Battle of the Nanas

The other thing I saw today was a woman wearing a blue hoodie with Kara's No. 1 Nana written on the back in red letters. That got me thinking what Kara's other nana will think about that, when No. 1 nana takes Kara home from her holiday in St Ives? Or whether they'd had a Kara's No 2 Nana hoodie made as well, and how she'll react when they gave it to her?

On Porthmeor Beach incidentally, whilst the lifeguard hero of the towel wars remained anonymous, I did spot Lifeguard I22Y (that's an I, two 2's and a Y), who had hair the colour of the oil that hangs around the edges of spaghetti bolognese, and Lifeguard Naomi (that just doesn't work somehow, does it?) patrolling the beach.

Sweet Molly Malone

If that wasn't bad enough, about an hour later the emmet mum and emmet dad were playing bat and ball when the emmet boy, who was called Tom and about 11, came up with a massive mussel, not just the shell but an intact mussel half the size of my fist, which obviously had something (a mussel) living in it. He showed it to his mum, then threw it to her and she whacked it with the bat! And then they both did it again, another twice. By this time it was obvious that they were trying to smash the mussel open, and then the emmet girl, who was about 8 and wasn't called anything, brought a rock and put the mussel on it, and the mum emmet, dad emmet and girl emmet watched Tom emmet smash the defenseless mussel with a big stone, like the ape that discovers tools in 2001 A Space Odessey. And then predictably enough, straight away the emmet girl went 'Yuurgh!' and lost interest, and the emmet mum poked at it for a bit before THROWING IT TO THE SEAGULLS! How many ways can one family show their total lack of understanding of beach life? That mussel must have taken at least 20 years to grow to that size, and they snuff out its life just like that. I hope it haunts them or that at least they get a bad dose of campylobacter in retribution for the wanton destruction of a harmless filter feeder.

Towel Rail

I was on Porthmeor again today, sitting just behind this family of emmets. They'd been in the sea and got their towels wet, and I couldn't believe it when their mum took all of these towels and hung them over the rail of the lifeguard's board ski which was standing on its side in one of those special rests, right next to them. You know what I mean, the long yellow ones with the straps that say LIFEGUARD on them in red, which are meant to be 1) visible, and 2) accessible, in case of emergency. Anyway, as the tide was coming in pretty fast it wasn't long before the lifeguard came along to move the board ski back up the beach. He couldn't find it to begin with, obviously because it was covered in towels, and then when he realised that these emmets were using it as a clothes horse he did a total double-take. I was just waiting for him to say something to the emmets, because you could tell he knew that the towels belonged to them, but what he did was even better than that. He just picked up the towels one by one off the rail of the board ski and dropped them on the wet sand! Then without a word he picked up the board ski and moved it a few metres back up the beach. I don't know his name (because being a real lifeguard he hadn't got it written in big yellow letters across his back), but whoever he is, he is a legend!

Anyway, the emmets didn't notice for a bit, then the dad spotted the heap of towels on the wet sand and obviously it took him a while to work out what had happened, but then he noticed the board ski had been moved, and I could tell he'd worked it out. I nearly asked him if he'd like me to ring an ambulance so that he could lie their wetsuits across the windscreen to dry, but I didn't.

I See Wed People

You know in that film The Sixth Sense when the little kid sees all these dead people nobody else can see? It felt a bit like that on Porthmeor yesterday. I was just walking down the rampy bit down to the beach, next to where the lifeguards sit to watch the girls through their binoculars, when I see these two people who've obviously just got married. He's in a cream suit and she's in this big cream dress cut really low at the front with no back, showing off her sun bed tan, that dragged in the sand as she walked. It was all frothy at the bottom, she looks like an upside down Mr Whippy. She's trying to hold it up out of the sand and you can tell at first she's really worried about getting it messy, but he's trying to get her to stand on one of the yellow swell boards that's lying on the sand in front of the surf school, so that they can have their photos taken. And eventually she stands on it with him on the sand, and and they both stand there in stupid Scooby Doo and Shaggy surfing poses that they imagine makes it look as if they're surfing but really just makes them look like total dorks. Then they go down to the edge of the sea, with this big stupid dress dragging in the sand and sweeping up the bits of seaweed and fag ends, and stand there while this dickhead buzzes round them like a fly taking photos. And I'm watching them and trying to imagine what these photos will look like, because standing behind them, while they're posing and looking all lovey-dovey, are all these emmets in the sea with bodyboards, and those of them that aren't wearing wetsuits look all red and purple with the cold, and and they're going to be in the photos as well. And then the obvious happens, and the newly-weds stand where the tide's coming in just a bit too long, and she gets her stupid dress wet, and they laugh ha ha ha because they want everybody to know that's the sort of people they are.

