village life 874

Sunday, 5 September 2010

It's funny how a village you know quite well can radically change in character with a couple of road blocks, a few hundred people, some live music, night time and lighting.  My friend and I mused on this as we wandered round a village festa last night, the street fête that each village holds once a year, that is all their own, that lasts a weekend and involves the eating of a lot of bifanas (pork steak in a bun), a lot of beer, and some unnecessarily loud pimba (look it up) music. It was the pimba that almost did for me last month when my village's festas were on.  The chapel grounds where the festas are held is a good 500m from my bedroom window, yet you would have sworn (as strongly as I did) that the pimba man (a man and his synth) were in the garden.  The only way to avoid being annoyed by the neverending pimba was to go, which we did one night, and drink enough to blot out the pimba as it played until 4.30 in the morning.  We had a blast. Last night, before the pimba began its assault to our ears, Vila Fresca put on some better music in the form of its own not-very-big Big Band, that had set up shop in front of the village font.  I climbed up the stairs of a derelict house that I have driven past dozens of times without really noticing, to take photographs from up on high.  It was really rather a beautiful sight, of the brightly lit village against the backdrop of the blackened peninsula dotted with sodium lights until Barreiro and Lisbon in the distance, then the pure black of the sky. Sometimes, there's a lovely friendly atmosphere, where everyone's welcome, everyone remembers that they know you, or have passed you in the street.  Sometimes there isn't.  Last night, there definitely wasn't, it was one of those closed-shop kind of nights... one of those "I don't recognise you, I'm not even going to smile" and my blond-bead-braided pal, tall and fit and gorgeous, who has lived here as long as I have drew even tougher stares of "you're gorgeous, but who the hell are you?". Sometimes Portugal is the friendliest place in the whole world.  Sometimes, it is...

ickle baby piggy wiggies

Wednesday, 1 September 2010

There's an important thing in Portugal.  It's called lunch.Yesterday I went on my annual trip to near Viseu to pick up my sogra* from the "termas" at the end of her two week stay.  "Termas" are hot spring spas, dotted about the country, much like Bath Spa, but still functioning as a spa and not as a railway station.  The "termas" and the experience of the "termas" is like something from another century... but that's for another day.  I left home at seven thirty yesterday morning.  I had to be there by midday and with the inevitable stops ordered by my bladder and a quick trip to a shopping centre in Coimbra to grab something for my sogra, there was no time for meandering about, taking pictures, something I always swear I must do every time I drive anywhere beyond Lisbon.  Portugal never ceases to amaze with its beauty.  Decadence, yes, squalor, sometimes, but underlying all that, beauty.   It was about 35ºC yesterday, overcast and humid... but I luxuriated in my air conditioning... something I wouldn't be able to use on the way home.  After the termas' treatments, my sogra can't get cold or draughty for at least two weeks, or the treatments will have been a waste of time (I really DO have to look into the science of the termas one of these days) and air conditioning is specifically a cold and draughty utility.Every time she visits these termas, her special treat at the end is to go and eat leitão in her favourite leitão restaurant in Mealhada, which is just north of Coimbra.  So much of Portugal to see in one day.  I left home, drove up the ghost motorway that is the A13 (don’t use it, it’s MINE) to Santarém and Almeirim (birthplace of sopa de pedra), then up to Coimbra (birthplace of Coimbra University), then across to Cabanas de Viriato (birthplace of Aristídes Sousa Mendes, look him up), then back to Santa Comba Dão (birthplace of Salazar, look him up if you really know nothing of Portugal), through Luso (birthplace of more hot spring water) and finally Mealhada (the birthplace — and deathplace — of tiny cooked baby pigs).  When I was growing up, the suckling pig featured in every illustration, film or cartoon that involved a banquet; that small pig on a silver platter, sitting on a bed of lettuce and, of course, it had an apple in its mouth.  I never saw one.  When you’re growing up you just hear the name.  It’s only when you’ve already grown up that it suddenly occurs to you that THIS IS A TINY ICKLY BABY PIGGY WIGGY! Coming down the hill from Luso, another spa town, a beautiful one that is half preserved in aspic, you start to see restaurants with pictures of either happy rounded cartoon pigs or photographed dead and roasted ones — unappealling, aesthetically speaking — until you arrive in Mealhada, the mecca of the tiny roasted baby piggies, where it seems there is nothing to eat except those roasted baby piggies.   Everywhere you turn there’s another sign for “Leitão da Bairrada”, Bairrada being a name for this region of mid Portugal, the beiras.  The bigger restaurants along the main road have their own roasting ovens at the back of the restaurant… this is industrial scale roasting of the tiny baby piggies, with huge chimneys black with burnt pig grease smoking away above the buildings, an uneasy sight.We went to the one we always go to.  It’s how the Portuguese side of this family rolls.  I pulled into the car park at 1.20pm and if there’s one thing that the Portuguese are punctual for (it is just the one thing) it is lunch: the place was already heaving.  Yesterday was August 31st.  This means it was the last day of the holidays and people may have just been paid.   As I did a quick tour of the car park,  20 more cars drove in behind me.  The car park was already full, but I waited until those who didn’t just give up (those who maybe didn’t belong to families who have to go to exactly the same place, year in, year out, and went to try somewhere else) had improvised an extra line of cars down the middle.  I improvised with them.  Once through the door it was confirmed that the place was extremely full.   We saw a waiter in a big white apron scuttling past, saying to a bunch of about eight people "follow me, follow me".  We didn't follow him, because I didn’t think he was talking to us.  My sogra said who cares if he’s not talking to us.  But in our deliberating we missed the man-in-the-white-apron-train.We went to ask at the bar.  “When you see a waiter in a wh...

