Cut my life into pieces....

Election decisions

2010-05-06T21:36:00.002+01:00

My mother is working at an election night count in the North West....

NorthernMonkey: All set for the count?

NorthernMonkeyMother: Sort of...but I've still loads to do before tonight

NorthernMonkey: Like what?

NorthernMonkeyMother: I've got to do my hair...I want to look nice if I'm going to be on TV when the result is shown

NorthernMonkey: but it'll be 3am, noone will be watching and it's not like you are announcing the result

NorthernMonkeyMother: I know but I might be on in the background and you know Evelyn has insomnia and might be watching and I don't want saying she saw me and my hair was all messy

NorthernMonkey: what else do you have to do then?

NorthernMonkeyMother: I have to decide what to wear...

NorthernMonkey: It'll be a late night with lots of hanging about, go for comfort...how about your jeans?

orthernMonkeyMother: But I don't want to look like I'm supporting any one party...

NorthernMonkey: But unless you have a big rosette on, no-one will look at the colour of your clothes

NorthernMonkeyMother: but they might and i don't want to give the wrong impression or be accused of favouritism when counting

NorthernMonkey: Ok, ok so what are the options?

NorthernMonkeyMother: I think I'll go with the brown trousers with a cream top..or maybe the beige trousers or should I wear my white shirt....

Politics

2010-05-04T08:21:00.003+01:00

I've been waiting for our MP to call round to try and canvas my vote. There is so much I want to grill her on - her rubbishy voting history, her expenses scandal - a luxury westminster 2nd home when we live in North London! - as well as trying to elicit some sense on her party's plans for dealing with the debt and, for issues close to my own heart, housing, regeneration and plans to decimate the lazy, final pay pension and an in line with inflation pay rise scounging public sector workers such as myself.

As the days go by with neither a leaflet nor a door knocking, I'm getting more riled and adding to my list of questions. I can sense the other half is starting to hope she or one of her party minions pops round when he is out....

Then on Thursday, just after the other's half's parents have taken monkey baby off my hands for the afternoon, there is a knock at the door and it's them! As I have ~~nothing better to do~~ time on my hands, I assume a comfy position leaning on my door frame just far enough forward so she can't stand on my porch entrance and I can loom above her in what I hope is a threatening Jeremy Paxman-esque manner and I prepare to give her what for.

I let her do her spiel first and wave a leaflet about which apparently outlines her recent accomplishments, including one bullet point called 'saving the local hospital from closure'...the said local hospital will not close that's for sure but it will in a few years no longer have maternity and children's services or an A&E but will still offer hip and knee operations, so her choice of the word 'save' is rather galling and I tell her so, then start my ~~rambling monologue of questions~~ grilling.

Midway through she raises her hand and says 'wait a minute - are you from Lancashire?' This is rather unexpected. 'Errr.... yes' I reply. 'I thought I recognised your accent' she says 'let me guess, Bolton way? No it's more East Lancs than that, Preston maybe? I exchange glances with the stunned party minion then correct her - right bit of the country wrong town - and then she goes on to tell me she comes from 5 miles down the road from me and before we know it, we are having the northerners in the south conversation....

Once we've established how long we have both been 'down' here, whether we have families back north, what they think of us being here, the heritage of our other halves and the difficulties/peculiarities/fun this can cause and the current state of our accents, its quite amiable. And at that point she says she has to get on as lots of doors to knock at with only a week to go and disappears down my path...

The party minion watches her boss leave and hot foot it down the road to where a bunch of her colleagues are accepting biscuits and cups of tea from one of my neighbours who has decorated her house with red banners and a home made monster garden sign, of which estate agents can only dream of. She turns to me with an expression of sad resignation 'so you had some questions on our manifesto?'

I take the leaflet and wish her luck with the coming week of cavassing... but despite this shameless show I'll still be voting for this woman on Thursday because in my constituency it's a 2 horse race and the alternative doesnt bear thinking about....

3 months later...

2010-04-21T09:16:00.004+01:00

Is it really 3 months since I last posted? Judging by the amount of spammers, it would seem so...

Life has been (for want of a much better all consuming, life sucking, very tired, can't do anything else but tend to baby word), hectic....monkey baby is getting bigger, more dictatorish and demanding by the day, but at least she now does it with a big gummy smile and squeal and as she now goes down for a nap twice a day, I can now start to ~~lose large portions of my day messing about online~~ regain my life again...so hopefully normal service will resume shortly...if anyone is still here and not run off with the japanese girls/dying with laughter at the SMS jokes etc...

In the meantime for those of you who like these things, here's a pic of the little monkey trying out her summer 2010 style...

Scar Tissue

2010-01-25T15:52:00.003Z

"It's like a great big smile" said the midwife as she inspected my C section scar before discharging me... I'm still a bit too squeamish to examine it thoroughly as I am under some ridiculous notion that if I poke it too much, my intestines might fall out. So I'll take her word for it, but it got me to thinking that the scars on our bodies tell the story of who we are, where we've been, what we've become and how we got here. They show the ills (or downright stupid things) that have befallen us as well as, in the case of my 'smile', the gifts they have brought...here's me top to toe...

Crown of Head
You can't see it, unless you know it's there and root under my hair - it's an inch long and an old old scar... 9 years old, running for the ice cream van, I tripped spectacularly and somehow fell backwards smashing my head open and requiring 5 stitches. I only remember having the stitches out and, much to my mother's disgust, the Dr honoured my request to keep them and put the removed stitches inbetween pieces of sellotape so i could take them home...I suspect they are still lying aorund in the bottom of a drawer in her house somewhere...

Left Eyebrow
This is now a silvery thread at the end of my eyebrow...if I am careful when I pluck my brows I can conceal it... Old enough to know better and 3 sheets to the wind, caught short on the way home from the pub, I crouched behind a parked car in a Swindon car park...my mate shouted at me to hurry up but in my drunken state I thought she was warning me that someone was coming to their car, so I panicked and tried to stand up/move/don't know what, fell over my jeans and landed face down in the tarmac cutting my eyebrow in the process. Apparently when I returned to the group, blood trickling and bits of car park tarmac stuck to my face, I pretended all was well...have learnt my lesson and haven't drunk gold schlager since.......

Stomach (about an inch to the left of my belly button)
When I was 7, my dad, princess sister and I got the chicken pox. It was June, it was hot and sunny and we spent our quarantine messing about in the garden for days on end. Every evening my mum brandished cotton wool and hot pink calomine lotion, doused us all up and lectured us about itching, scratching and picking the spots. I had one monster pox on my stomach, which I was obsessed about due to its size and I couldn't resist picking at it...I remember the immense satisfaction of systematically testing the edges of the scab for its removability and/or level of pain for days then when it felt ready, slowly peeling it off to reveal the new pale flesh underneath...I also recall the bollocking my mother gave me and she was right, it's been a pale, white, almost circular, flat scar ever since... it doesn't tan and interestingly increased from it's usual 10p size to £2 whilst I was pregnant...the Other Half says I am unduly fascinated by it...

Left Knee
I've always been allergic to insect bites and in spite of this always been a bit lax about making sure I don't get bitten. In 1988 I went to Italy on a camping holiday with my friends family. We stayed in a forest, with lots of trees, lots of vegetation and naturally lots of lots of mozzies. My mother had packed me lots and lots of insect repellent and bite cream which I studiously ignored... I got eaten alive...one of my bites on the top of the knee cap became quickly inflamed and after we came home, got infected and fascinated, I charted the progress of my swollen, hot leg with it's increasingly reddening, poisonous hue daily in the run up to my GCSE results. Of course, when asked, I told my mum it was itchy but ok and sprayed on some more wasp-ease.

On the day my GCSE results came out, I collected them from school, enrolled in college then as it was a nice day and I walked home. 3 miles later, I could barely move the leg whcih was almost doubled in size. My dad took me to the health centre where they lanced my knee and squeezed the poison out. He is still traumatised by the experience of having to sit next to me and hold my hand and watch what came out of my blood poisoned leg to still be unable to eat mushy peas to this day. I on the other hand, was completely uninterested by this point and only bothered about the fact I had to start college the following week, where there would be boys and I had to have my knee bandaged and use crutches...16 year olds truely know no shame....

I think that's me, what about you...

Overheard...

2010-01-14T18:44:00.003Z

In the "no sleep, condense your entire life and everything you need to do into the 3 hour slots between feeds" madhouse...ahem...I mean, of course, our kitchen - it's 7pm, we are bleary eyed and contemplating dinner...

Other half: I think I'm going to have a red bull
Northern Monkey: Another one!
Other half [with head in fridge rummaging for cans]: I last had one hours and hours ago, I just need a quick pick me up and then I'll make dinner

Other half drains can of red bull in super speedy time

Other half: although to be honest I don't think the red bull is even touching it now
Northern Monkey: But red bull is pretty hard core
Other half: Yes I know and it always used to do the trick but I think I need something stronger nowadays....

Northern Monkey: What like super strong stick to the cup espresso? A packet of pro plus?

Other Half: No I was thinking amphetamines....

By the way, he assures me it was a joke...at least I think it was....

Introducing....

2010-01-09T18:57:00.004Z

Monkey baby aka Rebecca......born weighing 6lb on 22nd December - handily 3 days early thus ensuring I didn't have to endure an NHS Christmas dinner....

Although I'm not sure how quickly I'll forgive her for the marathon 72 hour stop start labour which exhausted me, was apparently knackering and distressing for the other half (!!) and frustrated the labour and delivery staff so much so they tried to speed things up with drugs and stubborn to the end, she threw a fit with a wobbly heart rate which resulted in an emergency C section....but then again she is so completely gorgeous I just might...even if living with her is like living in a time sucking vortex of disappearing days, 3am feeds, no sleep whatsoever and stinky nappies...

Homes under the Hammer - a critique

2009-12-15T11:49:00.001Z

Whereby cheery, easily excited presenters go to auction house to see what people buying selected properties do with them after they bought them....

Whilst I’m sure this programme used to feature hoards of eager yet naiive buy to let-ters or those relinquishing lifelong careers for property development to make a quick buck, unsurprisingly in the current climate, all the people featured in the programme this week have been builders, building contractors and professional property/letting agents.

This fundamental position change of their subject does not appear to have a) been spotted by the programme makers or b) detracted them from their formulaic approach, therefore making a bit of mockery of the programme as each ‘case’ tends to go something a bit like this:

Presenter – Here’s Bill, who you will recall has bought the run down terrace in North Liverpool for £35,000

[cue pictures of said property looking sad and unloved]
Presenter - you got a great price for it , so what do you plan to do with the property?

Bill – We’ll be refurbishing it for the rental market

Presenter – That sounds great and sounds like you have done this before...

Bill – Yes my company has been doing this for around 10 years now

Presenter – The house has been empty for a while and looks like it needs lots of work – what will you spend on it?

Bill – I think mostly its remedial work and decor so I’m hopeful we can turn this around in a month and I’d expect to spend about £2000 on it max

Presenter – and what do you think it’ll be worth to you when it’s finished?

Bill - £300 per calendar month

We then see pictures of Bill and his team doing work on the property – they knock down walls, they lay new flooring, they have to do the electrics upstairs, which turn out to be dodgy, and then decorate everything beige and install new fixtures and fittings. Some of the bathroom and kitchen fittings are the style and colour of those in the end of aisle B&Q bargain bins, the carpets are atrocious and look like they were bought off ebay in a job lot.

Presenter – So it's a month later and here we are with Bill and the finished property – are you pleased with it?

Bill – yes, we did it in the time I’d expected and within budget

Presenter – we had some local letting agents view the property and price it up – let’s see what they think it’s worth...

We see 2 agents viewing the property – they comment negatively on the decor and then justify it by adding comments like ‘but then this property is for the local rental market so it'll be fine’ and both reckon they could let the property immediately for £300 pcm

Presenter [over enthusiastically] – That’s great Bill, you’ll get the price you wanted

Bill [nods and smiles sheepishly and presumably when the camera stops rolling heads off to the next auction for his next property]

So whilst I’m sure the programme makers want to see auction purchases, construction cock ups, costly mistakes and take delight in lenghty slippage in work plans and the abject failure to achieve projected income streams, the current nature of the housing market and our economic climate means that the people featured (call me cynical seeing as I work in and am knowledgable of this sector) are JUST DOING THEIR JOBS AND, by and large, seem to be DOING THEM WELL to keep a depressed sector of our economy moving....but that doesn't sounds as catchy as a programme title does it?

What I got up to on maternity leave...

2009-12-11T08:30:00.008Z

Week 1 of Maternity Leave

I know people keep telling me the start of maternity leave is a time to relax, prepare and enjoy the freedom before baby monkey arrives as I'll have my hands full soon enough, but (for the first time in my life) I'm disgustingly robust and heathly, don't feel unwell by the pregnancy and am yet not feeling too huge to do anything.

So I had a nice schedule of stuff lined up to do as I was worried about getting bored. Having been in full time employment for the last 13 years and in a hugely busy, all consuming job for the last 2 years, the thought of being at home all day with not much to do was weighing heavily on my mind.

Of course, there is little bordering on no correlation on how long it takes to do stuff when you are working, commuting and trying to squash everything else into your limited and precious freetime and how long it takes to do stuff when you actually have nothing else (or better) to do... As a result my planned weeks schedule was completed in 2 days even working at a leisurely pace, which resulted in the rest of the week being consumed by housework, slowly giving way to procrastination and poor quality made for TV movies of an afternoon accompanied by a packet of revels or chocolate digestives and some settee lounging...

Week 2 of Maternity Leave

House tidy...check

Hospital bag packed...check

Nursery stuff unpacked and ready...check

Washing all done...check

Review of contents of hospital bag...check, double check and checked again...

So I got out of the house and walked the streets like a nomad to pass the time and mooched about in shops and for some inexplicable reason found myself buying mince pies from different supermarkets in some some kind of mad taste test (my findings? the Coop ones are by far the best). When in the house I did lots of internet shopping for xmas pressies and whilst waiting for everything to be delivered, I read 3 books and watched yet more poor quality made for TV movies of an afternoon accompanied by a mince pie and did some serious settee lounging...

Week 3 of Maternity Leave

I have resisted for so long but this week I have, horror of horrors, actually started watching daytime TV.... no longer am I keeping busy of a morning and scouring the TV guide for something ‘special’ like an old film or a favourite TV show to watch with an afternoon drink and yummy treat to relax with and no longer am I treating it as I did previously - a one off when sick and off work, something to dip into or as background noise whilst doing something else.

I AM actually watching this stuff and as I a) seriously considered entering the GMTV competition for about 30 seconds and b) stuggled to complete the Guardian quick crossword and sudoku yesterday, I can only assume the slow rot of my brain has started...

Fully cooked

2009-12-10T10:46:00.003Z

As of last Friday, monkey baby was officially 'fully cooked' (I'm sure medical professionals don't use this term, but the other half and I think it works quite well) and so people I know as well as random people in the street/in the shops/at the Drs etc have started saying things to me like 'not long to go now!' or 'are you excited?' to which I can nod enthusiastically or 'soon you'll be able to eat all those things you've been denied for the last 9 months' to which I...er...can't....

When Friends was on TV, if I did the 'which one are you?' quiz in a magazine, I'd easily be Monica. I'm a control freak, I'm a stickler for doing what I should be doing, when I should be doing it and I'm happy to follow rules. But I also have a rebellious side which, if all the management self assessment exercises are to be believed, shows itself when I have endlessly weighed up all the options and associated risks (usually in an anal spreadsheety way) and convinced myself I know better.

As a result I expected to revel in the 'guidelines' for pregnancy...highly detailed rules set out for me to follow listing what I can and cannot eat and should or should not eat...however I have discovered that the inane, inexplicable and contradictory guidelines from different sources and, in particular, the baby bible we purchased brought out my rebellious side kicking and screaming...

When we chose the baby bible, we wanted a reference book to dip into when we had a question and whilst this book has proven a hugely useful resource as that, as time has gone on, it's preachy 'do this' but 'don't do this' and 'everything inherently has a risk and why would you knowingly put your baby at risk if you don't need to' tone began to slowly grate on my nerves. As a result, in the last 9 months, I have:

Eaten some brie
Eaten tonnes of shellfish, including prawns in sandwiches! With mayonaise! Bought in supermarkets!
Eaten mince, sausages, burgers, cold cuts, medium rare roast beef (although I did not choose the steak tartar on a fixe prie menu at an incredibly fancy restaurant we visited in July which was a source of huge disappointment)
Eaten runny fried eggs and dipped my toast in the yolks
Eaten the other half's home made mayonnaise (which with hindsight turned out to be a huge mistake as he mixed up 'cloves' with 'bulbs'...the indigestion lasted the best part of a week which no amount of gaviscon could touch)
Eaten peanuts and other nuts
Eaten unwashed fruit and vegetables (because I am lazy and I tend to just wipe them on my jeans first)
Eaten bags and bags of salad and not bothered re-washing them first
Drunk the odd pint of shandy on a night out down the pub
Drunk pop including big glasses of coke (until the endless indigestion kicked in)
Drunk coffee EVERY day (I have got it down from 3-4 cups of instant a day to one big cup of filter coffee I savour)

And I didn't have the swine flu' vaccination either....I am surely (if the baby bible book is to be believed) going to hell...

