Monday 8 August 2011

Slime, lavender and guns

What is slimy, lies in a sparkly trail under my lounge table (but only on one side) and appears every couple of nights or so?  A snail trail................. I have no idea where the offending gastropod comes from, or indeed where he scarpers off to, but he leaves evidence of his visit for me to vacuum up.  I have looked all over the area for an access point, moved the furniture around and checked the curtains but I am none the wiser as to where he is living.  In order to get to his slime-out zone he must have to travel across the room but there is no evidence of goo anywhere else.  This one has me totally baffled but once I find the little critter he will be relocating to Le Bonne Escargot Bistro to await his fate.
With the onset of some half decent weather I decided to give the back garden lawn a short back and sides for the first time since I returned from France.  Unbelievably I found a barren wasteland around the far side of the privet hedge.  Yes, you have guessed it..............my Dad had uprooted more shrubs after deciding they were just ‘undergrowth’.  This time it was three lavenders and a blue flowering shrub thingy.  They were all well established and smelled like an old lady’s wardrobe but they still went the journey to the wheelie bin.  I have now purchased more lavender for planting out with barbed wire around them to deter further decimation.
Last week I met up with some of the folk I first knew when we all grew up in the same street several (well............a lot) of years ago.  We had great fun recalling what we got up to, who we remembered from the street, what has gone on in the intervening years and how the area has changed for the worse over the past few years.  Our venue was a pizza restaurant in our hometown which has been in the same place since 1959 and has fed such celebrities as Mick Jagger (apparently he was thrown out), Frank Sinatra, Jack Nicholson and Norman Wisdom to name but a few.  Prior to last week I had never been in the place but I will definitely eat there again.  The original owner allegedly kept a shotgun under the pizza counter in case anyone considered by her as ‘unsavoury’ entered.  No mention is made of whether she actually had cause to fire it.
Talking of guns, I was watching some television coverage of the weekend riots in North London when a peaceful march was hijacked by the dial-a-mob fraternity.  They had nothing to do with the original issue (a fatal shooting) but saw it as an excuse to reduce a street to something resembling a war zone with burned out buildings and vehicles plus looting from every shop imaginable.  What gives these individuals the right to behave this way?  They should be rounded up and shipped off to a remote island with no means of escape, no food source, no iPods etc and left there to rot.  Subsequent looting has since taken place in other areas of the capital organised via text and internet information.  London used to be lovely place to live, the suburbs were sought after residential areas and people respected themselves and each other.  Sadly, we are living in a society where the minority wreck it for everyone else, the respectable residents are tarred with the same brush as the hooligans and people are not safe in their own neighbourhood.  Something needs to change fast otherwise it will be a more desirable option to move to the Congo and set up home there.



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