Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

2012-01-27T19:15:00.000Z

From Facebook, which usually tells me to befriend people I've heard of (thanks to the gayfia):

Manhunt
Sheila Gynodottir likes this
Like

Oh, not that Manhunt.

But then it was beneath the suggestion that I 'like' Nirvana because a Buddhist friend does.

Ooh, finally listening to CD (they still have those! Who knew?) a friend sent me (ok, so Amazon sent it, but it's the click that counts), and it's got strings in. #yay #fanofflorid #ohisthisnottwitter?

Except there's the slight glitch that one song gets my head singing along the words to a different song by a different band (and BTW what is that one radios keep playing at the moment that isn't Beyoncé, just sounds remarkably like one of hers?). There's also another glitch that the drive in this computer is clearly so whizzy that it only needs to scan the CD occasionally to get the data, instead of having it plod round continuously, so all songs have an underlying hint of microwave on defrost.

Actually, I'm faintly confused, because this music is the sort I like, and it's familiar, and yet I apparently don't already have a copy. Odd. That and the band name confuses me, although perhaps it's like the hiccups remedy in Sleepless in Seattle, and we're all meant to say "Wasn't it Jonah?"

Anyhoo,

PS. No, I do not use it—have just heard of it—only getting as far as lurking on Thingbox.

2012-01-23T17:29:00.000Z

I'm guessing the bridge over the river the town is named after is the cycle-path one I can see from the window.

So I'm in Pontycrisised, staying in halls (yay, no towels of any description anywhere shared, he said, shaking his hands), with an age-old friend (I can call her that; she's two days younger than I am, and I was just called 'old chap', so it needs passing on).

And there's nothing quite like arriving in an unfamiliar town, following the flows from the station to get to the town centre, then guesstimating my way to her half-remembered doorbell, to be presented with a butternut squash to peel and dismember and then being sent out with vague directions to buy bread from a petrol station that didn't stock it and so improvving my way back into town, then walking in the opposite direction to the Sainsbury's bags (my route, when mapped, does look a bit like a rodent exploring a maze).

So back to cooking in a massively under-equipped kitchen (GA's meagre kit seems to have become common as the other cupboards yielded three rice cookers. The sole capable of cutting knife is about half the width of the loaf. The recipe required every saucepan going, and then some, so was batch cooked and recombined later. Turns out it feeds 8 not 4).

Then unfortunately I thought going to a lecture the friend had mentioned before I arrived might be interesting (ok, I thought it polite with an outside chance of interesting). Not so much. Small room, a dozen or two round a table, and the eminence grise, who, being so fond of his own voice, as is his due [he said this, not about his voice, just his life. Charming man], failed to convey very much in quite a long time, even to those who understood the points he wasn't making. BTW, if quoting from your latest book to illustrate a point, limit extracts to just the one chapter. I ended up reading the titles on the bookshelves on the other side of the room (impenetrable on many subjects and Michael Crichton). And then people watching. Couple in the corner who started off subtle and then, well, I'm sure she was just cold. Next to them a beautiful man, from certain angles, in ironic Christmas jumper (I'm not sure which layers of irony were intentional). Beyond a couple of dull people a cute, touching, literally, probably Italian, nigh on undoubtedly gay, in the architect glasses, with the slightly too frequent eye contact. A bit further up mezzo-cute probably Italian (he was, I saw him at the museum) in the corner, reminding me a lot of one of GA's friends (if you're gay and have been to London he's probably in your Facebook friends, and not just for general trollopiness), so fairly good looking, but thinks he's better looking than he is. I noticed the fairly senior, somewhat arch couple, perhaps in multiple senses, at the end of the table late on, but they had cleared which to people watching too.

[Did I mention the drugs seem to be making me more dyslexic? If you don't understand the last phrase above try reading it aloud. Done that? Hello, welcome to a brain with coding difficulties]

It's not many academic discussions I've been to that have ended at half-eleven at night (I had to resort to subtly writing out "His email is on the paper (HINT)" and tilting it towards GA who was asking questions about as long as the answers to the visible exasperation of the host. Except it turns out she didn't notice either). And it wasn't all that good for her PhD proposal, which is why she went.

Best line: These are unmodellable systems [trans: I don't know]

Fortunately the barman in the college bar, where we adjourned recuperatively, is mighty cute (that no-staff rule doesn't count if they're doing a PhD, right?).

And so to tomorrow, which involved deciding on a list of places to go while GA writes, and thus spending all day in one of them, the WitzFilliam:
- A thousand and one uses for St Sebastian.
- When the end comes all that will be left are cockroaches. And stone torsos.
- Ancient Egyptian Cyberman.
- The perverse, persistent ingenuity of humans makes me cry (that or it's the pills).
- I need to go back, not least find the Hokusai irises they were selling in the shop, but also because, although it's like a small British Museum it's a lot less crowded than there, but does have some true grumps of staff, and I started to glaze over (celadon about right?).
- GA's right; the figurines whichever relative donated to the museum are bloody hideous (though I wonder how she came have the three best seasons).
- Only 20th century humans have body hair.
- Possibly related: one model did have polite genitals on the adult male. Except they were identical to those on an attached putto.
- Rape is so terribly beautiful, or so we are led to believe.
- The world will assume they're brothers.
- The expressions of Ganymede and Leda.

And so out into the fen replenishment, skipping the mooted genomics lecture because GA was caught academicking, and cold and dark and stormy nights are not the best time to explore, especially with a blood sugar level below the water table.

So instead emergency shortbread, hanging round till GA returned, and then watching Aladdin because I needed an antidote to yesterday but thought I might fall asleep in anything too worthy. Except we're both too old not to understand the double-entendres, thus sniggering into giggles at A Hole; New World .

Childishness never fades.

And then GA decided we had to head out for pudding, because, er, that's a normal thing. Turns out calories don't count if there's someone else at the table, and that diets can be ignored if the other person can remember the slimmer version. And so to the student pub on the millpond a few doors down, with a small glass of wine becoming a bottle because the rest of the bottle was free, and a pudding that had a Twix sticking out of it, which is just obscene (and I don't just mean the position of the round chocolates at the base of it).

And so, buzzing, to bed.

The next day we went back to WitzFilliam to discuss things and seek out the missed (guess which of us had discovered more). And so found:
- Turns out the three seasons are because distant-relative-of-friend was having an affair with the man who donated most of the collection, so she got first dibs, and presumably didn't like winter (or couldn't find it).
- Totes a "comradely gesture" (the Assyrians left of the main entrance); they're just very good comrades. Cue discussion about how the modern interpretations written in museums and galleries invariably seem to forget that the objects to their left were made by humans, so beings with both a sense of humour and sexual mores (and a variety of those). Occam is rarely applied, instead what is not sought is not seen.
- The Hokusai irises might be in the shop, on WitzFilliam branded merchandise, but they're buried in the archives, and that's appointment only (they actually seemed willing to help arrange one).
- GA's taste is, despite my best endeavours, not identical to mine. She liked, to the extent of describing it as her favourite, the sub-Richard Scarry thing that's on the right on the right-most room up the right stairs. I'm trying not to think about what it means that her favourite painting in the whole place is the first one most people get to (incidentally, when you go into shops, most people look, and then drift, to the right).

Out to explore and find the signature cake shop has sold out of its huge mound of signature cakes by still-sometime-in-the-morning.

Then a wander up the backs (faintly remembered from the last time I was here, when my brother was deciding he wasn't all that keen on the place. Unfortunately my other navigation point, where I got a tin I still have [some of you will be able to work this out], seems to be long gone, despite being pretty damn touristy [a corner in CoGa for example]. Trying to find it led to the curious Google result of "X, Midsonginterludevidivici" bringing up "X, Cowinriver") and some more wandering.

I liked the parish boundary markers on the hollow lower ground (spot the building on the flood plain) of Threesome College, complete with the lingering 1904 charcoal graffiti. And the stories in the less-public masonry. And not being the cause of the bicycle crash. And being able to read architecture and urban form well enough to thoroughly best GA's idea on which was the eponymous bridge.

And then we got to Potcalling's Callitametre, which brought in a whole new level of like. We went from the temporary exhibition, which turned out to be a room (looking remarkably like a small part of the Vorticists exhibition that was on a while ago somewhere arty; they even had the exhibition catalogue), failed to borrow the key to the sweet little church on the hillock because they're working on it, and then waited to be let into an idiosyncratic house, and that's just the entrance policy.

But, wow, and woah, and I like, and thoroughly approve, and want, and golly, and yes, and can I, please?

Basically a house, or four, of an ex-curator of somewhere else I like the collection, who clearly got access to all the stuff his employers didn't buy. And there's slightly, um, distinctive guardians wandering round drinking tea by it all and quibbling with each other on whether the houseplants need watering.

Then more wandering, discovering places on GA's list of galleries tend to be shops (but it's still art) and so eventually to WeThree's for evensong, because that way you get to see inside the chapel without having to pay, oh, and hear the Christmas Eve lot.

More golly goes here. The building is awesome, original sense, even when lit only by candles (or possibly when), and the choir are... human—stubbly, lingering Movember efforts, ironic glasses, upset and chewing the hem, making eye contact or sitting mute through the prayers—which makes what comes out of them ever more fantastic.

Admittedly the service was a bit, er, old testament, so God from the petulant, vengeful and misogynistic strand (though "whoredom" and "harlotry" are good words), and hearing pure innocence of a young boy's singing commanding His enemies to "lick the dust" did jar slightly (but perhaps this just means I don't go to church much. Lord's prayer: yes, creed: huh?). And the token female reading one of the lessons did keep stressing "ye" because it was an unfamiliar word, which didn't quite help.

And then, because we are two young adults and it was a Saturday night, we stayed in and watched The Third Man, sitting on a bed, pillows insulating backs, on a laptop, because neither of us had seen it. So now I know where that music comes from (and what Ferris wheel references refer to). Odd that those great holes and mounds of rubble aren't sets, but just what the world looked like then (it's almost like Manchester. I would duck, but I don't think he's reading ATM).

And so vegetable stew for brunch for the third day running (did I mention the unintentional feeds-eight thing?) and helping GA with World Bank data, so filling in the blanks in her economic zone categorisation, with occasional corrections (of course Bolivia is in Former Soviet and Eastern European states, and yes, I'm sure Pakistan would love to be classed as Arab World, just as Iran would be thrilled by that description too, and naturally Guyana and Papua New Guinea and Guinea-Bissau are all in the Caribbean, oh and Lesotho is in Latin America, just as Luxembourg and Liechtenstein are in Africa. To be fair though, San Marino does sound like it could be in the Pacific. But she is the same person who in English years ago used yellow taxis to set a scene in London).

Then I get sent off for an hour while GA struggles to adapt her findings to this new geographic knowledge. Except I wandered out of the Korean sector because I wanted to see what the rest of the town was like, found the Waitrose, then the river, thick with Sunday morning training (how exactly does one get distracted by a good mix of muscular and gangly young men flushed in cool, bright air and very-little-imagination Xchanging togs, while not getting run down by their coaches?), and then as swung round, back through town, the sun came out, so it turned into an hour and a half.

Suddenly in, to meet the beau, of whom I've vaguely heard, or studiously not been told much, and to discover the complicated route to their meeting (well, it'll make Christmasses easier). I'd say he's perhaps a bit old, but more importantly, not necessarily bright enough, and seemingly a bit patronising. But it's probably for the best that I didn't tell her that she ought to be able to do better (although understand her self-confidence is probably at the level where any is better than none; her social life seemingly solely ordered in from the outside).

Into town for lunch, in a randomly chosen pub, that turns out to have the same menus as the one next to the house (just checked, yep, that brewery have most of the pubs in town), then off for a walk to the end of the world (except we were just going for lunch so I didn't have my camera), which ended at the first village downstream, and the first pub there, and being almost the only people in the place, but that's because it didn't really imply it was open. The local newsletter on the bar looking forward to the royal wedding didn't really help the atmosphere (though it also advertised something happening in May 2010, so who knows).

Eventually back, chasing the dusk across fields, and then grabbing my things and fleeing for the train of one stop, which handily seems to have replaced the luggage racks with light fittings, which made for an uncomfortable start (through embarrassment over seat hogging). And so to dawdling my way home.

Anyhoo,

2012-01-16T22:50:00.000Z

A weekend in the country

"Oh fuck off, nanny."

As spoken by a child scarcely taller than his scooter.

Anyway, moving deftly on, look what I found:

The arrows! The arrows! The arrows! The arrows! Still the same arrows!

Sunday mornings invading my parents' bed. I don't remember the titles taking three minutes—maybe they did—but I do remember the curious amount of twins and triplets about who die in suspiciously similar circumstances. I don't quite remember what actually happened, but that's not important, right? I mean, it's only the birth of a nation and religion.

Bloody hell, there are 94 episodes. No wonder it was always on (and I never worked out what was on).

Anyway, is that suitably different from the competitive misery of the last post (it wasn't intentionally)? I just saw a comment while rummaging in Alec's archive (mostly because it was there) that was something along the lines of "Such problems I wish I had". Except clearly not; the lives are others are always greater, more important, more significant.

And I need to work on that. Rather than diminishing my preferences and desires lest they disrupt anyone, finding it far too easy to acquiesce to the ambivalence of others (I used that phrase the other day and was promptly accused of being fastidiously wordy. Clearly they didn't actually use "fastidiously", but brevity, and elegance, demands the misquote. That and I can't find a better way of saying it; 'yield' perhaps, but what is equivalent to 'ambivalent'?)

As for wordiness (and why is it that I can do wordiness better than worldliness?) I now really want to post the lyrics to something we're supposed to do in choir (now that I'm an old hand there I can happen to drop it in, in much the manner of civil partnerships *waves*. I must be an old hand as there's someone there newer than me, and who makes the debate as to whether the giant or I am the youngest suddenly irrelevant with his three-years post... what? Uni? College? School? In fact, actual or otherwise, I've been going twice as long as him, so, er, I'm not sure I have a point (so let's stick some more brackets in (because that's how I normally get out of things like this (just as long as you're not keeping count))).

Anyway, choir, in amongst the unpronounceable (seriously, 'pelotsethatha'? Hint: two of the letters are silent. Or even 'tu t'en vas' if fast enough), is this li'l beaut (trying to avoid quoting lyrics because I'm being paranoid, but we do seem to do a different version to most of the others, and the more obscure the more Google hits. See: Northumbrian dish of bacon, onion and potato).

And I really need to work on my French (ignoring the whole reading it unintentionally thing the other day). Turns out "ma tant" is not my aunt.

Et avec ça je vais bid yieu adieu.

Anyhoo.

PS. )

2012-01-13T16:34:00.002Z

A bit of a no can do. Yesterday was the first counselling session. It didn't happen; counsellor needs healing. London didn't happen. Food didn't happen. Sleep didn't happen. But weird dreams came over open eyes, altitude sickness symptoms well below the tree line. Listless yet lethargic, angry yet anxious, so, so scared.

The grating of Brandenburg at four, the comical vox pop pig farmer on the half-hours, the disquieting liveliness of others listening, the moon battling the dawn.

The farthest hill beyond the church is black ink running, blue mist over darkening shade and ivy, golden tan twigs flourishing.

Not now. Now the bald man's office matches the sky above, cold fluorescence through nineties' tint and white gold, also cold.

One apology sent. The not-fussed remain so. The oddly-cares need doing, but not quite yet. Instead hunched, Sigur Ros peripheral.

Need to buy a lottery ticket. As much chance that as anything else.

The future-planned suddenly daunts. If limbs too heavy to lift, what chance eyes, smile, brain? Once more unto the breach, tears from the crush of joy. Brine, my long streak of piss, sliding through the claimed salving, solving, balm of slick oily confident company's comfort. The blithe, bonny, and gay, taunt. Schadenfreunde.

I must not take pain in the pleasure of others. And yet my perpetual inability to notice potential, to peruse, pursue, possibilities pricks, pillages, plunders, prevents the popular pretence.

Style as ever over substance, and poor, puerile, style at that. Message mired in the medium. Should have stuck at Schadefreunde. Blackjack doesn't have five-card tricks.

Hollowness wears thin.

Anyhoo,

2012-01-10T23:12:00.002Z

Of course what I really should have covered in the last post is my tendency to seek out the best looking man of an appropriate age in any repeating situation and assign significance to him which is invariably misplaced and often damaging. Or in other words my gaydar runs on hope.

Yes, I've already done this with the choir, but he does have good eyes.

Anyway, as someone's just tweeted it, record in the comments the time at which the first smile erupted onto your face. It's like eating a doughnut without licking (ok, so I have done this, but it's not pleasant).

And now for something completely different (I'm not quite sure I've understood the plot).

And where were your eyes?

Anyhoo,

2012-01-10T19:04:00.002Z

Sunday was a doing day. A day of planning, putting things into the future. Nothing too big, or far off, just enough to create some semblance of intention, implied possible happiness. Of course the next day a text arrived buggering half of it, but such is life. Anyway, so soon I'll be going to visit the Tabs for the first time since biscuit tin and my brother decided he didn't want to go there (and clearly I need to try and remember if I've given that town a Google-stumping blog name, although I imagine the inevitable Flickring will sort of give it away) and then a little later the home of the Venerable Beet.

And unlike the last time I lived here I'm unabashedly listening to the Chicago soundtrack. Not sure it's the best for typing though; too many words jamming in head, too much finger clicking and jazz hands. Also I'm not sure where the shame came from; given I don't remember my parents objecting to me wearing out their copy of the West Side Story soundtrack. Still skipping anything with memorable 'fucks' in though (much like life).

Anyway, speaking of singing along I got dragged to a community choir the other night. Bear in mind I last sang in public in Year 10 (I got a cold; my voice was never quite the same; the bass parts were 64 identical bars of tedium) and I've never quite figured out where my adult voice ought to be.

Ooh, back to Chicago, it's this song. I know the person who plays her. Ok, so I think I know their faintly insane dog more than the owners (the market was like that. I also eventually worked out that the one who did the urban caricatures was in Hot Fuzz. But then I used to sign-on on the same day as someone from Eastenders and Doctor Who. Such thrills).

Anyway, singing. Turns out I'm quite good at repeating back the last thing sung to me, regardless of whether that's the part I'm meant to be doing; there was a slight domino effect as the altos leached into the basses, as the neighbours drift the next line glissends too. Also turns out that aping sounds isn't the best way know what the words are actually meant to be. The words are on a website and feature no French foxes (ok, it was unlikely what with the whole uncertain South African language thing. Googling suggests it's one of three options), which makes me suspect my pronunciation is about as accurate as French teenagers singing The Beatles (if you haven't encountered this you really should), which given I can get through this with only having to infer 'feoffer' from context displeases me (but had seen another version about a decade ago).

Incidentally is it a good sign if you read something in French before you notice it's in French? I thought I couldn't do that any more.

And remind me never to drive while under the influence of Chicago. Given the general jigging I'd probably finally manage to turn cruise control on.

Anyhoo,

2012-01-07T15:57:00.003Z

Grr. One thing about this whole making up for lost time malarkey, except really it's about trying to compensate for that I can never recover, being with the one who no longer is, is that the remaining one is sodding annoying. Childish, petulant, unwilling, contemptuous, pessimistic, aggrieved.

She responds not with delight to invitations, but with internal fury for the slights she finds in the manner of asking. She just doesn't seem to get that people doing things they do not have to do not have to do those things, so being thankful and pleased is really the deserved response.

She prefers to let life be bad, so it matches what she expects of it, than to put herself in a position, to do anything, that means it might not be. The woman who rails against the arrogance of others, who manages to be as stubborn and bloody-minded as they come, responds to any attempt to be prompt her into being proactive, or even just sensible, with sudden concern for the much lambasted others. Instantly she doesn't want to tread on the toes of others, yet would happily cut out their hearts with a soup spoon.

Life is the poison that swirls about her, trapping her twisting helplessly in its eddies, or so she suggests.

She is become Cassandra, and quite frankly life's more fun if you are one of those doomed fools who do not heed the predictions of the nay-saying soothsayer (regardless for their potential to be true).

And I am become the teenager, wanting to scream for the folly, the parental incompetence, the still grating awareness that parents are not the all-knowing and all-wise beings of childhood, instead languishing as the inept lesser mortals all humans are. Except screaming is tedious and the shrunken house no longer affords the run-up needed for a good slammed door (that and I sort of grew out of it when the bathroom window fell out).

I just have to remember baby steps, despite the absurdity of having an adult do them.

Anyhoo,

2012-01-06T21:05:00.001Z

Does it count as a meme if the only mention of it you've seen is someone complaining about it on Facebook?

