Two ferrets and a Soda Stream

Nope - not a new Curtis film, the result of going early to a Vide Grenier (car-boot/yard-sale) this morning - not that perhaps anyone else would have bought ancient taxidermy specimens. (Except Andy, if you read this). Five euros a piece - s'got be a bargain! The soda stream has yet to be tried but I can't see there's much to go wrong there.

                                 

So, what else has this season's scavenging unearthed? It's been a good few Sundays - last week procuring several shirts for Mark at a euro each. Actually, this is odd - how we always seem to find him shirts as he's not exactly a standard Southern France man shape, more Nordic, Viking, even.
Last weekend also resulted in clothes for me, a huge salad platter, an exceptionally nice etching for 5 euros, teapots to replace broken ones, a 1970s wall-hanging to funk-up Mark's music room and various other (mostly) useful items. Why anyone bothers to shop for new stuff is a mystery to me - OK I draw the line at certain things like . . . underwear, and . . . that's about it. Maybe not a second-hand pressure cooker - bit scary.
 A bit scary, is also how much stuff we, the human race - or at least the members of it who have manufactured all these non-vital things - have managed to accumulate over a relatively short period of time. This was just one small amassing of a few folk's spare room rubbish, in one small French village. Imagine all the millions of boot sales and variants of, all over the world. Eek. We are indeed heading towards a possibly not too distant new Earth-Epoch - Plasticusgallusossum era, perhaps. A plastic and chicken bone sedimentary layer. The end of the consumers.
Oo, dear, this is getting a tad dark.
Time for a cup of tea in one of our new 1970s brown teapots.



                 Suitably apocalyptic and lovely etching from a couple of Sundays back.

Clothes logo meeting.

OK, what can we put on this one . . . I know, drop the dictionary and wherever it falls open at, we'll use the first word, third line down, left hand side. Go.
Lawnmower . . . mm, perhaps not.
Try again: Long intestine. Nope.
Oh, let me try . . . skunk.
My turn: sock-stretcher.
You're not doing it right. Drop it higher, off the top of that filing cabinet. OK.
Scrotum.
Eccles cake.
Transvestite.
Culvert.
Minnow.
Wart.
Bastard.
Marsh warbler.
Wardrobe.
Taxidermy.
Scrag end of lamb.
Flying buttress.
Narcissist.
Flange.
Look it's five o'clock. The next three things and that's it.
OK.
Joy ride. Victorian. Times.
Silence.
That's rubbish.
I know, but I need to get to the shops . . . anyway Victorian times – that's alright . . .
Yeah, but, Joy ride?
Footsteps.
Did you turn the coffee machine off?
Yep.

Funny thing life . . .

And death.
While in Dorset visiting my Mum, I went to pay a visit to my lovely uncle in his resting place under this young tree.
As a muser, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about the after-life, if there is one. Whether one might return as a dung beetle, or a table leg . . . or perhaps some famous game show host of the future.
Anyway, uncle Ben is in a beautiful place called a burial ground as appose to a churchyard or crem's grounds The first bodies installed so to speak, are now nourishing majestic oaks and rowans as tall as the eves of a house. Compared to an average graveyard I think it would be a nice place to while away a few years watching the blackbirds nesting and listening to next door's trees rustling.
I hope Ben, who was an expert wood carver and lover of birds, trees and nature generally, is happy there.
My general mood at the time of contented melancholia was slightly pushed off its armchair when I found the following plaque dedicated to a certain Reg someone: 'Well, he tried . . . " Tried what? Morris dancing? Taxidermy? or maybe they should have left out the comma. Perhaps it was supposed to read 'WELL HE TRIED' in a sort of Victorian stiff shirt and brass fanfare sort of a way.
One cannot help reflecting on what ones own plaque might say: She piddled around a lot; she had a lot of ideas; she could really spot a bargain at a vide grenier.
I just looked up the definition of death in the dictionary: 'state of being dead' — don't know quite what I expected. Also saw this phrase 'death on'. Apparently means to be fond of/ good at. Related to 'dead good' I suppose. Sounds like something a thirteen year old buttock-exposing trousers-wearer might say. New verbal trend: 'Hey — death on!'
She was good at procrastination.
Work.
Now.