// My So-Called Life
Back on the Road Again
Sadly, Chris and I have been informed by our Landlord that he’s having his house refurbished and therefore needs our flat back for three months while it’s done. And so, once again, we find ourselves looking for a place to live.
And therefore back facing the same sorts of difficulties we faced before. The whole “yeah, but this bedroom could only fit a double bed if you took a chainsaw to it” thing is much in evidence, which is terribly frustrating - although at least this time we have only encountered one case of “which part of ‘must have a garden’ do you not understand?”
God I hate this process. It’s utterly soul destroying.
This time round, it has to be said, Foxtons have upped their game considerably and have been very helpful and efficient, not something I’ve encountered from them before. Sadly in the last year prices have gone up rather a lot (as the sales market slumps) so we’re going to be paying a premium rate but there’s not much that can be done about that.
One thing that has made life easier this time, though, is the fact we’re already in the sort of area we want to be in, so we’re no longer travelling for 45 minutes each way to view properties. It’s been quite nice taking a short walk in the sunshine to get to the places we’ve viewed so far! It’s just a shame the search is so far proving so fruitless.
Posted on May 12, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life | 5 Comments
Self-Cancelling Arguments
My stepmother - Shelley - has many virtues, but all too often it seems that the ability to form a watertight argument isn’t one of them. Indeed I once found myself in the position of watching her conduct a monologue in which she decided to stop taking the car to school of a morning but ended up with her deciding against it five minutes later.
No other person got a word in edgeways, it was a pure case of managing to talk herself out of something entirely unaided - quite a fascinating thing to view in many respects.
She is also able to sound off for ages on the evils of immigration whilst conveniently forgetting that her own mother - sadly recently departed - was born and raised in Holland and only popped over when the Second World War kicked off.
Last weekend, however, she outclassed herself. First, whilst merrily beavering away over a pile or ironing, she put forwards the view that a couple of generations ago people were able to live longer. She then put forward a load of caveats that would have prevented this, which it seemed was destined to become pretty much endless.
“So,” I said, after a moment’s pause in the speech, “what you’re basically saying is: in the old days people used to live longer as long as they survived?”
Best was yet to come though. She later took the opportunity to blast my father for his dependence on powered transport to go anywhere. “I mean,” she fumed, “you’ve got all these opportunities around for nice long walks but you never do any bloody exercise do you? All you do is your keep fit!”
Dad looked over at me and I’m afraid to say I just dissolved into a fit of giggles which took me a good five minutes to recover from and were in serious danger of damaging me.
Thankfully she is able to recognise these flights of self contradiction and laugh about them or I guess evenings at home would be quite frosty at times.
Bless
Posted on May 11, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life | 0 Comments
Thank You!
Just a quick note to say thank you one and all who - despite my completely ignoring the fact and giving no hint whatsoever - managed to remember or deduce that I have now managed to hit the wrong side of 30 on Monday.
I wasn’t really marking it since it’s not exactly a milestone one (more of a millstone really) but your well-wishes and occasional insults were very touching!
Even the chorus of Happy Birthday and TARDIS cake presentation at the quiz yesterday managed to move me (as well as mortify me too).
That said, it’s amazing how many people wanted a piece of David Tennant.
Posted on April 23, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life | 0 Comments
Crippling Pedantry
There are times when being such an appalling pedantasist (go on, it’s wide open for you) takes you dangerously close to being on the receiving end of some actual bodily harm.
For example, on Tuesday night as I queued outside the cash machine I found myself being vaguely irked by the sign in a Whorephone Carhouse window which advertised the fact that the “all new iPod’s” were in. I found myself wanting to go in and complain about this sign, but since I get stared at blankly by the staff in these places when I even ask for something as obscure as a new phone, so I thought better of it on the grounds that the finer points of grammar may cause some kind of seizure.
And you don’t want to be responsible for that sort of thing do you?
So anyway… I dragged my thoughts back to the present and waited patiently in line as before. And then over the top of the surging beats from my own iPod’ I heard the couple of people behind me chatting away. I politely tried to ignore them, but all of a sudden one of them uttered something so awful my blood turned to ice.
“Yeah,” said the camper of the two, “it’s definitely much more busier isn’t it?”
I fought to control myself at this and, thankfully, won. It would have been so easy to swing round and hit him with my manbag, it really would, but somehow I suspect shouting “for God’s sake, you don’t form a comparative with ‘more’ and a suffix you illiterate moron” in the street would have made me seem somewhat unbalanced.
Or, at least, more unbalanced than normal.
But why is it that comparative and superlative forms are so difficult for people to understand these days? Is it just because grammar hasn’t been taught in schools for years, or has there been some kind of consensus that this sort of mangling of the language is actually fine?
