The Bedside Crow

Anyway, here's a film of our daughter dancing in the rain to the sound of pork chops frying in butter and sage.

Willa dancing in the rain. from Jonathan Main on Vimeo.

Memo to self: Watch this one again in November

Am I having some chicken? from Jonathan Main on Vimeo.

Abroad is funny.

 

Hey Dad! I bought you a present. Eldest spent the weekend in Berlin.

Dad, you are *so* OCD when you make sandwiches for us.

Said first-born this morning as I prepared her lunch.

No, it's not that, I told her, I just don't want four years at Art school to go completely to waste.

 

Yesterday I made a pizza for each of my three children to take to school.

You know the sort of thing; freshly made dough allowed to sit in the fridge overnight, homemade tomato sauce, Tuscan olive oil, sun-dried olives, organic buffalo mozzarella and thinly sliced Wiltshire ham for the non-vegetarian boy, all dusted with generous sprinkling of oregano.

They loved it, but today the parents of their classmates are aiming to hunt me down and shoot me with a harpoon, or at the very least, paint a black cross on my forehead and drag me behind a horse to the outskirts of town.

Am I ever in trouble.

Dad, eldest said in the kitchen this morning, do you like the two birthday cards that I've designed for my friends?

I do, I said. Very much, but why do they both say fifteen, I didn't realize that you had friends who were a year older than you.

I got the death-stare, the look that can only ever be passed between a thirteen and a half  fourteen-and-a-half year old girl and her father. I don't, she said.

The Ebox-Eyecam

Following the huge international success of the Pony eReader our kids the R and D team at Recession Industries (a division of The Bookseller Crow) have been hard at work building up a portfolio of cutting edge products very much in the manner of our contemporaries Apple. The first of these, we are pleased to announce, is the Ebox-Eyecam. It is a very simple device and one that is bound to be on a thousand-and-one letters to Santa this Christmas.

As you can see it has the uncanny facility to turn the ordinary into the iconic. Here for example, Alanis Morissett .

 

Edvard Munch's The Scream.

 

The John Terry

 

And finally, the Benny Hill.

Super Thursday - How was it for you?

Somebody somewhere pronounced yesterday *Super Thursday* in honour of the number of celebrity-led new books released into the wild that are expected to keep the booktrade afloat until January.

Which booktrade that is, I'm not sure.

Somehow - under the influence of some particularly heavy narcotics, perhaps - I had managed to order 10 copies of St Jamie's new 'un. In return I was given a 50% discount, so that, in other words, I was paying £12.50 for a book listed at £25.00.

In the event I was only invoiced for 7 copies, our supplier apparently having run out. However, there were only 2 in the box, meaning a shortage of 5, and both of these were damaged. ( I hope you're keeping up.)

Later I went to the supermarket, where I noticed their attractive display of new books designed to save the booktrade. The sharp-eyed amongst you will have spotted, I'm sure, that they are selling St Jamie for £2.54 cheaper than I could buy it.

Like the man said; It's a great life if you don't weaken.

Football analysis from a 10 year old girl.

Fred was reading his Match magazine.

Dad, it says here that Andy Johnson might go to Newcastle.

Wouldn't be a bad move for him, or for Newcastle, I say. He would play well under Keegan.

Nah, says Trasha, it wouldn't be a good look, he doesn't suit a stripe.

Because I'm not made of money,

I say, in answer to Trasha's Sunday-breakfast question about why she can't have a new laptop.

No, but the BOOKSHOP is, she says.

Oh no it isn't, I say.

But Dad, that's just rubbish. Why couldn't you have opened a sweetshop instead? We would be billionaires by now.

Actually, I know exactly which sweetshop she means, and, quite probably, we would be.

Because, I say, if I had opened a sweetshop, Amaz*n would be selling sherbert dib dabs, Waterstone's would have a three for two on Curly-Wurlys and Katie Price would have her own exclusive range of aniseed balls.

Trasha sighs, looks out the window at the snow, and then goes back to reading The Spiderwick Chronicles.

The L word hangs in the air between us like the smell of burnt bacon.