Froggy is my darling

Or why we all love and worship Doktor Archibald Frogg from the League of Super Evil.

Find out more once I've finished writing it and posted it up here ...

The crepe list

In no particular order, a selection of the things that have been getting right up my schnonker (sp?) recently:

* Cupcakes - ponced-up fairy cakes with an inflated idea of their own importance
* Mismatched sets of vintage china - great way to charge triple for chipped pieces of bargain-basement crockery in balls-achingly trendy and eye-wateringly overpriced interior decorators called Carpet in Shoreditch (remember that shop in The Harry and Paul Show that used to part Trustafarians from their parents' hard-earned money?)
* Cake-stands - only useful for putting cupcakes on in twee teashop windows in Shoreditch
* Doilies - ditto
* Tea-cosies - what you make to pay your mortgage after you get made redundant from your job in the City
* Crochet - ditto
* Knitting - ditto
* Home sewing - something I am not very good at, due to being deficient in many of the more traditionally 'feminine' skills (so how I'm going to pay my mortgage during an economic downturn, I don't know.  Chutney-brewing, perhaps?)
* Owls - as signifiers of cute 'quirkiness', rather than ancient wisdom and knowledge
* Taxidermy
* Fancy cut-out silhouettes
* Bloody obsession with anything and everything Scandinavian - starting to wonder whether this hasn't all been secretly sponsored by the tourist boards of all these countries a la 'Carrots give you cancer - signed the Potato Marketing Board' campaigns
* Sara Lund's sodding jumper - she wears it because it keeps her warm in a cold climate and it's quick and easy to put on in the morning.  Proof - I have never seen her get snapped in it at the Coachella Festival
* Constant festivals - that all seem to be starring Florence And The Machine on the Jimi Hendrix Stage
* Assumption that I am meant to be at all arsed what all the female celebs are wearing at these endless festivals and who they have started going out with this week
* Twiglet-thighed female celebrities who don't ever seem to do any work, but only ever get papped on the red carpet/on holiday/at festivals, thus making you conclude that their definition of 'work' must be 'blagging designer clothes to get papped in on the red carpet/on holiday/at festivals'
* Constant twitterings in women's magazines about how 'lonely' and 'unlucky with men' Jennifer Anniston is meant to be - well, she doesn't seem to be doing at all badly from where I'm sitting
* Claiming that Prince Harry is 'handsome' - no, he sodding isn't!  Just look at him - a baked potato in fatigues jumping out of helicopters into the sea.  All these women only drool over him because he has a title, is loaded and appears in the papers every day.
* Liz Jones getting paid shedloads of moolah every week for writing total cobblers about her supposed 'fairy-tale' affair with a washed-up 'rock star' - generally referred to on Mumsnet, DigitalSpy, Gransnet, The Angry Mob et al as the 'FRS' (Fantasy/Fairytale Rock Star, rather than 'Former' RS) because that's what they have all concluded he probably is.  If Liz Jones longs to write novels with curlicued pictures of pink shoes and purple handbags on the front that stressed-out twenty-something women read on the Tube to take their minds off worrying about possibly losing their jobs during the current economic downturn, then why doesn't she just write up a synopsis of her idea and send it off to a few publishers for consideration?
* The media insistently banging on about how 'gorgeous' George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling are - don't you even trust me to make up my OWN mind about celeb men?
* Idea that it is intrinsically 'feminine' for women of all ages to absolutely adore pink sparkles on anything and everything - if I took this up at my age (44), the natural assumption would be that my husband had left me for his secretary and I was now attempting to drown my sorrows in chardonnay and male strippers
* Fake tits
* Tango tans
* Horrible dagger-like false nails - if I'm not working as a porn star, why the hell would I want to dress like one?

The tea-trays of Atlantis

Well, it's official, fans.

I am suffering from acute library book withdrawal symptoms.

Manchester's Central Library is going to be out of commission until 2014 (or even longer, if the current renovation works fall behind schedule) and I'm already finding it difficult to cope.

Because there isn't all that much room in their temporary quarters on Deansgate, the librarians have had to store  most of their extensive holdings down the bottom of an abandoned salt mine somewhere in Cheshire.  Hence there are far less books, papers, magazines, CDs, DVDs and so on in circulation at the moment.

I've been trying my best by extending my range and visiting first Didsbury and then Chorlton, but it seems obvious that all the branch libraries share a pool of books which they regularly exchange amongst themselves.  As a voracious bookworm, I've already managed to work my way through a fair old number of these volumes. So now I'm starting to read some of my old favourites again.

Oh, how I miss the extensive and capacious shelves of the Central Library!

Four floors crammed to the rafters with the brightest, the best, the brilliant and just the plain barmy in world literacy.  Plus tons more in the stacks that you can order up from the basement stores.

The lack of weirdy-books is proving particularly galling.

I realise that Manchester Libraries probably chose to keep the books most likely to be of interest to the greatest number of borrowers - and these days your average punter prefers Jamie Oliver's 30-minute mispronounced dinners and Kevin McCloud's wallpaper hanging tips to alternative history and parapsychology (unless it is the bloody abysmal Da Vinci sodding Code - how that illiterate berk Dan Brown has managed to earn so much money from it is beyond me).

But oddball books have provided me with hours of free inhouse entertainment over the years - as you will know if you've bothered reading this blog on anything approaching a regular basis.

One abiding favourite I will be forever indebted to the Central Library for is Discovering Atlantis by Diana Cooper:

http://www.dianacooper.com/atlantis/

In this classic of New Age spirituality, Diana elaborates on the popular theory that the people of that mythical sunken civilization owed their greatness to crystal power.

When their children reached the age of adult majority, they were presented with a crystal wand and an object that looked just like a large metal tea tray.  Every time they wanted to travel somewhere, they sat on top of the tea tray, tapped the side of it with the crystal wand and thought of their destination.  Slowly, slowly, the tea tray began to rise in the air ...