What's in a name?

2009-11-27T10:22:00.001Z

Choosing a name for your baby is one the most important things you can do, the baby bible tells me.

'Oh great' says the other half 'one more thing we can be crap at and people can quiz us about and then sit in judgement on for the rest of our lives'...notwithstanding the fact that the other half is currently supremely jaded with the 'advice' people seem compelled to share with us of late, you see, the other half and I don't have a very good track record in choosing names....

We own 2 delightful, very girly, female cats, which we both believed to be boys until the Vet told us otherwise about 2 months after we got them and had proudly trained them to answer to their very boys names in return for biscuits.

The vet was incredulous when she broke the news, although she did concede that a totally ginger female is rather unusual. Then she lost her patience with us when it quickly became apparent that we weren't going to change their names to more fitting girly ones, even though her slightly insane, middle aged, bit too over familiar Head Receptionist had helpfully prepared a list of 'possibles' all of which involved careful placement of alternative vowels or adding of consonants, like some weird new countdown challenge.

Subsequently every trip to the vet for the last 5 years with it's ever changing reception staff and eager young veterinary trainees has involved some comedy slapstick, which ends with the phrase 'oh but they are girls'. Then the Head Receptionist glares at us as she stubbornly continues to use presumably her 2 favourite names from her list of 'possibles', which for reasons known only to herself, she has entered as alternative names on the computerised medical records.

Surprisingly for 2 people who never ever seem to agree on anything, with not much argument, we have managed to pick a first name and middle name which we both think goes well with the other half's surname and best of all, it's a secret until she arrives much to the grandparents disgust...although the power of withholding this vital information and the interrogation and condemnation this has invoked, has been making me giddy with excitement....

It's not one of these trendy, poncy Jamie Oliver type names, it's not too girly so she won't feel compelled to wear frilly frocks and not climb trees and I've never heard anyone call their dog by it so I think it'll be ok and if it's not, as she is the other half's daughter, I'm almost certain we can train her to answer to it for chocolate hob nobs....

Deserter

2009-11-26T13:42:00.003Z

The Internet tells me that in UK military law "desertion is the act of forsaking or abandoning, more particularly the wilful abandonment of an employment of duty".

I didn't set out to be a deserter with plans to wilfully abandon this blog...it just sort of happened... Firstly, the great 'prepare for the baby' decorate necessitated some moving of the IT equipment about the house as we transformed our spare bedroom/dumping ground/office into a nursery. This resulted in the PC being dismantled and lying about unused for a week, then 2 then a few more. Then when we came to put it back together we had some 'extra special only known to Virgin media connection issues' with the router and then, following the other half's unfortunate incident with the hammer and the ladder, we needed to buy a new desk to put it on, then we couldn't decide which one to buy, then the new carpet was due to arrive so we put off making the decision for a bit then when we went to order it, it wasn't in stock and try as I might, in the meantime I just couldn't be bothered to use the PC lying on the floor and couldn't wrestle the laptop out of the other half's sweaty mitts....you get the picture....

We finally got everything sorted 2 weeks ago and I wondered what all my blog friends had been up to and whether I could be bothered to blog again...

Whilst deserting I'd found new things to fill my time....reading having a baby books because 'oh my god there's only a month to go and I still am not quite sure what I'm supposed to be doing'; trying to get the other half to read at least the relevant chapter of the books so one of us might know what's going on at the crucial time; having some thinking time, lusting over that bloke in spooks...ahem TV watching... and work got mental in the run up to my maternity leave starting largely due to my manager's head in the sand approach and general inability to recruit a maternity cover replacement like that would encourage me to not disppear for 12 months, stay at work, pop to the hospital next door, have the baby and be back at my desk in time for the 3pm staff briefing....

So I think it's less desertion and more missing in action....4 days in on week 1 of maternity leave and already I'm back here and trawling the blogs to catch up on everyone's news, so I figure I'll stay for now...

Simpleton Suppers

2009-10-01T21:51:00.000+01:00

I like Nigel Slater. I love his books. I love the fact he's not a chef instead someone with a love of good food and great flavours and by and large his recipes are varied, easy to follow and always work (unlike some from more prominent chefs/writers/tv whores I could mention), however I despise his new tv show.

If you've not seen it, it's roughly about being thrifty in the kitchen, making use of left overs or what you find in the fridge, eating seasonally and growing your own food...it's topical, it's useful, the premise lets Nigel do what he's best at - marrying a few ingredients for maximum impact - and we get to see lots of vegetables in lovely gardens and on allotments and Nige gets cooking up yummy things with what he finds.

So far so good, except the design is too clean..we see his lovely clean, spotless, white kitchen, his nice, cream le creuset set and his curiously empty fridge...where are the M&S custard tarts, the half opened jars of condiments, the chocolate bars...come on Nigel, I've read your books, I know what you like to eat...I don't believe you only have a lump of butter, some unpronouncable cheese from Italy and some unfeasibly thick slices of pancetta wrapped in greaseproof paper in the fridge...I don't 'find' those things in the back of my fridge...where's the recipe for something requiring 3 babybels, a can of carlsberg Export and some out of date tartar sauce?

We sometimes see Nigel pottering about in his garden...that too is well organised, spotless and, well to be honest, a bit soulless - he never seems to pick a vegetable covered in silvery slug trails, go to pick something and discover the aphids got there first, have to fight of a swarm of flies or the cat attacks him whilst he's rooting about his rhubarb...that'd just be me then...

He goes out to visit an allotment each week which presumably is supposed to contrast to Nigel's calm and luxurious world at home. Except these allotments belong to nice, friendly, middle class Londoners, who grow cavalero nero and fennel and have spotless sheds and friendly happy children dressed from head to toe in Boden who help out at the allotment...where do these children come from, I hope the north London vibe rubs off on me and I'm having one...

And the concept is too formulaic...or dare I say it lazy...every week Nigel makes 1 sweet and 4 savoury dishes - one for each night of the week apparently. Except I don't know about you, but there's 7 nights in my week, therefore I need 7 ideas of what to make for tea.

We never find out what he eats on weekends, but if his fridge is as empty as we are led to believe he either eats out or starves...I'm not sure that's something I wish to subscribe to...even if i am hankering after a home grown good life type of existence...and I suspect that many of the dishes would not suffice for a weekday meal for someone who has done an hour's commute on top of days work...

And so far, the sweet dish is always on a Wednesday...why not a different day? Is it bad to eat pudding on a Monday?

The other half can't bear to watch any more as apparently the extremely slow way Nigel moves anything into or out of the pan/bowl/plate is just too distressing. "Hurry up" he cries "just fling it in" as Nigel moves the spoon to put the cream in the bowl in super slow motion...

I can't bear the accompanying music any longer. Indie classics reworked into teeny tiny snippets of musak so I spend the time when I should be watching how to put my pork chops into the hot butter to brown at a snails pace, trying to work out what the soundtrack is...is it Blur or Primal Scream...I'm sure I know it, I definitely know it, then before my mind can grasp it, it fades out...

Sorry Nigel, I know you are a national treasure and I love you and your books dearly, but we won't we watching any more...

Things I have learnt about my baby before we meet:

2009-09-29T20:27:00.006+01:00

5am is playtime

Music by Celine Dion is good to wiggle and kick to...

As is the beeping door alarm on the train (or hustle alarm as I learnt it is called this week when a train driver had a shouty rant about people blocking the doors at Finsbury Park)...

As is my colleague's xylophone bongy mobile phone ringtone...

But, much to the other half's disgust, Motorhead, ACDC and Metallica are not...some rockucation is apparently in order (I shudder at the thought of what this may involve...)

Personal space is sacrosanct...balancing a book, a packet of revels or letting the cat stand on my tummy is not on...vigorous kicking at the offending object ensues immediately

Every scan and measurement taken to date is bang on average...not too big and not too small, just right on the button sizewise for age and there has been no deviation over the last 28 weeks (due to my inner Hermione I already take a certain pride in this)

It is a she!

Upside down

2009-09-16T18:45:00.000+01:00

My house is being decorated, not the whole house mind you, but it feels like it....

We're having the interconnecting bits decorated...the hallway, the stairs, the landing and the open plan room that leads from the hallway to the kitchen that we set up as a dining room, but never use except to chuck stuff on the table....and whilst I'd never really given these areas of space in my house much thought before, it transpires that they are not just a means to an end but seem to be the bits that matter....

The bare walls currently being readied for plastering make me feel deserately sad whenever I see them as they look so plain and so grim with all the life* slowly being erased from them so they look smooth and flat ready for my funky wallpaper with their splodges of whilte filler...

Ripping up the carpet has exposed the stairs, still with their old style painted edges and evidence of carpets past making me wonder if a stair runner would have been the more stylish choice for a house as old as ours rather than the fully carpetted option, but of course it's too late for that now.

The bare, exposed floorboards mean every creak as the cats trot about at 4am sounds like a herd of elephants rampaging through the house and have put an end to me running to the bathroom without my slippers for fear of a 100 year old splinter...

Moving from room to room has become a minefield of avoiding plaster dust, mess and decorating equipment...I'm happy holed up in the lounge or the bedroom of an evening where I can shut the door and ignore the more miserable looking bits of my house.

We're being incredibly lazy paying someone to do it but we've umm-ed and ahh-ed about it for years, done nothing and neither of us currently have the time, inclination or, if I'm frank, the skills to deal with our 109 year old house and it's idiosyncracies, crumbling plaster and spectacularly badly bodged DIY jobs courtesy of the previous owner, who obviously had the enthusiasm but seemingly even less skill than we do.

'It'll be fab when it's done and the mess is only temporary' the other half keeps reminding me to cheer me up. And I can see what he says is true as already the incremental step changes are making a positive difference and well on their way to what the finished article will look like only 100 times better, but I've always been impatient, unable to see the wood for the trees and look at the bigger picture when mired in the dirty, dusty, inconvenient detail....

* aka the bumps and bash-holes that my wonderfully clumsy other half made swinging his laptop bag around

Ode to September

2009-09-01T18:48:00.004+01:00

I love September.....

I was one of those sad kids who liked the whole back to school preparation...picking a new pencil case and schoolbag, perusing the new pen selection at WH Smiths, trying to con a new ruler, set square and protractor set out of my mum and convince her I don't need boring old clarks shoes....again!

Even though just a couple of days ago the weather wasn't much different, September to my mind always feels that crisp 'just a little chill in the air' cool, not enough to warrant a coat but enough to dig out the thicker cardigan and make me reconsider bare legs on the walk to station of a morning.

The thought of reddy brown autumn round the corner with it's crinkley leaves underfoot, cool air, nights turning in so my dusky walk from the station to home is filled with thoughts of warm radiators, furry cats sitting on my lap, casseroles for tea and wearing my boots, tights and wooly coat, makes me smile inside and want to laugh out loud.

And autumnal food...how gorgeous is the last of the glut of summer vegetables as we empty the tomato and courgette plants as we ready the garden for winter and finish up the punnets of soft, strokable summer fruits and the lucious, juicy berries....

Now I'm in the drudgery of work every day with no children in our household, the signposting of September is not the new school term, new uniforms and stationery, but suddenly shockingly busy commuter trains after the quiet summer holiday months and the other half whining about the increase in his drive time to work because of the school run mums....

The cooler weather, the food and the thought of autumn and wearing my black opaque tights is still there, but this year is tinged with fear and panic...time is marching on, the seasons are changing in their un-turn-backable way signalling it'll soon be autumn, then winter then Christmas....meaning its soon only 3 months till my maternity leave starts and 4 till we welcome a new person into our family....

New baby = Panic (part 1 of no doubt many...)

2009-08-23T15:47:00.003+01:00

"So you'll be turning your spare room into a nursery then?" asked my mother the other week. "Yeah..." I replied absent-mindedly as I was in the middle of making tea and her phone call was interupting my lasagna.

I then forgot about it until later when I was rehashing the conversation with the other half and added something along the lines of what type of simpletons does she think we are that we wouldn't be preparing a room for our new baby to sleep in....

And then there was a silence and he said "she does have a point, the spare room is a dump"....and then he dragged me upstairs so I could see for myself the piles of my stuff dumped in the room we hardly use, the unworn clothes piled on the bed, the discarded handbags, the towering pile of readit swap it books should anyone ever want to swap with me, the half used cosmetics bottles lying about and the general tat shoved out of sight and obviously out of my mind....

I'm not a hoarder, in fact I'm always too happy to chuck stuff away or fill those charity bags up, but I do seem to have acquired a lot of junk which is now lying about and so the last few weekends we've been busy....we've cleaned out the spare room, we've emptied under the stairs and in the loft and tidied up the shed. In the process we found all the packing boxes we used to move in (why did we save these?) and a huge collection of tat including stuff I'd forgotten I actually owned including 2 boxes we never got round to unpacking when we moved in and done countless tip runs. And this morning I found myself getting up at 6am (on a Sunday!!!) to offload all my junk at the local car boot sale.

A car boot virgin, my chastity was rudely nudged by the disgustingly early start, then again by packing of the car and my last minute can I really be bothered with this 'noone will buy this old muffin tin, why don't we just go down the tip instead adn go back to bed' jitters and then hammered away by the enthusiastic, early morning, bargain junkies clawing at our stuff as we unloaded the car.

We sold most of our tat...even the muffin tin....I say tat, but much of our stuff was better quality than the broken toys, stained children's clothing and out and out weird ornaments and a job lot of printer cartridges on the stalls next to us.

Once we'd got our pricing right or as the other half described it, I stopped being precious about how much I thought my things were worth and concentrated on getting rid of them and despite the efforts of some of the buyers - "I'm just not sure this is worth £3" said one woman cheekily man-handling a black soft leather Fiorelli handbag which cost £50 2 years ago and still looks brand new - we made over £150 with just a couple of items left for the charity shop and we were home in time for the grand prix.

Three Things meme

2009-08-03T21:12:00.002+01:00

Three names I go by (besides given name):
J
Jools
Fatty (the other's half's current oh so funny joke)

Three Jobs I have had in my life:
Argos counter monkey
Paper girl
Wine waitress (for one evening then I was sacked)

Three Places I have lived:
Swindon
Dresden, Germany
Berlin, Germany

Favorite drinks:
Vimto
Coffee
Vodka (oh how I miss it...)

Three TV Shows that I watch right now:
Coronation St
Greys Anatomy (it's finished but I'm still ploughing through my Sky+ backlog)
Mock the week

Three places I have been:
Kuala Lupur
New York
Prague

People that call me regularly:
My mum
A consultant who is desperately trying to get me to do some work for him but I won't budge
My decorator - he's booked to paint the front of the house but it keeps raining so we keep rescheduling

Three of my favorite foods:
Cheese
Crisps
Kitkats (preferably dark chocolate ones)

Three Things I am looking forward to:
Princess baby's first birthday party next week
The next pay day (am so skint at the moment)
Thursday as that's when I have my next hospital scan and get to see monkey baby again

Three Things that are always by your side:
Cash card
iphone
lipbalm

Cutlery

2009-07-21T22:04:00.003+01:00

Apparently we are becoming a nation of slovenly pigs and, if recent stats are anything to go, no longer want to eat our dinners with a knife and fork preferring instead a fork or our fingers....I'm sort of shocked and not shocked by this....

In my last job, my organisation ran a number of inner London youth clubs and many a time I heard stories of staff unable to take their charges out to sit down eating establishments as part of trips because the kids were unable to behave properly at a dinner table or use cutlery because it was an alien concept in a world where dinner came from the chicken shop and out of a box or the chinese takeaway to be eaten with a spoon.

We once asked a funder for money as part of a heathy eating programme to enable the participants (children from a deprived inner London neighbourhood) to go a restaurant as an end of course treat and to provide training in how to behave in a restaurant but we were laughed out of the place before our pitch had ended.....

But a bit of me thinks, just how much food can you actually eat without a knife?

If we've been a bit a slack in putting the dishwasher on, knives are always the first things we run out of in our house followed by teaspoons (but that could be because we like toast and cups of tea).

And thinking about the food we've eaten this week only one meal we've had could have been eaten without a knife - pizza - but we had it with salad and coleslaw, which necessitates a knife and a fork. (Although having said that, I did eat mine with my fingers as I'd cut it into fairly small, holdable slices, but the other half, who is a traditionalist, prefers his half on a plate to cut into pieces with the cutlery).

'How would you cut up meat without a knife?' I asked the other half. 'Maybe they are vegetarian and don't eat meat' he replied in a smart arse fashion then added thoughtfully 'or maybe they mash or hack it up with the side of their fork into manageable pieces or just pick it up off the plate and chew it'.

The thought of this revolts me and I don't even want to contemplate sharing a table with someone who eats like this...but I bet it won't be long now before Boris is funding restaurant familiarision classes in inner London in association with Jamie Oliver or introducing the new food delivery system for busy people - troughs....

I might be pregnant, but...

2009-07-19T18:32:00.002+01:00

....don't insult me with half assed, OTT hysterical "advice" on how to avoid swine flu...