My answer:

Now what was the question?

Anyhoo,

2012-01-05T18:05:00.001Z

When did it become the norm to core tomatoes?

He asked, in January.

But still, I don't like finding antlers in vegefruit.

I am going to endeavour to pretend that this was not the most thrilling part of my day.

Anyhoo,

2011-12-30T22:24:00.003Z

Once upon a time in a land far, far away the sky did not fall. This did not stop my mother, who had predicted such, from finding other things to complain about.

And so it came to pass (why is it I can only write by borrowing, aping, mocking the [trad]? And why am I stuck on zeugmas, echoes, lists?) that the depleted family went merrily, if 7-hours in a car with Folk Does Christmas* can be so described, to deepest, darkest Scotland (ok, so it was the Lowlands, so not so deep, and being west of here got dark at gone four, except the counter to that is it was still dark at eight the next morning).

* If this is an actual album I apologise. Think twiddle-dums, croaky singing and tabors. Ok, so there was also the sublime sound of prepubescent boys in appropriately grand venues, except I was in the back and Once in Royal David's solo...

Hang on, isn't royal David's city Jerusalem? *fact checks, so Googles, ends up on Wikipedia, discovers that he came from Bethlehem, although the City of David is in Jerusalem, and then gets distracted by wondering how an uncle ended up with the combination of names that he has, and then ends up getting further distracted by inbreeding (seriously, you married one cousin, then her sister, oh and a couple of other relatives along the way? The past: they do things differently there)*

Anyway, so we drove up, by which I mean I sat in the back, unable to hear and being assumed to be asleep, so dropped from the driving roster and we got there in daylight, which is unheard of for us going anywhere anywhere near Christmas.

And then came baking, and beating, and rolling, and emergency marzipan (only my mother would decide that making marzipan fruits is a good last minute activity. Sorry about the table by the way).

It's been years since I made marzipan fruits, and by fruits I mean carrots, owls, penguins, puffins, a pumpkin and a rabbit. Turns out that dilute Dr Oetker's red food colouring (with handy green top, complete with green fastening ring, so it must have been like that when it left the shop. The green had a red one too) is orange, not pink. Hence the baby Battenbergs went a bit wrong, and the presence of carrots, along with the tangerines.

Oh, and the birds were meant to be snowmen, but having stuck chocolate vermicelli in longways for the eyes, the carrot for a nose on the first one made it look like a goose, and it spread from there.

I still think the clove dust (used, cut in half, for the apple stalks and the tangerine tops) used to speckle the bananas was a nice touch.

I can't think why we stopped making them, given the hours spent on fastidiousness that descended in foolishness.

Frisian, Dalmatian and zebra hills. Guess who stuck that down as a phrase to be included in the section about driving up, but forgot it. Fortunately, and unfortunately, the deep snow that had engulfed, er, GazumpedbyhistoryandahovelinBraveheartton, was gone by the time we got there, straggles left high on the hills (presumably burying the lonely goatherds).

So Christmas Eve was about not doing much, then doing much, then not doing much and watching Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake because I broke the television and got it stuck in the Anytime section (actually that might have been Christmas Eve eve, which would make it an impressively swift conversion from a house steeped in the footballing travails of Celtic to one besotted with the beguiling dance of beautiful men. And what's it say about me that I take "Oh, make yourself at home" to mean "get excited about ballet". Stereotypically Sassenach much?).

Anyway, so it was Christmas, and instead of porridge we find ourselves presented with a full Scottish for breakfast, because it'd not like we're going to have much for lunch (except, nominated chef, you haven't put the turkey in yet, and nor will you until the presents are opened, which being two families' worth will be a while, but fractionally before tea-time is traditional).

And then presents. Incoming this year were:
- A Lego digger, because Lego is traditional.
- A flavour thesaurus, presumably because I once put rosemary in bolognaise because it was one of the only herbs they had and thus the SIL, who isn't good with surprises, went hungry.
- Some socks (thank you, bro's ILs).
- A tie (thank you, mother, and yes, I do know it came free with the Telegraph).
- A chocolate bauble from Chococo.
- Some silicon fairy cake moulds.
- Some Olympic mascot sweets (because nothing says winning like sucking spilt steel, except perhaps the Olympic branded Great British Design Icons toys, such as Concorde, the Mini and a Routemaster bus, all still... oh).
- A laptop.
- A case for it which I really must check fits.
- A collection of Cadbury's bars in a box with a game on (text on a table in front of me demands reading).
- A mini skittles game.
- A swirling lilac candle-holder vase type thing.
- A jumper very like one I had with me, that a couple of days later nearly caused the giver to comment on the one I was wearing, before realising it wasn't the one they'd given me, because that one has huge buttons on the stand up collar, is darker and bluer and thus a bit less of a colour I can wear, has lot less wool and a lot more acrylic in it, oh and short arms and a bulky body. Is it wrong I saw it and thought "I can probably take it back"?

Guess which got used that day? Yep, the computer—to install AVG and tell McAfee to bugger off—and the Lego (see the Footloose tweet).

Later presents were:
- Street Photography Now, so a book that makes me ashamed for being so much a coward. That and recognise things from Flickr.
- Last year's winner of the Costa Coffee Biography award. Filed under huh, until I found it referenced in some copy of the Spectator someone had left in a loo, whereupon I realised that calling it the Costa Coffee award is a bit like calling the Grand National or the Boat Race solely by the name of the current sponsor.
- The winner of this year's Booker Prize.

My brother apologised for giving that group the advice that I like critically acclaimed books. I don't think he needs to, other than for making me aware that I have no idea what the current batch are.

Outgoing presents were:
- Earrings from the little girl at the market (my mother described a grown woman, and a gothy biker one at that, as such). For once I actually found a present my mother liked.
- A wooden backgammon set, because I saw it on the way back from the doctors, in a shop that was closing down, so it was cheap, and I liked it, and thought both my brother and I ought to know how to play. Turns out their chess set has backgammon on the back, but they hadn't brought it up, even though my brother was meant to, because it was too cumbersome to travel.
- Some star shaped pastry cutters, ideal for the Mary Berry fan who did astronomy.
- A rabbit cutter so my brother wouldn't feel left out (I must have explained the Christmas rabbits thing before, right?)
- A ready-to-hang print of the orchids one (a smaller print of the woods hangs in their hall, with the mount trimmed erratically to fit the frame).
- A ice cube tray in the style of Tetris (really I wanted this for myself).
- A DVD on loan until the SIL's copy of Rear Window gets returned (it's been years).
- Two small miscellaneous Lego minifigs because it is traditional (although I'm not sure I approve of Lego going down the football cards route. And I'm really not happy about the new ultra-girly Lego, with its sudden implication that Lego isn't already for girls).

And then came peeling, and watching the West Wing while cooking, and more peeling, and making bread sauce to the age-old family recipe (so bung it in the microwave), with not enough milk, because all the strange Scottish ILs had never heard of it (sauce not milk).

Then came lunch for ten, evening reception for more than double that, discovering that, yes, the chillies are quite hot, and that myriad relations quite like the "sweet like rock cake things", otherwise known as the ordered macaroons that didn't have enough egg in to start with and were overcooked because the oven light is orange.

And judging by the reaction to the marzipan I suspect some of them think I'm mad (and some quite approve).

The next day not much happened. There was Frozen Planet in HD on SkyPositive. I woke up to find David Attenborough had become Christopher Plummer and the nuns were about to sin.

The day after there was a grandmother's birthday, in a conservatory, with the door open, in place with laminated menus and glass over the tablecloths, and being greeted by one of the guests with comments about my father; the same one who one leaving struck out at the other great not-unmentionable-just-not-mentioned. Isn't it nice when the only times someone speaks to you they say things to which there is no decent reply? I don't think it was ill-meant, just deeply ill-considered, a bit like the person who sent the cheery Christmas card which on opening covers death mournfully. I know Channel 5 keep showing Ben Hur at the moment (it's my fault; I bought heavily reduced hot cross buns two days after Christmas), but Christmas is not really meant to be the one with the constant reminders, and expectations, of pain and suffering.

And so home, via the lee of hills (puddles were exploding, and the gantry matrix signs warning of high winds wobbling). It's odd sitting in the passenger seat seeing bits of bank fall into the river, on those parts were the banks were still above the river, and then having to watch the way the land surges and valleys twist to call "wind on" before the buffeting roll reassigns lanes. Then out into the long endlessness of England (I've just about learned that there is a fair bit beyond Birmingham, or even Manchester, but it's the way it goes on even after Lancaster), dire warnings of wind, which was less than we'd just been through, and then the warnings of congestion between two sets of junctions ahead. Of course, we met one and travelled with that to the next; you do get a good view from the bridge over the ship canal, especially if the handbrake's on.

And somewhere along the way we passed what may or may not have been the original accident, a sleek black limousine with stoved in front on the hard shoulder behind a hearse with a crumpled rear. Do you think they strapped the coffin to the roofrack on a police car or put it on the back of a tow-truck? Where exactly does one get an emergency hearse from?

No pictures malheureusement because I was driving at the time and explaining to my mother that you can just press the button and that'll probably work would have taken too long. That and she was too busy tapping along to Swedish House Mafia (it was on Radio 1 because we needed the radio for the traffic reports, and Radio 4 had had You and Yours on, and the presets were buggered by nothing being where it was last time, and so it came to pass that my mother drove through the dark short-cut dog-legs of Berkshire tapping the accelerator in time to Ke$ha, having discovered Heart's frequency was most stable. This is the same woman who doesn't really like modern music, and she considers the Jackson Five modern).

This seems very short for the traditional Christmas write up, though I suppose the other bits either aren't happening this year, or were done in passing, with two of the usual four present.

Anyway, I'm off to eat yet more chocolate; this year's selection includes Cadbury's, Green and Black's, Paul A. Young and Chococo. So far the winner is Chococo's Prune and Armagnac, which was actually in somebody else's present but they kept giving them away (seriously? Diet or not it's Chococo), and I think my precise words were:
Yep, it is that one; it's definitely got alcohol in.
[Pause, then with surprise] Oh, this is nice.
[Long pause, then spoken through closed mouth] Shut up, I'm concentrating.
[Pause, then starts purring]

Anyhoo,

2011-12-20T17:26:00.000Z

Here's an interesting mental exercise.

But other people's problems are always so much easier. And that's how they discovered I could read (because I was solving other people's letter-based problems).

And speaking of problems, I'm slightly worried my body is learning to cope with the skewed serotonin levels, creating a new normal. But I think that's just the base me finding things to worry about because not worrying about things is worrying.

It's terribly odd, finding that winter is converted to spring in my head, that the bits where I actually feel like me happen, and have made me remember what that is, it last having happened so long ago that I'd forgotten it had, it existed.

There is a certain degree of "why the hell didn't I do this sooner" to all this. Not helped by my mother asking if I've been depressed my whole adult life, to which the answer didn't quite come, but that's because the one that was forming started with "not the whole".

That and discovering that pretty much everyone I know is either, or has been, on drugs or having counselling (or clearly needs it).

It's odd what the world looks like when you turn round.

Anyhoo,

2011-12-14T23:00:00.002Z

Ecoutez ici.

I could do fancy stuff with widgets, but two of three weren't loading and even if they had you'd have had to click each of them to make them load.

Anyhoo,

PS. If the wolves are running, do likewise.

2011-12-03T21:09:00.002Z

Um, it might just be me, but the first result Google gives me for the search term "en guarde" is, er, unusual (although, metaphorically, not uncommon).

It doesn't help the species name given in the extract is "hancockanus" (if you've got a different result, here is what was first for me [and now I have to worry about what Google thinks of me that this is first]).

Oh, I do hope I don't have dreams tonight. Especially as I now have visions of Tarantino expostulating.

*Think Iceman*
*Think Iceman*
*Think Iceman*

Anyhoo,

2011-11-30T16:02:00.003Z

So it turns out:

1. That there should be no impact on my psychological state yet, so the return of bouncy, skippy me is purely placebo (that or it was a sunny day, but not as cold as the last sunny day).
2. That these little things can cause increased activity (which it didn't mention in amongst the breast milk warnings) so taking them after supper is not such a good idea, and this might explain sleeping between the hours of midnight and three in the morning.
3. But I'm not sure if the pattern of lying awake hot and with churning guts, sleeping, waking up cold and lonely, with churning guts, then rapidly warming again, with churning guts, means my body was reacting to the drug or just that someone changed the settings on the heating.
4. That it's not just worms that serotonin stimulates peristalsis in. Getting up to go to the loo in the middle of the night is weird when it's not the bladder that's the driving force.
5. That the faint sense of saturation that I got soon after taking it, which felt like having been to a friend's for a dinner, having drunk during it, and then paced moderation is met with a heavily alcoholic dessert, so one of those occasions when one is early drunk, swimming in good humour and energy, limbs guilelessly wanton so staying at the table for the time being, saving face and crockery, happy, with ears ablaze with raw alcohol. Yes, that feeling, which I got temporarily, from a very little pill, is going to take some getting used to. I'm impressed the way that while making me feel drunk it even made my ears hot, because that's a surefire way of being able to tell I'm drunk.

Anyhoo,

2011-11-29T18:04:00.003Z

[Via QI] MEUPAREUNIA n. Sexual activity enjoyed by only one of the participants.

Is it right that I respond to that concept with "oh, I know that"? That and wondering if dedecoambula is actually a word.

One day my prince will come (except that's not really the... moving on).

Anyway, so the title of this post was going to be "goodbye cruel world".

Not in the offing oneself sense (and no, in answer to that seemingly much repeated question, I have not "actively attempted to kill [myself] or anyone else". I'm not sure how one passively does this), but instead perhaps, hopefully, turning off the cruel. Although really it's more rendering myself incapable of perceiving it. That and be able to produce breast milk (ooh, recorded side effects are fun).

So yes, someone has finally noticed that perhaps I'm not the jolliest fellow that ev' there was, and apparently they can do things about that now.

So in a plot twist as shocking and unsignposted as the gymnastics teacher with the alarm clock (well, from the author's perspective), I'm off to maraud the marvels of modern medicine. Except apparently it often causes side effects remarkably like the symptoms it's meant to treat. That and turns some people's brains off.

This could be fun (but I might not notice).

Anyhoo,

PS. 'Tis done. The packaging is annoying, because today is Tuesday but the end one is Monday. This is going to irritate me for at least a fortnight (when I can start a new strip and hold the spare Monday until the end). And about an hour after taking it something's kicked in suddenly. It just went. The light seems lighter but more diffuse and my body seems to have split into my oddly light shoulders and my warm, heavy, churning gut (the churning started about ten minutes after swallowing). The white balance of the screen keeps cycling too.

PPS. Oh, it feels like I'm a bit drunk; the world won't quite sit still and my limbs have gone all gangly (or ganglier). That and I keep getting fleeting, intense bursts of tastes and smells (chalky hospitals, dark nicotine). And I didn't notice I types 'limbs' with an n, whereas usually I'd feel there was something wrong without knowing what. I think I should probably just go to bed. Night, John-boy.

2011-11-27T00:13:00.003Z

"Adam Lay Ybounden's latest album".

Anyhoo,

2011-11-24T19:30:00.001Z

Anthropomorphising: Watching a BBC nature documentary, seeing predators chasing a herd of prey, seeing the footprints that show they've done that scene before.

Anyhoo,

2011-11-24T17:58:00.004Z

Crystal Tipps and Alistair

This is what my brain has concluded the lyrics are to some John Grant song that's currently stuck in my head.

Guess who went to see the film that presumably lead to me discovering John Grant, except it was through unattributing parts of the internet, so I don't know for certain.

Weekend is a magnificent film, if one can use such an embiggening word about something which toys with absurdity of the mundane, digs out beauty in the banal, and then deftly sticks your heart between a rock and a passing glacier.

It's fantastically observed though anything but fantastical; again another superlative fighting the spirit of the film. Just human, oh so achingly human. But it's so gallingly accurate (ignoring the "which drug was that?" bits; I am so much a small town boy) that I found myself uncertain if the actors and director are brilliant or if there just wasn't much acting.

Yet life isn't quite as adept as that, so brilliance it is.

Out now, nationwide, so that'll be four Odeons dotted round the country (name the gayest places in the UK. Yep, those, and Richmond). Marvellous country, isn't it? Do we wish to chalk it up to the cowardice of the bookers or the lumpenness of the proletariat?

Best not to answer that.

BTW, even the Telegraph gave it five stars. The Telegraph. Gay sex and drugs. Five stars from The Telegraph. How good does a film have to be to get that under those conditions?

Anyhoo,

PS. Yesterday's diary entry reads Stefaniishly "Weekend Angel Holborn Lego". I blame LondonDan.

2011-11-23T16:59:00.003Z

Parce-que les nuits sont sombres donc j'espere qu'il sera Noel demain:

Swayed by the power of the holy spirit, much?

Zut alors and such.

Anyhoo,

2011-11-21T22:05:00.002Z

"Not to be confused with Gays."

And there is possibly the best line in Wikipedia.

Anyhoo,

2011-11-21T19:28:00.001Z

When flicking through tweets and discovering that HMS Belfast has been holed and lies broken-backed, do try to remember—before wondering if it was an errant Cory's barge or a Thames Clipper that struck her—that one is subscribed to an account doing the second world war as it happens.

Also when writing a blog post do try to remember to go to blogger first rather than just start typing in the address bar on the grounds that Google will know what to do with it.

Anyhoo,
Ctrl-W

2011-11-19T22:14:00.003Z

Je suis une tad kaputt, parce-que...

I see this:

I hear "bittersweet strawberry, marshmallow bist schoen"

Anyhoo,

PS. Is it just my imagination?

2011-11-16T20:05:00.003Z

"If I ever got into a real relationship, that’s when I would tell everyone the truth."

Except it never quite works out like that. And sometimes I need to remember that thing about diving boards.

Anyhoo,

2011-11-04T20:35:00.003Z

What is it with people thinking they can forbid me from things?

The unsent reply:

Grow some dignity.
---
And in other news, The Railway Children, currently at Oakworth International, is quite good. And I gained a Malteaser there (during the interval the bag was on my brother's coat, so I assumed it was the SIL's and thus faintly all right for me to take one from. Turns out the row behind had dropped theirs. They didn't say anything, just picked up the bag at the end of the show and threw it away).

Still think emblazoning Waterloo Post-International with "Welcome to Yorkshire" is faintly cruel (the dirty, dated undercroft is grim, but it's not that grim. Ok, so the comment was more about confusing visitors [well, they might have come up from a ship at Southampton. Maybe], but it's bizarre how old the new becomes; CRT public information screens?).

And now to wonder if the ambiguously worded confirmation email means I ought worry about post not turning up or if the tickets to faintly improbable thing to see with one's mother (lastminute, rapidly vanishing offer, she'd complained the last time I mentioned going to something on my own) are going to be at the box office on the day.

Anyhoo,

2011-10-21T21:11:00.001Z

Since then I have mostly been outgoing.

By which I mean going out. So not only was there barn dance where I was flung round in lieu of my father, then the applegeddon, and a load of lullabies most of which would waken most adults.

It's odd hearing the songs from the funeral and the thereafter as structured as intended, cascading through a church. I probably should have collapsed in tears at hearing them again, bunched together, introduced with information about their traditional uses, telling us that this one is used for births and sudden deaths, knowing the one that scares my mother (because my father liked it, probably because it talks of places they discovered on their thirty-fifth[?] wedding anniversary, off on holiday together, and despite the complaints at the time, still lodged in the memo section of his phone and my mind of her phone calls, the photographs showed happiness) is coming up, and then of course there was this [m4a].

Ouch. And yes, I now that link rather buggers the ever-guessing who anonymity thing*, but, well, for years it's probably mostly been that everyone's just too polite to point out that Toto has torn down the curtain.

* This was meant to read "whole anonymity thing", but I like the new version, not least for the irony of forgetting to type the whole of the word "whole".

Anyhoo,

2011-10-11T19:41:00.000Z

...As for me 'mostly' seems to be getting used a bit. I know and yet manage to do doublethink. I'll be fine until something nudges me into trying to work out how something can just vanish; I can answer that, but somehow the answer seems inadequate, as if I've misunderstood the question. But partly it's horrific how easily life resumes, unchanged apparent from the occasional bump of a new pothole.

The funeral was... I was going to say odd, but they all must be. Something about being cold and standing round with patronising people one has no idea who they are making small talk about death. Seemed happier than most others I'd been to, but perhaps that's partly because being a son of that box over there meant I didn't have to worry about being appropriate (and not that I counted the box, or its contents, as him; it would probably have been easier if they'd vanished when he did).

