about as intellectual as i get

there's been a thought washing around in my head this week, and it's this:  i wonder if those ancient greek dudes were really on to something...?  believe it or not, this was prompted by my having my lip pierced.

look, in Squeaky's World, this makes perfect sense, i promise.

it was Plato (....um...i think...) who came up with the "Theory of Form", which basically, as far as my limited brain can understand it (following a distant reading of Sophie's World and a quick reference to Wikipedia), states that everything we experience through our senses is an echo of a perfect form that exists on some other plane somewhere. ....or something along those lines...

and i have begun to wonder, in an idle sort of way, if we are not all shadows on the wall.

bear with me on this.

so - at the age of sixteen, the embryonic Squeaky had her nose pierced. and she was so very proud of this. she loooooved her nose piercing. it gave her a little bubble of joy every time she looked into the mirror. it just felt so right - like it was meant to be. and she still loves her pierced nose, seventeen years later. (omg - i had my nose pierced more than half of my life ago! *momentarily feels old*)

then, a couple of years ago, having had blonde hair to her waist for most of he life, she had it all cut off, and dyed it purple. again - bubbles of joy nearly every time she looked into the mirror. like it was meant to be.

a week ago yesterday, she had her lip pierced. and she loves it.

now, the day after she had her lip pierced, she went to see her parents, who live on a boat near Hull, wondering what their response would be. her father, she was sure, would hate it, but that's just Dad. he hated the nose ring, too but, being Dad, said little or nothing about that, since he's so laid back, he's practically horizontal, and tends not to get aerated about things he realises he can do nothing about. her mother, she was not sure about. she had, after all, encouraged and paid for the nose-piercing (and the moment it went in, with Mum looking on proudly, is still a surprisingly vivid memory, by the way).

so she waited for their reaction to her new adornment.

and waited, and waited.

in the end, wondering if they were just being polite in not mentioning it, as they both hated it, she asked what they thought.

they looked mildly surprised when attention was drawn to a new piece of metal in their daughter's face and, individually, their reaction was much he same: "Well, i thought it was new, but i wasn't sure, as it seems like the sort of thing that you'd do, anyway"

....er....ok....

i'm 33. most people, i think, tend to get this sort of thing done when they're in their teens, or early twenties. but maybe that's just my prejudices showing. in western society, putting bits of metal into your face, or any part of your body other than your ears, has always struck me as a mildly rebellious act, since it's not really in our culture.

...um...i would like to stress, at this point, neither the nose or the lip were a consciously rebellious act on my part - more in the nature of decoration (though i must admit that it has been tremendous fun winding up a colleague who thinks that tattos and piercings are a revolting perversion)

anyway - back to the point.

i had very much the same reaction from colleagues. these are people i see every day, in an environment where facial piercings are pretty uncommon, though certainly not villified (except for by the colleague i mentioned earlier). and nobody noticed! not a single one! when it was pointed out, they said they hadn't really noticed, but that they thought it was very "me".

....hang on, a minute...

very "me"? what does that mean? now, i choose to believe that they think it suits me. but more than that, and here's where those ancient greek dudes come in. it almost seems like the nose, and the hair, and the lip, and various other things, were things that were always there in potentia, as it were. that Squeaky, as a person, exists in her whole and complete form somewhere beyond Plato's Cave, and she's coming into focus in the sensual world bit by bit. and that applies to her mind, too. and that's why every time i become aware of that thing that's changed, it feels right. because, somehow, that's how it was meant to be...

or i could, in fact, be talking complete bollocks, as usual. *grin*

***

in other news:

 we have a new addition to our family of vehicles.

because the adorable Talulah is such an expensive old girl to run, we have acquired a tiny little Fiesta van, who has been named Little V. (little van - geddit? :D)  and she, too, though battered, is adorable!  dirt cheap to run and lovely to drive, she's taking the pressure off poor old Talulah, and will save quite a bit of money in running and maintenence costs.  and we have found somewhere off the road to park Talulah - so she's not subject to the indignities of passing traffic hurling stones and road shit at her beautiful paintwork.

