Just like watching paint dry

Decisions, decisions. The moment has come at Dixon Towers when we can prevaricate, procrastinate, shilly-shally and vacillate no longer.

Although we can’t do it tonight because it’s the cat’s birthday. And tomorrow we’ve got to do the weekly shop. And then it’s the feast day of Saint Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, Apostle of the Franks. And you know what that means?

Exactly. No windows in our family calendar for at least another week.

Anyway, once we’ve got that little lot out of the way it will definitely be time to decide.

On what, you may ask. What decision can be so important, yet so avoidable? Out with it, Dixon.

It’s time to come clean. The master bedroom at Dixon Towers is in dire need of redecoration. The once pristine cream on the walls is now a murky shade of yoghurt. The woodwork is flaking. There’s still a horrible patch of bare plaster from when we had the loft conversion done six years ago. Hey, we don’t rush things at Dixon Towers. But we can put it off no longer.

The brief is for dark red, but Mrs D’s conditions are strict: not too dark, and not too red. And thick enough to cover up aforementioned plaster in no more than three coats, seeing as how she’ll be doing most of the painting.

Yours truly’s conditions are less taxing. Nothing that will require a second mortgage to buy. And nothing that looks too much like Germolene.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Germolene in its place, you understand. It’s just that it has an unnerving resemblance to dead salmon, and it smells far too much like Doctor Pepper. Or maybe Dr P smells like Germolene. What was that about procrastination?

Tally ho for Homebase, where your columnist has been dispatched to pick up some test pots.

Where to begin? Well, the paint counter, obviously. But there’s one paint counter for the fancy stuff, and another for the Eezy-Klene Wun-Cote common-or-garden household emulsion.

Let’s split the difference: four from the posh aisle, four from the cheap zone. And from there on in it’s a lucky dip, because the names don’t offer much of a clue.

Burnt Raspberry. Carmine Blush. Deepest Scarlet. Vicar’s Crimson. Boot Red. Fox’s Bloodstain.

(Only one of these is a real paint. Any guesses which?)

A sharp intake of breath as you realise that just shelling out for the test pots will set you back almost as much as what you’ll end up paying to cover the walls, and then it’s home with your spoils.

From a first glance at the lids, Mrs D is not convinced. All too dark, all too red, in her judgment. Except for the Ruptured Salmon, which looks too much like the well-known ointment. And smells worse.

Never mind. The Dixon bedroom is now festooned with sheets of lining paper painted with squares of the samples. Unfortunately, though, they all look exactly alike, barring the nasty accident with the fish.

So we still can’t make up our minds, and next week it’s the memorial day of St Denis of Paris and his companions the martyrs. The painting will just have to wait.

Wild, wild Weston

High noon in the Badlands. Small white empty clouds float motionless in a steel-blue sky. A harsh sun beats down on a dried-out gulch. Not even the tumbleweed stirs as the long hand of the town clock ticks, ticks, ticks towards 12.

A curtain twitches and a face appears briefly at the window, casts a worried glance towards town, then vanishes. The curtain flicks back and the dusty street is still once more. They’re coming. And they mean business.

Actually, if you believe anything you’ve read in the last 80 words or so, you’re the victim of what is known in the trade as journalistic licence. It’s time for a reality check.

We’re not in the Badlands of South Dakota: we’re in leafy Weston Village, Bath on Sunday lunchtime. It’s not a baking hot day: it’s about average for the middle of September. And it’s not even high noon: it’s one in the afternoon. Although strictly speaking it would be midday if we were on GMT and not BST. Let’s not lose track, though...

Because last Sunday, they were definitely coming, and they certainly did mean business.

“They” in this case meaning the road re-surfacers.

Ever since the cold snap last winter, our road has suffered from a bad case of the potholes. Driving down the hill has subjected the Dixonmobile (and every other  vehicle) to the suburban equivalent of a spin round the tank training grounds on Salisbury Plain.

Suspensions have twanged, shock absorbers have boinged, passengers have bounced and unrestrained parcels have flown through  windows every time a car went by.

But all the time, the promise has been there: “One day,” the handouts from the council have assured us, “we’ll come and mend your road.”

So at last the contractors arrived. All the parked cars mysteriously vanished (except for one), and a sweeper lorry trundled up and down clearing away the early autumn leaves while purposeful looking blokes in reflective jackets taped over the ironwork.

