(no subject)

I have blisters. This is nothing particularly unusual, lots of people get blisters on their feet from illfitting boots or damp socks but I have blisters on my fingers from sandpapering the floor. OMG the tyranny of interior decorating!!! Someone, and I spit on his grave, at sometime, I suspect the nineteen sixties, replaced the our nice Victorian tiles and good nine inch floorboards with bloody parquet. Sure it's expensive parquet - half inch thick blocks of afrormosia and you just can't get these days - but it has thirty years plus of polish and grot on it and Paul, coming over all Lawrence, has decided we need to strip it back, get all the dents out and seal it with marine varnish (in case of tidal waves? We are at 800 feet here.) Machinery, naturally, doesn't give a good enough finish so this weekend we have knackered my steam iron (a good blast of steam is great for lifting even quite substantial dents from timber) and have sandpapered into all the little crevices. It's BORING and afrormosia dust is turmeric yellow and very fine. Never mind a mining souvenir, every time we cough we get a parquet souvenir and it's bright yellow - one might as well be taking snuff.
I've just this minute heard a radio trailer for Erskine Childers "The Riddle of the Sands", an exciting story about two young men on a sailing holiday off the coast of Holland and the clip contained the following quote - "I realised that throughout this conversation he had been pumping me hard..." *sigh* must stop reading slash. Bet it's been done anyway. Actually, its a good book. One of the first ever British Secret Service stories and the 'controller' of the spies is known as 'M'. I wonder if Ian Fleming read it?
Isn't it odd how things that happen as a child affect one later in life without one being aware of it. I have great difficulty in writing Snape - dunno why - he makes me uneasy and there's no way I can make myself see him as a fandom sex-god. Now, I was turning out some of Mum's old books this weekend and came across an old Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin book of Noggin (non-Brits will not be familiar with these gorgeous cartoons - sadly your loss) and looking through it I realised that my mental image of the Potions Master conforms pretty exactly to that of - eeewww - Nogbad the Bad. If I get a chance I'll scan a picture of him.