"I was at a party with some people from church.  The party was at someones house who I only vaguely know.  Anyway me and some others had to go, dont know why, but we had to climb on this metal seat -  a bit like a fairground ride seat.  There were gates at each end of it, one of which we closed.  As we were journeying to see why red bull was called red bull we were surrounded by real life, wild, white bulls, one of which climbed onto the fairground type seat.  I panicked and quickly shut the gate after the bull got off.  We did discover how the white bulls produced the red bull drink but that obviously wasn't important as I cant recall how it was done.

On the way back to the party we travelled back in style, in a fire engine of course with me driving.  I hadn't learned how to reverse in it yet so hoped I didn't meet anything coming the other way down the farm track back to the house where the party was being held.  And guess what, we did!  First of all was a police car with flashing lights.  There was a car behind it which needed to stay close to the police car.  As it happened the 2 cars managed to squeeze past only for me to the meet a bright pink limousine.  After we had sorted out that little problem - I don't know how - we drove past the church where all my little Brownies were coming out.  They were so excited to see Tawny Owl driving a fire engine!

When we finally did get back to the party, which had grown in size from 5 people round a kitchen table, to a room full sat round a huge table and also mainly children, we started discussing who of the group was able to swim when we got to the swimming baths.  There was one girl who wasn't allowed to swim for some unknown reason.  Before we went we all had pudding.  The choice was apple crumble or plum crumble and also many others but I think that stuck in my mind as apple crumble and custard is one of my favourites."

Well I am now perplexed as to whether we all went swimming or not, how red bull became red bull when it supposedly came from white bulls, how or when I learnt to drive a fire engine, where I found a fire engine, where the limousine was going, the reason for the party and of course what on earth does all this mean?

Now I can show you some of my photos taken so far~

 <- This was my traditional-style bed in the condo on Ganghwado. When I first arrived in Korea I kept moaning to myself about all the material being quilted when the weather is so hot. However, having slept on one of these babies, I submit to Koreans' superior knowledge in the world of bedlinen!

 <- This is was the view out my bedroom window on Ganghwado. It gives you some idea of the scenery, but it's nothing compared to seeing it in person. You can also see the ma-hoo-sive swimming pool!

 <- Before we left the condo, we threw sweets at the kids. As one does. There was a vicious scramble to get as many as possible. Nobody was hurt, but it was a close thing! The boy in the front was the baby son of "Japsay" (Korean slang for police officer). Behind him, in the green vest and white shorts, is Geonmo.

 <- Before we left Ganghwado, we went to an old Joseon-era palace complex on the site. The rain was torrential, but it didn't spoil the fun! This is Mrs. Sung coming through the entrance gate. We also saw the magistrate's office, a book-museum (this king loved his literature), living quarters, an old giant bell and more gates.

 <-This is Japsay's son posing for a photo at the palace. The umbrella ("osan") was bigger than him!

 <- This is the funfair we went to on Wolmido last Monday. Apparantly Koreans think safety harnesses etc are the stuff of fairytales. Nedless to say I didn't try this. If you look closely you can actually see the people sliding down!

 <-Sohee and Geonmo at the AMAZING Japanese restaurant we went to for her birthday on Tuesday. Oh my God, the food here deserves a post of its own so I wont talk about it now. This was the moment when Geonmo gave her his present, a few pens he had picked out specially for her. VERY VERY CUTICLE!

 <- Incheon at night. In the context of other Asian cities, it's a small place. I'd never seen anything like it though, I was totally stunned.

 <- Sohee and Mr. Kang cut her birthday cake. It was full of creamy goodness. And because Koreans don't really differentiate between what food constitutes breakfast/lunch/dinner, we ate it for breakfast the next morning too! ^^

 <- Geomo after I just whooped his ass in Monopoly ("Blue Marble Game"). You can see the bitter, bitter resentment behind the smile!

 <- Finally, me operating an old-fashioned fire engine thingy at the Incheon Metropolitan Museum on Wednesday. I may have found my true calling!

That's it for now. Coming soon - kumdo/taekwondo, more food, generosity, the nice things about Korea, the bad things about Korea (maybe)!

Take care (and give me some news from home!)

Siobhán xxx

It's the start of birthday season, and I've made the same mistake I make every year.  I went too big.  Which means the parties that follow will have to equal or surpass this event or people are going to talk.  Ahh the casualties of parenthood.

