Spout, handle, lid of metal.....

Lums a Reeking ,

The day could not have started off worse. I freely admit, it was a fairly unproductive day yesterday and all the little jobs that required doing, well, I didn't get to some of them, or all of them. But I'm unemployed, I'm not meant to be productive, I'm meant to be shiftless and lazy and Jeezo, its not like I did nothing. Some people do not appreciate the effort it takes to reach pro level at Wii tennis.

Well today I paid the penalty. A list had been prepared to add structure and meaning to my day and instead of warm buttery toast and a steaming mug of tea being presented to me in bed, it was.

Speaking of tea, I make mine in a pot, I mention it because I think the popularity of the tea-pot has diminished over the last 30 years or so. I remember great big teapots with woolly tea cosies that looked like a balaclava for crockery. They never seemed to empty and always produced piping hot perfectly brewed tea. Now folk are in too much of a hurry to wait the 6 minutes it takes to brew, they just pour boiling water over a tea-bag in a mug, a couple of squeezes against the side, and that will do. Apart from being wasteful its like the flavour is being forced out the tea-bag under duress, like a CIA black ops team water boarding an Iraqi dissident, you get what your after, but it leaves a bitter taste. By easing the flavour out, so that it seems as if the tea-bag is giving you a gift in return for a warm bath, you get much more satisfying results.

By putting, CIA and Iraq in the same sentence, The Reeking Lum may get a few more followers tomorrow, all at GCHQ right enough, still, the more the merrier.

Anyway, back to The List. No one could accuse it of being one dimensional, it had a wide variety of tasks on it. Shopping chores, cleaning chores, laundry chores, of course, pointless chores, a good few of them but worst and most concerning of all, a DIY chore. It was chilling, like picking up a paper and reading your own obituary.

I mentioned a few blogs ago just how hopeless I am at DIY and my past is littered with disasters and accidents, mis-understandings and humiliations. I can build flat pack I thought, no problem, I mean all the bits and pieces are there with the instructions, what can go wrong. What can go wrong is building all the units for your new fitted kitchen in the living room, then finding they wont go through the kitchen door. I once painted the living room ceiling with gloss paint, I couldn't understand why my brush was getting heavier and heavier and the room was beginning to spin.

So it was with obvious anxiety I read "sand bathroom door and paint" on The List. I immediately thought of all the things that could go wrong, paint spills, tile damage, I could slip and get tangled up in the sanders cord and have my body discovered and mistakenly reported as having perished in a bizarre fetish gone wrong.

I took my time, all day actually and completed the task, incredibly, without incident despite realising half way through I hadn't gotten changed into a smock, or whatever you wear when painting and still had a good pair of jeans on. But tomorrow I think I will have to revisit it to touch up the runs and I fully expect something unexpected and disastrous to happen then.

Last night I watched that new BBC show about the solar system, and its brilliant. I love all that stuff, its the scale that gets me, its beyond comprehension and when I try to comprehend it, my mind just seems to empty, its quite refreshing actually. But I learned that on Venus, a day, lasts longer than a year and after the three days I've just had, I know what that feels like.

Then The News. Huw Edwards tie is immediately a distraction from all the terrible things going on around the world, good old BBC. It couldn't distract me from Tony Blairs ridiculous accent though, its like something you'd hear on one of those American God Channels. Some people just assimilate accents really easily, others could live in Australia or LA for years and not sound any different. The Lum of course, has no accent at all so could live and reek anywhere and not sound odd.

Huws tie couldnt distract me from more dead soldiers arriving home, shoulder high and draped in the flag. Surely this has to end soon, the public can exert pressure now, if it wants, with an election looming. I fear more are interested only in themselves and their own welfare, their mortgage payments and job security. Society, Thatcher was right when she said it didnt exist anymore and she should know, it was she that kicked and starved it to death.

I am of course as guilty as the next man.

Lang may yer lum reek

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How to stop a dog humping your leg.

Lums a reeking, (Yāncōng xī yān, for my potential new Chinese followers)

Let us go together to my e-mail inbox, and see how many offers of work I have received today.

