Neglect and Sour Grapes

It has been an odd year. I started out in January with the intention of blogging regularly but then, around mid- March, I started suffering from bloggers’ cramp, or blogger’s block or whatever. There has been no lack of material. If anything I have had too much to blog about – Irish car rental costs, Grand Central Station in New York, Colin Montgomerie, Monty Panesar, the cursed hot weather, the older brother’s disguise (short trousers, dark glasses and a baseball cap), staff reductions (I’m on my own now), the World Cup, and the wife’s poor foot (still encased in an inflatable boot while recovering from an operation).

My sincere apologies are due to the two or three poor souls who try to read the “ranting nappa” on a regular basis. I hereby resolve to try and blog better and to blog more often. I might even try and backtrack on matters such as Grand Central Station.

But for the moment my theme is “neglect”. While the blog hasn’t suffered unduly in my absence (it is much as I left it), other things do get altered by neglect. My hair, for instance, became like thick thatch this summer and needed emergency treatment as I was wilting in the hot sunshine.

The house in France got neglected as well. For about eight weeks we left the ancient edifice untended and unvisited until last weekend, when we finally managed to cross the channel again. The “blue paint” operation (see passim) is half complete (how did blue paint get onto a lavatory seat?), but masking tape had become embedded on the window panes. The handsome vine which grows along the front of the house was another matter altogether. Like some sort of Triffid the hot weather had caused the vine to try and engulf the building altogether (see photo above). Certainly there were many grapes, but none were of the eating or drinking variety.

Rather than relaxing, the weekend was spent pruning vegetation, collecting up more than one hundred arachnids of one sort or another from inside the house and creating a rather impressive bonfire. By the time we left on Monday morning the house looked a little bit more respectable.

Fortunately blogs don't require this degree of maintenance, but I'll try and improve on the regularity my postings in future.