Verbal High Fives

I recently broke one of four fundamental rules that govern my adult life: 1. Never leave the house without antibacterial hand sanitizer. 2. Never listen to Kenny G. 3. Never watch a musical unless being forced to do so at gunpoint. 4. Never go camping after 1997. I broke rule Number 4. Camping is widely promoted as an outdoor recreational activity which offers the participant a "wonderful" opportunity to get close to nature. As a nature-lover myself, I thrive on engaging with nature in its various untamed natural wilderness states - as long as it is on TV or located within 5 feet of urban sprawl and plumbing.  So, it was with a certain amount of apprehension (and a statistically alarming quantity of antibacterial hand sanitiser) that I recently found myself camping in a muddy show-ground in Shepton Mallet for mandatory - by which I mean “work-related” purposes.  We were camping because, even though mankind has developed perfectly adequate towns and cities ...

This week I was in the kitchen cooking dinner when I was attacked by ANOTHER Christmas beetle! It crashed into my elbow while I was stirring the chicken pasta. I got such a fright I screamed hysterically and temporarily forgot I was holding a spoon in the pot. On reflex, I thrashed my arm wildly in order to flick the darn thing off. Instead I just succeeded in launching a large piece of saucy chicken into the air – or as Buzz Lightyear prefers to call it, “To infinity and beyond!”   - because though I searched the kitchen carefully, I could not find it anywhere. In my hunt for the AWOL piece of chicken, I did manage to locate a Rain Spider so hideously large and hairy it looked as though it was sporting a large Chihuahua dog as a scarf. It skulked off and slunk behind the curtain with body language that proclaimed; “Follow me and you’ll lose a limb.” There were also a variety of flippy flying things harassing my kitchen light fixture and a slug leisurely mincing around on my bath...