I need more money

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I think we’ve all thought that at one time or another, haven’t we?

Laura Ripley is thinking it right now:

A 25-year-old unemployed woman who was given an £8,000 operation to help her lose 16 stone is complaining because, as well as her weight loss, her benefits have been reduced.
Laura Ripley, who has never worked, was given the operation on the NHS to help her slim down from 38 to 22 stone.

But the 25-year-old, who receives £600 a month in benefits, is unhappy because as a result of losing weight she can no longer claim disability allowance amounting to an extra £340 a month.
This, she says, means she cannot afford to eat healthily – causing her to pile the weight back on.

It’s not the first time that we’ve heard how difficult it is to eat healthily. Who could forget Coventry lard-arse Leanne Salt and her admission that she fed her 8-month old triplets on McDonalds because she was “too busy” to feed them decent food?

But we dealt with Leanne’s case back in April. Let’s return to Laura’s plight:

Without my disability allowance I’m left with just £210 incapacity benefit which I get because of my depression, and £100 income support I receive every two weeks and out of that I have to give them back £70 towards the cost of the £500-a-month flat I’m living in.

Heartbreaking, isn’t it? Depressingly, I find myself having to pay the total cost of my house myself, and in a bewildering step, the Government seem to take money from me each month, rather than giving it to me. Surely some mistake. And yet I still manage to eat an apple a day. So why can’t Laura?

‘I eat Tesco’s chocolate bars and packets of Space Invaders crisps, sometimes four of each a day’, says Laura, who spends seven hours a day watching TV.
People ask why I don’t snack on an apple – they’re cheap, but emotionally I don’t always feel like an apple.

Ah. Emotionally, I think if you shoved a whole apple in your fat mouth, you might find that you couldn’t eat as many of those Tesco’s chocolate bars and packets of Space Invaders crisps. And, as an added benefit, you wouldn’t be able to make utterly stupid statements like “emotionally not always feeling like an apple” and that would probably piss a lot fewer people off.

You might actually get some sympathy. But then again…

Since the extra allowance stopped Laura has put on a stone in just three weeks and claims she is being treated unfairly.
‘It’s heartbreaking that after all my hard work losing this weight someone’s come along and ruined it..I only want an extra £100 a month, that’s all’

Just an extra £100 a month? Why didn’t you say so earlier?
Here’s a quick thought – why don’t you go and get a job instead of sitting on your arse all day and stuffing your face with junk food, you lazy, sponging, fat cow.

Sorry, emotionally I just had to say that.

a-ha: Foot of the Mountain

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2010 marks the 25th anniversary of a-ha‘s first big hit, Take on Me, and the band are planning a world tour to mark the occasion. It seems unlikely that Cape Town will be on their venue list, but if you’re reading, Morten (and I know you’re a big fan of 6000 miles…) then you’re welcome to stop by our place on your way through. Please try to avoid June and July though, I have a World Cup happening and I will be busy doing World Cup stuff.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that a-ha are still together and still releasing albums. Their latest offering, Foot of the Mountain, is their 9th album and was released just last month. And with it, they have unashamedly returned to their 80’s synthy-pop roots, Morten’s distinctive and ageless voice soaring above wonderfully over-produced keyboards from the very first song, like an unusually cheerful Dave Gahan. And that’s something that’s been missing in their work for a while (the over-produced keyboards, not an unusually cheerful Dave Gahan).
Stand out tracks include What There Is, Shadowside and Foot of the Mountain, the latter probably being the most reminiscent of their early stuff, thanks to the repeating keyboard riff. And then there’s the rather Snow Patrol-esque sound of Nothing is Keeping You Here, which even now I can imagine was penned by Gary Lightbody. Although it wasn’t. 
So yes, it’s a surefire hit, but with whom, exactly?

