Neighbourhood Watch

Despite it being a Monday and a new week of being energetic and keen etc., feeling a little bleary this morning. I was woken up at 3.00am by some weird noise from our new Japanese next door neighbours. It sounded like they were using a power hose or something inside their flat. I stuck my head out of the window expecting to see them cutting up a body or something, but could only see that all their lights were on and they were up to...well something.

Was woken again at 5.00am by the same noise of the hose, and stuck my head right out of the window to see if I could see anything. All I could see was someone making some sort of pasties or pies in their kitchen. Although I could only see bits of (alive) limbs moving around the kitchen - they are on the ground floor and we are on the second floor in the next door building - it did look like they were preparing a whole load of Japanese food to celebrate the month of the owl or something. mrs househusbandnot thinks it was some sort of Japanese cleaning ritual that has to be completed on the morning of every 17 September before the sun comes up. Any thoughts on this welcome. (You will have noticed that I have put the comment option back on for househusbandnot. Incidentally, mrs househusbandnot was right about not bleating on about getting more visitors. When I did this on Friday, the number of visits to househusbandnot halved. I'm not going to go on about it any more. Obviously not a popular topic.)

In other news, I had supper with a friend of mine last week who is way into horoscopes and star signs. In her wisdom, she has decided that I am not actually a Virgo, but a Leo because my birthday is on the day that Virgo kicks in and I have more Leo traits than Virgo characteristics. So all those years of reading the Virgo horoscopes in newspapers and magazines have been giving me the wrong guidance according to my friend. I'm not into horoscopes really, but odd to think I have been reading the wrong one all these years. Good thing I never got a Virgo tattoo or anything, huh?

Speaking of indelible marks, mrs househusbandnot and I went to see that Al Gore film about global warming this weekend. The immediate effect of the film on our habits was that I was required to carry a whole load of litter home from our walk along the South Bank on Sunday afternoon. And mrs househusbandnot is setting up a new recycling regime in her office, where they drink lots of cans of diet coke and read many many copies of The Daily Mail every day. She is going to bring all this trash back to our place on Friday evenings so that we can recycle it. I find the idea of other people's litter kind of gross, but mrs househusbandnot's right that we should be doing more on the recycling front, even if it gives our neighbours the impression that I am addicted to Diet Coke and further addicted to reading multiple copies of The Daily Mail. (For those of you who don't live in the UK - and indeed some of you who do - The Daily Mail is the very worst of all the dailies in this country. It pretends to be serious newspaper, but is just a right wing tabloid, with every other article starting "Am I the only person in this country who..." When I used to work in press offices, it was always the Mail journos who picked up the wrong end of the stick of a story so they could continue to promote their right-wingery dressed up as avuncular concern and playful interest in the needs of the people of Britain. Some examples of their headlines this morning: "Arrest of foreigners leap by 18%", "Rooftop siege suspects get a sandwich and a hoodie", and "Wear balloons not masks for Halloween says Bishop". They have a regular section called FeMail which basically tries to scare women with contradictory articles about contraception, pregnancy, beauty treatments and cancer.)

Anyway, bit of a random wander around my thoughts this morning, but like I said am feeling a bit dusty from lack of sleep thanks to the nighttime activities next door. ("Migrant Japanese In Making Pies In Dead Of Night Shocker".)