....not everyone likes wrap tops or wants to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with some "witty" comment about their status..

....it doesn't mean I want to start kitting out my house in items covered with disney characters or ickle cutie bears...

....I think maybe my other half and I would like to choose the name of our child...

....I don't need to hear about the woman who gave birth in the taxi/every horror birth/the 'story' of the humungous piles

....surely I don't have to demean myself by wearing the totally shaming 'baby on board' badge just to get a seat on the tube/train on the way home or justify why I need that seat...*

* I'd naively thought a polite request would help to get a seat but when I tried it on my train last week I was told my lack of a sizable bump suggests I'm merely fat and the seat occupier told me he'd like to see some proof of my condition befoe he gave up his seat....ladies chivalry and politeness is alive and kicking on the North London train line

Treats...

2009-07-12T13:50:00.001+01:00

One for the beauty whores and cosmetic junkies....I'm such a sucker for this stuff and seeing as I had some birthday vouchers and my annual bonus burning a hole in my pocket, I decided to splurge and treat myself and I am totally loving my purchases....

First up, Suki Spa Renewal Bio-Resurfacing Facial Peel... Seeing as my maternity notes tell me I'm elderly, I thought I'd better look into facial peels but unable to get that SATC episode out of my head, I wanted something that works but isn't too harsh. I also love organic products but sometimes I find them a bit stinky and sometimes they don't do what they say on the tin but still charge you the earth anyway.

This stuff is fab, expensive but worth it....I'm totally smitten! It didn't smell bad but it is a werido mud colour and it didn't work immediately which I was initially a bit gutted about, but 24 hours later I had fresh, smooth, polished skin so much so someone even comented on it!

I love nail varnish and have been hunting around for a pinky beige colour for ages. Spotted this in Boots and loved it immediately. I like Bourjois stuff - it's made by the same company who own Chanel so the range and quality is good and well priced, although I don't know if it's just me being really clumsy but I keep breaking the lids off those little pots. Anyways I got beige glamour, which is a fab colour and my toe nails are now oh so shiny...

Finally hair stuff...I swear I spend a small fortune on stuff that promised to stop frizz, claims to keep it smooth, stuff that will hold it in place in a force 9 gale and stuff that ensures ultra moisturising...none of it ever lives up to the hype except these 2 products...Paul Mitchell Super Skinny Serum and Freeze and Shine Super Spray. I've been using these for years and they are my faithful standbys and what's more they last ages and ages, so I stocked up.

So what are your beauty faithfuls/treats/recent splurges?

Madness

2009-07-03T20:41:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I'm actuely aware and a little bit distressed that I'm bordering into grumpy old women territory and no longer down with the kids....but today I saw the most appalling thing and am quite happy to be getting old and sensible if the youth of today and their innate rudeness is anything to go by....

I was sitting in the car at the hugely busy junction at the end of my road waiting for a gap in the traffic so I could turn left. There was a car coming towards me from the right and I could see a big gap after it so was ready and raring to go when the damn car slowed right down. I'd been waiting for what felt like forever and could see the cars and, crucially, the super slow moving, block the road up, bin wagon behind slow mover making serious headway into the gap...MY gap, so I was not best pleased...

I noticed the passenger in the slow moving car - a young man teenager, possibly early twenties, whatever he had one of those ill-fitting t-shirts on and the crap idenitikit hairstyle they all have nowadays hanging in their eyes - was leaning a long way out of the window waving his arms about.

I thought he was trying to attract the attention of the bloke wandering along the street, minding his own business, maybe he was a friend, a relative, someone the car occupants wanted to say hello to?

No, as the car drew level with the man, they threw a paper cup of something liquid and brown at him - the cup bounced off his head and the liquid covered him head to toe.

The car sped off and rushed past me whilst I and the now 'soaked in some unknown liquid' man stared slack jawed, open mouthed and in shock.

When I came to my senses, the damn bin wagon was limping past me and indicating to pull in front of the cafe to collect their mountainous pile of bins and totally block the road...I sat at that junction for another 6 and 1/2 minutes......the man turned around, presumably to head back home to change...

Body Shock

2009-06-29T13:50:00.001+01:00

My body can't do anything in a straight-forward way....following a fairly quiet night out when everyone else is fine the next morning, I've always had the world's worst hangovers. If there's a food bug going round, I tend to get it worse than everyone else, my headaches last for days and days and my colds linger on and become infected sinuses or something equally disgusting and snot ridden and the accompanying coughs quickly turn chesty and usually become chest infections.

So I was expecting the worst with pregnancy, except nothing happened. No sickness, no dizziness, no tiredness, no aches, no pains, no food aversions, no cravings and none of the terrible hormone induced headaches the "quickly purchased as oh my god I know nothing about having a baby" book virtually guaranteed.

Absolutely nothing at all...I just carried on as normal, happily nursing my secret, running it backwards and forwards in my head when I was supposed to be writing reports, listening in meetings or watching TV, trying it out for size to see if it fit and whether I liked it and wrapping a big thick wall of denial around and around it....afterall if I wasn't having any physical symptoms, promised by the book and google, then maybe it was all a mistake, my error....I am waist high in that damn river in Egypt and striding purposefully forwards....

At my first midwife appointment (this was before the episode that the other half and I now refer to the as "THAT day") she was sorely disappointed that I didn't have a legion of afflictions or physical changes or body worries for her to advise on.

I contemplated asking something, anything - I'm nothing if not a crowd pleaser doing what is expected of me at the required time - I briefly recalled a query about accidentally sneezing/coughing the baby out I'd seen on the babycentre forums I'd recently started half-heartedly reading to see if I could 'make it real', but didn't want to be labelled unhinged so early on in our relationship.

"I guess I just don't have any questions at the moment" I said rather lamely and a bit ashamed that I couldn't think of anything to ask or own up to anything unusual my body was now doing for me to complain about and for her to poke and prod.....how I would live to regret that thought about a week later.....

Somewhat disappointed she got her diary out and started doing the dates thing to work out when to book all my appointments and that's when I realised my body was still able to cause me maximum embarrassment/hassle in a big way....the type of way that will now mean fuss will follow me about for the next 6 months...

'Ooooh!' she said as she consulted the diary. 'Oooh?' I enquired wondering whether it was a good oooh or a bad one. 'How exciting' she said and called another midwife over, who was passing the hospital lounge we were sitting in. 'We have a Christmas day baby!' she said and they started making squealing noises and then told the receptionist sitting nearby, who behaved like she'd just won the lottery.

I sat bemused watching them and then realised they were waiting for me to make some kind of similar noise/reaction and so I said the only thing I could think of 'if it's a boy, then I suppose we could call it Jesus'...this did not go down well...

That was then

2009-06-25T13:15:00.001+01:00

People always describe me as chilled out, laid back or easy going. It wasn't always this way, but over the years I've learnt that you can't always predict how people will react, what they will say and it's a fact of life that things don't always go to plan or how I imagine they will and restaurants sometimes lose reservations, so there's no point in painting that perfect picture of how this will go in your mind.

I'd like to think I've not become bitter and cynical instead I've learnt to go with the flow and deal with things as and when they happen and, if one of my former managers and his annual troubleshooter of the year awards he gave me year after year are to be believed, when faced with crisis/unpredictability/untold horror or things just going a little bit pear shaped, that's when I'm at my best.

So when I saw blood, bright red, gushing blood, that's why I just walked downstairs, calmly told the other half, then told him to pull himself together, put on my trainers and my coat and walked to our local A&E which is a good 15 minute, up hill walk away.

Forms, samples, examinations and more samples later, a very earnest young Dr explained her prognosis. It wasn't good and due to a backlog of appointments caused by the late May bank holiday the week before, they couldn't get me to see a consultant to confirm anything either way for at least 4 days so with nothing left for them to say or do, I was discharged.

Whilst the other half perched on the radiator sniffing into a tissue, I got dressed then politely thanked her for her honesty and her clarity and signed the delightfully named "permission to dispose of fetal remains" form. I suspect I may have even smiled at her. As we left the A&E, I glanced at the consultation room number we'd been in...number 13...'huh figures' said the other half 'but I've only ever found 13 to be lucky' I replied.

4 days is too long to do nothing but wait and fear the worst, how on earth do Drs think you can just do that? So within an hour of being home, I had made a private appointment on Harley Street. We travelled there in silence, got there too early and spent a strangely pleasant and convivial 45 minutes lying on the grass in Regents Park watching people enjoy the sunshine, chatting it through over a shared can of coke and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps

The consultant was lovely and wasted no time with small talk or in turning on his big scanning machine so we could know either way as quickly as possible. It took a few second for the grainy image to appear and a few seconds more for it to be clear what it was.

Whilst the consultant joked about making 90% of his money at the expense of NHS misdiagnosis, delays and backlogs of appointments and the other half started fumbling with the tissue again, all I could do was stare at the screen and think 'oh crap, there's something there and it's moving'.

Because whilst it's all well and good being willing and able to deal with the next imagined or potential crisis so I have something to focus on and deal with, there's a tendency for my day to day to be consumed with denial...10 weeks and 3 days of denial to be precise according to the consultant...

This is now

2009-06-19T12:18:00.000+01:00

There's been certain junctures in my life that I can remember with breath-taking clarity. I can recall the minutest of detail even down to the food I ate, what I wore, what he wore, the music, the weather etc. I guess I sort of expected it to be one of those moments, but it wasn't....

Don't get me wrong, it was the other half and I definitely sharing a moment, but it wasn't the heart stopping, mesmerising moment, I would cherish and wax lyrical to strangers about or one day devote an entire chapter of my autobiography to.

It was more normal, almost mundane...not disimilar to when we are making dinner and we have a who can do the stupidest dance whilst we wait for the rice to boil or at a party recently, when we exchanged glances across a crowded room and both cracked up because we knew we were both thinking the same thing about the hostess and her unusual attire....totally unfitting to the seriousness of it all...

There were no words to define the moment, instead we both made a kind of 'oooh' noise, then caught one another's eye and started laughing. If you'd asked me earlier how I thought I'd react, I would have said the laughter definitely, but would have wagered it be tinged with an edge of hysteria. It wasn't. It was regular jokey laughter as though we were on the settee watching TV.

It was only later that he seemed to have a fleeting wobble at the enormousness of it all and said something like 'what the hell have we done?' Unsure of how to reply, I kept my mouth shut but was thinking it's a bit late for all that now, isn't it?

Birthdays

2009-05-26T20:49:00.003+01:00

AWOL again...I'd love to say I'm off doign something more exciting/productive,/interesting/invigorating/newsworthy but sadly I'm not, anyways I'm back now...completely unrelated but I'm 37 on Sunday...

37????!!? How did that happen?

On the plus side, it's a prime number and, as you know, being somewhat weird and maths obsessed I like those! And as it happens good things have always happened to me in my prime number years.

I tell the other half this, who tells me his interesting '37' fact - there is an intriguing relation between numbers 37 and 666 as from 666 we obtain 6+6+6=18 and 18 x 37 = 666.

The other half is not exactly known for his mathematical prowess or interest in mathematical puzzles and I'm touched that he has obviously dug out this fact just for me! This apparently, he tells me, could be ominous and I should definitely lie low all year...just in case....

I see this for exatly what it is and remind him it's my birthday and he is still taking me out for Thai!

All the small things

2009-05-11T20:35:00.004+01:00

Just how funny has the MPs expenses thing been?

I know its a waste of public monies, they should know better, are taking the mick or as the amazingly astute old lady on 329 to Wood Green on Saturday told me "how are they supposed to be the ones leading us out of this economic criss with a public spending plan when they are too damn tight to pay their own tesco bills?"

I think what's funniest isn't the large scale renovate my house fraud or the switch the official residence rouse to cream off extra cash (because we all know deep down that, if those were the rules and you could get away with it and we were in their position, we would have done it too) but it's the small things.

Small things like bin bags, Christmas decorations, packets of maltesers, dog food and carrots. With a current annual salary for an MP at £64,766 plus allowances - almost 20 times the annual amount someone on jobseekers allowance would get - it's hardly like they are living on the breadline and having to struggle to make ends meet.

Even I with my considerable smaller public sector salary (with no prospect of a pay rise for the next few years) can manage to buy my own snacks and dishcloths

Weather

2009-05-04T10:08:00.004+01:00

As someone who is just a little bit anal about deciding what to wear and checks the BBC weather page about a trillion times a week to inform my choice of outfits, this article made me laugh...

Whilst I haven't noticed the BBC weather site being consistently wrong - I guess we all appreciate in this country that forecasting the weather can be at best unpredictable so are inclined to accept inaccuracies - I have noticed that some days I wear the wrong outfit (but that could be down to poor choice on my part) and the weather listed in London (where I work) is often very different to the weather in Enfield (where I live) despite them only being at most 9 miles apart and on all other weather sites the forecast covers London as a whole.

Being sad, I often check the weather in Blackburn too - it's usually raining and about 5 degrees colder than London/Enfield....which I need to remind myself about regularly before a trek north to see the family so I always pack a coat and a cardi to layer up, otherwise I'm accused of becoming a southerner unable to take the cold anymore.

The Scottish people reckon visitors won't come to the village due to the weather, whilst rain has never put me off going anywhere (if it did I'd never venture back to Blackburn), but it has given me the odd what coat shall I wear and which shoes dilemma...

Perils of Travel

2009-04-29T20:37:00.003+01:00

My parents, who are now both retired, have been travelling and seeing the world now that they have some cash to sepnd on themselves, no longer have to go to work and seeing as Princess Sister and I are supposedly fully grown adults and apparently capable of looking after ourselves.

They have just returned from their latest trip, which was a tour of China. The itinerary sounded fabulous - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong - with visits to the Great Wall, the terracotta army and the opportunity to eat as much Peking Duck and Dim Sum as physically possible, but seriously sometimes I wonder why they bother.

Here are excerpts from the phone conversation I had with them on their return last night:

Northern Monkey: So how was the food?
Northern Monkey Mother: Oh it was dreadful, it was nothing like Chinese food*

Northern Monkey: So what bit did you like the best?
Northern Monkey father: I loved it all - it was such an experience, but I really enjoyed the Great Wall, although it was hard work, all the steps were uneven so it was hard to walk up
Northern Monkey: well it is an ancient monument
Northern Monkey father: but still they could have built the steps evenly...

* Chinese food being represented by the New Hong Kong Restaurant in Blackburn, Lancashire

AWOL

2009-04-26T20:35:00.004+01:00

Not sure what I've been doing exactly, but I've not been here.....

Had some time out from online to do some stuff...fun stuff like decorating, spending time with family and friends and helping the other half to fill his greenhouse and get this year's flowers and vegetables growing - I'm the unglamourous assistant who gets to do the boring, messy jobs, which always involve fetching and carrying and perfecting my 'should be patented' expert slug/snail throwing skills (tip - always alternative which fence to throw over so the neighbours down't catch on)...and the not so fun stuff like long long hours at work to meet a few horrible deadlines, a tempermental cable courtesy of Mr Branson and a broken Internet connection, which turne dout ot be a dodgy model courtesy of you guessed it, Mr Branson ...

Anyways I'm back now...I have loads to tell you...but not tonight as I have to watch come dine with me...and laugh at people's pretentious cooking and downright awful home decor...

Overheard

2009-03-04T19:09:00.003Z

The other half and I have been immersed in the latest series of 24. I don't normally get caught up in rubbishy action TV serials, that's his domain, but there's something so daft and fantastical about this series, I can't help but be glued to the TV every Monday night.

For those of you who don't watch it, the concept is it's real time and the title refers to the 24 hours this drama covers. Each episode is 60 minutes long including the ad breaks and there's a clock counting down the 24 hours. The premise of all the 24 series - this is the 7th - is something super bad happens, usually involving terrorists, kidnapping, a complicated plot and our hero endures allsorts to...excuse the pun...save the day...

I watched it back when it started and liked it then, but whereas then it was innovative and different now it's lost some of it's sparkle, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the script-writers.

The current series (and I'll try and do this without a spoiler in case you are on catch up) involves a plot around an evil dictator of a made up African country (but I fear with their limited geography many Americans might actually believe it is a country!), who the American Government are attempting to overthrow in the name of democracy.

Inexplicably, the dictator is not actually in Africa but happily living in the good old USA, with a flat, a girlfriend, hideouts and henchmen and dreaming up hideous take over the world type plots, but no-one seems to have noticed. Even better in a recent episode the dictator was chatting to one of his henchmen on a mobile about a man they'd kidnapped and what to do with him from what looked like public transport.

"Can you imagine if you overheard that conversation on the train on the way home?" said the other half. "I bet it would empty the carriage' I said laughing "or at least stun them into silence".

A week later, I am running late for the other half mother's birthday dinner. Despite the fact everyone coming to the dinner except the birthday girl has been in work in central London and has to use public transport to get home, the restaurant has been booked for 7pm. I am flustered as I am coming out for dinner straight from the office, the Victoria line is rubbish, the trains are delayed and the other half has already made it to the pub for the pre-dinner drinks.

