// My So-Called Life

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Secret Satan

Does anybody else loathe the idea of an office “Secret Santa” as much as I (and, as it turns out, the other members of my team) do?

I find the whole concept faintly nauseating. There’s just something slightly “you will do this, you will enjoy it or you will be shot” about it all which makes me want to fold my arms, stamp my feet and go “fire away”.

I mean, I’ve bought mine (and by God it’s hard to find something imaginative under £5 isn’t it?) and entered it, but there’s just a part of me that wishes any attempts at forced corporate jollity were banned by law.

Or perhaps I’m just being churlish. To be honest I’m all 2007-d out now. The last few weeks have been a whirl of struggling to extract present ideas, tracking them down, buying them, wrapping the fuckers (I really really hate wrapping presents), deciding who gets cards and who doesn’t, attending - and giving a reading at - a funeral (an interestingly non-Christmassy aside), developing exczema for the first time in 30 years (which was a shock I’ll tell you), training clients, writing more pub quiz questions than I would have cared for, finally getting round to writing the Christmas cards out, and traveling to Canterbury and back (twice).

Bugger presents and festivities, for crying out loud. The only thing I’m really looking forward to next week is a couple of days off and the Doctor Who special.

Everything else can go hang.

Count ‘em.

Twelve pills I’ve just had. It’s ridiculous.

Between the Nurofen (oww!-ey back), Beechams (a cold is determined to bring me down, I can feel it forming), 5-Hydroxytryptophan (my SAD syndrome kicked in majorly two weeks ago and really left me feeling utterly depressed until I started taking it again), Conjugated Linoleic Acid (fat burner), Milk-thistle and Artichoke (system cleansing) and Fibre-sure (well, guess) it’s a wonder, frankly, I don’t rattle when I walk.

It’s a slippery slope, this supplements lark, I tell you.

Validation at last!

The Evening Standard have reviewed my mate Rob’s pub The Vauxhall Griffin rather positively (and rightly so, it’s rather fine).

But I’m particularly gratified by the fact that the quiz he and I run there got a mention.

Admittedly it was a one-word description, but as far as adjectives go I think “lively” isn’t a bad one at all.

And so it begins…

Lord. The first of my Christmas shopping arrived today.

How organised is that?

Noisome Deodourants

Gentle reader, pray tell me why so many men’s antiperspirants/deodorants are so utterly disgusting.

I mean… you do your duty to your fellow man by giving yourself a liberal blast of a morning or prior to going out and so on, only to spend the next five minutes gagging in an acrid cloud of spray that clings to your throat and nostrils, apparently burning its way through any membrane it clings to.

I’ve tried dozens of the buggers now and they all have that basic problem. Admittedly they settle down after a few minutes and become vaguely bearable (with the obvious exception of the entire Lynx range which is a form of chemical terrorism I can’t condone) but the application is an almost unbearable form of self-torture.

I’ve had to switch to a lady-spray instead.

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