Vestri vox vocis

The human voice is a magickal instrument, the mechanics of which are as individual to each person as a fingerprint. A baby relies on his mother's voice, grows with it, learns from it, thrives on it. Through childhood he learns the nuance, tone and timbre of the human voice. We learn to distinguish voices that are familiar and loving, and those who present threat and distrust. Regardless of accent, some voices grate on our nerves or pull us in, subconciously sending 'like/dislike signals' to our personal preference centre. All these things we pick up from the sound of a voice.

So how does this work in this world of the blog? I cannot hear your voice and I have nothing else to go on, and yet I like you, your personality shines through. How powerful this written word, how amazing this vox of the blog.

Tibuo est vestri vox vocis - give me your voice.

I've had a bit of a morning.

I think I must have had a silent beacon that said "come hither and tell me all your problems".

I didn't really need this today. I am neck deep in money and staffing issues and the last thing I wanted was to be used as a wailing wall.

My desk has a radiator next to it and one by one they came, perched on the heat with their cups of coffee and poured out their grumps and groans. Don't get me wrong, I have a good pair of ears, but today was one of those times when all I wanted to do was tell them to go and get a life. I didn't, I smiled sweetly and tried to continue juggling numbers in my head.

What is wrong with them? We all like a little grumble every now and again and working with an all female workforce allows you to offload those little everyday irritants called 'the men in our lives'. The trouble is, that I really did have a lot to do, yes really! Maybe I should have offered them a cup of this ........

A satisfying reading life

I am always happy to improve my reading life. We should never let it become stale, or uninteresting, and there are many manuals on the market to help us to spice up our reading lives.
Many people think that reading should only be done in bed with the light on. This is not so. The addition of a few reading toys can pep up even the most jaded of readers. Try purchasing a few large, plump cushions and reading on the floor. Try it in the bath with a glass of wine, or experiment in front of the fire, especially with a good horror story. If you are feeling brave, and the weather is clement, you may even find somewhere secluded to express your reading desires in the open air.

Some couples are even daring to try reading together and below is a chart to get you started.
Don't worry if you find some of them hard, or embarrassing at first, reading is all part of the person you are - enjoy it.

Behold....

....a miracle.

And The God of BBC Weather said unto the Lords of Small Councils - Go forth my sons, and grit thy roads for the white stuff cometh, and without the holy grit thy cars will slippy-slidey on the highways and by-ways.

The Lords of the Small Councils had ignored their God in times past and had suffered greatly with the slippy-slidey cars. They had learned a great lesson, which had come in the form of many letters of the email kind from the common people of the land. The common people rose up as a great force and spoke as one.

NO MORE OF THE SLIPPY-SLIDEY ROADS

So on a chosen day the Gods of Small Councils heeded their Lord God of the Holy BBC, and sent the wheeled vehicles into the towns, and grit poured forth.

Keen was their gritting - spraying road, pavement, mother and child, and the odd slow cat. They gritted through the long dark hours with vim and vigour, fire and brimstone and a certain amount of salt and sand.

The Lords of the Small Councils were pleased with their work and patted themselves on their backs. The common people would go to their work, the common children would go to their schools and the common shout of 'you're a bunch of wankers' would not be heard outside the hallowed halls of the Small Council offices.

So, today the roads are full of righteous grit with no sign of one snowflake, or one bit of ice - tis surely a miracle!

Bluffing?

Call My Bluff was a long-running British game show between two teams of three contestants, who were celebrities. The point of the game was for the teams to take it in turn to provide three definitions of an obscure word, only one of which was correct. The other team then had to guess which was the correct definition (the other two being the "bluffs").
I loved this show, because over time the bluffs became more and more elaborate and outrageous.

Take the word 'Clipe'. Does it mean....

a) A fixing. To clipe something together. To be bonded, firmly "Twas broked and I cliped it up good as new". Today, oil workers still use the expression 'cliped the pipe' when a job is done.

b) A derogatory term referring to a person scanty of good manners. Nothing could be worse for middle class parents to be told that their child was a rude and ill-mannered little clipe.

c) To clipe means to cuff, smack, or administer a learning blow. "He were rude to the wife so I cliped him one".
Rarely a fatal blow, but often the forerunner of something bigger.
(answer below)

So, what about these words. Can you 'bluff' one of these?

Periblepsis

Cocture

Fowerty Frappers

Slonk






(b) is the answer btw

At the end of the land....

...sometimes there are no words......

....that can possibly summon up the beauty of the land.