I call him from the train I've managed to squeeze on at Seven Sisters. "I'm running late" I say "ok" he says "I'll get you a recuperative beer in". I prepare to hang up when he says "Wait, say the thing". I am confused. "What thing?" I ask. "You know the 24 thing" he replies and I know instantly what he wants me to say.

I giggle and look around me. The train is limping through Tottenham at 2mph with a collection of it's finest looking residents. I consider it briefly. "I can't" I say giggling "pleeeeeeease" he says in a whiny voice. "No really I can't, the train is packed". I start getting a bit flustered and giggling more. He tries persuading me some more, I refuse, we evenutally hang up.

As I put my phone in my bag, I notice some of the people on the packed train looking at me. I'm sure they thought it was a lovey dovey conversation and my beloved was trying to get me to profess my undying love instead of what he wanted me to say which was "No don't kill him, bring him to me, I'll torture him later"

Obsessions

2009-03-01T17:43:00.005Z

I felt like I only did this yesterday, but having trawled my archives, it seems to have been a bit longer ago than I thought, so time to update it with my current obsessions....

Over-long, frankly ridiculous TV drama - I go through phases with TV and seem to be in a 'must watch crappy series' phase which is why I'm not blogging much...insead I'm curled up on the settee, eating wine gums and watching the mindnumbing, braindraining equivalent of a lobotomy of an evening...24, series 987 of Lost, the hideously stereotypical, one dimensional and frankly offensive to women Mistresses, far too old to be watching and getting a teeny bit flustered over stylish young men half my age Gossip girl, house porn etc etc...

Fabulous TV - 2 words....Generation Kill...I think I might cry when it ends in 2 episodes...I can hardly bear the thought of no longer seeing the elegantly controlled emotion of 1st Lt. Nate as he rolls his eyes at the stupidity of his superiors and then obediently delivers orders to his men....

Princess Baby - She only wears pink or shades of pink and much to Princess Sister's consternation her hair is spiky and refusing to grow in a discernable style and she can throw a massive ear bleeding, shrieking tantrum but she is soooo much fun and a total poseur....yesterday we went shopping to try to find the perfect pair of sunglasses so she looks cool this summer...we discounted these as a bit too twee...

Margaret Atwood - am on a book reading binge of massive proportions and I'm loving her books...Lady Oracle is by far my favourite, then the edible woman, then alias grace and Oryx and Crake...oh and the handmaiden's tale...as you can see I'm liking her books....

Genuis Playlist and last FM on my iphone - I'm so not a gadget freak, but I'm loving these and the fantastic soundtrack they provide to my daily commute right now...

Pak Choi - can't stop stir frying it...goes with everything, but especially garlic, ginger and a splash of soy sauce...

Over to you, what are your current obsessions?

Eating habits

2009-02-18T20:12:00.009Z

As a child I was a fussy eater. There was a huge list of food items I described as 'things I couldn't eat' and my mother described as 'things I wasn't prepared to try'.

To make matters worse she had some misguided idea (probably from some 1970s Government propoaganda) that it was only right I had a hot lunch every day and so subjected me to school dinners from the age of 5 till 14, when I managed to convince her my home made cheese sandwich would suffice (I then ate a cheese sandwich and an apple every day from 14 to when I left full time education at 18, like I said, I was fussy about food).

So I spent my infant school lunchtimes on the slow eaters table, pathetically pushing food round my plate with a bunch of likeminded classmates. Lunchtime was tears, resentment and half eaten plates of food whilst the dinner lady tried to coax us to eat enough so the parents wouldn't complain...I could usually manage to force enough lumpy mash and tasteless meat down my throat to escape any milky starch based pudding having to pass my lips...

My mother and I laugh about it now. Now that I eat most things...not fish, though I'll never eat fish, or tomato soup or starchy milk based puddings....

'At some times I thought you'd never eat normally' she once said, then told me she'd cheered up after a conversation with the mother of one of my pal's from the slow eaters table, who it transpired at home would only eat dairylea triangles and fruit cut into small square pieces.

The other half will eat anything. The only things I've seen him refuse to eat are sweet potato and garlic sausage, which I find completely bizarre considering he ate frog porridge in Kuala Lumpur and I've seen him have chicken curry, noodles and KFC for breakfast, although not all at the same time ...

He says my eating habits are still bizarre. Whilst I look normal as I eat most things, I am quite particular in what I will eat with what and how the food has to be on the plate, I can't for instance have things all touching or mixing and it drives me mad when he messes it all up together when he's on dinner duty. I like to keep my tastes separate.

Tonight, I was home from work late, was tired and the other half was on dinner duty so we had a fairly lame, probably unhealthy but quick and easy 'bung it in the oven' dinner. The other half decided to mix his up a bit and created something which still makes me shudder when I think of it now and i can't even think about what it tasted like without wanting to retch.

He says this proves I'm still a fussy eater ...so tell me what you think...he had oven chips, salmon fish fingers and a fried egg!

I'm not unique?

2009-02-16T20:39:00.004Z

Seeing as I'm still lacking a bit of inspiration and motivation blogwise of late, I thought I'd shamelessly pilfer from sanddancer and google myself, just to see if I am as unique as I think I am...

The results were:

1. A UK based charity foundation with my name (not me!)
2. A flickr account with my name (not me!)
3. A facebook account with my name (definitely not me!)
4. A linkedin account with my name (not me!)
5. A printable address label with my name for respondents to use for a procurement exercise (unfortunately me!)

How sad is that? Undeterred, I googled my full name - you know the one with the rubbishy middle name - and I got a variety of results most of which were:

An American lady who makes a variety of bags with, what she describes as, a unique style, while we would probably describe as overpriced tat...and she also had a fairly revolting sideline in brightly coloured, little handmade sleeves to go round your coffee shop bought coffee paper cup...you'll look like you have absolutely no shame or discernable taste but slip one one and you'll be burn free...

Not quite what I was expecting, but strangely entertaining and mood-lifting....

25 Things

2009-02-06T20:24:00.008Z

Seeing as I'm lacking a bit of inspiration and motivation blogwise of late, I thought I'd do the 25 random facts that Roses suggested...

1. My hair is currently the longest it's been since I was about 7

2. I still have a tan from my holiday courtesy of the lovely Body Shop Coconut body butter

3. I have freckles....100s and 100s of them and I think they multiple when I'm not looking

4. I hate my wonky teeth

5. I've just burnt the roof of my mouth on a baked potato I had for my tea

6. I am a perfectionist and have a tendency to get a little bit anal about things that really don't matter

7. I'm a geeky maths type obsessive who secretly counts in prime numbers (QED Fact No. 6)

8. Patience is most definitely NOT one of my virtues

9. I am horribly sensible most of the time with wild moments of unleashed recklessness that usually result in trouble...and 36 years later I still have not learnt a thing from this...

10. I do NOT have a poker face..my boss calls me her 'sanity check' in meetings, whilst the other half has developed a technique whereby he looks at me out of the corner of his eye and kicks me if needs be

11. I wouldn't do things differently overall, but there a few people I should have slapped along the way

12. I had an all expenses paid invite to visit Russia in May of 1992, but I didn't go as instead I came back to the UK for a 21st birthday party, which I kind of regret...

13. ....but not really as it was MY 21st birthday party and the last time I saw my Grandma

14. I was once arrested in Czechslovakia for not having a valid underground ticket. I wasn't charged as I pleaded ignorance and my lack of Czech and they took pity on me. My punishment was being escorted to a shop to buy a ticket by a man with a gun...I bought the ticket and I've never fare evaded since....

15. Last Friday I had a great night out in Manchester

16. If I had to live anywhere but here, Manchester would be quite high on the list, along wth Nuremberg in Germany

17. My eyesight is rubbish and deteriorating so I now need my glasses 24-7, this year will be the year I get contact lenses

18. This year I'm going to decorate the hallway, the dining room and our bedroom (but I've been saying that for the last 5 years)

19. I HAVE to start going to the gym again...I gave myself January off...I've run out of excuses now...

20. I already know what I want to give up for Lent this year

21. It'll be crisps...like every year since I was about 5...apart from when I was not doing religion and the year I was tricked into eating a quaver on day 2 (and I am obviously still a bit bitter about)

22. Most of the clothes I own are black and, as a result

23. all the underwear I own is black

24.I am obsessed with chinese BBQ meats - crispy pork with steamed pak choi and jasmine rice is my current favourite dish

25. My cat just fell off the bed whilst chasing one of the other half's socks

Snow

2009-02-02T14:53:00.004Z

I lived for a year in Southern Germany - not too far form the moutains. For most of the winter, there was snow, ice, more snow, blizzards, more snow and ice and it was permanently freezing (so cold I had to go out and buy a vest - the one and only vest I have ever owned).

During my time there, I don't ever recall not being able to catch a bus, a tram or a train and not making it into work due to "adverse weather conditions".

Today there's snow, ok a lot of snow for us and unusually snow in London, but we knew it was coming and still we have managed to end up with no trains, no buses, a few tubes and my office has closed.

The little boy next door built a snowman...whilst I've spent the day baking a cake, chilling out and reading and the other half has been dossing about with his new guitar. I could get used to 3 day weekends...

Holiday

2009-01-18T20:26:00.002Z

Finally done some picture sorting and some holiday pictures are here

Welcome back to work

2009-01-14T18:59:00.001Z

"Glad you're ready to go back to work" said Beth "hope the feeling lasts"... "Oh ha ha " I thought, then I went to work last Monday...

Monday morning was cold, frozen and there was one of those rubbishy icy blizzards blowing towards me as I trudged up the hill to the station. Surprisingly and in spite of the weather the train was on time, but when I got to the tube, the platform was 10 deep. "Welcome back to work" said the oh so witty transport for London bloke over the tannoy...the whole platform collectively sighed.

I got to work and found my desk, which had mysteriously moved 5 inches to the right and all my belongings were in a crate on it. I hesitated for a minute..."was there something HR had forgotten to tell me whilst I'd been messing about on a beach?"...

'We had a bit of an office move' said one of my minions 'bit being the operative word'. Seems some phone problems meant all the underfloor cables had to come up over xmas so all the desks in the affected area were packed up and the phone guys weren't that bothered about puutting all the furniture back exactly where it came from.

I unpacked my crate and rearranged my desk whilst trying to convince myself I easing myself back into work slowly and failing to remember my log on password. Lacking inspiration, I then waited an hour for the IT bods to reset said password so I could log in.

179 emails were awaiting me, in spite of the offices being closed for 2 weeks and only 27 of them turned out to be of the no need to read, just delete 'free food in the kitchen/lost earring in the gents/has anyone seen the Dagenham file' variety.

'Caffeine will help me through this' I thought but to no avail. The kettle has been replaced by one of those self service machines you get at conference centres where you put the little packets in the machine and get 1/4 cup of coffee out. There were no coffee packets left and my mug wouldn't fit in the machine. It seemed a bit pathetic to want to cry and it was only 10.15...

If you're wondering why I have been quiet, it's because the rest of the day and the week continued in that vein...not just for a few days BUT FOR ALL THE WEEK...

Crap commute to and from work, freezing cold weather meaning our house, which is ancient was freezing cold and we didn't dare leave the lounge, where we were camped out in front of the fire. Busy days in the office ploughing through the emails whilst new ones piled up. The healthy eating new years resolution already abandoned for lunchtime comforting packets of crisps. My cousin has just embarked on a round the world tripa dn has been texting me how fabulous everywhere is and sending me photos of fabulous places making me green with envy. Then to finish the week off, the other half's parents came to hang about at ours at the weekend for warmth and hot water as their boiler had broken down and couldn't be repaired until Monday of this week...you couldn't make it up...

The one bright spot? One of the minions went on maternity leave at Xmas and she left her cup in the kitchen and miraculously it fit snugly in the machine! That almost brought the feeling back for about 5 seconds, but then it was gone...

Holiday stories - illness - a farce in 4 Acts

2009-01-05T17:56:00.003Z

Act 1 - Packing to go
I am shoving the last bits of stuff in the suitcase. Air Asia, who we will fly with from Kuala Lumpur to Thailand, are apparently notoriously strict on baggage weight and I am limited to 2 cases of 15kgs each so I'm assessing the last few items and trying to decide whether we really need them.

"I can't believe you always pack all that chemist sh*t" says the other half "there are chemists in Asia and anyway it wouldn't be the same, if whilst on holiday we didn't end up in a chemist having to buy something for you and some broken or infected bit of your body".

It's true. I know it's true which is why I carry loads of chemist sh*t as he so delightfully calls it. "At least you'll be ok too if you fall ill whilst we are away" I say. "Ha" he says "ill? me?" and looks at me like I have 2 heads. Aware my prickly heat lotion tube is quite bulky, I wait for him to leave the room and ditch some of his socks, so it fits in. I'm delighted when we check in that our bags weigh exactly 15kg each....

Act 2 - Kuala Lumpur
At some point between Heathrow and in Kuala Lumpur, the other half has developed an irritating, tickly, repetitive cough. He lounges round the hotel room, coughing incessantly, interrupting my reading. I am anticipating man flu levels of whininess shortly. It's 3am, we are both jetlagged, irritable and awake and I'm not in the right frame of mind to deal with him.

The nice bit of me feels sorry for him and thinks how horrible it must be to be getting a cold when it's 100 degrees and 99% humidity outside, but the chemist sh*t didn't include cold medicine and earlier he refused a trip to the chemist so the evil bit of me thinks he can suffer. I turn my attention back to my book and tune out the coughing....the next day he reluctantly goes to the chemist and buys some strepsils which the chemist lady promises are better than the ones in the UK as they "come with special drug ingredient" - we never establish what this could be but there's obviously something in them as the cough goes a day later...

Act 3 - Thailand
It's week 3 of the holiday and the other half is running out of ridiculously spicy food to eat. Each evening he flirts shamelessly with the young girls at the night market food court to get them to make him stupidly hot 'not on the tourist menu' food. Long ago I stopped trying his dishes as it keeps ruining my [lift right hand in air, put thumb and forefinger fairly close together whilst other half laughs hysterically] 'just a little spicy' food.

Today we've been out diving and had a late lunch and we both want to eat but not a full dish each. "Let's share" I say "but I choose the level of spiciness". He agrees and we order a wonderful chicken curry - fragrant coconut, wafts of lemongrass, not too spicy with very tasty chicken and baby aubergines with a bowl of soothing steamed rice. "It's nice" says the other half "but it could be spicier".

The next morning, he has what he delicately calls a poo explosion. "It must have been the curry" he says "are you ok?" I am fine and continue to be so for the next 3 days, whilst he is most definitely not ok and having been forced to eat the entire pack of immodium in the bag of chemist sh*t, has to embarrass himself in the local chemist shop when the lady feigns ignorance then laughs when he tries to explain his predicament, which includes adopting a worried look and clutching at his behind.

Act 4 - Somewhere en route back to Kuala Lumpur
"Bye Thailand" I say as the plane lurches upwards and back to Kuala Lumpur where we will spend our last 2 days before the flight home to the UK. "My leg is itchy" says the other half. "well scratch it then" I say absent mindedly as I settle into my new book. "No really itchy" he says and then proceeds to fidget in his seat for the next hour trying to get his leg up so he can examine his shin. "Look" he cries and so I look - his entire leg is covered in an angry red rash. "it looks like prickly heat" I say "but you get that" he replies indignantly "not me!"

There is continued scratching and fidgeting, then he blatently lies on the immigation form (which reminds us that the death penalty exists in Malaysia) when it asks if he has a rash and if so to report to the quarantine area.

At the hotel he slathers himself in prickly heat lotion and takes to hiding in a darkened, highly air conditioned room for the rash to subside. We have 24 hours left in Asia and amazingly for the first holiday in years, I have not been ill once on this trip or had to use any of the medical stuff I brought with us.

I decide to go off shopping at the nearby mall, where I have spotted a shop where all shoes are £4 whilst he recuperates."Whilst you are out" he says "please can you buy me some socks as I seem to have run out'

Home

2009-01-04T15:20:00.009Z

"I can't wait for Monday" said the other half. "I need to go back to work and have some kind of structure in my life".

I can almost see the skeptisim in your eyes, but believe me it's true.....

Hanging about on tropical beaches doing nothing all day but dossing about, sleeping, reading a million brilliant books with the most important decision being which island to go to for some snorkelling or what fantastic food to eat for dinner and the only pressing appointment of the day being get to the beach by 5.30 so you can watch the magnificant sun set with a cocktail...is amazing, wonderful, relaxing, but exhausting and also a bit aimless...my friend summed it up better last night when he said "but you have to go to work every day to appreciate it when you don't"...

So back to work tomorrow after a month off...can't wait!

Sneak preview of holiday photos here...stories to follow...happy new year everyone!

Priceless

2008-12-03T20:53:00.004Z

Mozzie Spray - £5

Suntan lotion - £10

New holiday clothes - £150 (or £75 for 'necessities' if the other half asks)

Ridiculously swanky hotel booked for 10 nights with 'do something fun' money - £1000

Knowing you've negotiated a reroute of your flights to Thailand via Kuala Lumpur whilst the airports in Bangkok were still closed so your trip still goes ahead with just a bit of reorganisation...well you know how it goes!