yesterday, we went climbing, for the first time in months.  it wasn't long - just a couple of hours, but it was good!  we went indoors, to our local climbing centre, Alter-Rock.  it was good to be back.  since we were last there (in January!), they have added a large fin in the middle of the area, with loads of new climbs and textures/techniques.  as well as a traverse wall.  And. It. Rocks!  there was soooo much to do, and all very interesting.  loads of corners and aretes and overhangs and roofs to tackle.  great fun, and i did really well - having not climbed for months, i actually managed a couple of 6A rated climbs! and i even screwed up my courage to lead a 4!!! *pride*

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what i did on my holidays

...um...well...not a great deal, if i'm honest...

bearing in mind, though, that we haven't been away for a year, not doing much doesn't really matter, as we were too busy just chilling out.  of course, the rain didn't help all that much, either...  but it was nice and, forthwith, some pictorial representations:

first stop, the Headland Camping and Caravan Park, Tintagel, where the peace and quiet know no bounds.  you can just breathe in the tranquility.

that's Talulah at the back of the row - she has her roof up.  we hadn't been there ten minutes before the guy on the pitch next to us was taking pictures of his kids giving the VeeDub wave and saying "Duuuuude!" in their really tiny little voices.  sooooo cute!

then we headed off down the coast path and around the headland to Tintagel Haven.  it's one of my favourite places in the whole world - i would sit and watch the sea there for hours if i could get away with it...

as you can see, the tide was in.  the large cave in the centre of the picture is called Merlin's Cave (natch!).  when the tide is out, you can scramble over the slippery rocks in there and come right out on the other side of the headland.  this is the place hubby taught me to skim stones when we first came here about 12 years ago.  i'm pretty good at it, if i say so myself, and still ridiculously proud of being able to... *grin*

when hubby finally managed to drag me away from the border between earth and sea, we toddled off up to the cafe on the headland to have those cornwall essentials:  a pastie (for him) and a cream tea (for me).   oooh - heaven on a plate! :D

Talulah's bed, by the way, is totally awesome!

behind me you can see Mango The Rat's cage.  yup - she comes too!

later that evening, we discovered that we had a stowaway...

this handsome fellow is Spot The Spider.  a well-travelled fellow indeed, we found him in all sorts of unlikely places around Talulah, and he stayed with us for a day or two.  however, one night, he mysteriously disappeared, and hubby woke up feeling suspiciously fuller than he had when he went to sleep...

it also rained fairly hard that night.  as you can see - Squeaky is a genius when it comes to sorting out a leaky skylight...

the following day was beautiful, if extremely windy.  the pixie hat became my constant companion on this holiday - i rarely took it off, hence spent most of the holiday looking somewhat silly.  but then - there's really nothing new about that.

next stop:  St Ives. 

and the sun shone for our arrival.

(that sign we're making with our hands, BTW, is the VeeDub wave i mentioned earlier)

however, the following day...

it pissed it down. ALL DAY!!!  D:

at times like these, you make your own entertainment.  what we made was pouches for the magnets to hold Talulah's curtains up (which i'm still sewing on, BTW. a minimum of six on each curtain.  four curtains done, eight to go...*groan*).  it was a really lovely way to spend a rainy afternoon, and the time flew.

the following day, it had, thankfully, ceased to rain like the end of the world was nigh.  Talulah is lovely to spend time in but really, even i was getting cabin fever by the end of the day!

so we took advantage of the break in the weather and hotfooted it along the coast path to St Ives. 

 

...just...

...gorgeous!

there were many lovely things to be had in this ancient fishing village / haven for artists, the deli we found was quite heavenly (homemade brownies and gingerbread, delicious goats cheese, and charcoal biscuits - all organic and totally nommy!), but the little details of the town (which i believe is getting on for 700 years old) are utterly delightful.

seriously - how many places could this door lead to?  on this plane or any other?

this one delighted me beyond measure, being such a tea-obsessed slurper.  really, they ought to rename it Squeaky Street.  or possibly Teabelly Alley (a personal favourite)

*snigger*  no comment.  none whatsoever.  no cheap jokes, either.  ;)

following our days in St Ives it was, sadly, time to start making our way homewards.  but Talulah is an old girl, and needs to take her time when she's ambling around the country.  so we had to pick a place to stop for the night on our way home.  hubby, genius at picking new places to go that he is, picked a tiny little end-of-the-road place called Brean, on the Somerset coast - right at the edge of the levels.  the geography and scenery around there is awesome, but i don't think you can really appreciate its stunning beauty until you get yourself up high, and can see the whole world spread out beneath you.  we only discovered this when we climbed up Brean Down - a great chunk of turf-covered rock that thrusts up and into the sea between Brean and Weston-Super-Mare. 

look!  there's Talulah on the beach! :D

the vast expanse of sand was utterly breathtaking, and the land is just as flat for miles around, glowing with a million shades of green.

and the sun shone all day.