For those of us who took a degree in this sort of thing it’s like a foreign world sometimes it really is.
Posted on March 27, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life, The World we Live In | 7 Comments
The Influence of Television…
Over the weekend - where visits to Ikea, garden centres and so on were made less pleasurable by the flurry of snow - it occurred to me that I really don’t have enough jumpers. Nestling in the bottom of one of my drawers are a couple of quite slinky tight-fitting little numbers, admittedly, but until I have managed to pump up the physique considerably more I felt ill-inclined to wear them. Essentially a more chunky and standard look is definitely what I was short of, I thought
So last night, prior to a lovely evening of boozing in the Duke of Wellington with a friend of mine, I hit Oxford Street (with all the unutterable awfulness that entails) and rectified the problem with a few choice purchases. In retrospect I’m not sure the Lemon was a good idea - it occurs that more muted colours seem to suit me best - but certainly I now have an array of sweaters from which to choose.
And so this morning saw me struggling into one of said jumpers (I’ve managed to knacker my shoulder overnight somehow, which is agony), pottering round the house a bit doing my usual routine and leaving for work.
It was only when I paused to do a quick check of my attire before heading out the door that I suddenly realised that my entire look clearly echoed that of a TV character loved by millions. There in the mirror, with his short hair, big ears, maroon sweater and half-length black leather jacket stood the Ninth Doctor.
I cursed inwardly and scurried out the door before the flatmate could see. Because he would doubtless have pointed and laughed.
Posted on March 26, 2008 | Filed Under Film and Television, My So-Called Life | 1 Comment
Oh For Crying Out Bleeding Loud…
Some of you will be aware of the fact that I was, at the end of January, the victim of telephone banking fraud. Someone had verified they had my bank account details correct by making a small deposit on my account - in Forest Gate of all places - and then rang up Abbey and transferred a substantial sum of money out of my account.
I won’t bore you with the saga - Abbey basically are hopelessly understaffed and overworked as far as I can tell - but it took six weeks all told to get my money refunded and for an account to be made available to me again. (I am so switching accounts once the dust has cleared I tell you.) But what is irritating is the fact that other institutions with whom I have financial dealings aren’t apparently any better.
Whilst I was on holiday for example I started getting phone calls from Amex pointing out that I have missed payments and can I pay them now please? On the first day I said no, and explained why and they seemed quite happy. In fact they unfroze my cards in case I’d need them and made sure the case notes reflected this. This was a good thing and I was mightily impressed by their efforts.
It’s just a shame that no-one at Amex ever read the case notes before giving me the next phone call two days later. Or the one after that. Finally, on my return - once I’d been able to go to the bank and pick up my new card which (naturally) turned up while I was on my way through airport security the week before - they rang up asking me to pay without actually checking whether I had.
In fact I’d beaten them to it by half an hour. And their computers showed that clearly, apparently.
But then yesterday I had to deal with what I later described as “O2 / BT Vision Buggery Bollocks”. A shitty letter from O2, for example, complained I hadn’t paid and my phone was thus restricted. This was a surprise - they were one of direct debits who had acknowledged Abbey’s request to change the details - but it turns out that whilst they acknowledged the details they simply didn’t bother to action them.
BT Vision on the other hand, were given my bank details before I went away because a bill needed paying urgently. I got a new bill yesterday asking for me to make the next payment manually and when I rang them it turned out (after a lengthy time on hold) the details were in the system but whoever had taken them forgot to submit them to the billing department.
And no, I couldn’t pay it there and then because the payments system was down.
I despair I really do. Not so much that the person in question forgot, but that their computer system takes payment details but doesn’t automatically update the people responsible for taking it. The last two months while I’ve tried to sort my life out have basically been one system or process failure after another. Stupid inflexible processes, inefficient bureaucracy, or just simple bloody minded stupidity have probably well and truly shafted my credit record for the next couple of years.
It’s no wonder all these companies are going down the tubes. They either have lax security procedures (I mean, Abbey’s is shockingly poor), or else give credit to people who have no means of paying and then make it stupendously difficult for those of us who can pay to actually do so.
Complete and utter fuckwads, I tell you. Arsewittery in the extreme.
Posted on March 19, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life, The World we Live In | 1 Comment
Journey Into Teror
Whilst in Gran Canaria, just so as to make it seem as if we hadn’t just slept, read, drunk, eaten and sunbathed for seven days (although it was a close run thing), we took the opportunity of a trip to a market town way up in the mountains of the northern part of the island.
The reason? The town was called Teror, and due to an initial misreading of the name, the prospect of “the Market of Terror” proved too much to resist. (I mean… if that isn’t a great Doctor Who story title, what is?)
