The Post Woman Only Slaps Once

I am just about to go to bed; I am having visitors tomorrow so I thought I would get my post in now and then I won’t have to worry about it. Bed is supposed to be a place of rest and recuperation (well it is at my age) but it wasn’t like that for the Hub last night: I turned over in my sleep and slapped him in the face. They say we do the things in our dreams that we would like to do in life but don’t have the courage for…poor Hub.

Before you start feeling sorry for him, let me tell you that I am not the only violent sleeper in this marriage: more than once he has dreamed he’s in a fight and has punched the wall. Sometimes he wakes up with a bruised hand and wonders why; sometimes I wake him up by yelling at him that he nearly got me that time. Then he mutters, ‘Curses!  Foiled again.’  Maybe we should think about separate beds or arguing less. No: when I suggested it we argued more.

We are great squabblers over stupid things: the door’s not quite shut; whichever one of us closed the curtains left a gap; the pillows are the wrong way round on the bed; one of us ate all the cheese & onion crisps. It used to bother me but now I think it works like a whistling kettle (on a stove top, naturally): a little tension is released each day so we avoid drying up and exploding. I have known the break up of couples who never argue; by annoying each other each day we are actually saving our marriage. That’s what I’ll tell him next time he moans that I didn’t take my empty cup into the kitchen. Right before I throw it at him.

I wonder if it’s the squabbles that make me punish the Hub in the night, when we are both asleep? Apparently, I often yank his pillow out from under him so that his head crashes to the mattress. It wouldn’t hurt when awake but he tells me it’s a shocker when you’re dreaming that Demi Moore has at last seen the light and dumped Ashton for a real man, and you suddenly find yourself flat on your back with a humped-back woman hogging the bed. The humped-back woman is me cuddling his pillow and imitating a chevron.

Then there is the matter of the duvet: the poor love is under the impression that, because he sleeps in the same bed, he’s entitled to a share in it; he has delusions of equality. Men think the funniest things, don’t they? He’ll be wanting more than a quarter of the mattress next.

Doesn’t Bode Well For The Future…

I have signed up to Twitter. There has been a lot of publicity this week about British MPs signing up and I thought well, if they can use it, so can I, as technept as I am. It doesn’t bode well, however, that a lot of the publicity has been about Twitter identities being hijacked. Nor does it bode well for me that I told my family I had signed up to ‘Tweeter’. They thought I had become a birdwatcher. Or is that ‘twitcher’? Tweeters are usually paired up with woofers in a Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch, aren’t they? This online stuff is complicated.

My Twitter name is laughwife because I couldn’t fit the whole of ‘thelaughinghousewife’ in. I am a little concerned that my new name makes me sound like a crazy fishwife. My first tweet probably didn’t help: Is there anyone in America who owns an electric kettle? I haven’t had any replies yet so if you are reading this; live in the States; have important information pertaining to kitchen appliances; and nothing better to do, please tell me.

This question is still bugging me. I think the answer is ‘no’ because a look at blogs discussing similar topics turned up a raft of Americans now living abroad who rave about the wonders of their newly-discovered electric kettles. There are even posts dedicated to instructions on how to use them properly. I wouldn’t have thought you could say much beyond, ‘Fill with water. Switch on. Wait,’ but you’d be surprised at the detail these kettle converts go into. I’m not going to mock because I remember my Mother’s wonder at her first automatic washing machine after years of slaving over a twin tub; and my own astonishment, when we first went out to South Africa, at the miracle that is the sandwich toaster.

Do you think John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh felt the same way about the potato? Bet they never foresaw the invention of the chip pan or the deep fat fryer. I wonder if they have those in America? Probably not: tea and chips are very English habits; though, of course, we didn’t invent either of them – Belgium invented chips, according to my Asterix the Gaul books.

Here’s an interesting fact about kettles that I came across when I was researching the potato:

1891
Electric Kettle Crompton and Company developed the electric kettle in England. The earliest examples of electric kettles all had the element in a separate chamber underneath similar to traditional vessels which boiled water and had the fire underneath the pot.