:)

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Inception

Just come back from the cinema. This film surprised me. Seeing the trailer, i expected it to be blow-your-hair-back spectacular and, well, yes - the SFX were, of course, excellent. But pretty much of a muchness with so many other big budget spectacular movies. Can't actually say they were anything other than a bit Meh, to be honest, though the freefall scenes were very well executed, and pretty impressive. The thing that most caught my attention was the story, and the concept behind it. The fact that there actually *was* a story, and a good one at that, was a very nice surprise, i admit. And so beautifully constructed, too. Simple, yet very complex. And the concept was always guaranteed to get my attention, having spent so many hours as a child pondering the differences between dreams and reality, and how one could really, *really* tell one from the other. And if that telling would be right. So glad it really *isn't* just me. And the guy who played Eames? Hot damn! *thud*

camper porn and other news

so the last time i blogged, i believe i mentioned something about a bit of a catch-up.  really, it's just that there are one or two minor things i meant to blog about and just never got round to it.  what can i say?  i'm like good pastry - flaky.  however, i'll start with things uppermost and see where i go from there...

continuing the love affair with Talulah.  *sigh*

something we never thought about before we bought Taulah, something that never even crossed our minds, is that VeeDubs are rather special creatures.  yes, they are beautiful design classics, and iconic in their own way. yes, they are veeeeery fasionable (as, of course, they damn well should be - there are, after all, some people left in the world who have taste and discernment... ;). and yes they are, of course, camper vans.
and that's what we thought we were buying: a camper van.  a very pretty and well looked-after camper van, but a camper van, nontheless.  and, of course, we did.

however, stealing over us a little more every day since we bought her has been A Realisation.

Talulah is a Classic Vehicle.  one of those things you see at shows and on driveways, being polished to within an inch of their mechanical life.  and now, we've got one.  by default, yes, but we have one.

now we have to look after her.

oh, gods - we have to put fuel in her!

something we never thought to check is the rate at which these things drink fuel.  oh, my - Talulah is a thirsty girl!  she did 22 miles per gallon....  when she was brand spanking new!!!

ohmyjesusgod! 

so the plan was to use her in much the same way we used Isobel.  *cough*   kinda not really practical.  notwithstanding the cost in fuel and maintenance (hubby drives 40 miles a day on a filthydirty road that's caked in salt in the wintertime - EEK!), we don't want to wear out her poor engine.

Enter Plan B (no - not the band - do keep up)

there is a very nice old lady a few doors down from us that was my beloved and much missed Nana's best friend for over 50 years.  she's agreed to rent us some space on her driveway.  we are also buying a runaround from some good friends.  this little thing is about as generic as you could get as far as cars are concerned (therefore extremely cheap and easy to maintain) and, moreover, does about 60 to the gallon.

result!

so when the weather gets shitty, we will tuck Talulah up on her lovely cozy Tarmac (with a cover, natch), and use her only on weekends - to keep her ticking over.  and now, despite the fact that the vehicles in this family will soon outnumber the humans by a factor of 1.5 : 1, i don't feel the sliiiightest bit guilty about that.  no siree bob, i do not.  because sitting on that driveway a few doors down is all of our holidays for at least the next three years.  hopefully much, much longer.  and she is a work of art.

ok, i'm done now.  i promise i will try veryvery hard to not post any more pics of our baby.

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and so - in other news or, as it's more accurately known....

Random Stuff. *checks pic folders for Stuff I Have Done Recently*

several weeks ago, we went on a work outing to Stratford-Upon-Avon because...  well, frankly, it was a cheap day out, and we thought it would be interesting to go there and see how well we could avoid Shakespeare.  we did pretty well, actually, we did Pub, Shoe Shopping, and....

Making New Friends.