It's probably strange to have to the wife, the sons and the brother each deliver their own comment, each getting laughs from the dearly-beloved, but then it was him; not much raucous laughter but often wry awareness.

And then choir my parents were part of (it's a fairly recent phenomenon, but that's part of the cruelness; just as he was getting good at life) stood up to sing, draining half of the crematorium, and drowning us with feedback (microphone at the lectern, which can't be controlled from inside the room, cue much shuffling over and crowding round the coffin, and me nearly sweeping the curtain round the choir while trying to turn the microphone down—what damned fool puts the dial for the curtain next to the microphone?). And suddenly it's happy Zulu stuff (well, happy until one translates the words), that sounds a lot better than the CD (which I was going to be given for Christmas, but then some presents have a habit of shifting, with the vase given for Christmas to one grandfather two weeks before he and my grandmother died within a day of each other—the irises were still going—used for part of the dismembered and recycled coffin-top array currently flooding my mother's house, and the t-shirt I made for his last birthday suddenly turned into a great symbol of him by my mother [my sister-in-law suggested burning it with him, I cried, and it ended up outside the coffin, confusing pompous ex-colleagues]).

Then a bit of God and the final curtain, and out to stare at the flowers you've just seen and greet the endless queue while trying to make sure everyone know what's happening next. And then being hurried away because the car's only been booked for so long and the next funeral is about to come out.

Oddly the tomatoes ripening on the office windowsill on the right as we went in, sombrely, slowly, behind the cheapest of the available options coffin, glossy red against calming, sedate, institutional green are one of the things I remember most, possibly because I wasn't sure it was appropriate to walk into a funeral chatting, and because I nearly half turned to my father to make a flippant comment about his this (and every other) year.

And so to the cheap venue that'll let the musicians play (I suspect that was the largest gathering of folk musicians a Wetherspoons has ever seen. God knows what the gym upstairs made of the massed song. And it's a little odd standing, drinking, talking, eating, surrounded by dozens of childhood memories incarnate (and the godparent I didn't recognise, having not seen him since he divorced my brother's godmother, back when Thatcherite meant they would vote for her [no sign of the other godparents; the vicar was doing 4 funerals, no wedding, and the nun is MIA]. He chatted a bit, asked if I was confirmed, I replied and conversation ended) in what I still think of as the bread bit of Waitrose (down the ramp past the biscuits, yes, it had ramp inside, it was just how things were done then).

I appear to be turning this into War and Peace (and probably the bit about the Masons near the end, given tedious irrelevancy levels), so had better stop, or at least hire a decent editor. But then I had four people come up to me after the funeral asking if I were a poet or telling me I ought to write (I'm not sure repeating structures and dropping in zeugmas, echoes, quite counts as poetry, nor if actually ripping off both Auden and Lear is really an art [yes, I used and distorted a line from /that/ poem, you know, the one, the over the top written as mock eulogy for a dictator, but nicking the foundations of others does make it easier]).

And how exactly ought one respond to variations on the theme of "you're so clever; I couldn't do that"? Because I've yet to master it, having been praised for my public speaking, what I said, my design abilities, my photography, and my general politeness and charm. People being nice confuses and irks me (and makes me wonder if they were at the same funeral, and if so why they feel the need to lie so poorly about it)...

Anyhoo,

PS. Apologies to the person who saw this as an email before I copied and pasted it here.

2011-10-10T11:41:00.004Z

It gets better.

Not only did the bank respond to my mother informing them of my father's death with "you're joking me", but now Orange apparently reacted to this news by asking to speak to him.

Anyhoo,

2011-10-01T19:11:00.002Z

So many thank-you letters and I don't even get any presents.

2011-10-01T19:08:00.000Z

"Like you, waste of a good husband".

It's best I don't cite sources on this, but you can probably guess.

Anyhoo,

2011-09-26T18:55:00.002Z

Think goldfish dead

And that was as far as I got on the 26th [what follows was written later, with many varying degrees of 'much']. It was the PPS on a note left for the SIL. The PS was almost "PS. I love you". The note explained that I'd left, hurriedly, for Notacity, because my father was in hospital and a nurse had spooked my mother. The goldfish had been ailing, and we'd discovered the other two had been eating bits of it while still alive, so have sectioned off part of the tank, where it was now lying, gills still.

The goldfish got left for dead for days. The SIL followed me down, a couple of trains later. My brother fled the activity drenched boys weekend he was on. And so we accreted by the beside, tired, hungry, confused and trying to work out how to calm a puffy and panicking father.

His hands were cold. The skin of his upper arm seemed to have all the strength of a damp paper bag, but at least it had some heat to it. He'd always had great hot hands.

Eventually we were sent out. Talks happened. Long silences followed them, thoughts dwelling, bubbling, expanding, relighting, different, better interpretations sought, except they were there in the words that were said.

We sat round, failing to do the crossword (he'd know which poet; there were always things only he'd get), scared, worn, fatalistic, uncomprehending, glib. Commenting on the absurdity of someone from school and college being "the doctor", the person saving my father. I didn't mention that she'd retaken biology A-Level.

We went back in, two-by-two, different nursing staff deciding to enforce the rules. He's calmer, irritated and mocking the slurping of the mask puckering on his forehead (I thought my brother was there; was that earlier? Time is flitting). We chat, well, weakly, petering out, not sure of what to say, all aware that this situation is perfectly ridiculous, yet is. There's a brain still running in there, and a lot of machines going out of parameter out here.

Once more chivvied out, so "see you in mo". Back to wait, to student sleep, suddenly awoken, but less suddenly than others. They've gone to see him again, but apparently he's not really him, awake, theoretically, but out of it.

Somewhere along the line there's another talk, although this one introduces me to the concept that multiple-organ failure can be a temporary state, things can start working again assuming the cells are still alive; it's just a supply issue.

In hindsight those sodding great boulders of hope were not what I needed.

More updates. I think I got good at napping. I don't really remember. Maybe I didn't get that good at waking.

My uncle, his brother arrives.

They've got his blood pressure stabilised enough now they've sedated him that they're going to put him on dialysis. We can come and see him after that.

This takes a long time. The one from year 8 comes in, shutting the door behind her.

That door has stayed open, even when the other man was held outside, engulfed in tears, the other one in ICU, the grey-haired woman, disappearing before we next passed her.

"Passed away". He is not a parcel before the music stops.

Say "dead".
Say "died".
Is no more.
A Daddy gone.

There's a great gasp from the SIL, the rest of us mute, waiting, listening still.

Turns out it's not just my father and Australians who say "strewth".

Brother crying, mother coping, uncle blank.

Tears, talk, hugging, leaning, tears from her, eventually, gladdening. I fail to remember the line about the audacity of hope, but those three words get seized on.

Hideously banal, and inept, inelegant, and just hideous world, crouching outside the window, a courtyard, looking towards his window, all weeds and skylights and vents and broken chairs and forgotten spares.

Then in to see him. Fidgeting, furious. Wanting to pound him just to make him complain, respond. My brain stuck on "how?". That and swearing. Stupid sod. Sodding idiot. Bugger. Bugger. Shit. How? God. Bugger.

Wanting to rage, smash, tear down this world, in a room built of glass, full of expensive equipment. Do breakages have to be paid for? Including the one in my brain?

I was trying to find something I'd written in an email. I found more:
[These are from various emails; they contain repetition; just cope with it]
---
** Things that have made me cry recently:
- Walking into the greenhouse.
- Answering "3, no, 4, no, 3".
- The girl from college's hand reaching for the door handle (the doctor on duty was in my year. She liked Shania Twain and retook Biology. She's lost weight though).
- Ears best described as taupe.
- Not being able to find the fifth plate when washing up.
- Not being able to find the right swear word.
- My mother crying.
- My brother crying; cue "Mummy, stop him crying" (it'll be explained in the blog proably).
- The world in general. Cruel, callous, cavalier, capricious. It's like there's a whole continent missing and only a few of us have noticed.
- So many other things I've given up trying to keep track.

nd this sodding keyboard is nearly driving me to them as well.
---
It's just the endless assumptions that one keeps finding that are only apparent as assumptions when they're proved wrong.
---
There's so much to be done, yet I don't know where to start on any of it; I can't even quite throw away the Guardian from Friday because I was trying to do the crossword while my father was dying (and of course there's at least one clue I think only he'd know—there always was at least one—and which I still can't get. /British poet d.1965 (5)/ Middle letter probably 'i', assuming 'opium' is a narcotic [I think the fact we couldn't get more than half the quick crossword probably says a lot about our state at 2 in the morning, but I saw the clue and wanted to wander down the corridor to ask him]).
---
PS. Quote of the day, from a neighbour to my mother "Eys mos'ly use [name a local firm of funeral directors]".

Fortunately I was indoors, out of sight, when he said it. It was just idea that one can be a loyal customer of funeral directors (do you get reward points?) delivered in a Hampshire accent. Life is a little absurd.

As my mother said, while berating me for not being witty, I "have a very dry sense of humour".

PPS. And then it sweeps back in, like another tiresome nosebleed, the pain of remembering, the cold hollow behind me to the right. The kernels of tears form, dry, deluge already spent. Weariness again, frustration and impatience. Knowing one day it'll all... not be ok.
There is no escape, no end to the dream sequence, no waking up to normal.

Then there's the whole mechanics of death, brain running as organs tumbled, aware of possibility, but not certainty, assuming, expecting, the amusement at the predicament, the blitheness of goodbye, because it was "see you in a mo".

And then a series of too-long waits, and knowing, and going in to cooling, mottled, puffy, ashen, gormless—you'd shout at me if I were breathing like that... but of course you're not, I thought you were just then, but I was just swaying... then wanting to scream, beat and shake, anything to get him to complain, to react, to be...

How
Wow
Woah
Strewth
Bugger
Stupid
But
How
Silly
Move
Stupid
Daft
Please
Sod
Just
How
Stupid
Wow
But
How
Daddy

I felt broken and hollow before all this.

Still at least the economy's screwed so the death duties will be less; he didn't even have a will; he wasn't expecting; we weren't; another twenty at least; promised my mother until she was a hundred.

Sudden is too long a word. My mother complained she didn't even need to have paid 24-hour's parking at the hospital.

Sorry for the outpouring. Typing is a displacement activity.
---
Sharing memories? But I can never make them come; they arrive unbidden. I've got add my tuppenny-worth to the tribute (no idea which of us will read it, presumably whoever can at the time), but don't know where to begin. How does one quantify abiding warmth, which is only noticed in its absence?

It's all so terribly odd and utterly arbitrary; nothing else in the world works like it. What was constant just isn't (much like c? Though best guess on that at the moment after user error is a shortcut through another dimension).

As for favourites, well, it's weird. Going home I found they'd switched to using Pear's soap, which to me is [Kitchenville]—the loo under the stairs, the 70s hand-towel that matched the soap, the two types of loo paper, the disconcerting way the bowl filled and then suddenly siphoned out, climbing through the window onto the wooden box covering the drain and going back in again before anyone came to tell you off, and all this isn't [my father], it's his parents—from Imperial Leather, which is [TheSaltyKnoll], and the other grandparents. I can't think what is [him] alone; I can think of [Tweeton] soap as it used to be—Boot's oatmeal—but that's [Tweeton], that's both, though mainly [my mother]. Him alone is anything available, Original Source after [my brother] and I started using it, as with many other things, the boys learn about, get, do and he followed.

Am I meant to think of sweets instead? Glacier Mints mean [my brother] to me, Opal Fruits [my mother's mother]; [he] is uneaten chocolate, last year's Easter egg next to this year's still wrapped chocolate orange, dusty bars of Green and Black's, all on the bookshelf next to bed, along with the toy cars, dud pens, tissues, change, receipts, pen-knives, flyers, unused fittings, dead torches, and stray anything-elses. But then he's also the tangled tie drawer that still smells faintly of smoke decades after he gave up, with its mix of the valuable, important, inconsequential and the deeply sentimental (the letters to his parents on the birth of his "brosis", including one starting with the immortal line "I am just to say..."—sehr Peter—or the small blue shoe of an older brother, complete with very blond hair inside).

It's also odd what one finds out (despite the great awareness of what one never will). Turns out [my brother] and I are both replacements. I knew there was [another child] between the two of us—died after a few days as he had a hole in his heart, the type of thing they fix with Gautex now—for whom I was the replacement, but it turns out there was a miscarriage pre-[my brother]; [my mother] told him about it, presumably in the context of inappropriate replies (apparently the head of the school she was teaching at responded to the news "I'm not pregnant" with "Oh good", whereupon his wife hit him. This was in context of the private banking people responding to my mother informing him of my father's death with "You're joking me", which did not go down wholly well. But then apparently that office also managed to reply to a customer telling them "I've just lost my son" with "Well, where did you last see him?").

When he first died the world seemed callous; now I wonder if I am.

Though while spreading news of the funeral (did you know the Guardian operate several days in advance, the Telegraph about 8-hours? My father is currently opposite some War of Peace guy, the person behind rap and the inventor of Doritos; he is not the youngest in his section, but about 25 years off most) my mother discovered that one of the people she intended to invite—a friend from before they were married—had died from the cancer she no longer had, and her funeral will be in the same room as my father's, twenty-five hours before.

Perhaps it's not me.

And we're hoping the goldfish was the third (though that wasn't another pneumonia related one, more ailing and part cannibalised [and then left presumed dead in a separated part of the tank for days because all the humans had vanished]).
---
Funeral was on Thursday. Song, if not dance, and each of us got a little laughter as we spoke.

Oh hell, while trying to find a song a choir sung at the funeral I managed to find my father—standing directly behind someone, so there's only the very outline of him, but it's him—singing on Youtube.

And there's another, with one of the funeral songs in it, and once more my father is behind someone.
[link gone bye-bye]

But imagine this being sung by half a crematorium (after we'd sorted out the feedback; the microphone was on the lectern behind them, and we couldn't switch it off. Turns out dials next to microphones in crematoria aren't volume controls. They are however curtain controls. It's fine, no one noticed, except the hired vicar—my godfather vicar was doing four other funerals, and the proper one had a bishop descend upon him—and as he'd just called my female cousin "[Masculine unconnected name]"—can't-read-his-own-handwriting much?—he probably wasn't in a position to criticise); it's better live.

And now I'm trawling through things (their version of Summertime made me cry when I first heard it, but that was a couple of days after his death, listening to what was to have been in my stocking, and it's one of the most menacing versions I've heard) finding occasional glimpses of him.

And then to the Morris video. And struggling not to laugh. I'm not linking it because Morris might not be quite your thing (and also my parents are being themselves, by which I mean one of them forgot to bring the handkerchiefs and it doesn't really get better from there).

All of which is probably a bit too much insight into this family.
---
Morris: [...] Anything beyond 1:15 is irrelevant (but by that stage I've already hidden behind my hands. But to be fair the shoved guy is a bit forgetful. And dancing on sloping cobbles probably isn't that easy. And they had many different tunes drowning each other out. The emperor's new hankies on the other hand...).

Which reminds me that I really ought unleash on the world the one I recorded the weekend before last (except of course it won't have him in, just my mother and people dancing out of the frame because I was holding the camera at waist height to keep it stable), at [Ruratopia] Apple Day (bring apples, get cider, wonder about the shifting exchange rate, wander round, decide there are only so many uses for an apple, end up being asked to deploy my gaydar on a couple of "flatmates" by my mother [firstly, my gaydar usually consists of "oh, he's cute... pretty wife too", secondly, I do not believe in using crude stereotypes to help assert arbitrary conclusions, although one of them did have manicured nails]).

I also wish what there was left behind of him was the better him. I struggle to hear his voice, and then found the recordings on his phone, except they're mostly him listing the faults in a cottage they rented in Skye. Peevishness is not quite what I want to remember him by, however accurate it may be.
---
[Not related, but in the same series of emails]

(it's something from a very odd, and silly, film I faintly remembered from my childhood—one of those bank holiday lying-alone-on-your-parents'-bed things, flicking through sport until there's something with singing in it**—and which I've only recently rediscovered (having seen a bit, and thus been able to say "oh, that's what that was", while wondering how I managed to miss the bizarre fixation with Julie Andrews's 'fronts')).

** My family clearly aren't good with hints. And I'm definitely related to them.
---
Though the head of the choir organised a memorial session for my father in [Notacity] yesterday, so equal parts casually talented musicians bemusing a pub, multi-part harmonies being sung throughout it, and then morris dancing beside the [Endoftheline] Road, confusing quite a few people (one couple walked up to the pedestrian crossing, reached out to press the button, then stood watching while waiting for the light to change. Two minutes later someone else came along and pressed it for them).

Unfortunately my brother made some comment along the lines of hoping he gets as much response when he dies, which made it fairly apparent neither of us currently would and I don't really want to think about yet more death right now (quite honesty I'm struggling enough with thinking of life).

And I've just been going through the videos . Firstly, I am not a cameraman. Secondly, see the first one and so do not attempt to adjust the zoom or focus, or really even the position and angle, while filming; this does not good video make. I'm beginning to understand why camera crews have someone whose sole responsibility is adjusting the focus (and I need to get my lens realigned so it doesn't slip out of focus when the zoom shifts).

And thirdly, don't speak while filming. My voice is really weird.

I also seem to be exceptionally good at missing the first line or verse of songs (including an unexpected and slightly brain popping version of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks, done to the melody of Barwick Green, otherwise known as The Archers theme tune. Presumably those who know about time signatures would say it's obvious, but to me it requires being incomprehensibly talented).
---
It occurred me yesterday, shortly after talking to a woman who has "reason for absence: family bereavement" on the screen in front of her and yet who managed to drop in a bit about how she wanted to find a rich relative so they could die and she inherit because the rich husband plan wasn't working—I thought it best not to mention having to investigate deeds of variation so my brother and I wouldn't inherit our parents' money while one of them was still alive—that if I live to the same age as my father, as I might reasonably expect to do so (well, I'd assumed at least a couple of decades more, but it doesn't always work like that), then he will have been dead for more than half my life.

Merry thought, huh? I shall try to remember what a small fleck of a hurtling universe we are so I have a better reason for feeling quite so scared.
---
Think over the constant tearing bewilderment and pain now; instead blips of it and faint expectation that he'll be back on Sunday evening. Though my sister-in-law suggesting that he ought to be wearing a t-shirt I designed for him for his last birthday when incinerated made me crumple (firstly, it's not him, it's his remains, secondly, it's still almost new, that's a complete waste, thirdly, he was delighted with it and you want to burn it, fourthly, no, no, no, no, no. I can understand how she got there, but it's one of the few things where I can be reasonably certain I didn't get anything wrong—I did something that made him happy—and to destroy the only remaining evidence of it would just be heaping more arbitrary destruction on what has already passed. A use where it makes someone else happy is
fine, but torching it for the sake of—what? Aptness?—seems absurd and cruel).

And yet no cruelty was intended and if we had not selfish and self-indulgent sentimentality then it would not be absurd. Unfortunately I'm not really an automaton, despite the recent numb blankness, where mostly I reach the edge of tears, sigh dramatically to stave them off, devoid of the enthusiasm to cry again, bored with the tedium and nuisance already, like a bout of nosebleeds.

Sorry, seem to have been fixating slightly, but not sure what else to write about; laughing in the funeral directors perhaps (who had a rainbow sticker in the window, which makes one [ok, both my brother and I] wonder if the other one in town isn't). That and having to laugh silently and out of sight when a neighbour recommended the funeral directors with the words "Eys mos'ly use [Brand X]" (was it the Hampshire accent or the idea that one can be a discerning and loyal consumer of funerals?). Or simply the off-topic conversation about Celosia because we'd never seen one before (possibly plants that represent body-parts aren't quite the thing to have on top of a coffin).
---
I'm not really sure what I should put. I doubt once [sic] can ever quite prepare for the death of anyone so close, but I was wantonly unprepared. I assumed he'd be around for another twenty years before I'd even need to consider it. But then I assumed so much—absence makes the heart grow aware—probably inevitably.

When it first happened and we emerged into that beautiful morning, sun burning off the mist, it seemed as though America had gone missing and we were the only people who knew; there was whole continent missing and the smug, conceited, callous world didn't deign to notice or care.

Now I seem to have run out of the energy and enthusiasm needed to cry. I occasionally strike the edge of tears, but nothing further. I seem to have even run out of annoyance at the endless bouts. Life just is—except for when it suddenly just isn't—and there are things I really ought do yet haven't.

