Rossetti or Woolf of the group - the leaders, the most prolific and infamous. Their list of contributions to the world is impressive:
The jumper. lamb shanks. Insipration for religion (the Lord is my Shepherd) and popular culture (Shaun) and common phraseology (mutton dressed as lamb). They are my heroes and an inspiration to many.

Cows are a slightly lesser geniuses (genei?) but also impressive… where would we be without the roast beef dinner, cow print pajamas and udderly dreadful cattle-related puns?
Even ducks, who are perhaps more craftsmen than artists, manage to deliver a mean pancake, and also star in the world’s greatest joke: (two ducks, swimming on a pond. One says 'quack'. the other says 'I was about to say that!')

Goats, however, I cannot place into my theory. Tragically for them, they remind me of those people who try their very hardest to contribute great things, to be remembered, but only succeed in producing junk, like the poor guy off Dragon’s Den who pitched his idea of a single driving glove to remind motorists which side of the road to drive on. Or Giles Brandreth.


 

                                                                                   
                                               Spot the Difference

 Here is an inventory of the goat’s achievements to date.

Goats' cheese : mingin'
Goats' milk : funky-tastin’
Billy Goats Gruff : an okay fairy tale, but it's no Chicken Licken.
The goatee beard... the worst of the lot. Beards should always look accidental.
Just to complete my theory, I once ate goat stew when on one of my many forrays into Africa. They even taste like sheep gone wrong.

Perhaps if there were no sheep or cows, we wouldn’t have to compare a goat’s attempts at art to his vastly superior contempories, and he could come into his own on his own and shine on a global stage. If there were no sheep, perhaps the religious would be chanting ‘the Lord is my Goatherd’ and we’d all be wearing goat-string vests in summer. But sadly, it’s all relative, in the cultural hotbed of the farmyard as everywhere else.
 
Still, God loves a trier.

Rhubarb and Its Effect on Global Warming

The great Raymondo knows three things about rhubarb :

1. It is grape-flavoured celery.
2. It’s the kind of thing no-one under 40 cooks with. One has to be a certain distance over the hill to even consider it a viable ingredient for anything.
3. It is the word most often repeated by extras in Hollyoaks, when they are attempting to emulate real conversation. (Seriously – watch their lips).
All fascinating facts, obviously, however not very helpful in attempting to decipher how far this innocent looking vegetable is actually to blame for the meltdown of the planet.
With this in mind I asked my flatmate who, as a graduate with honours from the University of Q.I, gave me the following bona-fide scientific facts:

When rhubarb is filmed, and the film is sped up, one can hear it creaking.
There is a place in existence today called the Rhubarb triangle. It is not a place where planes full of rhubarb mysteriously disappear, (if such planes existed, rhubarb’s effect on global warming would be happily obvious), but three towns over in Yorkshire which specialise in growing the stuff.

These growers of rhubarb play a cruel trick on it. They put it under intense sunlight, then shove it in a dark corner. This peculiar form of vegetable torture disorientates the stuff so much that it stops growing leaves altogether, and all its energy goes into its crumbleable stemmy bit.
Using my mighty B grade in GCSE Biology, I can now triumphantly declare that, when rhubarb Has No Leaves, it cannot do its photosynthesis, and this will increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, thus not helping the Global Warming issue one jot.

Put another way, with the help of my flatmate who also has a Sciencey degree from Liverpool University where she did statistics and stuff :

'there is a significant negative correlation between the number of rhubarb leaves in existence and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere'

Leafless Rhubarb : not doing its bit.

So there you go.

Alternative Mother's Day

Mother’s day, in my family, runs a little something like this:

The Great Raymondo turns up on her Mother and Dear Father’s doorstep with a card bought the day before, a bunch of flowers from Tesco and a half-hearted offer to hoover.

What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing

My sister Catherine 'The Deserter' Edwards will follow and ram a 4th car onto Mother’s two-vehicle drive, with a bigger bunch of flowers, a husband, a rabbit called Rufus on a lead and a half-hearted offer to dust the living room. We will drink tea prepared by Mother. Someone will ironically sing two lines of Mama by the Spice Girls.

