I’ve hit a creative nadir. Well, I’m not particularly creative anyway, I guess I’m just using “fancy words” to say that I can’t think of anything to write.

Fuck it then, don’t write anything! That’d be too easy.

Ok, watching The Weakest Link earlier, I noticed a bespectacled young lady (yes, those sort of specs with thick, black rectangular frames!) who was called Bryony.

Now, there’s a name that when you see it, you automatically want to punch the person to whom it belongs. It screams “I’m a stuck up spastic” and “Daddy’s got a Porsche!”. It’s the sort of name that somebody who is a completely affected, stuck up nob would call their child. Other names that fit in this category are:

Jocasta,
Vida,
Hermione,
Cressida,
Candida,
Tomassina,
and my all-time top of the “slap me” shop…. Verity

These names scream “I’ve got a name that people will automatically hate me for, but I’ll always have enough money for it not to matter.”

Bryony, for fuck’s sake.

Ministry for speaking the blindingly obvious
I’m not sure whether I’m just more in tuned to my absolute hatred of politicians because my loathing of our current Government, but I’m sure that this Government must have a Minster for Speaking the Blindingly Obvious.

As well as being nannied over just about everything – to such an extent that you have to ask permission to take responsibility for your own life – the Government seems to have done remarkably well at fooling the people by saying things that are completely obvious, but dressing them up as fantastic policy decisions.

“We are introducing new legislation that will enable all UK citizens to wrap up warm over the winter months!”

“Education is vital for any young person’s development”

“We need a reliable and modern healthcare system”

“A dwindling pension fund means that people will have to work past retirement age”

“If you eat crap food, you grow up to be thick, obese and diabetic”

“A robust and prudent economic policy is good for the economy”

“Stability in the Middle East is vital for international security”

“Keep your workplace safe: mop up spills and don’t leave trailing cables that people might slip or trip on” (This is an actual radio advert that’s running at the moment)

The latest rumour is that, having failed in its bid to increase literacy and numeracy skills amongst school leavers, the Department for Education & Skills is to ask schools to introduce lessons in text messaging to our youngsters. At least they’ll get a high pass rate in the national exams for that one!

Fuck me. I’m sounding like a grumpy old woman. I am a grumpy old woman.

With inspiration low, it’s always great to know you can fall back on:

1. Ginger beer
2. Toe nails
3. Getting new technology for no justifiable reason
4. Flirting with your line manager
5. Tinned spaghetti
6. Wrapping up warm in winter
7. Sycamore trees
8. Tree ratsGrey squirrels
9. Anchovies
10. April Pissoff

As highly valued members of the blogging community, your responses will be treated with the utmost respect. Thankyouverymuch, we couldn’t have so much fun without you.

Musical interlude?
You grew up ridin’ the subways, running with people
Up in Harlem, down on Broadway

Too bloody easy, that one.

Today is Monday and Monday is never a good day for most people. Having been kept awake for a lot of the night because of a tickly cough, I’m now pretty boogered. Creativity sapped from too much codeine (I was eventually forced to take a swig of codeine linctus to get to sleep last night), Cakesniffers is having the evening off.

But here’s something for people to try. If you haven’t already got the Google toolbar, download it, go to “options” and turn on the word translate tool. I’m hoping to have a full Italian vocabulary by Christmas.

Oh look, I managed to get that photo of Uma in again.

Poll analysis
Careful analysis of the public vote held on 15th October 2005, gave some interesting results. Despite some surprising opposition, Uma Thurman returned a landslide victory and was voted in as Shag of the Week by 90% of the electorate.

Let’s see how Uma reacted to this outcome…

“Naturally I’m delighted that so many of you think so highly of me”, she said demurely.

While relaxing over a celebratory cigarette donated by Mr Coldearth, she continued: “Of course, it was a total shock to find myself in this position after so many years in the shag wilderness. However it’s amazing how much a good dye job can do for a girl. My campaign manager, Mr Tarantino, has been amazing.

Run, run for you life, little one!

Yes, the grey squirrel, or scoiattolo grigio, or even “that fucking bastard is on the fence again!” as we say in our house, came to the UK from Canada. Having a maximum lifespan of 10 years, the grey squirrel will, on average live for 3-4 years. That’s 3-4 years of annoying the fuck out of little Otto.

Whereas Max has had a constant battle of wills with the local magpie population, to the extent where one once pood in his eye, Otto has been trying to capture one of these things for the past four years.

If only he could understand me when I tell him: “No chance”. Although we did once find the tail of such a beast, its body was nowhere to be seen.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I’m actually wondering whether Otto lost his eye in a scrap with a squirrel, it wouldn’t surprise me.

• Block out the light
• Drop sap all over my car and the path
• House birds that crap on my car
• Drop leaves and seeds on my car
• Try to get in to the bathroom through the window
• Trap dirt and dust that gets blown into the house
• Attract insects and flies that invade the house for 6 months of the year

This is me in my back garden. You see I’m wearing sunglasses? That’s because outside my garden it was nice and sunny, but inside, all the light had been blocked out by the fucking bastard sycamores.