It's all so strange, but it is future and it leaves me guilty for experiencing it.
---
Bearing up mostly; the wrenching pain and futile rage (which was mostly rage at futility) seem to have passed, replaced by numbness, absent-mindedness, dramatic sighs staving off tears that won't quite come anyway. Still crumple on occasion. That and the vomiting this morning, but I think that was more to do with being too hot and exhausted.
---
It's odd how much just cease, vanish, evaporate and be scrubbed out. There's nothing else in the world which works like it. Nothing just isn't. When he first died it seemed like America had gone missing and we were the only ones who knew.

And then the world goes all bright and shiny and fun just to really grind the contrast into your face. Gorgeous, miraculous days drenching the wanton, arbitrary destruction; guilt over my very existence is an odd concept (just as well I'm not a Catholic, as I think that's a prerequisite; I'm think I'm probably atheagnostic, as in I can't quite believe, but realise it would be useful on occasion, but also can't quite care enough to worry about the whole thing).

I'm still here, still scared, uncertain, only now more crumpled and hollow than ever before, and hideously aware the buffer-zone of generations is eroding far quicker than I'd like (dread to think how my mother feels, as before all this she was worried about my aunt, her sister-in-law, who has lymphoma dying [it feels awful to think now that that's who I thought I'd have to dig out my black tie for next], then her husband dies fairly rapidly, and then when inviting people to the funeral she discovers one of her friends from before she was married is dead, of cancer she thought had gone, and the funeral is in the same place as my father's, 25-hours earlier. Life has a habit of ladling it on).
---
It's remarkable how rapidly the anguish fades. I still can't quite believe the nevermore bit—rationally I can explain the process of death, but the answer does make it seem like I asked the wrong question—as it feels so odd. And yet it is what is, and must be. But still so odd, so terribly, terribly odd.

I think we're mostly what we were before he died, just somewhat duller, a little more scared. The funeral was interesting, better than I remember them; still cold and so many strangers, but less anxiousness, perhaps because I didn't have to worry about being appropriate for once. Still bizarre, but awfully, possibly wonderfully, human. Faintly inept (the feedback when the choir started, trying to turn the lectern microphone off using the curtain control, the vicar-for-hire [the parish one had the bishop round and my godfather one already had 4 funerals that day] calling my female cousin "[yes, I recycle stories]" because he can't read his own handwriting), a little mundane (the tomatoes ripening on the crem office windowsill as we went in), but warmer (laughter speckling each of our tributes) and more joyous (a Zulu lullaby, which possibly would never get any baby to sleep, and which didn't have much to do with death, other than it used to be sung by a dead man, sung by nearly half the congregation and sung well) than those I remember from elsewhere.

According to my mother it was a lot better than the one the day before (friend from before she was married, stuck in the same oven 25 hours earlier. Sometimes life twists the knife).

Afterwards, at what I imagine must have been the wake, but no one called it that, there was song, and a toddler dancing, and much talk (including being asked by a man who lives down the road from my parents, who has talked to me while I've been gardening there, how I fit in. But he did it to my brother too). Although some of the talk was telling me how much of a shock it was for them (it's not just you), how brave I was for standing in front of people talking about someone behind their back, and that I ought to write given my natural poetic voice (I ripped off a line of Auden and played with Lear's words [Edward not King]). And on the Saturday following my mother dragged me to a barn dance in lieu of my father (she's not stopping anything, despite have one woman from a fortnightly event suggest that perhaps they'll see her in the new year, and is fairly annoyed at the extra problems not having an immediate partner will create) and then next day out to a celebration of all things apple where she morrissed.
Which is where the t-shirt I hadn't yet mentioned fits in:
[link missing]

I designed this as a birthday present for my father in April. Oddly enough he liked it. Then he died and I moved the washing to his wardrobe upstairs, knowing one day it would get me. And then my sister-in-law suggested he be cremated in it, which made me crumple entirely, so that idea was mulled a bit, tearfully, then quietly scrapped. And so my mother decided it ought to be on the coffin during the service, as a summation of him (Youthful? Fun? Unusual?), which seemed odd to me, confused the hell out of some of the rather fuddy-duddy duffers from his old work, but made my mother happier, and I'll acquiesce to that.

But I'm digressing. Mostly it's just odd how very nearly normal everything is. But it's that slight crack, yet infinite schism, that draws the milling eye, catches, jars as you pass.

As for being not-strong, I'm not sure I have much option; coping is what we do. We're a hardy lot, and yes, there are wobbles, but there is also endless pragmatism (I suspect us of being emotional Weebles).

I'm aware that far too soon someone will make an oblique reference to the vanishment, I won't understand and then I will, blurting out the words "Oh, that! I'd forgotten that".
---
[And none of this is as good as the words my brother posted on Facebook]

My dad went into hospital on Friday and was taken into intensive care on Friday night. Leaving the hospital I did an automatic head count and we were missing one. [My father] wasn't there. And he won't be ever again.
---
[I've just found something sent on the 23rd]
And I think if I ever have to ring up anyone to say that someone's dead I wouldn't be very good; just had to phone my uncle to say my father's in hospital in the manner proscribed by my mother (in hospital, chest infection, keeping him in overnight for observation. Not allowed to mentioned Intensive Care, the oedema, the liver and kidneys out of whack, the heart struggling with it all, and not allowed to worry about it, though my mother had just paid for more parking, which given it's expensive).

He had a cough. It didn't shift. He complained of feeling weak but he's a hypochrondriac (childhood was any cold you can get he could get better). Was on antibiotics, but they did nothing. Doctor sent him to get a chest x-ray. Picked up possible irregular heart beat, so they were going to investigate that. Then somewhere along the line they found he had too much water milling round his body, and that his kidneys and liver weren't working as they should, so they're keeping him in until they sort it, but think it's something they can quickly treat. No idea yet on the cause (heart weakening could cause a pressure drop in the kidneys, disrupting excretion...

Er, phone call.

Excuse me, I'm just going to [Notacity].
---
Clearly I don't do clairvoyance. Except then we thought—they thought—it was something they could easily sort out.

Anyhoo,

2011-09-22T21:25:00.004Z

Just made a circle on Google Plus labelled "Teh Gays". Feel bad for making a ghetto. But there's a common bond (amongst most).

And promptly failed to use it because gay/=avidfansofcamptat in all cases.

It started with a video posted on Facebook labelled "Raspberries!"

I assumed it would be from Thoroughly Modern Millie, before I noticed the thumbnail and the poster (baby being 'so cute!').

I feel like a bad human (but presumably good clapping seal. Not that I think of the respondents to an acquaintance's posts as clapping seals when they start quoting Wong Foo or Lucky Bitches or Heathers or fake southern US adverts, okrrr?).

But my brain had been primed by seeing Glee cover Hairspray (to quote a friend's ex-housemate on the latter: "What is this crap?" which was shortly followed by "Get this song out of my head").

Hmm, how ought one handle knowing something to be pointless junk and yet mindlessly fun?

Oh, arbitrary dichotomies are fun.

Embedding blocked. Boo hiss.

Bonus, because, well, it's just too zany not to.

Anyhoo,

2011-08-30T21:39:00.001Z

Is it right that I watch this thinking about their use of complementary colours?

Anyhoo,

2011-08-08T13:31:00.004Z

So it turns out I don't have to go to do X today due to not being able to get through the police cordon.

Which is a different excuse.

I'm not sure I approve of the entire High Street being sealed off.

Anyhoo,

2011-07-27T19:08:00.000Z

Geitjie

Any guesses?

Ok, so ignore what it means and just stick with how to say it.

Well?

Guh-ite-jee?

Except ji=y in Dutch en Afrikaans*. So that makes:

Guh-ite-y

Unless the first couple of vowels are one syllable, which would make it:

Guyt-y or Gayt-y

Which is almost there. Except the consonants are wrong. Because in this case g=h (well, I think it's a -gh or -ch as in loch or Cruquiusweg), but I can only hear the aitch.

Oh, and t=k as in what is this, I don't even.

Yep, dat woord op die top is pronounced something along the lines of "hike-y".

Seriously, hiké?

You learn something new every day. Not all of it encouraging, my little treasure balls.

It's probably best not to ask why someone called me a geitjie-kind (and thank God they didn't call me "boy" instead of "child").

And the next time some American complains about "Britisher" spelling I shall refer them to Dutch (or Afrikaans).

The other options for lizard according to Google are: akkedis, hagedis & koggelmander.

The first two are the same word. Hark-at-this.

So g is h except when it's k. And the vowels are sometimes h too. And t is sometimes k. And ji is sometimes y, sometimes é and sometimes silent (the reason boy/seuntjie/zirnk would have made me cry).

Anyhoo,

* Turns out I was thinking of ij. Still reasonable to think -jie is -gee or -ee or -eye.

2011-07-25T19:50:00.000Z

Was about to be publicly indignant about fudge.

Bought some "Devonshire Made Confectionery Home Made Home Made Clotted Cream Fudge" from a shop in Croyde. Got home, which is very not Croyde, to find the best before date is apparently a week before I bought. Cue mentally composing witty but derisive tweet about buying food from somewhere called The Old Cream Shop/in a package that makes use of Comic Sans. While typing that date into Twitter thought that 17/7/11 looks a bit palindromic if you're a bit dysexic [typo, but, er, moving swiftly on] and wondering why I hadn't noticed earlier, and then went to check the address of the makers and the ingredients for further mocking material, when I happened to notice the reason for the not originally spotting the palindromedary.

I'm not sure whether I'm happier to know that the fudge isn't a bit stale because it will remain incorruptible for an entire year. Turns out it uses palm oil instead of butter, hence the not-going-off-ness.

Note to self: in future, when a package talks about the product "using a traditional family recipe handed down through the years" remember that two is plural.

And this is the view where it is made.

Um, yeah, so I think the best thing to come out of the Teignmouth probably still is Muse.

Anyway, Croyde fun. Didn't surf. Didn't swim. Stood taking pictures of patterns in the waves around my feet and climbing hills because they were there.

Anyhoo,

2011-07-19T21:16:00.002Z

It is good sign if you nearly tell the "baby milk" beggar (and possible crack addict) that she's looking well today?

Because she was. Although I'm surprised her baby's not on solids yet, given how long she's been jumping in front of strangers and telling them she needs £2.49 to buy baby milk. Unless of course she's had another baby, but if so then she's shifted the baby-weight remarkably well, although she can't have put much on because I don't remember her showing. I am a bit surprised the price of the formula hasn't gone up, but maybe they've just shrunk the tins a bit, or she's switched brands.

As I made my excuses and left she shouted after me "I like your hairstyle. Where you from? Israel?"

Answer came there none because, well, where does one start?

It was almost as good as being asked while on the stall selling myownwork, which tends to be a bit light on people, and which tends to be taken by me, a child of the eighties, if I had anything of The Beatles.

1. I probably wasn't capable of operating a camera when the first of them died (but I'd have probably be able to ~~chew~~ gum the strap).
2. While there is a slight overlap between all four being extant and me being likewise, they had been disbanded for some while by this stage.
3. Just generally, what the hell are you on? Baby formula?
4. Seriously, you think I look old enough to have seen The Beatles live? I'll have you know that someone earlier in the day assumed I was 19 or 20; people often assume I was born after Back to the Future. I think they mistake ineptitude for inexperience.
5. Unless they're shiny I probably won't have taken a photograph of them anyway. Also they're people, and they move, and those of you with Facebook or Google+ access will know I'm not all that great with moving subjects.

Anyhoo,

2011-06-28T22:15:00.005Z

Landlord annoyances.

Just been asked pointedly if I know where the bags for the recycling bin are (er, yes, because I was the one who brought them up from outside). Because I put stuff in the recycling bin when there wasn't a bag in there. Except the lid was on it, and there was other stuff in there, but clearly it's my fault his guest disrupted his system.

And then he asked me if I enjoyed the meal the other night. Blank face ensues. Oh, you mean the leftovers? The spoonful of bits of burnt garlic and the fillet of miscellaneous, very deceased fish (I saw the Morrisson's Value packet, so don't pretend you know) no wider than my thumb and about as long, so basically a single fish finger sans breadcrumbs. That one? The one I already thanked you for? And which was conspicuously not a sumptuous repast? Although what you left for the other flatmate apparently was? I have got the right one, haven't I?

Well, if we're doing by-the-ways, did you see I'd added those pictures [you forced me into taking*]? Yes, those. Oh, I see, now you suddenly lose interest in talking to me. You "don't mind". What does that even mean in this context? You treat me as a free event photographer, and can't even thank me for that? You've suggested I'm being paid in hospitality, in my own home [which I pay you, profitably, for], often with things I provide, and yet at every stage I get half the amount you dole out to anyone else, the charred tag-ends, because I'm just make-weight, making up the numbers, just there to document from the outside and keep quiet? What, you think equality would distract me from the pro-bono work? You expect me to bugger off entirely for half the day when it's one of the many gatherings you throw at which you don't need my services, make comments about the way I never have anyone round, yet when I do you decide that now is a really great time to need help to set the mousetraps, break bits of the kitchen to show how badly made it is, turn the oven off to save energy and scour that baking dish (by the way, it was non-stick and it's still not clean)? That or come in and sit on people.

* Yes, I know they're not very good, but you expect perfect rendition in candlelight without anything so disruptive as a flash, of people who treat me with patronising disdain and so who generally don't display their best side in front of my camera, and you sulk when the edited results aren't on Facebook by the time you're going to bed?

Well, screw you**. Except it's probably your expectation that I would that's made you like this.

** Except I do need somewhere to live, and the other guy's nice, and house-hunting is hell even when you have proof of a fixed and significant income.

Ho hum.

Anyhoo,

2011-06-27T20:40:00.002Z

Et maintenant mon, euh, landlord et sa nièce est dans la cuisine. Ils parlent en français avec beaucoup des rires. J'entre. Il y a silence. Il y a une remarque. Il y a des rires. Mais je la comprends. Je n'aime pas mon landlord.

If you're going to talk about someone behind their back in front of them in a foreign language do try to pick one they've never learnt, however badly. You managed it perfectly well with the stray Italians you picked in the street and then let sprawl for days.

Except that's not such a good thing. Even with the other flatmate there's a sudden silence aborting the laughter when they hear my door or the stairs creak, as both suddenly remember they have things to do.

The only good thing about to paranoia is when it is.

Anyhoo,

2011-06-27T19:47:00.000Z

Seriously?

According to this the maximum rent for where I live is £85 a week. Trundle over to Gumtree. Stick in "Max £85 pw", tick "Borough Where I Live", await expectantly.

Apparently I can get a half-day share of a photography studio, some ambiguously described desk-space, a self-storage unit or parking space. There is one bedroom listed*, in which a shared bed is mentioned, along with other requests.

Widening the net a little and I can find somewhere on at £83 pw, in... oh wait, that's over the border in the next LHA rate area, which doesn't even pay £85 pw.

Who the hell came up with this? Apparently someone who concludes that Kennin'tun is Cla'am is Ca'fo'd.

* Oh, so it turns out I was in the wrong section. But even so, my rent, which is cheap even for a not-wholly salubrious area (don't worry, I've never shopped in that place round the corner where those people got shot, and I wouldn't be seen dead in KFC [hopefully]), is still above what I am entitled to (unless I stick a camp stove in the corner, above a bucket, in which case I can get £100 more).

Checking the proper section and it's single rooms in places (where?) famous from the news, with storage over the bed, where to open the window you'd have to have half-stand and half-kneel on the bed because there's only room for one leg down there, oh, and the edge of the door frame is in shot, possibly to help block those dark fractal patterns on the wall. And this too is over the housing-rate border.

All of which probably is in response to having some guy, while swearing at me and threatening to hit me at the market yesterday (don't ya just love the general public?), call me a "little rich kid".

And then my mother, while talking about making use of the free travelcard that comes with the tickets to beach volleyball, on the subject of over-travelled-tiredness-induced waning attention, happened to mention that falling asleep was possible because they're not all women playing. And then she remembered.

Yep, today was the day my mother forgot.

I would have protested that it's about the gamesmanship and I'm not like that, but there is the whole watching rugby not football because of the thighs thing and I was at the time envisaging Top Gun-esque scenes.

The betting that they play music over the PA? And that that music is Loggins? I'm going for totes.

After chasing ~~rainbows~~ sunsets one of life's little joys: playing with the boys.

Anyhoo,

2011-06-08T17:19:00.003Z

Passing schoolboy on the topic of my jumper, unbidden: That makes you look gay.

I didn't have time to point out that if he'd been a minute earlier he would have just seen me kissing a man, which I think is more likely than knitted material to make me look gay. I mean, as indicators go homosexual PDAs probably beat clothing from Gap (I thought it was Uniqlo, but that's the moth-eaten one. Now unnecessarily trying to divine respective gaiety quotients [are we counting staff?] and unsurprisingly failing).

Anyhoo,

2011-06-07T19:26:00.001Z

I wander'd thinking silent memories
a thousand beautiful mirror s cloud ed

This thought brought to you by the available words of Londondan's fridge poetry. I went to watch a film at his and somehow failed to do so, instead helpfully pointing that Corfu is not in the Cyclades and it's not even in the Aegean (there was holiday bookage going on [and probably still ongoing] and an errant database entry. Well, Something Ioannis and Ioannis Something are quite similar in the way that Ottery St Mary is to St Mary Mead).

Anyhoo,

2011-05-31T21:38:00.009Z

Awesome people hanging out together

Sponsored by Marlboro.

Unrelated picture content brought to you by Indecisiveness.

Anyhoo,

PS. Appearance in this post does not explicitly imply awesomeness.

2011-05-29T21:14:00.004Z

Mouseover true in 17 steps.
Mouseover true in 15 steps.
Mouseover true in 19 steps.

That enough iterations yet?

Anyhoo,

2011-05-25T19:10:00.001Z

"I suppose you are really"

Anyhoo,

PS. Except by combining the two I now except someone to swivel on their stool to face a side camera and utter a single word...

2011-05-16T18:53:00.000Z

For all the Michael Jackson fans:

For those who were not amused (and if 29 seconds in doesn't tweak the edges of a smirk on your face good luck with that at 1m07s):

For all the rest of you:

Anyhoo,

2011-05-06T21:49:00.002Z

Perhaps the options should have been:
Yes, please do away with FPTP.
No, I detest change as it is unconstitutional.
No, I would go with the option just above, but I object to the use of the un-British word 'unconstitutional'.
No, I like the word 'disenfranchised'; it's fun word to say.
No, electoral reform is for little countries.
No, I do not like some current politicians.
No, the paper told me say this.
No, I do not wish to have this referendum.

Then we would have had fair and accurate response—a clear mandate—from the electorate.

Anyhoo,

PS. 100% of those I follow on Twitter who mentioned it were for AV/reform, and about 80–90% of the same on Facebook. I think I have a sampling error.

2011-04-30T19:45:00.003Z

Skip to one minute in. Did you see it the way I see it, even though I'm not sure what it is I'm seeing? Maybe it's me. Maybe it's something in there, shining.

Anyhoo,

2011-04-25T21:44:00.004Z

One day I'll speak.

Drifted by a conversation, heard the content, didn't stay long.

How does one react to [over]hearing someone declare that gay people looking after children "is not right", that "freedom's gone too far" and that "if they tried that anywhere else they'd be shot".

Someone countered that it was better that children were looked after than not. The main proponent argued that even if the gay people don't harm the children, putting children with them would be harmful because the children would be bullied, society would reject them, so it ought not be allowed.

I left at this point, when it was obvious that no one was going to challenge this.

I oughtn't have done. I should have stayed, and argued, and pointed out that continuing to maintain such a caustic, vindictive society is directly harmful to children—to any that discover themselves to be gay, or to any that are perceived to be—and so in his, well, I would say status-quo model, except it's not really the status-quo, not as it has been for a long time, not as it really has been since pretty much forever, because, well, life always provides the exceptional, that this model harms three sets of children; the gay, the thought to be, and the missing out on a better life.

I ought to have pointed out that in saying that gay people are not to be trusted with children, for whatever reason, he is declaring one part of humanity to be lesser mortals, untermenschen, and that such a trope really hasn't worked out well in the past.

It's self-perpetuating. All are equal, but saying some are more equal than others, and those that are less equal are only so to save them and their kin from the ills of society, means that society is confirmed in its ills. The salvation is condemnation.

Besides which did you never get to that thing about the sins of the father? Oh, sorry, yours is later edition; less New Testament, more Deuteronomy.

