Welcome To The Glass House

The family gather round

Spud has a thing about his cups and glasses: only he must use them.  He has special items that are his and his alone.

Unfortunately for Spud, we didn’t know that for a long time.

When he revealed it to us in a strop one day, because we had all, at some point, had our dirty, germ-ridden mouths on the bulk of his drinking receptacles, we agreed not to use the one unsullied glass in his hitherto unknown collection.

On Friday he came home from school, poured himself a cool drink, and disappeared upstairs.

SCREAM!

Spud had dropped his last glass; it had shattered.  Spud was gutted.

Once cleared up (into the loving arms of a plastic bag), Spud insisted that we give it a proper send off.  Fortunately, we were all suitably attired: me in black; the Hub in grey; Spud in black.  

Click on the first photo to read the captions.

We gather here today to lay a beloved friend to rest.

Would you like to say a few words, Father?

He was a good glass; a reliable glass…

Rest well, dear friend. You never let me down.

Glass funeral. No, seriously.

Seeking solace at the feast

You can’t see me because I was the official photographer for the event.

 

Bill ‘n’ George’s Excellent Adventure

I have the day off today.  Yesterday was good again, particularly my home-made lunch of chicken & coleslaw sandwiches and a pudding of jelly (sorry, Tory Boy; but you forgot to take them with you and they have a sell-by date).  I haven’t eaten jelly for years; it was delicious, if mushy.

It was while eating lunch that I overheard this: ‘I have to clean three times a day, every day; I think I caught that OCD off me mate.’

I have learned some stuff this week, so it has been worth the effort of getting out of my pyjamas before ten.  I am a bit slow on the uptake, though: it was only yesterday that I realised the course has an actual name, Launch Pad; we are ladies who launch.  It also clicked that everyone except me is a single mother.  That explains the three-hour session on childcare provision and benefits.  I was wondering.

*

I thought last night’s leaders’ debate was much better than last week’s; we saw some blood and guts, at least.  David Cameron’s problem is still that he’s too polite, however; that’s the problem with being well brought up.

*

Today is St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s purported birth and death days.  As one sounds like a great story and the other wrote a great story, it is fitting that they share a date.  I will be out waving the flag in our local park tomorrow; I wonder if the George Formby Society will be present?  Nothing says ‘English’ like a bunch of old men on ukuleles.

*

*

This prompt is a wordle:

 

*

If you haven’t come across it before, a wordle is a picture of words, like a category or tag cloud on a blog.  You put in a whole bunch of text and it makes a picture, with the most-used words appearing bigger than the least-used words.  Here’s a wordle of what I have written so far:

 

Um, scrap that…I’m on the Hub’s computer and I’m not allowed to change anything without his permission and Wordle wants me to install thingies before it creates a wordle for me and I dare not on pain of prolonged tickling of the feet, so you’ll have to have a go yourself.

We were supposed to use one or all of the words in the wordle.  I went with ‘reverberate’ because I was thinking of ‘the shot heard around the world’ which exemplifies the meaning of the word, but I left it out in the end, because it didn’t work in the poem.

*

Why I Left South Africa

*

A bullet cudgelled

a child’s skull,

forcing hatred from me.

*

*