From: http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/history/food_timeline_html.html

It has just occurred to me that my non-Brit readers might not know the term ‘fishwife’. It is a derogatory term for a woman, meaning one who swears loud and long in public. It originally referred only to women who sold fish but was made notorious by the women of Billingsgate fish market in the Nineteenth Century. Now, of course, it seems like every female in Britain, from two to ninety-two, swears like a fishwife and gives the first fishwives a bad name.

I’m starting to feel hungry for some reason; I am suddenly in the mood for fish and chips and a mug of tea. Must be the hard work of writing trivia that only I could possibly be interested in.  It makes me feel a bit of a twit, which doesn’t bode well for the future of this blog….

PS Did you know (from the same source; or ibid, for my Latin friends) that ‘by the early 1900s there [were] more than 30,000 chippies in Britain’?  Me neither.

America, Please Enlighten Me

This is something that has puzzled me for years: are there no electric kettles in the USA?

Watch American movies and tv carefully: whenever a cup of tea or coffee is made, the character fills a kettle and puts it on the stove. No-one ever plugs a kettle into the wall. Why is this? I mention it because I was reading WendyUsuallyWanders this morning and she had an interesting virtual tour of her kitchen, and I noticed there was no kettle. I asked her the same question and she was a little helpful: she doesn’t drink tea or coffee herself but she has seen electric kettles in other homes. But that doesn’t tell me why they never appear on tv. Is there a ban on their use in the media, like there is for cigarettes? Does the American Government know and is not telling us that electric kettles cause lung cancer?

There is also the question of tea: why do Americans drink tea with the bag still in the cup? I know this is so because the string and label always hang over the side. The tea must be stewed by the time they get to the bottom of it. No wonder there are so many hairy people in the States. And don’t get me started on how they drink it the minute the boiling water is poured in – do they all have asbestos lips? My own theory is that America has traditionally been a nation of coffee drinkers and directors want to show their characters’ individuality by making it obvious that they are tea drinkers: maverick detective with hirsute trout pout clears name by killing seventy-three queuing assailants with six bullets, and rounds off the day with a nice cup of Earl Grey. Or it could just be a matter of product placement. But that still doesn’t explain the weird absence of electric kettles.

‘Queuing’ came from last night’s writing class, where we discussed the fact that there are no new stories, then segued into movie clichés: the baddies always take turns fighting the hero instead of rushing him en masse. It’s usually a him. He might have – in fact, he will have – a gorgeous female sidekick and she will have a fabulous name and these days can kick butt as well as him, but she will inevitably be captured and be reduced to ‘the girl’: ‘Let the girl go/just give me the girl/blow up the Isle of Man or the girl gets it.’ If I am ever captured and the Hub rescues me and I hear him say, ‘Let the girl go,’ the first thing I will do after my grateful smooch will be to kick his butt and leave him for a dentist. It annoys me.

Then there is the matter of coffee drinkers: we see them in their homes, loading their stove-top kettles or their coffee machines. Next scene: a cardboard cup of coffee in their hands, bought from Starbucks on the way to fight crime. What’s that about? Are the stove-top kettles decoys? Or a subliminal message…if it ain’t from a street vendor you’re killing the planet?

One final question: do I spend too much time watching tv and worrying about inanities?

Quite Interesting

I was watching QI recently and I learned two interesting facts:

1. The Netherlands now has its own version.  I first typed ‘Holland’ but luckily I remembered that an episode of QI explained why that is incorrect.  I’m not going to bother telling you why it is, because I’ve forgotten. 

I checked out the QI website and I don’t think it’s that helpful for the kind of information I was looking for – which other countries have their own version?  But it did steer me towards the QI entry in Wikipedia , the first time I have known that to happen, and this in spite of QI’s regular mockery of the veracity of Wikipedia’s entries.  The answer was The Netherlands only.  (Wikipedia cleverly avoided the Holland trap by saying ‘The Dutch’.)  The only reason it hasn’t been picked up by other countries, apparently, is the issue of copyright of the images broadcast.

It took me so long to type that, I’ve forgotten what number 2 is.  How annoying.

Took a chocolate break and it came flooding back; chocolate is clearly brain food – how else do you explain the number of degrees given out each year to 21 year-olds who believe that three years of eating crisps, chocolate, pizza and Coke constitutes a balanced diet? 

