wendy house

provides a well designed dispenser to make sure travelling ladies can have timely prevention of:

1) underwear staining

2) headaches

3) STD’s

USA restrooms that I have frequented rarely include any form of dispenser. 

forty-seventh in a series of posts describing the experience of taking tea English style.

Thursday Tiffin #47: practical session

Use the knowledge you’ve gained from the last 46 posts to make yourself a nice relaxing cup of tea.  You know it makes sense.

fifty-sixth in a Wednesday-series of posts detailing the geographical causes of my singleness.

Reason # 56: Downtown

It has been pointed out to me that I am unlikely to meet cool happening cosmipolitan dudes while I do not live Downtown.  Where all the lights are bright.  Downtown.  Even Kevin Turvey recognised the value of going Downtown.

cafés to the left.    cafés ahead.    cafés to the right.     

Cafés on the edge of the Lavapies district of Madrid. 

Perfect places to eavesdrop,  observe locals,  and tourists. The wait-staff of the two empty cafés ahead hold conversations across the street and physically perk-up whenever potential customers, people, walk down the street between them…

The film ‘Becoming Jane’ pulls together themes from Jane Austens novels and rewrites them as-if they were experiences happening directly to Jane and her family.  

A generous perspective might describe this as a creative pastiche highlighting Janes classic storylines littered with powerful quotes that interweaves elements of her own life story. 

A less generous interpretation might be that the film cobbles together crowd-pleasing dialog into a script that lacks the powerful character insight, detail, and well paced plot developments of Janes own writing.   

Ratings explained

irritants:

• Jane as vibrant and very physically pretty girl by current beauty standards.  Janes modern style of self expression does not convincingly fit with the proprieties of the time captured so beautifully in her own writing.  
• The film’s premis that Jane wrote only about that which she experienced first-hand.  The implication is that she did not have the imaginitation or capability to construct storylines beyond her immediate experience.
• Jane as wooed by virtually every batchelor with whom she converses.  Virtually no situational relationship development demonstrated over time all relationships are portrayed in brief encounters with implied chemistry (or lack of it) with the slight exception of the main love interest.  Slight.  We are required to believe that deep love evolves across a couple of encounters and conversations. 

fun bits:

• spotting quotes from Jane’s books.
• working-out which characters and actions were inspired by which book characters.
• aesthetics of the sets,  costumes and characters.
• some novel unexpected character developments.

There may be a time in every bidet’s life when it waits on the street. 

The silver Moped appears to be gaurding the silver Bidet from random attack by a misguidedly malicious person that may well hold a grudge against bidets in general due to unfortunate accident in their formative years.  Its possible.  The attacker is unlikely to have been raised in the US where people are protected from high-risk,  irresponsible, youthful escapades with bidets. 

Do you think this bidet is visiting the Hotel?

The lines of this beautiful door obscured by a message that does not invite me to happiness,  to participate,  to come-in, to adventure.  The paint changes the door into a wall.  It made me sad. 

A basic coat of white covered with coloured dashes and squiggles overlayed with grafitti.  The car appeared to be inviting me to get a spraycan out and add my momento to its journey.  Mobile, socially accessible and constructed art.

Fabulous use for a classic car of which I have very fond memories.

forty-sixth in a series of posts describing the experience of taking tea English style.

Thursday Tiffin #46: Tea is an attitude

The mission statement on the Blog “Nice cup of Tea and a sit down” captures the attitude exquisitly.  I was particularly taken with their fruitcake serving suggestion developed during their Suffolk cycling tour,  especially since I haven’t

• had any fruitcake for at least a year. 
• been to Suffolk for 7 years.

Oh deary me, that needs fixing.

Nice cup of Tea and a sit down blog Mission statement:

Our Mission Statement

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely.

fifty-fifth in a Wednesday-series of posts detailing the not quite realistic causes of my singleness.