But then what did I expect but inept solipsism from someone who uttered the phrase "no disrespect". It's "with the greatest respect" for those who don't even know they don't mean it. It's a "no homo" flag, a signal of cravenness. It's "not being racist, but..."

But then I think people who use the phrase "I'm not being funny" usually are—frequently both senses—although often don't care to know it.

Anyhoo,

2011-04-18T17:36:00.003Z

Did you wear it to that funny thing? That what do you call it? I want to call it that registry office contract, a civil contract. They can call it a wedding—they think it's a wedding—but it's not.

She chose not hear me querying her use of "funny thing".

And in other news, I've just noticed that the Yes to AV letter gives my address as:
Forename Surname
Top
## Residential Road
London

Anyhoo,

2011-04-09T13:21:00.002Z

Um...

So it turns out I've got quite good at posting infrequently, and by posting I mean writing two thirds of a past then just leaving it as a draft. Permission to have a sort of amnesty? Except I don't know who I'm asking permission from as I long ago gave up looking at the stats for this site (when one has stats for work sites and spin-off not-work sites but which actually lead to income [of a sort; think of a deep contraction of my real name and bung that in Google along with a colour and liquid trapping a gas], well, seeing I've had a visitor from Guyana who came here after Googling "cow parsley prawns" or some such pretty much undergoes desire-wanage. No one intentionally comes now so there's no point paying attention to whether anyone does or even preparing content in case someone should; may as well turn the whole colour-scheme grey, install a raccoon and claim there are gardens somewhere out there under it all).

But on the off-chance, look out for things appearing in the archive.

Anyhoo,

2011-04-05T19:50:00.002Z

One problem with the whole lapsed anonymity thing is that is it absurdly hard to find anywhere to vent. Here only suffices because I think it's been forgotten about.

For my father's birthday I gave him a t-shirt. This led to my parents viewing the site on which my designs are sold. Nothing disastrous so far. Then my mother rings and while talking about a whole load of other things happens to mention that one of the designs is wrong, as 'gay' should be in capitals, because otherwise it means "en fête". This from a woman who days earlier was mocking the BSE effect of the Daily Mail on some acquaintances (it makes them bovine and makes their brains rot).

Presumably my father's birthday is not the time to reduce his wife to tears over the phone.

Whenever I think it's fine there's always something I'm told I need to change about me, about something I do or have done. I would say it's as regular as clockwork, except it's not at all, and that's half the pain of it. It's like the game; suddenly it exists again and you just lost.

So how does one gently suggest to a parent that one might like to nudge one's spelling out of the seventeenth century, which after ALL was the laſt TIME that anyone ſane uſed ERRONEOUS capitaliſation?

Unless of course we're back to that backronym/club.

Which I think we are.

Oh JOY.

Why must killing these canards be so canard?

Bonus point to the person who can find the source of that joke.

Anyhoo,

2011-03-09T10:56:00.004Z

Jumping on my parents' bed, spinning in mid-air, one of my mother's skirts billowing around me, scarf streaming from my head. The inevitable angry challenge. The protests, with reasons; I wasn't damaging it, you weren't using it. Perhaps "But I like the way it moves" wasn't the best answer to give.

Playing with her underused make-up. The struggle for balance; trying to see both eyes closed. The weird shifts in emphasis, when I hadn't know there was emphasis at all. The quivering of eyes, and skin that won't stay still.

The teds. They were my toys. Men and women, boys and girls, all stuffed as dogs, pandas, geese. Occasionally they'd flip, the heretofore males becoming females, but that's because my brother's were male so mine had to be female. And if they were female you could make them hats and clothes to wear as they drove round in tissue-box cars (and had car chases and crashed them, repeatedly, so the cameras could get different angles).

It's odd how some of the names stuck. New York, in the t-shirt, started off male then switched. Brown Ted, who was nice, and had series of gowns rigged from fabric scraps. Koala, the Stieff with oft rebuilt hands and feet, later crowned Queen (because she was only slightly too big for the Fisher Price car park that became the palace), when she wasn't Inspector Koala (to the theme tune to Inspector Gadget, but I never realised this). Doggles, one of my brother's. Jammy, a panda, the name being a pun two nicknames for police cars (he was my brother's; his sister was mine, but I can't remember her name). June, a blue and white scrunchy feeling thing I won in a raffle at school (I chose the teddy bear—are you sure you want to choose that?—in front of the whole school over various other boring things; I kept winning things in that raffle. The name is because she was won in June). There were a lot more, but I can't remember them.

Called "gay", called "queer", called "cissy", called "nancy", called "ponce", called "poofter", called "bent", called "faggot", called others, the words lost, the meaning kept. Always denied it. It was bad, I was not, so I couldn't have been. But then I denied being a virgin in year 7 because I was asked if I was one by the same people who asked if I was gay. I didn't know what it meant, but if they were asking it had to be something bad, so it wasn't something I wanted to be, or wanted to admit to being, so I denied it.

Pick a name at random from a class-list whittled down to the most suitable options, having crossed off any I've already decided to fancy in the last two years. Wait for the usual secret Valetine's post to be set up. Make a card and send to the dullest girl in school. Sit back and await the joy as she works out who sent it, realising of course it's the person she wants it be, who in hindsight would be the one I'd like to send me a card.

I just Googled; he—the beautiful boy, happy, charming, indulgent and carefree—is an accountant. Still beaming from his Linkedin page, but still an accoutant. Married. Has Cowfish as a Facebook friend. And the one whose father designed jet engines, whose life had kinks I wasn't supposed to know about, who lost a tooth against the playground wall, is now an army captain.

It's very odd, galling almost, realising the subjects of early infatuation, the lionised, idolised, fêted and nigh-on sacred, those who left in 3D—are left in 3D—are just this or just that. They might not have feet of clay, but they are standing in it.

Anyhoo,

PS. Turns out I've done this before.

PPS. This post triggered by BTW.

2011-03-08T23:06:00.001Z

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

---
I have no idea where I was going with this, other than a general should-know and ooh-new-words.

Anyhoo,

2011-02-20T15:53:00.002Z

Catkins dangling like a thousand earrings or cum skeins.

2011-02-08T20:31:00.003Z

Music:
Covers heavy for some reason.

James Blake - Limit to Your Love

Feist Original

Sam Tsui - Hold it Against Me

C'est tout pour maintenant.

Anyhoo,

2011-01-20T23:54:00.006Z

Am I a bad person?

Friend request appears on Facebook from someone who I've always found slightly standoff-ish (though she probably thinks that of me), who I'm pretty damn sure dropped me from her Facebook friends a while ago, and my immediate response is to wonder if it's worth Googling to find out if her company is laying people off.

Or am I just a tragically maladjusted person incapable of understanding that someone might add me on Facebook simply because they like me?

Though I wouldn't have thought she knows me well enough to like me. And our greatest contact came when we were working on a project together, which meant she spent each night overwriting the day's work and then on the last day decided there was something crucial needed and so I was nominated to go out until I found it, which only took up most of the rest of the day.

Yep, I think she definitely likes me.

Anyhoo,

PS. Totes craven: added, filtered.

2010-12-07T18:46:00.002Z

Divine, divine.

Anyhoo,

PS.

2010-12-03T22:37:00.004Z

Palm reading graffiti
Optimist, deep down.
Good at communication
A spiral on the end of my ring finger means I'm highly creative
A couple of relationships, one hard to get over.
Intelligent
Very changeable period, settles in a year and half.
---
What one does when it's cold and snowing, and there's no one to sell to. It was the first time I've had someone read my palm (actually that's not true, but it was the first time by someone who makes their living from it [rather than someone who can't quite remember it all and two-thirds of the way through wonders if she's meant to be reading the other hand).

So other than getting bits of my hand coloured in for free, I... didn't learn much that couldn't already be deduced from my presence there. And kept slightly quiet on the guesswork bits when they went wrong.

Still, it was something to do that wasn't shivering.

Anyhoo,

2010-10-31T20:00:00.003Z

Late wedding present baby ferrets from £25
driving over apples
Wife! Where is wife? Twat.
---
The above was the foundation of a post about a wedding. A garden centre we passed was selling ferrets. The B&B we stayed in was down a farm track, with feral apples cobbling the lane, over which the locals drove. The last is a series of quotes from someone who magnetised assembled jaws and eyebrows with matched polarity. No mention was made above of how to pluralise kir royale; the anglo kir royales, the Franglais kirs royale or the full-blown kirs royales? Or should one just declare them to be sheep and so innumerable? Perhaps the last given the frequency of top-ups; I failed to keep count.

Anyway, two friends married. And I was actually invited. And there were pumpkins and toffee apples* at the reception. I think I approve of my friends.

* Ok, white chocolate apples, but I'm choosing to remember the inspiration, not the rather insipid outcome.

Oh and finding the great outdoors thing still exists was quite good, even if the milkiness of a cow's eye does disturb me.

But all that seems so long ago now, a whole couple of seasons.

Anyhoo,

2010-10-24T09:55:00.005Z

Eek, it's nearly the wedding and I still haven't done the stag do (blogdone, not lifedone you understand).

And so it came to pass that I found myself on a coach to MattDamon'smouth (because early organisation didn't really happen and the coach was ten minutes more than the train but half the price and things aren't going quite as well as they might). Having wandered over to the hotel, I'm rung as I'm just outside (the three numbers I had all went unanswered; this I expected) to be told that they were inside in the foyer bar. Despite this it took ten minutes to get in because reception were ignoring the intercom (um, I can see you busying yourself with something else, so um, thanks for that, Miss Superba Customa-Surveese. I can also see Freecell reflected behind you) and the muppets the other side of the blinds couldn't work out there was this knocking sound coming from the window.

So dump bags in the room, go downstairs again, remember just how crass and homophobic some of the people from that uni were, be quiet, dread the entire weekend. Is the idea of two humans asleep in any vague proximity to each other really that outlandish? I'm also guessing that they've never twigged, not even with the all-invasive Facebook's help. Oh well, cloaking device on.

Fortunately I'm in a room with two unknowns, sharing the bed with the duller, who only echo back the idiotic comments. I endeavour not assess this in the light of my relationships with those I'd known for years; clearly I fail at doing this.

So a hotel bar, filled with what looks like at least four stag or hen parties. Yep, cheap rooms of multiple occupancy which don't ban all-male parties. So basically a confluence of glittering pink and a seething morass of checks. I'm there too late for a Stella (such calamity), so wait for everyone else to finish and head off into town.

I'd forgotten what provincial town and city centres get like. Oh. Pavements sticky with, well mostly, the discarded reduced entry stickers for various clubs and bars. And I've never been offered so many excellent rates for brothels and massage parlours (see Mother, not quite as screaming as you think).

And so because, it's downhill, we end our great meandering wander at AsAustralianAsWellington, which features a live DJ. It's dire, and this is from someone who, on occasion, can just get on with enjoying himself. Fortunately because everyone else has been drinking a lot more, this means they try to enforce drinking in others by buying them drinks, albeit glow-in-the-dark milk-based drinks (which came in a plastic test-tube with a screw cap four of us failed to open until someone did it with their teeth). Yep, viscous off-white fluid which fluoresces under UV around the mouth of every member of a heartily male group, that's not at all... um, yeah, considering how much effort you lot put into denigrating others you don't seem to be particularly self-aware.

Oh, and a shout out to the DJ: We have watches, or phones, or can read time off the till; we do not need you shouting out the quarter-hours. "Hands in the air, Wankabout Boremouth! Two fifteen AM, make some noise!"

Shout out number two: Hey, Mr DJ, put a record on, and then leave it. Do not play ready-made remixes featuring at least four songs, some of which don't really go to together and none of which keep roughly the same rhythm throughout. If you get to the stage where everyone on the dancefloor has given up trying to keep up and are all standing puzzled trying to work out what the sources are then you've probably killed the vibe. Oh, and maybe learn to make longer mp3s so there isn't a pause at the end quite so often (cue: let me here ya if you're from Devon! *tumbleweed*). Oh, and if you play one mangle of grime and that clears the floor do not keep it up for another two goes in case they change their minds; Dorset is not Dalston.

Put it like this, the stag, who grew up in Louisham, and so can dance to anything, and who was really rather drunk, and so was likely to dance to anything, got bored. I at least tried to keep going as long as him, though hit occasional patches of, well, not so much wake me up when the tune starts as wake me up when the rhythm starts. But there were plenty of old fogeys in our group (please don't point out that some are at least five years younger than me) who'd given up at the first thing that sounded like does-her-own-eyebrows-on-X-Factor would like it. Incidentally, on the latter point, just imagine anything she does as it would be done by Cher Horowitz; far more fun.

So everyone just got decided they had to be up in the morning and went home.

And then it was morning, with daylight and everything, and off we went straggled to breakfast, at a little cafe someone had discovered, which turned out to be a Withharpoons (which are much nicer places during daylight). Cue a battle to finish breakfast (um, guys I had the large and I finished ages ago. Are you not eating that? BTW does anyone know why I still have hollow legs? Or am I just missing some enzyme?).

Anyway, then off we went to Goa PE, which I didn't even know what it was. And bizarrely they didn't insist the stag change out of his gorilla suit, despite the myriad safety warnings (but then they did have the signed waiver). Basically, like Scouts, but with wires and padding instead of worn ropes and more rope.

Of course, it somehow came to pass that the part of the group I knew buggered off and left me stranded at the tail, waiting for everyone else to clear everything, and really, really not liking the whole concept of down. Shaking on a rope ladder doesn't make going up it any easier. And then you get to the top and hug a tree, which then lurches when someone jumps off. Oh my, what fun.

Although as the day went on I became more preoccupied with my complete lack of upper body strength and less with the doom at my feet. Though telling people not to look down when you're walking on a succession of swinging things that won't be under your foot unless you watch is a bit unhelpful. And it's probably quite a good thing that the zip lines are at the end of each round because then you get the whole nerve-racking thing, the straining and draining thing, just left up on the last platform, sloughed off with glee. Although I never quite managed to launch with the élan I intended. Usually it was a case of "Geroni... [clench eyes closed as the lurch of the launch bites]... Oh bugger it". That or just going with a very manly "Weeeeeee[oh, I need bigger lungs because this thing goes on a long way]eeee". Look, it's not like anyone was going to hear me, having just ditched anyone not gung-ho. Though that did mean that they got to see the end of the zip-line and wonder aloud how it was I didn't crash backwards at the bottom, pocketsful of woodchip (because I did it in Scouts, which didn't run to woodchip, just mud if you were lucky, so have learnt to put your weight on the line before setting off, learnt to weathercock, or if necessary to flick dementedly, although nearly all of them were just feet-pointed straight runs, breaking into Crouching Tiger air-running about ten-foot above where the ground actually is).

Anyway, so that was all gruellifun, with added glimpses of a gorilla dancing on a treetop wooden platform. Bewilderingly someone else in the group didn't know what I was talking about when I said the stag was an Ewok. Seriously, there's an English-speaking male slightly older than me who doesn't know what an Ewok is? I nearly pushed him out of the tree just to rid the world of this aberration, but he was clipped on.

Anyway, that was that. And then we went back to shower and change (or not in the case of one of the guys I sharing with, who hadn't bothered that morning either), and then back out to misordered calzone (the intended dosa place not really coping with the customers it already had). And then the restaurant enforced split was perpetuated as the other half vanished off who knows where, and so missed the karaoke joys of a gorilla performing "in the style of" The Monkees (he can't even have been drunk by this stage, and wasn't anywhere near as bad as he might have been, though had the distorting mask to save him).

And then the inevitable headless chicken herding cats bit, which featured, amongst others, a great place with two for one cocktails, the weekend papers on sofas, and Star Wars playing behind the couple who couldn't understand why everyone was staring at them, although the place did first steal our table and then actually pulled the rug out from under us, so we lingered over our melting ice and went to meet the rest, and so found ourselves in a sleek urban joint, which was all white leather and ever-changing lights projected on the wall, except they projected it down the length of the room, in both directions, so there was nowhere that didn't have bright pulsing lights firing into one's retinas, so the whole thing was like standing inside a fibre optic cable, complete with music that was mostly binary with a modem thrown in (we were enticed in by the free entry/free shot combo. Didn't even bother to claim the free shot).

So we headed out and downhill once more, and collecting free-entry stickers left, right and centre, and slathering my wallet with them because I'm not walking round with one on, and somehow managing to steer the group past Wankabout (seriously? You want to go back in there? You've just been complaining that the whole place is a succession of chav bars [though quite frankly, m'dear, you could be mistaken for one], but you're hoping it'll be better tonight? Um, ok, whatever, I suppose they did have some cute yet clueless guys there along with the bad transvestites, oh look, we've gone past it now. Shame). And ending up at the bottom of a hill at somewhere with an actual queue which you had to pay to get into, and which had different music in different rooms (how revolutionary), so I spent about four hours solid dancing [and probably singing along] to indie, cheese and the irredeemably camp, and don't even know what the other room (or rooms) had. But then the stag was there too, and it would have been rude to leave him, like the best man had, repeatedly.

It's amazing how curmudgeonly young men can be. How much sulking goes on. How much arms folded killjoying. How much concern for tomorrow.

Anyway, that was quite fun, finding myself part of the abandoned nub that refused to leave quite yet, give it to quarter-past if the songs are good. And still I got back to the hotel way before most others (I have legs, cold-induced impatience and no craving for a kebab).

Then the next day was paintball, with the children (we were offered the choice of playing with the men who had brought their own kit, or with the children and teenagers. We are not fools. We were also largely hungover [not me, but well, that's about par for me; it's the not keeping pace that does it]. Except some of the teenagers had brought their own kit too).

The bit about paintball I don't like (along with the cold, wet, muddy, bruisingness of it) is knowing quite how much each paintball costs, being able to see the coins flick out of the gun to bounce pointlessly of the opponent slightly too far away. So being me I made the ammunition I had last all day, to avoid spending a fortnight's food on small bits of yellow. And yet still had some quite good games (um, guys, and presumably gals, but it's hard to tell with overalls, if you keep getting shot from the right when you walk past a bush, could you maybe not walk past there again, or try to work out where the shooter is, because, well, to be honest, while I'm getting a very high, oh, you just don't learn do you, bah-bye, anyway, a high shot-kill rate, this is using up my ammunition and I need to keep some for the stag-hunting at the end, oh, if you insist, sayonara sonny, anyone else? Oh hello generic lemming-sheep hybrid number seven. Goodbye too).

So basically good at hiding, sniping, crawling, climbing, not so good at making swift headway, as demonstrated by standing up after the whistle to a conversation something along the lines of:
Oh, hello, was it you I was shooting at for most of that?
Oh, hello, yes, I got the one behind you, but just couldn't get the line for you. I think you managed to hit the safety on my gun. You definitely messed something up for a while.
Oh, I wondered why you'd stopped, but couldn't tell if you were waiting for someone who didn't know you were there.
Were you the one I who was over there just after the start?
Where? Yes, then round under that tree, hanging off the bank. Who won by the way?

So sort of quite fun, despite a firefight from three-foot with the stag at the end (the other had all chased after him and I knew he'd have to come round, so scurried over to cut him off, faceplanting spectacularly along the way, thanks to worn out Converse and flapping overall legs. Oddly the first shot I fired after that was mostly soil), which involved both our guns jamming and both backing off to make it fairer and more fun. And then he shot me in the neck, which hurt quite a lot, but didn't bruise.

Final tally: Minor bruises and grazes, though I've done worse than that selling cards (or sailing). Oddly it was only at the end that the stag revealed that under his overalls, under his cloths, he was wearing a variety of padding. Cheating, but understandable.

And then we all went home, finding in the process who is the most unthinking, who the most dismissive and who the most kind (how? Because those of us who weren't driving had arranged travel from the place we were told we would be, whereas the drivers were either happy to leave us in countryside a dozen miles from the nearest station or would maybe consider dropping us off at a station if it was on their way home, where we could all buy new tickets. One, who had the furthest to drive, went the long way home).

And so to bed, and photo editing, except I only took photographs of me things, so buildings, reflections, coast, because I didn't think having a camera while paintballing would be a good idea (though I was the only one of the group to see the sea [excepting the bit by the roundabout] the whole weekend despite only being a block over from it).