We're off on Friday, the other half is promising availability of technology that might allow blog updates, so watch this space otherwise it'll be Christmas time before I'm back. Have fun whilst I'm gone!

Lancashire day food challenge

2008-11-27T19:20:00.000Z

Let's do something entertaining to take my mind of my potentially ruined holiday and all those lovely new clothes I've just bought that might not get an outting...

Today - November 27th - is Lancashire day!

Did you know Lancashire had a day all of it's own? Probably not, but it's the date on which in 1295, when King Edward I called the first elected representatives from Lancashire to Westminster to attend Parliament. Nowadays the friends of Real lancashire use Lancashire day to call for the reinstatement of Lancahsire's historic borders or for us all to wave mad flags with big red roses on them. But as far as I am concerned I think as a Lancashire lass*, it's only fair that we have a day to celebrate in honour of all things Lancastrian.

How should you celebrate? I'm sure you won't be waving gaudy red rose flags about, or trying out a bit of Lanky so how about sampling some Lancastrian cuisine?

Lancashire cheese makes the world's best cheese on toast; Goosnargh ducklings are delish; Morecambe bay potted shrimp are yummy on toast; a Bury Black pudding perfectly complements a fry up and, if you love eccles cakes then why not try a chorley cake...less messy to eat and just as delicious... And don't forget Lancashire Hot Pot or Hollands pies...and if you need something to wash it all down then Thwaites have a great range of beers...

So food challenge, let me know what you tried, why you picked it and whether you liked it!

* Technically my heritage is in doubt as the home town of my birth became in unitary authority in 1998 and therefore is no longer shown on maps of Lancashire, however it was in lancashire when I was born!

Cursed?

2008-11-26T19:01:00.001Z

I fear the other half and I may be cursed when it comes to holidays in Thailand...

Fat isn't a feminist issue, support for oneanother is

2008-11-23T11:09:00.004Z

I look at the menu and, as I sense growing impatience around the table, try to make a snap decision between the two choices I've got it down to....I'm always last to choose and order... 'Scampi' I say hesitantly. 'I could have guessed you'd choose that!' whispered the other half unhelpfully and I kick him under the table. 'With chips or jacket potato?' asked the waiter. 'oh definitely chips' I say whilst toying in mind with whether I'd dunk them in ketchup or mayo.

'Northern monkey!' admonishes the other half's mother snapping me out of my condiment reverie 'don't forget you're on holiday soon and will be in your bikini'. I smiled sweetly, then made some lame comment, so as not to upset the extended family outting, about how 2 weeks worth of chips won't make any difference, when I've been sinking lager all year like there's no tomorrow. Then I raised my pint glass in a toast to our holiday, but I was mad.

I accept she is a woman of a different generation and one who is obsessed with her weight, not all year round, mind you, just in the month prior to her annual August holiday when her annual pre-holiday diet kicks in (July dinners round the other half's parents are affectionately known as weight watcher's sunday dinners) but what gives her the right to comment on my weight?

Women commenting on other women's weight in a public arena seems to be the thing to do nowadays, which to me is the most unfeminist, b*tchy and downright nasty thing another woman can do. It's like knowing exactly what button to press to create maximum damage as even the most confident, assured woman is nervous to some degree about her body image.

As women we should support one another, because we know our body image self doubts are (broadly) likely to be the same as yours. Voicing those thoughts is vindictive to other women and makes us as guilty as the male dominated, plastic enhanced and thinorexic, celebrity obsessed media...and anyway let's face it, scampi and a jacket potato isn't half as good as scampi and chips!

Grammar

2008-11-14T19:08:00.004Z

Lately I've been really aggravated by astoundingly poor use of English and grammar. It's not like I'm a huge Lynne Truss fan or one of those sticklers for punctuation who pens a complaint letter at the first sign of a misused semi colon, but I do like things to read nicely, make sense and be spelt correctly with good grammar.

Today I had a battle of wills with a colleague about a sentence in a legal letter we were issuing and whether it should read 'provided we are satisfied with the strength of the finanical covenant' or 'satisfied on the strength of the financial covenant'...after 3 hours of handwringing and debate, it took all MY strength not to shove the covenant document somewhere he would have found supremely unsatisfying...

Then there's the woman who does the weather on the local news on the BBC breakfast programme. For the last 2 days in the 7.25am bulletin she has repeatedly used the term 'much more mild' to describe today's weather in contrast to yesterday's weather...it's so irritating even the other half, who at best has a lackadaisical approach to grammar and spelling, has started yelling 'use milder instead' at the TV...

But the best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) has got to be a sign at Victoria Underground station, which is often displayed near the Victoria line escalators. It proudly boasts the environmental credentials of Transport for London by stating 'to save energy at quiet times we run less escalators'... To my delight this week, I noticed a likeminded sufferer had put a biro line through 'less' and written 'fewer' over the top....

Completely Unnecessary

2008-11-08T13:00:00.000Z

I'll be honest upfront, I'm not expecting much sympathy for my predicament, but you know me, stubborn to the extreme in the face of adversity (and sometimes just for fun) so I'm going to plough on and whinge at you anyway...

The other half and I are off to Thailand for December. I know what you are thinking...."The whole of December?" because that's what every single person has asked us when we've told them, except my boss, who said "you are coming back aren't you? This isn't you handing your notice in...[cue her concerned face]... is it?"

Yes we are coming back, we've just wanted a holiday, a big holiday, for ages and not got round to it until now. When we recently and very unexpectedly inherited a large amount of money courtesy of the other half's step grandma who'd left word that we 'should spend it wisely but use some of it to do something fabulous and have some fun!'...so we're off to Thailand...for a month...like you do...

Thing is obviously a holiday necessitates nice, new holiday clothes - it's 32 degrees in bangkok today but its 12 degrees here, rainy and autumny. My 'holiday panic planning' lunchtime shopping this week has shown me stacks of Christmas gifts, scarves and party clothes so what's a girl to do to get a new holiday wardrobe when going on holiday at the wrong time of year?

Temporary

2008-10-27T18:56:00.001Z

Back in the day after graduation from uni and seeking beer and rent money, I temped for a while...which was possibly the worst experience in my career except for a 12 week Christmas job in Argos where things turned a whole lot worse, but that's another story for another day.

Temping is London is often portrayed as glamorous, high profile, financially rewarding and the chance to get a foot in the door of a potential new career or new employer. In the rest of the UK, it is rotten, underpaid and doing monotonous jobs in boring offices that no-one wants to do. At my lowest ebb and, if I recall correctly, the job that drove me to seek the delights of a wearing a 100% nylon uniform whilst standing next to a statically charged conveyor belt lobbing toilet seats and toys at me for 7 hours a day, was where for 5 whole days I once addressed postcards to every pet shop in the UK with an urgent message to recall a flea treatment.

Temping is a miserable non-existence where no-one bothers to learn your name because you are 'just the temp' and sometimes you are only there for a few days, so no sooner do you manage to find your way about or the best way to circumvent the security system/harridan receptionists, find the shortcut to the ladies, figure out the phone system and find out where the coffee is kept, your work is done and it's time to go. However I've realised temping teaches you valuable skills, which I wasn't aware I possessed until recently.

I've been seconded to cover a long standing vacancy in another office of a sister organisation. It's one of those 'do it for the kudos' 'great personal development opportunity' or whatever crap my manager used to big it up then when I said I'd think about it, then it transpired it was non negotiable...anyway I digress...

The secondment is a bit like temping. It's a completely different job to my 'day job' but needs a similar skill set, so although I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing, I can kind of get by and it's only 3 days a week until December, so I figure I don't ever have to learn, I just have to look as though I have.

I'm based in a huge building with security systems galore. Day 1 required wearing a visitor's badge, which meant waiting to be let in and out of the building, having my bag searched on each floor and getting permission to wander about the place or go to the toilet unaccompanied. This was to my mind, frankly, unacceptable. So by day 2 I'd befriended Derek the Security man on the front desk and negotiated a badge with a swipe card so I could come and go at free will. 5 whining calls to HR got me a regular staff badge by the afternoon, with full access to the IT system by day 3.

This apparently was unprecedented and at speeds which no other regular employees could fathom, once everyone had repeated 'but you're only here for a short while' 45 times and got over the shock the security man was called Derek, they told me apparently it takes at least a month (could this phrase be any more depressing?) 'to be processed'.

No knowing the tea/coffee arrangements I'd arrived without a cup and my own drinks on day 1, and my new colleagues were quick to point out it's a service yourself arrangement with no lending of crockery/drinks or milk. But by lunchtime after sweet-talking the cafe people in the public cafe downstairs I'd 'acquired' a cup and some beverage making equipment so I didn't have the freewheel the afternoon as I had the morning...caffeine free!

And so it goes on...my manager here apparently told my manager in the day job 'I'm horribly and incredibly efficient at getting stuff sorted' which I'm taking as a complement, particularly, as before I left for the day, he tried to make me take the cup back to the cafe so no-one would see it on one of the desks in his section.

Is there a financial crisis?

2008-10-09T18:46:00.005+01:00

Not only am I 'credit crunched' out, I'm financial crisis-ed out, I'm tired of being explained to in single syllables how it affects me, the person in the street but I'm even more out of patience with the media and their continual spinning of scare mongering credit crunch related stories....

In all seriousness, before today, where did people actually think their local authorities put the reserve money? In a vault in the town hall? And reserve money is surely just that...i.e. Trevor MacDonald et al stop making out we need it to pay the bin men next week, because I'm pretty sure even the most badly run, inept council isn't on a week by week cash flow plan!

Back in March when I was thinking I really should get one of those ISAs but couldn't be arsed to fill out the paperwork and sort it, self styled money guru Martin Lewis was whole-heartedly praising icelandic banks and couldn't recommend them highly enough on his website, on GMTV, in the papers etc.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but I'm not seeing his smiley face around much lately and his heartfelt apologies to everyone, who took his advice and now can't access their cash...

Then there's Robert Peston..or credit crunch hearthrob as the media have taken to calling him...is it me or is his hair dyed? There's a strange solidness to it under the 10 o clock studio lights, which I find highly distracting when he's chatting to Hugh Edwards of an evening in a serious tone about how the financial crisis is probably affecting me today, in a totally different but definitely nastier way from yesterday even though I have no money in an Icelandic bank.

He's a single-handed credit crunch news hound machine, hunting out new and ingenious ways to get the Government to dig deep and say they'll underwrite failing, bank financial type things.

If we stop him hunting out failing things to report on and harranging Gordon Brown to do something about it, surely we can single-handedly stop the international financial crisis?

Or as Beth so eloquently puts it - where was Robert when the farepack hampers collapsed? Championing the cause for the 'man in the street'? Guess you don't like tinned ham or canned peaches Robert?

Cat fight

2008-10-07T19:22:00.000+01:00

I'm feeding the cats next door whilst the neighbours are on holiday. Everytime they go away we feed the cats and everytime there's some confusion about how long exactly they will be gone for and when they will be back.

The first time I thought it was because they were so embarrassed to ask us to do it as we hardly knew them - they'd just moved in - that when we said yes, she fluffed it as she gratefully garbled the perintent information out before we could change our minds. The second time, I blamed the other half and his lackasdaisical collection and retention of information, resulting in us presuming they were home a completely different day to when they actually were and running out of food 3 days early. By now I know different.

"We'll be home Tuesday" she said. "Tuesday" I repeated slowly "Tuesday the 7th?" "yes" she said. There was no hesitation in her voice, no checking of the diary or double-checking with her husband, just an affirmative. "What time Tuesday?" I asked feeling I may as well go for broke and pin her down to a time as well. "Late on" she replied, "so if you can feed them when you get in from work on Tuesday, that'd be great as I'm not sure what time we'll get home".

Reassured by the constant repeating of the word 'Tuesday' I wished her a pleasant trip and thought no more about it.

Until I turned up to feed her cats and counted the packets of food, that by my reckoning would only last until Monday breakfast time. Then I saw the kitchen calendar with the words 'home from Portugal' scrawled against Thursday.

Tuesday? Thursday? I guess you could make that mistake, if you were a small child and learning the days of the week! But there's a mix up everytime they go away and everytime they don't leave enough food out, so I end up buying food or feeding her cats some of my cats food, and when I tell her she's like 'oh my god, I'm so daft aren't I?'

Then she reimburses me too much or buys me a bottle of wine or chocolates to apologise on top of the bottles of wine for feeding the cats in first place and then I feel bad for thinking the worst of her, when maybe she's just dippy and disorganised or possibly unable to count out enough packets of cat food.

I don't mind feeding her cats whilst they are away, but I just want to know for how long and to be sure there'll be enough food left out - is that too much to ask when you are helping someone else out?

Monkey Interrupted!

2008-10-04T17:38:00.003+01:00

No I'm not dead but my PC is!

It blew up a few weeks ago and then died completely necessitating costly and timeconsuming purchase of a whole new one, much to the delight of the salesman of a certain PC manufacturer - I swear we must have been his only sale that week!

So I've been incommunicado and PC less, which initially was interesting in a retro kind of way and quite nice. Instead of mooching about online, I caught up on my Sky+ viewing, read magazines and newspapers, started pottering about in the kitchen when I got in from work and made interesting things for tea, developed an addiction to radio 5 live and my bank manager has, no doubt, enthusiastically welcomed the break from my random online purchasers (although I don't think my addiction to lookfantastic has totally gone, it just needs nurturing again), but then it got annoying when my visa bill needed paying, my friend called to say she's emailed me some photos, I wondered what all my online friends were up to and I ran out of TV to watch.

Got the shiny, new pc yesterday and we're just getting everything back up and running so normal service should be resumed shortly!

Overheard

2008-09-15T21:31:00.002+01:00

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm in M&S taking some boots back, which looked fabulous online but on me looked like I'd dipped my legs up to my knees in treacle. The returns counter is on the third floor so I head to the stairs/escalator.

When I got there, a man was apologetically putting an out of order sign on the escalators and directs me round the corner to the stairs, where with a big sigh I exchange a 'how typical' roll of the eyes with a woman holding hands with her young daughter.

Daughter: Mummy no! Not the stairs! The escalator!
Mother: But the man told us escalator is broken so we have to go up the stairs
Daughter: I don't want to go up the stairs

Mother drags daughter to the stairs and rolls her eyes again at me

Mother: It's not far to the top
Daughter: I don't want to go up the stairs
Mother *dragging child up first few stairs*: why do you think God gave you legs?
Daughter: So I could climb into the car and you could drive me where I want to go!

Nothern Monkey *stiffles giggles*
Mother to Northern Monkey: There's not a lot I can say to that is there!

Really from the north but not really a monkey...*

2008-09-04T18:29:00.003+01:00

Back in the eons of time in one of my early forays into the world of gainful employment, I had to regularly phone some bloke who taught engineering at Skelmersdale College. The reason for the monthly phone call was mundane collection of data that no-one ever seemed to do anything with.

Nowadays it would be done with a 1 line email that I would have set a reminder for in outlook and it would be a quick 30 second cut and paste from last month's message and job done. But back in 1994, we used the telephone, so it was a bit more laborious as we had to be polite and make small talk to oneanother before getting down to business.

During these phone calls, I built up a very precise image of him in my head based solely on the small talk (the football, the weather, the mutual colleagues, the cretinous students, the journey into work); the state of the data he supplied (low numbers, high numbers, qualifications and drop outs); his demeanour (quiet yet friendly and efficient always with the data to hand), and the lilting tenor of his 'phone' voice with the soft, almost imperceptible but definitely there scouse accent.

To my mind I knew him exactly, what he looked like and how he was, but then I met him!

It's funny how we make pictures in our minds, deductions on the barest of facts offered, assumptions and presumptions and then are continually surprised when they are blasted apart when faced with reality.

You know lots about me and probably have your own pictures in your head of northern monkey personified, but it's based on what I choose to tell you, and whilst I try to be honest and make this a reflection of my personality, I choose to be anonymous so sometimes I can't tell you everything or I have to hold back if, say I want to remain gainfully employed, in a relationship and not disowned by my family.

Recently some of the blogs I read have been the subject of vitriolic abuse, been spammed across message boards with people encouraged to go visit and comment against the writer, had to go password protected or just 'was there a minute ago' gone!

This got me thinking about privacy, subject matter and how those who blog choose what they write. I choose my subject matter on a not very scientific what's happened, what's interesting me, things I want to write about to get out of my system or things that make me laugh. Nothing political or contentious where I'm likely to be hunted down by special interest groups.

I always get the biggest views and numbers of comments when I write personal stuff about family issues - I guess its stuff people can easily relate to - so I can understand how some bloggers could get drawn into regailing the minute details of their life and compromising the privacy of themselves and their family.

So how do you decide what to blog about, do you consciously try to keep it anonymous, selectively censor aspects of your life or ham it up with artistic licence, or it is a total work of fiction based loosely on your life to be published next year having pocketed a large publishers advance? And whilst you're at it - go on indulge me - what is the Northern Monkey like in your head?

