Triathlon

My lovely husband Dan has just completed his first triathlon. Which means he paid to jump into a freezing lake swim 750 m, then cycle 31k and then run 8k up a mountain.


This is what the triathlon did to his face:

Thankfully his face went back to normal!











When he had finished this test of endurance  in the time of 3 hours 28 mins he was handed what every person in that situation needs- a complementary coaster. On one hand I admire his ability to do a race like this, but on the other hand I don't think it sounds fun. If I was doing a triathlon I would like to dry my hair after a swim in a lake and re-apply my make-up and maybe stop for a cup of tea and a nap.

I have been thinking a bit about what kind of race I could enter that I would be good at. I'm not really good at doing anything fast, I'm only good at endurance  Also I don't really have the competitive personality need for sports I'm a bit of a communist sports wise.  In year 7 I used to really annoy the boys in football by trying to always make the teams draw, even if this meant scoring home goals. I got a few like minded girls to declare they were on 'team orange' when the actual teams were yellow or red. My orange team mates had only one goal in mind  and that was to equal the score. Anyway if I was to win any race now it would have to be a 2k breast stroke swim followed by a 5k unicycle ride followed by a 1k skipping race which finished in a big house with lots of hiding places, upon finishing the skipping element of the race the competitors must find and get into the best hiding place they can. Last to be found by the judges wins. Unfortunately that race doesn't exist. My worst race would be the 100m sprint followed by a game of scrabble followed by having to do a reverse park under pressure. Dan would actually be very good at that.

On the way back from the triathlon in Snowdonia we were looking out over the coast and I said 'Every time I think England is pretty I remember we're in Wales'

The National Trust Sucks

Yesterday Dan and I decided to go for a bike ride because it was a nice day and it's good to make the best of the rare moments when we both have bikes that work. I suggested going to Speke Hall  because it's one of those places that is relatively near but I have never been to. Speke Hall is one of those big old houses from the olden days that old people like to talk about, it's owned by the national trust, that organisation that has prevented school children from fun for decades and decades. I'm not sure why but going to places like this even out of my own free will always brings out my rebellious side. I wasn't bothered about going in the house bit I just wanted to sit around in the gardens for a bit as a break before cycling back home again. However you have to pay a lot to get in, it was going to be £20 for the two of us. But I got us a big discount with my cheekyness. Here's how:

Me: hello which bits can you get in for free?

National Trust Man: The cafe and the shop.

Me: Well that's no good. Ok how much is it to get into just the gardens?

National Trust Man: £20

Me: Is it true that if you live in poor postcodes you can get in for free? Coz I live in L15 and we've had 3 crimes happen to us this year.

National Trust Man: It's not deprived areas that get in free it's areas near here.

Me: oh, we've only got a fiver.

Dan: and card.

National Trust Man: Look I'll let you in for £7 for both of you.

Me: oh ok.


So we went in and looked round the big old house from the olden days. They had a music making device from back in the day which was basically like one of those things that you turn inside a music box but on a really big scale with a massive handle. Ironically it didn't work and there was an old woman standing next to it who's job it was to press play on a tape recorder from the 90's so you could here a cassette tape recording of what it used to sound like. We looked round a load of bedrooms from the 1500's and I couldn't help making sarcastic comments about how I would plaster whole sections, and get some ikea storage in there. In one of the rooms that was described as a gentleman's room there was a huge tapestry of a river and trees and some people. I didn't think it would be the kind of thing a guy would have in his bedroom nowadays, and I wondered if there was a market for slightly racy tapestries that would appeal to young guys.

The grounds outside were beautiful but I couldn't help thinking that I'd put a massive lawn to much better use with big trampolines, a zip line, a pony and maybe a hot tub maze that you could swim round. I asked Dan what he would do with the lawn and he said he's mow a huge penis into it. We then discussed how a penis would be a perfect shape for a swimming pool because you could have two nice Jacuzzi bit's at one end and a long thin bit to swim lengths in.

Today we randomly ended up going to the slavery museum with Alex and we learnt there that the man who owned Speke Hall also owned 200 slaves and so the whole thing was basically built on slavery. It's a good job I din't really know that yesterday or I probably would have brought it up with the National Trust ticket man and got us kicked out.

Basically my message is if you enjoy a nice day out in Speke Hall you're supporting slavery, and if you are a National Trust member you are almost certainly going to hell. Night Night x

The Lakes

Hello, how are you? I hope you are well and enjoying this lovely sunny evening, but I know your not, your inside on a laptop procrastinating just like me. Oh well as you and I clearly have nothing better to do I will write down some of the recent happenings in my life and you can read them.