What - twats who spend hundreds on a stupid dress to wear for half an hour and then go and get it wet in the sea? Who get married in the full white dress and cream suit but want to have their photos taken on the beach in their wedding gear just to prove what cool and unconventional guys they are? Hey, and we even went on a surfboard in our wedding gear - yeah, a kook emmet's hireboard foamy that no real surfer would be seen dead on. Yeah, and they've got the photos to prove it. Real surfers would have gone to Bali or somewhere to get married, and then decide they couldn't be arsed and just go surfing anyway.

I made sure I wasn't in any of the photos myself, but I was thinking (in a way that they obviously weren't) while I was watching them that these two have already managed to embarrass their kids before they are even born.

What a twat D. H. Lawrence was

I've been reading a book about D. H. Lawrence who wrote about sex and lived in Zennor. I can't believe someone that famous would bother living in Zennor, but apparently his wife was German and very fat and quite well known around St Ives for wearing really brightly coloured stockings and waving at zepplins when she went shopping (at the Co-op I suppose), and as this was during the war they probably couldn't get away with living anywhere else. She was quite famous in her own right for having 1) been a cousin of the famous Baron von Richtofen, the 'Bloody Red Baron', who was a German communist fighter pilot, 2) for being very fat and smoking all the time and 3) for waving at zepplins. DHL (as he liked to call himself) was thin, had a beard and a whiny voice and was from Nottingham. She called him Lorenzo except in a German accent. Sounds like an ideal couple, ha ha, not, because they used to fight like Itchy and Scratchy and chase each other round the kitchen table and hit each other over the head with frying pans.

They lived in Zennor for two years trying not to mention the war and singing Hebridean songs round the piano until they got kicked out for singing rubbish, having cameras in their rucksacks concealed in loaves of bread and waving at zeppelins. Believe it. And I'm expected to write something meaningful about these tossers by the time I go back to school next week.

I've got my room back at least. And I found a pubic hair on the soap in the shower which might have been Gemma's or Jade's. What would DHL have made of that?

Wuthering Heights

Turns out it wasn't Gemma's bikini bottom but her fag ash dad's speedos. The 's' had peeled off the little name thing, so it just said 'peedos'.

I had a dream last night about Lifeguard Gemma and Lifeguard Jade and woke up in a wet bed. If I was that kid in The Shining who pedals round the corridors on his tricycle waiting for the lift doors to open and flood the corridors with blood, I'd end up being flushed down the stairs, out of the front door, down the street and into the harbour.

Loading Only

I'd like to think I've had something to do with this, but that would mean 1) some one reading this blog, which they don't (yet) and 2) someone noticing me taking down the registration numbers of all the cars illegally parked on Tregenna Place when I go to the Co-Op every morning. That autistic looking kid with the notebook, yeah that's me.

Anyway, the other day there were a load of road cones on the road, which most of the silver 4x4 driving emmets who are the worst culprits had just ignored and driven over. I wrote down all their numbers in my book and took a few photos on my phone. The next morning I was a bit late going to the Co-op because I'd followed Gemma and Jade (who were off-duty, in that they weren't wearing their hoodies, so I couldn't tell them apart) down to Porthgwidden and watched them messing about on the beach for a bit. There was a fat woman with white trousers and a stupid dog on a really long lead that had been shaved so that it's blotchy pink skin was showing in parts and it had these daft long hair bits round its feet. (I think the secret with anything you're shaving is that when it starts to go pink you stop, but this woman obviously thought her dog made her look like Kerry Katona or somebody).

Anyway by the time I got to the Co-op, 1) all the croissants had gone because the bloody EMMETS had bought them all, and 2) the Council had painted white lines saying 'Loading Only' on the road outside. So unless the silver 4x4 driving emmets think that means they can park there while they load their cars with our croissants, that should be that. I wrote down one number, but that was a delivery van to Yeungs the Chinese take away.

Gemma (or maybe Jade) left her bikini bottom in the bathroom.