have a nice weekend... of carnage

Friday, 27 August 2010

Now, shall we have a sweepstake on how many people will die on the roads of Portugal this weekend? How many paraplegics and quadraplegics created?How many drunks/uninsured/unMOTed caught by the 1700 moustachioed GNRs they've announced that there will be "fiscalizar-ing" the roads.This weekend is the main going home weekend...  people coming home and people going home.... and there will probably be, as usual, carnage.It occurred to me the other day that maybe the still disgraceful state of driving in Portugal is the fault of all of us living here.  How often do you shout at stupid drivers  from the safety  of your car?  Or shake you head in dismay reading the headlines in the paper everyday about road accidents Do you have friends and relations who drive like morons?  Do you dare to tell them to slow down?  I don't.  And what about the drinkers?  Do you offer to drive them home? Take their keys away? I don't.  I'd like to.  There some people I know who I'd like to call the police about, so drunk do they drive.  But then I'd be an antisocial pariah.Some time in the eighties in Britain, drink driving became the really antisocial habit that it is now.  There are still people who do drive drunk, of course, but it's mostly just scumfucks and good old fashioned alcoholics who do it.  It's not embarrassing to say "I'm driving" and decline a drink.  It's not unheard of for friends to take the keys from each other, to prevent them from driving.   This social turnaround is still to happen here.  There have been plenty of campaigns but it doesn't seem to stick; everyone must know by now that drink driving is stupid, illegal and horribly dangerous, but we ALL know people who do it.  (And sticking a load of police or GNR on the roads doing road side stops doesn't work very well.  Everyone knows where they are because they tell each other, and as soon as they're out of sight they just speed up again).So, are the rest of us to blame for not bugging the shit out of them? I think we ar...

Portugal never learns

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

A drawing I found in the archives from 2004, because Portugal never learns and with yesterday's fog and drizzle it was inevitable that there would be a 100 car pile up with 6 dead, and 24 seriously injured, because everyone here knows better and knows that they can drive just as fast as usual when the roads are wet, or they are drunk, or their vehicle isn't insured, because Portugal is a just a bunch of macho idiots on roads (I include women in that macho).

shadowy things

Sunday, 8 August 2010

I've been snorkelling in the Atlantic.  It's good, because I can see any sharks or giant octupodes that might be coming to get me,  the imagining of which normally prevents me from going out too deep.  SHARK!!!! There are so many different fish, just metres from the shore, that you'd never notice with out a mask.  I have been amazed. There are fish and bigger fish and not so big fish and small fish and tiny fish and REALLY tiny see through fish, a couple of starfish, some grotesque turd shaped sea cucumbers, loads of anenome, an urchin or two... but mostly default fish whose names I do not know. It is remiss of me.

I am in competition for stupid

Monday, 26 July 2010

Last week, Miss Non-Working Monkey put the best thing ever she has ever found on the internet, on the internet.  It is brilliant AND stupid. Of course, I felt I had to reciprocate the stupid. This is also an experiment in internet stupid. Why is it that the absolutely stupidest things get seen, passed around, emailed, facebooked, tweeted, etc.'ed more than other stuff? So this is my bit of stupid, dedicated to all the stupid on the internet.  I fully expect it to go viral.  Unlike anything else I ever bloody do.  *sulks*

my snot is black...

Monday, 19 July 2010

I have just got out of bed after getting home at three and spending half an hour scrubbing the shit (well, dust) off.  I still have grit in my eyes, my throat is coated in a fine layer of stoneware, and my snot is as black as a Londoner's.  This is what it is to go to festivals and outdoor concerts in Portugal - dust.  Not the knee deep squelchy mud of festivals in Britain, but all-pervading air-borne dust, this time from a mix between sand and earth in a big field near Lagoa de Albufeira, which is normally a twenty minute drive away from me. Yesterday afternoon, it took an hour to get to Super Bock Super Rock, even taking the back roads that not that many people know about.  We left at five, because I was going to have a tantrum if missed Stereophonics at seven oclock. I have had fantasies about putting tiny Kelly Jones in a cage in my kitchen so I he can sing gravellily whenever I prod him .... but that's what ipods are for, I s'pose.  Driving in to the enormous car park field, it was impossible to see much other than dust.  Dust in the air, dust on the staff, already wearing facemasks and scarves, dust on the parked cars.  Me being the slob I am, I think this is amusing.  The friend who went with me is more Portuguese about dirt. After a quick feel-up by a sour-faced policelady who confiscated the lid to my bottle of water ("Why?" "Because blah blah blah blah" "oh, ok..." well, she had one of those faces that you don't ask more than once) we were in with time to have a wander before Messers Stereophonics began.  It was all very Super Bock, BES, EDP, etc., and a shit LOAD of food.  One could have been forgiven for thinking that the only reason the Portuguese EVER go out is to eat (it IS the only reason the Portuguese do ANYTHING) .... where there's food, there's queuing. Them there Stereophonics were great.  We were right up front, and I finally realised just HOW tiny tiny Kelly Jones is, but just as adorable and just as gravelly... I don't know how he manages to not lose his throat entirely.  The five of them on stage and the crew all had a great time between themselves,  which compensated for the not exactly huge (but enthusiastic) crowd and everyone was very happy that they played "Maybe Tomorrow" and "Have a nice Day". When they finished, we wandered off to enjoy the dust a little more. More dust. Some more dust. Then a beer.  OH, god, I shouldn't have, because then there was THE LOO, which, although not the latrine of the eighties, WAS absolutely grotesque, like an individual plastic sun-warmed latrine full of poo. Some more dust. Some sitting and some sitting and some sitting, which included a lot of taking the piss out of everyone.  We are bad. As the evening went on, The Nationals and Spoon did their thing, which we ignored - I have energy enough for jiggling about and "woooooo-ing" for only two popular beat combos per day - and the crowds grew and grew, until there were a good 30,000 people there.... and the crowds WERE ALL OLD PEOPLE. So, old means over 35.  But when we were 17, that was damned old.  That was "holy shit, who's that loser, why's he hanging round with US?, he's always got some dope, I s'pose, but damn, he's weird and creepy" old.  There WERE people under 35, but more fun to see were the older ones.  There were people in their forties (yes, me), a woman who I recognised from somewhere, probably some "famous people are great" magazine, whose teen daughters were incapable of eating with their mouths shut, plenty of leathery tias in their fifties who would be horrified if I told them that they looked like the gypsies they despise, gentle looking people in their sixties, and some in their seventies, looking at odds with their doner kebabs.... a very un-festival crowd.  It was funny. Half past eleven, and we wandered down towards the main stage which was already pretty full.  We were close enough for Prince to be slightly larger than a large ant.  That was ok. Just before midnight, that ludicrous symbol appeared on the side screens and the backscreen and WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! More WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! and some intro music played as the New Power Generation (they're STILL called that) got themselves onto the stage.... bear in mind that I had decided that this was going to be a heap of shit, that Prince has gone too far up himself and Jehovah to be even remotely enjoyable (see here) .... Prince stepped onto the stage and my mouth, entirely of its own volition, grinned like a mad box ...