Anyhoo,

2010-10-23T08:04:00.003Z

A dream: I was walking past the council-only rubble car park which used to be a cheap but good garage before it was evicted by the council and the abandoned site squatted by a cheap but good garden centre (um, this bit's reality, except for the walking past recently thing), with a straggling group of as yet unidentified friends who were all talking to other people who were clearly going to the same place, up towards the police station (the pavement, part of Tweeton's 'key site' [so key the council trashed it, and wanted a tower block on it, simply to fund their underground car park, and then found themselves facing the Audit Commission, and Private Eye, over some of their undeclared conflicts of interest. It remains trashed and littered with council employee cars], has never seen so much pedestrian traffic; the inner bypass road next to it was about 4 am empty, although it was a greyish dusk), and therefore we were allowed to talk to the strangers, and then we're there, indoors, lying down, side on to the not much of a stage, watching Lady Gaga sing Halo (in a manner, and voice, somewhat, as in very, akin to The Gadsdens' version, who incidentally I saw on Thursday at St Pancreas Intracostal, which at least explains the appearance of the not exactly revolutionary, convincing blonde, in a could have been Garbage way), when I notice there's a £15 lying on my chest, which I pick up, then there's a noise from the girl next door, who then pulls the money from my hand, saying it's like taking candy from a baby, so I snatch it back, and she says something antagnostically patronising (dreaming the intent of a sentence, but not the words? Um ok), so I say "Oh sod you" and turn back to the singer, who is to our right, as all Americans tend to be, who has stopped singing and is telling us to all live in peace and harmony, or some such bollocks, before then announcing she'll call the police on me, and telling me I have bad karma, then pointing me out before the crowd as ugly-hearted and I ought to be locked away, which I try pointing out is prejudicing people, and she's not normally a fan of that, but she's too egotistical to listen or thick to get it were she doing so, and then I'm trying to work out what to say to the police, to explain that the money was mine, although I'm trying to remember why it wasn't in my wallet, which I think was because my landlord wanted change for a twenty, but I only had fifteen, but someone else had something else and then it got to one of those convoluted resolutions where four people owe each other varying amounts of money, so I switched off while that was going on, leaving the money out and forgetting about it, and then I was trying to work out why there was a ten, a twenty and a five left when I had two twenties earlier, and how I'd explain that to the police, as I couldn't remember what I'd spent it on, although I knew what I could explain spending it on and why one wouldn't bother with the receipt for that amount, and so why I couldn't show them one to demonstrate that the money must be mine, and then I woke up.

Anyhoo.

2010-10-05T19:54:00.000Z

Question of the weekend: is it poor form to pick blackberries in a cemetery?

Anyhoo,

2010-09-13T19:06:00.000Z

That's just mean. The end of The Alcoholic by Rõyksopp, especially when played on a grey mid-September afternoon in England, so basically highly plausible and leading one to a Four Weddings quote, albeit with different intonation.

Anyhoo,

2010-09-11T17:09:00.002Z

Stimulus: Landlord listening to the gospel of Bobby-Lee loudly, while prepping to go clubbing.
Response: Watching True Blood, cos God, oh yes, He does, yes, sir, yes ma'am, he surely does, because God loves, L O V E loves, oh yes, loves fangs.

Stimulus: Brother taking it upon himself to move his stuff and my stuff out of our parents' house.
Response: Waiting for the burst of efficiency to get wedged between my mother blocking his meddling and his wife blocking any of the stuff going into their flat.

Stimulus: The sneer and unintelligible comment from the guy behind me in the queue at Tesco's presumably because my basket had more than 50% Tesco Value products in it. He'd already made a loud comment to his girlfriend that he didn't have clubcard because he didn't usually shop in Tesco's (I suspect the relationship won't last).
Stimulus: The self-scan thing in Tesco's hanging whenever I pushed the "own bags" button but barking impossible and conflicting instructions at me (the staff in Briquesville having the butler-like ability to vanish into the wallpaper even when there isn't any).
Stimulus: The self-scan thing in Tesco's refusing most of the notes in my wallet.
Stimulus: The called out comments at Tesco's because I had to pack after paying because on the whole broken machine thing.
Stimulus: Some guy swinging his empty trolley into the streams entering and leaving Tesco's without looking hitting one woman and causing rapid adjustments by many heavily laden people.
Response: One part of one of those streams slapping it back in much the same way I hit cars that drive through red lights (only occasionally and in situations where there are other possible culprits and where easy to do so, though the best was on Oxwarren High Street, where the thud was loud enough to cause the mystified driver to stop a car length before he had to [the exit being solid, so yes, he did jump the lights when he had nowhere to go], only to take a broadside of three lanes of traffic all trying to be the first round him; I may have carried on walking, albeit a bit briskly). From the abruptly curtailed cry I think the handle caught his, er, handle.

Sometimes life is not really as good as it might be. And the moral of this story is never assume people leaving Tesco's are going to be happy and in a good enough mood to be pleasant. Or that proportional responses might be working to a different score.
---
[The following was appended to the end of the draft unfinished. Draw your own conclusions, and full stops.]
I've just had a pointed text message about whether I want my three bottles of wine brought up. I suspect these were the ballast from the Cavalier (otherwise known as the remains of GA's parties, so the type of event where one buys wine, and then takes it home again because it's not really a party if no

2010-08-28T09:53:00.000Z

Even though most of your will have already seen it via Facebook or Twitter, run this:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

All it's missing is the music, which you can provide in your head (unless your landlord happens to be blasting out very excitable American Jewish Christians at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning [so, er, that'll be any in the actual morning]).

Anyhoo,

2010-08-21T11:07:00.003Z

So pretending I'm not childish enough to get the giggles at one of the Brickstown ranters commanding a market full of shoppers to "Come! Come! Come with me! Let us come! Let us come unto Him! Come men! Come young men! Come old men! Come men together! Let us come together! Come women! Come men! Come black! Come, er, white*! Come with thy neighbour! Come! Come! Come for the Lord! Your God commands you to come! Come! Come! [ad nauseum]. Come into the glory! Come with glory! Come into the love! Come with love!". It didn't help she'd just been very obsessive, and a little graphic**, about the perils of men who are wit' men, men who be as woman, men who becomin' woman.

* Thanks for faltering token inclusivity there. Personally, think coming black ought to be to the one to worry about.

** Well, as graphic as someone can be who refuses to name any body part. This possibly might have started the sniggering.

One day I'll get round to asking her why it is her god has forsaken her, although I suspect it wouldn't be wise to be standing near her amp for the reply.

Anyhoo,

2010-08-11T19:45:00.002Z

An enlarged weekend in Swanwich, built around a July-birthdays meal, with the clans mother and SIL, so that'll be eight gin-&-tonics and a Martini-with-lemonade (no, it was not me).

Because we were nine (meant to be ten, but there was a bailer, who possibly may have bailed on more than the meal or been bailed upon, but the bailer may not even be who I thought the bailer was) we ended up in a private dining dungeon (well, basement or doorless cellar with dry fish tanks containing cacti, Star Trek Barbie and a mirror-ball, but it was all ours).

I thought all went well, especially the duck (very, very good [1 Inst., if interested]). And then ma pauvre mère happened to mention après l'event mid-commenting-on-the-state-of-everything-which-is-not-her (moderate becoming poor) that she thought I nearly minced down the steps. Following comments seemed to suggest that perhaps the gay taint was why I was unpopular.

Hello, have we met? I'm Irked.

Firstly, I'm going to need more than one 'Firstly'.

What is this mincing of which you speak? I don't know how to do it.

Really not a fan of the reverting to school oddness seeking thing.

Undelighted that I am supposed to worry about such things again (have you any idea how hard it is not to cross your legs? Or to only do so in that private-school ankle-knee pose that is not only cumbersome but which flashes unexpected amounts of one's inner thigh if one does it while in shorts because one's mother has just made one paranoid again, which is probably more gay than not displaying the pallid, hairy bits, though maybe having the pallid, hairy bits pallid cancels out... this is never going to end, is it?).

Visibly gay is bad?

General grr.

I wasn't; ok, so I might have been doing slightly springy galumphing at the top of the stairs, possibly linked to the alcohol intake, but that's the other sort of gaiety, and anyway, the visible bit was the bottom of the stairs, two turns away and after I misjudged things a tad, so descended while trying to restrict any more rapid descent. So Mummikins, if you happen to class nearly falling down drunk as nearly "walking with an affected fastidiousness", then perhaps you were right, although the cause is not the G-A-Y but rather the G-N-T.

Still irked.

Still trying to argue it from both the "was not" and "gay is not bad" camps, thus happening to engage in a little overzealous friendly fire through the vehemence of the first.

But then she was also complaining that I'm too skinny (as I have been since about 8) and I ought to start going to the gym to build up my shoulders so I appear less, um, noticeable in that light.

You're laughing right? Please tell me the Alicia-Silverstone-falling-for-Paul Rudd-ness* is as mirthsome for you as it is for me. Perhaps she'd like me to grow more body hair, and a beard, oooh, and a beer gut, and wear more checked shirts, and lumberjack caps, and hang round certain tavernas in Voxhall with other rugged rascals more, just so I can appear bit more butch, a bit more macho. But then her straight and narrow has always kinked; seriously, my maternally-selected teenage wardrobe contained more pizazz than a world of jazz hands triple-Lutzing a mirrorball moon beneath a tap-dancing sun. Or maybe I'm being a trifle unkind to the scarlet paisley concoction (look, if even the guy who later became the first of the guys who decided being gay was preferable to remaining GA's boyfriend thought it was a bit brave, who incidentally was perhaps the first greater-than-one I encountered who didn't get suspended from or even leave school because of it**, then perhaps it was).

* Hey, who wouldn't?

** And my mother asked how it was that I even knew what homophobia was.

Actually I should have asked her which gym she'd suggest: Bitchfest First or Gogo Hims.

Speaking of gaysignia, the writers of Sherlock***, so Messrs Moffat and Gattiss, do know that they've basically just declared all males born after 1986-ish to be gay with that visible pants thing, right?

*** I nearly tried to hashtag that. #fail lol (I think "lol" is the new full stop, or rather the evidence suggests it is. That or wit personified drowning [or just waving, or just sticking its hands in the the air like it just don't care]).

Hmm, this post was going to be about sun, sea, sand, steam and crabs but somehow that didn't come to pass. Maybe tomorrow (I just might settle down?).

And now, the end is near as every clichéd phrase is becoming lyric, which probably means I'm a bit tired.

Anyhoo,

2010-08-01T08:34:00.001Z

Quotes from the day:

"Walk away from London" - Spoken in authoritative tones by me while on the phone, trying to navigate someone across t'eath from Sansada Hill. Much hilarity and heckling ensued.

"Oh sod it" - Spoken in defiant tones by me while on the phone, trying to navigate someone across t'eath, on line that was mostly Morse, only to find the signal hadn't gone quite as much as I thought.

For the record, I provided people with three maps that they could memorise or print out should they so choose, including an OS one with grid reference and contours and everything (and one with a dragon, a food processor, a sketch of an island off Venice). The nearest anyone got to doing that was the guy who was going to download the Corp.-O'-London PDF when he got to t'eath, but found he didn't have enough signal to do so.

Of the fourteen-yesses, two were never heard of and one failed to navigate so gave up and went home. Firstly, bloody poor show (she'd asked for nav help, so we arranged to meet at Canterburyormargate Tube station at 1.45, then sent a text just before 2 to say she'd be late, but because she was on a bus had no idea how late, but at least twenty minutes, which given I had to be about twenty minutes away by two wasn't really working for me), secondly, it seems she may have asked directions from someone else who was on their way to the party, and who arrived without needing umpteen "Can you see me now? Are you near people playing badminton? Are you by the tent? Is there someone by you with a kite? Can you see an oak tree?" conversations (my answers were generally "no" except for the last which was a "er yes" tinged with dread).

"Trees everywhere" - From the ever helpful Man Who Waits In Line.

"On top of the hill" - As spoken by me, repeatedly. Seems people have difficulty with "more up".

"On top of the hill?" - As spoken by the great many people who came with luggage (somehow it never seemed to occur to them that what they were sitting on and what they were eating and what they were drinking while moaning had also been lugged up the hill). So why all the way up there? Because it's got a good view, but also is less crowded, has long grass (no spiky stubble), gets more breeze on a hot day, gets more sun than the nearby fields late in the afternoon or evening [so the bit when there was no sun] and because I said so.

"Oh, it's actually good" - Spoken to me in surprise. Thanks. Spoken of the apple cake and that was before they tried the chocolate one.

"How many chocolate oranges died in the making of this?" - Spoken of the chocolate cake. And none did, just two huge navel oranges and three bars of chocolate.

So what did I learn?
- Arrange to meet somewhere with landmarks, signs and good public transport at a fixed time. Leave it about half-an-hour after you've told everyone you will.
- Carry flares and maroons, or possibly a flag with pole (or burn a path through the grass from the main entry points the night before).
- Provide navigational aid only in a previously announced window. After this turn the phone off and assume anyone remaining can cope with mapreading using a grid reference (people suddenly become a lot more capable when there's no other option).
- Delegate imperiously on everything.
- And when someone says they want meeting from Sansada Hill (wondering if "bunge" in Swahili is related to "bundes" in German) realise they may well appear from the opposite direction before you've put your shoes on.

Anyway, now the important bit.

Taking my inspiration from Stairs:

The Lactose-Intolerant-Intolerant Chocolate Orange Cake

For the cake:
8 oz. butter
8 oz. caster sugar
4 lg. eggs (yes, I know the other recipe said 6, but these are big and also there were viscosity issues I'll come to later)
2 oz. cocoa
5 oz. SR flour
2 zs. huge navel orange
2 ju. huge navel orange
6 oz. dark chocolate (well, one 150 g Green & Black's Cooks' Chocolate bar [72% cocoa mass, 43% cocoa butter]. Yes, we know G&B under Cadbury's are evil for putting milk powder in even the 85% cocoa, but the recipe's got cream in it so my brother's already ruled out. Green & Black's chosen because I didn't quite trust the Tesco Value Chocolate Flavour Cake Browning and the Patisserie Greenandgoldpackaging one was twice the price).

For the ganache:
200 g. dark chocolate
284 ml. double cream (yes, this is copied direct from something else, and yes, I'd guess this was something like half-a-pint).
2 tb. caster sugar

For the encasement:
3-400 g. dark chocolate
An equal volume of tart marmalade (how one knows which the tart one is when they all seem to be about 63% sugar I don't know. I went with the one on offer that wasn't Robinson's*. Can you tell it's something I never normally need enough to actually buy?).

For good measure:
XXX ml. double cream

Yes, I know the units are all over the place in this, and seriously misleading in some cases as I only bought three bars of chocolate, making 450 g in all (wow, I've just realised this thing has a pound of chocolate in it; no wonder it tastes nice). I think I must have used 100 g [4 ounces] in the cake, about 200 g for the coating and 150 g for the ganache.

Anyway...
First, copy down your ingredients from a defunct blog.
Then, check you've bought everything (including the cocoa powder because you've just realised the jar in the cupboard is a just-add-hot-milk one, not proper cocoa).
Then, realise the blog says "bake".
Then, having found a recipe that tells you how to cook a different cake, bake.

Oh, you're not going to let me get away with that? Ok, so adapted from BBC Good Food as linked above:

Oven on gas mark 3 or 160 degrees Celsius (if you can't use proper units you're not allowed to make it). Worryingly it says 140oC for fan ovens. Mine has a one of them, but as it took me several months to realise the thing has been grilling everything I put into it (I just thought fan-assisted ovens were vile and it lived up to that expectation), I'm not really sure what adjustments ought be made.

1. Melt the chocolate going into the cake with the butter (and the coffee dissolved in 125 ml of water, but we're not doing that bit). Either use the smallest hob on the lowest flame or use a bain-marie.
2. Sift dry ingredients into a separate big bowl. And by sift I took that to mean shake from a bag a couple of foot above, because, well, sieves are a pig to clean, even if I had one. And I include the zest as a dry ingredient because it's small.
3. In another separate bowl (these BBC people must have a dishwasher) beat the eggs into the buttermilk which we're also not using and that's not just because I don't know what it is or where to get it.
3alternativeversion. Fold the molten chocolate and butter into the flour and stuff (figuring that anything the involves adding hot liquid to raw egg might not go too well). Break an egg in and mix it in. Repeat. Think 6 eggs might be pushing it, so stop at four, with one on hand to add later.
4. Add the orange juice little by little. Realise many littles can make a lot. Decide it must be fine the recipe for a different set of ingredients says it's meant to be glossy and runny. Be quite glad you didn't add any more eggs.
5. Wonder if you should have drunk some of the orange juice. Start eating the juiced segments instead.
6. Ignore your misgivings and the instinct that's screaming for you to add more flour and perhaps some whipped egg whites and pour into your freshly washed then pre-greased cake tin because you've only got one and hope it doesn't leak out of the bottom (I think it's an eight-inch tin, round).
7. Stick in the middle of the oven.
8. Studiously don't look in the oven for quarter of an hour past the minimum given in the range of times of a different cake (so at about twenty-to-seven, or 75-minutes after you put it in if you insist on doing things that way).
9. Open door, stick knife in (the cake, not the oven or your nemesis), pull it out clean and wonder what that means.
10. Leave to cool while resting on a tin of tomatoes (to get the side off) because it turns out that your slightly obsessive landlord appears to have thrown out the grid from the grill along with anything else that might have been touched by a reasonably pleasant if slightly lax ex-flatmate thus scuppering one's impromptu cooling rack plans (yes, I know the really imaginative domestic godless would have woven a self-supporting airing structure out of forks, but I had been baking for most of the day and that would have meant more washing up.
11. Go and stare mindlessly at the internet for an hour.
12. Make your slash and ganache.
13. Oh, all right then, cut the cooled cake which is still surprisingly hot and not particularly cakey looking inside, transversely twice, or once in my cake and then lift of the self-detaching top to leave three discs. Try not to wonder about the lava tubes near the top nor the bituminous tendencies of lower down.
14. Glug a good amount of cream into a saucepan and add the sugar, and stirring bring almost to the boil (yes, this is a helpful you'll only know when it was right when it's not instruction). By the way you can so pretend it hasn't curdled because you put it in the freezer without thinking if one takes glug in its dig and thump sense.
15. When beaten to a less flakey consistency (that beige electric whisk with the dusty smelling motor that somehow left a house with you through being still at the packing stage when the moving stage came comes in handy here).
16. Pour over broken chocolate (that is chocolate you have broken up, not chocolate sold in the style of those vast mythical boxes of biscuits from childhood/Shopper's Paradise).
17. While that melts, apply your beater (mechanical, a beatiel, not a companion of Mellors) to some of the remaining cream to make it liquid enough to impersonate whipped cream.
18. Beat the chocolate cream. Apply both cream and darker cream to various layers and sandwich together.
19. Melt any leftover chocolate, this time in a bain-marie because you're a bit tired and this way if you forget to pay attention you'll set fire to a plastic bowl or your hand before the chocolate catches.
20. Dollop in the appropriate half-jar of marmalade.
21. Stir.
22. Stick in the freezer because making a runny chocolate coating for a cake, in a south-facing kitchen, with windows closed because there's a man outside with a circular saw throwing out screams and plumes, on a sunny day in late July, in southern England, in a city with a strong heat island effect... well, it just needed to go in the freezer.
23. Apply thickened chorange paste to the cake. Keep applying. Push it back up the sides. Dump it in the freezer (thank you flatmate who works in a restaurant so never has food at home and so has never used his drawer).
24. Reapply and apply more chocange paste (name clearly varies with consistency).
25. Decorate according to family custom (there was an Easter Christmas cake at some point, ask my brother).
26. Transport across London. Do try not to leave it on its side while you put the other two cakes upside-down.
27. Serve.
28. Bask in the surprise that your closest friends have that something you made tastes quite nice.
29. Keep the smile fixed while they debate whether it's more a torte than a cake and what exactly constitutes a torte and whether it was the acidity of the cake or the heat of the day that caused the whipped cream layer to curdle (look, it tastes like cream and so what if it happens to feel like cheese?).
30. Remind yourself, safe in the knowledge you'll never make this again unless it's for something, to practice next time so as to be able to ascertain the quantities that make for a more cake-like cake.
31. Realise that the next allowable birthday celebration is in 2036 (something happened at my brother's seventh, thus moratoriumising any subsequent, and clearly I have to stick with precedent when it comes to the spacing of celebrations).
32. Blast through the birthday far too fast, and carry cake home (the carrot, reflex, matched the apple, obtuse, and the chocolate just avoided being acute. The Lego cake was right-angled, oddly, as was the flapjack).
33. Spend the next week eating cake.
34. Be surprised about how healthy your face looks, given the amount of fat and sugar you've been taking in.
35. Still not finish putting things away a week later.
36. Realise some things don't change much regardless of age.

Anyhoo,

* Or even Robertson's. The one that doesn't have the golliwog on.