He likes fire trucks.  Obsessed.  They’re big, red, shiny, I get it.  I get it.

Sorry if your invite was lost in the mail.  Here’s a peek at what you missed. 

www.jasonvogel.com

www.drmez.com

I am so so tired. We will be bringing him to the Civil Defense Heritage Centre cos i made the mistake of telling him that there are fire engines inside. I thought he will forget about it. He pester me for 2 days before asking me to call and see when we are go and visit. :P

No Shichida class on Sunday as Teacher Dilah is sick. They are having make up on another day. Thus, went back to my mum's place on Sat night.

This was snapped extremely quickly on the spot in Glasgow last night. So it's not the best of panning shots I know but I think it still came out "alright". Although I had the settings on my camera all screwed up (exposure compensation of +2.3eV), because I was shooting in RAW, I managed to recover the image and I think it still turned out really well.

Well this week has been absolute hell for me. Been tired out thinking about things like CNY Night, Global Village. I have yet to even prepare my testimony although I have an idea of what I want to say.

Here's crossing my fingers.

1. I don't remember much of this one as i think I had it pretty early on. all I can remember is being in a boat on what seemed to be the river in Lincoln, I think with Helen and Imogen. Then someone shouted us from the riverbank. That's all I can remember.
2. So, this takes up the majority of what I remember. I was in the front passenger seat of my dad's car, being driven by my Grandad. I turned round and my cousin Joe, who's 11, was boasting that he had some sweets. I remember looking forward again and there being a packet of sweets in a compartment which doesn't actually exist in the car; they looked like those lilac sweets you get, only they were green and gummy. So, we keep on driving and I realise we're going to the big church in the town where I live. We're going to my cousin Esther's christening (she's now 8.)
3. So, this could be a follow on from the previous. But I'm not sure. I'm in a room in a house that i know to be my Grandparents', but it looks nothing like it. I'm on the second floor (my grandparents live in a bungalow) and I'm looking out of the window across the fields, but there's a housing development on the left-hand side. Millie comes into the room and asks if I want to go outside and draw (I'm by no means remotely artistic) and then she sits down on a chair at the desk. For some reason I choose to move the laundry basket (which looks like a big pink urn!) and as I'm doing that my mum comes into the room and asks me what I'm doing. She walks to the window and says something along the lines of "I remember looking out this window when I was young" then I asked her "How didn't you realise that?" referring to the houses that were being built. I then looked out of the window and saw a fire engine in the back garden raising and lowering a ladder on top of it.

That's all I remember.

The mucositis has resulted in Rhys finding it difficult to eat and drink anything easily, even bacon sandwiches are off the menu. The dihydrocodeine wasn't working and so the doctors have switched Rhys to morphine to help control the pain. He's on a continuous infusion which started at 0.7ml per hour but at the time of writing is at 1.8 ml/hr. Even that isn't reducing the pain to something that makes it easy to eat or drink. Mind you it doesn't stop Rhys from talking to people on his web cam. It has resulted in him sleeping during the day, which is a good thing as it will help him to get through the infection without having to deal with too much pain.

Considering the fact that you aren't overly active when in hospital, you do get surprisingly tired from sitting around and Rhys (as well as Tray and myself) has been known to fall asleep during the daytime.

The doctors have taken Rhys off his Ciclosporin temporarily because the levels they monitor in his blood, when giving the drug, were elevated.

Rhys is also getting feeds during the day as well as the night through his nasal tube. Since his mouth is sore the nurses are also administering his medication through the nasal tube as well. Apart from the obvious that using the tube means he can still have his medication without it causing him pain, there is the advantage in that he is receiving itraconazole this was as well. Since the itraconazole tastes disgusting and the only way that Rhys can normally take it is with a drink then there are some good points to the tube.

The last two days have seen some events occur to keep Rhys entertained.

Yesterday morning when I got into the hospital Rhys was having his Ciclosporin. I happened to glance at the bed and noticed that his line was red with blood in it. As the drug was supposed to be going into Rhys and not his blood coming out there was obviously something not quite right. We called the nurse who looked at line and couldn't see any obvious reason for the blood leaking back. As it was the Ciclosporin going in there was no way that we could fiddle around with the drug because it is very important that Rhys gets it so that the donor marrow is not rejected by his body. We could see on closer inspection of the line that the drug was going into Rhys. The nurse then suggested that we try raising the line up slightly and let gravity take a hand in getting the blood to flow back into Rhys. This worked with the result that the line was cleared after about 15 minutes of raising it section by section.