ANOTHER new fillum, Dead Sad Video...

Thursday, 8 July 2010

Another chloe red song. See her on http://myspace.com/chloered

my summer romance/hatred begins

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

Sometimes motherhood means having to make a fish in a hurry

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

everyone has a talent

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

AND her shoes were hideous

Sunday, 30 May 2010

It is done.  I took my girls to Rock in Rio to see Miley Cyrus and I will never have to do it again. My friend, Filomena, and I arranged to leave home yesterday with plenty of time to compensate for the inevitable traffic and queueing, with a picnic in her people carrier and pep talks to our four girls (8 to 16) about getting lost and "calming the hell down there in the back, we're more wired than you lot" (and for different reasons!).  We drove across the big bridge into the Lisbon, sure that we would immediately hit traffic once onto the ring road, safe in the knowledge that we would arrived at the gates well after the ghastly D'Zrt (a trying desperately to be hard and tattoey boy band who produce the blandest of "hard" pop, who were created in the equally ghastly kids' telenovela, Morangos com Merda), having had to drive an hour away from the park, get the metro, keep the smaller ones entertained, and queue for hours in the baking sun, willing it all to end.  But no.  We got a parking space ridiculously close to the venue, and the walk up the hill was the fasting moving queue I've ever seen.  We were inside the gates at ten past four... ten minutes after the gate opened, or rather, two hours earlier than we had hoped. It was supposed to be prohibited to take food and drink into the park, and the sixteen year old's friends had assured her that everyone got pretty much strip searched on the way in, so to avoid the disappointment of getting our sandwiches taken away, we left them in the coolbox in the car.  As we sailed in through the gates without so much as being looked at askance by a security guard, I mourned my sandwiches that were now a mile away, imagining just how much we were going to have to fork out to eat later. A sea of marketing was inside waiting for us, Millenium bank, Vodafone, Pepsi, with piles of plastic rubbish to wave in front of us and make the kids go a little bit madder.  At one point the girls were given some glasses in the shape of crossed guitars.  After a while we had to put them away, so fed up was my eight yr old with the envious glares.  Even what would normally be sober looking parents came up and asked in a frenzy "WHERE'D YOU GET THE GLASSES!!!!!?".  There were wigs, glasses, straw hats (the only one we growed ups actually would have liked, with our burning faces) inflatable guitars, tshirts, inflated plastic things with "Brasil" written on them to bash together and make a noise, LED lit finger rings and the worst: Vodafone were giving away inflatable armchairs that soon became the scourge of the whole thing.  Couch potatoism soon became the festival goers' mode of choice.  Families all around were setting up their own living rooms on the dusty dried up old carpet of fagends and dead grass. The sixteen year old and my ten year old, our respective "cool" children, were abandoned in the growing throng in front of the stage by the thirteen year old and my eight year old when the latter two finally understood why I wasn't going to allow my smallest to stay there once it hotted up, a good half an hour before D'Zrt were even going to start, with increasingly stroppy peri-pubescents gathering around them.  The sixteen and ten, though, were NEVER going to leave... because they are so cool. At first, it was ok.  We were hot.  We weren't hungry yet.  And no one wanted the loo.  I had banned the eight year old and myself from drinking except in exceptional near death dehydration.  We suffer the same bladder.  I still have the terrible memories of the Glastonbury latrines from the eighties, so the loos were going to be the last resort.  It was a blazing hot afternoon for a while, and people kept walking past me with glistening cold plastic cups of Sagres... OH, I WANTED ONE... but I knew that I'd be in the loo queue five minutes later... beer does that to me.  Pathetic, I know. D'Zrt came and went.  Dull as dishwater. The first "I'm HUNGRY" came soon after.  Filomena and I braced ourselves.  This was going to cost us. There was KFC and Pizza Hut, in two or three huge long marquees.  Normally I refuse to buy the girls Pizza Hut when we're out in some food court or other in some mall or other.  Firstly because it's AWFUL and because it costs SO much money for a bit of dough and slathering of cheese-shaped lava.  4€ for a slice of pizza and some watered down coke is too much for me. ...

vitsma's lemon tart to knock your socks off

Wednesday, 26 May 2010

"Oh, alright then:  For an 8 inch or there abouts flan tin, lined with shortcrust pastry, baked blind:-4oz butter14oz caster sugar4 large eggs4 large lemonsSoften the butter, zest and squeeze lemons, then mix all ingredients together.  Add more lemon juice if not very lemony.  Pour into pastry case and cook in oven - 180C,  till wobbly like a jelly and brownish on top. Best eaten at room temperature. Now you know why I could never write a cookery book!" No, mother, that is PRECISELY why you SHOULD write a cookery book.

a very short story

Monday, 10 May 2010

an open letter to the PM of Portugal?

Tuesday, 4 May 2010

Apparently there is another livin' drawist, a Lúcia Pimenta and she went and did this this afternoon, because she's QUITE angry about something the government (the prime minister) is doing when Portugal is in a very precarious place (and not just hanging off the western edge of Europe).  The Portuguese one is first, then the Englishly subtitled one is next, for you sillies who don't speak the Portuguese.

a TINY BUT IMPORTANT change

Friday, 30 April 2010

I have just split my site into two sites. One, http://lucypepper.com is now my FAR simpler, web and iphone capable portfolio site for the purposes of getting some bloody work in. The other is this one, and nothing has changed, either with the URL, which is still http://lucypepper.com/pt or with the RSS. And it'll be just BLOG 'n' stuff.   As you were.  