This will be followed by church, where the vicar will inevitably talk about Mary as the epitome of Motherhood – self sacrifice, endurance of trials, unfailing love. We will all patronisingly applaud our Mothers. Mum will smile at the sentiment but her eyes will tell another story.

We will return home where mum will prepare a Sunday roast, listen to arguments about unresolved childhood mysteries (Was it Catherine or me who scraped that rude message about our neighbour onto the bonnet of Mum’s red Micra?) and she will ask me, again, if I would ever like to become a Mother. The Great Raymondo will repeat, for the 20th year in a row, that ‘reproduction is self annihilation’ and take another bite of her roast beef. Pregnant sister will cackle.
We will play Scrabble. I will win.

The cards and flowers will stay up for exactly one week, after which they will be shoved in a sock drawer inside cards from previous years.

This routine, as you may imagine, is getting a little old. Perhaps mother feels the same, but is keeping schtum in a spirit of Mary-esque Motherly endurance.


Here’s how I’m hoping 3rd April will go down this year:

Morning: Sister and I will arrive at family home. She will park car on road, sensibly.

We will go to church. Vicar will tell congregation that Mary should have stood up for herself and not taken any rubbish her from unruly children, Mother will raise her hands and shout ‘testify.’

There will be zero attempts at allaying guilt for a lifetime of demands with offers of housework. Instead, the Raymonds and Edwards’ will go out for a pleasant round of paintballing.





The question of who scraped the rude message about our neighbour into the bonnet of Mum’s car will be decided once and for all by paintballs-at-dawn. I will win. Sister will tearfully confess.


Mum will enjoy the experience so much she will start a paintballing group within the University of the Third Age.


In the evening, Dad will cook his famous steak, chips and Colman’s peppercorn sauce. He will remember to flip the chips over halfway through.

When asked if I ever want children I will answer ‘hmm, yes, maybe,’ to avoid Mother utterly despairing of more Grandchildren.

We will play Scrabble. I will win.

Here’s hoping. Happy Mother’s day.

Why I Believe in Fairies

Because I was one. In a primary school production of Sleeping Beauty, I played the green fairy, and was allowed to bless the crib holding the Baby Beauty with my little spangly wand.

Blatant Fairy Amazon Link :)


 I had a green vest, a white underskirt with green bows sewn on, and my one line - of which I was hugely proud - was ‘she will grow up to be healthy’. And lo and behold, she did grow up to be healthy, apart from that 100 years she spent asleep which is probably more than medical professionals recommend, no matter how hard she’s been worked by the evil step-mother/queen/grandmother (I forget which).

Reason number 2 : As a resident of Liverpool, home of raucous hen-dos and badly put-together fancy dress costumes,  I see them every Friday night on the way home from my weekly shop at Tesco Express (don’t laugh – it’s their quietest time). They congregate on Matthew Street, complete with tinsel wands, sparkly wings and knee socks, and occasionally with facial hair and handfuls of leaflets for two-for-one shots at Baa Baa that they thrust in my direction, despite the fact that I am laden with carrier bags full of loaves and sardines. They are usually much louder and lairier than one would expect such delicate supernatural beings to be, but still, seeing is believing as they say, and I have seen with Mine Own Eyes.

The Great Raymondo on her way home from Tesco

I am not alone when it comes to believing in fairies. Mr Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame believed he had some living down the bottom of the garden between his compost heap and his petunias and there are plenty of people you’ll come across at Mind Body and Spirit Fayres who will agree with him wholeheartedly and try to sell you squares of porcelain with their footprints in. If however, Monsieur Doyle and nice ladies in flowing silk scarves are not strong enough witnesses for you, why not try one of these little ways to test their existence?