Actually, as far as descriptions go the “Journey Into Terror” wouldn’t have been bad at all. Gran Canaria’s a bit of a mountainous island and thus the roads tend to circle the outside of the mountains, with sheer drops around first one side of your carriage and then the other - which for those of us who suffer from vertigo (the tour guide included) is not so great. If the roads were larger or more sturdily barriered, it might be less of an issue, but as we headed towards the highest points of the island, circling round the dormant volcano caldera there was a certain amount of looking the other way on my part - not to mention the occasional “oooohhh shit”.
Once my feet were on the ground again, though, I was fine - even at the very summit. It was just when trying to manoeuvre a BFO bus round tiny craggy roads that I found myself a bit discombobulated.
Teror itself was… well, pleasant enough. As you might expect it looked fairly like your average old Spanish town, but to be honest the market itself seemed like a bizarre hybrid of Borough and Camden: viz and to whit, various stalls of hugely tempting food stood next to stalls filled with what can only be described as utter crap.
And by God some of the religious crap was the most tatorific tat I’ve ever seen. That said, given the state of the church (the interestingly named “Our Lady of the Vine”) I can’t say I’m surprised. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t in a bad state of repair by any means - quite the reverse in fact: the chancel was by far the most gaudy and overly-gilded one I’ve ever seen. And if you didn’t think the excessive grandness bordered on tacky, then the presence of an electric votive candle stand would certainly have changed your mind. (I mean… really!)
Still, the landscapes were lovely, the food was good, and it was a nicely diverting day out. And, lame though it may have been, the endless possibilities of the town’s name kept our little group amused all day, I tell you. Everything became a story title: the Market of Terror, the Steps of Terror, the Church of Terror, the Waitress of Terror (actually, she was really scary), the Toilets of Terror and so on.
The highlight of the day for me, though, was - sorry - the Cat of Terror. Some old moggy in a perfumery with only two teeth (the cat, that is, not the shop) took a shine to me when we visited - not least when I pulled my usual trick and used Rob’s Magic Fingers™ on its ears (Cats love me for that - they become putty in my hands).
Actually I think I made a friend for life there - it looked ever so upset when I left.
Posted on March 7, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life | 0 Comments
What I Learned on My Holidays
Hello! Did you miss me? Probably not - I suspect you never knew I was away. But I was, having spent the last week happily ensconced in Gran Canaria.
It was very nice, though, thanks for asking. Whilst the temperature barely rose above 22, I was still subject to seven hours a day of baking sunshine which was very pleasant. The wind, mind you, did mean that the afternoon on the beach had a vaguely exfoliating effect, and I am still finding bits of sand in places I never knew it was possible to get sand into, but there we are.
So did I learn anything from this trip? Well, yes I did actually. Here in no particular order are the things I learned or discovered while I was out there:
- I really should pack more books. I seriously under-estimated how many I’d need and as a result once I’d finished my four, I then had to read the flatmate’s ones as well. (Although actually he’d taken them from my bookshelf anyway, so I was effectively rereading my own. Still, “The Vesuvius Club” and “The Devil in Amber” are definitely worth revisiting.)
- The people most inclined towards naturism are generally the people who have the least to show off. (There should be a law against people of a certain sagginess from doing it, in my opinion.)
- One of the best gay bars in the world is called Detox Retox and serves incredibly nice fruit smoothies or shakes (for the detox) and some amazing cocktails with suitably smutty names for the retox. It’s beautifully appointed too, with some lovely staff, and it was there I made my next discovery….
- You can barely walk after a Double Penetration. But it’s so worth it.
- Another of the best gay bars in the world is called Centre Stage and is inevitably oriented around show-tunes and theatricals on its big screen, where snippets from Morecambe and Wise rub shoulders with clips from Ab Fab, Kenny Everett, Lily Savage and the like. The only downsides are a) its extremely limited capacity and b) the extremely painful hour in which I made my next discovery…
- I hate American Film Musicals. Really. With a passion. The thigh-slapping idiocy of Calamity Jane, the pastel and primary-coloured hell of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or anything that has even the vaguest hint of being Rodgers and Hammerstein-esque makes me feel so fundamentally uneasy that I have to leave the vicinity. And this is especially true of The Sound of Music, a musical so nauseatingly saccharine my stomach is churning just thinking about it.
- That said, Howard Keel was a bit of alright in his day wasn’t he?
- I’d never have believed it possible but the Daily Mail has, if anything, got worse. (Look, I was stuck, I couldn’t find a real newspaper anywhere.)