the spider and the firefly

Wednesday, 28 April 2010

****wits

Friday, 23 April 2010

This morning, I was going about my exciting business when the water company rather aggressively rang the enormous bell at the gate. I ushered them in, thinking it was just to read the meter, and wondering why it took two of them to read a tiny water meter. I was showing them to the meter when I noticed that on the back of their waistcoats it said "fiscalização" which translates as "checking up on you, you bastard". Hmmm. They checked the meter, and we opened a couple of taps.  The meter had stopped (confirming what they had noticed at head office). "Oh dear", I said, "then we must get it fixed.  I know that it WAS working, and that I double checked this when I changed the account over to us when we bought the place." They then checked the water in the kitchen to make sure it was company chlorinated (hideous tasting) tap water.  It was. They went back to the meter and announced that there was a tap on one side of the meter that had been turned off. "Oh", I said. They said that this was what they had expected, that this meant that there was an illegal pipe somewhere, diverting the company water past the meter and into the house.  And that we were going to have to euphemistically "resolve the situation" (i.e. pay a huge back payment, plus a fine, plus enormous wads to some bloke to dig up the WHOLE quinta to make sure there were no more illegal pipes). "oh", I said. I resolved then to not say again that I was sure it was working when we moved in because it would begin to sound like I had turned this tap off and laid down an illegal pipe. They then checked all the taps around the quinta, and announced that at least THESE taps weren't company water, and must be coming from the well. "Well, that'd be interesting" I said, "as the pump doesn't work and there's no other outlet from the well." They said that this was ALMOST criminal, since if the water from the well and the water from the company were meeting up somewhere in some illegal underground pipes that I didn't know about, we could well be killing the village people (not the Village People) with our deadly untreated mountain water infiltrating the common supply. "Are you SURE you've pulled sufficient water from the taps to make sure they're not chlorinated company (hideous tasting) tap water, because, you know, what with the rain and all, they've barely been used in months, and I'm sure the previous owner told me that these were ALL company water". They said, of COURSE, they were sure.  I was rather glad, as well water is free. Theirs is hideously expensive. Twenty or thirty years of using well-water might compensate the huge fine and back payments and some-bloke-payments we were facing. The bloke (there was one of each sex) went back to "fiscalizar" the meter.  I went round with the woman to all the taps, AGAIN, with her chlorine test, and I insisted on pulling a load of water out of each tap. ASTONISHINGLY (in ironic capitals), the outside taps all proved to be company water after all. Then the bloke came back, muttered something to the woman that I didn't quite catch. "Thank you for your patience", she said (this had taken about half an hour). "Everything's fine" she continued, in such a matter of fact way that I didn't realized what she really meant until they started to walk back to their car, packing things back into their pockets. "So, I HAVEN'T got an illegal pipeline, then?" "No," she said.  "It's all fine." "What about the meter, then?  Why isn't it metering the water?" The bloke said "I gave it a waggle.  It's working no...

be NICE

Monday, 22 March 2010

I was really annoyed that I had to miss “Limpar Portugal” day on Saturday as we had to go elsewhere, but well done to everyone who joined in.   Limpar Portugal is an iniciative thought up and organised by a group of friends that rallied the country into a day of picking up the crap that is EVERYWHERE.  I was also really annoyed to read that some companies used the knowledge that 100,000 people were going out into the woods and roadsides this weekend to dump their rubbish the day before.  What a bunch of utter scumbags. This country really does my head in. We (I’ve been here almost 11 years, I can say “we” now, don’t you think?) are facing bankruptcy and a good spanking from headmistress Angela Merkel, and rely massively on tourism, yet still it is necessary for a volunteer organisation to take it upon itself to tidy the place up.  Keeping the place looking good should be second nature.  It should also be damnably easy: partly because Portugal is fantastically beautiful anyway (especially where there aren’t any bloody humans) and partly because the Portuguese are fanatically clean, tidy and keen to keep up appearances.  Look inside the majority of Portuguese homes (not mine, mine’s a disaster) and you’ll not find a doily out of place, but as soon as you step outside, you may well step in someone else’s rubbish, falling down beautiful building, builders’ rubble or dog shit. The last couple of weekends were spent away from home, that’s why I missed out on sticking on my wellies and rubber gloves and mucking in with the best of them in the nearby woodland.  And I was reminded of something else that ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH (Sorry, my headmistressly ways are coming out again…. bring back Vitriolica!). For the first weekend we were in the Alentejo, for pleasure, the second in the Algarve, for work of sorts (not mine, his) (gosh, the Algarve is an ODD place.  For me, it’s like visiting a slightly different country that isn’t quite Portugal, what with all the Union flags and cod and chips and estate agents’ billboards in English and German.  I know it’s not ALL like that, but what an awfully pervasive presence the Northern European has there… I bet you could live there for ten years without coming face to face with a farinheira…, but back to the thing…..). After many years of being somewhere, one gets used to things… or resigned to them.  I am slightly inured to the ways of the grumpy Portuguese whose job it is to provide a service, but ONLY SLIGHTLY.  I mean the people who work in cafés, supermarkets, clothes shops, restaurants, hotels, banks, oh, you know, pretty much everybody, everywhere.  I must say, before I go on, that things HAVE been getting better in recent years… much to do with the big corps. and the brazilian invasion (I insist you read this before you read on) and when I get a girl behind the reception desk at a hotel easily saying “good afternoon, how can I help you” with a polite smile on her face I am thrilled to see that things really are getting better… only to have my hopes of service greatness dashed as she immediately drops the smile as she thinks she has done her job and hands me the room key without even looking me in the eye. Whenever I go somewhere new I am uncomfortable.  Take a hotel.  I don’t know where stuff is.  None of us do.  Where’s the room?  Where’s the bar?  Where is the breakfast room? Where’s the swimming pool?  I don’t want to be lead by the hand and given a sweetie, but when I ask you where the entrance to the pool is, I do want you to make me feel welcome to use the damn thing and kindly point me in the right direction… I do NOT want you to look at me like I just asked if it was ok to take a shit on the floor.  I haven’t been here before.  YOU have, because YOU work here.  It is YOUR job to make me feel welcome so that I will come back, will direct friends to your hotel, will spend more money with you while I’m here.  It’s not that I want you to be subservient to me… I just want to feel WELCOME to come and spend MONEY that will pay your bloody wages. Is your hotel food utter crap?  Because if it is, you’re an idiot, because sometimes I want to go to a hotel, not just to go out and explore, but to use as a retreat and stay IN for a day because I’m knackered and don’t want to drive, walk, cook etc., i.e. the stuff I normally do at h...