Yesterday, we also happened to glance out of the window and saw a crowd of people stood around outside the oncology hospital. It was obvious that the fire alarm had gone off and they had evacuated the building of everyone they could while they waited to confirm there was a fire. The fire engines turned up a short time later but left an even shorter time after that so it was a false alarm.

This is the second fire alarm that we know of. The first Rhys and Tracey discovered when they went over to the radiotherapy and found the place empty. They had used the shortcut between the Children's Hospital and the Oncology Hospital. By the time they got there the alarm had been switched off which left them in the radiography department but with nobody around, as they were all stood outside the building.

Less dramatic but no less entertaining were the visits from the play specialist, the music therapist and the massage therapist.

Rhys spent an enjoyable morning getting messy with paints. He painted one of the sick bowl, unused I might add, turning it into a rather fetching hat. Then he spent the remainder of the session dropping paints onto pieces of spinning card in order to make colourful patterns.

The music therapist arrived in the afternoon but had to come back as Tracey wasn't around and she wanted to be there for the session so that she could join in. When Tracey, Rhys and the therapist were finally in the room together I legged it in order to protect my hearing. Rhys or Tracey will have to post about the session.

Day 5 saw Rhys avail himself of the opportunity for a foot massage. As Tracey and I were in the parents room at the time we missed out on this. Rhys will have to tell you all about this himself.

Rhys continues to work towards becoming either a doctor or nurse when he grows up. He can operate most of the equipment in the room, probably as well as the staff can. He's now learning how to look after his bed which includes stripping it, washing it down (mattress and frame included) and then remaking it with clean bedding. This has to be done every day because of the need to keep everything as clean as possible. The staff being are being brilliant about it and letting him help. In fact the staff are pretty brilliant in general with looking after Rhys and us.

Brockville Volunteer Hook & Ladder Company No. 1 - ca.1890

[Listed individually below, along with their daytime job, if known]

Back Row (from left): Patrick S. Roberts (railwayman), John York, William J. Reynolds, John L. Upham (bookseller), James Connors (moulder), W. Kelly, James H. Stewart (butcher), W. Ezra Amond (labourer)

Middle Row (from left): John Woods, Henry Mathen (boat livery), Michael Collins (machinist), William Mathen, D. Brady, John Flanigan, James H. Hall (carter), George K. Dewey (tax collector).

Front Row (from left): John R. Reid, Henry Jennings, J. Owens, Thomas Miller (moulder), William Dodd, James S. Dodds, Joshua E. Timlick (machinist), John Botham (packer), William McKay, Thomas Nicol, William H. Harrison (stoves).

Some Fire Company History

The creation of a formally organized volunteer fire company was one of the first important pieces of business undertaken by the first Board of Police created in Brockville in 1832.

The year before, this item was published in the pages of the Recorder on November 24, 1831: “Through the spirited exertions of Mr. Norton and other individuals, means were lately raised, a fire engine purchased, and a fire company formed in the village of Prescott. Brockville is thus outdone.”

With this impetus, the members of the Police Board representing the citizens of the newly incorporated village of Brockville passed a motion to set aside 125 Pounds for the purchase of one of the latest hand-pumped fire engines. They then ordered that Alexander Grant be appointed captain and engineer of a fire company of 48 persons. Each member was to provide themselves with a proper fireman’s uniform at their own expense.

Local blacksmith, Stephen Richards was sent off on a scouting trip to the U.S. to find a suitable engine. On March 4, 1833 Mr. Richards appeared before the board and recommended that one of the latest and largest models made by the John J. Rogers & Co. of New York be purchased for 125 Pounds. The order was placed and this was the beginning of the Brockville Fire Company.

For over fifty years, the Fire Companies were operated by volunteers, but in 1886 the first group of paid firemen were hired by the Town of Brockville, who then established a fire department. The first fire brigade was made up of John Hall,(later to be Fire Chief), William Seaton, Joshua Bedlow, and Thomas Devereaux.

At the same time, a new Hook & Ladder Company was organized with 33 members of the volunteer group. This group, it appears, operated out of one of the older fire halls in the east end on King Street just east of Garden St. Twenty-seven of this group are shown in the photograph above.

