Apparently this is what a Black Hole looks like. I hope I've got the right tee shirt on!“Why are you ironing the tee shirt that I sleep in?” demanded Jean on his way through the kitchen this morning.
“Because Maggie says that if this experiment in Switzerland tomorrow goes haywire, we might all end up in some new dimension or in another century, so I thought we ought to go to bed looking tidy just in case”.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, but since he was on his way to the garage, it was not the right time to share my concerns about us being turned into lots of tiny particles and left floating around in outer space, even if we are wearing well ironed tee shirts.
In view of the confusion surrounding the outcome of the Hadron Collider (even though with a name like that it sounds like something out of Dr Who), Maggie and I had a brief email discussion about the virtues of sleeping with a pencil and notebook somewhere about our persons just in case we needed to leave a message in another century so that we could hook up again. I also told her to carry a Swiss Army Knife, but she didn’t think that her nightdress had pockets. These are not the sorts of concerns that men have and as usual, it is left up to us women to work out how to gather up the remains of humanity if it all goes pear-shaped.
I think that secretly Jean might be concerned about what might happen because he has suggested that we bring Ralph and his little blue house indoors. Perhaps he thinks that if the experiment at CERN goes wrong, Ralph might suddenly morph into a massive pterodactyl with beaks on both his feet and the ability to carry us miles up into the sky and then drop us. At least if he is indoors, he will have a problem getting airborne if he has got this solid stone house to lift, along with the two of us filled with Sacristans and baguettes.
I am quite sure that many of you who read the title of yesterday’s blog thought that I had lost the ability to spell. We are still trying to insure the car which will in time ensure happy carefree motoring, but for the time being, we are getting the usual run-around from insurance brokers who are trying to sell us policies that would cover a brand new sports car, let alone our ten year old Citroen. A friend has kindly gone into battle for us and hopefully she will manage to extract a good deal from an insurance pal of hers, so for the time being, we are housebound awaiting phone calls, with a garden clogged up with cars that we can’t drive.
Instead of worrying about particles, I have been trying to get to grips with participles and other worrying French adjectives and verbs. Only I would start to learn a foreign language the day before the earth is supposed to disintegrate, but you never know whom you are going to meet out there, and a friendly “Bonjour” might be just what I need to be taken aboard the Star Ship. I have found several excellent websites that are encouraging, and they even try and make some sense of the male and female gender and the mysteries of tu and vous. Yesterday evening while we were out for a walk, Jean fired numbers at me in English and I had to translate them quickly into French. Memories of my school-girl studies disappeared like butter off a hot plate and trying to wrestle my way around seven hundred and seventy seven nearly made my nose bleed and my eyes pop. No wonder French is the language of diplomats; it takes so long for them to work out what to say and how to say it correctly that they have to think before any violent outbursts are made. Wouldn’t it be nice if a few more politicians used it, or at least weren’t allowed to make any major decisions until they had learned the basics. That would slow them down a bit!
Our walk yesterday evening started out as a gentle stroll just around the corner to find the illusive “Popes Armchair” which is supposed to be some chunk of stone that a Pope from many centuries past, lowered his posterior on to. Despite walking right out of the end of the village and discovering an ancient stone track deeply embedded with the marks of countless wagons that had been used to haul the aforementioned chunks of stone around the place, there was no sign of any armchair. We walked so far that we found ourselves deep in the garrigue, and decided before darkness fell, to turn around and head for home. I didn’t want to be confronted with the ghostly spirit of some ancient Pope wandering around looking for a place to sit down. Mind you, maybe he would have more success in finding it than we did.
And on that happy note, if there is no blog tomorrow, you know that we are all floating around with our mouths attached to our feet and our eyes on the ends of our fingertips. At least our grandson is coming on a state visit tonight and we are buying pizza from Marco, so we intend to go out with a bang (which I fear is what a lot of the scientists seem to think might happen).
“Because Maggie says that if this experiment in Switzerland tomorrow goes haywire, we might all end up in some new dimension or in another century, so I thought we ought to go to bed looking tidy just in case”.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, but since he was on his way to the garage, it was not the right time to share my concerns about us being turned into lots of tiny particles and left floating around in outer space, even if we are wearing well ironed tee shirts.
In view of the confusion surrounding the outcome of the Hadron Collider (even though with a name like that it sounds like something out of Dr Who), Maggie and I had a brief email discussion about the virtues of sleeping with a pencil and notebook somewhere about our persons just in case we needed to leave a message in another century so that we could hook up again. I also told her to carry a Swiss Army Knife, but she didn’t think that her nightdress had pockets. These are not the sorts of concerns that men have and as usual, it is left up to us women to work out how to gather up the remains of humanity if it all goes pear-shaped.
I think that secretly Jean might be concerned about what might happen because he has suggested that we bring Ralph and his little blue house indoors. Perhaps he thinks that if the experiment at CERN goes wrong, Ralph might suddenly morph into a massive pterodactyl with beaks on both his feet and the ability to carry us miles up into the sky and then drop us. At least if he is indoors, he will have a problem getting airborne if he has got this solid stone house to lift, along with the two of us filled with Sacristans and baguettes.
I am quite sure that many of you who read the title of yesterday’s blog thought that I had lost the ability to spell. We are still trying to insure the car which will in time ensure happy carefree motoring, but for the time being, we are getting the usual run-around from insurance brokers who are trying to sell us policies that would cover a brand new sports car, let alone our ten year old Citroen. A friend has kindly gone into battle for us and hopefully she will manage to extract a good deal from an insurance pal of hers, so for the time being, we are housebound awaiting phone calls, with a garden clogged up with cars that we can’t drive.
Instead of worrying about particles, I have been trying to get to grips with participles and other worrying French adjectives and verbs. Only I would start to learn a foreign language the day before the earth is supposed to disintegrate, but you never know whom you are going to meet out there, and a friendly “Bonjour” might be just what I need to be taken aboard the Star Ship. I have found several excellent websites that are encouraging, and they even try and make some sense of the male and female gender and the mysteries of tu and vous. Yesterday evening while we were out for a walk, Jean fired numbers at me in English and I had to translate them quickly into French. Memories of my school-girl studies disappeared like butter off a hot plate and trying to wrestle my way around seven hundred and seventy seven nearly made my nose bleed and my eyes pop. No wonder French is the language of diplomats; it takes so long for them to work out what to say and how to say it correctly that they have to think before any violent outbursts are made. Wouldn’t it be nice if a few more politicians used it, or at least weren’t allowed to make any major decisions until they had learned the basics. That would slow them down a bit!
Our walk yesterday evening started out as a gentle stroll just around the corner to find the illusive “Popes Armchair” which is supposed to be some chunk of stone that a Pope from many centuries past, lowered his posterior on to. Despite walking right out of the end of the village and discovering an ancient stone track deeply embedded with the marks of countless wagons that had been used to haul the aforementioned chunks of stone around the place, there was no sign of any armchair. We walked so far that we found ourselves deep in the garrigue, and decided before darkness fell, to turn around and head for home. I didn’t want to be confronted with the ghostly spirit of some ancient Pope wandering around looking for a place to sit down. Mind you, maybe he would have more success in finding it than we did.
And on that happy note, if there is no blog tomorrow, you know that we are all floating around with our mouths attached to our feet and our eyes on the ends of our fingertips. At least our grandson is coming on a state visit tonight and we are buying pizza from Marco, so we intend to go out with a bang (which I fear is what a lot of the scientists seem to think might happen).
As a footnote, Jean who has just heard this has announced firmly that Black Hole or no Black Hole, he is going to fix his wooden mallet. You’ve gotta love a man with his feet on solid ground!
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