Earlier I mentioned that Amelia enjoyed the theme to The Great Escape while being changed. While I was pregnant with her we listened to Paul Merton reading Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hilter: My Part in his Downfall. A major point of this memoir seems to he Spike’s pure detestation of the Warsaw Concerto.
So I was very amused when changing Amelia just now that Classic FM started playing the “Bloody” Warsaw Concerto just after I switched on the radio!
Today Amelia has been left to the sole charge of her mother as Jon has gone back to work. I’m not sure who I feel more sorry for… Jon, who for a few hours a day can swap the three Ps (pee,puke,poo) for catching up on email and dealing with what he usually has to at the office. I suspect that he would rather be covered in semi-digested milk. I know I would ;-)
Thankfully though, the prospect of dealing with things now without that handy extra pair of hands isn’t as daunting as it was just under 3 weeks ago when we brought her home, at which point we didn’t even want to think how we’d have coped without my parents around to help with shopping and cooking. We are now quite adept at changing and with the recent purchase of a molded bath chair - bath times aren’t so fraught as they were, as Amelia can still move those legs in at least 3 dimensions, and I wouldn’t put her past 4 at a push.
As one would expect we have been peed on - well I was, but it was a heart shaped stain because she loves me, obviously. Pooped on - me again, while we were changing her. And puked on - this time it was Jon who got the force of this one, he let her have her bottle all in one go, not a great idea. She is very good a throwing up in her own ear, but we seem to have improved our winding technique, this is to hand her to me.
Her weight is now steadily rising, which makes me feel alot better and I’m not at all guilty about bottling her, SMA gold was good enough for her parents. The problem is that she gets too cosy at the breast unless she’s been let cry for a very long time, and conks out after 5 or 6 desultory sucks and then the feed follows a suck -nap pattern that can last for 3 hours. And at 3am this isn’t fun. Now instead she has “SnackyBoob” while we boil the kettle and if she’s sucking well we let the bottle cool on its own. She also gets EBM if I’ve had a chance to express a decent amount - I got an electric one last week as I’ve had a dodgy left wrist ever since I had her. It sounds like a Dalek when its running and I swear to goodness that that is what that plunger attachment is… “Lactate! Lactate!” She’s also reasonably happy to sit in the bouncy/loungey chair which is handy as it means I can sit her in it while I work and also feed her while she is in it, it keeps her vaguely upright so the winding is easier. I suspect winding is to new parents as “the drains” are/were to English householders. While being changed she likes listening to Classic FM, although the reception isn’t great in the loft, and Jon tells me that while changing her once she didn’t really like The Flower Duet from Lakmé but did enjoy the music form the Great Escape! She has also raptly watched 3 episodes of Doctor Who (I was catching up having only seen the first episode of the new series) while having lunch.Not sure what we are going to do today, I have a pearl necklace to finish knotting and I am tempted to introduce her to more BBC Radio 4/7 , probably the News Quiz. Last night we listened to Core Coren. Part of me is glad that I am mostly bottle-feeding. Listening to BBC Radio shows, like the Now Show or Clive Anderson’s Chat Room has the effect of making me laugh a lot, and I do worry about her when she is breast feeding and I am laughing that she will develop shaken baby syndrome from it…
I’m known as a bit of a film nut, although anyone who has seen our living room dvd nook and then the two piles behind the chair and finally the overspill in my workroom will know that both bit, and nut are rather tame.
Also our collection runs at a number of strange tangents, I say tangents because they do overlap some actors and sad person that I am I can given you those tangents 
However, I also adore listening to the radio, its easier when beading, and until we got the MythTv set up to record digital radio my best friends in the world where BBC’s Listen Again and MPlayer.
At the moment while I’m eagerly awaiting the next Lindsay Davis’ novel to be serialised as a Radio Play; the previous four were very well done, I’m trying to make an effort to listen to some other shows, that I might have overlooked but now have the time to listen to.
At the moment I’m very much enjoying Tomorrow, Today! which is currently in it’s second series on Radio 4. Set in 1962 it sees a somewhat beleaguered radio producer and writer trying to produce a show set in 2008, the 2008 as expected in 2008. The show deals more with the cast and crew than then actual stories they are trying to air but you get some hilarious snippets. My favourite was mention of the villian “Dr J Chaotica, bachelour of Science” which reminded me a great deal of Dr. Science, who if you are not familiar with him and his radio show where he gives the more incredible explanations for everyday things: “Knows more than you do” despite the fact that “He’s not a real doctor. I have a Masters degree. In… Science”.
Of course podcasts are great, but so far BBC radio doesn’t podcast much of its (proper)comedy, neither Russell Brand nor Chris Moyles are my cup of tea, but at the very least they do roll The News Quiz and the Now Show in to a single podcast subscription.