2010-07-21T21:51:00.001Z

The song: Journey - Don't Stop Believing.
The time: A summer evening.
The place: A valley of back gardens.
The event: Spontaneous sing-along to sound pollution by at least three unconnected individuals*.

Such is the curse of Glee.

Anyhoo,

* I was not one of them.

2010-07-18T12:34:00.003Z

Thank you Mummikins.

Because it really more fun to go through a few hundred images trying to work out which you're taking about because you don't want to make comments on Facebook, yet interpret "send me the link for each image you'd like" as use one word descriptors where the word used may not be used in the text accompanying each image.

"both planes"

That was on its own on a single line. I didn't think I'd added any shots of aeroplanes*. Is that the views from an aeroplane, of which there are three? Or something else, being basically anything with a flat surface in it?

And this from the woman who always refused to playing guessing games. I would add something scathing about sketching out the images on little scrolls paper before attaching them to pigeons as being a more efficient way of doing things, but, er, it would be. An image may tell a thousand words but you do need at least about 0.5% of those to have some idea which image we're talking about.

Bloody audience participation.

In other news, it turns out Brighton in July, so somewhere around force six and surfable, plus oddly cut last time and needs cutting again hair equals epicness. And odd looks.

Anyhoo,

* Um, so it turns I did, but forgot that the Red Arrows are anything more than coloured smoke.

2010-07-12T19:08:00.001Z

The transit of Venus across the Moon.

At least that's what the loud voiced pretentious group of French people (I suspect it was only the heat that made them remove their berets. Yes, they were that close to embodying the café-intellectual cliché) decide a series of Wolfgang Tillmans' photographs must depict (parce-que il est impossible de photographier le soliel, ne c'est pas?).

I can only hope they try watching the event from a beach when it happens.

And did you know you get over 30 Venuses into the gap between the Earth and the Moon? Except for the whole gravity-induced shrinking of the gap and ultimate collision thing.

So there's Tillmans thing on at the Serpentine at the moment (I like the spiders one), right next to a big red thing that's very, very red, so very, very red that one starts to think one's camera isn't working properly because chimping just seems to show slight oranges on a very grey background, whereas it's actually just the human bit that isn't working properly.

Oh and I liked the spiders.

Um, so what else haven't I done? Well, Moore art.

Sort of self-explanatory notes:
- Pre-Columbian figures with 1920's hair.
- Room 4, wartime tube = Pompei.
- Room 5, Mother and Child = raptor [I blame... actually do you think the writers of Enron are fans of XKCD?].

A bit of Rude Britannia, but I found that much artful funniness a bit heavy going.

A bit of a do, in a male public convenience, featuring breasts, not nipples, and more importantly cake with alarm-clock decoration. It was a friend's birthday in a euphonious burlesque club. And it didn't quite shock me to my core (but then, according to some, I'm damn near unshockable; I don't quite beleive this). Anyway, a pleasant, slightly underwhelming experience (I didn't know what to expect, so feared the moderately bad).

So:
- Champagne = not so shocking, except my ability to eek it out because the ticket was expensive.
- Cake = 60% gaudy buttercream = blood sugar shocking and otherwise faintly unsettling.
- Gambling with fake money = It was pontoon, with bits of plastic instead of matchsticks = not so shocking, except finding that playing only the dealer is much easier.
- IRL partially naked female not my mother, an absent-minded/drunk friend or breastfeeding = my world just ended. Or not. So completely don't get the fuss.
- Weak LED lighting cycling through various combinations = seismograph spectra = shockingly poor photography.
- Someone from the same school year being thirty = not so shocking; it's just a number; it's a lot less old than it used to be; who the hell cares anyway?
- Being told my shirt looks like a tea-towel = and your point is?
- Being told not to look so terrified = can't really claim to find that perception shocking.
- The now aged friend running through the changing rooms fountain outside the RFH while in a corset and dry-clean only shirt = yep, still not shocked.
- Ambling over to the P-Ride (yeah, that's not a good rebranding in terms of possible mental images) to meet by fluke a numerical man, fail to find anything to talk about (he tried to find me the right bit of rubbish; we both ended up staring at our shoes or vodkaed sandals instead), arrange to meet someone else but have them leave by the time I made it to the drop zone (turns out I can't [or maybe won't] walk at normally just-avoiding-ramming speed down OCS during Beforeafallfest), discover that Londondan was around so meet him instead, and then proceed to spend the rest of the evening quaffing gin, discovering German causes conversations and talking to someone from Camberwick Green and friend, before losing the friend and finding myself wandering through various "I'm sure they've banned drinking in the street round here" places with about a pint of gin and tonic, and then getting really excited (possibly due to the last item) about the London Eye looking tremendously pretty, so gallivanting down a handy pontoon to take blurry photographs of it, blaming the floatiness of the images on the river and not the river of Gordons within me. And then tiring of waiting for Londondan's bus to come so heading home via more Eye spy shots.

Other stuff: A1 mounted canvas prints are about as big as A1 drawings though less prone to curling (and needing less revision). Some do-better-next-time-ables in the batch, but as ever printing stuff is a good ego boost, especially when some sell before even being printed.

Anyway, tired now, so stopping.

Anyhoo,

2010-06-29T17:54:00.001Z

[Probably superseded]
Wrong place for this, but I'm not sure where the right place is. Basically I've been trying to use GIMP 2.6 to replicate a process I use in Paint Shop Pro 6 (why? Because Flickr penalises any image without EXIF data [digital cameras include EXIF, so no EXIF means it's not a photography, just art or advertising], which this ancient version of PSP strips out).

The process is extrapolated from Stairs's technique:

I run it through a couple of adjustment layers - I blend a 70% grayscale (to desaturate non destructively) with a 58% inversion layer above (to increase contrast but reduce depth of shadow) - then a couple of masks to burn and dodge the highlights and shadows. It picks out every little imperfection, so it works better for men than for women.

My take on this is in PSP6 is:
- Open image.
- Take out gunk, hot pixels, straighten.
- Add Hue/Saturation layer, using saturation of -80 with a layer opacity of 25%.
- Add Inversion layer, using a layer opacity of 40% [it's looking pretty grey by this stage].
- Add Curves layer and dump the contrast back in, leaving the shadows a little off absolute-zero.

Yes, I know this veers wildly off-course from Stairs's route, but if I do what I think he says it sort of does the opposite of what I think he says it'll do. Also my version, although it feels desaturated is a lot less so than Stairs's [No. 8 in his Camera folder].

Basically it's a way of damping the shadows while encouraging contrast in the midtones, while avoiding the super-saturated look that is a little frequent on Flickr (I believe it's technically known as 'punchy').

And trying to replicate it in GIMP* just turned the sky pink (seriously, how can an inverted layer with opacity at less than 50% invert the colours? Setting the opacity to 50 shows a slight negative image amid the grey. According to my take on maths +50 + -50 = 0, not somewhere a bit below freezing. PSP with an upper invert layer opacity of 50 becomes one big block of middle-C grey, so it's not just me. So if the mid-point in GIMP is below 50%, what's).

* Which I did by:
- Duplicating the base image to provide the right number of layers.
- Leaving the base as is.
- Desaturating the next (20% opacity should equal my -80x25%opacity, Stairs says 70%).
- Inverting the third and applying 40% opacity.
- Merging the visible layers.
- Applying curves.
- Abandoning it in the preview because the sky is pink.
- Going back and tweaking.
- Getting the same result.

Interestingly turning off the visibility of the desaturated layer stops the 50% inversion layer from being anything but the purest grey. Which is kind of weird.

You'd think that makes it sound like I've applied the the inversion to two layer, except I've reverted and repeated the steps a couple of times to get the same pink result. Most, most weird.

So anyone have the foggiest idea what's going wrong? What am I doing in a really absurd way? What have I forgotten?
---
So it turns out closing everything and starting again but this time using Hue/Sat within gimp to desaturate works better. Using the same settings still desaturates more in GIMP than it does in PSP though (and inventing layers and then applying non-editable changes to them [you can undo, but you can't tweak] is mighty cumbersome).

Guess who's reverted to the old way.

Anyhoo,

PS. The image above is not one the technique has been applied to. It's simply one that shows what happens when I don't have some idea of what I'm trying to do.

2010-06-19T07:24:00.002Z

What amounts to a glorified office foyer, ranks drinking, watching football. In the crowd is Anyhoo, here at the behest of fellow ex-UCkLer, with others of that ilk and a disturbing number of his ex-colleagues, many of whom are clearly suffering familiarity dissonance.

While talking, and ignoring the sport (I figure if one just treats it like cricket, so basically sit on the grass at the boundary, or nearest equivalent, talking amongst ones-selves, clapping politely occasionally, being late to a sudden cheer and asking "What did I miss?" repeatedly, and happening to send the landlord's daughter back across the road every so often to top up the Pimm's jug. Basically sport is there to be ignored while chatting and imbibing. Unless it's rugby, but that's because of the thighs) the following occurred.

Having stayed in the flat of two friends while, er, between homes [never, ever move in somewhere where the contract finishes at Christmas], I left as a thank-you (ignoring the bit where I was told I could stay until date X, which suddenly became date about M, when friend A returned to the flat after Christmas while friend B was still away and within 24 hours invited three sets of people to stay, each sooner than the last, so basically giving me two days to get out, this while the country is literally snowed under, um, yeah, there might have been a permanent downgrading of her trustworthiness) two prints. Friend A was there last night. Friend A mentioned that one of her friends had been in the flat, and had really liked the prints. I asked if she had passed on my details, you know, in case he wanted a copy or something similarly outlandish, it kind of being a significant source of income for me now.

Reply came thus:
"No, why would I? Why would he want that? He's an architect, but he also has a camera; he's an artist."
Well, FYVM too.

Maybe I should have entered something into the RA Summer Exhibition just to have a rejoinder (spite is a wonderful motivator).

Or maybe I should just remember that I do tend to tolerate her presence because it means I get to see her flatmate (who wasn't there). And to judge by her actions the only positive she finds in me is that sometimes I'm quicker and more accessible than Google. Somehow I suspect that despite really not getting on well with the whole football thing (I was always the penultimate pick, always in defence, so basically could sit making daisy chains for most of the game, but wouldn't because that wouldn't be fitting*, and then occasionally get sworn at [ah, the joys of middle school] because I didn't stop a ball eight-foot above my head) I may be about to become an ardent support of Paraguay. Or Slovakia. Or even those crazy fools, New Zealand.

* Ok, so sometimes I did, weather and daisies permitting. It's not like anyone was going to notice. Anyway, the other defender was usually feeding the horses that leant over from the next field.

And yet Friend A later looked surprised that I wasn't joining her for dinner, despite her using half-time to check her text messages in preference to talking to me (I ended up talking to the smokers).

Sometimes (basically all instances I can remember) I don't get her. Sometimes (not all instances) I remember that this really, really doesn't matter. And then sometimes she decides she knows everything there is to know about me and dictates what I must do (oddly, what with the whole silent seething and loathing going on, I don't tend to, especially when her diatribe [between the two halves of her brain] makes it pretty damn apparently that she's lapsed into woefully misguided comedy).

As I say, the F of a whole load of Fs, so kinda hard to excise.

Still, I'm not wholly sure one of the high-ups at this do wasn't making slightly too much eye contact, so perhaps not a complete write-off (or maybe it is, outcome A being unlikely, outcome B being unlikely to be a good idea given the existence of the possibility of A).

I think I've lost where this was going.

Anyhoo,

2010-06-13T19:28:00.001Z

The Thames by Tommies. Four people, one walking, three on a bench drinking, one male, three female.

A: Hey sexy! Show us your nipples.
B: *faint dismissive snort, carries on walking*
A: Nipples!
A: Come on!
A: What, are you gay or something?
A: You look it.
B: *fails to fire back witheringly bitchy yet witty retort finished with a snap, carries on walking*
A: [Indecipherable shouting then laughter]

I think I need to practice so I can be like the guy on the upper-deck of some late night bus, who when accused of being 'fucking queer' by one of crowd headed towards the back replied, with a sweep of the hand towards his static, seated body "if this looks like fucking then I pity your girlfriend". Rapidly stifled laughs. De dissed simmers, riled. Another member of the aisle-bound posse points out that DD can't get a girlfriend. Cue flouncing towards the back, finding the back seats taken and slamming into an empty seat, arraying himself widely, trying to look tough, evil, managing gangly and not that far off tears.

Of course it probably was about yea far off someone being stabbed, but at the time it worked.

Anyway, back to the nipples, I can't help wondering if perhaps they trio were in the wrong city (and probably country) for that sort of thing (seriously? At the mid-point between Sogo and Voxhall?). But chief instigator is probably doomed anyway given [by her statements] she finds gay men sexually attractive. Can't ever really see that working to her advantage.

Anyhoo,

2010-06-02T22:35:00.002Z

From Tesco.com:
Dear Mr Anyhoo,

This week at Tesco.com we're celebrating the highly anticipated release of Sex and the City 2 with these fantastic offers to help you have the perfect girl's night in.

Highly anticipated?

Anyhoo,

2010-05-30T16:37:00.001Z

If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won.

2010-05-18T22:47:00.003Z

So it turns out the Various & Assorted are about as good as organising events as they are at exhibitions. On Friday they, as part of Nuit des Musées (wherein those that open late on a Friday close as normal and those that don't stay open until 8 pm. Je pense qu'un petit peu de l'espirit de la chose a été perdu dans la traduction), were having an evening of Hitchcockery. This was to start with a talk at half-past-six, film at twenty-past-seven and another at quarter-past-nine.

I'd arranged to meet a friend there at seven, because they wouldn't be in time for the talk. Somehow, despite leaving late and taking the bus (which basically must have sunk in the marsh at the bottom of the hill, because how else does one explain not moving for eight cycles of the lights? The only culprit I could find was repair work on a bridge; who knew closing a pavement could cause such problems with the traffic?), I managed to arrive not long after the published start of the talk, and discover my friend arriving at the same time.

So we went to the talk, only to find that it had been cancelled, and so were sent away by the staff.

So we mill in the museum, wandering the galleries they'd failed to rent out for private events, thinking it perhaps is quite a good thing the reformation came along, until it's ten-past and we pop back through to watch the first film. Only at some point in the last half-hour the staff had changed tactics and told anyone turning up late to go in anyway and wait, and then having filled the auditorium started the film.

The staff couldn't really see that this wasn't quite on as this meant anyone who had twice turned up on time or early had been turned away both times when the people twenty-minutes late were rewarded (I left it to others to battle it out; I fear the concrete may have crazed around the incandescent Italian making her feelings known).

So once more we wandered, failed to find anything of use in the shop and wondered how many times they can run the catering trolley through the silver gallery, thus making the whole place shake, before something falls over.

And then we went back down before nine, to nab the last chair and the join the somewhat annoyed queue with no order.

The staff, still not quite grasping the concepts of crowd control, or fairness, let on that we could go up when the film ended, assuming enough people came out to let us in. Cue a bit of frantic stamping on the blue touch paper, trying to put it out. Suddenly they decided that for security's sake they'd have to clear the auditorium between screenings.

We wait. We get told to go upstairs. Shortly afterwards we get told not to. We get left to our own devices huddled round the bottom step. We lob "The queue's back here" and other such comments to the artfully casually artily dressed 'blondes' happening to sashay up the stairs (though without much malice because we know we'll get to point and laugh with our eyes in about three minutes).

The boss woman type thing emerges to look surprised that there's a queue. Consultations continue. People start coming down. Some of them see the mass waiting at the bottom and turn back up to keep their seat. The hordes continue to descend piling onto the end of the queue, muttering. Then we're some bizarre upper echelon will be given first dibs because "they've been waiting". Oddly the person who said that ran away upstairs again.

And so there's more waiting. Then waiting at an invisible line with no staff around for about five minutes. The queue eeks onto the stairs. Some break ranks, bounding up. There's cries above, staff are hailed and the forward outliers sent back down. Then it's announced that there are two auditoriums and they've decided to show both films simultaneously, so if we hadn't seen the first would we go to the right and if we had then we should go to the left.

Oddly most of the front of the queue, who all hadn't seen the first film plumped for the second, more famous one, the mavericks that we are.

And so I found myself watching a DVD that my sister-in-law has, of a film I'd already seen, but in a lecture hall, on the wrong aspect ratio, next to someone who hid during the flashing scene (which much of the rest of the audience struggled not to treat like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

And that was Rear Window, which I may well not have blogged about the first time I saw it. Good lines, and good but-is-it-just-imagination-age. Oh, and good climbing fashion.

Anyhoo,

2010-05-12T23:33:00.002Z

I was very shocked when my son told me his boyfriend was a homosexual.

2010-05-10T23:09:00.006Z

The tags used on the blogs at the Daily Telegraph as they appear on the site:
afghanistan Alistair Darling Barack Obama BBC BNP Boris Johnson china climate change Climategate Conservative Party Conservatives Copenhagen David Cameron david miliband Ed Balls eu european union general election General Election 2010 George Osborne global warming gordon brown Harriet Harman Hillary Clinton immigration Iran Islam Israel labour Liberal Democrats Lisbon Treaty Margaret Thatcher Michael Gove Morning must-reads MPs' expenses NHS Nick Clegg Peter Mandelson Pope Benedict XVI referendum The Guardian tony blair Tories twitter UKIP

And now if we sort them by whether they have grown-up letters or not:
- Alistair Darling
- Barack Obama
- BBC
- BNP
- Boris Johnson
- Climategate
- Conservative Party
- Conservatives
- Copenhagen
- David Cameron
- Ed Balls
- General Election 2010
- George Osborne
- Harriet Harman
- Hillary Clinton
- Iran
- Islam
- Israel
- Liberal Democrats
- Lisbon Treaty
- Margaret Thatcher
- Michael Gove
- Morning must-reads
- MPs' expenses
- NHS
- Nick Clegg
- Peter Mandelson
- Pope Benedict XVI
- The Guardian
- Tories
- UKIP

- afghanistan
- china
- climate change
- david miliband
- eu
- european union
- general election
- global warming
- gordon brown
- immigration
- labour
- referendum
- tony blair
- twitter

In the words of the meme du jour: just saying.

Though I am surprise they couldn't find a spare capital i for immigration.

Anyhoo,

2010-04-29T22:40:00.003Z

Ooh, just remembered I can post beyond Twitter-length stuff here.

Ooh, just remembered it's not really very interesting to rehash debate things.

So basically Clegg did less well than previously, but still beats others. Best bits were:
- Cameron agreeing with the stance of a man who asked a neutral question and claimed the leaders don't listen to voters, thereby showing Cameron's assumptions about the question and the voter (I've never really got the anti-other-people thing. Populations shift. Just because we have stats suddenly it's a bad thing?).
- Brown managing to say fairly near the end "We are desperate", but my shorthand failed me so I don't have the words that followed it.
- And in the category of #epicwin*: "And this your chance, Nick Clegg, not to repeat what you've just said, but to respond" probably counts as Dimblebitchery. But it was in that context kinda true.

* One day all nouns will be hashtags. To avoid confusion the current various uses of # will be known as 'grated potato patties a la current prime minister', 'bung-tinned-food-together-and-heat-meal', 'mini portcullis key', 'and the number shall be', 'performing to the expected standard' and 'Not-Knorr'.

On which thrilling, absolutely chilling insight so long, farewell and so forth.

Anyhoo,

2010-04-27T20:23:00.002Z

While discussing the apparent rise in the freakishly high [i.e some] violent incident rate around my current abode that correlates with my period of occupancy (probably not causal), which oddly MPM had noticed while I hadn't, MPM then commented that my hometown would probably score badly for murders if judged on a certain patch of it. Discussion then ensued between MPM and the LSF about their local murders, during which MPM managed to say "But they were middle-class; doesn't count, that could happen anywhere".

Fortunately this conversation was being held by telephone and as long as one laughs silently one can get away with it.

Sorry, just amused by the idea that only slaying by ne'er-do-well strangers (or acquaintances) is proper murder, and the other type is basically just abrupt divorce.

And then MPM reverted back to worrying about me, asking if I were at risk, assuming I shouldn't be because "You're not in any danger; you're not overt, are you?". And then warning me off Cla'am Bit-Infra-Dig*, because that's dangerous too, just look what happened too... The LSF suggests that Labour guy. Cue discussion about careers being killed, not people, in which none of us can remember the euphemism.

*Also known as Cla'am Come-On[-Tim].