Hippy Hubby talkin' to teh animals

Squeaky and friend (look at the butterfly - not the face!  aaargh!!! *hides*)

The Art Of Disguise

seriously - how cool is this little dude?!

t'was quite a jolly day.  didn't do much, but it was relaxing.

---------

even more weeks ago, on a miserable, drizzly saturday, we went to Derby musem.  haven't been there since my grandad used to take us as kids, 25 years ago.  ever wondered what 25 years' wrth of dust looks like...?  nope, me neither.  i found out, though, as some of the exhibitions really were the same ones i used to look at as a kid.  there was some stuff in there that i was dreadfully bored by as a kid that was fascinating now, but that's to be expected, right?  oddly, though, and slightly worryingly, the most fascinating object in the entire place was part of an exhibition of stuff that was found in an old chemist shop before it was demolished recently.  viz, this:

i have a low pain threshold, and i hate having injections, but for reasons i have not examined too closely, i found this absolutely fascinating, and very beautiful.  i actually spent a good ten minutes with my nose pressed up against the glass, trying to imagine what something this delicate would feel like, sliding into my flesh...

---------

lastly (i'll tell you about the curtains and the slightly haunted sewing machine another time...) there is a new addition to our interior decor.  finally, finally, i have bookshelves of my very own.  my wonderful and clever hubby made them for me, and i cannot express how happy it makes me.  seriously - i actually cried when i saw them all finished and mine all mine.

*happy sigh*

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homecoming

she's here, at last - Talulah hath arrived! :D

look!

gawd, but saturday was a loooong-ass day! 

it started at 6am.  we had to get the bus to derby, catch a train to st pancras in london, a taxi to fenchurch street station in same, a train to stanford le hope, then richard (the lovely guy who sold Talulah to us) came to pick us up and take us to our new baby. 

then we spent a couple of hours alternately cooing over her loveliness, and loading her up for the journey to her new home.

yup, loading her up.

she came with a spare engine.  and sundry other spares that are, frankly, almost enough to half-build another camper.  result! :)

it took us four hours to drive home.  we made it at about 7:30pm.  then we had to get everything back out of Talulah, and up the stairs into the spare room.  hubby had to carry the engine block up on his own! \'o'/

but she's home, now, and soooooo shiny! (as you can see from the pic).

i would talk about the delightful day we spent at some friends' house yesterday, but the internet and my laptop have been playing silly buggers tonight, and it's nearly bedtime.  sometime soon, i'm gonna have to do a long catch-up post.

but not tonight.  so i'll leave you with a pic of richard and Talulah.  oh, and some strange woman who snuck into the pic and grinned like an idiot.  no idea who she is, but we only just managed to patch up the crack in the camera lens...

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Waterworks

Shitty afternoon. Got miserable enough to cry on the bike on the way home. Dropped the bike off at the bike shop to get the rear tyre changed, and walked home through the park. I'm still here, as it happens.
I sat under a tree in the shade, and watched tiny insects dancing in the sunlight, listening to my ipod - possibly my favourite possession, btw. At least I've stopped sobbing for now.
Fucking hormones.

*sings* "My name is Talulah..."

squeaky is a bad blogger. *shame*
i haven't blogged for far, far too long, i know.  but honestly, there hasn't been much going on.  there appears to be something growing out of the silt which is, at present, about 11,000 words long.  it's coming very, very slowly.  and i keep hitting walls with "OK, smartass, what happens next, then?" scrawled all over them in dripping red paint.
but it's coming.  the working title is utterly crap, and there's already a lot that needs poking, but i still have a connection with it, and ideas for what happens later (without any idea of how i'm going to get from here to there), but it's coming.... :)

-

and now, since the end appears to be in sight, the sad and terrible story of Isobel, our poor, abused camper.

