Thursday 4th April 2013
WARNING! CODE RED! THIS IS A CODE RED!
MAN THE DEFENCES. EMPLOY ALL SAFEGUARDS. FORTIFY FIREWALLS!
THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEBOY IS IMMINENT.
Friday 5th April 2013
Is there anybody there? Said the houseboy, knocking on the website door.
Hello, hello, it’s me Gilli De La Mare. I’m back. Excuse me a mo while I do my world famous Dick Van Dyke impression by leaping in the air and clicking my heels together, while singing Chim Chim Cher-ee in a cockney accent so bad Michael Caine would reject it.
I’ve been offline for what feels like years, but now I’m back on it. Yay! Have you missed me? No! Awwww, droops shoulders and pouts. Why not? I’ve missed me.
So where have I been? Not far away, and yet miles away. It all began when the computer in the study passed away in its sleep. It was so dead that not even Doris Stokes could communicate with it. It’s never been a brilliantly good machine. The bloody thing froze and crashed at the drop of a hat. It started playing up big time a while ago. It took forever to boot up and was so slow it was faster to communicate by fucking carrier pigeon than by email. Yahoo was terrible to try and connect to, mainly because it’s bogged down with a zillion ads. By the time they’d all loaded I’d lost the will to live never mind email.
Anyway I set up a moaning campaign to encourage the men folk to invest in a new streamlined sexy computer with an ENORMOUS hard drive for the study. What can I say-size does matter. I moaned at breakfast and again at dinner, and when I couldn’t moan at them face-to-face I moaned by phone and text.
It cut no ice, which was a shame seeing as there was a lot of it about at the time. Shane, owner of a slick super fast laptop, said there was nothing wrong with the study computer. It wasn’t that old. He reckoned a good disk clean up and defrag would soon sort it out. So I deleted a heap of stuff, including a ton of porn belonging to Dick. Honestly I bet the vice squad’s archives hold less porn than he had in his filth folders. After de-fucking the machine I defragged it, a process that seemed to take several centuries. It didn’t make a jot of difference. In fact I think the strain of the clean up was the final nail in the computer’s coffin because a couple of days later it refused to boot up at all. It had died in the night.
I called in a mobile computer chappie to look at it. He looked at it, made disparaging noises about fans and cooler systems and cheap motherfuckers, or it might have been motherboards. Basically he was saying the machine was crap and had it not died voluntarily it should have been executed for crimes against technology. He said rather than attempting a resurrection, it would make more sense to buy a new one.
Now it just so happened that as well as mending computers the mobile computer chappie sold computers. He’d do me a deal, if I were interested, scrap value for the old one to put against a new one. He’d have me up and running in next to no time with a superior computer that would give years of trouble free service. To cut a long story short I had a temporary lapse in sanity and allowed him to bamboozle me into buying a piece of kit from him. Several hours later there was a smart new computer purring away in the study. Problem solved. Er, no. Problem just beginning.
Shane, for fuck’s sake, boy, use your initiative once in a while, blew a gasket at my use of aforementioned initiative. I got bawled out for not consulting him before plundering the household account to buy a new computer instead of having the old one patched up to live another day. He didn’t give a fuck what the MCC had said about it not being worthy of first aid. He’d probably told me a load of old flimflam and I’d fallen for it. I should have got a second opinion from someone who didn’t have a vested interest in selling new stuff instead of fixing old. More to the point I should have asked for his opinion and sought his permission, before spending a small fortune. He was a very cross Daddy. I paid for my impulsive decision. It was pants down and over the knee time. He slippered my bare bottom and to add insult to injury he banned me from using the new computer. Online was offline and out of bounds until he granted me a full pardon for my crime.
So, here I am fully pardoned and back on the WWW. I shall try to make up for my lack of chat over the coming days. Mind you, it has to be said, once the agony of withdrawal had eased a little, it’s amazing what you can find to do in place of sitting staring at a computer. The house has been sparkling like a diamond. Meals have been marvellous. I’ve been going out for more bike rides and stuff. I’ve also discovered the pleasures of lunching. It’s a bit like surfing the web, only it involves randomly choosing a friend, neighbour or acquaintance and landing uninvited on their doorstep just as they’re about to have lunch. They then feel obliged to ask you to partake of their meal. It’s good; saves a fortune on food bills and you don’t have to wash up afterwards.
Right, that’s enough gibberish from me. I’ll just take this opportunity to sincerely thank those of you who have emailed me over the past month or so.