Sources: The first group photograph of the Hook & Ladder Co. appears to have been taken away from Brockville, perhaps before or after a firemen’s parade, because the stone building behind them is not recognizable. A short history of the Brockville Fire Company, accompanied by this picture and others, was printed in the 1906 Souvenir supplement published by the Brockville Recorder on the occasion of the Old Boys’ Re-union held in Brockville from July 28th to August 3, 1906. Many of the volunteer firemen’s first names and their regular jobs were gleaned from other sources.

The other two photos are from an extensive collection put together by the late Merv McKay. Merv was a career fireman, as were some of his forebears.

!!!

For pricing or to order cakes or cupcakes, please contact Mama Min. Cakes/Cupcakes with special requirements, eg, diabetic, reduced sugar & fat, vegetarian, available upon request. For more details and information on cakes, click here. Click on View All Images for more photo of cakes.

I had many plans for today.  Both the girls are in school and it’s just me, The Lone Ranger and shorty boy Tonto this morning.  I have to get Tilly a Christmas present.  I have to go to the post office sorting depot and pick up some parcels.  I have to buy Oxo cubes.  I need to think wistful thoughts about panettone.  How will I do that in this weather?  I know I’m just going to sit around with the heating turned up to melting point playing cars with Oscar and pretending to be busy.  It’s exhausting.  I know the kind of pressure Kofi Annan must live with.  Thank God nobody has asked me to join the UN as a good will ambassador.  I can’t even take the kids to school without having a lie down.  It’s just so demanding, all this responsibility.  It makes you long for the simple life. NOT! 

I love watching all these programmes where world weary accountants and advertising executives pack up their loved ones and cart them off to Tuscany to live in a haystack, while they pursue their idea of a golden age rural idyll after having burned out in their jet set city life styles.  Invariably they have names like Tarquin and Jeremy and the one thing you can absolutely guarantee is that the most research they’ve done on this wonderful plan is to read Peter Mayle’s ‘A Year in Provence,’ and think: ‘how hard can it be?’ 

It is of course all bollocks.  Anyone who has ever lived in the country and done anything vaguely rural will tell you that getting tired from earning too much money and snorting coke from a lap dancers navel is nothing compared to lambing five hundred sheep at three a.m. in a howling gale with water pouring down the back of your parka.  It doesn’t matter whether you do it in a rusticated backwater of the unspoilt Dordogne, or Herefordshire, it’s still going to be hideous in large parts, and will smell quite bad a lot of the time. 

The other thing they neglect to think about is the fact that the words ‘rustic’, ‘quaint’ and ‘unspoiled’ are all brilliant when you’re visiting for a two week holiday, but not when you’re trying to rewire your entire house in a thunderstorm using a blueprint from 1933, and the only electrician in the entire area has gone on holiday for the entire month of August to escape his stressful lifestyle (he’s sitting in The Spearmint Rhino drinking champagne out of a stripper’s shoe, thinking he’s died and gone to heaven). 

Jason’s parents moved from the city to run a strawberry farm in Cornwall when he was a teenager, in pursuit of a quiet country life.  What they don’t tell you while you’re blissfully dreaming of agas and plaiting your own corn dollies is that even strawberries need twenty four hour, round the clock attention, let alone any form of livestock.  You become hostage to a bunch of weeds and a perambulating pork chop.   

You can’t ever go on holiday again and you spend your whole life doing such joyous jobs as rotivating; spraying; mulching; weeding and other back breaking chores.  You spend the next twenty years of your life cultivating calluses the size of Denmark and spending all your hard earned cash supporting the local osteopath who plays golf and jet skis round the globe while you remain tethered to your rural lifestyle. 

Jason can’t even look a strawberry in the eye any more without hyperventilating, and he’s got a whole raft of stories prepared for the Kevin and Perry days of the kids’ wild teenage cries of: ‘It’s not fair!’ that are going to drive them absolutely bonkers!  Because the other thing that these programmes don’t tell you is that the children never ask to be set free into the country to roam wild.  It’s all about the parents. 

They say that they’re doing it for the children, and that they want to give their kids either a) the kind of idyllic childhood they remember or b) the kind of childhood they would like to have had instead of being a latchkey kid on a run down housing estate/ghetto surrounded by burning cars and pre-Asbo teenagers.   

