We have an estate agents coming today to look over the house and give us a valuation; hopefully it won’t be too far off the price it was valued at 18 months ago for the purposes of probate, but we’ll get three or four quotes and then choose one. It’s disappointing not to have heard from either of the private buyers but I guess there’s still time. I just hope the selling process doesn’t drag on too long because we’re already fed up.
Yesterday the son came round to continue sorting out his bedroom; you can actually see the floor now, which is an advantage. I feel as if I’ve got so many balls in the air I don’t know what to do next; it makes me wish I were a nomad and could just pack up my tent and move to the next spot. But I guess you have to have it in the blood to be a nomad. Then again, one of my favourite films in recent years has been Nomadland. I’ve blogged about this before; it’s a very peaceful film following a group of boomers who lose everything in the 2008 crash and end up travelling round the Midwest in trailers finding work here and there to keep going.
Lately I’ve been dashing off a lot of comic poems. I guess with all that’s going on I don’t have the energy for serious writing, so in the last couple of months I’ve written a skit on Lewis Carroll’s The Mock Turtle Song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mock_Turtle%27s_Song
which is very ecclesiastical and references PG Wodehouse as it’s called The Great Sermon Handicap. I’ve also written a farewell to the Plough pub where we did the singaround, based on Goodbye Yellow Brick Rd, as well as Nothing Rhymes with Orange, an audience-participation piece about how – well, nothing rhymes with orange. And now I’m embarking on one called the Thingummy. Loosely based on the song called The Marvellous Toy, it’s about a mysterious object with widgets and sprockets and how nobody knows what it is. I started this because there’s a shared lunch in a couple of weeks and we were asked to bring a mysterious object for people to talk about. I don’t have any mysterious objects and even if I did they’d be deep in a box somewhere, so I thought I’d write a poem about one instead.
Too cheer myself up when I feel overwhelmed I look at bikes, on which topic I’ve had a lot of recommendations from a Facebook biker group. Right now it’s a toss-up between a Yamaha and an AJS Cadwell. I think if I like the look of the AJS I’ll probably go with that as, no matter how reliable, you just can’t fall in love with a Yamaha. I mean, look at this and tell me you’re not drooling…if I had one of these I’d want to take it to bed every night.
image removed on request
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
The Marvellous Toy is the sort of song which used to feature regularly on Junior Choice years ago [remember Uncle Mac?]. I’m not a massive aficionado of poetry, but I do have a soft spot for such as The Mock Turtle Song; I watched a rather sad recent documentary on Sky Arts a couple of evenings ago about Syd Barrett, and his song lyrics had a randomness, and particularly British quality to them, I thought: I was surprised that Vivian Stanshall wasn’t mentioned, as they much have been roughly contemporary. Yes, older British motorbikes have an elegance which the utilitarian Japanese could never match. Cheers, Jon.
The AJS is indeed a classic. Have you considered a Triumph Bonneville? The 1970s models were very desirable, as I recall. I definitely thought about buying one at the time, but stuck with my Honda 400 twin as it was paid off, and I was only really a ‘commuter biker’.
Last week, I met a lady who was living in a large van converted into a very rudimentary motorhome. She was parked in the small car park of Hoe Rough Nature Reserve for 3 days. She told me that she was originally from Shropshire and had decided to embark on a nomadic life after splitting up with a long-term partner and not having enough money to buy anywhere to live or pay the inflated private rents being asked these days. She now tours the UK finding places to park ‘off the radar’ for a few nights. Her vehicle was signwritten with the logo ‘Menopause on tour’, and she was very positive about living that way.
Best wishes, Pete.
I’d love to have met her, she sounds great. I’d also love a Triumph Bonneville but at the moment I’m limited to 125 cc