Product placement

I appear to have attracted a Google ad for Fred Perry hoodies on my blog. I would just like to say that I have never bought, owned, worn or seen a Fred Perry hoody in my life and have nothing to do with this product which my blog appears to endorse. As far as I'm concerned they are shite and I would have nothing to do with them, even if I knew what they were. How come some flesh-creeping e-spider can crawl over my blog and find me, but no living person has found me yet?

Not that I care, because a girl from Bonley with chipped electric blue nail varnish who identifies herself as Lifeguard Gemma and may or may not be a kleptomaniac, thinks I'm hot and to prove it she has nicked my PULL-INs.

Ball of Confusion

I'm sure that Lifeguard GEMMA and Lifeguard JADE have nicked loads of my stuff from my room. They went off back to 'Bonley' this morning, which turns out to be BURNLEY, as I discovered because their dad was stoked when they beat Man U the other night, which made his week (just as well because the weather has been SHITE). All he and Mrs Bonley did all week was argue with each other, well, not quite, as he spent a lot of the week standing outside in the RAIN smoking fags one after the other and reading The Sun. My dad said he said to him that he was happy enough just being on holiday and away from it all, whatever it was, with his fags and his paper. You wonder if they don't have somewhere a bit nearer to 'Bonley' he could have got to do that, but maybe Lifeguard GEMMA and Lifeguard JADE have got them banned from every B&B between here and Bonley, because they turn out to have been complete frikking KLEPTOS, and nicked loads of stuff from my room. I went in there today after they'd gone and not only was there loads of stuff missing but a bloody note on my bed that said: 'Hey Jed we bin watchin u an Gem thinks ur HOT lol' and a crushed Coke can in the wastebin.

Fast Car

I was in Norway Stores a few minutes ago when the two girls from Bonley who are staying at ours came in wearing red hoodies with St Ives Lifeguard GEMMA and St Ives Lifeguard JADE written in yellow on the back. I'm sure I saw one of them nick a Coke from the fridge on the way out and wink at me as she hid in her hoodie.

Here's Johnny

Thing with a lot of the houses in Downalong, right (that's what they call the old part of St Ives where I live) is that when they were built nobody cared about how they looked. They didn't think of them as houses even, just as a space that they threw four walls round and called a room, then proceeded to pile more and more rooms on top until they had what they wanted. And what they wanted was a place to keep things, a place to fix things, a place to do things with the things they'd caught using the things they'd fixed, oh, and a place to sleep. So typically you got these dingy spaces all heaped on on top of another, where these old fishermen guys used to press a few pilchards in the cellar, stash their fishing gear and mend their nets on the next floor that opened out on the street, bring up their eighteen children in two rooms on the next floor and take it in turns to sleep in one bed probably on the floor about that.

There's a granite channel that runs down our street that used to be full of offal and oil from the pilchards, which just got sluiced away down into the harbour. There are holes in the walls of our basement that according to my dad are where the big beams, that had weights on the end to press the pilchards, used to slot in.

When the pilchards stopped coming, the visitors started. At first they were posh people, and artists and that, who liked the look of Downalong but didn't like the smell, the streets full of fish heads, or the living conditions, or the fishermen's kids, who used to throw stones at them. So the artist's 'colony' did what colonisers do, they built their own bit of town from which they could look down on the locals without actually having to get their posh shoes covering in fish guts or risk getting cholera from the bad sanitation, and paint the quaint fishermen without the risk of having stones thrown at them. It's called Upalong (obviously), and that's where all the hotels and terraces of big guesthouses got built when the railway made it easier for people from up-country to get here.

Downalong turned into a bit of a slum, most of the fishermen did what the fish had done and went somewhere else, loads of them going off abroad to dig for gold and that, and those who were left did what most people do down here, a bit of this and a bit of that. Like Alfred Wallis, this mad old rag and bone man who hung around the end of the Digey painting bits of cardboard and waiting to be discovered by Jack Nicholson.

Then somebody had the bright idea of doing up some of the old rickety houses and before you know where you are Downalong becomes full of places the locals can't afford any more. Builders like my dad do OK out of it at first, but (not just because my dad's a crap builder) the work starts going up-country, and they're putting Smallbone kitchens and AGAs the size of a small town's crematorium into these tiny little fishermen's house (the houses are tiny I mean, not the fishermen, although they had to be, because the beams in these places are so low). And all the plaster gets chipped off the walls revealing the bare granite, and internal walls get knocked out to open up the rooms, and before you know where you are there are no LOCALS left and Downalong has been colonised by the sort of colour supplement reading twats from London who don't see any irony in framing an Alfred Wallis print to hang it on their whitewashed exposed granite wall.

