Oh, My Days!

'One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire Cat in a tree. 'Which road do I take? she asked. 'Where do you want to go?' was his response. 'I don't know,' Alice answered. 'Then,' said the Cat, 'it doesn't matter.' (From Alice in Wonderland . Picture courtesy of Disney) This, dear readers, is my current dilemma, solved beautifully by a stripy, ever smiling cat. Cats, I have discovered, are good like that, though. Putting the world to rights. Unless they are Bambino Bobble Wilson, however, who recently took a bit of chomp at Flora Bijou Mybug during a particularly robust game of 'Grappling Cats' rendering her infected and swollen of face and needing a dose of anti-inflammatories and antibiotics at the vets yesterday so her ear didn't fall off. Okay, maybe that is a bit melodramatic, but it did look nasty and Bambino should be ashamed of himself. I suspect he is not...  Back to forks in roads. (...

The decorators are in at the moment. Stairs and landing. Given my previous history of 'Hoo Ha Occurring on Stairs ' - reference the Trapped Under the Sofa Incident and the Foot Wedged Between Bookcase and Stair Rise Debacle - I thought it wise to pay for professionals to decorate the stairs and landing rather than get myself in a mix with ladder and plank combinations and achieve the Magic Three of staircase accidents. The decorators are a father and son combo who go by the  names of Craig and David. This automatically causes me entertainment. 'Came in on a Monday, prepped, filled and undercoated, back on Thursday, first top coating, by Friday finishing touches...' Okay, not as frisky or well-scanned as the original song, but you get where I'm coming from. Anyway, before they started the job Craig asked what colour I wanted for the walls. 'Same colour as the downstairs walls, please,' said I. 'Dulux Frosted Dawn.' And then white for ...

"You!" said the Caterpillar, contemptuously. "Who are you?" Alice replied, rather shyly, "I - I hardly know, sir, just at present - at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning but I think I must have been changed several times since then." (Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.) So, in the absence of large and somewhat aggressively opinionated caterpillars, I shall ask - 'Who are YOU?' Actually, I have been asking myself the same, so don't take it personally, will you? I am mostly challenging myself, but feel free to join in with your thoughts about yourself, too. If you feel so inclined. For a start, I've decided you cannot say, 'I am me.' That is a cheat and cop out, and if you have said that, you can jolly well go to the back of the queue. Nor are you Sparticus, before some smart arse up the back starts being clever. My immediate thoughts, then, were these, 'I am all of these things - wife/mother/d...

Certainty in life (other than death and taxes. And a cat sitting on a magazine when you are trying to read it) is generally a good thing, because certainty suggests that, good or bad, at least you know what you are dealing with. Overt certainty, like coming home and finding a bill in the post that you know has to be paid, is an easy thing to manage. Certainty that comes from within oneself, though, which provides no tangible direction or advice, is a whole different kettle of fishy hoo-ha. Like the other day when I was driving in my little car and I knew with certainty that it was time to give my life a shake up. A change of pathway, if you will. The road less travelled. It felt, I imagined, like Alice felt when she found herself falling down the rabbit hole. She knew, with certainty, that she was falling, that she couldn’t stop herself, but that at some point something would stop her, hopefully a soft grassy tussock, a pile of squishy cushions, a trampoline maybe. And not a bed of n...