And so ended the phone call (ok, so I'm skipping the bit about the bluebells and certain Moorish activities [thank God they only started when I was no longer a teenager, and yes that was me working round writing 'a grown-up' or 'an adult', because I don't think it counts if it's only biological], oh and MPM admitting she's learnt to use Facebook well enough to mute the person I was surprised she was linked to [ah, the politics of whether and how to ditch someone over politics]).

Anyway, hier ist some other stuff.

Was ist 'ouch' auf Deutsch?

Anyhoo,

2010-04-26T17:26:00.000Z

Sometimes Google wins; a repost from Facebook, because it's just too weird to be contained by FB (I quoted a lyric at someone quoting different lyrics, she Googled and got the wrong, the very, very wrong, result).

And you thought the original was quirky.

Speaking of which, because there was a question, long, long ago, I have no taste. Possibly.

While I'm doing links, I think I ought to be concerned by how amused one person can be by a very simple idea.

And sometimes being stuck in telegraphese or txtspk or Twitterish can occasionally be useful. The B asked a question following the contents of the last post (not the bugle one), my response follows:-
Free to divulge: not sure newsworthy.

But NSNW sums up quite a lot of what I think about myself.

He said, voluntarily self-publicising.

Anyway, just quite pleasant to be able to write that. I know I thought the whole thing ought to have had a great crashing score throughout (think Brief Encounter), but the calm after the storm is no less of a calm for lacking the storm even if I occasionally forget that.

Hmm, and I've just realised that I can't quote good bits* of Twitter because we're back to that pesky real name thing (oh why can't the English teach their children to be Luddites, so then I wouldn't have to worry about showing three separate facets without muddling the damn things).

* I use the plural in the optimistic, future-inclusive sense.

And because I've not much else to say, except that the moon is very bright when it wakes one at two in the morning, that'd better be it.

Anyhoo,

PS. What does one do if one should happen to notice that one's mother is 'friends' on Facebook with someone with pretty dubious political views made very prominent? It's not often that I see my mother next to Geert Wilders.

PPS. If the earthquake in Chile made the world spin faster because a plate dropped a bit, did grounding all those planes change the spin speed?

2010-04-20T19:13:00.001Z

So a conversation was had. The world did not end any more than it was already doing so (the apocalypse is very sunny; it's more the Acapulcolypse).

Parent 1 asked if that was why I changed my hair.

Parent A reminded me that the NHS might not always be around (translation "do be careful", although quite why my brother has not needed this advice...).

Parent 1 continued 1's thoughts on the theft of the word GAY, which in this context should only be written GAY because it's an acronym (um, that's backro... oh never mind), and which thoughts a certain related person summed as being "complete freedom, unless in these certain instances". One day I'll see if I can get 1 to suggest little membership badges are a good idea, perhaps a natty pink triangle (but then I'm also waiting for the phrase 'sneaky gays' to creep into the Telegraph, sans source).

Parent A said it was not a surprise to A.

Parent 1 said I should have said something when 1 was talking about buying another hat (um, it's quite hard being non-specific then), then got distracted about whether or not one wears a hat, or the type of hat one wears, to a registry office, but then reminded me that I was a long, long way from a hat.

Parent A said it was comeuppance for A (um, there's some weird backstory I don't really know to do with a neighbour's son's public yet intimate website; I think A's logic was schadenfreudekarma, but I'm a bit concerned that A perceives this as retribution, divine or otherwise).

Parent 1 said that ramps up the pressure on the SIL (clearly the B is not necessary for reproduction, and I think there's a bit too much presumption of fertility going on).

Parents both said at least I don't need to worry so much about being a financial failure now (ok, that's not quite what they said, but not terribly far off it).

Parents both also said things they shouldn't really have said (in a high praise where there really ought have been equal praise way).

And then conversation turned to more important things, like relations marooned on a volcano by another volcano (remember schadenfreudekarma) and I made a sandwich.

Anyhoo,

2010-04-18T20:49:00.001Z

"Is that why you've changed your hair?"

2010-04-16T19:33:00.002Z

Weird recent dreams:

- Switches in the plugs not the sockets.
- Explaining things to my brother's grandchildren.
- Being able to change which colours, which wavelengths we can see, on demand.

And that's not even getting into making myself travel-sick while lying in bed because I was thinking about how orbits work and the Spirographing rotations of the Earth.

Anyhoo,

2010-03-25T19:31:00.001Z

Bank, vote, not lib.

No, that isn't a lack of endorsement for the Liberal Democrats, just Lame-Beth refusing to let me read.

It's odd that I can get a vote without showing any identification, but I can't get a library book out without giving them insight into my credit rating.

To join the library I need a bank statement or utility bill. I don't get bank statements since the bank told me that receiving paper statements is a very, very bad thing. I don't pay utility bills [directly]. Ergo I cannot exist.

Sod the passport, which might suggest that I am a person who exists, sod the parcel with the customs sticker on it, which might suggest that can be contacted at the aforementioned address, that the Government admit the address exists, and that the address lies pretty much within Lame-Beth's domain.

Instead palm me off with a form that I can't use until I have some paperwork I won't get. But which I can fill in now, you know, just in case it comes in handy.

Except when I try to fill it in I find it's gloriously glossy, so basically wipe-clean.

By the way, Lame-Beth, your form is ageist. That or the state of the populace of Lame-Beth is such that it is impossible for anyone to reach 100 or older (which, ya know, isn't such a zany idea).

And it's anti-American-ist. And anti-ISO-ist too.

When I say anti-X I mean it doesn't preclude X, but would simply let the wrong date be entered into the system if it happens to be a DDMMYY-format one (but then maybe it does expect YYMMDD format dates; it just doesn't say what the two-by-two-by-two boxes should contain).

While I'm pointing out faults, where's the "please specify" box for the option of "Other" in the title section? "Dear Other Johnston..."

But then it also proclaims 2008 to be the National Year of Reading. If only they'd give me a chance to read I could look forward to it.

And now on to bigger and greater rants.

Anyhoo,

2010-03-22T20:00:00.002Z

Is it time?

I don't really know what to say here any more. The anonymity thing has thunged, or at least if it hasn't then that's only because here is so moribund Google and ilk forget it exists.

I rarely seem to get past the first third of a post, aborting it mid-draft (I know; parallax, m'dear). But then it's only very seldom that I remember Blogger. It's taken longer to forget than Google Wave, but then it did once have a function. Facebook and Twitter have nicked all the ideas, leaving this place as somewhere waiting to add padding.

That's not quite true, but this isn't what it was. It holds less power now. I can say less. I'm not sure I have any less to say, but it's harder say it here, to say it anywhere, now the world is a little better at finding and knowing.

Except I've just discovered in amongst the moribund blogs a green shoot of recovery. The old guard live on. So there goes the "well, everyone else isn't doing it" reason.

Ok, so maybe I'll carry and not so much hang the consequences but simply hope there are none. I've been doing that for an age. All it takes is not counting some of the consequences as consequences.

So what's happened since last I wrote? When was that anyway?

Ok, so what's happened recently? Well, the side-project that never really was now isn't again, only in the other way. I just have vision issues. Romping in Elysian fields (clearly without bothering with the death bit) seems so bloody unlikely. I think I need to reread... was it James that was "I can and I will"? Obarm myself.

Other stuff that I've no idea if I mentioned: Theatre.

Because I can and I will and I lastminute cheap but surprisingly good seats. Ok, so so far the grand total has been Waiting for Godot (because, well, it's like reading Dickens or Austen; it's something one simply should have done [don't point out I've never read either]. That and I missed something I wanted to see and had missed WfG the last time round, so thought seeing something on your own is better than not seeing it) and The Little Dog Laughed, because Mr 5500 commented on it and he's my Jai, although he may not know this (though last.fm apparently does. We're 'SUPER'. Oops). But then left to my own devices, not would I probably would, but my listening seems to revolve around tie-in music (last three songs played being that one from Glee, but not by them, that one from the John Lewis Christmas ad which is in no way linked to the BBC2 JL documentary that was on whenever it was, and The Gadsdens covering Small Town Boy, which is bound to turn up in some soap break up montage. Not that I watch soaps. Well, except for one that had Chryed, which is not very good but either both actors have been sacked or it's their turn again soon [it's a soap; they can't let the dead stay dead, let alone lingering desire stick at that]).

So what has this taught me? That there's nothing to be done and that I wear rentboy clothes.

Well, if one must shop in H&M. Was very glad I'd planned to wear it the next evening, as that could have been... conversation starting.

Um, yep this looks like it's all making about as much sense as ever. All I need now is to master the master of magic spells part (except being me, I just checked I'd remembered it right, and it's the rhyme of the line I was referring to. And I must be back because Google's cache of my searches just became a lot less useful for them).

Still don't know how to end these things though. Not that I ever really get the start right (ooh, shoes flashback) or the middle beyond middling.

So um, other other news: I think I may have worked out why my Lemon Surprise Pudding (p588 in the other bible) always has the wrong surprise. SA:Vol.

Anyhoo,

2010-03-14T17:22:00.004Z

Tweets I doubt I'll ever use.
- There are worse things I could do than buy three for the price of two.
- Forthright, if not always right.

Or more likely forget to use in an appropriate situation. Though I've never quite managed to get my phone to tweet, so that might have something to do with it.

Anyhoo,

2010-02-15T19:28:00.001Z

[This draft is so old I'd forgotten the annoying ad, and can't remember the song I thought sounded similar to the song I can remember]

Friendly Fires - Skeleton Boy - Olive - You're not alone.

Speaking of which, Spotify really needs more advertisers. Because at the moment I have the Dell [?] one lodged in my head, except that instead of "lollipop, lollipop, ooh, ooh, lollipop" it's "bugger off, bugger off, you can just bugger off" because that's pretty much what I hear whenever I hear it again, and that's quite a lot as they seem to be playing it twice an album.

Anyhoo,

2010-02-05T21:38:00.004Z

Questions answered this week:

Does Gandalf not like parsnips?
Who will win in an epic battle between a G-Wiz and a hill into Hi!gate?
Where can one find roses that match the nylon lining of a parka?
Is it possible to cover Massive Attack using bagpipes?
Wife, Girlfriend or Mistress?
How many samples of the one that tastes of cinnamon is it possible to get?
Are you reading this in a deep yet enthusiastic American voice?
[Are you ever going to forgive me for four?]

It might have helped if I'd answered these at the time of writing. I think I still can now, but sure it'd be worth the effort. So briefly:

1. Watch Waiting for Godot to find out.
2. The G-Wiz adopted the tortoise technique and so won, although he presumably had to field off offers of a push the whole time.
3. M&S. The Q and I differ in our flower buying habits.
4. Yes, but the audience may snigger and/or guffaw. And wince. Burns' Night has a lot to answer for.
5. How the hell should I know? Especially since I've no idea what prompted this.
6. Many.
7. HTHSIK, again.
8. Result pending.

Anyhoo,

2010-01-12T22:07:00.002Z

Feeling strangely grey. Translucent grey. Globular too. Like soot diffused into molten wax, now cold. But watery. Softer. The contents of a hollow container; a container too understated too exist. An Adipose wraith; less charming, less present.

Hammered by circumstances; I built the forge. Beset by Kipling's mutinous men; soul set to auto-immune. Endless stumbling skirmishes whirling seditiously.

The truth was not the answer. It may not even be the beginning of the answer. Glib is neither.

Occasionally reaching up to touch the weak facsimile of life, copied on dying cartridge, shaken to stir, to start. Dim, scattered ink dissolved by touch; in memory it was always blank. Yet. An ember somewhere. An ember scarce remembered. Distantly deep den of darkness. A homœopath's scintilla.

Spinning the batteries of hope one last time. The only warmth the friction of bread-mould crystals on the contacts.

Well, maybe next time. We'll always have—there is no always; there never has been.

---

Because that's how reading sidebars clashing with the confident, cocky, chaotic cacophony of youth made me feel. Perhaps, where did it all go wrong? Simply, where did it all go?

Beautiful and unique snowflakes are crushed into the pack, drowning mangled, marred by grit, scarred by salt, an ever-weakening, -thinning quixotic slick of treachery, fit only to retain the cruel disdain of humans—detritus padding—to linger unwanted for a distorted temporary age, swamped by the new young or ever vanishing, to be forgotten far longer than they'll ever be remembered, lost for so long that snow itself is a surprise.

If only "you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake" were true.

Anyhoo,

PS. Yes, I am publishing this rather than leave it as yet another draft in the forlorn hope (what other sort is there?) that the utter Typepadishness will embarrass me into posting more to bump it down the page.

2009-12-26T19:21:00.001Z

Gender
We think http://any-hoo.blogspot.com is written by a woman (63%).
Age
1. 26-35 (28.6 %)
2. 51-65 (20.6 %)
3. 18-25 (19.9 %)
4. 13-17 (16.9 %)
5. 36-50 (7.4 %)
6. 65-100 (6.5 %)
Mood
1. upset (61.1 %)
2. happy (38.9 %)

Hmm.

So you think I'm either my age or maybe my parents' age (I think they're still in that bracket)? And that I'm female and annoyed? Can one have a self-fulfilling half-prophecy?

'Ways, u ent noin wachu tawkin bow, blud, ya get me?

Now, if that doesn't get me bumped into da yoot cats, then I don't know what will. Except I used an apostrophe (for our younger readers, that's a "sidenose") on "anyways", so probably dooms me to the mid-life crisis section.

All this because I don't write like Hemingway?

[Insert pastiche of Hemingway here, full of short sentences, jabbed speech, brassy blondes, not real blondes, but fake blondes, blondes from a bottle, blondes bloody men like, men with rust on the hands, brown dirt on their brown faces, the sea as prison, non-non-or-are-they-sequitors, simp words for simp guys, misogynists, pointless all, violent abrupt, Greene's Pinkie with heat, on heat, packing heat, crusted heat, no commas, sure, what the hell; a semicolon].

Anyhoo,

2009-12-21T13:00:00.003Z

When I woke up the room was filled with light and silence.

[I forgot to use this in a post, but you can guess what the post would have been about. Yep, that which stops being a good thing about three-hours in]

Anyhoo,

2009-12-16T19:46:00.005Z

Hurrah, I have internet. Ok, so I actually don't, but my brother has, and he's out at the moment therefore it's mine, all mine (comme le brouillard). So now for the usual apologies for lack of abnormal service. But not having internet probably counts as a reasonable excuse for silence. Anyway, I have seen bloggers recently if not blogged.

First was LondonDan for Pam-Ann (finally learned to type that in the not-showing-my-age way), who was, oh hang on, there was half a post drafted about this, wasn't there? So read that then.

Then came

[Walky Talky Stairs and Co.]

One down, how many to go?

[Can I claim the CIA came and took away my words because they were dangerous? And that's why there's nothing more written here?]

Anyhoo,

2009-12-06T23:18:00.005Z

Watching ~~this~~ again. It's not my fault. Pam Ann (hurrah I got it the non-showing-my-age way round for once!) kept referencing in her show tonight. 'Twas good but occasionally a bit too, well, she described it as being a pantomime, but parts of it were like those sections during the service of church parade where suddenly the congregation chant some non-sequitur back and then keep doing it with different phrases. Which is fine if you've done it before, but not so much when she could break into a chunk of Sister Act and I might not notice (though it was eerie hearing her echo the inner voice when Roxy the Viking emerged; damn cultural priming).

Anyway, there are probably seats available for next Sunday's performance (unless you happen to have something better to do, like, um, that Christmas number-one maker thing. Hmm, maybe that's where everyone was). By which I mean I bought the cheapest of the cheap seats and found us up/downgraded to the tier below. Which only made the jibes pitched up to the economy gods slightly awkward because Pam Ann was about the only person in the place seemingly unaware that there was no one up there.

Anyway, so I've now spent a Sunday night at the Loldom Platinum and discovered it's got good acoustics because when the microphone popped in and out of existence the word came through regardless.

[What a thrilling thought to end the post on. Must remember to try harder. Anyway, Londondan, lovely guy, fluff filler probably covers the rest of it].

Anyhoo,

2009-12-06T19:22:00.000Z

Awaiting the Pandora moment (and I don't mean the America Spotify). But it might be a while coming having managed to very effectively kill of this thing (hands up if you're reading this. Hardly looks like Nuremberg out there).

[Again a thrilling post, but then it was to be another post about why I cannot post, except I probably could anyway, but let's not mention that]

Anyhoo,

2009-12-05T17:37:00.003Z

On further questioning he admitted to having pale stools and dark urine.

The most interesting line to come out of a talk by one these guys, albeit on the medical notes left behind in the lecture theatre. Beyond the hepatitis, it was the usual call for a war-footing, ditching of GDP as anything but a measure of what it is, and wondering why we appear to be waiting for it start snowing technology*.

I am of course leaving out much, because, well, if I repeat what normally gets repeated then the wilful hedonism option does start to look attractive.

So what else has been happening? Well, I've seen both James Corden and Ruby Wax; the former in incongruous shoes on Hantstead Heath, the latter twice in the RA. I quite liked the bit where she gets fired at the wall.

I've played drink while you think with in-laws (not mine but I've yet to work out the correct term for them).

I've been repeatedly disappointed by a recurrent trending topic on Twitter; It's snowing is just misleading when they're talking about Austin or Albany not 'Ackné or 'Ammasmith.

Thought this good.

Failed to finish a children's book yet.

Managed to buy dry-clean-only trousers, but they are quite nice, and labels like that are like the best-before dates on food or the red man on crossings. Scant is a good word, isn't it?

Managed not to buy some skinny jeans**, not because of the mutton trussed as lamb thing, but because I was mostly skinnier. I clearly need a job that I have to get the Tube to (and so spend my days running up escalators) or move back to Exciter. Suddenly the grunge of the Gumtreed doesn't seem so bad; they may be halfway to Hardfortsheer but at least they're in Loldom, technically.

And on that thought I'm off to fortify myself for tomorrow's home hiring hopes.

Anyhoo,

* One day it will. Pray you don't live that long.
** I manage to be so far off the fashion radar I'm probably on its sonar. I think part of the problem is I don't tend to look at the men around me and wonder what their clothes will look like on me. Now try that with a different stress.

2009-12-01T23:28:00.004Z

[I have no idea]

Love More (knuckles)

The freedom to post Lady Gaga lyrics should I so chose (but only because I tend to hear "you and me could write a pantomime").

"There was a boy, a very strange, enchanted boy. And I have his number".

"With a cheer, not a tear"

Anyhoo,

2009-11-27T23:34:00.007Z

Weird dream: We all had to stop everything and sit in the darkness for twenty minutes while they closed the flood barrier.

Clearly wasn't a very long dream. Just the type of dream must-be-published-by-thirty* novels are made of.

* My brother and his friends had a competition to see who would be the first to get their novel published. I scoffed at his inability to write a book. Whereas I merely forget how old I am or am nearly and that exempts me. Anyway, I've tried writing stories. I have a habit of neglecting to include any likeable characters. Or making it like that awful blazing tsunami of doom book which wipes out London (yes, I know that's pretty much par for the course in the first 45 seconds of the disaster any disaster film is built around [God, villians, sacrificial English-speakers], but this book made the waltzing tornadoes of Day After Tomorrow look sane). Just because one's found out what could happen and how it could happen does not mean it all will happen especially not at the same time.

But it might. Right about the point the quick brown pig jumps over the lazy shark while building up the speed to take off.

There was some other dream as well, but it wasn't of Twitterable length so I can't remember it.

Speaking of which, just noticed Desert Island Discs trending. How not very 2.0 is that?

Speaking of music [albeit blatantly nicked from Stephen Fry's Twitter]:

Soundtrack coming to a Spotify near you soon.

[/easily amused]

Anyhoo,

2009-11-07T19:40:00.001Z

Have you walked into a church on a winter's day?

Not just me, is it?

Although having listened again much later it may well be.

Anyway, something else. How should one respond to the following sic text?
I find pleasure in your company for the following reasons.. Your articulate ,humourous sensitive ,strong minded and why would I not want to buy you a meal . Oh and on a more personal note ... Well you'll just have to wait till our next meeting... If there is to be one ?

The hills are alive with the sound of people running to them? Apart from anything else: Your articulate... What? Cousin? Eyebrows? Lorry?

And there other things that never got worked out beyond the précis:
- Stomach making noises like Skype.
- Bus. Oyster out. Dripping ceiling. The Waters of Mars. The joys of the 29 and living up to the stereotype and therefore having watched it live and on iPlayer. Water always wins. Though you'd think something called Oyster would be able to cope with it.
- The joys of subliminal Facebook messages:
-- X Y and K Y are now friends.
-- X Y is all signed up for her first course in counselling!

Anyhoo,