I've just got back from 4 days camping in the lakes. Not actually in the lakes obviously, underwater camping does not exsist yet. I was camping on grass in the lake district. The lakes are beautiful obviously that's why people go there, but they are not a place you can actually live in for long. There are no corner shops, if you want milk you have to extract it from an actual cow, and a lot of the roads don't have names. A man I met who lives in a YHA hostel still has dial up internet. On the plus side they have lots of things out of picture books like mountains and rivers and a lack of crime. But how often do you think 'I need a mountain right now', and how often do you think 'we need to buy more milk?'

Weather wise we had two good days and two bad days. One of the bad days was spent mainly in car parks and cafes and in an old lady art exhabition. I quite enjoyed that bit, not because there was any good art, I just find old ladies amusing and I think one day I would like to join a old lady artist club and I would do especially contraversial art just to see there reaction. On one of the good days we went for a really long walk with Lydia and Amber. Which included a heroic moment when Amber rescued one of my wellies that was floating down a ford we were trying to cross.

On the other good weather day we hired a tandum from a very cool campsite that has a hot tub. Unfortunatly that wasn't the campsite we were camping in. We cycled to wastwater lake and then I made the slightly irresponsible decison to swim to the other side. I based this decision on the fact I could see the other side. However there was nothing to show scale on the other side and it was a lot futher than I thought, at 3/4 of the way across I couldn't even see Dan and he could't see me. There was no way of him retriving me from the other side so I had to swim back. The whole thing probably took about an hour and a half.

On arriving back in to civerlisation we discoved our house had been broken into, which is not very civilised at all. My laptop was missing and the house had been searched through, Dan's laptop had been looked at but they obviously decided it wasn't worth it. Thankfully we don't have much worth robbing, we don't have a tv and although they did look through our board games cupboard nothing took their fancy. The police told us that PVC doors have to be made with a removable pannal in case of fire. Good one heath an saftey. There are many youtube videos showing several ways to get through PVC doors, always handy if you forget your keys/ are a criminal. We spent that evening with friends making mildly rude words in a game of bananagrams, which was very theraputic. Christians just love to go mental like that when they're angry! I spelled out Tampax, pubes and kex.

The next day Dan was very concerned that our chocolate cereal had been stolen as well lukily it was safe and sound.

Embarrasing Myself in Asda

This week I have embarrassed myself twice in asda once while I was trying to buy scissors and once while I was trying to twin my armchair.

What do you mean 'trying to twin your armchair' I here you cry....don't worry I will tell you. We have an armchair that was donated to us when we got married because when you get married everyone wants to unload their unwanted things onto you. At one point we had 2 washing mashing 2 tumble dryers a three piece sweet and 2 other sofas. I am grateful for this stuff but there is a limit to how much furniture we can fit in our house and the limit is 2 small sofas and one armchair. So we had an armchair to get rid of, and for one night only we had a van. We texted round all our friends trying to give it away and then gave up and went to the pub wear we met Katie Hunt - the girl who says yes to everything she's great. She really had no need for an armchair she lived in a shared house with an abundance of armchairs but she kindly offered to take ours because she says yes to everything.

Katie has since moved house and took her armchair with her, so every time we go and visit her or her housemates we can go and visit our armchairs' best buddy- katies' armchair. Then we decided we should twin them. We originally wanted to have a live video link between then so that anytime you were sitting in one of the armchairs you could see what was happening in the other one. However we decided against this because their were some concerns that me and Dan might get up to some chair hankie pankie that the residents of Halkyn ave did not want to see. Oh yeah and financial reasons. So we made these instead:

This is what lead to me having to explain the whole thing to the guy that works in the Asda photo department. I hope this is a craze that will catch on, there's loads of things that could be twined with other things. My mum has actually twinned her loo with a loo in somewhere like Burundi, we have a photo of their loo in our bathroom. It was a charity thing though, I think she gave the charity enough money for the loo to be built. I don't think they have a photo of our loo in their little toilet hut.

The second time I embarrassed myself in Asda was today, I kicked off a little bit. I'm not even that embarrassed actually their the ones who should be embarrassed by their ridiculous policies. Today I got ID-ed for buy these:







Kids Scissors! Can anyone else spot the bit that says 'FOR KIDS' so how stupid is it that you have to be 18 to buy them and that have to ID anyone who looks under 25. Apparently they could be used as a weapon. Please remind me that next time I go to Asda for the soul purpose of attacking someone to either bring a weapon from home or if I plan to attack someone with a weapon bought in the store remind me to take ID with me.

Art can save the world (part 2)

"Art has the power to turn people who previously egged you into your admirers" was probably the message of my previous blog...this blog is more along the lines of

"Art can save the world, if random people saying funny things to you whilst your doing art constitutes saving the world"

I have finally finished my house mural it looks like this:

Here are some funny things that passers by have said to me whilst I painted and in brackets is what I should have said back

'Are you Banksey's Mrs' (Maybe I am Banksey)

'Is this Graffiti' (It's middle class home owner's graffiti)

'Are you a little artist?' (I'm kneeling down, but I'm an adult it's my actual job it says community artist on my marriage certificate and everything.)