Ciao for now, peeps.
Monday 15th April 2013
The big man and self have been at loggerheads ever since ex PM Maggie Thatcher died. He and I have differing viewpoints on many things, not least politics. I come from a working class background while he’s a true blue middleclass Tory. The Iron Lady was practically a pin up girl to his family. I’ll be glad when she’s planted and the news turns its attentions elsewhere. It’ll be a bloody miracle if I escape getting a hiding the way things have been going. There’s a simmering tension between us and if it comes to the boil it’ll be me who gets scalded.
The trouble is I can’t keep my big gob shut. The minute anything comes on the telly about her, it opens and starts chuntering. There’s a deeply ingrained legacy of bad feeling against her in the area I grew up in. She devastated the industries that supplied the workforce with jobs. The mines, the steel industry and the shipyards were all but destroyed under her leadership. Not only did she put folk out of work she then turned round and called them scum for not having a job. She may not have been at the forefront of politics for many years, but she’s neither forgotten nor forgiven in some quarters.
Shane pointed out that I wasn’t even born when MT came to power and was a mere babe during her elected years. He claims I therefore have no right to rant on about stuff I know fuck all about from first hand experience. I disagree. I think I have every right to rant on about stuff I know fuck all about from first hand experience. I’ve got eyes, I can read history, and I’ve got ears, I can listen to all the people who still remember her contemptuous attitude towards working class people, not least Lee’s dad and my friend Dot, who has been apoplectic on the subject of Baroness T.
Dick tends to try and be neutral when it comes to politics. As a posh person his natural leanings are towards the right, though he claims to be more Conservative than high Tory. He’s been acting as a kind of oil layer, trying to diffuse the tension between Shane and I, but he lost his temper on Friday night when we started arguing again after watching the news. He flung a strop. He said if he heard the name Margaret bloody Thatcher one more time he was going to book into a hotel for the weekend, leaving us to bitch each other to death. He said he’d had a tough week at work and he wanted some relaxation.
Poor Dick, he really was cross, and upset. It shut us both up, though of course I got the shittiest end of the stick. Shane sent me to bed. He said seeing as I was the one who had instigated the argument, again, it was best for everyone if I had an early night. I wasn’t chuffed, but I didn’t protest. I made a sweet apology to Dick and bade him goodnight, leaving him with a warm kiss. Shane got a cold goodnight and no kiss. He called me an ungracious brat and whacked a cushion across my arse as I passed him.
It’s easy to see who’s the ruling party in our house, and it isn’t me. Shane claims I try to rig the ballot every now and again, and says he won’t let me get away with it. Good job I love my Iron Man.
Tuesday 16th April 2013
I’ve just burned the arse off a batch of white chocolate and raspberry cookies. They look fine on the top, but the bases are as black as coal. I put them in and forgot about them. I had my nose stuck in a book. I’m reading Stieg Larsson’s ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’ I should have learned by now that reading and cooking don’t mix. You either do one or the other. They don’t work in combo. Pity. I was going to serve the cookies with home-made vanilla ice cream for dessert after dinner this evening. I can’t be arsed rustling up another batch. I’ve got no white chocolate left and I don’t fancy struggling to the shops through the gale force wind that’s blowing today. I might be able to rescue and use the top bits.
Burned biscuits are not the only culinary disaster to have blighted the quasi mansion of late. I made a sausage casserole for dinner last night. I served it with creamy mash and seasonal veggies and it was all very tasty, until Dick encountered something hard in the sausage he was eating. God knows Dick’s mouth has encountered more than its fair share of hard sausages, but none of them have had a tooth embedded in them. Poor Dick. There he was happily munching on his sausage when he suddenly yipped and spat something into his hand. It was clearly a tooth. The poor sod was horrified. He was even more horrified when he checked around his gob and found all his teeth present and correct. It begged the question. Whose tooth was it? Two pairs of accusing eyes turned on me, the resident chef, as if I might have planted it there. I immediately opened my gob for inspection. My teeth like Dick’s were all firmly in place.
They were top quality sausages too. I bought them from the farmer’s market on Saturday. The only thing they should have had in them was organic pork and seasoning. I shall be complaining to the stallholder when the market comes round again in a fortnight’s time. Shane reckons it’s a pig’s tooth and whoever prepared the meat was a bit careless about what parts of the pig they chucked into the mix. Needless to say it put us all off our dinner. It's one thing biting down on a sausage, but quite another when the sausage bites back. Yuck is the word that springs to mind.