ten past eight

Tuesday, 5 January 2010

It's 20:10 and here's to a better year than 2009 for everyone.  What an odd year that was.  Some awfully good things happened (we moved, prof's big fat brick of a book was finally finished and got into the bestsellers and he has moved papers, this time to Expresso, I had a couple of nice jobs to do) and most of everything else was a speeding but damp squib, for us and an awful lot of friends. This morning I saw a cedar tree with about 40 egrets sitting on it.  I was driving past it on a main road so I couldn't take a picture, but it was so weirdly beautiful.  My daughter was with me, she saw it too, so I know wasn't dreaming... and I was so annoyed that I hadn't got a picture of it, so I could stick it on flickr and say WOOOO, LOOK what I saw!  and then I berated myself for being annoyed... ten years ago it wouldn't have mattered to me whether anyone else saw it or not.... I was enough.  I think the internet needs to give me some space. I'm going to spend a lot more time away from this internet thing this year.  I need to go back to the drawing board in more ways than one.  I may find that in a couple of week's time I have so much to write about that I go back to illustro-blogging daily, but I doubt it.  I feel rather spent.  Although my head is full, it is also stuck.... full of ideas and thoughts, but needing some space and time to get any of them out. I want to work on some bigger things, get a whole book done (god knows what about), get this house underway, work out where the hell it's all going.  It has much to do with the utter chaos that has abounded since we moved into this odd and quite crap house that we shall hopefully be demolishing this year.  The drains are abysmal, the lectrics are hanging by a forty year old thread, strange things happen when it rains, and it's full of the junk that I didn't have time to dump when I had to move us and 20,000 books all of a sudden in the summer.  I'm de-junking this week.  I used to live with an Aussie friend in London who used to say "I just going to de-spunk" when she was going to take a bath.  This didn't sound wrong to her sweet young antipodean ears.  Anyway, I'm not de-spunking, I'm de-junking. Twitter has utterly done for my attention span, so that's going to be accessed only when I'm standing in a queue with nothing else to do, I am rather fed up with it.   After six years of an awful lot of blogging, my site will probably morph into more of a portfolio site... everything will still be here, just different and there will still be things to be writ in stoney gibberish, but gosh, sometimes I do feel like I've said everything.  The more outrageous or disgusting things I want to say or paint will go on Unkempt Women... which I created for just this eventuality, when a gel just wants to write from time to time or do something different.   I'm not giving up, just going a bit easier on my non-internet-self So here's to a gloriously creative ten past eight for me as well as all of ...

to my friends. and enemies. probably.

Wednesday, 23 December 2009

a no-brainer, really

Wednesday, 9 December 2009

It's not just all the climate change denialists that are coming out of the woodwork, grasping at every straw to prove their point; nor the greenalists who don't believe that anyone can question their proclamations; nor the rest of us in the middle, who find it hard to be a reactionary for either side (how ludicrous to have SIDES in the face of such an important problem), worried that we will be laughed at if proved wrong; nor the detracting and pointless argument about whether this is man-made or not; nor the preposterous machinations that the politicians at the Copenhagen summit will go through to prevent them making a single damn decision, proposal, treaty, whatever.  It's a big fat combination of all of us filling a big balloon of stupid. It's worth a punt, isn't it?

it's women. and they're unkempt

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

excuse me while I just employ HYPNO-FROG.... *hypno frog* FORGET ALL REINCARNATIONS OF "UNKEMPTWOMEN" THAT LUCY HAS MASCARADED BEHIND FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS, THIS IS THE REINCARNATION THAT UNKEMPTWOMEN.COM WAS REGISTERED IN THE ETHER FOR, ALL THOSE YEARS AGO */end hypno frog*   On 7th December, I'm opening a brand new website.  I'm telling you about it now so that I absolutely HAVE to finish it.  This new website is a website full of big internetty WOMEN.  They are quite UNKEMPT, mouthy, not-normal, and lovely.  Every last one of them.  Some of them you have already heard of.  Some of them you haven't.  Some of them will remain anonymous.  All of them are writers, journalists, novelists, long term proven bloggers and/or artists. You see, sometimes, I get an idea in my tiny mind and I want to blog about it, but that idea is a bit different from what I normally do - maybe it's me being SERIOUS, or maybe it's a recipe - sticking a recipe in the middle of my blog just wouldn't work.  It would break the flow of idiocy... and that's what you come here for, isn't it?  Sometimes, I just fancy being really REALLY disgusting. I did have a separate area for some comedy p0rn once, but it instantly got listed in p0rn listings along with my name.  Since I published my recipe book for kids a couple of years ago, I do get some squidlets coming to my site.  Obviously, squidlets and p0rn don't mix, so I had to shut down Harriet Hole and her Farm-Based Filth.  I didn't do her often enough to justify her own website, but it would have been nice for her to have somewhere to do her business (I have a feeling she'll soon be back).  I thought that MAYBE, other lady bloggesses and writers and things might feel the same.  So, I asked.  And they did. Blogging itself has changed, too.  So many of us just don't keep up the steady stream like we used to, much of the time because blogging has brought us real work to do....and as your posting rate goes down, so does your findability... findableness... er... visibility (living in forrin for too long does this to a girl's inglish).... some of us have given up blogging almost completely, but still get the occasional urge to put something somewhere and have it read.  Just sticking it into a page floating about in space isn't going to have it read by anyone.  Sticking it in a vibrant, buzzy, loud kind of website, populated by a disparate bunch of lunatics lovely set of ladies, however, will help it to be read.  So THAT'S what I've turned Unkempt Women into. You may wonder why it's just a WOMEN thing.  Well, I keep hearing that the internet is chock full of men with hardly any women.... and that we're all housewives blogging in little support groups, saving each other from madness and suicide.  This is utter HOGWASH, but the myth won't die, so I thought a loud concentration of the boobed sex will help to quash it.... and, anyway, "unkempt people" doesn't sound so good. I'm not telling you who's contributing yet, because a. some will be anonymous, and b. the contributor list isn't complete yet... although we already number over twenty splendid lovelies, bursting with talented-bloggish-writery goodness. So, there you are.  http://unkemptwomen.com opens 7th December.  Follow @unkemptwomen for reminders and teeth-kicking on ...

blinky blinky

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

I've been dazzled these last couple of years by the new road planners' favourite thing of the Portuguese roundabout. There were never that many of them Portugal, and now there are ten in the space of nine kilometres on my little home stretch of the EN10.  While they were digging up the road to make the new layouts, it was a death trap, not a metre without a pothole of death, but now that the work is done, the roundabouts do help to calm the traffic... of course, in some places there should be roundabouts and aren't any and in some places the roundabouts are a pain and a bit pointless, but I'm coming round to this more rounded-out road of ours. BUT.  BUT.  Would SOMEONE (oh, I dunno, how much would a short infomercial by the gov.pt cost?), PLEASE, instruct the 80% of Portuguese drivers who don't think it necessary to touch the little stick at the side of their steering wheel on how to use those little blinky-blinky orange lights on the sides of their cars when they are going right or doubling back on one of the roundy-roundy things before someone gets SQUISHED .... it's turning me into a shouty-shouty sweary-sweary mo...

a self- and 'im indoors-publicising post

Monday, 9 November 2009

While I'm having a busy week finishing off illustrating a book, finishing off 'im indoor's website because it's about time he damn well has one, watching his book truly fly off the shelves [ever the optimist - splendid book, especially good for christmas present for EVERYBODY - hint hint] as of tomorrow, getting used to my not whining about how he's always working on the damn thing, expecting that I will soon start begging him to start on the next one so that he's not under my feet all day, and drinking a lot of coffee instead of stuffing my face with my new found extreme cake joy [Lidl Mini Stollen - omg, marzipanny goodness], I leave you with one of me vids from earlier this year, because frankly, it's been too long, you need to waste three minutes of your life, and I think they need to be seen more. of.  prepositions. dontcha just luv ...