Blogging as an allegory of life

Just to let you know what does happen if you try to post two blogs with the same title, it's this. You get an error message which flashes up for just a split second, long enough to let you know you've done something wrong, but before you've had time to do anything about it, the screen changes and tells you the blog has been posted anyway.

So that's just like life really. You say the wrong thing, your tongue being quicker than your brain, and just have enough time to realise you've fucked up in the split second before it's too late to put it right.

Inside the Whale

I went off at a bit of a tangent the first time I tried to write this blog, so I'm going to start it again. I really like the title Inside the Whale, so I'm not going to change it. I don't know if it'll let me post two blogs with the same title though.

I ought to say before I get going by the way, that it's not my original title. It's from this book by a writer called George Orwell who was actually called Eric Blair. It's not about whales, and neither is this blog.

As I was saying, going down the stairs in our house is like being swallowed by a whale. And on the way, if you go from the attic, where it's light and like the last glimpse you'd get of the sun and the sky as you went headfirst into the whale's mouth, you go down the narrow gullet of the stairs, onto the top landing, where you can either carry on down the stairs or go into one or other of the two rooms. If you carry on, you come to the next landing, with two rooms, and if you carry on, down, down, down from one floor to the next, eventually you get squeezed out through the front door and down the steps into the street. If the attic is the whale's mouth, the rooms are like its internal organs, like its liver and its kidneys and its stomach and its bowels and its intestines. You can work out what that makes the front door, which when we open it to VISITORS we must always do with a welcoming smile on our faces. And now you know what it is I'm smiling at when I open the door.

Inside the Whale

OK, so if you were going down our stairs, say from the attic (where I have to sleep when there are bloody annoying VISITORS using my bedroom) down to the front door, it would be just like being swallowed by something big, like a whale like that Joaner dude in the bible.

I see that's twice in two blogs that I've mentioned somebody in the bible, viz Jesus and Joaner. Don't get the idea I'm into all that stuff, but have you noticed how often they crop up in everyday conversation? Jesus is a constant presence in our house, my dad probably shouts his name more often than he shouts my mum's actually, often in the following grammatical construction: "Jesus + present participle verb + Christ!" When I was a kid I actually thought f...ing was Jesus's middle name, like mine is Jed.

Bet you thought Jed was my first name. As if I'd use my first name in a secret blog dissing my mum and dad's crap attempts at running a bed and breakfast. As if.

Let's do the time warp again

I've just noticed that when you publish a blog on this blogspace, the time at the bottom is totally wrong. This sometimes makes it look as if I'm some sort of obsessive nutter or geek writing at odd hours of the night, which is not the case. Just thought I'd point this out to my followers, if and when I get any. I say followers, obviously that's what they're called, not because I'm some sort of messianic freak who thinks he's bigger than Jesus. Although that does remind me of my favourite joke, which is 'Why did Jesus fall off the cross? Because he bit his nails!' I don't believe in God, but I like to think I've got something in common with somebody who had to get born in a stable because all the rooms were full of bloody EMMETS. I imagine Jesus was pretty damaged by this experience, so he probably did bite his nails like Gordon Brown, and get a bit stressy with his disciples from time to time.

Welcome to the House of Fun

Dad isn't convinced that I thought they were Jehovah's Witnesses. Turns out he was coming down the road and they asked him if there was anywhere they could get bed and breakfast, didn't they, because the one they had just tried was full.

So anyway, once you've swung your way up the stairs, as I say there are two rooms on each floor, one at the front and one at the back. The rooms at the front overlook the fronts of the houses opposite - the rooms at the back overlook the backs of the houses in the next street. That's how you can tell the difference. You can't see the sea, even though (allowing for the tide) it's only at the bottom of the street. The only room you can actually see the sea from, ironically, is the shitty attic room I have to sleep in when VISITORS are using my bedroom, like this lot from Bonley (wherever that is) are doing now. Dad made me take them upstairs and show them to 'their' rooms. There's a man and a woman and two girls wearing Hannah Montana teeshirts that are way too short for them and chipped electric blue nail varnish. The man's bad tempered because he couldn't find anywhere to park after driving all the way from Bonley (I just had to take his word for it, but it's a long way apparently), and the woman's pissed off because I told her we didn't have any vacancies. I bet Newquay would have been a lot closer to Bonley, but I just stopped myself from saying that because they might have taken it the wrong way. Which would have been the right way.