And everyone on the street came out to have a look. The excitement was palpable, we all had a  chat, and waves of community spirit drifted upwards into the September air.

At last the big moment arrived and a gigantic machine started spreading the micro-asphalt.

(Which, for the non-technically-minded, is a combination of aggregate and bitumen emulsion that restores skid resistance quickly and with minimal disruption to the carriageway user. Or so it says in this leaflet. What it doesn’t say is how to get the bits off your carpet.)

First the machine did our side. Then it did the middle. And then it went away, along with the road-sweeper and all the yellow jackets.

An eerie hush descended and we all started to wonder: whose was that car at the bottom of the hill? Would the asphalteers ever come back and finish what they’d started?

Of course they did, on Monday, and we now have a lovely new road.

It may not be the wild, wild west. But it certainly livened up Weston.

Karrottenstein will rise from the grave

Readers slavering in anticipation after last week’s mention of comedy vegetables will be delighted to know that our preposterous carrot won first prize at Weston Flower Show last weekend.

An in-depth trawl through Mrs D’s carrot patch produced a specimen of such ugly weirdness (or indeed weird ugliness – there’s not a lot of difference between the two) that it didn’t take much imagination to come up with a winner.

The carrot in question was broad and sturdy. It already had a knobbly protuberance that would make a passable nose, and markings suggestive of a mouth. We rifled one of the children’s old craft kits for a couple of googly eyes, and stuck them on with Evo-Stik. We grabbed a pair of spare stainless steel coach screws from the stainless steel coach screw cupboard and drove them into the sides of his neck.

A jubilee clip for a collar and a brass curtain ring round one of his carroty ears completed the ensemble.

(Money spent on DIY is money well spent. QED.)

Then we simply connected some electrodes to the carriage screws, awaited a passing thunderstorm, and faster than you can say “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”, Karrotenstein was born.

To quote unashamedly and at length from our inspiration, Mrs S:

 “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

Scary stuff. And Mary Shelley could just as easily have been writing about the Dixon kitchen on the night before the show as about Frankenstein’s gloomy laboratory at the University of Ingolstadt.

On reflection, “born” is the wrong word to describe the arrival of Karrottenstein. His roots are in the ground (or they were until Mrs D pulled him up). Maybe it would be better to say that he was propagated.

Be that as it may, The Big K presented a frightening prospect to his creators, the latter-day Victor and Igor.

We did take some pictures, and offered them to the editor of The Bath Chronicle for publication. But he felt that they were a little too disturbing to see the light of day in a family newspaper.

If you have a strong stomach, though, and a stronger internet connection, you can see Karrottenstein's picture here.

Like Frankenstein’s monster before him, Karrottenstein met an early and unnatural fate. Following his triumph in the humorous vegetable stakes, the only way was down. None of us fancied eating a carrot covered in glue, so we removed the screws, the clips and the rest of the metalwork and consigned him to the compost heap.

But don’t sleep easy: his vital force lives on among the potato peelings.

Be warned, gentle reader: Karrottenstein will rise from the grave, and walk the earth once more.

When vegetables go get weird

So that’s it then. No more bank holidays between now and Christmas. A three-and-a-half-month desert of work, weekend, work, weekend, work…

Meanwhile, of course, the clouds have parted, the wind has dropped, the sun is shining and it’s summer at last, just in time for the kids to go back to school.

You get the picture. We need something to cheer us up. Now and every weekend between until the festive season.

Well, we can start with the Weston Village Flower Show. It’s this Saturday, and it should provide enough fun and jollity to get us through the first week of the Long Hard Slog Through Autumn.

Wallace and Gromit fans will remember the climactic scene in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Rotten cad and all-round bounder Victor Quartermaine chases Wallace, who has been transmogrified into a gigantic and voracious rabbit, through the village fruit and vegetable show. Quartermaine has armed himself with an ancient blunderbuss, loaded it with golden bullets supplied by the vicar, and is out for bunny flesh.

Meanwhile, in the skies above the show another chase is going on. Gromit and his arch enemy, Quartermaine’s slavering hound Philip, are slugging it out in an aerial dogfight (geddit?) in planes untethered from a fairground ride.

It’s not spoiling the story too much, if you’re one of the few people who don’t know it already, to reveal that the good end happily, the bad unhappily.

