Thursday 3rd July 2014
Good day Houseboy watcher (s.) I thought I’d pop in for a quick chunter while I eat my lunch, a cheese and chutney sarnie with a side order of cold baked beans. Never let it be said that I don’t know how to dine in style.
Dick and I took a trip to the seaside yesterday evening. Shane had some work to do and there was sod all on the telly so Dick grabbed his car keys and me and we set off for the coast. I love going out for a drive with Dick. He’s gorgeous, sophisticated, expensive and sexy, his sports car convertible is gorgeous, sophisticated, expensive and sexy and just being with the pair of them makes me feel gorgeous, sophisticated, expensive and sexy instead of a humble, but adorable, bargain basement boy. Dick drives just the right side of fast to give an air of excitement to a journey. To be honest, he can drive scarily fast if given the opportunity. Fortunately, Shane doesn’t give him the opportunity and if Dick takes it anyway and Shane finds out, then take cover, because all hell lets loose.
Anyway, getting back to yesterday. It was a beautiful, sunny evening so naturally we drove with the top down. It felt great to feel the wind rush through my hair. Another great thing about driving with Dick is that he doesn’t mind me fiddling, diddling and chatting, unlike Shane. Going for a drive with Shane is like going for a drive with a very strict schoolmaster.
Examples:
Him: ‘be quiet, Gilli, I’m trying to drive here. You’re distracting me.’
Me: sighs and slouches.
Him: ‘sit up straight, stop slouching.’
Me: sighs again, but sits up straight.
Him: ‘what are you doing?’
Me: ‘looking for a CD to put on.’
Him: ‘leave the CD’s alone. It’s bad enough you nattering in my ears. I don’t want music blasting out as well.’
Me: yelps as he slaps the top of my thigh.
Him: ‘close the glove compartment.’
Me: sighs, closes the glove compartment, but reaches for the radio dial, then yelps as he slaps my hand away from it.
Him: ‘leave the radio alone. I’ve told you before about fiddling with it. You don’t touch anything inside or outside of my car. Sit still, shut up and we’ll have a nice day.’
And all that before we’ve even pulled off the drive.
Anyway, returning to last night. I stuck on a CD, turned up the volume and Dick and I sang along to the greatest hits of The Kinks as we zoomed along. You know Dick and kinks - they just go together. We got to the seaside, parked up the car and went for a stroll along the beach. There weren’t that many people around so we held hands, we got a few double takes, but nothing nasty was said, not within our hearing anyway. We watched a couple of guys racing sand yachts and another couple of guys who were kite surfing. Both activities looked fun, so much so that Dick said he’s going to look into getting some kit and having a go. I’d love to try sand yachting, but I’m not so sure about the kite surfing. I’m not so keen on water sports. I don’t like going on a boat never mind attaching myself to a surfboard and a huge kite. With my luck, I’d get dragged out to sea and never be seen again, either that or whisked up into the air by a freak gust of wind and carried off to Oz.
We had an ice cream and did some more strolling along the sand. Unfortunately, we strolled a little too far and didn’t notice the tide coming in behind us. Two guys alerted us to the danger by yelling and waving from the slipway, telling us to get off the beach before we got cut off altogether. I must admit I felt a bit panicky as we splashed our way back to safety. Both guys rushed to help me up the slipway, leaving Dick to help himself. I think they thought I was blind, thanks to my welding goggle style sun gegs.
We thanked them for warning us. They told us it was a tricky stretch of beach and quite a few people got caught out by the way the tide crept in. There’d been a number of tragedies over the years. Grateful that we were not to count among those lost at seas we headed home, making a pact never to divulge to Shane that we’d been foolish enough to risk drowning by not paying attention to the tide.
We were barely home and through the front door when Dick’s mother rang on the land line. I left him chatting to her in the hall and went into the lounge. Shane was still tapping away on his laptop. He works too bloody much. I sat down and slipped off my trainers, peeling off my sand encrusted, sea damp socks. It’s funny how sand manages to get into even the most secure of footwear. A mischievous impulse suddenly descended upon me. I stretched out one of my socks, aimed it at Shane and twanged it like a catapult, showering him in particles of sand. He was not amused and angrily demanded to know what the fucking hell I was playing at.
Observing the look on his mush I asked myself the same question, just what the fuck was I playing at? Unable to supply an answer that complied with the rules of sanity, I grabbed my other damp, sandy sock, stretched and aimed it. The look on his face was a mix of incredulity, annoyance and wonder. He stabbed a digit.