There is – allegedly – a website in America called seeitrot.com, where you can buy a webcam for a coffin and watched your loved one moulder to dust away.  I say ‘allegedly’ because of course I had to check it out, and nothing came up except lots of laments about rotten food, and advice on protecting your boat because salt water will otherwise kill it off.  Didn’t know that either.  This self-educating business is fun.

I found the seeitrot.com thing interesting because of my Mum.  I hasten to assure you I had no desire to watch her rot away – it would have been kind of dull, anyway, because she’s a pile of ash – but she had a phobia of being buried or burned alive in her coffin and  I’m sure she’d have insisted I sign up if she’d known about it.  She made everyone she knew swear to stick a pin in her when the time came, to confirm she was truly dead.  Everyone agreed to do it – well, you have to placate crazies, don’t you? – but only the Hub and I followed through.  Just as well, really as, with that many holes in her, the pall bearers would have had embalming fluid stains on their suit shoulders at the funeral.  Now that would have been interesting.

Cartoon Quotes

More from my clippings notebook (I’m running out now so I’ll have to blog about something original in future):

Dilbert quotes, from an old Sky TV magazine:

• Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue
• Last night I lay in bed looking up at the sky and stars and I thought to myself, ‘Where the heck is the ceiling?’
• You’re slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter
• Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience
• Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups

This next one is from Hagar the Horrible. It’s not that funny but it struck a chord with me because I read it when the Hub was travelling sub-Saharan Africa for weeks at a time and I was trying to think of reasons why that might be a good thing:

Helga: (Sigh) Being the wife of a traveling man is a trade-off…He gets to visit the great cities of Europe for three weeks…and I get a clean house for three weeks!

Only, the house was never clean for three weeks because I always re-arranged the furniture when he was away and it would take days at a time to do each room and the house would be upside down. He would come back and be walking into things and getting into the wrong side of the bed for ages afterwards. Served him right for leaving me alone with a baby and rubbish telly.

An old favourite from Hi And Lois. I can’t remember the characters’ names but it doesn’t really matter:

Mum (enters room where children are watching television): This program is awfully violent.

Boy: It’s just an animated cartoon, Mom, made up of thousands of drawings. The characters aren’t real so nobody gets hurt!

(Mum leaves)

Boy: That’s what I call my “Disney Defense.”

Some Peanuts quotes; these are from the website http://www.allgreatquotes.com :

Sally: I think I’ve discovered the secret of life – you just hang around until you get used to it.

Charlie Brown: Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

Charlie Brown again: Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, “Why me?”, then a voice answers “Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.”

My personal favourite, unattributed: If I were given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself.

Sunday Sermon

I had an enjoyable morning at church – seriously; it happens occasionally.  Our parish has three churches and can’t fill any of them but this morning we all came together at our church and roped in the Methodists as well (whose church it really is; we rent their space).  We were packed out, despite the overnight snowfall.  It was lovely to be squashed in next to ancients I hadn’t yet met.   The Bishop of Stockport took the service so I can’t help wondering if it was the local equivalent of the Songs of Praise effect: a full church because you might get on telly/touch a Bishop.

I did touch the Bishop, and it hurt.  I said to him, ‘That’s quite a handshake – I bet you don’t lose many of your flock.’  Once he’d moved on I whispered to the vicar, ‘What’s he Bishop of?’ because I wasn’t paying attention last week when they told us he was coming.  He seemed nice enough.

Afterwards, we had a bring and share lunch so I was finally able to offload the Twiglets we bought at Christmas and which we all thought tasted foul.  They weren’t that stale and went down well, but not as well as the quiches and pork pies: there’s nothing like a hungry Christian for a table full of sausages.  I won’t need any dinner.

 

A Gad Soodbye

We’ve had a lovely week with the Niece and Nephew but they have gone home today.  We will all miss them.  Well, maybe not Toby: his nose has been a little out of joint this week because the Niece loves her Uncle Hub and likes to sit in her cubby hole in the one tiny corner of the couch between his knee and arm that he doesn’t use.  Toby played a trick on her yesterday: he growled to say, ‘Play with me,’ and when she stood up to get a toy from his basket he jumped into her seat, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Our last night was spent playing Monopoly and I discovered that when it comes to tycoonery, Spud is a monster – he owned three-quarters of the board and had hotels on everything.  He bankrupted his decrepit mother with a gleeful snort and a biting of the hand that won’t be feeding him anymore.  His poor cousins – in every sense of the word – were shown no mercy.  Telling their Dad about the game this morning, he told us he ‘never learned to pray Monopoly ploperly.’  The dysphasia must have been catching because the Hub later spoke of ‘teaning his cleeth.’  They’ll have to get a loan from Spud for peech stherapy.