- The most amazingly sublime understatement in the world is found in the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guide to the Canary Islands and it reads as follows: “Vegetarians will suffer in the Canaries.” Thankfully, for Michael’s sake, on the last day we discovered Valentines - possibly the only restaurant to have a selection of vegetarian options (as opposed to just one starter), where we were all able to eat heartily and also enjoy the warm, attentive and friendly service of our hostess, Ms Beverley Hills. Not to mention the desert:
- Caipirinha Tiramisu. A revelation, let me tell you.
- On the subject of food, on another occasion I also found that Reindeer is extremely tasty. So thanks to the “OK! Restaurant” for that (and I must point out to the owners that its name really is really under-selling it by quite a large degree.)
- Vodka measures in the Canaries are about six times that of an average UK double. (Poor Michael. And, for that, matter Poor Chris.)
- The best way you can survive on a flight if you don’t like flying is to be seated next to someone who is more scared than you. This happened to me on the return flight and despite the turbulence I found myself quite happily sitting there and enjoying it. (The wine may also have helped.)
- However much you loved your time away, your own bed is always the best.
Posted on March 5, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life | 2 Comments
How much?
Just finished re-organising my MP3 collection (tidying it up and consolidating it and so on) in part of a migration to iTunes. This is due, in part, to my purchase of an iPod Nano the other day.
Why did I buy the Nano? Well, for one thing I’ve had an unutterably shit few weeks (doubtless I shall reveal all at some other juncture when the dust has settled) so I needed a new toy. And for another I have decided to get myself a MacBook Pro, so I needed something compatible with it.
So… what has this consolidation and sorting out taught me? Well, for one thing it’s taught me that I have about fifteen gigabytes of MP3s in total.
Fifteen. Count ‘em. Fifteen.
It’s also just underlined that I am one of the campest men alive. Just a random sampling reveals 64 ABBA tracks, 138 Pet Shop Boys tracks and 49 PWL Remixes (that’s just the official PWL remixes, not the songs originated by Stock Aitken Waterman themselves).
Even the 105 episodes of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again - it’s far funnier than bloody Python - and the appearance of a few guitars in the odd unexpected place can’t normalise this curve.
Perhaps I should just hang it all and start wearing glitter on my cheeks.
Posted on February 20, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life, Pop Music | 4 Comments
Welcome to 2008…
Well, how was your new year?
I spent mine at home, on my own, sober, watching crap telly and only pausing at the stroke of midnight to raise a (slightly larger than I’d intended) glass of Amaretto to the new year.
Frankly it was bliss.
Over the last few years I’ve come to regard New Year’s Eve parties as a bit of a nonsense really. I somehow either find myself trapped in a houseful of almost complete strangers whose attractiveness causes my normally low self-image to crash still further; or else crammed into a bar - where the DJs are trying to be cool - whilst being jostled left, right and center while it slowly dawns on me how awful the journey home is going to be.
I have enjoyed precisely two NYE events since moving to London. One was a private bash at the Griffin last year where it was just about the right number of people and they were mainly people I knew. The other was an OUTintheUK event where Other Rob and I did DJ duties over the actual moment. (Boney M doing “Auld Lang Syne”. Who’d have thought?)
But there we are. Nothing much seems different. I look back at 2007 and think it was okay, really. Aside from the buildup to the collapse I suffered in April it’s been not too bad. Following said collapse I changed jobs (hello comfort zone - nice to be back), and moved to a bigger, more transport-friendly location. I even had a boyfriend for a few months too, which was a novelty - although obviously this now precludes the possibility of me having another until about 2011). And the Quiz is - whilst utterly exhausting to keep going - well received and went out with a bang for the last one of the year. And I got 25,000 words into my novel which is officially more than I’ve written in six years so I’m quite pleased.
Okay, 2007 slightly fell apart at the end with a death in the family and the associated running around and so on as detailed previously, but on the whole it was good.
So what for 2008? Well, drinking less is on the agenda. Friday aside (where Daniel and Orlando came over for a very pleasant evening) I’ve been laying off the sauce mainly over the last week or so and feeling quite proud of that too. The health and monetary benefits of this are something I hope to be reaping over the coming months as long as something awful doesn’t happen. And I finally will be rid of the tummy, I’ve decided. The gym-going starts in earnest on Monday and I WILL NOT FALTER!
I have trips to see Girls Aloud (amazingly good tickets) and Kylie (rather less so) over the coming months - did the Spice Girls on Wednesday by the way which was fun - and a trip to Gran Canaria coming up in February so there’s some other events to look forward too.
And in between all that hopefully I’ll get the novel doubled in size on the way, and a new Vitriol and Old Lace website should be live by the end of the month (trust me - it’s gorgeous) so Daniel and I can start pushing that again too.
I’m feeling quite positive about 2008 really. Hope it all goes well for you too!
Posted on January 6, 2008 | Filed Under Musings, My So-Called Life | 0 Comments