“Don’t. You. Fucking. Dare. Boy!”
Peeps, I did dare. I twanged more sand at Daddy.
He let forth a mighty roar, cast aside his laptop, leapt up and lunged for me. I gave a screech, half fear and half laughter, and made a run for it, pounding past Dick in the hall with Shane close on my heels. Racing up the stairs, I bawled apologies back at him. They were not accepted. He caught me on the landing and hustled me into our bedroom. Throwing me face down on the bed, he yanked down my shorts and underwear, whacking at my bare arse. He wasn’t playful and it bloody stung, but even so I couldn’t stop laughing, in between yelps and yells. The look on his face had been utterly priceless when I flicked the second shower of sand at him. My giggles disarmed him. He turned me onto my back and leaned over me, caging me with his body, reluctant amusement replacing the annoyance in his lovely green eyes.
“You tormenting little sod! You’re always wired when you’ve been out with Dick.”
Reaching my arms around his neck I promised to make sweet amends for being a naughty boy. And I did. Dick soon joined in and we all had a happy time. It was a very nice close to a pleasant evening. And there ends another small chapter in the ordinary day-to-day life of this boy.
Friday 18th July 2014
Things not to say to Daddy -
Breakfast with Shane this morning was going well until the weather announcer on the radio stated the possibility of storms with hail and up to three thousand lightening strikes hitting some areas of the country. My gob opened and quipped: “that’ll be Penny practising her dark arts again.”
Oops.
Shane does not take kindly to inferences about his sister being a witch (from my point of view, there’s no inference intended, it’s pure fact.) As a remark it fell into the same category as the one I made a while back when in the car with alpha Daddy. We drew up behind a vehicle whose registration plate was BY11TCH. My gob could not resist the temptation and wisecracked: “I didn’t know your Penny was in town and that she has a new car with a personalised number plate.”
Alas, my Sir was not amused. He issued a sharp rebuke there and then. Once home again, he made known his displeasure via the hand to arse method. It was the same this morning. This poor houseboy ended up over Daddy’s knee getting his bottom well smacked for his ‘cheeky' 'insulting’ and ‘uncalled’ for remark. I'm still a bit tender in the rump area, but have only myself to blame.
Shane appreciates that Penny and I don’t get on. He doesn’t mind that I don’t like her, but he won’t tolerate me being rude and disrespectful about her within his hearing. Oh well. There you go. Me and my big mouth. I wish someone would run a class on brain to gob cooperation. I swear my mouth operates independently and without the consent of my brain.
It isn’t the first time I’ve wound up Shane this month, and I don’t mean the sand flicking incident, but I haven’t got time to journal it today. Laters.
Just got time to say thank ye kindly to those who have emailed of late. The question has been asked about ‘Christmas at Leo’s’ is it going to be published soon? The answer is I hope so. I am working on it, painfully slowly I know, but still, I’ll get there in the end.
Must dash. Ciao for now.
Saturday 19th July 2014
Dear Diary,
Today is not a good day. I woke up feeling grumpy, a hangover from last night, but not in a good way. There is no boozy fun for this houseboy. The hangover was of the bad feelings variety. The dinner I made last night was so vile that both men folk felt obliged to put very stern fleas in my ear. What happened was that I went to visit my mate Lee yesterday. I got back much later than intended - half an hour before the men folk were due back from work to be precise. The dinner I hastily threw together was, in Shane’s words, not fit to serve as pigswill. Having already pissed him off at breakfast with my lip about Penny he was in no mood to be lenient. He made it clear that I was a serf in deep disgrace and cast me from his lordly sight to spend the evening in splendid isolation in the single room. Bad boy.
The weather isn’t helping to lift my glum mood. The rain is falling in torrents and seems set to do so for much of the day. Shane has gone to work and Dick has toddled off to his golf club in the optimistic hope the clouds will part and allow him to belt balls with expensive metal sticks. I’ve spent too much time trawling the Internet reading things that have left me utterly sickened. The news is full of horrors that make me ashamed to be part of the human race. My mind is filled with nightmare images I can’t seem to jettison. I hope the people directly responsible for bringing down Flight MH17 are brought to justice I also hope they suffer strangling pangs of conscience for the rest of their lives, that’s if they have a conscience at all. Then there’s the unremitting turmoil and misery in Gaza. Why do we humans put so much energy into hating, maiming, torturing and killing each other, and why is religion so often at the heart of it all? It seems to me that religion is the toxic, evil core of this great big poisoned apple we call earth.
