The Turtle Head of Light

Its New Years' Eve and I'm sitting at home on the laptop in the front room with my MP3 player on, listening to Stone Roses "Waterfall"- brilliant track. Kaz is doing her family tree on the other PC in the dining room (god that sounds well posh doesn't it, for a family that eats food on their laps watching the TV!)

On the 29th Dec Paul and Georgia (a really great couple of people, Kaz and I got to know through Ty and Tina) invited us to celebrate Georgia's 40th birthday at their house in Ringmer- hence the picture above- which doesn't do justice to the village.

Its a small habitation outside Lewes in East Sussex. And although small has its own website:http://www.ringmer.info/ . The wierd thing was when we got to the Broyle, via the 22 and 28 buses (a mini adventure in its own right) there were no street lights! We stumbled on, a group of townees, muttering about how dark it was and where the f*** were we?

Finally we got to the house and were greeted by Georgia at the door. She had been cooking all day and had laid on a feast of curries, to be washed down with gin, wine or carva. The house was packed with adults, kids running up and down the stairs and a dog wanting to play catch... it reminded me of our house!!

I watched Paul getting the nearest to stressed I've ever seen him. Cooking can be a multi tasking exercise which (as Kaz keeps telling me) men can't get the hang of. ( Oh yeah? How come I can drink beer and sit at the same time then, eh?) Anyway, Paul is one of those people I've always envied. Quietly spoken, gentle, unflapable, intelligent,with a sense of humour as dry as the sahara. And although I don't fancy him myself... a good looking chap to boot. I suppose I should hate him in normal circumstances!

I got called into kitchen where Kaz showed me her drink. I thought I was seeing things. Her glass was glowing flouescent yellow. It was a plastic ice cube with a light in it!!? Well I got one in my drink- red, naturally! Anyway I joked that I couldn't crunch my ice cube, to which Paul replied if I was successful then if I woke in the morning with my arse in the air it would be "the turtlehead of light".

Latter we got to discussing science and whether it could solve the problems it had so far created. It reminded me of those debates that Victorians like HG Wells initiated. Is science the saviour or the Frankenstein's monster that will unleash unimaginable horror on the planet? I tend towards the latter view because science does not sit outside a human paradigm. Then we went onto talk about global warming. The consensus appeared to be that it was a major, the major, threat to humanity. Certainly I found Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" pretty convincing. But Richard, a reasearch scientist, was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. Latter, on the way home Ty and I told Margaret- Richard's partner, that he had also been denying the holocaust because he had read Irving's "history" on Hitler. Margaret took a few moments to realise we were taken the piss and being satirical.

It was a good night and in the morning Kaz told me that Tina and Margaret had complemented her upon her breasts. I was a bit bemused about that. Is that what women do? "Oh you hair looks really good like that. Is that a new top? Is it from Monsson? Nice breasts by the way."???

Sometimes life is just too strange!