'Your talents being wasted' (how do you know? are you just assuming that I have some boring job and I'm doing this for fun, or are you assuming that I have another talent that I'm wasting by doing awful art instead?)

'Dat's decent girl'

'My dog can draw better than I can' (well you have a very talented dog...I did actually say that)

It was a lot of fun and I'm a little bit sad it's over but I have started a new similar project in the back garden of a lovely old Swiss couple who saw me painting this one. I'm so glad to be doing some paid art work during the summer holidays. This little commission could have all gone very wrong before it even started but thankfully the man was too Swiss to realise what was going on. I shall explain....

My husband Dan like to phone me and put on silly accents about 2 weeks ago he managed to totally fool me by phoning from his work phone and putting on an Indian accent. A few days later the Swiss man stoped me in the street and asked for my contact details. I had given out about 5 business cards whilst doing this work and everyone who took one said something like 'I'll be in contact' but a week later no one had contacted me. Then last week I was stuck in traffic when my phone went, at first I hung up but they phoned back so I answered. As soon as I heard the foreign accent I said 'Dan I know it's you, ha ha ha I'm driving phone me later.' luckily the man ignored all this and continued to talk, I was about to hang up thinking it was someone trying to sell me something, when I realised who he was.

p.s. I just spell checked this an it is amusing to discover that the spell check for this blog doesn't have the word 'blog' in it's dictionary, it suggests I mean bog.

Art can save the world

Judging by the small but lovely things that have happened in my street in the 2 or 3 hours I sat outside and painted, I have decided that art can save the world. All we need is about 10% of the population to go out and paint lovely pretty things everywhere and then everyone in the world will be happy and lovely all day.

I've decided to paint some pot plants on the front of my house which was a suggestion that came from Will Evans. This sounded like a fun low maintenance way to garden and since Dan recently cut down the rose bush in our actual garden (thinking it was a weed) I wanted to have flowers again. In my opinion the best kind of flowers are pictures of flowers, they are much less needy than real flowers.

This is what I've done on the house so far obviously I haven't "planted" any flowers in that middle pot yet. Two days ago I did the sunflower but I had to come in before it was finished because their was a fight on the street that I didn't want to get involved in. Then today lots of random passers by were lovely to me. Quite a few people stopped to complement the work, a guy that owns a coffee shop brought me out a free cup of coffee because he says he likes seeing people be creative, he also said the best thing about it was that 'I was actually doing it' which was an odd thing to say but I got what he meant. It's a shame I don't like coffee, I drank some of it anyway to be polite. I had a good chat with the post man about it, and my new Spanish next door neighbours, and a old man on a bike who said he's wife had told him to come and look. A woman also asked me if I did murals for children's nurseries so I gave her my business card and hopefully she'll get in touch.

I do proper love liverpool sometimes. Everyone talks to everyone, sometimes it's bad and people should learn to be a bit more private like this woman who walked past on the phone today shouting 'the sex was crap you cheeky c***!' But coming from a quiet village I would rather have interaction with people than be ignored.

Probably the best thing that happed today was that two kids that were about 9 or 10 came over and complemented me on my work and asked if they could do a bit, I would have let them but one kid persuaded the other that it would be boring so they walked off. The amazing thing about this is that I have seen these kids twice before and both times they were less than loveable. Once we were having tea in 'The Jam Cafe' and they came in with chips they have bought somewhere else and sat down and demanded a fork and salt and were genrally cheeky, and the second time was when they attempted to egg us. Even as they were walking towards me today one of them suggested robbing my painting stuff, but I like to think that the art inspired them to be nice for once. Who knows they might wait till I've finished and then come back and spray paint over it all. I hope not.

Racism Disclaimer

If you've just got back from a very nice day out at 'The Big Day In' (a christian social event in Coventry) that was only ruined by a girl shouting what may have sounded like a massively racist comment in front of a lot of people, I am that girl, and it didn't come out how it was meant to come out. Allow me to explain.....

After preforming a bit of stand up comedy Adaire the compare told his favourite joke 'Why does the baker have brown hands? because he kneaded a poo' I've always though this joke was a tiny bit racist because lots of people do have brown hands and it's not because they kneaded a poo. We should assume that the baker's hands weren't brown to begin with. So when Adaire started saying why did the baker have brown hands I stood up waved my arms and shouted in front of a lot of people. 'BECAUSE HE WAS ASIAN!!' It was only later that it dawned on me Adaire hadn't said 'why did the baker have brown hands? he said 'why did the baker have DIRTY hands'

embarrassed doesn't really come close. Sorry guys.