Isobel has been with us for about four years.  and we love her.  she has given us much joy (and occasional frustration - like the first time her sliding door fell off, but never mind that), and has been astonishingly reliable.  she's carried hubby to work every day, and he and i all over the country to watch ravens, and wolves (the latter only in a safari park, sadly), and long, long walks in deserted woodlands, and so many other places.  she has been a true and faithful friend.  but she was getting rusty.  so we decided to give her a new set of clothes (i.e. a new paint job), and get a few things repaired and spruced up.
we took her to a local place, which shall remain nameless (insert copious and acidic swearing here), as they were VW refurbishment specialists, and the work they showed us looked pretty good.  they quoted us a price we could afford for replacing panels, getting rid of the rust, taking her back to the bare metal and respraying, and we saved hard for several months.
she was to be purple on the outside, and we were going to redo her insides in green.
she went in at the beginning of november, and was supposed to be in there for four weeks.
six weeks later (we didn't mind waiting, these things take time, after all), we finally got her back.  it was two days before christmas, and the spanking new purple paint was a fantastic christmas present.  we were thrilled!  yay! :D

five weeks later, it all went tits up.

rust started showing through the new paint.  not just a little patch, either -  all over the bloody place!  we were horrified!

we took her back and showed the guy who runs the garage, and he gave every appearance of also being horrified at the shoddy work.  apparently, the reason it had taken six weeks was that "Dave The Paint" (the sprayer who does all of their paintwork for them) had been having one or two personal problems when he did Isobel's work.  really?  no shit!
well anyway, we were very understanding - people do have problems, after all - and garage bloke said he'd get it sorted, at no extra cost to us.  too bloody right!
so off she went again.  i will leave out the description of the shitty fucking deathtrap car he loaned us, or what a nightmare we had getting temporary insurance for it, or any of the myriad other things that happened, each one sinking our spirits lower and lower.
we missed out on our first week's leave this year, and the second. 
THREE MONTHS after we took her in for the second time, the work still had not even been started.  apparrently, DTP was very angry that we had dared to complain about his dreadful, shoddy work.  go figure - we're so ungrateful.  *shrug*
we finally demanded that garage guy return Isobel, and the money we'd paid him.  the cheeky bastad tried to give us 900 quid less, saying work had been done on the body of the van.  hubby, on the verge of tears of anger, frustration and sorrow, pointed out that she was now in a worse state than when she went in.  her door locks no longer worked, the speaker cables had been carelessly cut when they removed the doors, all the interior window trims had disappeared, and the rust was even worse, with paint flaking off all over the bloody place.
he returned Isobel and, a couple of weeks later, we finally got all of the money back, but were now faced with the question: "What now?"  find somewhere else that would charge us even more and be just as likely to rip us off?
Why bother now?
i can't adequately convey the trauma of this whole story here.  she was our pride and joy, and those scumbags had fucking RUINED her.  she no longer had that spirit of joy that made us relax as soon as we sat in her.  she was, to us, a flat, dead thing.  a moving cavern of metal, and nothing more.
we decided the time had come.
we were ready. 
"we shall buy a bay window". 
one of the ones you see all over the roads of Cornwall in the summer.  a proper VW bus.  not a splitty (the really old ones with the split windscreen), since they're really, really expensive.  but we worked out that we could just about afford a bay window, with a pop top.
so we started searching the interwebz.
there's a place we found down in Oxfordshire.   they buy and sell and do up campers, and they do really, really good work, on site (bonus!).  but they were a little out of our price range.  so we started trawling through the classified ads on vwcampercrazy.com.
we saw a few we liked, and even went to look at one (which was pink! XD), but there was one ad that really caught our eye.  however, we couldn't get hold of the guy, and the ad was a couple of weeks old.  we thought it might already have gone, since the good ones tend to go really quickly, but a week later, the guy finally got back to us.  it was still for sale, and he was happy to keep it for us until we could get to see her.
yesterday, we drove all the way down to essex (three hours!), just to see it, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be a wasted 360 mile round trip.

it wasn't.

we've found her!  we've found our new baby!

***HAPPYDANCE***

her name is Talulah, and she's GORGEOUS!!!

look-->

her bodywork is immaculate, without a speck of rust anywhere (apart from a teeny tiny patch on the passanger footwell - easily sorted), and her interior is fantastically well designed, hand built, and, again, immaculate.  i should probably mention that the paint job and interior were both done by the lovely guy that's selling her to us, and quite obviously with a great deal of love.

she is a dream!

now we will be on tenterhooks for two weeks until we can pick her up.

WE CAN'T WAIT!!!

and poor, abused Isobel?  she's going to a new home, where she will be loved and appreciated.  she's going to go and live with The Most Wonderful Woman In The World and her lovely chap.  this makes us happy, too.

*smile*

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