1. Yank out a tooth (preferably a non-essential one, a lazy incisor or another), put it under your pillow, and sit and wait for a 50p piece strapped to the back of a little sprightly being to float in through your bedroom window.
2. Drink a glass of Absinthe, sit back, and wait for a little sprightly being to dance in through your bedroom window (it worked in Moulin Rouge).
3. Clap your hands really really loudly chanting ‘I do believe in fairies’ and see what you get (besides vibrating palms).

DO you ever think : What if it's me?

Here are some occasions when the Great Raymondo thinks ‘What If it’s Me?’

·         When playing the lottery.

·         When someone says ‘what’s that smell ?’– ever so slightly paranoid as I am.

·         When people talk about who is next in line for the throne after Harry

·         When Police Cars go past with their sirens on, even if I haven’t stolen from TK Maxx that day (arg, gnash, guilt, perhaps they found footage from two-years ago etc etc)

·         When someone says ‘who’s round is it’ while looking right at me and shaking their glass. This is closely followed by me looking at my handful of bacon fries and whistling.

·         When looking for the cause of it all going wrong. This is followed by a cold, dismissive laugh and a shake of the head.

‘What if it’s me?’ like ‘I should really call my mother’ is a thought which occurs to many, so I have cast my net out into the world of my friends and drawn in some interesting responses:

Louise: What if it was me in the Japanese earthquake?

Tom : When I am looking around at the mouthbreathing swill that makes up the world around me, munching contentedly on tasteless excrement, grinning idiotically with their loved-up lifemates, reaping the fiscal rewards of an inanely materialistic culture sometimes I wonder if it’s me? What if I’m insane and they’re the sane ones?

Mum : (when a little girl) What if it’s me who gets to marry Prince Charles? (FYI, it wasn’t).

Jen :  I can’t think of anything. Je suis rubbish.

‘What if it’s me?’ is a question which can land on you in a state of joy, hope, horror, despair or pride. It is the question which accompanies all emotions. When it turns out that, in actual fact, it Is You, the question ‘And What Are You Going To Do About It?’ is the trickier one to answer, and the one that will ultimately define you.

And I’m sure my Mum would have made an excellent Princess, and wouldn’t have stood for any carrying on with Camilla nonsense.



Not my mother



Life Drawing

Life Drawing is another area of this fine world that I have No Experience Of. My drawings at school were always described as erratic by my art teacher Mrs Heaton, and to my recollection I have never drawn anything from life other than a pot plant during one rainy art lesson in year 9 with my Beloved Friend Jennifer Valerie. (We subsequently snuck out to help the caretaker litter-pick on the back field as we made the joint decision that it would be altogether More Interesting).

My father, an excellent artist, is a connoisseur of the more risqué types of life drawing, aka, the naked type. He is currently enthusiastically rummaging around in a box of pastel drawings that he just dragged out of a dusty corner of his office in an attempt to find some of his favourites, done as a member of the prodigious Ashton Art Group. The top three are, in descending order :

Naked 20 something lady in nothing but a hat
Naked twenty something lady in nothing
Naked twenty something lady with back to us and bottom shaped like peach.


So far it all seems rather glamorous, however, I am assured that the world of life drawing is not all Jack, Rose and the hope diamond. Men have stormed out when faced with male posers in possession of multiple rude piercings (Dad’s art teacher’s advice to ‘always draw the human form starting from the middle’ proving too difficult to follow)… and a lesser artist once threw in the charcoal when asked to draw a voluptuous 70 year old lady among purple umbrellas and scarves, with all her goods on display like a Greengrocer on Market day. 'I don't know where to start,' she apparently mumbled bewilderedly.

Life Drawing : Not Always Like This.

Just like life, and boxes of chocolates, it seems that life-drawers are never aware of what they’re gonna get before they walk into the church hall and turn on the heater. It’s all part of the fun.

All things considered, Life drawing seems like a perfectly nice, healthy way to keep fathers out of trouble. However, it is not something the Great Raymondo would consider participating in, either on the pencil-holding side or the lying-on-table-borrowed-from-the-Brownies-and-trying-not-to-blink side. One would make her blush and the other would make her shiver. She is not a fan of doing either.