Still, all things fall into perspective and are seen for what they are, nothing compared to the sheer horror of what happened in Boston yesterday. Thoughts and prayers for all those caught up in the attack. So many people’s lives were changed forever yesterday. It’s heartbreaking.
Sunday 28th April 2013
Hello peeps, ‘tis I, the houseboy, popping in for a visit. It’s been a lonesome weekend for me. Dick is away visiting the land of his Carebears, or should that be forebears. Either way he’s not here. Shane is also an absent Daddy. He’s away on business, though is due back this evening. It’s a far cry from last weekend when we all spent some much needed quality time together. Self and Alpha Sir had had a midweek run in and I was very much in his bad boy books. Dick was also cross with me, so I felt very unpopular and unloved.
Come last Friday night the doors of the quasi mansion were locked tight, phones were turned off and a household conference was called. The Daddies had a stern chat about a certain houseboy’s shitty attitude, and then we pretty much spent the weekend getting back in balance with each other. It was good. I loved it. I like having my Daddies undivided attention.
I’ve been keeping busy this last week, doing a lot of work in the gardens, cutting, trimming and feeding the lawns and putting in some spring bedding plants. It’s starting to shape up. It will be nice to get some warmer weather. It’s sodding freezing at the moment.
I’ve also been giving some thought to writing another book. I’ve been in two minds about it for some time now. I’m seldom in the writing zone these days. I’ve decided to press ahead. Maybe once I start it will get easier.
2009 was as much an annus horribilis as 2010, if not more so. My mum’s death signalled the start of some pretty difficult times. I lost myself for a while. I had a hell of a lot to contend with, and so did the men folk. It was a tough two years for us all. I reckon it could easily have been the end of us, but thankfully we came through.
I don’t know how long it's going to take me to write up events, so don’t put off booking your summer holidays for fear of missing the big launch (ha-ha) I’ve decided to tackle both horrible anuses in one volume, which I’m calling ‘Revelations.’ I’ve once again designed the cover (picture my proud look) which you can view on the ‘my books’ page if you so desire.
Ciao for now, peeps. I’m off to slaughter a chicken ready for Master Shane’s homecoming feast.
May 2013
WARNING! CODE RED! THIS IS A CODE RED!
MAN THE DEFENCES. EMPLOY ALL SAFEGUARDS. FORTIFY FIREWALLS!
THE RETURN OF THE HOUSEBOY IS IMMINENT.
Friday 5th April 2013
Is there anybody there? Said the houseboy, knocking on the website door.
Hello, hello, it’s me Gilli De La Mare. I’m back. Excuse me a mo while I do my world famous Dick Van Dyke impression by leaping in the air and clicking my heels together, while singing Chim Chim Cher-ee in a cockney accent so bad Michael Caine would reject it.
I’ve been offline for what feels like years, but now I’m back on it. Yay! Have you missed me? No! Awwww, droops shoulders and pouts. Why not? I’ve missed me.
So where have I been? Not far away, and yet miles away. It all began when the computer in the study passed away in its sleep. It was so dead that not even Doris Stokes could communicate with it. It’s never been a brilliantly good machine. The bloody thing froze and crashed at the drop of a hat. It started playing up big time a while ago. It took forever to boot up and was so slow it was faster to communicate by fucking carrier pigeon than by email. Yahoo was terrible to try and connect to, mainly because it’s bogged down with a zillion ads. By the time they’d all loaded I’d lost the will to live never mind email.
Anyway I set up a moaning campaign to encourage the men folk to invest in a new streamlined sexy computer with an ENORMOUS hard drive for the study. What can I say-size does matter. I moaned at breakfast and again at dinner, and when I couldn’t moan at them face-to-face I moaned by phone and text.
It cut no ice, which was a shame seeing as there was a lot of it about at the time. Shane, owner of a slick super fast laptop, said there was nothing wrong with the study computer. It wasn’t that old. He reckoned a good disk clean up and defrag would soon sort it out. So I deleted a heap of stuff, including a ton of porn belonging to Dick. Honestly I bet the vice squad’s archives hold less porn than he had in his filth folders. After de-fucking the machine I defragged it, a process that seemed to take several centuries. It didn’t make a jot of difference. In fact I think the strain of the clean up was the final nail in the computer’s coffin because a couple of days later it refused to boot up at all. It had died in the night.