Lands End - the end of our land, the tip of England. Here, where the Atlantic meets the Irish sea and the English Channel, lies the most dangerous piece of coastline in Britain. We stayed the night here, birthday treat, in the last hotel before you get to New York. With nothing to break it up, the wind blows relentlessly off the sea, battering this hotel since the early 1900's.

This romantically wild, desolate coast attracts thousands of visitors a year and a number of writers as well! Known as the 'wrecking coast' it is not hard to imagine the number of ships that have gone aground here. Unfortunately most met their end with a little help from the locals! Land pirates, who put out the warning beacons and reaped the rewards of rum, whiskey and anything else they could get their hands on.

Photos -

a) The Lands Ends signpost - have a photo taken for an extortionate price.

b) Greeb farm - over 200 years old and still going!

c)The Longships Lighthouse (one of about seven)

d) Wolf Rock

e) A modern (granite) carved way marker

Broken in peace

The day was not long
but enough to disrupt
all thoughts of reasoning,
the will to stay strong

the moment was black
lost from the grasp
serenity slipping
with no turning back

life is a short lease
taken at will
so savour each moment
or be broken in peace

I want cake

Today is the anniversary of my birthing and I have managed to reach the gorgeously, wonderful number of 44.

Oh, how I hated 43 - the numbers are uneven and ugly. I have tried being 44 for some months now, and today I am finally legal! Whoo-hoo!

Helliferocious - and other similarly exciting words.

Call me a vulgarian, but when the weather is drawky there is nothing I like better than to sit down like a shumpgullion, with a muggety pie and a book of dildrums.*

What happened to all those lovely dildrums, those old interesting words that have long since passed from our mouths? Words that rolled off the tongue like 'conbobberation', 'clunch' and 'snoodle', sounding vaguely rude and adding a richness to our language.

Today's words are policed by political correctness and influenced by the technology that has taken over our lives.

I say bring back all those gorgeous, tongue lubricating words. We could hold a mafficky, dress like dollymops and indulge in cataglottism in celebration of long lost codswallop!

*The modern version

Call me a slut, but when the weather is shite there is nothing I like better than to sit down like a lazy-arsed so-and-so, with a bad-ass pie and a book of complete rubbish.

Here's a thing.

Well, yes, a thing. A sort of an exercise really, only without the sweat, or the expensive running shoes.

Try this.....
Set a stopwatch/egg timer for three minutes. In that time write as many sentences as you can. Each sentence must be written in a different style and not linked to the sentence before, or the one after. Just let your head go and you may be surprised with what you come up with.

Here's mine....... go!

- Oh, how I wish I could shoot a gun, it would bring enormous relief to my headache. The foghorn rang out over the still waters letting them know that the land was often more treacherous than the sea itself. Hang 'em high Billy Joe so papa ain't alone in his wooden casket. Sloe worms are not so slow and neither are they related to the sloes that my grandmother used to stuff into jars and suffocate with gin. The purple jacket in the shop window caught her eye but a swift mental calculation and a vision of the letter from the bank manager thought the better of it. If Jack Nids had not left the house that night then Mickey Doughnut would not have got a bullet in the butt and Meggy Sampson would have no reason to give up that bottle of whiskey that she had been hiding under her bed for the last six years. He thought killing would be easy but the flesh was stubborn and fought the knife to the last. -


If you want share then have a go in the comments box, or you can email me at - innerminx at google mail dot com and I will post them up, if you wish. I would appreciate your thoughts on how it went and whether you would use any of them elsewhere.

Bordering on mental?

I wondered if they, the boffs that is, might ever come up with something that could make you stay awake for weeks on end without any ill effects. Surely some clever dick could come up with a way to write for hours on end without waking up with an imprint of keys on your forehead. I have also wondered if a head could explode from the pressure of words that often builds up within. These strange questions, and others - maybe more bizarre ones, have squeezed into my head since I started writing. I think I was fairly normal before - heh!
Maybe I am just trying to make up time - I have only been writing for about five years and I often kick myself for not getting around to it sooner.
Ah well, I suppose the time is right, the moment is now, but will someone now please tell me how to stop! The need to write is an ever increasing itch and I think I may have a little problem!

Idle ; meaning - not working, not in use

When I go away from my computer it goes into 'idle' mode. I often wonder what it does. Does it think about those invading cookies, those damned pop-ups, or does it wonder where the hell I have gone?
As humans, are we ever idle? We lead busy lives and I am constantly irritated by those jobs that take me away from the things I would like to be doing. I consider ironing, cleaning or any domestic job to be times when I am enforced into a kind of idleness.

