Am off to the hospital this morning. Just a minor thing but it involves a general anasthetic, so no food or drink for me until it's all over - which is why I now need a cup of tea and a bit of toast like I've never needed them in my life before!

What larks, eh, Pip!

... Jack "Born to be Riled" Sugden reels from the fallout of his exploding house - cats are out of bags, pigeons have come home to roost and pipers are about to be paid (probably in dead cats and pigeons) as one of his fire-staring offspring heads for chokey and the other yet again seeks to blame everyone else for her own wanton disregard for the safety and well-being of others (a trait she shares with, among others, our own dear ex-prime-minister Mr Tony Blair).

Still, at least the Woolpack didn't burn down this time.

One of the many delights of our recent holiday was a visit to a little village called Turzo to buy candles. Turzo is a tiny place - not much more than ten houses and a church, plus the Turzo Velas candle factory and shop. And what a shop! It's full of the most amazing candles, all looking gorgeous and smelling like heaven. Impossible to describe it adequately, but their website will give you a ghost of an impression. And I've put up a few pix of the shop and village on Facebook.

Also, the shop man was great - dead friendly and helpful. Plus he spoke great English, which is always a humbling experience.

Husband has written with his usual eloquence about our visit to the utterly lovely Casa Zalama. I meanwhile have posted a few pix of this little slice of heaven.

Sometimes I think it would be better not to go on holiday. I mean, you go, you have a fabulous time and then you come back to, well, normality I suppose. And in my case, normality means emails I should have answered weeks ago, a mountain of transcribing which never seems to diminish, a house and garden in sore need of some serious tidying and the inevitable mound of post-holiday washing.

Having said that, it was an unexpectedly top-notch holiday. Everything was more than a cut above our expectations - great lodgings, terrific location, nice little hire car, yummy (and girth-increasing) food, and a visit to the tomb of El Cid (actually the tomb itself isn't very exciting, but it's a bloody lovely cathedral).

The new camera did yeoman's service - 432 shots in all, of which probably about 40 are any good - not a bad average for me, I'd have to say. Selected shots will be available for viewing just as soon as Husband gives me the flickr password.

Over the years Husband and I have become occassionally-avid players of boardgames, favouring in particular those of a fantastic bent. Our first love was Talisman (1st edition* I think - the one where the expansion sets come in a wild variety of graphic styles and don't really fit together with the main board in any meaningful way) and we have enjoyed this in many locations with many different friends.

More recently we have become rather enamoured of Arkham Horror, a fabulously complex little beauty that has you battling co-operatively against a different one of H P Lovecraft's Great Old Ones each game. Yesterday we took on Nyarlathotep - a damned close-run thing in the end, what with one of us in the Assylum and two more barely clinging on to both sanity and stamina whilst battling hoards of nasties in the streets of Miskatonic University. With four of us in the game it took about 5 hours and many cups of tea to get the job done. Fortunately it all ended without loss of life, and a hearty and well-deserved curry was enjoyed by the victors.

* A fourth edition is due out in October - you can see an overblown and rather crap trailer for it, if you really want to waste eye-power in that way.

So, yesterday was the day of Frank's funeral and a hard day it was, but I think we gave him the best good-bye we could manage under the circumstances. My brother Ken oversaw the proceedings and friend Chris spoke with affecting wit of Frank's renaissance-man life, love of Merrydown cider and house full of musical gadgets (many of which he'd made himself), while later at the 'do' a friend from work explained the significance of pink shirts. Afterwards we talked of our beloved friend and of ourselves, swapping family news and gossip, talking about the easy stuff because the other stuff was just too hard.

And despite the utter tragedy of the whole affair, it was a day of strange, almost guilty, pleasures: meeting up with old friends, some of whom not seen for decades, and finding the old connections still intact despite my neglect; being back in my beloved Black Country and hearing my accent echoed back to me in many voices; taking tea and cake on Stourbridge High Street, familiar from the days when Roy used to live there but strangely unfamiliar too; driving through the country lanes of Shropshire, most beautiful county in England, and remembering it as our old stamping ground from the Wolverhampton days; and finally westering home up the M6 with a huge orange sun beside us and Blazin' Fiddles on the CD. Not putting the 'fun' in funeral exactly, but reminding us of our connection to life.

