Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Here we go!  

Why a blog, you may ask? And why Vera's Monkey? 

Some of you may remember Vera, for her idiosyncratic contributions to the Comments on T-shirt Wars back in 2005. She really enjoyed that opportunuity to disseminate her wit and wisdom accross the web, and missed it when the competition finished. One of the T-shirt lads tried to persuade her to start her own blog, maybe as Granny Geek, writing reviews for the board gaming community. But that was his agenda.

She tells me she's been too busy, however, what with her U3A Book Group, Poetry Group, Shakespeare Reading Group etc. And that's not to mention going to weird esoteric films like Martha Marcy May Marlene or Once Upon a Time in Anatolia with her Film Appreciation Group. She's also been indulging in Game of Thrones, on the back of some-one else's Sky subscription - though she calls it "babysitting", would you believe the cheek of it? Then she does that wafting-about dance thingy as well - Five Rhythms or Movement Medicine they call it. Just an excuse for regressing to the days of "Music and Movement" she did at school.

Recently, too, she's been learning Python, so-called after Monty, although it's actually a programming language [Sigh... These humans...] in preparation for getting a Raspberry Pi. She's going to wait until she can get one with a nice trasparent box, and a pre-loaded SD card. She sits up far too late over her old desk-top, muttering "to if or to elif, that is the question". Crazy. But ever since the ZX81 she's been one for technology - especially computers.

You can see that so well from this photo of her in her prime. (Click on it to see it enlarged.) Funny, though, how she looks a bit like Grace Hopper, isn't it?

WHY this particular blog, I imagine you're still wondering, and why now?

Well, last week we went "down South". A typical human illogicality: there's no reason for "South" to be any more "down" or "up" than anywhere else, of course. It's a mere colloquial convention, and nothing to do with feet above sea level. She went to see some "Art" exhibitions. (Damien Hirst is a matter of opinion.) We met up with an old mutual friend of ours - the very one in fact who got Vera to adopt me when he went gallavanting off to the antipodes. He said then it was to do with Culture and Creativity, but being human, I'm sure Love came into it as well. (Forgive my presumption if you're reading this.) It turns out he didn't know how well travelled I've become myself since then.

I'll get Vera to put up some photos to show you - if this blogging (that's some kind of euphemism) doesn't take her too many hours. I don't think she's got the hang of it yet.

Later on, we related this information to another friend, who's very sensibly just moved away from the English capital - so expensive, so noisy, so terribly BIG! She's very intelligent and appreciates what I have to offer on the wideness of the web, and she said, "Monkey should have his own blog!"

So I finally persuaded Vera to set this up. I'm somewhat digitally disadvantaged, as you can see from my Profile, so she agreed to do the keyboard bit, as long as I told her what to say. She'll sneakily add stuff of her own, of course. She's already said "We must tell them that Tyrion and Arya are my favourite characters." OK, OK. GoT references yet again. Do you know, she even spent more than was sensible getting herself a Stick 'em with the pointy end T-shirt! Personally, I suspect she really fancies the actor who plays Jaime - the one with the long foreign name.

Alice (Vera's carer, you may recall) says it's Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Yes, I know Vera's old enough to be his mother, but then, you're never too old to dream, are you? I prefer the Dire Wolves myself: fellow creatures, even if they are very big and very fierce. They're so wild and strong and yet protective also. Alice likes wolves, too. She's even got a wolf paw tatooed on her wrist. Something Shamanic, I presume. I digress. But that's the joy of a blog, isn't it?