Embracing the spirit of the day

Saturday, 31 October 2009

This is the first halloween in this house and the first one away from the neighbourhood children that used to hold a black mass on this Forrin's doorstep.  I'm celebrating with some halloweeny stuff here in the site, so I don't have to do it out there.  It's too scary out there. First, a revisiting of the horror livin' draw: The Gothic Horror... from lucy pepper on Vimeo.      

pink sky thinking

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

it's like finding bacon or a herring stuck to a wall

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

but, in case you're a bit squeamish, you have to press the read more... button to see it.  

TEN!

Sunday, 4 October 2009

I've done it again, missed a HUGE milestone in my life... two days ago, that is, I had been living in this country for 10 years.  A quarter of my life, half my adult life.  Gosh and HOW Portugal has changed in those ten years.  It really isn't the same place as the one I arrived in, with a two month old baby on a GO plane and the bumpiest landing I had ever had at Lisbon airport (until last month, anyway).  I'm not going to wax all lyrical and stuff and thing about it.  I'm just glad I came. {artsexylightbox flickrApiKey="f798df35d29fe039f54f438ee994486b" flickrNumberOfImages="680" flickr="84657428@N00" flickrImageSize="o" flickrSet="72157613115397523"}{/artsexylightbox}

the rights thing

Friday, 25 September 2009

I'm trying to make a point, albeit a little obliquely, so erm, here it is:HOW ARTISTS GET PAID Let's take a list of your bog standard kinds of artist and artisan, and see what the FAIRLY SUCCESSFUL ones are paid (i.e. not the tiny % who are phenomenally successful):Painter - crapIllustrator - crapGraphic Designer - crapPhotographer - crapAuthor/Novelist - crapJournalist - crapPlaywright - crapSongwriter/Composer - not sure, but probably crap, unless with large repertoire of successful songsSession Musician/Orchestra Musician/Session Singer - crapPerforming Musician with published music - quite a lot reallyActor - paid crap, except HUGE starsDancer/Choreographer  - crap(taken from a survey of people populating the inside of my head) Taking as read that there are a good few wannabes and people who aren't good enough and people who shouldn't even THINK of being in the business they are in, because they are talentless idiots and somehow miraculously get IN the business because of their looks or extreme luck or sheer bloody mindedness, let's also assume that the rest of the people in these fields have a certain talent for what they do, to a lesser or greater extent... and are doing it because they are good at it, they love doing it, it's a vocation for many, and the world needs a bit of jazzing up.... so can we assume that all these people need to make a living at what they do?I'm trying to come at this illegal downloads thing from a different angle, you see.  I listen carefully whenever the music industry and film industry get up on their antsy horses about their right to be paid for every copy of a song or film that is seen or heard.  I agree with them that musicians and film makers need to earn a living.  I also agree with many other people that they are going at it in entirely the wrong way by threatening people with legal suits, which is ludicrous... and if you want to know almost word for word what I think, listen to Stephen Fry on the matter from this summer, because he agrees with me. yes, he does).  I get a bit crazy when I hear people in relatively brand spanking new industries, such as anyone in broadcast media or the published music industry, talking about "tradition" or "the way it has always been"  - because they do use that as a part of their argument - because it is nonsensical.  Film is only a hundred years old.  TV is only about 70, and really only 60, what with the war happening and that. Reproduction of film for personal use (vid/dvd/digital) is only just pushing 30 years  Published music media, from mp3s back to 78s back to phonograph cylinders, is 140 years old at an extreme push, but as a mass market thing, it only goes back to the 1920s.  Those media, because of their extreme mass-ness, because of the technology that enabled them, made enormous stars out of the artists and even enormouser companies that ran the whole thing. Those artists got used to being paid in a certain way, the companies getting used to it and entirely dependent on it... instead of the way they had been paid before, like the wandering minstrels that they were... like the rest of us. The rest of us artisans and artists, apart from a very few rockstar-statussed exceptions, get by (or don't) by being paid job to job, or with royalties that amount to bugger all because the books aren't by Dan awful Brown or Nora awful Roberts, or with not-very-big salaries, or by selling paintings once a year.  Just like it always was. And when I say "always" it means "always" not just "for the last few decades".... writers, illustrators, poets, artists, entertainers have been around as long as we have.  Just to give you a better idea of this from my world, most people think that when you illustrate someones else's book, you get royalties like the author.  ha.  no.  well, sometimes maybe, if you're a rockstar level illustrator, but generally, you get a fee for doing the job and if the book sells like crazy, well hard bloody luck, pal, we already paid you.  When you illustrate a sparsely worded children's book it's likely that you put a hundred times more work in than the author... and yet, the author is the one who gets the royalties.... but then the author won't get much from royalties anyway, unless it is one of the few runaway successes.It's how it is.  It's similar for journos, session musicians, actors and dancers.  We do the job because we love it, and it's a vocation. A TINY few get rockstar status (whereas rockstars all get rockstar status, if you see what I mean) and make some real money, but the ...

WAKE UP!

Wednesday, 23 September 2009

I'm going to makro this morning.  Please send me your prayers regarding not buying a couple of catering sized boxes of mars bars and/or an industrial lump of cheese. 

one of the four best seasons of the year

Monday, 21 September 2009

orangey, purpley, reddy, yellowey.  Today, I' sticking with photies, words being too hard while working on magalhães of daughter, which has a keyboard too small for a mouse, especially a very large mouse like me.

that was the summer...