* Inspiration from girl on a train - approx 5'6", shoulder length, wavy blond hair, wears a Leeds top round the house and has a radio in the kitchen that is always tuned to radio 5 live with a fondness for a meat and potato pie with a side order of peas from the local chipshop on a Friday night - and Hottie - 5'10", mass of curly black hair, wears lots of jewellery and funky bright coloured clothes, chicken and mushroom noodle obsessive who never leaves the house without her sketchpad...... Go on admit it, I'm right, aren't I?

My weekend at Reading Festival

2008-08-25T19:01:00.004+01:00

The Bands: Biffy Clyro; The Enemy; Jack Penate; The Fratellis; Vampire Weekend; QOTSA; RATM; The Automatic; British Sea Power; The Subways; Dirty Pretty Things; We are Scientists; The Editors; The Raconteurs; Justice; Bullet for my Valentine; The Manics; The Killers; Beans on Toast; Henry Rollins; the Plain White Ts; Mindless Self Indulgence; Dropkick Murphys; The Music; Pendulum; Tenacious D; The Last Shadow Puppets; CSS; Metallica.

The Weather: Surprisingly dry and sunny resulting in sun-burnt arm and face, overnight rain on Saturday meant muddy boots on Sunday...the festival kagoul never made an outing!

The Food: Burger and chips; Chicken Curry with Rice; An Apple - attempt at healthiness!; Baked Potato with Beans and Cheese; Chicken Burger; Bowl of Cornflakes with warmish milk - yuck!; Toasted Bacon Butty; 1/2 a pack of wrigleys extra to remove bad taste in mouth - see drink section; Chicken Curry with Rice.

The Drink: Approx 18 pints of Tubourg, 2 pints of carling extra cold with lime, 1 chocolate milk, 1 fruit twist fanta; 2 coffees white with 1 sugar and about 3 litres of water

The state of me today: Tired, deaf, bloodshot eyes, sunburnt face, aching back and limbs from sitting on the ground, croaky voice from too much shouting, stinking clothes that I couldn't get into the washing machine fast enough, lethagic and generally in a bad way and totally unfit for work tomorrow...but I wouldn't have missed it for the world!

Olympic-ed out

2008-08-19T18:45:00.000+01:00

Whilst it's very good we are winning lots of medals in Bejing, the olympics is messing with my carefully designed, should be patented, 35 minutes bed to front door morning routine and its doing my head in.....

No longer can I check the weather with Carol at 7.45 before a quick rummage in the wardrobe for suitable clothes for the day with ample time to iron. And with random sports updates, which have a tendency to get exciting so end up being longer than expected and eating into the news slot, nor can I now be guaranteed to get the travel news before I have to leave the house at dead on 8am.

As I result I've been wearing random clothes and turning up in the cold, pouring rain at 9am in a nice summery combo because it was sun shiny at 7.50am or freezing my tits off because I didn't realise how cold it is outside and not having a jacket when everyone else is wearing a coat!

I'm also running a fine line between being appraised of the local travel news but either having to run up the hill to the station or missing the train or having no idea that the Victoria line has packed up again and then having to take random bus routes across north London.

The other half tells me I'm being unpatriotic and its only 2 weeks, but even so, and especially now we're onto the strange and random not really genuine sporting events, I'm a bit olympic-ed out - what about you?

Place your bets - update 2

2008-08-16T09:24:00.007+01:00

After a week of nothingness it all got exciting on Friday!

First of all princess baby was born. Either sheer laziness or ensuring she lived up to her moniker right from day one, she arrived with muss fuss and melodrama at 5am via emergency C section following a 24 hour labour. Everyone is fine and she's a tiny 6lb 8 but apparently has already started to exhibit princess diva -like behaviour.

I'm on the phone to princess sister trying to convince her I don't need the gory 'but it feels just like they are rummaging around inside you' birth details when she stops suddenly mid description. 'One minute' she says then I hear her shout 'nurse nurse there's brown goo coming out of her mouth' I hear the nurse say 'I'll get you some tissue to clean that up'. Stunned silence from princess sister, then a huge sigh, then a rustling noise then I hear princess sister say 'no don't do it again, I've just cleaned that up and not all down me'....then the phone goes dead!

I'm loving princess baby to bits already and can't wait to meet her in 2 weekends time - this is going to be fun!!

Meanwhile in court, the other half has been wasting his week and tax payers money listening to what can only be described as the most pathetic case in the world. Typically its that age old story of 2 men, a woman and er...a TV remote control.

Man A has lent Man B a TV remote control as they have the same TV, but when Man A hears that Man B has moved in with Man A's ex girlfriend, he decides to call time on the lending of said item. Man A goes to girlfriend's flat to collect the TV remote control and unsurprisingly a fight may or may not have ensued - no-one seems to remember the pertinent facts - in which Man A may or may not have been injured - no one knows as he decided not to go to hospital but claims a variety of injuries - and just to rub insult into (potentially fictitious) injury, Man B still has the remote control to this very day.

3 days of trial, at least 45 tickings off from the judge because the jury can't stop laughing at the various witnesses testimonies, which are vague, obviously made up and contradict one another. The other half escapes late on Friday afternoon dying to return to normal life on Monday and the remote control still in the possession of Man B.

Place your bets - update

2008-08-12T18:17:00.003+01:00

Despite consumption of copious amounts of pineapple and hot curry, lashings of raspberry leaf tea, midwife interference, long walks and a marathon swimming session, still no sign of Princess Baby.

"It must be lazy like its mother" said the Princess sister on the phone to me yesterday, it took all my willpower and I almost bit through my tongue in the sheer effort, but I managed to refrain from agreeing.

On the other hand, there is news on the other half's jury service as he has now got a case!

It started this afternoon and for someone who is normally a bit lacksadaisical in terms of doing as he's told, he's being unnaturally coy about the details as apparently the judge warned the jury not to talk about it until its over.

When pressed as he arrived home this evening (witholding of a cup of tea - shhhh don't tell Amnesty) he cautiously volunteered that the trial is expected to end tomorrow and the subject matter is so stupidly trivial I'll probably die laughing...

Place your bets - 2

2008-08-08T19:00:00.000+01:00

The other half has been on jury service all week and has yet to step foot inside a courtroom!

So far he has been called as standby for 2 cases but the defendents changed their plea at the last minute meaning a full court session was not needed. This is been a mixed blessing as if not called, would be jurors get to go home every lunchtime so he's been doing laundry, housework adn catching up on old Star Trek, however is frustrated that he's not doing anything sensible or at work, which is the busiest period in the calendar year and he is dreading what's waiting for him when he goes back the week after next. Anyway onto business, a double header today:

Can the OH make it through next week without stepping into a court room? and if not, when will he be called and what type of case will it be? As usual key facts to help you decide:

a) He is at the crown court

b) There are approx 100 people on Jury service with him and next week is week 2 for him

c) His boss is expecting him back at work the following week

d) The Crown Court is based in a highly insalubrious area of North London

e) When we were there last Saturday (scoping out the court and potential parking) at midday, we saw a prostitute with a client in a car on a side street, a man rooting through a bin and triumphantly pulling out then eating something from what looked suspiciously like a kebab wrapper and some people having a fight outside the tube station.

f) My money is Thursday and a mugging with a knife in the nearby shopping centre

Place your bets - 1

2008-08-05T21:53:00.000+01:00

'THE' baby was due yesterday, but it has yet to put in an appearance.

Place your bets here....when do you think it will show up?

Some key facts to help you choose your date:

a) Both my sister and I were late babies (my sister was 2 weeks overdue and apparently my mother's waters only broke because she laughed so hard at the Goodies 1975 Xmas special - the one with the giant Dougal)

b) It is expected we shall visit at the next availble weekend after the birth

c) We rather fancied going to chilli fiesta this weekend

d) We have tickets for Reading festival August bank Holiday weekend with the ex-John Simm lookilikey

e) Despite many weeks of frantic knitting, the lure of daytime TV and trips round the sales with Aunty Brenda have proven too difficult to resist for my mother and its now a race against time to finish the 'special pink' baby ensemble - apparently its about 3 days from completion....

Prize for the winner (when I am feeling imaginative enough to think of something suitable).

Lost in France

2008-08-04T18:20:00.009+01:00

The other half has a theory that whenever you go to another country, you realise how poor we (as a nation) are at some things.

Take Germany, for instance. The land of incredibly efficient and, crucially, interconnecting public transport, which puts our overly expensive, somewhat shabby and best suited for carriage of animals "system" to shame. Spain, he has christened, the land of the amazing outdoor food experience, but then he is extremely biased as he is hooked on sitting in the sunshine eating tapas and knocking back sangria like its going out of fashion.

France? Well this is what we spent much of our 10 day break discussing and not actually coming to a conclusion on....

Honfleur was beautiful, quaint and the cobbled streets and winding roads, although back breaking, were pretty. Even the hulking monster of Le Harve across the Seine estuary did not dispel the mood. Our loft apartment, borrowed for the first week, was amazing with wonderful views over the rooftops of the town and over the estuary to the staggeringly enormous Pont de Normandie.

Veules - our hideaway with friends for week 2 - was a seaside village with craggy white cliffs, a gorgeous beach and a refurbished 17th century Normandy farmhouse just a short stroll from the boulangerie for fresh bread and the epicerie for delightful cheese, yummy wine and hangover inducing local scrumpy cider.

The restaurants were excellent but, as a non fish eater, once I'd had the moules every which way they come (including the somewhat random and very unFrench 'moules au curry') the menus were extremely limited. And how come French people are so thin when salad and vegetables are almost entirely absent from restaurant menus? We arrived home desperate for flavoursome food served with something other than 'frites' and promptly ordered half of our local chinese takeaway menu.

The waiters were, ahem, French. We were pointedly ignored, chastised for our menu choices/sub standard GCSE French/not wanting coffee at 11pm, thrown out of one place for daring to 'just' order a drink, and the recipients of a variety of Gallic shrugs and sighs for a whole host of perceived misdemeanors.

Our biggest fear - driving on the wrong side of the road - proved unfounded as French motorways are clean, clear and virtually unused. For most of our journeys we were the only ones on the road and the roads were quiet and other drivers forgiving when we drifted over to the more familiar side of the road marking or hilariously completely cut someone up assuming we had right of way on a roundabout when in fact we didn't.

As mainly the passenger in a right hand drive car and the one normally picking the music, singing along, distributing the sweeties or dozing on long journeys, I had to earn my keep. I had my work cut out at the tolls making payments at the automatic booths or trying in vain to chuck euros at mainly young, blonde, French women who spoke very little English and looked petrified when our car drew up alongside their booth.

The little local shops each just as described in my GCSE textbook (charcuterie, boulangerie, epicerie, pattiserie etc) were a joy and much nicer than a jaunt round tesco. The cheese was amazing and we brought a huge selection back which is still stinking out our fridge as I type, and the wine...oh don't get me started on the wine...the 3 cases we bought at the hypermarket is testamount to how good that is!

We returned home relaxed and thoroughly chilled out and on account of the amazingly good weather I acquired a lot of freckles and the other half burnt shins from playing football on the beach. We had a fantastic time with our friends and I wasn't sick on Eurotunnel despite the odd sensation of sitting in a car and not actually driving and the M25 en route home was pleasantly quiet for a Friday afternoon just before rush hour.

As we arrived home and we assaulted by our 2 angry cats, a pile of bills, a jury service summons for the other half and a week old phone message from my work about something inconsequential or other for me, it was clear France had been good for something....a bloody good getaway!

More piccies at http://www.flickr.com/photos/northernmonkey/

Au Revoir

2008-07-16T17:46:00.004+01:00

The other half and I are setting off on an adventure on Saturday - we're driving to France!

If the Tonight programme is to be believed we face officious, nasty French traffic police, horrors galore and probably a jail sentence, but in the pursuit of cheese, moules et frites, fine wine and 10 days of relaxing at our friend's seaside house in Normandy, we've decided we're willing to risk it, but have done a bit of research into the speed limits just in case.

The other half is inordinately excited about seeing his friends again, going through Eurotunnel and, most bizarrely, having a picnic lunch en route, preferably whilst we are on the Eurotunnel train. This appears to be some kind of twisted bid to re-live some kind of childhood family holiday memory, which is obviously less emotionally scarring than mine.

I'm liking the idea that by driving ourselves, there's no real requirement to stick to the confines of a suitcase and 20 kilos when packing. I can already envisage myself randomly lobbing stuff into the boot on saturday morning as I have last minute wardrobe ideas...

Of course it's not all adventure and extra shoes, the downside of driving yourself if that you have to plan the route and do all the stuff you take for granted by just turning up at an airpiort and letting someone else take care of you. As a result, we've spent the best part of 3 evenings over the last week emptying the house trying to find the paper bits of our driving licences, print off a european route map, check oil and water levels in the car and establish whether by French law we are required to carry high visibility vests (for the record not yet, but you will have to from October).

Also the other half and I do not have a good track record in harmony on long car journeys, in spite of the music already loaded on the ipod and the bags of midget gems to hand, so we're bound to be arguing by the time we reach the M25.

But it all seems worth it for the thought of 2 weeks of relaxation, hanging out and catching up with friends, hitting the beach and generally chilling out over a few glasses of wine and hopefully some local calvados.

So it's au revoir for now and see you in a couple of weeks....

Exterminate

2008-07-15T22:23:00.004+01:00

I read in the paper on the way to work this morning that this is tipped to be the Christmas toy this year.

My mother also read the same article and emailed me at work to alert me to its existence.

As the resident sci fi lovers in our household my mother and I had many a happy hour playing Dr Who back in the 70s on laundry day. (Honestly now, can you see princess sister being into aliens? Let me assure you she was not, unless of course there was an alien barbie range)

Why laundry day? Well, I used to wear her laundry basket on my head (which looked a lot like this except it was baby blue which doesn't quite have the desired scary effect but you can get away with it, provided your mother is willing to 1) overlook it and 2) doesn't need to hang the washing out anytime soon) and run about with whatever kind of pointy thing I could find and stick through one of the holes threatening extermination in a comedy voice.

Current washing baskets are just not as good nowadays and when I demonstrated my darlek impression the other week in my excitement at the return of Davos, the other half kind of spoilt it by pointing out the general weaknesses in the costume with such gems as "It's not really working for me as I can see you through the holes"...I swear he is the most unimaginative person in the world...

So what I'm trying to get at in a round about way is, tell me is it wrong as a 36 year old to add it to my Christmas list?

In the wrong...?

2008-07-08T17:40:00.000+01:00

In less than a month I shall be an aunty and seeing as over the last 4 months my mother has been entirely incapable of having a conversation without mentioning a) the baby and/or b) its gender all surprise is long gone and I now know I'm going to have a niece (although hysterically my mother still denies all responsibility claiming I guessed from her description of a recently knitted ensemble!).

Although my sister has told me about 498 times that we are top of the babysitting list as she is dying for a night out, the other half and I are quite excited by the prospect. He's been helpfully eyeing up unsuitable outfits we can buy which will surely upset my sister who (I fear) is planning on treating this baby like one of her princess barbie collection and already hunting out impractical, very frilly, flowery numbers. I meanwhile am looking forward to seeing the transformation of my sister into an all new nigella style domesticated being who, shock horror, has responsibilities...

'You will be visiting after I've had the baby, won't you?' asks my sister. I briefly wonder how soon she is planning on having this long lusted after night on the town but instead say 'Of course. We'll be up the following weekend or whenever we can get off work and come north'.

This apparently is not the right answer. I know this now, as a few days later my parents call me to quote the conversation back at me and then ask me what I am playing at, then start asking inane questions like 'but don't you want to meet your new niece?' to which, of course, there is no right answer, sarcastic or otherwise...

It seems I am always in the wrong, making wrong decisions, wrong assumptions and doing the wrong thing. Apparently having a job where I might need to ask for a day off having not booked out the 2 weeks before and after the due date just in case, having the gall to want to coordinate it with my other half, who also wants to visit, then figuring out how best to negotiate 250 miles is no excuse for not dropping everything and rushing north the moment the baby is born.

'There's ways round these things at times like this' says my father, somewhat unreasonably seeing as he is one of the senior managers at his company and so can go home early to spend the afternoon on his settee at home watching the racing and picking the icing off fondant fancies if he so wishes.

My parents frustrate the situation further by suggesting they buy me a train ticket, like I am incapable of making it north under my own steam and must somehow be coerced or, even worse, as the other half uses our car for work, implying this is what's stopping me visiting. Tempers flare and sulkiness ensues all round, this time at home as well as 250 miles away and somehow, through no fault of my own, I am trapped on all sides by angry people.

Luckily Friday comes and it's time for my parents to go on holiday for a week. The fear that the baby might come a month early whilst they are out of the country surpasses all worry of uncontrollable, stubborn, miscreant offspring. Rather underhandedly I resort to baking banana bread which coaxes the Other Half out of his sulk and he even manages an apology for taking out his strop at my parents on me.

Later over tea and cake, the other half sensibly points out 'All this crap and the baby's not even born yet!' then asks why don't I just go along with what everyone wants to shut them up rather than living dangerously.

But to my mind, it's not that easy and it's also the principle of the thing, so I ignore him and throw myself into cleaning the house in preparation for our weekend guests - John Simm Lookily likey ex brother in law and his new girlfriend - and try to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach....