If you go here and watch the Short Cuts Documentary Video, you will eventually see me coming over all rhapsodic about Celia Johnson's enormous face. Rather confusingly, the preceding bit (shot in almost total darkenss as an accidental homage to Clint Eastwood) features one of our esteemed Film Studies Lecturers talking about the 1979 gang movie The Warriors and the doc is cut such that I appear to be talking about that film and not, as I actually was, Brief Encounter. I am however mightily tickled by the idea of an archetypal icon of the English middle classes going all hard-assed on the gangs of New York. Bet old Celia had a mean left hook, and woe betide if you got on the wrong side of her broken bottle, eh, Trevor!

Husband has recently been fiddling around with Facebook in an effort to understand its appeal to the Young Folk.  Not wanting to be left out I done got me one o' them critters m' self.

At first I thought the whole thing was a bit (a) fatuous (b) puerile and (c) pointless, but having played with it quite a bit when I should have been transcribing interviews or reading Very Hard Books I'm really beginning to warm to it.

Strangely, since Facebook is a so-called Social Networking Site, its appeal to me is directly related to my lifelong difficulty in making friends.  Because I'm articulate and funny, people mistake me for an extrovert (if that binaried nomenclature has any real validity) when I am in fact a much stranger beast, an introvert in search of an audience.  This is to say, I find the company of others both frightening and draining (the more so when they are strangers) but I'm driven to perform a version of myself to entertain these fearful entities, in order to feel part of the human race.

This need to 'dance my dance' has resulted in my keeping not one but four, count 'em, four blogs (all with pretty much identical content): A Lull in the Proceedings (LJ), Thinking of Wittering (blogger), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (wordpress) and Celia Johnson's Enormous Face (blog.co.uk).  Lull was my first foray into the blogosphere and initially the LJ friending mechanism drove me to distraction.  I longed for friends but could never decipher the protocols for making it happen.  I'd gaze enviously at other people's friends lists, darkly muttering 'nobody loves me, everybody hates me, going down the garden to eat worms'.  Things got so bad that I had to lay off the whole blog thing for a couple of years until I'd calmed down.  It only got better when I realised what I was doing and came to appreciate that, as in fleshworld, I am a creature who requires a few, close friends and a big audience.

So where does Facebook fit in?  Well, with the fear of other people comes the retincence, the feeling that any personal communication from me could only ever be regarded as an impertinence and an imposition.  My habit is, therefore, to lose touch with people, even those I really like, rather than engender in them an imagined irritation.  Facebook, however, with its poking and message walls, aquariums and gardens, allows me to send gentle and not-very-importunate reminders of my existence that require no more response than the occassional poke back to let me know I'm still human.  Furthermore, its endless array of personality-divulging titivations, which inform the world of your favourite books, films, TV show, backpacking holidays, llama farms and so on, have enormous appeal for my Inner Performer.

So now, while I still think Facebook is fatuous and puerile, I no longer think it useless.

MySpace though - that's just ugly!

It's a glum old day in the office this morning - everybody else is on holiday, so I am alone with just a fan heater and some ailing plants for company. My aloe vera plant, which was doing so well last year, has suddenly started to develop crispy brown bits. Could this mean it needs water? Odd, since it survived the last twelve-month on barely a teaspoon of liquid. Or am I perhaps overwatering? Eek - how do I tell? Add to this the fact that my trail-y creeper-y vine-y thing is looking a bit the worse for wear and only one conclusion is possible: I am NOT Good With Housplants.

Alternatively they might have Sick Office Syndrome. I do after all work in a location which requires cooling fans in the middle of winter and warming fan-heaters at the height of summer. Not the way to lessen our carbon footprint, is it chaps?