Monday, 14 September 2009

...and I didn't go to the beach, not once, which was FABULOUS.I'm having a splendid time in my little ex-kitchen-with-quite-nasty-tiles-studio, hard at it back to work, two big fat projects to work on, kids back at school (properly today), eight hours every day to just DO stuff.  The temperature has started going down at last, and we have had rain twice in a week.   Gosh, aren't I boring when I'm in a good mood?  

friday story in ten parts

Friday, 11 September 2009

1

creepy crawling

Wednesday, 9 September 2009

I'm up for climbing trees, getting covered in mud and poo, trudging through the undergrowth in open-toes.  I'm happiest photographing dead rats and live bugs as juicy as the juiciest grasshopper or dragonfly.  I love amphibians, not enough to pick them up, but enough to get up close and personal. So what is it about anything reptilian that makes my skin crawl as if someone has just put one down the back of my tshirt? nyAH... just writing that makes me go nyAH all over.  I can be a metre and a half from an osga/gecko and I'm fine... but any closer and I freeze with nyAH-ness.  The more lizardy, less-geckoey ones get to me less, but still...nyAH."MUMMY!!!!  There's SOMETHING crawling in your SHOE!!!! I just saw its tail!!!" nyAH!  

beach. i haven't been.

Monday, 7 September 2009

I just painted it instead.

after a long awful summer...

Friday, 4 September 2009

... of not being able to work on hardly anything except moving house, making everyone's bloody dinner, lunch, breakfast (why can't children cook?), unblocking drains built by skinflints, I'm making a concerted effort each day to lock myself in my "office" for at least an hour and do SOMETHING, to get my hand in again, for all the lovely work I've got coming up once the little ******************s go back to school in ten days' time... while I'm still at the receiving end of "MUMMY she called me STUPID!" "Mummy, what's for lunch?" "Mummy, I'm BORED" I can't concentrate on anything. LONG LIVE SCHOOL.  I love my children, but there are limits, you know.  [Note to Daughter nº. 1 When you happen upon this post when you're a bit older and flicking through Mummy's blog, for god's sake PLEASE don't take offence.  OK, it's probably too late to say that as you've already read it and taken offence, but PLEASE understand that Mummy writes in greatly exaggerated terms and really really would love for you and your sister to stay at home with her all day, watching the Disney Channel, fighting, making a mess and asking if you can do some painting... in fact, Mummy is considering homeschooling as the optimum option for your schooling].  Prepare to be bored to tears with paintings of sunsets as seen from my ...

POLÍTICA!

Wednesday, 2 September 2009

Right, role call:All of you who aren't from or in Portugal, you are excused.  You may continue onto your next blog or task on the internet.  You won't be remotely interested in the fact that we've got elections at the end of this month, you don't care who Sockrutch is, so please, don't bore yourself and go and make some hot chocolate.Right, the rest of you.  I'm just rather keen to see if anyone knows if Sócrates a. has had a frontal lobotomy OR b. has been working with a public relations coach.... the man is TRANSFORMED all of a sudden. In his debate with Portas that he's engaged in as I write this, and in his interview with Judite Eyelashes Sousa last night, the prime minister has STOPPED SHOUTING!!!!  He is ALMOST acting like a professional politician and I am unnerved by it.  His usual I'M GOING TO JUST SHOUT UNTIL I'VE FINISHED seems to have been surgically removed.  So, right now he's still talking over Portas and Constança, but hey, that's the Portuguese way, but he's not doing his Mr. Angry act.  It's almost as if he wants to win the election.  Or he has been reading my twitter.  Yes, the latter is more likely.  Just wondering, like.  And excuse me if I throw a brick at the telly the next time he claims that every kid now has English, Music and Gym at school.  What MY kid had for the last year was a stroppy cow giving strangely biased lessons in throwing a ball round a room, music lessons where they made stuff out of bits of paper and English lessons with mysteriously qualified people who taught them about six words in the space of a year (it MIGHT be, of course, that my kid's reports of those English lessons are skewed by the fact that English is a her mother tongue, but she did wonder often quite how qualified these women were to teach English).    Anyway, that's all the politics you'll get from me before the election, because I'll be sick to the eyebrows with it by then, having to have the endless and ultra tedious debates and analysis shows for dinnertime wallpaper for the house analyst to watch. Sigh. ...

low tech joy

Wednesday, 26 August 2009

I got me a fruit picky implement today that saves me from climbing ladders or trees and it is SO girly but being head chef/taxi driver/slave around here it's better to be girly than fall off a ladder/out of a tree and breaking my cooking arse/clutch finger/any part of me, frankly.  

drawma queen

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

Sometimes, but only sometimes, mind, I wish I had the bollocks to be a complete drama queen diva nightmare.  Wouldn't it be fun?  People seem to not just put up with people like that but swarm around them, loving them, pandering to their every silly wish.  Yes, maybe I should just do that, be ghastly and pushy and stroppy and create big dramas wherever I go and see what would happen.  Just for a laugh, mind.   

a bad coping haiku

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

battery recharged. for my camera, that is. mine remains uncharged.

Muriel, saved!

Saturday, 25 July 2009

The last of the furniture and crap came out of the old house this week and in went a gang of builders sent by the owners-to-be with their sense of entitlement and everything (the new fashionable disease of the young in this country... hey, I'm 40 next year, I can now refer to the under thirties as young).  I lived in that house for ten years and as I wandered about the place finding things that had been found under and behind and lodged in stuff, I felt absolutely zilch for the place.  I was concerned that once we had removed all the books and their shelves that I would like the place again, once it was filled with space and light again, but it's a nothingy sort of a house, always was, and I felt not one downbeat of my icy heart... that is, until I went into the girls' old bedroom and found that on their first morning there, the builders had chipped off the mural I had painted there almost ten years ago for my babies.  A tiny icicle dropped from that icy heart and stabbed me in the stomach and I felt a bit sick.  Right, that's as flowery as you're going to get for a Saturday morning. Let's just say I was gutted.  Gutted that the new lot and the builders didn't have the reverence for the great work of art that it was (or really, probably wasn't, but it was MINE) and got to it on the first bloody morning.  Later, as I was leaving, I walked past the steadily growing rubble heap and noticed that some of it was quite colourful.   I grabbed a bucket and shovelled a few handfuls in.I shall be making something out of the bits.  I have photos of the original.  Somewhere.   But I'm damned if I can find ...

living up a hill

Saturday, 18 July 2009

This is why I've always preferred living up hills and not in grim low-down pits of despond; you get to SEE more stuff.  It's fun to see where the smoke's coming from, to see the hellies doing their stuff, see what the weather's going to do later, to see the tsunami inundating the grim low-down pits of despond below, to see the giant wasps from space coming to earth to finish with the human race.  It's also nice to always have a bit of a breeze even on the hottest days to keep cool with.   Back to drawing in a few days I hope.  Quite a lot of stuff still to retrieve, arrange, climb over. 

just knowing...

