Georgian By Choice

Too cool

I've had a week of contrasting environments. Last Friday I was at a big record label. Laconic, beardy, achingly cool - even with post-Brits seediness. Walls plastered with black and whites of pretty much every big star you could imagine. Floor to ceiling speakers.  Interesting lighting.

Too hot

On Tuesday, I was deep in the labyrinthine warren behind a massive supermarket. Stiflingly hot. No natural light. Endless corridors. Grey linoleum. Swing doors and lockers with stern notices - 'This area is often left in a disgusting state. Clean up after yourself'. Next to the lift, a poster titled 'Smile of the Week' - featuring snapshots of slightly happy staff.

Sort of cool/sort of hot.  Just right

Today I am in a Georgian mansion. Rooms with high ceilings, flooded with lights from huge windows, vast staircases (both wide and shallow). Staircases to glide up and down.  Staircases from which to make a Grand Entrance. If you shut your eyes you can almost hear the rustle of silk taffeta. The house is set in the middle of rolling park land, with old walled gardens (schwing), and a lake and a crumbling stable block.

Last Friday was a sleek showroom - tight and staged, effortful, impressive and slightly intimidating. Tuesday was bleak utility - the ugliness and grind behind the scenes. Today is peace and confidence. Nothing to prove. Nothing to hide. This place KNOWS it's beautiful.

Fallback Position

Ballsack

A crossword puzzle. I am faced with the conundrum of _ ALLBA_ _. My internal lexicon immediately offers up a solution: BALLBAGS. And now I'm seeing BALLBAGS, it's like I'm blind to any other possibility. But is this really likely on the MindGames page of The Times? Let's be rational and search for an alternative. Maybe, just maybe, the B is wrong. Which would leave me with _ ALL _ A _ _.

BALLSACK. This seems more feasible. It's the sort of down-to-earth term that Dr Christian would use on 'Embarrassing Bodies' to put a patient at ease. 'So Lee, I understand you're having problems with your ballsack?' Yes. Perfectly reasonable.

I'm about to ink it in when I realise, sadly, that the answer is FALLBACK. Not BALLBAGS. Not BALLSACK.

Of course, there is nothing to stop me writing the letters I want in those tempting spaces. Occasionally I choose to do this. The only bit I can manage in a cryptic crossword is the cross. They make me disproportionately angry. Like riddles and anything involving a man filling a bath with a dripping tap. But on a busy commuter train there is nothing I enjoy more that filling in a cryptic crossword at breakneck speed. With drivel and rude words. Particularly if I am respectably dressed.

1 Down - Spanish magistrate offers new deal after gangster gets caught (7)  PATATAS
51 Across - Move slowly, being at communion? (4)  ANUS
44  Down - Get very cold outside?  One needs shelter round start of evening. (3, 4) DOG LARD

To any competitive onlookers (and they do exist) I appear to be some kind of autistic savant.  Only those closest know the truth.

My fallback position is ballsack.  Always and forever.

Running In - Please Pass

Imagine with beard + overalls

Last week my car became due for its first proper service.  Not one of the silly intermittent one - which seems to be little more than an oil change and a flannel swiped round the privates.  For these I've been taking it to the dealership, in a scaredy-cat-not-wanting-to-risk-the-warranty's-validity way.  It's now out of warranty, but the dealership contacted me, so I asked for a quote anyway.

When they told me the price, I laughed, and then retched, and then laughed again.  Then I rang the local garage up the road.  I told the chief mechanic what the dealership had quoted me and he laughed drily.  'They would, wouldn't they?' he dead-panned, like a bearded Mandy Rice-Davies.

And with that, I woke from my dealership enchantment, slashed my way out of the forest of complimentary key fobs and showroom Nespresso, and came to my senses.  Back where I belong, in the garage up the road, where nobody raises an eyebrow at the tooth I've lost from my front grille, or the scuffs on my wheel arches.  Was going to get these fixed, but quite frankly they're the only thing that stops my car looking like Noddy's runaround.  Know who you are.  Know where you belong.

Anyway, I'm back.  And the title of this post is not actually about my car, but more about this blog.  I've been SORN for a long time - there's rust on my brake discs, corrosion on my exhaust system and a great deal of bird shit on my bonnet.

Nothing that a road trip and a flannel can't sort.

Good to be back.