Dessicated Follower Of Fashion - E-Mail correspondence with Spooky St. Ives

Helen Bristol

26 July 2003 19:15

thoughts from the orient

I've just been making some tzadziki. In your capacity as cookmeister you could advise me on the best way to hold a peeled cucumber will grating it so that I don't end up with pink tzadziki. Carefully spring to mind. Any thoughts..............?

Braved Ipswich this afternoon, BM needing yet more clothes. He's dead chuffed as we found an old fashioned Gentleman's Outfitter with masses of assistants, some of whom reminded us of Grace Brothers/Suits You Sir. There's even a Ladies' Outfitters on the 1st floor, not that I'm prepared to part with a month's salary for a blouse. Now tell me, why are women's clothes relatively costlier that men's? BM got some shirts that were less than the price of a pub lunch (Sloop excepted).

Also spent a happy half hour peeling brown shrimps. Guess where CM was........................right, at my feet waiting for the merest slip of my hand as I put shells/skins into one bowl and naked shrimps into another. god, we know how to live out here............Saturday afternoon shopping then home to peel shrimps.

I'll have to go and lie down now to recover from the excitement

Vile Jelly

27 July 2003 08:38

The safest way to avoid injury while grating peeled cucumber is to get someone else to do it. And you thought you'd run out of uses for BM!

Can't answer the clothes question, though. Possible explanations might be: (1) women's clothes are harder to make because you're more irregularly-shaped, (2) women's clothes have more expensive ingredients because you're such demanding customers or (3) you're getting ripped off for being slaves to fashion. To be honest, haute couture is not a particular field of expertise for me.

I can't afford clothes of any denomination so the problem doesn't really affect me. Instead I am concentrating on trying to grow my own fur/scales/etc. like the RT!

Helen Bristol

28 July 2003 21:07

No, no, his uses are infinite.............and my imagination.........we-ell! (Anyway, he's more accident-prone than you)

Re clothing - looking at some of the males of the species (present company excepted, I think) I cannot agree with your suggestion that women are more irregularly shaped. But then I'm looking at them with a feminine eye. I know you can't all be Adonises.

We do a nice line in wode here - would you be interested? Even when I was subsisting on my paltry grant I managed to afford a few rags to put on my back ............but then I guess you were probably nobly supporting CAMRA?

BM off with the germans again..................(dare I say it?) in Brighton..........

CM's trying to initiate me into the mysteries of reading-the-entrails. He keeps leaving little test pieces on the mat.......this week sems to be mostly The Kidneys of Small Furry Mammals, god knows what they mean. Do your fleabags do this or have they given up on you? Perhaps he's gone off Felix......I know he much prefers fillet steak, offal, in fact almost anything raw, and brown shrimps. All of which are probably better for him than the tinned stuff.

Well, another day another euro, 'cept I didn't get my payrise 'cos HR cocked up again. No blame culture in the NHS?.............you have to be joking! - please?

Vile Jelly

29 July 2003 10:01

Maybe. But I still think women's clothing must be more irregularly shaped because it never seems to fit me!

Our fleabags used to bring dead creatures of various denominations in back when the wrinklies lived in the frozen north but seem to have given up down here (possibly because a St. Ives seagull is a slightly different proposition from a sparrer!). Perhaps CM is thoughtfully bringing you these titbits so you've got something to nibble on while he tucks into your steak.

PS. Didn't quite understand the last bit. Please explain 'rise', oh, and 'pay'.

I thought you all worked in the NHS for the love of the human race and now you're telling me you are creaming off our hard paid taxes! Tsk, tsk, holding ill people hostage for your own personal gain. Next you'll be going on strike because someone asked you to clock in to account for your working hours!

I think you should all be put on the St. Ives Tourism Workers Employment Scheme; i.e. no contract, minimal pay, no guarantee there'll be a job next week let alone next month. Give the BA Baggage Maulers a week down here in the Slave Pits and then they'll know what cruel and unusual working practices are!

Helen Bristol

29 July 2003 17:10

You're just irregularly shaped in different places.

Gave up working for love years ago. Some of the Human Race are very hard to even like, let alone love. The rate at which people are being booted out of hospital belies the idea that anyone is held hostage, sort of released prior to being taken captive.

