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Showing posts from December, 2007

Playroom? Dressing Room? Tales from the Neanderthal Smugglers' Den

"But the room is too big." both my children declared - their excuse for persistently succeeding in destroying my efforts to tame their untidy bedroom. What was to be done about it? I plotted and planned, measured and sketched, then headed off to Firwood Timber , our local timber merchant. Nowadays I think I'm probably just 'that quirky woman who thinks she can do DIY', but initially the men in the yard treated me with a kind of revered contempt. I did a small stint in a timber yard myself, as a cashier, not in the yard itself. My manager-to-be explained at interview that he would not discriminate, of course, but there was a horror story of a girl who had once worked there that had to be told. Not that I wanted to work in a cold, windy timber yard: a warm office shared with a lovely accountant will do quite nicely thank you. So, the Firwood timber men got past the fact that I know my wood, mostly manage not to look too put out by their self-derived need to curb the

Oh No! Not Twittering. Anything but Twittering.

When I started this blog, I was adamant that it would not be a 'blog': hence the title 'de-blog' - a play on words that allowed me to connect my name to this log of my life whilst at the same time condemning the shortening of the term web log / weblog. With this in mind it may be surprising to read that last night I received a ticking off for my use of 'ur' as instant message shorthand of 'your' in a writers' chat-room, and rightly so. Sometimes these things occur out of force of habit and it's one I wish I hadn't acquired. Modern methods of communication are obliterating our language and it seems that I, like everyone else, have succumbed to the necessity to 'get with it'. This is not to say that I despise new technology; far from it, I appreciate the simplicity and immediacy of email, something I have had far more success in using than I ever did with traditional postal mail. It is a long time since I had penpals, who undoubtedly we