I called in a mobile computer chappie to look at it. He looked at it, made disparaging noises about fans and cooler systems and cheap motherfuckers, or it might have been motherboards. Basically he was saying the machine was crap and had it not died voluntarily it should have been executed for crimes against technology. He said rather than attempting a resurrection, it would make more sense to buy a new one.
Now it just so happened that as well as mending computers the mobile computer chappie sold computers. He’d do me a deal, if I were interested, scrap value for the old one to put against a new one. He’d have me up and running in next to no time with a superior computer that would give years of trouble free service. To cut a long story short I had a temporary lapse in sanity and allowed him to bamboozle me into buying a piece of kit from him. Several hours later there was a smart new computer purring away in the study. Problem solved. Er, no. Problem just beginning.
Shane, for fuck’s sake, boy, use your initiative once in a while, blew a gasket at my use of aforementioned initiative. I got bawled out for not consulting him before plundering the household account to buy a new computer instead of having the old one patched up to live another day. He didn’t give a fuck what the MCC had said about it not being worthy of first aid. He’d probably told me a load of old flimflam and I’d fallen for it. I should have got a second opinion from someone who didn’t have a vested interest in selling new stuff instead of fixing old. More to the point I should have asked for his opinion and sought his permission, before spending a small fortune. He was a very cross Daddy. I paid for my impulsive decision. It was pants down and over the knee time. He slippered my bare bottom and to add insult to injury he banned me from using the new computer. Online was offline and out of bounds until he granted me a full pardon for my crime.
So, here I am fully pardoned and back on the WWW. I shall try to make up for my lack of chat over the coming days. Mind you, it has to be said, once the agony of withdrawal had eased a little, it’s amazing what you can find to do in place of sitting staring at a computer. The house has been sparkling like a diamond. Meals have been marvellous. I’ve been going out for more bike rides and stuff. I’ve also discovered the pleasures of lunching. It’s a bit like surfing the web, only it involves randomly choosing a friend, neighbour or acquaintance and landing uninvited on their doorstep just as they’re about to have lunch. They then feel obliged to ask you to partake of their meal. It’s good; saves a fortune on food bills and you don’t have to wash up afterwards.
Right, that’s enough gibberish from me. I’ll just take this opportunity to sincerely thank those of you who have emailed me over the past month or so.
Ciao for now, peeps.
Monday 15th April 2013
The big man and self have been at loggerheads ever since ex PM Maggie Thatcher died. He and I have differing viewpoints on many things, not least politics. I come from a working class background while he’s a true blue middleclass Tory. The Iron Lady was practically a pin up girl to his family. I’ll be glad when she’s planted and the news turns its attentions elsewhere. It’ll be a bloody miracle if I escape getting a hiding the way things have been going. There’s a simmering tension between us and if it comes to the boil it’ll be me who gets scalded.
The trouble is I can’t keep my big gob shut. The minute anything comes on the telly about her, it opens and starts chuntering. There’s a deeply ingrained legacy of bad feeling against her in the area I grew up in. She devastated the industries that supplied the workforce with jobs. The mines, the steel industry and the shipyards were all but destroyed under her leadership. Not only did she put folk out of work she then turned round and called them scum for not having a job. She may not have been at the forefront of politics for many years, but she’s neither forgotten nor forgiven in some quarters.
Shane pointed out that I wasn’t even born when MT came to power and was a mere babe during her elected years. He claims I therefore have no right to rant on about stuff I know fuck all about from first hand experience. I disagree. I think I have every right to rant on about stuff I know fuck all about from first hand experience. I’ve got eyes, I can read history, and I’ve got ears, I can listen to all the people who still remember her contemptuous attitude towards working class people, not least Lee’s dad and my friend Dot, who has been apoplectic on the subject of Baroness T.
Dick tends to try and be neutral when it comes to politics. As a posh person his natural leanings are towards the right, though he claims to be more Conservative than high Tory. He’s been acting as a kind of oil layer, trying to diffuse the tension between Shane and I, but he lost his temper on Friday night when we started arguing again after watching the news. He flung a strop. He said if he heard the name Margaret bloody Thatcher one more time he was going to book into a hotel for the weekend, leaving us to bitch each other to death. He said he’d had a tough week at work and he wanted some relaxation.
Poor Dick, he really was cross, and upset. It shut us both up, though of course I got the shittiest end of the stick. Shane sent me to bed. He said seeing as I was the one who had instigated the argument, again, it was best for everyone if I had an early night. I wasn’t chuffed, but I didn’t protest. I made a sweet apology to Dick and bade him goodnight, leaving him with a warm kiss. Shane got a cold goodnight and no kiss. He called me an ungracious brat and whacked a cushion across my arse as I passed him.