Come, come, Paul, even someone with the concisest of Concise OEDs could find that out for himself. And anyway the amount I pay in deductions accounts for a sizable chunk of my income, so I pay myself!

Vile Jelly

29 July 2003 17:35

Too true.

I was only being facetious as you well know. [Incidentally, apparently facetious is only on of two words in English in which the letters 'aeiou' occur only once and in the correct sequence]. I can never remember what the other one is.

Anyway, the bottom line is most of us have a job that is poo and the only solution is to rise up against the economic tsars. Can you imagine (I do, oh lordy, yes, I do!) the look on Mr Smug Convertible's face when he is run through by an irate cook only to find that the hospital peeps who could have saved him are all off for the weekend just like he was).

I'm sorry, I've got to go and lie down in a darkened room now!

The only thing that stops me indulging in poetic justice is that I don't care much for poetry .... apart from Owen, Sassoon, Gerard de Nerval.

Helen Bristol

30 July 2003 10:15

Don't know what happened then..................I had just click to open your emu and there was a power shutdown.............as in all the electricity went off. I know, I thought, its that explosive reply from his Vileness. And lo, it was.

Not to rub it in too much.......I'm off for 5 days and, true to form BM isn't. This is a running joke in the dept. I suppose I could mosey over to Adnamsville but the reason for taking some time off was to get away from the deafness-inducing Airshow so it would be a lost cause, being a mere handful of miles down the coast.

Must get on, so little to do, so much time to do it.

Vile Jelly

30 July 2003 11:55

You're a cruel and heartless woman .....

..... have you ever considered a job as a St. Ives Pub/Restaurant Manager?

Helen Bristol

30 July 2003 13:57

Got a twitchy finger or something? You sent this one twice at exactly (?) the same time. The stress must be getting to you. I empathise.

Vile Jelly

31 July 2003 15:36

The german singing owls made me do it!

Helen Bristol

30 July 2003 14:01

I'm cut to the quick. I shall have to indulge in some retail therapy to get over that.

Now, you see, VJ, I don't consider my work as a mere job...............I'm told I have something called a career path..........which probably leads somewhere............. I'll let you know when I find out.

And the answer is "yes" but I think it was in a nightmare.

Vile Jelly

31 July 2003 15:36

Cut to the quick, eh? As opposed to moi, who is merely quick to be cut. Those damn Globals nobble me every time it gets busy (i.e. all the time) and I get stressed (i.e. all the time). Mike, one of the chefs in the Slave Pits, was saying that he found a small trail of blood this morning and so knew we'd been busy last night even before he saw the score on the counter!

Helen Bristol

31 July 2003 17:50

I've just spent the day filing my report for the Big Dig, so now need to sooth the fevered brow and have a swig of something cold - back to the Sancerre again.

Talking of cuts, BM tried the slicing-the digit-off trick with the bread knife at some godly hour this morning. I was still fast asleep.

Vile Jelly

31 July 2003 22:06

How do you know he did it then?

Helen Bristol

01 August 2003 10:44

What? The cut? Says he was being parsleymonious and trying to get an extra slice off the end crust. It was just after the dawn chorus which yet again failed to wake me, as did the alarm clock.

BM in Lunnun today, I wonder if he'll encounter the saintly one.

Looks like the Airshow will be a wash-out today. Yesterday a couple ................. (sorry, mini interruption........a Geordie (if I'm any judge of Jimmy Nail-like accents but I was 'luv' not 'pet') with 'Whitby Fish' embroidered on his whites, selling fresh fish from Lowestoft. I hadn't the heart to tell him that I can get that any day of the working week....................anyway, a couple of F16s buzzed the town, rattling windows and reminding me again, as if I really needed to be reminded, why I hate them so much. Even all the birds Dived, or is it dove, for cover and put their wings over their ears.

Trying to get the house a bit tidier as younger son coming for the weekend. I'm beginning to think that this chair is what aggravates my back after slaving over a hot keyboard yesterday and playing with my new infra red mouse.

Vile Jelly

01 August 2003 15:37

F16's, eh?

You should have got a job as a plane spotter! Did you happen to notice what Mark they were and which ordnance they had chosen .....

Sorry, about the interruption I think the secreted services must be interfering with the site!

PS. Infra-red mouse? Does this mean that CM is investing in Night-Vision Goggles? Who knows where this particular arms race may lead us.

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