Cleanliness is lovely. There’s nothing like that feeling you get when you’re nice and clean out the shower. You have freshly laundered everything on and your hair smells nice and looks ok for the next five minutes and that’s about it. You’ve just had a squirt of your favourite perfume too. Or even better, imagine the same and getting into a freshly made bed.

Ahh, lovely.

Ahhhhhhh.

Now, this lovely feeling is even better if you’re absolutely minging before you get in the shower. I once set myself the ming-challenge, whereby I tried to see how long I could go between showers. I think I lasted 4 days, it was ace. Even better was the fact that I was decorating my bedroom at the time so I was super pongy; covered in plaster, dust, wallpaper, paint – the lot. I obviously didn’t leave the house during that entire period and my folks only just stopped short of making me sleep in the shed, but it was well worth it for the shower at the end of it.

DIZGUSSTING

Time for a…
I was every little hungry schoolgirl’s pride and joy, And I guess it was enough for me

1. Spiders
2. Orange wee
3. Black cherry yoghurt
4. Spring greens
5. Aunt Flo(????)
6. Poisoning your date
7. Christmas decorations in October
8. Rollerskating
9. Slot machines
10. Uma Thurman

Musical musings
Heaven knows, I was just a young boy
Didn’t know what I wanted to be

Artiste and title OR next two lines please. Ok, there’s a clue here somewhere if you look close enough.

This is a test, surprisingly enough.

I nick cocodamol tablets from my dad. They’re crap for pain relief, but brilliant for sending you a bit squiffy. The dose is pretty good in prescription cocodamol; you get 30mg codeine “cut with” a bit of paracetamol in each tablet. So long as you don’t take them too often, i.e. no more than once a week, you get quite a nice effect from taking a couple of them – unless you’re my sister, then you die (she’s terrible allergic, you see).

While others around the UK are nursing booze-fuelled hangovers, I’m still feeling slightly like an out of body experience, but my coffee (which all of Cakesnifferdom knows how to make for me) will soon kick in.

Not all fun
But it’s not all fun with codeine. Cocodamol are actually prescribed for pain relief of all things. A couple of years ago, I did my back in. It was so severe that I couldn’t walk, sit, lie – nothing. After being gingerly placed in my mum’s car (accompanied by much agonised screaming), I was driven to the GP who didn’t really examine me or look me in the face, but wrote me a script for cocodamol.

Whereas cocodamol are great for sending a person squiffy in the head, they’re pretty useless for relieving agonising back pain. Worse still, given enough of them, they make a person feel a bit sick and soon have the effect of causing constipation. One of the worst things about doing your back is sitting up straight is just about impossible. Sitting on the toilet is just as bad, and sitting on the toilet while using your back and other muscles to squeeze out a poo can actually cause enough pain to make a person faint. Imagine then, the added problem of your poos developing codeine-induced grappling hooks that effectively make them hang on to your colon for dear life. Fuckers. So much pain and a really bloated abdomen.

So that’s my take on cocodamol: never take it for its intended purpose because it’s not very good.

Threadbared
I recently took to blog cruising again and I came across the delightfully entertaining and eloquent Whinger – she’s in California, you know.

Being on the lookout for new blogging experiences to add to the excellent ones that I already read, I followed the links that Whinger had on her blog (she seemed pretty shrewed and I trusted her taste). One of the links was Threadbared and I highly recommend it; I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in ages.

People can be afflicted with all sorts of disabilities or impairments, some of which can bring about severe handicap. A common affliction is poor vision, and people can be either long- or shortsighted to varying degrees of impairment. This can require correction through wearing glasses, contact lenses or even surgery.

I love long-sighted people; they really make me laugh. Not only do they have to hold pieces of paper at arms’ length to read, which is hilarious in itself, they also look fucking ridiculous in specs:

Knackered and a bit under the weather, so not going to post anything this evening. This shit from earlier will have to suffice. And there’s something not right with the formatting but I can’t be arsed to fix it.

For those who don’t subscribe to Popbitch – just WHAT is wrong with you??? Anyway, here’s a selection of this week’s digest:

Being a bombmaker isn’t just about the nasty things in life. 22 year-old Samar Sahib from Gaza managed to get rarely granted permission from Israeli authorities to travel through Israel to the West Bank to marry her cousin, Ramsi. As soon as they were wed, Samar began to instruct her husband in the joyful art… of bombmaking.

The first known female bombmaker of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Samar taught Ramsi how to make bombs in case she was arrested. But Israeli forces in a helicopter and more than a dozen jeeps swooped down on the newlyweds’ home and arrested them.

Way back in “them days”, women like me – I don’t exclusively mean women like me, I’m referring to any single women of my age – would have been described as being “on the shelf”, or even worse as “a spinster”. Spinster? What the devil is that supposed to be? It sounds so cutting and spiteful, like there’s some horrible stigma associated with it. Of course, the male equivalent would’ve been “bachelor”, which has an air of suave sophistication about it.

A spinster would have to have something wrong with her: for some reason, she wouldn’t be able to fulfil a normal womanly duty, or she’d be barren, she wouldn’t be seen to be right.

But what of this dereliction of womanly duties? What would women of the day be expected to do? Let’s see: