Clean Sheets

Sweet rain – not much to be honest, just a few drops on the windscreen this morning, but welcome.
We don’t get as much here in Richmond as they do in North Vancouver, often at the Nature Park we’d have school groups arriving from across the city, soaked, beaten by hailstones even and we’d be dry, overcast but dry.
It seems to me that people here are more bothered by rain than in Britain. Oh, Brits grumble about it, make jokes about the British summer, but then we basically ignore it, carry on as if it weren’t happening.

The lad’s results have finally arrived, I received an e-mail first thing from his sister. Their father had had to go in to the school and get them in the end. The grades were adequate. If I consider how bright he is, they were shocking, but we weren’t shocked, he had done no work for them, and gave himself a weekend to do a year’s coursework after the deadline and before the DEADline. And nor could I even squinny, I did the same thing myself, scraping through O-Level and then having to go full on for A-level. Austen admitted to having done this too.
But given that Ben's gameplan was always to optimise the balance between fart-arsing around and getting just enough core subjects so that he didn't have to re-take any of them, I suppose you could say he scored.
As for squinnying – I had never heard that word before going to Portsmouth, and then, out of all the peculiarly Pompey words there are, considered this one to be a nice one to adopt and use, it sounded like what it describes, not in an onomatopoeic way, just…it sounds right.
And then last week, watching ‘Slings and Arrows’ on TV, I heard it in a speech by King Lear. Figures. I suppose I should look that up.

We clearly get a better class of graffiti around here. The yobbos who have spray painted this on a portacabin used by the secondary school across the road from us and the same message on the elementary school just across the playing fields, have taken the trouble not only to spell it correctly but to punctuate as well.
So not Italians then lads? ( I learnt this much from watching 'The Sopranos'.)
In general, my experience of graffiti in school at the very least, was that the artistes (sic) couldn't spell their abusive messages properly.
And yet, graffiti can have a use.
Many years ago, in the women's toilets in the Students' Union at Keele university, someone (I always thought perhaps the man himself) had written,
'Tom Slattery is the worst shag on campus'. About twelve others had then expressed their opinions. Clearly Tom was getting the action, even if only to report on his lack of prowess - you see why I thought he had written it....

Clean sheets? Just that today is Tuesday.
On a Monday I wash the bed linen and so on a Monday night we have the pleasure of clean sheets to snuggle into. Well, one clean sheet and a duvet cover to be more accurate, but enjoyable nonetheless.
In the dim and distant past, making the bed was a daily chore, folding the bottom sheet under properly, then the top sheet, then the blanket and finally the counterpane, and on top of it all, a candlewick bedspread. They even taught you how to do it at Brownies, taught you how to make a sleeping bag with one old double sheet, a blanket and a blanket pin.

I don’t miss any of that, but I do love Monday’s clean sheets.