It’s easy to see who’s the ruling party in our house, and it isn’t me. Shane claims I try to rig the ballot every now and again, and says he won’t let me get away with it. Good job I love my Iron Man.
Tuesday 16th April 2013
I’ve just burned the arse off a batch of white chocolate and raspberry cookies. They look fine on the top, but the bases are as black as coal. I put them in and forgot about them. I had my nose stuck in a book. I’m reading Stieg Larsson’s ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’ I should have learned by now that reading and cooking don’t mix. You either do one or the other. They don’t work in combo. Pity. I was going to serve the cookies with home-made vanilla ice cream for dessert after dinner this evening. I can’t be arsed rustling up another batch. I’ve got no white chocolate left and I don’t fancy struggling to the shops through the gale force wind that’s blowing today. I might be able to rescue and use the top bits.
Burned biscuits are not the only culinary disaster to have blighted the quasi mansion of late. I made a sausage casserole for dinner last night. I served it with creamy mash and seasonal veggies and it was all very tasty, until Dick encountered something hard in the sausage he was eating. God knows Dick’s mouth has encountered more than its fair share of hard sausages, but none of them have had a tooth embedded in them. Poor Dick. There he was happily munching on his sausage when he suddenly yipped and spat something into his hand. It was clearly a tooth. The poor sod was horrified. He was even more horrified when he checked around his gob and found all his teeth present and correct. It begged the question. Whose tooth was it? Two pairs of accusing eyes turned on me, the resident chef, as if I might have planted it there. I immediately opened my gob for inspection. My teeth like Dick’s were all firmly in place.
They were top quality sausages too. I bought them from the farmer’s market on Saturday. The only thing they should have had in them was organic pork and seasoning. I shall be complaining to the stallholder when the market comes round again in a fortnight’s time. Shane reckons it’s a pig’s tooth and whoever prepared the meat was a bit careless about what parts of the pig they chucked into the mix. Needless to say it put us all off our dinner. It's one thing biting down on a sausage, but quite another when the sausage bites back. Yuck is the word that springs to mind.
Still, all things fall into perspective and are seen for what they are, nothing compared to the sheer horror of what happened in Boston yesterday. Thoughts and prayers for all those caught up in the attack. So many people’s lives were changed forever yesterday. It’s heartbreaking.
Sunday 28th April 2013
Hello peeps, ‘tis I, the houseboy, popping in for a visit. It’s been a lonesome weekend for me. Dick is away visiting the land of his Carebears, or should that be forebears. Either way he’s not here. Shane is also an absent Daddy. He’s away on business, though is due back this evening. It’s a far cry from last weekend when we all spent some much needed quality time together. Self and Alpha Sir had had a midweek run in and I was very much in his bad boy books. Dick was also cross with me, so I felt very unpopular and unloved.
Come last Friday night the doors of the quasi mansion were locked tight, phones were turned off and a household conference was called. The Daddies had a stern chat about a certain houseboy’s shitty attitude, and then we pretty much spent the weekend getting back in balance with each other. It was good. I loved it. I like having my Daddies undivided attention.
I’ve been keeping busy this last week, doing a lot of work in the gardens, cutting, trimming and feeding the lawns and putting in some spring bedding plants. It’s starting to shape up. It will be nice to get some warmer weather. It’s sodding freezing at the moment.
I’ve also been giving some thought to writing another book. I’ve been in two minds about it for some time now. I’m seldom in the writing zone these days. I’ve decided to press ahead. Maybe once I start it will get easier.
2009 was as much an annus horribilis as 2010, if not more so. My mum’s death signalled the start of some pretty difficult times. I lost myself for a while. I had a hell of a lot to contend with, and so did the men folk. It was a tough two years for us all. I reckon it could easily have been the end of us, but thankfully we came through.
I don’t know how long it's going to take me to write up events, so don’t put off booking your summer holidays for fear of missing the big launch (ha-ha) I’ve decided to tackle both horrible anuses in one volume, which I’m calling ‘Revelations.’ I’ve once again designed the cover (picture my proud look) which you can view on the ‘my books’ page if you so desire.
Ciao for now, peeps. I’m off to slaughter a chicken ready for Master Shane’s homecoming feast.
May 2013