Don’t imagine for a minute that anything quite as dramatic as that will be happening in Weston on Saturday. The show is a generally calm affair, with more than 100 classes for produce, crafts, cooking and art.

With one exception: the Humorous Vegetable competition.

Quite possibly this part of the show was inspired by Blackadder II. (Remember the turnip that looked like a thingy?) It may equally well have its historical roots in the odd-looking produce that were such a memorable feature of That’s Life.

Be that as it may, if you want to see contorted carrots and preposterous potatoes in abundance, Weston All Saints Centre is the place to be this Saturday afternoon.

Mrs D was going to enter her secret weapon: a tromboncino. For those who don’t know – and there’s no reason why you should –  a tromboncino is a monstrously mutated cousin of the courgette, with a curved body and a club-shaped blobby bit at the business end.

The specimen that Mrs D has nurtured lovingly from seed is now more than 120cm from nose to tail, and threw a system error when we tried to weight it on the electronic kitchen scales.

It also causes spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter in all who see it, and is quite rude into the bargain. We don’t really feel we can take it out of the house during daylight hours without causing a breach of the peace. So for now we’ll just stick with a comedy carrot.

Weston Village Flower Show, Saturday September 3, 2.30pm in the All Saints Centre, Weston High Street, Bath.

'Tis the season to be jolly silly

August. The dog days. The hottest, stickiest time of the year. A time so called because of the ancient observation that Sirius, the Dog Star, is at its closest to the Sun in August, and is thus responsible for hot weather.

Or, as one ancient put it, a time when: “the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies.”

Palpable nonsense. Those ancients may have known a thing or two about waving swords about and singing roundelays and giving each other  the plague, but they didn’t have a clue when it came to explaining the weather.

Neither, though, do we. For the last week most of southern England has been under attack from a small hurricane, which has battered us left, right and centre  – especially Dixon Junior who has been swooping up and down the Channel on a yacht – and triggered off potato blight alerts on Mrs D’s mobile.

So much for ancient wisdom. No doubt we’ll have a warm, dry January to make up for this month’s windy wetness.

But the other name for August, especially in and around newspapers, is the silly season. And that tradition of printing implausible stories, often concerning animals, carries on whatever the weather.

Earlier this week, for example, it was reported that a crocodile had been spotted circling round sailing boats near the port of Boulogne.

Some bright spark christened it Croc Monsieur, and for a day or two the coastguard, police and army went onto high alert.

Le croc français turned out to be no more than a floating log. It would be inappropriate to call it a frog log, but it just kind of slipped out.

And the original eyewitnesses, whom we know only as Pierre and Laurent, are probably now enjoying the traditional hospitality of the gendarmerie. Which as far as we’re aware doesn’t include much in the way of tea and biscuits.

And now Bath has its very own silly season story to rival other papers’ tales of 30-inch Ratzillas and other prodigies.

At the bottom end of the evolutionary scale, it appears that microscopic worms have forced the transfer of this weekend’s racing at Chepstow to the Bath course.

The worms, or root gall nematodes as they’re known to their friends, have caused instability in the Chepstow soil, which is obviously pretty dangerous on a racecourse.

And in the jargon of the newsroom, it’s the sort of story that has legs. Even if the worms haven’t.

Could this be the start of something much bigger?

Maybe the sneaky nematodes are hatching plans for world domination, or undermining England’s 2018 World Cup bid by destabilising the soil of sporting venues across the country.

Maybe they’re in the pay of an evil cartel of artificial turf suppliers. Maybe they don’t want their Bank Holiday disturbed by the horses.

Or maybe not. Because that would be a bit too silly, even for the silly season.

No surrender to the big cheese

It was Charles de Gaulle who said of his native France: “How can you govern a country which has 246 different cheeses?”

History does not tell where he got the number from. Indeed, some sources claim that le général put the figure at 258. But judging from our recent  holiday across the Channel, he probably underestimated.

Visit any self-respecting French hypermarket and it’s not just the cheese counter that’ll have you staggered. Twenty-five different types of ham. A bewildering range of natural yoghurts. Three different sorts of pizza-flavoured cracker.

And the wine. Let’s not get started on the wine. (Too late, unfortunately. We already have.)

No, there’s a colossal difference between the English concept of choice and the French idea of choix.

To your average Sainsbury or Tesco, choice means either (a) own brand or (b) expensive.

