Love. And bacon.

I’ve got myself into trouble again. I wrote a poem the other day about bank queues. It was silly. My wife saw it, and instead of smiling because it was silly, she decided that I was not nearly romantic enough, and would be writing her a love poem. I can’t do that. You see, I do not love my wife.

They say that the Eskimos have over a hundred different words for snow. I love the idea, and was devastated the other day to learn that they don’t. They have one.

Snow. Just snow.

The persistence of touch.

Before I started this blog, I hadn’t really written anything but e-mails for nearly twenty years, so I need all the practice I can get. I swore never to write any poetry for this blog. Here it is:

 

The memory of touch.

 

It’s been hours since we were together

And still

The warmth of your skin warms mine.

 

The soft, slow waves of your breath

Are gone from me now

And still

They stir the fine hairs on my neck and shoulder,

A touch without touching.

 

The weight of you

Still

The smell of you

Still

 

Jesus lady!

It was a bank queue,

Not a conga line!

 

You need to learn about personal space

Before you fall pregnant

On the five o’clock bus.

 

Crashing back down to Earth.

Today started out very well indeed. I had posted on my blog just before going to bed, and checked my stats first thing in the morning. I thought WordPress was broken, because I had over a hundred views. It turns out that I had been Freshly Pressed by the happiness engineers.

For those of you I have just lost, the happiness engineers are the shadowy, sinister organisation that controls the blogging world. Think of them as a slightly more cheerful version of the thought police from George Orwell’s 1984. If your blog is not quite positive enough, they might just pay you a little visit.Freshly Pressed is a page where they put up the very best blog posts in each category. The categories today included neuroscience, books, fatherhood and civil liberties. Mine was the very best in the shoplifting category. The other three shoplifting posts were just not up to scratch.

Forgive those who trespass against us.

It’s finally happened. My home is a haven of criminality. I live surrounded by thieves, anarchists and drug abusers, but up until now, I have managed to remain a beacon of honesty and integrity, a light in the darkness, a paragon of virtue. And then I got caught shoplifting on Friday. This came as as much of a surprise to me as it does to you. Not because I didn’t expect to get caught, but because I didn’t know I was doing it at the time.

I was caught by the man (who in this case was a short, round little woman) taking a pie out of the Pick ‘n Pay without paying for it. As I always say, go large or go home!

Me last Friday.

Let me lay out my defence. Firstly, I was not feeling very alert. This was not my fault. My son, a lord of chaos masquerading as a sweet, sensitive boy, had decided to investigate the alarm clock in our bathroom. Naturally, he had set it for 2:30 am. As one does. South Africa is not the sort of place where one gets woken by strange noises in the middle of the night and takes it lightly. I lurched out of bed armed with a set of dangerous catch-phrases (“I’ll kick your arse so hard your dog will bleed!”) before realising that it was just a clock. Then I had to find it. Drunk with sleep and blind without my glasses, I lurched around for five minutes before finding it on top of the toilet cistern. Obviously. The rest of the family, shagged out after a heavy day of bringing civilisation to its knees, slept on oblivious, but that was it for my night.

How to drive traffic to your blog.

I started this blog because my wife made me jealous. I was spending my evenings watching lumberjacks on the history channel (I know, I don’t get it either!) while she connected with the world. I was really enjoying it, too, until my mother asked me how I was going to make any money from it. I wasn’t. I was doing it for the affirmation one can only get from having complete strangers like what one was doing. Or rather “like” what one was doing.

Ah. Sex.

My wife has a blog of her own (http://tracyloveshistory.wordpress.com/). Instead of dealing with the broad sweeps of history, like the world wars, or colonialism, she tends to focus on little details that bring history alive, like what underwear the Victorians wore, or what a filthy old pervert Samuel Pepys was.

Lock up your daughters. Seriously.

Crime wave

I wrote a post the other day about how my daughter had stolen my wallet, and hidden it (https://23thorns.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/every-story-needs-an-antagonist/).  Don’t worry, my daughter isn’t a crack addict. At least not that I know of. She’s three. I did sit her down to find out why she had done such a naughty thing, and she came up with a perfectly rational explanation. It was because she wanted to.

It’s the small things that count (part 4)

My quick post on the small, many legged creatures of the South African bush has turned into a four part monster, and I’m only scratching the surface! I had hoped to get the little things out of the way quickly, so I could move on to cooler things with much bigger teeth, but in doing so discovered that I am actually rather fond of the creepy crawlies. The thing with cool, big toothed creatures is that you have to go out and find them. To get to the little stuff, all you have to do is step outside. Sometimes, they come inside to find you!

It’s the small things that count (part 3)

This is the third part of what was supposed to be a quick post on the creepy crawlies of the lowveld in South Africa. I need to create an ecosystem for a book I am writing, and in the absence of any genuine creative talent, I’m plagiarising one that I already know. In my first two posts, I covered the “cute and cuddly” (https://23thorns.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/226/) and the “terrifying but harmless” (https://23thorns.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/this-is-the-sec-9/) categories. Now we can move on to the really fun stuff; the tiny little creatures that can hurt or even kill you.