Rubbish.  They’re doing it because they imagine themselves sitting in a giant farmhouse kitchen swimming in terracotta tiles and Emma Bridgewater crockery, being interviewed by someone from the Guardian weekend supplement about their ‘simple’ lifestyle, which in actuality has only been made possible by their vast trust fund and mummy’s largesse.  There is nobody in the world who can sleep in Cath Kidston sheets, surrounded by hand woven kilims and treasures from Paul Smith’s antiqueorama from the proceeds of a run down olive farm, unless you’re Terence Conran or a drug smuggler on the side. 

The kids meanwhile, who are supposed to be enjoying getting back to nature and running wild and free like Brooke Shields in that dreadful film (the one where they had to superglue her hair to her nipples to stop people getting over-excited!), are going mad with boredom.  They’ve spent three months whinging about the fact that the home made bread is breaking their teeth, and are praying that their dad will get the solar panels fixed in the next twenty minutes so they can immerse themselves in Gran Turismo III on the X-Box and pretend they live in a mean ‘hood stylie ghetto with some car jacking pimps and crack whores. 

The reality gets as exciting as Pound Stretcher, early closing on Wednesdays come hell or high water, a burned out telephone box miles from anywhere and a bus shelter where the buses go once a week if you’re lucky, but don’t come back, if you’re even luckier. 

There speaks the voice of bitter experience!  I lived in the country when I was little, and although there are parts of it I really loved, I confess to being more than ready to move on by the time I hit my teenage years.  Thankfully my parents had their ‘let’s pretend we live in The Good Life’ moment, early on (that Felicity Kendall has a lot to answer for), and by the time I was old enough to crave the delights of ‘yoof culture’, they had had enough of weaving their own vests out of vegetable matter and brewing parsnip wine. 

Despite what your parents tell you, travelling forty minutes each way to school by bus is not a ‘fantastic adventure’.  It’s a pain in the arse.  Living ten miles from the nearest Chinese takeaway is not character building either, especially when your mother’s cooking is as erratic as mine. 

Having the only jobs available to you to supplement your meagre pocket money being potato picking or a paper round is also a bit soul destroying.  My mother wouldn’t let me do potato picking because she was having a vendetta with the local farmer, so paper round it was.  To add insult to injury (paper rounds were crap pay, four pounds a week for seven morning’s graft.  Spuds were positively lucrative in comparison), the paper round in our village was taken by the 75 year old father of our eccentric cleaning lady/girl, who resolutely refused to drop dead of old age or heart failure so that I could have an easier job.  This meant that I had to do the paper round in the next village, which was a two mile bike ride before I’d even started. 

Life wasn't easy.  My bike had collapsed several months earlier, but my parents didn't want to buy me a new one, so my granddad had fixed it using cotton reels and a soldering iron.  It was a little unreliable, and because I had had a growth spurt, my knees brushed my earlobes as I pedalled. On Wednesdays it was Radio Times and magazine day.  I was quite tiny at this stage in my life and only managed to make it round without snapping my spine by innovating a manoeuvre where I rode perpendicular to the floor and grated the paper bag along the road to stabilise myself.  I went through a lot of paper sacks. 

My brother was supposed to help me.  It was he who mentioned the idea of having a paper round to my mum, and she thought it would be ‘character building’ for him. Now this is all very well, but I was, as we have established, a lazy toe rag who hated getting up and was quite content to eke out what meagre pocket money I had if I couldn’t throw spuds in a bag for however much spuds in a bag went for in the olden days.  I did not, under any circumstances, want a paper round.  My brother however, was dyslexic and couldn’t read very well.  My mum said that I had to go with him and help him for the first few weeks until he could memorise the round, and then I could stop. 

After two weeks my brother had hysterics when a Jack Russell leapt out from behind a bush and tried to kill him, and cycled home in the middle of the paper round, leaving me to fend off the slavering beast and refusing to go out ever again.  My mum felt sorry for him and agreed that he didn’t have to do it any more.  I on the other hand, had to continue for the honour of the family etc.  We had made a commitment, we couldn’t let people down (what’s all this ‘we’ stuff about?  She didn’t get up at five thirty every morning to cycle herself into oblivion).  I was outraged of small village in the arse end of nowhere.  I protested to no avail. 

I hated that job more than any other job I’ve ever had in my life and I’ve had a few.  One day the door between the shop and the flat where the owners lived got jammed and they couldn’t get in to open up.  Because I was small they posted me through a ventilation window about eight feet up in the wall, whereupon I plummeted down like a stone.  The only thing that broke my fall was a display of dry goods, and I was chastised for squashing a box of Scots Porridge Oats, which I thought was a bit rich. 