Well, after depressing everyone, I’ll be off. Shane will be home soon and I aim to redeem myself by preparing him a lunch fit for kings and household deities. I want to be his good boy again.
Tuesday 29th July 2014
Good morning, Peeps and Peepettes,
What a night it was last night, hot and sticky-sticky-sticky! There was much fractious snarling and growling in the bear lair at sleepy time. This poor little house cub ended up in the den while beta bear took up residence in the single room. Alpha bear claimed the master bedroom. I spent a good part of the night sitting on the windowsill in my birthday suit, in the hope the air from the open window would cool me down. My mind is overactive at the moment, which doesn’t aid the sleep process. I’m trying, crosses fingers, to get ‘Xmas at Leo’s’ completed and tidied up to put ‘out there’ on or around the 1st of September. I said it would be out this summer and September is still technically summer, just. Where has this year gone? It’s whizzed past. I’ve already noticed that the evenings are getting a little shorter. No! Don’t start, I hear you cry. Don’t fucking start moaning and depressing about the briefness of life. Okay, okay, calm down. I won’t go there, not today.
Referring back to my last entry, I did manage to get back into Daddy Shane’s good book by preparing a delectable lunch when he returned from his Saturday foray into work. This was followed by a delicious dinner at a restaurant later that evening. On Sunday I produced a pleasing lunch. Leo joined us and I only rowed with him once, after he made a disparaging comment about my cabbage. I won’t have my Savoy cabbage commented on at my own dinner table. He claimed I hadn’t chopped it finely enough and offered to give me a master class on the proper way to prep cabbage. I told him if my cabbage wasn’t fine enough for his poncey palette, then he could dine elsewhere. He patted me on the head and told me not to get my knickers in a knot. If I was too stubborn to accept constructive criticism, then so be it. Mediocre cabbage might suit me, but it did not suit him. He made a point of leaving it, so I made a point of putting it in a ‘doggy’ bag and handing it to him when he went home later that day. ‘Here,' I said sweetly, 'chop that, it’ll give you something to do this evening.’ Aside from that, all was mellow. Daddies were happy. I was happy.
Alas, I screwed up on Monday, after I went over to have my usual morning coffee, cake and natter with Eileen. To cut a long story short, or we’ll be here all day and I’ve got a haircut appointment with flirty Jay at one, she announced her intention to have a long overdue house clear out and recruited my help. What a task it turned out to be. She wasn’t kidding when she said the house hadn’t been cleared in years. Talk about the accumulated clutter of decades. We started with the attic and I brought down boxes, crates and more boxes of stuff. There were yet more boxes from the bedroom cupboards and then the garage. She was all for donating the boxes to charity with contents unseen, but I said we should sort through them all, in case there was anything of value that she could sell. I offered to help catalogue the contents. It proved to be addictive. I loved going through the boxes. It was like a treasure hunt. I ended up taking loads of them home so I could go through them at my leisure.
Sadly, the men folk did not share my enthusiasm. They were not pleased to arrive home from work to find the hall and lounge cluttered with boxes. I had bric-a-brac and old newspapers spread everywhere as I unpacked and examined the contents of the boxes and crates. There was some lovely stuff, delicate old china tea sets, ornaments, house wares, pictures, you name it and it was stashed in a box from Eileen’s loft.
Shane finally lost his cool when he came home last Wednesday evening and found me on the computer in the study. I was engrossed in researching some old blue and white china dishes I’d found, a full dinner set. They were super old and I wanted to try and gauge their value so I was looking for comparative stuff on Ebay. It might not have been so bad if I’d produced a decent dinner, but I hadn’t. I’d been busy unpacking, examining, cataloguing and researching all day and had lazily assembled a ham salad from pre-packed ingredients. He was most put out. He did not slog his guts out all day to come home to a dinner of limp salad. The plug was pulled on the computer. I was physically disciplined for putting my own interests before household duty. I was ordered to get my priorities straight and the house cleaned up. The place was in bloody chaos. He was sick of it resembling a car boot sale.
I realised that I had got carried away with my personal project and neglected all else. I apologised to both Dick and Shane and promised to get back on track.
I ended up taking the unsorted boxes down to the summerhouse and storing them there. I’m still going through them, but only allowing myself a set amount of time each day. The house is clean and tidy and dinners are decent again so the men folk are happy and my cute botty is safe from Daddy retribution.
Well, my peeps, that’s enough from me today. I must be off. Jay and his precision scissors await me. Before I go I’d like to thank those who have emailed lately. I enjoyed reading them. Ta-ta for now.