Reason # 55: fantasy land

Wendy having an absolutely fabulous time often involves lashings of fantasy play both indoors and in public places.  I have met very few boys that tolerate or engage in, or better still promote spontaneous fantasy play in public places.  They are absolutely yummy companions when I stumble across them…   

In Spains Catholic religious capital Cathedral, Toledo, the burial places of Cardinals are marked by their hats being suspecnded from the ceiling above.  The hats hang until they decompose.  They add an eerie feeling to the cathedral as they gently swing in the silence.

The building in the centre of this photograph is covered in cloth that is coloured to look like the outside of a building.  Behind the cloth I can hear what I pressume to be hammers and drills and conversation,  muffled in the distance.  What a wonderful gift to the inhabitants of the city,  containing the noise and dust of renovation to the building being renovated. 

Cosmopolitan? thats me!

because I drank a German beer made with the finest organic hemp from a bottle with an English label in a Spanish cafe.   It was all terribly civilised. 

Politeness and respect all around.

The man in this photograph was giving the lady a personal guided tour of the Latin Quarter of Madrid.  In English. 

I followed them,  at a distance,  for a couple of miles hearing all sorts of lovely little details.  They nearly discovered me once when they walked down a dead-end alley and turned round to come back out.  Luckily I was still in Hitchcock sleuth mode and managed to scarper without being spotted or falling over any parked Mopeds.

According to the guide this is the oldest door in Madrid at 500yrs old.  Madrid is a fairly young city by European standards.

they do not drip messy wax,  they do not blow-out in the gentle church breezes, securely collecting donations,  equal lights for each prayer, only the bulbs need replacing and the cover eases dusting and cleaning.  These prayer installations were in both the Cathedrals I visited in Spain.

Progress? 

The emotional, sensual, experience of an electric prayer barely touches that of lighting, smelling, watching real candles. 

forty-fifth in a series of posts describing the experience of taking tea English style.

Thursday Tiffin #45: Tea is a meal

At my parents home my family had 3 meals a day:

• Breakfast:  Toast and cereal with milk around 8am before school
• Dinner: meat and two vegetables between 12 and 1pm
• Tea: a selection of cheese and cold-meats Smorgesbord style to make Danish style sandwiches with several pots of tea shared after the BBC 6 o’clock news had finished.  This is not necessarily an English way of taking tea,  it’s a mix of my Yorkshire Mum and Finnish Dads food preferences.  On Thursdays the timing could seriously interfere with watching ‘Top of the Pops’. 

fifty-fourth in the essential-reading Wednesday-series of well-hyphenated posts detailing the causes of my singleness.

Reason #54: touched

When I see an instruction saying “do not touch” on something circular and raised that looks remarkably like a button,  it makes me want to push that thing even more.  Take this picture as an example.   Do you think I touched the button-like thing with my forefinger like one-would press a button? 

Was the designer of the Descarga automatica pulling my leg finger or am I still a tad too paranoid?  It’s hard to tell.  I need help with such tricky questions.

These two people, he with a big camera and pants des cargo con khaki,  her with hotpants and wobbly thighs, whirred passed the Madrid cafe where I was peacefully soaking up the view and the vino. 

I suspect I would fall-off and crash such a contraption that clearly needs advanced balancing skills.  Why aren’t they wearing helmets?  Such wild wrecklessness on whirring wheely thingys.

not the name of an English pub.

A Madrid morning moment.

Infront of a Musical Opera shop where Nun and moped pretend that they have never met before.

After taking the photo I joined the game by pretending that I was in an Alfred Hitchocock movie and followed the nun.  Just incase.   I think I managed to stay incognito,  following from a distance,  wearing dark reflective Ray Bans.

Sat at SeaTac airport with an hour or so before my flight to Madrid I ordered a nice pint of Bass and started studying my pocket-sized English Spanish conversation guide. 

Questions 

“Do you speak Spanish?“  I don’t think I’ll need that,  I will need “Do you speak English?” but it is not listed.   The book does provide this question ‘what are you saying?” but without the ability to understand the answer this question would merely be digging myself a confusional hole.  There is no book section on useful  ‘Answers’ or a translation of the ever-useful phrase:  

“I’m really sorry,  I can’t speak your language can we use pointing and acting instead?” 