So now I can hear them having an argument in that special voice people save for having arguments in bed and breakfast houses when they've only just arrived (which is different to the voice they use when they're having an arguement after they've been there a few days), and the girls are jumping on the bunk beds which are all there is space for because my dad insisted that we had to have an en suite bath room on that floor which takes up half what was previously the back bedroom. He calls it the family suite, which is a bit of a joke because he apparently doesn't see the irony that one of his 'family' (ie me) has to sleep in a shitty attic so that people like the Bonleyites can play happy holiday families in my bloody bedroom. Still at least from the sound of things their holiday isn't getting off to that happy a start. Ha bloody ha.

No Vacancies

OK, let me describe my house.

It's on a really narrow street running down to the harbour. The street's cobbled, and when dogs pee on it (as they often do right outside my house) it runs down the gaps between the cobbles turning left and right as if it was chasing through a maze, like a sort of urinous pacman game. There isn't room to get a car up the street, but you wouldn't believe it, emmets sometimes try to and get stuck and then complain because they can't park right up outside the door of their holiday let. The houses are quite tall and thin and painted white. If you want to look up at the sky you have to bend your neck right back and make yourself dizzy as if the high white walls were closing over your head, but if you want to look at the sea you just look straight ahead, although you have to squint a bit as if you were looking down the sights of an airgun, and there it is, all silvery at the bottom of the street, unless the tide's out and then it's just sand. For those of you who don't know, most of the day the harbour in St Ives doesn't have any water in it at all, which is a bit of a bad place to have built it but OK if you're a fisherman who doesn't like fishing much because its a good excuse not to go out. It was probably meant to keep out the Spaniards or something so they wouldn't have anywhere to land.

There's a chip shop near us called The Balancing Eel, and that's a bit what our house is like, tall and thin like an eel would be standing on its end, and a bit unsteady and liable to fall over any time. There are four or five windows up the front, depending on how you count them, one on each floor, including the basement and the attic where I have to sleep while mum and dad's VISITORS are using my room, which is most of the summer. It's like a child's drawing of a house, if the child was autistic and thought houses were a stupid shape. When you get up to the attic there's a chimney, but you can't see it from the street so I don't know whether to include it in my description or not. I think I will, because it means I can tell you about the seagulls. Every year the seagulls nest on our roof and my dad moans about them but always leaves it too late to do anything about it, but they make 1) a mess 2) a lot of noise as soon as it gets light, like at about four o'clock in the morning 3) my dad moan.

The most annoying think about our house though is the stairs. I think I mentioned the stairs in my first blog. Yes I did, I've just checked, but I'll mention them again here because you probably can't be arsed to go back and look.

Ha ha, bet you did now, but I didn't say much at all about the stairs in my first blog did I? OK, so there are a number of granite steps up to the front door. Let's say there are six, but there isn't. When you knock on the front door, let's say you're lucky and somebody opens it, the first thing you see in front of you (apart from whoever opened the door) is some stairs. Steep stairs, going almost straight up, so steep that they've got a rope instead of a rail. And they're really narrow as well, so narrow that some people can't get their bags up and sometimes people arrive who you know are going to be too wide to get up the stairs themselves, let alone their bags. If you look just beyond the shoulder of the person who opened the door (say it's my dad, he's quite short) you'll see the stairs twist round a corner and there's a narrow wooden post about as thick as the top of my leg, with wedge shaped notches cut in it and a metal ring where the top of the rope is tied. And just about level with where your head would be if you didn't duck there's another beam going across the top of the stairs, and you have to sort of swing from the first rope to another at the opposite side of the stairs, just round the corner, where there's another ring in the wall. That's how you get up and down from one floor to the next, swinging from ropes and trying not to fall down the stairs. There's two rooms on each floor, one at the front and one at the back, and a little landing about the size of a portaloo joining the whole lot together. It's just an unsteady heap of floors held together by a series of ropes threaded through a twisty staircase, like one of those bangles the guys with dreadlocks sell to emmets on the Wharf.

Ha ha, someone just came to the door and asked if we had any vacancies for tonight. Mum's at work and dad's out, so I said no.

Advice to visitors to St Ives

1. The best time to shop in the Co-op is between 8am and 8.30pm, where you'll meet plenty of friendly locals buying the odd pint of milk or loaf of bread, more than ready to wait behind you while you chat to the woman on the checkout.