When I had let them into their own shop and then cycled four miles round the paper route (middle of nowhere, farms all spread apart with vicious dogs, geese, hamsters etc) I got back expecting some praise and maybe even a reward.  They grudgingly gave me a bar of chocolate! Chocolate for God’s sake.  I mean, never look a gift bar of chocolate in the horse’s mouth and all that, but please?!  I had risked life and limb and got a bar of bloody Dairy Milk for my pains.  I expect it was reaching its sell by date and they would have had to reduce it anyway. 

The worst bit of the job was the cycle to work.  The road to the next village was down an incredibly steep hill, which was fun on the way there, and murder on the way back, and then round a series of hair pin blind bends with high hedges and no pavements.  Once the clocks changed in the Autumn, the frequency of my near death experiences increased exponentially and I used to come home a quivering wreck, weeping into my bicycle clips. 

One day, several months into this horror, my mum took me to one side and said that even though she knew I enjoyed the job, she really didn’t think I should do it any more as she was a bit worried about me getting killed one dark morning! Outraged of Outrageousville.  Nothing more was said between us, due to the fact that I had no wish to be convicted of matricide.

The only good thing about living in the middle of nowhere used to be the frequency with which we were snowed in in the winter, thus avoiding masses of school.  With the advent of global warming even that benefit has now disappeared into the ether.  Tragic.

Moving back to the present day I am pleased to say that we had no squabbles over uniforms this morning, and there was even queuing at the door at twenty past eight. Tallulah is so desperate to see the back of me she got dressed last night!  I remember doing that when I was a child. 

I have always been absolutely terrible at mornings, and I used to hate that mad scramble on a school morning in particular.   Our house was what an estate agent would call, ‘full of rustic charm’.  We would call it miserably freezing.  One of my major dislikes was the brutal transition between the warm cocoon of the duvet and the freezing, arctic conditions of the rest of the house.  I puzzled long and hard and figured that if I dressed in my school clothes the night before and simply slept in them I could avoid much of the anguish of having to be naked in sub zero temperatures. 

It was brilliant.  In fact, an inspired stroke of genius.  My mother however, did not feel the same way when she came to tuck me in before she went to bed and found me sweating in thick woollen tights and a school tie.  Unimpressed would be the word I would use to describe her mood, unimpressed and shouty.  I felt brutally wronged that she couldn’t see the brilliance of my plans.  If truth be told, I still do… 

Children are seldom appreciated for this kind of thing.  I once made a pill box hat out of cardboard, which I covered with cunningly made roses which I fashioned from toilet paper.  I proudly took it downstairs to demonstrate my marvellous millinery skills and got told off for wasting valuable toilet paper!  Hence my early retirement from the world of high fashion and my overwhelming desire to own a Philip Treacey hat. 

One of my worst crimes was committed on the day I benevolently decided to make my mum and dad breakfast.  It was a Sunday morning and I was the first one up.  I was always getting shouted at for waking early on Sundays (despite my sluggishness during working hours.  It’s a kid thing, weekends, holidays and bank holidays are always fair game for early rising), and told that I shouldn’t wake them, but should go and find something constructive to do. 

I thought it would be a nice idea to take them breakfast in bed.  I would earn many Brownie points.  I would be a ‘good’ child, and I would get to fiddle about with dangerous cooking implements unsupervised.  A winning plan all round. 

Now we didn’t have read sliced bread from the supermarket.  We had a baker who used to deliver bread to our house, or my mum would attempt to make it.  Consequently our bread was in vast loaves, and if my mum made it, akin to chewing on a brick.  Sawing through one of these monsters balanced on a stool wrapped in fourteen layers of clothing was my first obstacle. 

I managed to cut two ‘slices’, although their smoothness and regularity of form was not a joy to behold.  They were however separated from the main loaf, and this was all that counted to me.  By then I was brutally bored of the whole thing, it having taken me a good twenty minutes of sawing to get to that point, and I had almost taken my thumb off twice.  I knew my mum would shout at me if I bled all over the kitchen, so I needed to move on to pastures new where bleeding was not an option. 