Friday, 10 July 2009

...that this will make some of you go "ew!" makes me happy at this ridiculous hour when I should be in a coma, but instead can't possibly sleep because there are photies of flies to broadcast across the internet. It was a very big and very juicy fly at that.  

the end is in sight...

Friday, 3 July 2009

Well, kind of, anyway.  I seem, at least, to have made a dent in the stupid book mountain. It WILL be worth all the effort, though.  This is the view from my bedroom window. 

things I have learnt iii

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

1. 73% of people with too much time on their hands cause 98% of trouble in the world.  Probably.2. Books published in Portugal, Spain and France (had lost interest by the time I got to the German and Italian ones, so can't even remember which way round they are)(as opposed to anglophone books...(shouldn't that be angloscript not -phone?)) have their spines printed upside down, so that when you have to lay books on their sides to fit all the damned things in, if you want to be able to read the spine you have to lay it cover side down.  How counterintuitive is THAT? 3. I think it might be time for an "intervention" with little Mr Bibliophile, and it occurs to me that I could be classed as an "enabler" to an addict (i.e. when I get a phone call from Lisbon... "do you want to come and have lunch in town?" "You mean you want me to bring the car and collect a shedload of books, don't you?" "mmmmmmm", "oh, alright then", etc.)... I think I've been watching too much Dr Phil (I haven't really, I just catch his judgmental moustache when channel flicking because the remote for the telly has left this mortal coil). 4. The sight of cat nipples makes me feel a little bit icky.  5. back to lugging. ...

I'm in danger of forgetting how to use the internet...

Saturday, 27 June 2009

...or even a pencil. but I'm getting there.  very, very slowly.  this is just the tip of the book iceberg. 

wing puddle

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

The world is full of really bloody strange people.  I mean REALLY bloody strange.  I think they seek me out.  Apart from that, bugger me, it's hot.  Still toiling away.

vicious weed killer

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

This stuff is vicious... when you try to strim it down, it shoots nasty evil killer bits of stick at your legs.  I'm going to have to invent myself some chaps... or better, invest in some waders.  Papavit used to spend his whole working day in waders.  He's a vet.  He used to wade around in a lot of shit.  The whole county was inured to the vision of my dad, shirt off and in waders up to his bum.  But I  bet he looked a right vision to anyone just popping by the county of Devon.  Waders.  It's a heritage thing.  I have to have some. I wonder if they sell them anywhere near by. 

quietitude... (or dear world)

Friday, 5 June 2009

(p.p.s. (as in PRE-PRE-script) [14.7.09] getting there, getting there... this move is just about the shittiest house move I've ever done, because of the stupid books, having to do it all myself, with my little car (before I can finally get the big fellahs in with a big truck to move all the existing shelves and crap like big furniture that doesn't fit in a Saxo), and not being able to accept much of the help of dear friends because of logistics and needing to know exactly where everything has gone in anticipation of the inevitable "where the HELL is .......?????!!!"  ... (living with a genius has its drawbacks... but luckily, he lives with an ever bigger genius, so I know he'll get his) ... anyway, this p.p.s is just to say that I'm not dead, I'm still pootling between two villages (one lovely and one shit), and that if you see blood running down the road from a lovely tiny village in Portugal it is almost certainly blood spilled by my hand having been reminded that "we're supposed to be decluttering, you know" by the man whose ridiculously huge library and newspaper archive of thirty years I have just spent four weeks moving singlehandedly while he STILL finishes that bloody book, so if you're new here, read on and please note that there is plenty in the archives to keep you going for a while, and if you're not new here, then you know the drill already, move on...see you in a tickypoo)(p.s. (as in PRE-script, not POST script) this post is keeping the front page and my demo reel company while I'm so busy and losing all the weight that I put on since Christmas ... I am putting some stuff in the blog, on the imaginary inside of this fantabulous me-zine that is my website, mostly photies, so do click on stuff...you may now read on if you haven't already) It's raining again, which is a glorious thing, as it means I don't have to water either of the gardens today AND it might mean that the annual all-schools-in-the-district party is cancelled, an awful pain in the arse of watching other people's children doing some godawful dancing, waiting for hours for one's own children doing some godawful dancing and having to pretend it's fabulous, all run to the usual Portuguese timescale, which dictates, by law, that nothing start until at least an hour later than it should and that it all drags a bit in the middle, meaning that if it's finished by midnight it's a shocker.  And then there's the other tiny thing... that we've finally fixed a move-by date and I have seven weeks to move me, the kids, a bit of furniture, several trillion pairs of knickers and socks, a writer clamped to his desk desperately trying to finish one book before the next one starts and his twenty or thirty thousand strong collection of dusty old books, at the same time as getting the plans sorted for the new place... which we may be knocking down and starting from scratch (if you're confused, SO AM I...this will entail moving in for now, waiting for licences and permissions and crap to go ahead, then move out while it's being built or whatevered), added to which I have a book to illustrate by the end of the summer, it's all gone a bit OMFG! around here.  What I'm trying to say is that a. it may go quiet around here and b. this may very well be kept un-quiet around here with a litany of moving (house) stories, builder stories, how I lost it and set light to the books stories, that kind of thing.  I intend to document it all, from moving in, moving out, designing, planning, building and moving in again, in text, video and photo so that I can remember it in the end, and then sell it as one of those up-their-own-arses "how I built the dream in Provence/Tuscany/Malaga" type books that some people just lap up like milk out of Kevin McCloud's saucer.  (L + D... I can't persuade 'im indoors of the benefit of getting Grand Designs to cover this one... actually, I'm not sure of the benefits either... if it goes badly then one is left looking like an arse and if it goes well, people keep coming to see it (I've been reading the comment boxes in the Grand Designs site, what a bunch of loonies!  "I went to the house, but the lady wouldn't let me inside to see it".  LORKS!) It's only 4 km up the road, but still going to be a bit of a process.   Now, one more thing while I'm at it.  Google is a marvellous thing, we'll mostly agree on that.  But it does get people HERE under the ...