But yesterday after discovering that the SciFi channel have removed the Seeing Ear Theatre archive form their website, boo hiss, I did find another podcast of OTR shows at Pirate TV Theatre Classic Radio Drama . Alas, not all the shows seem to bee still in their podcast directory but there were a good 70 or more available when I set my iTunes on it yesterday afternoon. The website SFFAudio is a good source of sites which collect OTR shows, but I’ve not investigated much further, as I don’t want to deluge myself with more than I can listen to quite yet
Also, for those mourning the passing of the Seeing Ear Theatre into apparent oblivion, before I managed to capture their archive, and as far as I can tell they only every released some of the plays on tape ( I’ve got volume one which my uncle bought me many years ago, I can blame him for many things including my MST3K fixation which has since been caught by my husband) , I discovered that they are recreating the classic Twilight Zone shows as Audio Dramas, they’ve been at it for a few years now, and while it seems to only be broadcast int he US they have a number of CD sets out, at around $39 each, which gets you about 10 episodes. I’ve ordered a couple and can’t wait to hear them.
However, Amazon have just provided me with Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life, abridged(alas) read by Tom Baker(wh00t!) which should provide at least 3 hours of fun.
Saturday morning saw Jon and myself setting off from Dublin where we had spent the previous week eating our body weight in cooked breakfasts, and in my case in Mikados. It was a nice break, the cats didn’t spurn us, Jon managed to collect a handful more stars in Super Mario Galaxy, and we got to see a number of family friends and babies of many ages including a brand new 5 week old one ( a little boy, but Jon doesn’t consider him a threat to our still-bump of a girl quite yet)
Thankfully, for Jon and myself as navigator, the journey from my parent’s house in Templeouge (not Ballyboden, stupid Google) to Dublin Port was stress free - I can’t say it wasn’t uneventful because we had the radio on at the time.
There is something unique about Irish Radio, or at least that is how it seems to me and I don’t really listen to much other than Radio 4 and 7. I can recall waking up on Saturday mornings to adverts for sheep dip on RTE Radio 1. Although the most traumatic has to have been being woken up by my parent’s previous radio, which sounded awful as it had suffered greatly form being knocked over by a cat, vomiting out Bohemian Rhapsody.
What’s that you say? What’s wrong with Bohemian Rhapsody?
Well, nothing of course, it’s a cracking song, it is a seminal work. But I’m not talking about Queen’s recording, what I am talking about is a cover. By De Dannan with traditional Irish musical instruments. The effect is, well effecting, and that’s all I can say about it.
My general response was to lie on the futon in my room screaming ‘What the Fucking Hell is that God awful Shite?’
And I’m not generally prone to swearing, and not at 8am on a Saturday morning in my parents ‘house. My mother thought it was quaint, the music, she didn’t care about the screaming, and joyously informed me that the same band had done a cover of the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba in a similiar style. I laid my head on the table and wept for Handel.
Thankfully for me, Jon and my baby the radio this time didn’t illicit such violent outbursts, but we were left on two occasions with a ‘wtf’ moment.
Firstly as we drove through the KCR and through Harold’s Cross it was the fact of Songs Sung in the French Language, two of them. This amused me as a voracious Dorothy L Sayers reader.
Then not long after we were treated to The new Supergrass single. The choices of the presenter were ecelectic to say the least. But nothing can beat Jon’s reaction to the presenter’s statement after the single finished…
‘I love a good Polka’ and, sure enough, hard on the heels of an energetic Supergrass track came an equally energetic Polka.
We had arrived at the port at this stage so escaped from the Polka by going to get a cup tea. We then returned to the car to hear some odd tune followed by - in a rural Irish accent:
‘This tune is well known to all, but not to this girl, she’s never heard it before, and never will, because she is quite deaf’
Jon, who is also quite deaf, when he chooses to be, retorted that she was damn lucky. Still, it was the phrasing as much as the words that had us rolling about laughing, and then we had to pull ourselves together to get the car on the ferry to head home.
While on the ferry, in the very nice Stena Plus lounge we settled in for the 3 hour trip to Holyhead. Jon bought himself some wifi access and actually wrote his first blog post in over a year! He seems to have abandoned xanthein.net and is now over at www.jonstill.com . I’m not sure of the reason for the domain change, perhaps impending fatherhood is causing him to cast of to some extent his old irc screen name (and given that I met him on irc he was initially xanthein to me, I was sunbug but never had that as a domain ) and embrace the real world…
I don’t think its anything so deep. He’s been mucking around with a new WordPress theme for ages on the jonstill.com domain and likes it better. He can be so finnicky!