"You're funny." a friend said recently "I do all my thinking when I am ironing."

"The only thinking I do is how much gin I can drink to take the edge off a job that I loathe."

In the interests of the Minx Institute of Research into 'mind-numbingly boring jobs', I decided, this morning, to make my thought audible as I did the dreaded deed.

In thirty-five minutes (I don't hang around), I had planned a new project for work and added a few things to a current writing project. I visualised some art work, poured lavish scorn on my boss, noticed that we were low on milk and ran through a table of events that need to be sorted by next week. In between all this, I observed that my coffee making skills leave a lot to be desired, fed the cat (reminding myself that he needs a new collar) and willed Big Fecker into remembering his revision in his exam today.

Is my brain never idle then? This is worrying! I will have to think about that next time!

"I have been thinking for hours - but still

have not come up with a way to remove my hand

from my head"

Witchery Pokery

Meloney Lemon said... (and she's talking about me book btw)
Really enjoyed visiting your witchy world. It was cosy yet menacing, dreamy yet compelling, simple yet complex.....hard to put down yet easy to pickup...(shut UP!)Anyway, I am interested to know what constitutes a witch of today. Do the rites come from the pre Roman, nature/fertilty religeons of Britain (Wicker Man-ishly)? Or are they drawn from the Eastern science,astrology and numeracy that peaked in the 16thC, in the court of Elizabeth 1st, with her resident alchemist, Dr John Dee? Or is it a mixture of these?Not that it matters. It's a great story. And I LOVE the talking cats! x
8/1/07 21:43

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^**^*^*^*^^^^****^^^^*^^*^*^*^*
I was just about answer Meloney's more than intelligent question, when I suddenly remembered another interview I did with Paxman a while ago. (My first interview is here).


Paxo - Well Minx, gorgeous as ever by the way, now, would you like to tell the world about yer witchin'?

M - Tricky one this, Paxy babe. Most people have very definite ideas about a witch, and I'm afraid none of them are true.

Paxo - Oops, steady with those pointy boots.

M - Sorry, they have a mind of their own. White witching, hedgewitching etc, are all practiced in the name of good.

Paxo - So no dark arts?

M - There are many arts practised in the dark - usually the more exciting ones, but always for good!

Paxo - So no devil worship? I think I could see you in a little pair of horns!

M - Paxy! Please! The God aspect is often mistaken for the devil as he is often depicted with horns.

Paxo - Gorgeous pentacle by the way, umm, where was I? Oh yes - you seem to have a lot of festivals in your calender.

M - Yay - loving a shindig. Paganism is based on the Wheel of the Year - the natural cycle of life. A celebration of the seasons, the cycle of the moon but we are not adverse to anyone elses' festivities either.

Paxo - And the spellmaking, oh love of my life? Did I see you cooking up a little something before you came in?

M - Not a bit of it. Spells confirm the positive, make a wish tangible and to give hope where they may be none. Spells for attraction and the like are, err, not likely to, umm, work - take your hand me knee....

Paxo - Sorry my love, my only light, my .......

M - Umm, hello, hello, could anyone remove Paxy from me lap?

At this point Paxo was dragged from the building. His last words echoing down the corridor.....

"Minx, Minx, you can burn my steak any day!"


^*^*^^^***^*^*^*^*^*^***^^^^*^*^****^^^**^^**^**

I hope this gives you a rich, and valuable glimpse into the world of a modern witch. Further posting may be considered, but then again....

Oh, and by the way, there is a very interesting 'Party' going on over at The Pundy House. We are aiming to party on up to a 100 comments by the time the Pundmeister returns from the land of sheep. Please join us -

Silent Grey Competition

My entry 'Funeral Greys' (No 30 ) is up at The Clarity of Night .

The competition called for fiction of up to 250 words (yeah, I know, what a squeeze), inspired by a photo of a grey wall.
Go and have a look, there are some really good entries. The comp closes Wednesday - so get a move on!
Also don't forget competitions at Skint and Verilion - ah, so busy!

The chocolate, a safe and a firemans axe - a sordid tale of desperation

Did I mention I like chocolate? No? Well, I do.
Since the Feckers got old enough to stand on a stool, my life has been one long round of trying to find new hiding places for my precious supplies. A few years ago I realised that my fool-proof system of hiding it in the brussel sprout bag in the freezer was in danger of being discovered (before this the Feckers wouldn't look at any foodstuff that required more than 3 minutes in the microwave).
A solution was sought, and very cleverly came in the guise of a safe.