The Doctor

What about when I fall-over?  If I need a doctor for a broken bone?  The cartoon with the Doctor section is intriguing.  What excatly is the Dr. doing?  I looked for the “I think I’ve broken my arm” phrase but got no further than “Undress please” which seems a bit of a premature suggection for diagnosing a broken arm.  Though,  obviously,  as a single girl,  I need to memorise the phrase:

Quitese la ropa, por favor

Warning.

Lady in deceptively slow-moving dress caught undertaking a yellow Moped on Gran Via.  Watch out for the Handbag,  it’s like an air-bag only much harder on sudden contact.

In November I lost my second passport in one year.  I found lost passport # 1 when looking for lost passport #2.  When the UK Govt. sent a replacement passport #2 they put me on a special limited edition.  Limited to 1 year validity.  They call it the scatterbrain edition.

Tonight I found lost passport #2.  It was under an unused dusty note-book,  in a cupoboard, under a sink,  in a bathroom,  a cupboard that I didn’t think I had ever used. 

Passport.  Bathroom undersink cupboard.  Now I think that’s a bit silly. 

forty-fourth in a series of posts describing the experience of taking tea English style.

Thursday Tiffin #44: into the harbour

BBC America recommends that local US natives use subtitles (US = cc, closed captioning) to get the full benefit of programs such as Murphy’s Law because of their lack of familiarity with the British accents stemming from wrecklessly having dumped some tea in the Boston harbour.

fifty-third in a Wednesday series of posts detailing the very serious causes of my singleness.

Reason #53: delayed reaction

when my leg is pulled 

sometimes I don’t notice it for

 …. minutes ….  

especially if my knee is grazed,  which it often is…..

PrivateLie: how long have you lived in the US?

Wendy: severn yers

PrivateLie: you haven’t picked up the accent

Wendy: ….

PrivateLie: you have lost a lot of your burr

YURrrrrS urv lurv’n oral-oh-VURrr ‘ee UMPURrrrrr UV durmm’d ee BURrrrrrrr uv moiy Reej-in-AU AXE-synth een’ FAY-VURrrrrrr urrrrrv moi bee-een  UN-urs-ood  

 INNIT? 

I jumped right in and fell-over on my first day in Madrid. 

Nice scrape there on my knee… …and what colour and style are those pants I’m wearing….a shade of khaki…a version of cargo….have I succumbed to the camoflauge of the masses? 

Oh fickle me and my grazed knee. 

We are sat at the beautiful Madrid airport watching the rain……

the RAIN  in SPAIN waiting for my PLANE

The Spanish locals are wearing the pants of the cargo khaki.  They are internationale.  They are slightly smaller than the US equivalent.  They look like they fit the wearer.   They are all over the place here in Madrid.  Should I be scared or simply make sure I extend my wardrobe to contain the now essential khaki pants des cargo?

*part 2

Gosh,  I hope I’m alright

forty-third in a series of posts describing the experience of taking tea,  or not taking it in this case,  English style.

Thursday Tiffin #43: withdrawal

It is highly likely that I haven’t had a cup of tea for days by now because I’m on HOLIDAY in SPAIN where its probably too HOT for proper tea. 

When I know for sure where I am and what I’m doing and whether it involves tea or not I’ll write a comment on this post about withdrawal symptons.    I can’t really be sure what’s happening because I wrote this blog entry before I left for SPAIN and used that automatic post-it widget doobry to post it now. 

Gosh,  I hope I’m alright

fifty-third in a Wednesday series of posts attempting to uncover the many mysteries of my singleness

Reason #53: see reasons 1 though 52

I’m on Holiday in SPAIN,  Madrid,  its and exotic place,  surely you can’t expect me to write sensible reasons for being single when I’m on HOLIDAY.  You’ll have to satisfy your curiosity with a bit of re-visiting earlier gems of delightful rationality because I’m GONE.  Let’s say it together, with feeling,

GONE

MADRID

SPAIN

HOLIDAY 

(gosh,  I hope I’m alright)