Gig 2 of the week - Big hair and Spandex

2008-07-01T18:00:00.000+01:00

Thursday found me in 1987...

'Treated' to a ticket by the other half to see Whitesnake and Def Leppard at Wembley Arena, it transpires there is a large (mainly middle aged) part of the UK population who are still in 1987, reluctant to leave and apparently alive and well.

It was all big hair, enough hairspray to instil genuine fear when the lighters came out to be waved about for the de rigeur 'big romance' numbers, tight jeans, spandex (which was not worn in an ironic style whatsoever) and I spotted some gig T-shirts over 20 years old.

'Where have all these people been hiding?' I asked the other half in genuine shock. He stopped rocking long enough to humour me 'don't worry' he said 'they'll go back to the server rooms, meat packing factories and catalogue company warehouses tomorrow' then wandered off to continue the debate with our friends on just how much reconstructive facial surgery David Coverdale must have had.

I went back to sipping my pint nervously in awe of the sheer volume of leather clad people in the crowd and, whilst I waited for a song to come on that I might recognise, pondered just how many 50 year old women had been itching for this night to get their Cher outfits out (clue: more than 20).

There were a couple of songs I knew - the big hits which had full grown, pot bellied, bearded men standing on their seats waving their arms about frantically. If anyone had been having a cardiac arrest and was trying to summon help, they had no chance! - but largely were all a bit samey. 'Well of course' said the Other Half in explanation 'Whitesnake songs are all about having sex, not having sex ,wanting sex, not getting sex, thinking about sex, trying not to think about sex etc etc'....once that had been explained to me, it was patently clear they had one song in many guises....

Def Leppard were better, not least because I recognised a lot of their songs and as I watched the already animated crowd 'let's get rocked' I wasn't sure this was necessarily a) a good thing or b) something I would ever admit to in polite society. Then horrifyingly I realised that I wasn't recognising their songs from the music, it was from the accompanying videos playing on their stage backdrop, which I can only attribute to many a Saturday morning screaming in frustration when it turned out to be the Rock Chart again on the Chart show thus proving the destabilising influence of TV on children long after the inital viewing and into adulthood.

It was an interesting night. It hasn't driven me to hunt out some old stadium rock Cds and neither, as the other half hoped it would, stop me refering to them as Sh*tesnake or Dead Leopard but there was an energy and a huge, over excited electric atmosphere, which is sometimes missing from gigs I've been to recently with a younger crowd.

It might be that middle aged men don't get out much or maybe it was the costumes and vigour that everyone was clearly putting into the evening or maybe it was just the toxic fumes of the hairspray, but it was ...shhh....quite good fun in the end!

Gig 1 of the last week - Laugh out Loud

2008-06-30T17:47:00.004+01:00

Last Sunday the other half and I went to see Frankie Boyle (of Mock the Week fame) making his 'On Sale in time for Christmas' DVD at Hackney Empire.

Whenever I go to see comedians at the back of my mind is 'don't sit at the front'. Largely this is down to extreme embarrassment and emotional trauma sustained following an horrendous experience on a friend's birthday night out at Jongeleurs in Bow where "as we were a birthday party!" we had to sit on the table under the mike and then be picked over by every, single, last person who came on stage (including the bad, unfunny comedians at the start of the evening as well as the man moving the equipment for the disco at the end) . As a result, on entering any comedy venue, my default position is now....at the back, waaaaay back and preferably behind a pillar if possible.

As I'd bought the tickets for this event and based on my very careful choice of seats after 1,024 goes on the ticketmaster random seat picker until I was satisfied, I knew we would be safe. However surprise, surprise, the less careful and stupid people who happened to be sitting on the front row, were not.

If you've ever seen Frankie Boyle, you'll know he is famed for his acerbic, cutting wit and pithy come backs. He is also fairly mercenary in his subjects - nothing is too small, too crude, too vulgar, too off limits, too political to have a go at. Therefore, sitting a foot away from him with a crap hairstyle and questionable fashion sense, does not strike me as a sensible option.

Sure enough in between rounds of hilarious jokes and hysterical monologues, Frankie laid into the front row with the determination of a competitive food eater tackling a mound of hot dogs. He picked off the row one by one with the result that someone chose to leave early, others pretended they were not the one being asked the questions and played dumb and someone got a bit shirty. Why sit on the front row if you can't take the hassle?

All in all it was a good evening and very funny. If you like Frankie on MTW you'll love his stand up and his show was (and therefore the DVD will be) hysterical, although I bet those on the front row can't wait for it to come out and for their humiliation to be complete!

The Flickr Game

2008-06-29T13:12:00.004+01:00

It's been a busy few weeks - a conference in the West Midlands with work, a week of entertaining my parents at home, chronic hay fever making me feel like crap coupled with a bad cold (which I'm still suffering from), a couple of gigs (which I plan to review this week), my first attempt at making something with my birthday sewing machine and general stuff like going to work, eating and doing laundry.

So much to tell you not sure where to start. So what better than some good old displacement activity and procrastination - here's my version of the flickr game, shamelessly pilfered from sanddancer

The concept:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Music Prescription - the verdict

2008-06-15T17:41:00.004+01:00

When I posted my plea for new music I was kind of thinking that there wasn't much I hadn't already heard of/discounted/was uninterested in/didn't like/currently love etc so I was pleasantly surprised by your suggestions and armed with some birthday itunes vouchers and immediately set to work in researching and with the handy itunes preview button road testing them. They all went on the ipod and I've listened to them on my travels to and from work this week, so what was the verdict?

Roses managed the amazing feat of recommending whilst, at the same time, dismissing Cinematic Orchestra, but seeing as she is a woman of great taste and mentioned Faithless and Moby in the same sentence - both of whom I really like - I decided to give them a go. Verdict: Good but I need to be in the right frame of mind for this type of music so it's on the back burner for when the mood next takes me.

Hottie suggested the Kinks, which I love and the Flaming Lips, which I flip into and out of love with as the mood takes me and Vampire Weekend, which I had heard previously and dismissed, but seeing as she wholeheartedly endorsed my Belle and Sebastian obsession, I decided to revisit. Verdict: still not convinced but am warming to them slightly. The 2nd suggestion of Kingmaker made me think of uni and sparked a heated debate with the other half about whether the singer was the guy out of Carter. I was right - he's not! Verdict: Lovely memories of Uni and pogo-ing with a pint of snakebite. Good music to make dinner to.

Sanddancer provided a huge list of suggestions, that despite being older stuff, I had never heard of and after working through the list I wondered how they had passed me by when some were exactly up my street. The album "Ballads of the Book" was interesting, not only for the music but for the background to it and I liked it, a lot as it was so varied. Looper, I had never heard of, but I'm always up for a ex B&S-ite and enjoyed it, not massively to start with but I think it's a grower. Didn't really get on with Big star and Alfie initially but listened to the again today whilst cleaning the kitchen and felt a bit differently about them and I totally loved South, once I'd found some of their stuff. I was slightly worried as my initial search, after I'd weeded out all those other bands with 'south' in the title, threw up a soundtrack album to the TV show The OC but I really liked their stuff and went onto download 2 of their albums. Verdict: Wonderfully eclectic and exciting with South a definite hit and a number of growers, I need to go to and spend some time with

Was unsure where to start with Beth's suggestions when I realised Death cab for cutie had about 10 albums. So after a bit of faffing about, I downloaded 'plans', which I loved to bits and will now go and hunt out some more. Fleet Foxes I didn't get on with quite so well, but that may have been down to major delays on the Victoria line and a man with BO who kept kicking me and a woman with a bag she had to keep picking up and moving around my feet every 2 minutes, so I shouldn't hold that against them, particularly as on first listen the other half said 'yes this is your kind of music' so I probably need to persevere in more controlled and less stressful surroundings. Verdict: One word: Great!

Thanks for all the ideas - this has been a fabulous way to discover some new music - and will probably have to do it all over again in a month when I've spanked this lot to death!

Music Prescription Needed

2008-06-10T18:24:00.003+01:00

I've recently rediscovered listening to my ipod going to /from work. I know that sounds really lame, but I'm a Gemini so am a bit flighty with a tendency to flit about from one thing to another. So I was into the ipod months ago, then I discarded that when I bought a pile of books, which I dutifully trawled through, then I was into reading a newspaper for a month or so, then I discovered the joys of sleep, then podcasts of radio lancashire, which deserves a whole other post, and now I'm really into music. Again.

Partly the music thing is about weezer and their new album, which I have been impatiently waiting for, like forever, oh and I have a huge geeky crush type thing on Rivers Cuomo, but again that's probably a whole other post where I should be trawling for deep psychological analysis.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I found the album online a few weeks ago, 'acquired' it (yes we're excitedly awaiting to be educated by virgin media) and have since spanked it to death. Then I loaded a whole load of other stuff from my music library onto my ipod, which I have also spanked to beyond death.

I need new music and that's where you come in - recommend me some music to listen to! Don't care what it is, just want something to liven up my boring old train trips to/from work and wean me off my usual stuff. I've been of the mindset for the last 12 months that there is limited new stuff about so haven't really got into anything new, with a tendency to concentrate on old favourites, so any new stuff that you can suggest would be welcome.

To give you an idea of what I'm sick off/usually listen to here's some pointers about my musical tastes so you can fine-tune your recommendations accordingly...

Last Purchased Album: Isabelle Campbell and Mark Lanegan "Sunday at Devil Dirt"
Currently obsessing about and it needs to stop: Weezer
Last Obsession just got over: Interpol
Previous Obsessions: Smiths, Depeche Mode, Belle and Sebastian, Muse, Foo Fighters, QOTSA, Klaxons,
Raconteurs, Elbow, Beck, Idlewild, Mansun, Placebo, Beth Orton,
Currently in the CD Player: The Cooper Temple Clause
Last band saw live: Supergrass
Cannot stand: Anything RnB or Rap, Iron Maiden, Korn, snow patrol, coldplay (1st album excepted)
Guilty Purchases: Girls Aloud, 101 1970s disco hits (they're my party albums...honestly)
If I had to label myself and my musical tastes: Indie, alternative, noisy, eclectic, make me fling my hair about

Birthday Gifts

2008-06-06T18:36:00.002+01:00

My family are a bit lazy when it comes to selecting gifts and the other half's are even worse. So usually its gift vouchers all the way, which I like as it means I don't end up with ruffly blouses from the cat (I never did show it you did I?) and I can choose what I want, but a bit of me is always a bit bleugh about it, especially as I always put a lot of thought into choosing gifts for people, but it seems they can't be arsed to do the same for me!

Anyway this year, the other half decided to help everyone along and so, for the first birthday in years I got some pretty great gifts.

The other half always buys fab gifts and this year was no exception - some handmade earrings made by the lovely bloke in Yorkshire we know, to match a ring made for me years ago and, as my hairdrier is currently intermittently dying, an ionic hairdrier!

No, I'd never heard what one of these was either and the marketing gubbins on the box was the biggest load of old tut I'd ever heard - ionic particles to challenge negative ions to smooth out my hair and speed drying time, leaving it shiny and frizz free? Yeah right!

However, and I fail to understand how, it does work and I have smooth, non frizzy hair for the first time in years and it only takes about 5 minutes to dry my hair. I'm am amazed and as it seems too good to be true, am now secretly wondering if the other half is straightening my hair whilst I sleep or messing with the water pressure in the shower so my hair doesn't get as wet as it normally would!

My parents and the other half's parents clubbed together and bought me a sewing machine!

Being a short arse I have to shorten all my trousers and jeans, which I've always done by hand and more recently I branched out into altering some old clothes to make them look new and funky again and in a style that I want. The sewing maching, I guess will be my next step to making my own clothes and my sister bought me a stack of sewing books with gorgeous patterns, which I'm itching to try out. So prepare for lots of sewing updates...

The other half's sister indulged my Clarins obsession and also bought me a selection box of chilli sauces. Why I don't know, as I'v enever shown a great interest in chilli sauces but you always get one duff gift don't you?

Older not wiser

2008-06-01T23:01:00.002+01:00

I spent most of today in bed with the world's worst hangover - I haven't felt that ill in ages and was unable to lift my head until 3.30pm. It was either the copious amount of white wine or possibly the champagne or maybe the ill advised post meal brandy or possibly all three coupled with the fact I didn't crawl to bed until 4am because I just had to prove that I could beat the other half at Gran Turismo first. But whatever it was, it definitely cast a downer on last night's birthday celebrations.

'So how old are you this year?' rather bizarrely asked my mother when she called to wish me happy birthday. 'You should know - you're my mother' I replied 'well of course I know' she said ' but I'm testing you for early onset alzheimers'....

Whilst I'm sure alzheimers shouldn't be kicking in 36, I am starting to wonder at what age will I actually feel like a grown up or, even, behave like one. Some bits of my life are decidedly adult but some are most definitely not and I always figured as I got older, things would slot into place or all would become clear, but instead at the moment I'm still confused and seem to be in free-wheel unsure of my direction.

I guess everyone feel like this from time to time. Birthdays just make you think more about passing time, obligations and direction, even if you still haven't learnt not to mix your drinks, still don't know what you want to be when you grow up, are desperately excited that Weezer might be the band yet to be announced to play Reading and you just won't recognise that you will never be the gran turismo champion at our house (especially after alcohol - if proof were needed that drinking and driving doesn't go togerther try playing GT and actually staying on the track).

What makes a house a home?

2008-05-23T18:40:00.003+01:00

With the credit crunch* everyone is obsessing about house prices, whether they are falling and if so by how much, affording houses, buying and selling houses, equity release schemes etc etc ad nauseum....

Working in the sector means everyone seems to think I am some kind of expert. Before you start bombarding my comments box with queries about what I think will happen to the price of your house over the next 2, 5 or 10 years, let's get it straight, I'm not!

I did economics at university, I can do a whole load of stupid level maths and through my job have access to banking, economist and housing experts who do nothing but research all day to provide the highest level of information on the market. I have current and forecasted prices availble at my finger tips in the office and what that means for the man on the street, but I'm not going to tell you. Why? Because I think we've all got it wrong about property.

We're obsessed with falling prices, the equity value and what that means for us because we're obsessing about the money. Since when was owning a house about money? I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I bought a place to live because, well, we needed somewhere to live - a roof over our heads - and some security in having a place that was ours and where we could shove all our stuff and go to sleep at night safely.

I'm not talking about the greedy, ill-informed 'buy to let'ters (who have screwed the market up) or property magnets but for the vast majority of us with only 1 place, surely it's not about the money...it's about having a home, for us and our families.

This post from Ing made me laugh today as it sums it up perfectly. The secret history of my house? It's a victorian terrace which was built on land once owned by Walter Raleigh. In 1901 our tiny, 2 up, 2 down was inhabited by a family of 9, which I find quite hard believe as sometimes it's seems so claustrophobic and there's only 2 of us and 2 cats!

What's the secret history of your house (that makes it a home)?

* which incidently has got to be the most inane, ridiculous name for a crisis ever, if we're going to call it something at least let's get it right and call it a liquidity crisis, but somehow that doesn't have the same media ring to it, does it?

Marital Rating Scale

2008-05-15T18:47:00.004+01:00

I've often blogged about the fact the other half and I are not married and the consternation this seems to cause for other people.

Yesterday the other half came home from work and told me he'd just heard something on the radio and knew instantly why he couldn't ever marry me...apparently I would make a rubbish wife....in 1939!

An American Magazine has unearthed a 1930s 'Blue Print for Happiness' which comprises a series of tests to determine what makes a good or bad wife/husband. My failing point (among many and the only one I'll own up to here)...I warm my cold feet on his legs in bed at night...

And seeing as I'm not one for whining and complaining (test for wives demerit No. 28) I'm not even going to start on his failings....

Silent Alarm

2008-05-07T18:42:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I found myself walking round Bermondsey in the middle of the day. I was with a colleague, who until last year lived in London but now lives in the lovely West Wiltshire countryside and was just visiting for the day. Whilst Bermondsey would not be my favourite destination for an afternoon excursion, we had volunteered to wander around the place on a reccy for my boss as we thought it would be a chance for a doss and a gossipy catch up whilst on the clock.

Despite not having seen one another for the best part of a year, we wandered through the maze of housing estates trying to pretend that we weren't obvious candidates for a mugging, in silence. This was largely due to the fact, everytime we started a conversation, sirens would start from passing emergency vehicles rendering us both deaf and, after a while, a bit hoarse.

'If I had to choose a sound of London' she said in between a police car and an ambulance 'I would choose emergency vehicle sirens'.

As I lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, I counted 5 different sirens in the space of 20 minutes. Whilst we normally sleep with the window open, I'd never noticed the sirens before. I'm sure Tuesday night in North London was no different to any night of the week, but last night I heard the sirens for the first time.

Before I came to London, if I'd been on the street and heard sirens, it would be cause for alarm and curiosity (where are they coming from? Where are they going? Is it police car, ambulance or a fire engine?). Now it would seem I am oblivious and that makes me feel a bit sad.

