May, 2014 - cushtie.com - Page 2

Month: May 2014

  • Poor preparation, patties

    This evening I went for a three kilometer run, which was quite possibly a bad idea, after spending the previous hour hunched over a computer, debugging code, and the time before that either hunched over the bathtub, washing La Serpiente Negra, or stuffing Jamaican patties into myself. (After much begging, I finally prevailed on my […]

  • Wrinkle free in Chicago

    I don’t know why, but Groupon thinks I live in Chicago, and today emailed me with an offer for cut-price Botox. If you’re in the market for discounted injections of botulism into your face, I wonder what else you might buy – buy one, get one free anthrax shots in your buttocks? A volume discount […]

  • Going out again, going out too quick again

    Every Monday afternoon I get an email that tells me how far I ran in the previous week. I was surprised to find I’d managed an entire kilometer – the week had been such a shambles that it scarcely seemed possible that I’d even put my shoes on. Still, every kilometer is another kilometer. Tonight, […]

  • Back up

    For the first time in an absolute age, I was back on a stage, performing to paying customers. This was the high point of a weekend where I mostly lay around the house, devoid of energy, trying to prevent my daughter headbutting furniture, so it was a good way to end Sunday.

  • Anubis Gates

    On the advice of a friend, I bought a copy of Anubis Gates, a book Tim Powers wrote about twenty years before Declare. It’s a time travel romp, for want of a better word, through London in the pre-Regency era, with the odd digression to Egypt or other times. There’s an evil clown on stilts, […]

  • Cramped

    This morning, after a night when our child yelped and raged, I fell out of bed screaming. Two bottles of beer had once again washed all the salts from my body and my left calf was cramping up. This seems to happen every couple of years, and my muscle clenches with such vehemence that I […]

  • Going Scarlet

    This evening I went to the Scarlet Hotel for drinks. It’s just over the road from our apartment block, and in the days before baby we used to go there quite frequently. They’re digging up the road outside (again – it seems to be one of the National Projects To Ensure Prosperity to have people […]

  • My child won’t smoke – what can I do?

    My wife and I are at our wits’ end and could really do with some advice. We’re the proud parents of Gumpfy, our first child, and even though she’s a girl, we love her very very much. However, she’s now nine months old and no matter how hard we try, she refuses to smoke. At […]

  • Bathtime, Under The Frog

    Our child has decided that she doesn’t like bathtime any more. For a while, she would get upset at one bath in every three, and then she she seemed to grow reconciled to being bathed, and only howled at the end, after she had been soaped and rinsed, as if the worst thing in the […]

  • Hot Relish

    We met friends for brunch at Relish, a restaurant over the road from the Botanic Gardens. There was no brunch. Ordinarily, this would make no odds to me. Brunch, that odd portmanteau of breakfast and lunch that’s really a waste of two opportunities to have breakfast, has never been my favourite meal. It doesn’t make […]