boredom

Geoffrey and I are still recovering from the dreaded lurgy. We're not sure if we've had "swine-style flu", or just bog-standard, or just "bad colds". Either way, we've barely moved from the fireside for about a week. But we must be getting better because we've started to get bored. Readers will know that we don't have a telly or even a wireless. We do know about these things, and how people fill their time staring at other people capering around in little boxes blaring away in a corner of the room - or as Apsley and Cherry have theirs, nailed foursquare to the wall. But we can't enjoy such pleasures as we don't have leccy.
No. We have to entertain ourselves, the old-fashioned way. Sometimes we might take the old volume of Tennyson or Browning from the mantelshelf and read aloud to one another. Sometimes we might have a game of whist - although not often as that tends to get Geoffrey awfully worked up. He's a terrible loser. Sometimes we might whittle away at a piece of driftwood, fashioning some mythical creature from the bare wood. (actually, no, we've never done that.)
Mostly we just sit and chat aimlessly while enjoying our pipes and madeira, and wait contentedly for the odd visitor to arrive. And that's precisely what we've been doing for the past week. So why on earth are we bored? I wouldn't go so far as to say we're bored out of our minds, or bored rigid, it's more..well, I don't know...
"We're fed up, Tuppy!" declares Geoffrey, bursting willy nilly into my train of thought without a care in the world or a by your leave. "Let's plan a holiday!"
"But where should we go?"
"How about a health spa?"
"Don't be ridiculous Geoffrey! your mind must have been affected by the flu. Snap out of it, please!" Health spas indeed!
But he's got a point. They say a change is as good as a rest. Perhaps it's time for us to get the old coracle out and head across the seas again - although I don't think I could face the Flannan Isles so soon after the last fiasco...(see previous posts)

lurgified

Geoffrey and I have flu, so we are currently swathed in tartan rugs, smoking our pipes and sipping boiling hot madeira toddies out of pint sized pewter mugs beside a roaring fire. Readers will know that that is how we spend ninetey per cent of our time, anyway. Nevertheless, we'd like some sympathy - for example, where is Wilson when he is ...well, I can't bring myself to say NEEDED, but as we are feeling generally ghastly and have genuine death's door-style illnesses, some medical so-called expertise MIGHT come in handy. But no. Razor Bill has been delivering leaflets, under pain of death, which advise sufferers to use "self help remedies", such as staying indoors and drinking plenty fluids. "Take your chances" it says, smugly. "After all, it's your own faults for not taking the jab when offered."
Offered? Readers will know that Wilson was firing needles into people's backsides willy nilly and without so much as a by your leave - to the extent that it put me in mind of the English archers raining arrows at Agincourt.
I don't regret leaching the vaccine out of my behind with the bread poultice ( see previous posts). No, not a bit. Neither do I regret conspiring to have Wilson bucked off into the Bay, where I believe he is still just managing to evade the clutches of baby Orca (last time I looked).
People will wonder what became of the bread poultice, with which I leached out the vaccine from my behind, and which then lodged itself on Elizabeth T-G's bonce. And they won't be hugely surprised to learn that we ate it, toasted, with butter and marmalade, for our breakfast yesterday morning.
One benefit of having flu - Spockfingers isn't with us any more - he took off with his juke box, declaring that he didn't want to catch "the lurgy". I think he watched X factor at The Old Rectory, on Apsley and Cherry's 62 inch telly, possibly with a pineapple on his head.

nippy grimshaw

Razor Bill told me this morning that a new person has moved in - someone called Nippy Grimshaw, and he's living in the flat above the Puff Inn. (no, Stormy doesn't live there - he lives in the old broch). A lot of people seem to be coming and going at the moment. The Narks are still at the North Pole, and obviously we're hoping they decide to stay there.
Spockfingers has gone to London for the finals of Britain's Got Talent. The Swallows are around, but we don't see them much as they're very busy due to impending arrival of youngsters. The Tupfinder general is recovering from a touch of swine flu, so has obviously been staying in. The only person we've seen this week is Razor Bill when he delivers the post.
I suppose we did have quite a weekend of it though, so can't complain.
Wilson's still working on a "cure" for swine flu, and as the dead pig behind our oven had rotted sufficiently to allow it to be unwedged, we managed to heave it over the cliffs, where it landed just above the tide line, and Wilson is presently performing a dissection.
We hope to make Nippy's acquaintance later at the Puff Inn.

a pig flu

I'm afraid Dave and Valerie refused our invite to a BBQ at the Fulmars, and furthermore didn't like our "general attitude", which they found slack and degenerate! apparently, we are completely lacking in knowledge of our local ecology never mind that of the "planet" and we need to be "re-brained".
Clearly this won't do - and we aren't taking this lying down, or even "feet up on the sofa" - but more of that later. As regular readers would expect, we are having a top level meeting with the Tupfinder to discuss a riddance plan over a glass or two of madeira. But there is a bit of a problem at the moment - we can't actually get out! Dave and Valerie have decreed that as we are not humanoid like them, we are a massive pig flu threat and we have therefore been quarantined, at the outcrop. (It might also have something to do with the powerful reek of rotting pork emanating from the back of our oven...)Dave's using a surveillance camera to ensure we stay put, and if we don't we're going to be hit with a tranquilliser dart and shipped over to the hulks, and we know what ghastliness happens there, having rescued all these sheep from the jaws of death just last year (see gazetteer for "hulks" and previous posts for the rescue drama)!
The likes of Dave Nark isn't going to get the better of us. He's clearly raving. We're resourceful characters and will be out of here in a trice. Fortunately, we have spades and have started a tunnel - we hope it will link up eventually with one of the many others in the tunnel system in the cliffs (see gazetteer), and we'll be able to escape via the landmark on the cliffs known locally as the "sow's purse" (well it is now, and it will be added to the gazetteer forthwith).
Of course, before we hit on the idea of digging our way out, we were feeling quite "boared" and so we had a game of "backGAMMON" until we got "pig sick" of it. I'm sure Wilson will be working on a "cure" for pig flu but he's bound to make a "pig's ear" of it. It's high time he got the "chop". I've heard the symptoms of pig flu include crackling in the ears. Instructions for taking remedies involve "swilling" down some medicine with a bucket of water....

new neighbours are utter swine

We've got new neighbours. Two eco-style warriors have set up home in a yurt in the tourist car park. They're called Dave and Valerie Nark, and they want all of us to get our roofs and pipes lagged, and cavity walls insulated, or they'll do something terrible. They announced through a loudhailer that we're destroying our environment, and if we don't do as they say, they will spray the area with the deadly pig plague virus. That way, the environment will be free from our contamination and abuse.
Obviously this is a bit worrying, but we think if worst comes to worst, we can ask the dreaded Wilson to manufacture "vaccine" from the dead pig behind oven - yes, it's still there - we can't move it, it weighs a ton. We'll just have to leave it till it rots away completely.
We can't possibly get our walls etc. insulated - the Outcrop is "traditional-build" i.e. draughty and full of holes - it would be a case of rebuilding the entire place, and that is utterly unthinkable.
We're going to try and get Dave and Valerie along to a BBQ at the Fulmars, this weekend weather permitting - although they do have supercharged patio heaters, so weather doesn't really matter - to see if we can get them to mellow out a bit.