We did not have a toaster at this point in my life either (It’s a wonder I’ve made it thus far, with these levels of deprivation in my life).  We had to use the grill on the oven.  With much twiddling and pushing I managed to light the grill and extricate the grill pan upon which I placed my dainty morsels of soon to be toast.  I soon noticed that the slices were rather large and didn’t quite fit in the space between the top of the grill pan and the bottom of the by now, red hot, element. I decided that I could not go back to the bread whittling stage, as I would surely lose a finger and then my life would be over as my mother battered me to death with the soggy end, thus defeating all my plans.  Consequently I came up with the brilliant idea of hitting the slices very hard with a rolling pin to flatten them a bit.  Voila, perfect fit. 

I was merrily filling the kettle and messing about with arranging tea cups on a tray when I smelled the acrid stench of burning toast.  I turned to see that the bread was not only beginning to char, but in the places where the bread was touching the element it was actually on fire.  Now I had a dilemma. I had at this point gone into shock.  At no stage in the proceedings had I thought: 1) make breakfast for grateful parents 2) burn down kitchen in the process.  It had never crossed my mind that the burning down the house thing might be an option.  My mum and dad got quite cross when the house looked like it might burn down, which happened on a regular basis, so I knew I would be in big trouble if I made a fuss. 

I stood and watched the blaze as it crept along the grill pan and started to lick over the sides of the oven, unsure of whether to confess my sins. Now why I didn’t just pull the bread out and toss it into the sink, I really don’t know.  I put it down to the trauma of watching all my plans fall apart.  In the end, as the smoke got denser I decided the only thing to do was to confess all.  I ran upstairs two at a time screaming: ‘I’ve set the house on fire!’ which was slightly different from the original lines of: ‘Good morning Mum and Dad, here is your breakfast and the newspaper.’

My mum shot out of bed like a scalded cat, shouting: ‘What? Where? How? Etc’ and stood on her glasses, which made her even madder.  She hedgehogged downstairs, threw the remains of the toast in the sink and opened the window to let out the clouds of smoke.  As predicted I was seriously in the dog house, and banned from making any more gestures of goodwill towards them before I’d taken my Brownie, Safety in the Home badge. 

Now when I say that my parents nearly set their house on fire with alarming regularity I am not exaggerating.  I will point out for the record that all stories, however far fetched they seem in my blogging adventures are actually true, and this explains everything.  You can ask my mum if you like.  She’s a very reliable witness, as long as you don’t ask her whose idea it was for me to get a paper round that is. 

Our central heating was erratic to say the least.  My dad loves a good bargain, and will never buy anything legally, or full price if he can avoid it.  He used to be in the motor trade and was forever doing deals with people which meant that we ended up with a random bunch of rubbish that generally made our lives either a) strange, b) unmanageable or c) both.  One year he bought my mum  a church organ for Christmas, but forgot to tell her that it was coming, and she had hysterics when two burly men turned up at the door shouting: ‘Where do you want your church organ love?’  He also bought a fire engine, which we had parked on the drive for the longest time, two fruit machines and a Victorian cash register.

These things weren’t too bad, just eccentric and difficult to dust or decorate round.  The big problem was when he went in for practical stuff, like the champagne coloured toilet that had to be held together with orange bailer twine and flooded the entire landing one Christmas Eve, and of course, the boiler. The boiler was French.  The instructions were French.  We were English and our French was limited to: ‘Ou est la plume de ma tante?’ and three verses of; ‘Sur Le Pont, D’Avignon’, which oddly enough don’t crop up in the instructions for how to fit and light a boiler, try our level best though we did. 

My dad hired a random stranger who had once done a weekend course in panel beating and needlework to fit the boiler for us as best he could, and then proceeded to try and translate the instructions on how to light it.  It turned out that, according to my dad (who should never be trusted on these matters, and why we let him this time, I really don’t know), you had to fill a wine glass with methylated spirits, open the top of the boiler, throw it in, and then throw a lighted match in on top.  Then Bob was indeed your tante, and your house would emanate a rosy glow, etc, etc. 

My mother was very sceptical and made us all hide in the larder while my dad was sacrificed for this foolish experiment (fair do's, it was his fault).  There we were, crouched behind a packet of boudoir biscuits waiting for a loud bang and a scream, when nothing happened.  After twenty minutes of nothing happening we ventured forth using some old Newbury Fruits as a blast shield, to find my dad nonchalantly having a cup of tea and telling us how brave he’d been. 

