View from the Window

The view last weekend was beautiful, a sunny forest clearing, birds singing among the tall trees, the hot tub sizzling in the background the empty champagne bottles waiting for the cleaners, this morning guess what, it's raining. It is not only raining but pouring it down and it is being made worse by the wind, it is grey and I can't see anything past Washington House, it's like one of those dreadful horror movies where you expect some long dead pirates or zombies to come at you.

I notice that there is a shedful of those movies still being made costing at least £40 by the look of the trailers. How is it that no matter how slow the zombie/monster is and how fast the victim/hero or more likely these days the heroine, or is that out now as well and everyone is a hero like everyone is an actor. I digress, the victim leaps away at a startling rate of knots only to find on turning the corner the zombie is right there, having taken a shortcut, or they sneak out of one room and make for the safety of the third floor only to find the zombie or whatever now behind the door as they close it. And of course the dumbest thing to do is "Let's split up and go look around", or as I once saw in a movie which had a mad axeman running around in a forest, on hearing a scrapping noise outside the lady of the house slips into a pink negligee and 5" heels and steps outside uttering "who's there?" If you are female and good looking or were good at sport at college and gave the nerds a hard time, beware, you ain't getting the bus home.

What ever happened to patience? I dropped the missus off at the station for an early train to London the other day and went round to the supermarket for some tomato juice, I start my day off now with a spicy tomato juice, but I was two minutes early so I sat in the car. There were two people stood at the shop door and a few in cars like me, 0800 hrs came and no one was to be seen, one of the standing people moved over put his hand to the glass and peered in, the other one started fidgeting, the car people looked at their watches. A minute passed, 0801, now both standers were peering in, watches were again checked in the cars. An employee turned up at the door, but on the wrong side, she was immediately questioned by the standers who pointed at their watches and the sign with the opening time of 0800 on it. The standers had now become comrades in arms, they were suffering together, the supermarket was treating them as numbers not human beings, it was 0802 hrs. The driver next to me had had enough, two minutes was taking the mick, he roared out of the car park, while I found myself going through in my mind the email the supermarket was going to get about how tardy they were at opening the bleedin' place, making me sit here for just ages! Wait, a shadowy form at the doors, talking into a bluetooth thing on her ear, click, click, the standers march in glowering at the woman, it was 0803.

The Gemans have a great word  "schadenfreude" it means pleasure derived from the misery of others, wunderbar! I revelled in schadenfreude this week when all those FIFA officials had their collars felt, hiding behind bed sheets as they were popped into police limo's to take them away for questioning. I particularly enjoyed their spokesperson squirming while informing everyone from his empty conference table that nothing was wrong and of course the said prisoners were innocent and the FBI had it all wrong. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that the outfit is as bent as a nine-bob-note and particularly its leader, Mr. Blatter and has been for years, and if you missed all that the choice of Qatar as host for the World Cup should have made the penny drop. Don't get me wrong, I have no interest in sport whatsoever and could not hazard a guess at how many men are in a football team but I do like to see the mighty fall and the baddies get their just deserts, which after all does not happen very often these days when people can literally get away with murder because of their fame, contacts or the amount of money they have.

Ok, I will give you the tomato juice recipe, dash of Tabasco, dash of Lea & Perrins, pinch of salt, some ground black pepper, a shake of Aramat (it should be onion granules but I can't get them here in the North), and a small glug of cider vinegar, stir and enjoy. The missus tells me that tomato juice is one of the 'superfoods' so I feel that now I drink it I should at least be able to cut out exercise otherwise what is the point of a 'superfood'. We are also going back to basics, real butter, the cows have to be grass fed, real milk, no namby pamby watered down rubbish, the stuff with a little crown of cream on, delivered from the local farm by a milkman! So called vegetable oils from things which are not vegetables by the way, are out, olive oil and natural beef dripping is in, oh and any kind of farmed fish is also finished. In other words all the stuff we ate when I were lad, mmmmmm.