back again

enid would like to apologise for her long absence. she has had the most horrible experience that a person could suffer. no, not christmas in front of the sound of music, but a crashed hard drive. enid has lost a lot of work, all her writing and many photographs. she also lost a lot of important numbers and passwords, including her blogger password (which she's managed to work out, at last).

the worst thing is that enid is usually quite good at backing things up, but that day she had to copy a lot of her photos around, and she needed space on her external hard drive during this process, so she deleted her backups. then, a day later, she pressed command-s to save her document, her cursor went into a spin and she never saw her hard disk again.

enid recommends everyone buy a very big hard disk and a backup program.

bleeding hell

over sunday lunch - pork with cheese on, which should be the national dish of molvania - enid told the man of her early experiences of menstruation. (no wonder he prefers working to eating out with her.)

there was a special lesson at school when enid was 10. her mummy had been sent a letter about it, and had agreed enid should go. enid didn’t know this till later - all enid knew was that the afternoon’s lessons were cancelled, and there was a special lesson in its place. In the special lesson, the teacher told them how babies were made - which was quite interesting, because enid and her friends had decided it was when a man and a woman mixed their wee in a toilet bowl, which was wrong. at the very end of the special lesson, the teacher told them about periods. enid felt quite sick. was it really true that every month, until she was an old lady, she would bleed from her front bottom? did every grown-up lady in the world really bleed from her front bottom every month, and if so, why hadn’t they cured it yet?

usually enid walked home from school alone, because she was a big girl, and this was the 70s, before paedophiles were invented, but on this day, enid’s mummy met her at the gates. enid was very cross, and demanded, “did you know this already?”

her mummy nodded, yes.

“why didn’t you tell me!” enid couldn’t stand it that her mummy had known what was in store for her, and hadn’t prepared her. why did girls have to do all this to make babies, when boys didn’t? especially as she didn’t even want any babies? it just wasn’t fair.

enid’s own periods started two years later, when she was twelve. It was just before her holidays in the south of france, and she had to sit on the beach wearing too many clothes and getting hot, while her younger brother eric pestered her about why she wasn’t swimming. she and eric loved swimming. the year before they’d bought themselves snorkels and masks with their pocket money, and they’d spent hours in the water, chasing the little silver fish and pretending to be divers, pearl fishermen and mermaids.

this year, enid cried to her mummy, who was embarrassed and muttered that there was an internal thing that enid could have done so she could swim next year. enid was so happy. there was a cure, after all. they’d take her to a hospital and stop these period things, and she’d be able to swim again, like eric.

a couple of months before the next year’s holiday was near, enid worked out that her period would again been in the middle of the fortnight in france. shyly, she approached her mother, and asked if she could have the operation now.

“what operation?” asked her mother.

“the internal one, so I don’t get periods any more.”

enid’s mother explained, rather crossly, that she’d meant something that was “worn internally”, which enid now realised meant “inserted in your vagina”, but her mother had been too embarrassed to say that plainly, and so enid had misunderstood her.

the story has a happy ending. enid did manage to learn to use tampax in time, and she did go swimming with eric. she still has periods, though.

ill

last night enid and the man had dinner in a thai/japanese restaurant. they could have had mediterranean/japanese, molvanian/japanese or pizza/japanese, but they both had a yen for something spicy, so thai/japanese it was.

the meal was good, apart from the girl mistaking enid’s order for spicy squid in basil, and giving her prawns in mayonnaise instead. perhaps it was really a thai/japanese/molvanian restaurant?

at about three am, enid started having to rush to the toilet a lot. at four am she started throwing up. today she has been shivery with a very achy tummy, and has spent the day in bed. this is a bad thing, because she is going to london at the weekend to deliver her paper on mobile graphics, and she will never get it finished now. luckily the company enid is working for is very considerate, so she doesn’t think there will be any problems, but she doesn’t like to miss her deadlines.

enid is sorry for not being funny and will try harder next time.

things enid has looked for

things the man has lost (and enid has found) in the last week:
- his car keys
- his work bag
- an important customs form for the car
- his house keys
- the scissors
- fluffy’s pills
- his ipod
- his slippers (three times)

when enid got married, she didn’t realise there’d be so much searching involved.

dogs, sundays, arrests

enid wants to introduce you to her dogs. they are black russian terriers called stalin and fluffy. (those are not their real names, because dogs get named when they are very small puppies, and their genocidal tendencies have yet to become apparent.) fluffy likes to snuggle up to humans, lick their faces and display her tummy for tickling. her half brother stalin was tortured by small boys when he was a young dog, and is spending the rest of his life getting his own back. unfortunately stalin is quite bright, and remembers even minor offences against his doggy person that happened a very long time ago. for example, he was stung by a wasp when he was only a few months old, and now he snaps insanely in the air every time he hears a buzzing noise that is even faintly reminiscent of stripey insects.

now it’s december and grey so the island is deserted and even stalin is allowed to run off the lead and swim in the cold river. enid and the man enjoyed their sunday walk almost as much as the dogs did. as they drove home, enid was even thinking “it’s not so bad here”, but then they were stopped twice by the police, and the man had forgotten his car documents again, and it cost them twenty pounds in bribes to stop the car being impounded.

ddiy (don't do it yourself)

when enid looks in the mirror these days, she sees someone who is starting to be an old lady, not enid, because enid-inside is 25 and has creamy, glowing skin. it’s sad to see someone else now, someone with an illness called old age that makes her skin dull, dry and starting to wrinkle.

enid has a clever little white cuboid called a magic eraser that she uses to clean the marks the dogs make from the walls. (this is relevant.) the cuboid is a white foam, very dense, and it just takes the very top layers off things without damaging them. (can you see where this is going?)

enid had a brainwave. no expensive laser face peel, just a few rubs with her magic eraser and the real, young enid underneath would be revealed. the eraser felt good on enid’s skin, refreshing, cool, so she overdid it a bit. now one of her cheeks is quite red and puffy, and her nose is sore.

enid recommends that you don’t try this at home.

moving on

enid and the man will be moving to california in the spring. the man has been promised a big important job at head office, and enid is going to follow him. enid has followed him to japan, france and molvania, which is where they live now.

california will be better than molvania, enid thinks. molvania is cold and the people speak molvanian, which is really russian, but you are not allowed to say so. enid doesn’t speak molvanian, or even russian, so she is quite lonely. In california, it is warm and the people speak a sort of english called american, which is much easier to understand.

Sometimes enid wonders what it would be like to go home to england again. She’d like to live in a cottage in a small town by the sea. the man would get home from work at 6 o’clock, like people used to in the olden days, and then the two of them would walk to the pub and drink warm, flat beer. perhaps afterwards they’d buy chips and eat them on the pier, watching the waves. on sundays they’d read the papers in bed, then roast some beef for friends.

enid wonders if she’d be happy with this forever, or if she’d get bored and want to travel again.

hello

hello, you’ve found enid, except i’m not enid, but let’s pretend i am. everything enid says is true, much more true than if i wrote it and had to tell the truth.

enid hopes you enjoy yourself here and find some things to smile about and maybe a few to make you think.