2. The most convenient place to park during the day is in Tregenna Place, as it is close to most of the shops.

3. Although you wouldn’t risk it at home, it is perfectly acceptable to walk down the middle of the busier streets like High Street, Tregenna Place and The Wharf as if they were pedestrianised zones, and you're sure to get a friendly wave from the locals!

4. St Ives is a pretty laid-back place, so if you overrun on your ticket in one of its privately-run car parks, don’t worry, the clampers will be cool about it, just tell them you're a visitor.

5. If you're a second home owner, a useful tip to remember is that putting a notice in the window advertising it for let, with your home phone number on it, is sure to get you a response!

6. On changeover days, if you are staying in Downalong leaving your car in The Digey or Fore Street while you unload/load it will save you having to walk far.

7. The Tate gives discounted entry to people in wetsuits.

8. Haggling is quite acceptable in restaurants – in fact many restaurant owners are insulted if you don't try to bargain down the price of your meal

9. Jogging down Fore Street in a shortie wetsuits with a foam bodyboard under your arm will gain you immediate acceptance into the friendly St Ives surfing community

10. Wearing a St Ives Lifeguard hoodie with your name on it is an excellent way of blending in with the locals (see my blog from Tuesday).

11. On a crowded beach ensure your privacy by getting down early in the morning and creating a large private enclosure of windbreaks.

12. Talking loudly in a braying voice in restaurants about how much your house is worth will get you respect and extra special attention from the waiting staff.

13. If you want to chat with locals, remember that asking them how much their house is worth is always a good ice-breaker!

14. Surf wax is used locally for cleaning car windscreens, and many locals are happy to surprise visitors with their free windscreen cleaning service, especially if your car is parked in a popular location.

15. If you spot a seal in the harbour shout 'seal!' loudly and wave your arms. They are nature's clowns and like nothing better than performing for a crowd, the bigger and rowdier the better.

16. If you're a second home owner, don't miss the chance to let people know you are, by remarking loudly how much better the place is out of season when all the visitors have gone home.

17. Don't forget that without you St Ives would have no economy or jobs whatsoever to speak of, and locals are grateful of being reminded of the fact.

Invasion of the Fake Lifeguards

One thing that being forced to queue for hours behind the hordes of emmets in the Co-op gives you the chance to do is read their backs. One of the things the emmets are doing this year to make themselves fit in with the locals is to buy red hoodies with yellow writing on the back that says 'St Ives Lifeguard' which underneath has THEIR OWN NAME printed, completing the illusion that said emmet (usually about 12 years old) is a St Ives Lifeguard called Tom or Elliot or Jessica. Some take the familiarity thing a bit too far, like I saw one on Porthmeor beach the other day that said 'St Ives Lifeguard TASH' on it, which I thought sounded vaguely rude. Quite what these stupid emmets imagine one of these hoodies is going to do for them escapes me. Do they think that some distressed woman's going to run up to them and say "Oo, quick 'St Ives Lifeguard Josh' (or whoever) my husband and four children are all being swept away in a rip current, please rescue them!" or what? Don't they think that anybody stupid enough to imagine that somebody about 4 foot tall carrying a polystyrene bodyboard with a shark on it might actually be a lifeguard isn't going to think twice when they realise they are only about 12 years old and from Birmingham? Haven't they noticed that REAL LIFEGUARDS don't wear hoodies with their names on the back?

Pier Jumping - a disclaimer

Just reading my last posting, I reckon I should make it clear that when I mentioned PIER JUMPING I should have said that it is potenitally dangerous and should only be done by people who take proper precautions and exercise due care and attention when doing it. That is, LOCALS who know what they're doing, not stupid emmet kids who don't realise that if you jump off a pier into water about half a metre deep you stand a good chance of BREAKING YOUR BACK and being PARALYSED FOR LIFE.

The worst weekend of my life (so far)

I've jsut had the worst weekend of my life (so far). The annoying kid really DID have pig flu as it turned out, and not just that but first his mum and then his dad and them MY DAD all got it as well, so I ended up (well with my mum) having to look after the whole lot of them for the whole weekend and my mum said we couldn't charge them extra for the three nights they ended up staying here when they were IN ISOLATION and on top of that I had to keep going up to my room and giving the annoying kid and his mum and dad drinks. Great, especially as we've just had a really sunny weekend and I wasn't able to go on the beach or go pier jumping or anything. Talk about adding insult to injury. And mum said we couldn't RESPONSIBLY let anyone else into the house if we had people ill with such an infectious illness, so she ended up cancelling all the bookings we had for this week as well. Then the annoying kid's family dad said he felt better enough to drive them back home this morning, so they went. And they wrote in the visitor's book that they'd had such a disappointing holiday with the rubbish weather and then getting ill on top of it all that they wouldn't come back to St Ives again and they'd be going to Spain next year.