AHA_header

I’ve enjoyed a-ha’s music since the beginning. Yes, I’m a fan and yes, I have all their stuff – even when they lost their direction a bit around 1993. I’ve seen them countless times. I have Paul Waaktaar-Savoy’s leather wristband at home, gained after he threw it into the crowd at Sheffield City Hall in 1988. I have their solo work, even Morten’s Poetenes Evangelium, which is wholly in Norwegian and which I therefore don’t understand, but I still enjoy listening to. Last night, I even held on until the end of the pisspoor Coneheads on SET so that I could hear his version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. OK – I’ll accept that that was a bit sad.

Of course, when the whole a-ha thing started in the UK, it was cutting edge, new age and trendy. Not quite so now it seems, as they are BBC Radio 2’s album of the month and being interviewed by Dale Winton. Terrifyingly middle-aged, you might argue. And I’d agree. 
But I guess that as the band and their music has got older, so have their fans (I know I have, despite my best efforts to resist). And somehow, the 1980’s style of Foot of the Mountain has got me reliving those days and made me feel all young again.

That’s why I think it’s going to be a popular album with their fans – they still have a huge following in South America, Germany and, of course, Scandinavia. I don’t think they’ll win huge numbers of new followers with FotM, despite the critical acclaim that it has received: there just isn’t a big new market for this sort of music these days. But I doubt that the band are expecting a plethora of teenies bopping along to their stuff anyway.

Suffice to say that this latest offering will keep their fans very happy and eagerly awaiting the upcoming tour and – beyond that – the next album. Let’s just hope that we don’t have to wait another four years for that.

Big Hole by night

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Now that I’ve started writing this, I realise that without a “before” photo, this “after” photo won’t mean a huge amount to anyone. But, for the record, suffice to say that if it were taken a few weeks ago, the majority of this particular photograph would have been taken up by my big tree, which fell over in high winds earlier this month.

I now have a Big Hole to rival Kimberley’s Big Hole (this is a reference to Kimberley in the Northern Cape and not Kimberley on Sea Point Main Road) (although she does also have a big hole) (allegedly).


My garden minus the big tree, yesterday evening.

While I was taking that photo, I took a couple of others – one with a smaller, barer tree that we can now see and another which captured a rare visit by a zebra to our garden.

What? This is Africa, you know?

Table Mountain From The Car

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Some blogs have confusing, technical or arty-farty titles. Others are more empirical.

Table Mountain From The Car features a daily photograph of Table Mountain, taken from a car. Which is brilliant.

 tmot

There now, that was pretty straightforward, wasn’t it?

EDIT: TMFTC appears to be the brainchild of Just Plain Ron.

Broken garden

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Just before we embarked on the 2009 Kids in Tow Tour, we had an evening of very strong northeasterly winds in Cape Town. Those of you from this area will recognise that northeasters are fairly rare and bring with them the heat of sub-Saharan Africa.

Not all of it, obviously. I mean, I am in no way suggesting that the Democratic Republic of Congo drops to Absolute Zero just because it’s a bit breezy in Cape Town. That would be silly. But when it’s blowing at 45km/h at three in the morning and the temperature is still 23°C, then you know that someone, somewhere, is missing that warmth.

The other potential issue for me was that aeroplanes taking off and landing at Cape Town International Airport don’t like those sort of winds. And that was my main concern regarding the gusty conditions – at least until I woke up the next morning and found what it had done to my big tree in the garden. It had broken it. And the big tree, being a big tree, had broken some more stuff underneath itself. Gravity wins again.

Before it was broken, the big tree used to provide a landing spot for Cape Turtle Doves who would gently coo and… coo some more; it gave us that little shady nook at the corner of the pool where you could escape the fierce rays of the Cape Town summer sun. And perhaps most importantly, it hid the rather messy bit at the back of the garden from us.

There wasn’t much we could do about the big broken tree with 12 hours to go before our flight to Heathrow, so when we got back from overseas, the big broken tree was still big and broken. Yesterday, some big broken tree experts came, tutted a bit and shook their heads and then took the big broken tree away, breaking much of the rest of the garden in the process.

Now I have a broken garden with a big tree sized hole where the big tree used to be.

“Look on the bright side,” said Mrs 6000.

But then she stopped and there was silence, because there was no bright side.

We have a broken garden and it’s very sad.