During her visit Melissa raised the terrifying spectre of cheese spiders. Spiders of any sort give me a rash but Melissa has assured me that the French (who else) make cheese in which spiders live. The spiders apparently help the cheese mature and when you need to eat the cheese you just brush the spiders off. This is such a horrifying scenario that I have not yet been able to contemplate it without hyperventilating.
However – apart from the fact that you can actually buy this cheese (would you like spiders with that?) it raised the very serious question of what happens to the spiders after they are brushed off the cheese. I have nightmares about vast armies of displaced cheese spiders marching through the streets of Paris. Where do they go? What do they eat? Do they just march off to the nearest cheese shop and join their mates?. How do they know where the nearest cheese shops are – do they have GPS?
Now I am not a spider fan but I think it is not really fair to let the spiders make the bloody cheese then give them the heave ho when the job is done. It would not happen in my case of course because they would not be any survivors – and the cheese would taste of Mortein – but someone needs to do something. I will write to the French SPCS to see what type of rehabilitation programs are in place.
I am afraid to ask what else the French might use to make cheese.
This morning a German man named Florian bounded out of the next door apartment while we were waiting for the elevator and said that he had been living in the apartment for four months with his wife.
Why haven’t we seen him in the month we have been here? I hear you ask. Well he has been away for two weeks and travels a lot. And the people we saw in his apartment? His wife and her friend(s).
Did we buy all this? I am not sure and we are not prepared to let go of the skinner-meat hook hypothesis at this stage – although I admit it does look a bit shaky.
The rental furniture has been collected by the two guys who delivered it in September. Their English and my German has deteriorated since we last me a month ago so we had to conduct most of the discussion with grunts and signs. They kept trying to pack the stuff we have bought during the last month so I spent most of the day stopping them from doing this.
After an hour or so their boss arrived and they had an animated conversation for an hour or so about (I think) the various ways of wrapping lamps in plastic. This got quite heated for a while and I think the boss wanted cross-hatching while the worker wanted to stick with standard one-wrap-overlap. I think the boss is right because it gives better support. I understand that it goes to goes to arbitration next month.
In the middle of this the female Postie and the assistant to the packer’s boss (also female) arrived and they had to interrupt their discussion while I signed for a parcel from David. There were six of us standing cheek by jowl - surrounded by mountains of furniture - while all this business was conducted and then the bemused Postie moved on.
Did you get that? – the Postie delivered my mail to the sixth floor. In Sydney the Postie writes out a ‘you weren’t home’ card – flicks it into the neighbours garden and moves on.
The parcel from David contained DVDs so I slobbered over them for a while and imagined what it would be like to watch a TV show in English. There was, however, no vegemite!
My Site meter tells me that someone from the Premier’s department in NSW visited my blog. The vast intelligence network of the NSW government must have swung into action when their search bots picked up my references to Morris and Joe. I guess they should do this stuff well – because they suck at running NSW. I expect to be arrested and give suitable punishment (Minister for Health?) when I return to NSW. I will give them some more work – Frank Sartor, Nathan Rees, Michael Costa.
Furniture arrived today – the day was more ghastly than I could ever have imagined. Will report soon. However – we now have vegemite!
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