Soggy Saturday

It has put some rain down here today, I'm so glad that the Bangor Pier thing was last night and not tonight, or it might have been a complete wash out. It was lovely all morning, I even suggested to Mr G that we go out again this evening for a walk. We watched the Crusaders v Hunslet match on Our League - they lost 18 - 26 - and the rain was torrential in parts during the match, even hailstone at one point. A short while after the final whistle blew it started to come down here, bouncing off the ground. So, we'll take a raincheck tonight - no pun intended.

I think (I hope!?) the issue with my blog has been resolved. I haven't done anything as such, only Google things and then panic because I did not have a clue what these people on these forums were on about. By this morning that scary red page had disappeared and instead, in the address bar, it was warning that my site was not secure. It seems to be ok by now, anyway, all the pages seem to have the usual padlocks on them. At the end of the day, I'm a housewife and mother who is keeping memories. 

I use Blogger in the simplest form, I click a new post button, I type, and I click another button and insert photographs which are stored by Google themselves in their Photos app. I don't do all this <insert bollocks? =whatthefeckamIdoing> nonsense. The last time I programmed a computer was back in 1985, when I made my Dad's Commodore 64 play Michael Row The Boat Ashore. I remember it used words like Peek and Poke and Goto. I think Peek or Poke changed the border and the screen colour. But this newfangled nonsense goes right over my head. I don't host adverts. I don't sell anything. I don't even allow comments except from people who are logged into Google, and even then I have to moderate each one, due to the spam level. So, if you're watching, Google. Housewife, not hacker, hun. Mother, not (criminal) mastermind. I can only assume that it was a glitch. No doubt it happens, even in big companies like Google. 

Nice easy tea tonight, pulled pork baps. Mr G had pulled pork barmcakes because he is from Wigan. Despite the pack stating Henllan Brown Baps. The last lot I bought, he crossed the word baps out and wrote barmcakes over the top. Loads of stuffing and apple sauce. Simple, but lush. Washed down with a nice glass of Rioja whilst watching the Chelsea v Leicester FA cup final as a neutral. 

I've spent the afternoon knitting a stuffed toy. My brother David turns 40 next month, and when he was a small boy, he had this huge stuffed toy, called Nigel. Nigel was as tall as him, probably taller when he was really young, and only for photographs of Dave and Nigel together being in existence, you'd think I was making him up. Because I cannot find Nigel, as we know him, anywhere on the internet. Nigel was a Smurf. But as Smurfs are blue and white, Nigel was flesh/pink colour, with a brown bottom and a brown Smurf hat. I can't find any legend of there being Smurfs (Smurves? Wtf is the plural of a Smurf? Let me know in the comments...) that were these colours. Mr G suggested that he was a rip-off Smurf; maybe, I don't know. Back in the early eighties, you couldn't be so blatant with counterfeiting, could you? 

Like a lot of working class eighties kids, we frequented a lot of coffee mornings and jumble sales. We weren't so poor that we ever bought clothes from there, but I was such an avid bookworm that Mum used to take me on a Saturday morning and I would buy up all the Famous Five and Secret Seven books to complete my Enid Blyton collection.  In retrospect, Nigel's appearance in our lives probably came from a coffee morning to begin with. Anyway, when I was in the second year of Juniors, we 'adopted' this small patch of land between the toilets and our classroom in school, and we made a school garden as a yearly project. Probably one of the defining moments of my education. We exclusively fundraised the garden, planted it, cultivated it. One of the fundraising ideas was a jumble sale. So, we secured the school hall. We had parents bake cakes, we had jumble, books, bric a brac, tombola, raffle. The usual tat. Our class sorted through all donations (at the expense of our proper education, gasp!) and I remember we set up the hall after lunch service, for a 3 pm start time. Every child was allocated a position on a stall, or selling or serving something. 

So, Mum has the obligatory clean out from our rooms. We donate everything we don't want any more. Thankfully, Nigel makes the cut, because Mum hates him - in her words...

In her defence, he was a disgrace. He wasn't the prettiest looking of stuffed toys. He was actually quite frightening and intimidating, as a three foot beige and brown Smurf would be. Plus he was a health hazard. Filthy. I don't know if he ever had a proper wash, if David would let her wash him, if he would have fit in her twin tub (lol) and then been line dry and back in bed for him, because he wouldn't sleep without Nigel.

So, of course, Mum has to support my class's endeavours. She brings along David, who would have been about three at this point. David spots Nigel, has a hissy fit, and makes Mum buy Nigel back. Despite having donated him, she had to buy him back, and she's furious about that to this day. 

The only time I've seen her angrier, was after her hip replacement, and Dad and I went to YG to see her, and - still off her tits on anaesthetic - she points at the woman opposite and said 'SHE ate my fucking sandwich'. Huge emphasis on the she. Think... sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, complete with vocal intonation. Complete with pointed finger, eye contact with fixed glare at this poor woman who was admitted and offered my Mum's sandwich, not knowing it was Mum's.   

This is all to come, dear reader, this is all to come...