"Just punch the number in and hey presto" the MD said.

Fantastic! Not only a place to squirrel away all me choc, but also somewhere to store all those things that had now come under the new Fecker rules of 'what's yours is mine, and what's mine is, very definitely, only mine'.

"What was the number again?" I said, late one night.

The MD reminded me.

"It says ERROR" I said.

"Don't be silly" he said, coming to rescue me from my slightly blonde moment.

"Okay, yes, it does say 'error'. You must have changed the number"

There followed a very rude response and then a couple of hours of experimentation with a screwdriver, a nail file and a hammer. There was even a nasty moment with an axe that was tried after we had dropped it off the top patio a couple of times.
To cut a long night short - we ended up phoning a friend who dabbles in locksmithery and he came the following morning to put me out of my misery.

"You put too much in there," he said "there is an internal reset button".

I learned my lesson. My supplies are now safely distributed between my knicker drawer, the breadmaker, the tin marked 'nails' and a, well, not going to say the last one because that is only for me to know!

A fatal flaw

Computers - I can't live with 'em, and I can't live without 'em (now). I will admit, secretly, that I fear those things that I don't understand and I have very little understanding of the machinations of said pooter beyond the keyboard and where to shove me USB stick. Messages like this one below, are just beyond rude, shouting at me in a gruff voice and giving me the willies (well, not literally - but I suppose that will come!).

How nice it would be if they designed a computer that was more, umm, well, more feminine. A gentle voice that guided you through your fatal errors and stopped making you think that you were responsible for the lives of your nearest and dearest, the lives of whole populations and the lives of those who have yet to be born.

Can we not ban these aggressive pop-ups, replacing them with something a little more personal?

So Microsoft, if I get any more of these aggressive messages, please change your tone or I will be sending back some messages of my own!

Phew!

I have just read an article in First magazine that says that I can now 'rejoice' that the fashionably emaciated, anorexic size zero is well and truly behind us, and that we can now live on more than a lettuce leaf a week. Well, thank fuck for that, I was getting a little worried that my side view was disappearing altogether!

The magazine shows that 'stars' are actually putting on weight - amazing what happens when you eat more than a couple of lettuce leaves! The 'before' photos look like something that you would cry over if you saw them in the papers. Pictures of skinny, bony women that are bereft of 'lady bumps', or anything that celebrates the feminine.

What the hell is a size zero - just another word for 'fashion victim' which has unfortunately encouraged women to think that the 'cancer' look is in? Apparently, after the death of two six-stone models, the fashion industry has come to its senses (sort of) and decided not to employ any models who have a Body Mass Index of less than 18 - it's a start, I suppose.

I read this article as a woman who is a healthily rounded size10/12, comfortable with the ravages that childbirth, and life, have left behind and I was pleased to see that the article was encouraging women to put on a bit of weight and celebrate their slightly less 'deathbed' looks.

Unfortunately the rest of the magazine highlighted 7 celebrities who were hung up about their bodies, a battle of detox diets, various fitness videos and an 18 year-old who has had her stomach stapled.

I don't know what I weigh, and have even less idea about my BMI, but I do have a handy pair of jeans that tell me when me stomach is hanging over the edge - which seems like a reasonable enough gauge to me!

The Clarity of Writing

Jason Evans, over at the 'The Clarity of Night', calls for submissions to his latest competition -

'Silent Grey'

go HERE for details.

This Blogging year

Normal service will be resumed just as soon as I have done the popular thing and reviewed me year!

After receiving nasty mails and comments I found out the power of the blogosphere here..
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/06/all-in-valley-of-death-rode-six.html

I found people who understood my weird meanderings and laughed until I peed me pants!
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/05/staff-photo.html

I met strange people on the beach
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/08/bedouin-blogsisters.html

I had me very own interview with Jeremy Paxman...
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/09/minx-interview.html

I won me first ever prize for writing....
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/09/me-prize-has-arrived.html

Then, of course this happened...
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/07/so-there-i-was-sitting-in-hot-tub-with.html

Which led me to here....
http://innerminx.blogspot.com/2006/11/oh-oh-here-we-go-again.html

What a year!
Thank you, thank you, to everyone. Your rude comments, innuendo, constant support, love and light have given an old Minx a kick up the arse - please do it again!

And if I don't get it right - give me a clip across the ear!