Half gone!

After a working week of almost uninterrupted sunshine the first day of the weekend has dawned in a spiteful and sullen way – were it not for the fact that I own a MacBook Air, which is the equivalent of having one’s own private star, I might despair.

Also the delight of having got rid of the marking on a Friday night continues to please and surprise.

The proposed excitement for this Saturday is a visit to the heaving stronghold of the Swedish furniture monopoly.  To get Toni to go to IKEA at all is astonishing, to get him to go on a Saturday is frankly unbelievable.  The answer to this conundrum is that he wants to purchase an occasional table for his mum and, at the moment these are absurdly reasonably priced.

Toni is what is known, in a term that I have just originated, as a “mono-purpose” shopper; indeed the term “shopper” is a grave misnomer for him as he is much more of what might be described as a shop “visitor” of the “in, get what you want and get out” mode. 

I, on the other hand, may be classed, in another term newly sprung, as a “developing purpose” shopper: one goes into a shop to discover the reason why one should be there in the first place.

 

To be a true shopper in the style of my mother you have to adopt Lear’s visceral cry of “O reason not the need” as the clarion call to commercial visitations.  She had the basic Cartesian belief that “I shop, therefore I am” which, to some extent, she passed on to me.  Like her I loathe going in to town with insufficient money to buy something if I see it.  After all you never know when you might “need” something which has to be bought.  Of course the ever-present bankcard means that one is always in “instant spend” mode – which I find strangely comforting though financially diminishing.

I am faced with an ethical dilemma.

The inconsiderate, selfish, uncaring, thoughtless dog owner next door allows her selection of deranged mutts to bark and whine at will.  Our dawn chorus is canine not avian.  I have had enough.

At the moment I behave like some strange teacher, poking my head out of the window and emitting hissing “shushing” sounds like a snake.  This is the accepted from of indicating to children that they should be quiet and I assume that the dogs will have grown up with this form of control as well.

This technique is as effective with dogs as it is with children: momentary silence and then life goes on as normal.

So I have read about super-sonic whistles that only dogs can hear and I am inclined to get one and each time one of the canine criminals starts up to give a few blasts in the hope that it will be as annoying to the bloody dogs as a normal whistle is to humans.

I do not, however want to find myself like some form of urban conductor giving an admonitory blow on the whistle and like the raising of a baton produce an orchestrated cacophony from all the dogs of the neighbourhood from the piccolo yaps of the disgusting rat-dogs that flat dwellers seem to favour to the basso profundo of the larger dogs which house owners keep outside with all the other instruments of the orchestra (in debased form) being horribly mimicked by the plague of dogs that we have in our area.

It is a wonder to me that the people in this benighted part of the world have not bred dogs small enough to perch on their owners’ shoulders like parrots so that they can take their noise with them wherever they go!

Lunch was very reasonably priced in a restaurant that we have taken to patronising.  The food wasn’t quick but it was freshly cooked because we saw the waiter/owner/chef cooking it.  In my mind I compared the price and value of my meal with that I had in the restaurant of St David’s Hall in Cardiff where, affected by the downpour in which I was caught, I incautiously (and uncharacteristically) decided that a Carvery meal would be a good idea.  It was relatively expensive for a one-course meal with a frugal glass of wine and unsatisfying and indeed cost more than my three-course meal here with bread and a bottle of wine included!

The trip to IKEA was horrific.  Well, not the journey but the heaving mass of stagnant humanity infesting the place did make the actual arrival and wandering through the store akin to being in one of the less fashionable circles of hell with the sonic accompaniment of crying, screaming, whining and simply breathing kids.

We didn’t actually find the thing that we went for: a small, inexpensive occasional table – but I still managed to find a few things to buy.

Once a spender always a spender.