That’s fall, olks.

A Small Revelation

I promised on Sunday that the reason for my late post would be revealed. The problem is, this revelation is not very exciting, so leaving you wanting more has backfired on me. Here it is: my niece and nephew have come to stay for the half-term holiday. Great fun for us but not much in there to excite a reader.

We have had a lovely few days. We have walked the dog – of course – if by walking the dog I mean Spud and Nephew allowed me to accompany them to the football pitch and then dumped me, while Niece refused to be more than thirty centimetres from a computer screen.

The Hub took us all dog racing last night; we enjoyed that, especially eight year old Niece, who can now talk knowledgeably of outsiders and trifectas, form and odds-on favourites. She was doing rather well, better than the rest of us, in fact, until the last race when we all decided to bet everything we had on different dogs. We lost £12,000 between us. That was £1 well-spent by the Hub at a boot sale on a dvd game.

Today we took a walk into Stockport, where a fun activity day was held at the town hall. Spud, his friend and Nephew all thought it was lame and bummed the bus fare home from me; but Niece enjoyed herself. There were craft, dance, music, sport and other activities. We went across to the art gallery afterwards because I wanted to show Niece something, and then walked home. For dinner we had a hearty and unhealthy home-made pizza, crinkle-cut chips, home-made milk shakes so think they solidified in the glass and cake for afters. Yummy.

A simple life but a happy one.

The Boy Nik (Not The Boy Nick) Knocked And He’s Got Manky Teeth

The Boy Nik has lost the ‘c’ since the last time I saw him and he needs to lose the majority of his teeth as well, as he showed me. Not a pleasant sight, but that’s drug addiction for you. He had the number of an NHS emergency dentist but he wanted me to phone his Mum and give her the number so that she could make an appointment for him and then phone his mobile to tell him the details. He assured me that he wouldn’t be bothering me anymore because he was having a land line installed today and could he wash our car as a thank you? I declined his kind offer but I did appreciate it.

He puts me on the back foot because he always calls early, while I’m still in my dressing gown; and every time he apologises for getting me out of bed, which he never has, but I feel embarrassed just the same. I’m never sure if he is just going out or just coming in, but today he came between last night’s elderly neighbour, Mrs S, who called for her spare key because she had misplaced her own (again); and next door’s Mrs J who is really Mrs F but everyone in the family has a name beginning with J, plus the son-in-law and one grandchild. Only the husband escapes but his name begins with G so he’s almost one of them. Mrs J was looking for the Hub to fix her laptop, which took him ten minutes. She says we can never move because she needs him too much: she is always borrowing his tools and his expertise. She spends a lot of time on her own and she taps away at the walls at all hours of the day and night, doing we know not what. I think she might be building a secret extension into our living room.

It was Coronationside Square in Neighbourhood Central this morning because the phone rang as often as the door bell. At one point I looked like Taz the Tasmanian devil because I was just about to put the recycling in the bins outside the back door when the phone went; I had almost answered it when Nik knocked; and that was when I noticed the dog had upchucked and I wasn’t sure where to turn as I searched for somewhere to put down seven empty bottles, five tins and a partridge in a paper tree. However, rest assured, dear reader, that if there was a screaming baby I’d have seen to him first. Fortunately, the Hub was asleep.

Bits & Pieces

This is the first chance I’ve had to blog today, for reasons which will be revealed later in the week (I’m following the old showbiz adage Always leave them wanting more; it works for chocolate). Some snippets:

H.L. Mencken:

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

The Hub:

The bloke in the car behind me had his finger so far up his nose he scraped the dandruff off his scalp.

Jason Manford in The Sun last week (this won’t appeal to non-cat people):

Dear Cat,

If your idea of a gift is a dead mouse at the foot of my stairs then please leave me off your gift list or get me some HMV vouchers.