I hope she's going to FUMIGATE my bedroom after having three plague victims in it for the last three days, not to mention the annoying kid wetting the bed.

Three less emmets on Porthgwidden

Ha ha, turns out this kid wets the bed when he's worried and when he woke up this morning he thought he'd had a visit from the ghostly fisherman and KAKKED himself (not really, just shit scared) and I heard his mum telling my mum she thought he'd got PIG FLU when they came down for breakfast and she was dead worried.

So that's the last day of his holiday, and it's really sunny today and the whole lot of them are sitting in the house with him instead of going down to the beach.

Ha ha, three less emmets on Porthgwidden beach today thanks to me.

My Revenge

I got that kid back. I made up a story about the terrifying ghost of an old fisherman who comes back from his watery grave at night to haunt our house and how anybody who sees him drowns before the end of the week. He said he didn't believe me but he was FRIGHTENED SHITLESS, you could tell. Ha!

Annoying interfering GUESTS in my house

OK, so apparently it turns out that one of our GUESTS heard me say that about emmets and complained to my mum that I shouldn't be so DISPARAGING about people who came on holiday to St Ives, and spent money here that kept people like me and my family WHO WERE LUCKY TO LIVE HERE in a job! What about people who nick my bedroom and make me sleep in the BLOODY STUPID attic with the bats and let their BLOODY KIDS mess with my stuff and leave sand all over the stairs that I have to sweep up on changeover days? My mum said that I shouldn't talk about them like that because if I did they'd get the impression that's how mum and dad talked about them behind their backs.

I met one of our GUESTS kids on the stairs after breakfast this morning and the little git pulled his tongue out at me. He's only about eight. Mum says not to get AERATED about it because they're going home on Saturday and he's probably fed up because it's been raining all week and today was the first sunny day they'd had since they arrived. Well ha bloody ha. I hope he stands on a weever fish and has to have his SILLY BLOODY FOOT pissed on by a lifeguard.

why isn't there a checkout for locals only at the Co-op?

One thing aboutSt Ives, right, is that it isn't exactly poorly off for Co-ops. You go into one street in town and just about every other shop's a Co-op. You have to get in their early, otherwise the emmets have bought everything, and worse you end up in a massive queue that stretches all the way from the till back to the chiller cabinets.

Anyway I went in this morning and because it was sunny FOR A CHANGE there was a massive queue of emmets in there, all buying stuff to take on the beach, and little kids on holiday buying sweets that they could have got from the paper shop (McColls) across the road BUT INSTEAD they were holding up the queue digging in their pockets for two pees to pay for chews and stuff. And the queue trailed all the way past the booze aisle and nearly down to the frozen food. It took me about half an hour to buy a BLOODY CARTON OF MILK.

Why can't they have special checkouts for LOCALS ONLY? Then people who are on their way to work at 8 in the morning wouldn't get held up behind a massive line of emmets. What's the point in the Co-op giving out loyalty cards? What they really need is a card that says I'M A LOCAL, SERVE ME NOW!

Then when I got home mum asked me really sarcastically if I'd eaten the bread on the way home. I didn't say I'd forgot it. I said the emmets had had it all and there was none left for LOCALS.

Bloody silly GUESTS

This is the worst house to do bed and breakfast in in the whole of St Ives and that's saying something. It's really tall and really thin, and all the rooms are stacked on top of each other like a game of Jenga, and you think if you open a door all the lot is going to fall down. It's all stairs really, no rooms, nowhere for people to sleep, just stairs, stairs, stairs. I say there's nowhere for people to sleep, that's not exactly true, there's loads of rooms for what mum and dad call our GUESTS but nowhere for me to sleep because there are GUESTS in my bloody bedroom and I have to sleep in this shitty little turrety room right at the top of the house. It's like the gunner's turret on an old wartime bomber, and if I fit my head and shoulders up into the dormer window I can swivel round and go ack ack ack ack and pretend I'm shooting all the bloody silly GUESTS.