I have a mail from the CSI Forensics School asking if I'd like to be a forensics investigator. I'm pretty sure those guys in Vegas have more than 4 O' Grades so I don't think that's for me. Bevvy Struminski has got in touch asking if I'd like some Cialis, and so has Aliosia Cipolletta, its nice when people are concerned that your are running out of medicine. Finally Rhonda Stubbs needs to know if my penis is too small, maybe its for some peculiar job that requires certain dimensions, I'll think about that one, she doesn't mention what it is that it might be too small for, its certainly too small to be assaulting anyone with, like that bloke from Aberdeen I told you about the other day. If its a job, I hope there isn't an assessment centre for it.

Last night was the final evening of Curling for the season. This is a pastime I have taken up lately, mostly to make up the numbers but I've ended up quite enjoying it. There is something about sizing up your opposing team and finding their most fearsome and ruthless competitor is a 73 year old pensioner called Janette that makes me laugh a little laugh inside. I reckon you could put her off though by reminding her how brittle her bones are and to be extra careful on the ice.

But back to today. My sander purchase of last week, from the bankrupt hardware store, is useless until I buy sandpaper for it, so I set handlebars to West and puff and wobble along the very convenient canal towpath to B&Q. Speaking of which, I read in the Kirky Herald this morning that the local DeafBlind association is organising a fun run along the canal towpath, I couldn't help but ask myself, have they thought that through?

So B&Q, somebody once told me that B&Q stands for Big & Quick, which even though doesn't really make sense as the name for a hardware shop, I believed. I probably would have gotten that question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and suffered national humiliation over and over again on Challenge TV. No, it actually stands for Block & Quayle, which makes even less sense until you learn that those were the names of Richard and David the founders. Did Richard Block ever get called Dick you think?

Reeking Lum tries to makes sure everyday is a school day.

Very little of whats inside a B&Q makes sense to me, I am to DIY what Harold Shipman was to caring for the elderly but that didn't stop me wandering about trying to look knowledgeable and handy.

I ended up buying clothes pegs. Now while I'm down here plumbing new depths of Blogging mediocrity I should tell you of an observation I made. Alongside my clothes pegs, 100 for £3.28 by the way, beat that gypsies, was the option to buy "gentle" clothes pegs. These didn't only come in a mix of pleasing pastel colours, in contrast to my stark greens and blues, probably a nod to west coast sensibilities there, but they also promised to be less distressing to your clothes. At more than three times the price, they were only distressing to me, and I hurried off to the coffee shop before I thought too much more about it.

The coffee shop because it had an alluring banner draped from the ceiling with a picture of a provocative bacon roll, with a teasing glimpse of crispy rind visible from between its floury bun.

But it was all a massive bluff, they only had muffins and bloody Belgian buns, whatever they are.

I'm not one for breakfast TV, my eyes and ears are still a little too sensitive to light and noise at that time in the morning, so I don't know why I turned the telly on this morning but I wont be doing it again. BBC breakfast presenters must be the most condescending, patronising and superior found anywhere on the 3 or 4 hundred channels of mince we have the dubious entitlement to pay for every month. I thought I had tuned into Watch with Mother on the I Love The 70s channel or something, I expected one of them to get Hamble the doll out from behind the sofa to help explain how to tie our laces before heading off to work. I'd be quite happy to be Chinese and have the government filter out all that ire inducing pap.

My May edition of Empire arrived this morning, the years just flying in. In an interview with Omid Djalili their is a joke that made me guffaw out loud and inhale a piece of toast. Laughing out loud from something you read I think is an oddly gratifying experience, I suppose its because we are accustomed to laughing in company, from things we hear on TV or at a show but when its something you read it just seems much more , I dunno, internal, and because you've worked the joke out yourself without the prompt of dubbed or someone elses laughter it just seems more rewarding. Anyway, here's the joke. How do you stop a dog humping your leg? Pick it up and suck its cock.

Dàn yuàn nǐ de yāncōng hēi yān