Your Human

Dear Human,

It’s not a gift, it’s a warning.

Regards,

Your cat

Sad Fact:

Dick Francis died today, aged 89. I love his books.

An Interesting Fact:

Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife was first made famous by Louis Armstrong but is from The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill, based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. It was originally sung by Lotte Lenya, who was married to Weill and is mentioned in the lyrics – wonder how she felt about her husband naming her as one of the victims of a serial killer, and then making her sing it? Maybe that was why she divorced him; though they did remarry. Depending on which Wikipedia page you read, however, Louis Armstrong inserted the line, ‘Look out, Miss Lotte Lenya!’ when he recorded it.

When I told the Hub this fascinating fact he was distinctly underwhelmed; I was forced to threaten him with more fascinating facts if he didn’t at least pretend to be interested; he fell asleep before I’d finished sharing with him that Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan used to be called The Good Woman of Szechuan in ye olden days of the 1970s and is based on the tale of Solomon and the two women who claimed the same baby was theirs – no, no, I was thinking of The Caucasian Chalk Circle…

…Hello? Where did everybody go? Where did all those letter zeds come from?

Free Poems

A lot of people come to my blog looking for a funny poem, particularly if there is a knickerless housewife or Cheryl Cole involved; I feel bad that I can’t oblige.  However, I came across this website today and it has all kinds of poems, funny and not, so I thought I would re-direct you: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/

By the way, please, one of you: leave a comment telling me why you need a housewife poem.

 

UPDATE Tuesday 16.3.2010

I’m BEGGING you: tell me why you need a housewife poem – not a knickerless housewife poem; I think I can work that one out for myself: an ordinary housewife poem. I get so many views from Google searches that my curiousity is piqued.  I have steered you in the direction of a possible source, so I think it’s the least you can do.

 Thank you for stopping by.

God Bless The NHS

Today’s original heading was It Doesn’t Happen Often, But I Actually Find I Am Outraged Today (snappy, eh?).  I am a Yankophile and would probably vote Republican if I was an American citizen, but I came across an alert that said, Vote Republican: Together, we can Prevent access to healthcare, and I felt my blood boil for the first time since British Gas tried to lure me back as a customer; the same British Gas who charged me three times as much as any other utility supplier has ever done and treated me appallingly for the privilege. 

I had marshalled a stern retort to the offender and written my own post exposing the nastiness of American politics, before I had even had time to click the mouse on the offending blog.  When I did, all I got was this picture.  I tried to find somewhere to comment and it was then I realised I was on a sales website and the logo was a pig, not an elephant.  Looking closer, I realised it was a cushion with a satirical message.  It gave me a good laugh. 

http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+sick_pig_throw_pillow,287271298

It has done its job because it set me thinking about my own situation.  Without access to free healthcare I could, quite literally, have died last week.  I had a nasty infection that floored me even with two sets of antibiotics.  We have no spare cash; I could not have afforded those antibiotics if I had needed to pay for them.  The infection could quite easily have turned to septicemia without antibiotics.  I can go back further: I had my wisdom tooth out because I have had two infections in the past two years caused by its awkward position in my gum; I can’t afford to pay for dental treatment.  This blog might never have existed and my children would have been motherless today if I had not had access to free treatment for the infections. 

I don’t believe I am being melodramatic: people die from septicemia every day.  I once worked with a man whose sister died after giving birth because she had needed dental treatment while pregnant and refused it because she didn’t want to harm her baby.  It was too late for her by the time she delivered.  It was tragic but, in her case, she had the option of treatment.  Millions of people around the world don’t have that option, including in America.  I sincerely hope President Obama succeeds in his reforms despite the opposition.  I know there were similar arguments against our own NHS before 1948, but I am so glad they didn’t win that fight, and I have the healthy gums to prove it.