To its French counterpart, la choix seems to a passing Brit to be synonymous with abundant variety.

And the only problem with that is that it leads to indecision among those who are doing the buying and mutterings of rebellion from those who are traipsing along behind wishing they were still at the beach.

The differences don’t end there, of course. You won’t find many English supermarkets in which a live spider crab glares balefully at you from a glass tank, knowing that the only thing preventing a dinner date is a certain squeamishness on the part of the designated cook in the matter of grabbing said crustacean and bumping it off.

On the other side of the coin, you won’t find many French supermarkets that do cashback. Big swing, small roundabout.

No, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. And the cheese is always smellier.

As we discovered when, seeking to bring back a little souvenir of de Gaulle’s administrative nightmare, we plumped for a Camembert with the unlikely sounding name of Jort.

Jort is made of unpasteurised milk. Jort is moulé à la louche. Which would take an entire blog to explain. Follow the link instead. Jort is supposedly best eaten with a wine of the 1984 vintage. Fat chance on our budget.

(Quick break here for our Word of the Week slot. Tyrosemiophily: collecting the labels of Camembert cheese. Strange, but nonetheless true.)

Anyway, Jort was so smelly it had to be put in the rooftop box on the way home to forestall a full-scale revolution on the part of the smaller passengers.

Thinking about it, we should probably have acquired an export licence before attempting to drive on to the ferry.

And once we were back in good old Blighty, Jort had to be transferred to a holding cell in the garage, whence it now exudes a malodorous warning to anyone rash enough to approach it with a cheese knife. According to one French supplier, a good Camembert should give off  "odours of farmyard and stable". If that's the case, Jort is good in spades.

Still, it will meet its fate, sooner rather than later, at a dinner for two in celebration of our 20th wedding anniversary.

And it will undoubtedly taste a heck of a lot better than it smells.

You can't lick the bowling

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Mrs D plans a jaunt during the the school holidays, and muggins here must needs take a day off to ensure that children (a) get out of bed before 11.30; (b) don’t burn the house down when they do get up; and (c) maintain at least a basic level of nourish-ment.

Plus Bath Chronicle Towers was scheduled for one of its occasional technological meltdowns, and home was a far better prospect than an unequal struggle with the many-tentacled octopus that is our computer system.

Mrs D’s awayday? Well, it was a bit hush-hush. Suffice it to say that it involved a very posh garden: so posh that she needed photo ID to get in.

Need another clue? Arrange these letters into a well-known acronym: RHH. More than enough said.

How to fill the day without tears, though? No amount of electronic sedation from Messrs Nintendo, XBox and Co was going to be enough. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Welcome, therefore, to the world of ten-pin bowling. Welcome to a building with the floor area of an aircraft hangar and the ceiling height of a small shed. And welcome to the home of utter humiliation.

First challenge: getting the scoreboard to work properly. (There’s no escape from technology, even on your day off.) Just type everyone’s name on a keypad that seems to have been drenched in cola and then sprinkled with the dregs from a crisp packet. And then apologise to the people in the next lane for messing up their scores.

Second challenge: choose your ball. There appear to be two sizes: extra small and extra large. Choose the former and you’ll need the fire brigade to extract your fingers from the holes. Choose the latter and you’ll end up in hospital with a dislocated shoulder and a broken toe. Eventually you find the one large-sized ball. It’s pink.

Third challenge: the bumpers. These are the rails down the sides of the lane that stop the children’s ball dropping into the gutter. You need an advanced degree in computer science to work out how to program them, and even when you crack it,  one side doesn’t work properly. Adjust the scores accordingly.

Fourth challenge: aiming. The first few times you take your kids bowling, they’re still quite small and need to use one of those special ramp things to point the ball in the right direction. You, on the other hand, have to rely on your natural bowling skills. And thus get beaten hollow. Nowadays the youngsters are big enough to wield the ball themselves. And still whup you.

Fifth challenge: inconsistency. How is it possible to score zero on your first two goes and then a strike on the next? Just asking.

Halfway through the whole sorry episode you spot what they should have given out at reception: the instructions, in the form of a leaflet entitled How To Bowl! This blithely informs you that “The art of ten-pin bowling really is quite simple to master” and then goes on to demonstrate that it isn’t. With copious illustrations. Art means practice. And practising is what you haven’t done enough of.

Still, the children have fun. And that’s what holidays are all about.