My brother and I were rather let down by the lack of drama and went to bed in a huff.  We needn’t have worried.  It turns out that my dad had been rather over enthusiastic with the meths and had started a teeny, tiny conflagration in the boiler, which had then become a much bigger conflagration in time.  By about nine in the evening the boiler was making a series of hideous groaning and knocking noises and sweat was dripping down my parents noses as they rang the fire brigade. We were evacuated to the front lawn while they put the fire out and were very excited to be running round in our wellies in the dark on a school night.  My mother was not so impressed, and her language about my dad and the boiler was positively Anglo-Saxon. 

We also had open fires in all the downstairs rooms of our house, which my parents set on fire on a fairly regular basis.  The best one, at which I was sadly not allowed to attend, was when we had all decamped to my aunty Carol’s house to play and the local farmer rang my mum to say that her chimney was on fire.  She left us with Carol and hared up the hill to our house to try and put it out.  Unfortunately the farmer had other ideas. 

He thought that girls were weedy and wet and as any fule no, only a real man could put out a fire.  He elbowed my mother out of the way with the words: ‘stand aside. I’ll handle this Sue!’ and promptly shoved a load of sacks up the chimney to stop the draft and cut off the oxygen supply to the fire.  Now this is correct in all aspects of chimney fire management, except for the kind of sacks he used. 

You are, for the record, supposed to use wet hessian sacks (see, hessian does have its uses).  He used plastic fertilizer sacks, which were not only highly flammable because they were plastic, but because they still had fertilizer residue in them (fertilizer is an active ingredient in many home made bombs).  The whole chimney then exploded into life and large gobs of burning plastic came shooting out of the fireplace and set the rug on fire as well.  Job done! 

My mum called the fire brigade, but so started the long feud with the farmer, which escalated when he cut off her water supply digging a hole through our pipes in his paddock, and shot out our bathroom window with an air rifle while my mum was trying to relax reading Georgette Heyer in the bath.  I was never going to get that job picking potatoes was I? 

Right.  I have to go and pick up the girls from school.  I must tell you that I have resisted the urge to buy a panettone again today, for which much kudos.  I did however buy a cake called a Pandoro, which came in the same kind of box as a panettone but was half the price.  A weird way to buy cake I know, but we live in hope. 

It is o.k., but it’s not a panettone and never will be.  It is rather like a brioche that’s been inflated with a bicycle pump and fed on steroids. It’s so enormous it won’t fit on a tea plate and I’ve had to eat it on a dinner plate, only exaggerating my already shameful claims to gluttony.  It has not diminished my desire for a panettone either, and if I were a betting woman I'd say that that was another tenner gone by the end of the week.

I've never seen a fire truck that needed to be shaved. I would rather be burned to death than be saved by this hairy piece of shit.

A GROUP of pals’ trip to the races turned into a nightmare after one of them was mowed down by a fire engine on a callout.

The four friends had travelled to Musselburgh racetrack from Glasgow when the 35-year-old man stepped into the path of the emergency vehicle.

After being treated on the roadside, he was taken to hospital where he remains in critical condition.

Sarah Lowe, 30, was working as a waitress in a local café when the group came in just before the accident happened on Friday night.

She said: “There was four of them in total and they said they were through from Glasgow for the races.

“The were laughing and joking, and were in really high spirits. The one who had the accident seemed a nice guy and was trying to hug me.

“After each eating a plate of fish and chips, they paid and left the café saying they were going to the pub next door.”

It was after this at approximately 5.15 that the accident happened.  The man, from Glasgow, stepped out onto Musselburgh High Street where he was hit by the fire engine, which was on a 999 emergency call out.

Shocked Sarah continued: “Five minutes after they left I could hear sirens and see flashing lights outside.

“I went outside and could see the guy lying 20 yards up the road on the other side from the café.

“There was a pool of blood around him and his friends were having to be restrained by some of the firemen.”

Police immediately closed the road as the man was treated and a subsequent investigation was carried out into the accident.

A spokesman for Lothian and Borders police said: “A 35-year-old man was hit by a fire engine in Musselburgh that was responding to a 999 call.

“The injured male was taken to hospital and he remains in a critical but stable condition.”

The fire engine was on its way to a call out in Wallyford and had its sirens on at the time of the accident.

The road was closed for five hours while an investigation into the accident was carried out.

ENDS

Fire engine, originally uploaded by Howard.

This evening in Oxford. Recorded on the cameraphone and tweaked in Picasa.