 

Channelling Bill Withers

I have had a lovely day. I wrote a poem this morning that I was pleased with. In the afternoon I went into my sons’ old school and had a great time with the children, which is not always a given because we live in a deprived area and sometimes it shows. Today they were all well-behaved, polite and friendly. We had great fun with tracing paper and plastic tiles. We had some interesting conversations about football, new schools, religion, accents, particularly Scouse, getting in trouble when it’s not your fault, Darwinism and speaking other languages – not one of them had anything good to say about French, but that could be because the Head was taking them for it. It was lovely, and I didn’t even mind that no-one mentioned the graphite smudges on my face and which I didn’t discover until I got home and the Hub pointed out I was a dirty girl.

Toby and I had a pleasant walk in the freezing sunshine and there was a hot cuppa waiting for me when I got back. A delicious dinner of pasta and then out for parents’ evening. I love parents’ evening. Our boys work hard and do well and most of their teachers over the years have liked them; I always come out smiling. The appointments ranged from 6.15 to 8.15 with twenty minutes between some of them, and the Hub was nervous that we wouldn’t get back in time for the City game; but we did. The trick, of course, is to ignore the timetable completely. The Hub and I have developed the habit of finding a free teacher and asking if they mind squeezing us in; they never do, because they want to get home for the football as well. Sometimes we even see a couple who teach Spud. It amazes me each time to see the parents who take the timetable at face value and wait twenty minutes or more between appointments when other teachers on their list are sitting free; they obviously believe in obeying the rules. They don’t realise the timetable is really just a guide, and a teacher who has put in a full day childminding wants to get home even more than the parents, who have at least had a bite to eat.

We have always managed to avoid the Headmaster’s speech, as well, but he caught us out tonight – on our last teacher. We still managed to get home an hour before our last appointment, however: partly because one teacher didn’t show up and partly because another teacher almost fell into a diabetic coma. I have never been present before when the announcement, ‘Is there a doctor in the room?’ has been made. The atmosphere was electric. People are so easily excited by misfortune, aren’t they? We happened to be standing on the other side of the table that the poor, sick teacher was sitting at, and at first we thought he was sending us funny looks; then he seemed to be in a trance; and then his eyes rolled up in his head. We may be slow but we got it eventually that he was unwell. Fortunately, some of his colleagues were a little quicker off the mark and one of them went to his aid while the other went for the microphone. And guess what? There was a doctor in the house. Hardly surprising, given the calibre of the school; my only surprise was that just one doctor appeared.  There was a terrible traffic jam on the way there, however, so maybe the other doctors were trapped in their cars.

Finally, my lovely day was topped by City winning their match; the menfolk will be in a good mood and it might even last until tomorrow morning. Everyone’s a winner.

No Teeth Were Harmed In The Making Of This Post

Scratching around for something to write about that doesn’t involve my sore gums – at long last starting to heal so that I’m only crying three times a day now – I hit upon my old cuttings notebook and I thought I’d share a few more funnies with you.

*

An old Garfield cartoon, in which it is obvious that Jim Davis has been spying on me:

Jim: Nothing lasts forever

Garfield: Except whatever is in the back of the refrigerator

*

A cartoon strip called Animal Crackers, by Fred Wagner:

Scene: An aging gnu and two frogs in the grass.

Frog One to Gnu: Sit!…Sit!

The gnu ignores him.

Frog Two to Frog One: Don’t you know you can’t teach an old gnu dog tricks?

*

I always bin chain letters but this one really scared me; I don’t know where it came from:

This letter was started by a woman like yourself in the hope of bringing relief to tired and discontented women.  Just send a copy of this letter to five of your friends who are equally tired and discontented.  Then bundle up your husband or boyfriend and send him to the woman whose name appears at the top of the list.  When your name comes to the top of the list you will receive 16,337 men and one of them is bound to be better than the one you already have.

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN.  ONE WOMAN WHO DID THAT GOT HER OWN MAN BACK.

Promises, Promises

So much for stronger painkillers: at one o’clock this morning I found myself in the Hub’s arms, blubbing like a girl that ‘They didn’t work.  They didn’t work.’  My face felt twice its normal size and throbbed from crown to chin.  A couple of magic pills in the form of co-codamol, however, and the pain eased enough for me to sleep.   My face was throbbing again when I woke up at eight this morning (late for me) so I took some more co-codamol and it is temporarily bearable.   I hope the antibiotics start working soon. 

I am rather bored with the whole thing now, and it would be nice to have something else to blog about but, oww.