I rolled over onto the other half''s pillow, poked him and told him this. He turned over from his 'going to sleep position' to face me. "I'm not oblivious to the sirens' he said gently pushing me back over my side of the bed "they are keeping me awake" and in spite of my initial earnestness and against my better judgement I giggled.

Tagged

2008-05-01T18:52:00.002+01:00

Today is the day London elects its mayor and earlier in the week I'd thought about blogging about the election, the candidates and writing something topical and hard hitting, but I've been pc-less for a couple of days, I'm a bit tired after a long day at work and feeling a bit bleugh with the world at the moment, not least because everytime I leave the house this week I seem to get rained on and then have to have frizzy hair for the rest of the day...so instead courtesy of sanddancer's tag here's something completely different...

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to your blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

My 7 things are:

1. I am currently obsessed with The Wire, Tyrells Crisps and Dr Hauschka (in that order)

2. I don't eat fish but I do eat fish fingers

3. Although I had my ears pierced aged 6, I haven't worn earrings since I was 22 until last weekend!

4. I'm not very good at following rules, I tend to just do what I think is right, unless it means I'll get shot or something equally horrible

5. My quite excited about the forthcoming Indiana Jones movie...

6. I am lost if I don't have my watch on - my current choice is a funky black swatch

7. I voted at 8.05am this morning and I didn't waste my vote on the useless blonde mopped lump that is Boris

I'm not sure I know 7 people who haven't already been tagged or already done this, so if you are reading this and want a go, feel free! (cheating I know but see 4)

Lifts

2008-04-21T20:59:00.001+01:00

I work in a huge building shared by a number of other organisations. There's a children's entertainment production company, a well known construction consultancy company, a variety of NHS administrative and bureaucratic offices ranging from medical records to top of the Doctor hierarchy to machine storage for the local hospital and us, which for want of a better description, I'll call a Government quango...I'm sure you know what I mean...

I work on the top floor - the 8th - and the building is serviced by 6 shiny lifts, which inexplicably every single time I arrive at work are on the 7th or 8th floor and at hometime, when I'm trying to get out of the building as quickly as possible, are all hovering about the basement or on the ground floor.

With such a diverse number of organisations and large number of people housed in one building, the likelihood of me getting in a lift with one of my colleagues and having to make small talk is relatively small, although it does happen from time to time.

Thankfully it's so mercifully infrequent that my 'lift patter' is not yet exhausted, although in my first week there, I did nervously ramble on for the full descent of 9 floors about how I don't like light rain as it makes my hair frizz - it was raining I don't normally just go on about stuff like that - to a man, who I later discovered to be the chief executive.

What happens instead is on the way into (or up to) my office the lifts are filled with a smorgasboard of employees of the different organisations and despite there being so many potential permutation and combinations of people in the lift, rather horrifyingly, what I have decided to call 'floor presumption', is blindingly obvious....

Imagine it's peak time (probably 8.55 am) and there's a bunch of people waiting for a lifts in the foyer. One of the lifts inches its way down from floor 8 and everyone surgers forwards and goes for the buttons....

The NHS administrators in their sensible outfits and M&S footglove shoes, often carrying big piles of files under their arms will get off at the first and second floors. The remaining lift occupants often exchange 'why couldn't they take the stairs' glances at this juncture.

The strapping young men, usually in casual clothes with mad hair, poking mobile phones or ignoring the world wired into their ipods, employed by the NHS to shift machines backwards and forwards between our building and the nearby hospital buildings exit at floor 3.

Floor 4 arrives and the chunky, manly looking, middle aged blokes in ill fitting suits get off and turn left to the project management arms of the building consultancy. Sometimes they make it too easy for me as are carrying hard hats, clipboards and floresecent jackets, but sometimes young women exit on this floor but to the right...I've yet to establish where this leads but the signs tell me it's part of the same company...I'd like to think there's some surreal conspiracy theory about why the women don't go to the left to the offices where the men are, but there's probably a simple reason, like its the short cut to the main office or something...

The funky, young creative types with brightly coloured hair and the very trendy clothes get off at floor 5 - for the children's entertainment company offices. They are loud and noisy and often insist on chatting to one another in the lift about inane nonsence or un-self-consciously singing along to their ipods. Even the older members of staff - the suits - somehow manage to look cutting edge and trendy as they all wear heavy rimmed glasses and camper shoes.

By the time we get to floor 6, the lift occupants are thinning out...this is where the management offices are for the local NHS Trust and nearby hospital. The people who exit here are, for want of a better word but not finding it, grey and exude seriousness and importance and usually are checking their blackberries.

Floor 8 is my floor and 7 our offices too.....all the people for my floors wear suits and long black coats and there's more middle aged, balding white men than the equality and diversity people would probably like. I'm a relative baby in the organisation, which is at times creepy and strange, not to mention the fact I'm female, like to wear my hair in a flicky style that might be construed as modern and have trendy specs.

But sometimes in the lift, in spite of the flicky hair I can see in the mirrored walls of the lift, I look down at my suit and my black coat and then at my fellow lift travellers and think 'they so all know I'm going straight to floor 8'...and I'm not quite sure how exactly I feel about that...

Coincidence

2008-04-15T20:13:00.001+01:00

When I was 6 I had my tonsils out. I was supposed to have my adenoids out too but for some reason, I didn't.

I don't recall much about the actual event but I do vaguely remember the stay in hospital. I was in the children's ward of what was at one time a Victorian workhouse then later a large Lancashire hospital. I remember lumpy porridge for breakfast, which we were given as it was supposedly easy to swallow - it wasn't and, as a result, I still despise porridge to this day - and more happily the copious amounts of ice ceam we were encouraged to eat at teatime to ease the swelling.

I can still vividly remember the red and white striped barrier across the corridor about 50 yards from the entrance to the ward to stop us all wandering out. I also can easily picture the 6 year old me in dressing gown and slippers clutching my doll standing at the same barrier with some of the other patients, as we waited and waited for our parents to turn up every afternoon. Only to be disappointed one day when, due to an accident on the nearby motorway, resulting in traffic chaos in the surrounding area, they were all delayed and missed the daily one hour afternoon visiting slot and were refused entry. Can you imagine such draconian measures in place today?

As a treat that evening and because they were feeling sorry for us, the nurses negotiated use of the hospital portable TV for the ward for the evening, when it wasn't our ward's turn AND they let us choose a TV programme to watch after tea. We watched the incredible hulk, which was doubly exciting as my mother didn't let me watch it at home, so somehow I felt I was getting my own back for her shoddy travel planning.

The adenoid thing was never a big deal at the time, but how I have suffered since. Cursed by blocked sinuses and chesty cough with every bout of hay fever, cold and 'flu since.

'If only they'd taken them out when they had the chance' joked the Dr once years ago. "Yes if only..." I thought as I lay in bed for the fourth day with the world's most snotty, chesty cold and debilitating sinus headache. So bad initially I could barely lift my head off the pillow and open my eyes through the fog of olbas oil, let alone enjoy some usually off limits daytime tv or lounging about in bed catching up on some quality reading time.

Then as I was channel hopping yesterday afternoon, what should I find on an obscure satellite tv channel yesterday afternoon but the incredible hulk! When I told my mother this story later in the evening, she laughed but still couldn't remember why the Dr didn't take my adenoids out.

Surprise?

2008-04-07T22:19:00.000+01:00

"Do you want to know if you'll have a niece or a nephew?" my sister asked. "No" I replied "I'll wait until August" which apparently is not the done thing.

A few weeks ago my sister had an amnio to rule out some weird, hereditary chromosome imbalance thing no doubt fostered from distant, inbred relatives. Thankfully all is ok but as a result she found out the baby's gender.

Both she and her other half found this to be incredibly exciting and, strangely, appeared more interested in that than the actual result they were supposed to be waiting for and the reason the test had to be done in the first place.

"Oh I couldn't wait to find out and I just had to know" she said. According to her midwife this is now the common reaction, especially as many NHS Trusts will no longer tell you what they see at the scan for fear they might have got it wrong leading to a costly legal challenge. As a result many parents to be pay for expensive private scans just to find out so they know in advance of the birth.

I thought maybe it was a my sister or an age thing, but my parents are no better. As soon as they knew she knew, they had to know too. My mother tried to fob me off with a lame excuse about knowing what colour cardigans to knit, but seeing as I know she has been using up gaudy turquoise wool chosen by 4 year old me in 1976 for a deluxe knitted ensemble (with hat!) for Angela my tiny tears doll, this doesn't convince me.

Where's the mystery? What happened to being surprised? Or choosing male and female names and waiting to find out which one it will be? I also can't believe people would actually sue the hospital for getting it wrong - shouldn't you just be happy the baby is healthy?

So the other half and I are in blissful ignorance, whilst everyone else knows and they are all trying hard not to let slip. I'm not overly hopeful we'll make it to August without finding out seeing as in the first week, there were 3 almost let the cat out of the bag incidents.

Do you think we are being odd? Would you want to know?

Whim

2008-04-01T20:32:00.000+01:00

On Saturday I went to the hairdressers.

The last few times I've had my hair cut, I've been to my mum's hairdresser up north and had a nice but ditzy man called Jeff do the honours, who is very good and gives you a glass of wine, but will insist on providing a blow by blow account of his recent shopping trips to the Trafford centre whilst chopping off my split ends.

As much I wanted to know if Jeff had treated himself to some new shoes recently or ever found a shirt to go with that impulse buy blazer from the sale rack at selfridges, we have no plans to be north anytime soon and with my hair getting stragglier by the minute, I had no choice but to do the pick a local random hairdresser thing.

Regular readers will know I'm not a big fan of the hairdressers, but after much deliberation I chose one not too far from home, that looked fairly modern and the one I hadn't seen someone crying outside the week before.

The girl was really friendly, nice and we 'clicked' almost immediately. It was early saturday morning and I was a bit tired and not really with it and possibly lulled into a false sense of security with my first coffee of the morning and her all round niceness. So it was possibly for all these reasons that I agreed to 1) let her chop more than an inch off the length; 2) nodded enthusiastially when she suggested a fringe (a fringe? what was I thinking? I haven't had one of those since I was 12 when my mum used to cut it wonky and, if I pointed it out, she would accuse me of moving at the crucial moment!) and then most horrifyingly of all...3) took my glasses off and happily sat is a hazy blur whilst she did the business!

When I put my glasses back on, I could see she'd done a good job. I had glossy locks and an actual style rather than the usual tamed frizz. One of the other hair dressers came over and complimented her on her work and me on my hair. This went straight over my head as I could not do anything but stare at the fringe.

The fringe was massive - a big, heavy, 70s, blunt fringe, skirting the tops of my glasses. Rather shockingly I didn't look like me at all and, in the back of my mind, I vaguely wondered if this was what I actually set out to achieve.

This was exciting for the 7 minutes it took me to pay and leave the shop, but by the time I'd walked down the street and caught sight of myself in shop windows and thought 'oh that's me!' about 45 times, I was starting to panic slightly.

I texted the other half to warn him 'my hair is weird'...he replied with 'I promise I won't laugh'...this was not wholly comforting. So I texted my sister 'I have a kate moss fringe - it looks like I did it myself with nail scissors'. But from her parallel universe, where nothing but her matters, she replied 'what is a kate moss fringe?'

I went home and rang the doorbell...to his credit, when he opened the door, the other half didn't laugh.

Auntie Monkey

2008-03-27T21:11:00.000Z

With all the on-going crap with my family since Christmas, I've been so busy arguing, I haven't given myself any time to think about what it all means and as Hottie asked, way back when, what I feel about it and whether that excites me.

Whilst I'm sure my sister is currently developing an angelic, rose tinted vision of how the perfect auntie will behave, what she will say, do and buy for the baby, which naturally I am bound to fail to live up to, I am (now) a bit excited about it all.

Although my mother's side of the family is large and many of my cousins have had children, we don't have any babies or young children in the bit of the family we are close to, so it'll be nice to extend our family further. I can already see how excited my mother is, as (to my sister's abject horror) she has started digging out old bits of turquoise wool and dusty 1968 knitting patterns for matinee jackets.

Whilst a couple of my friends have had babies fairly recently, I haven't really had any close, prolonged contact with babies and young children, so in all honestly am a bit scared of them as they seem so fragile, although my mother assures me they aren't as I am testamount to being dropped on my head in the swimming baths and being...ahem perfectly fine 35 and a bit years later...

I am however quite good at peering at them intently in their prams or if someone else is holding them, especially everytime one is brought into the office by a colleague on maternity leave. And whilst everyone else rushes to hold the baby, I'm a bit scared of handling them so am usually the one at the back and the butt of the jokes like 'if you touch it, you won't have to have one, you know'... So I'm thinking it might be fun (and possibly a challenge) for me to get over this particular, somewhat irrational nervousness...

But best of all I'm liking the idea of being the fun one! The one with the treats, jokes and pressies and with his boundless energies and silliness that knows no bounds, I know the other half will be the secret weapon for winning over small children.

I'm also liking the idea of having an excuse to play with toys again and can't wait until niece/nephew gets older and I can buy some good stuff like a farmyard set and frustration, which if I've never mentioned it before, is without a doubt the best board game in the world. Oh and even better, I can buy noisy toys with beeps and rattles and music and best of all when we've tired niece/nephew out and it's ratty and over-tired or sick, I can happily hand him/her back to his parents then shoot off to the pub for beer.

Flight from hell

2008-03-24T15:36:00.006Z

Why do I do it? I ask myself, then remember I asked myself the same question, last time and the time before and, hang on a minute, the time before that too....

The other half and I had impulsively booked to spend Easter weekend in Palma and whilst the actual break was fantastic, relaxing and fun, the journey to and from there was awful.... Flying with Ryanair...oh the joy....

The airport was unecessarily stressful - I always find Stansted to be that way. A tiny, regional airport stretching well beyond its capabilities and falling apart at its budget airways seams. I don't think I've ever taken a flight from there and not had to run straight from security to the gate, unless of course you count that one time the flight was delayed for 4 hours...

The journey started badly. Inexplicably, the check-in desk doesn't open until 75 minutes before the plane is due to depart, then they had the cheek to put up a sign saying it would close promptly 30 minutes later. 'Just made it guys' said the cheery check in bloke and I had to kick the other half to stop him yelling that we'd been waiting for 2 hours already. The queue had been immense and filled with indignant, moaning pensioners travelling to their holiday homes, some of whom had most likely been in the airport for at least 3 days. Despite the delay, naturally the plane was on time, so we had 15 minutes to beg speedy passage through security and run to gate, which was of course in the special, ryanair, shed complex at the arse end of the airport.

As usual the non allocated seating policy worked a treat. We had angry people having paid for speedy boarding, denied their £7.50 preferential treatment because of their poor running skills through the airport. There was a large family of 10 who were arguing of their right to sit together and hysterically almost a mini riot by some pensioners, ejected from the second row of seats they'd smugly commandeered because the seats should have been reserved for the man in the wheelchair, who was escorted onto the plane a good 15 minutes after everyone else.

As we can't be bothered to queue endlessly, the other half and I knew we wouldn't be sitting together...in fact I've forgotten what is is like to sit next to my travelling companion, but on the plus side I know I won't get my fingers crushed in his vice like grip as the plane takes off and I get some quality reading time in.

Josef, our flight attendant looked 15 and as though he was wearing someone else's suit. Someone about 5 times larger than him. It's not particularly reassuring, but I tell myself it'll be ok as he has a little winged badge on his oversized lapel, therefore he must have done some sort of training that might come in handy, say, if the plane unexpectedly plummets to earth.

This settles me for a good 10 minutes until it becomes apparent that his knowledge of English appears to be somewhat lacking and he communicates by a means of pointing and pigeon English. This later becomes laughable as he struts through the cabin carrying a bin bag and accosting passengers with a shouty 'You? You have the things to throw away?' accompanied by a steely eyed stare and pointed finger.

The journey continues. It's 2 hours to Palma but feels like 22. I'm tired, crotchety and increasingly aggravated. The small child is still making the same fretful whining noise it has been making for the last hour and a half. I can only see the top of the other half's head about 5 rows away and from the angle and occasional movement can guess he's psp-ing, I meanwhile am stuck on my suduku.

Josef and co try to sell us overpriced drinks and a very limited selection of food - none of which is vegetarian, which causes a fuss. Then we have the chance to sign up for a Ryanair credit card - it gives you free flgihts! - buy some duty free; buy special Ryannair scratch cards etc etc...it goes on and on and on...

I exchange smiley glances with the woman sitting next to me and try to good-naturedly wrestle a bit of the arm rest off her but seeing as she's twice the size of the seat, it's largely unsuccessful. She goes back to staring at her mobile, which she's clasping in her sweaty hand, presumably waiting for the moment she can turn it back on...which she does as soon as the plane touches the ground in Palma then starts receiving seemingly hundreds of texts and furiously typing out replies.

I catch up with the other half in the terminal, we collect our bags and head straight to a bar near our hotel for copious amounts of beer. We manage to eradicate the memory of the journey enough to enjoy 4 days of Majorcan hospitality and sunshine then its back to the airport to do it all over again to get home to the cold.

Duvet Battle

2008-03-16T13:30:00.004Z

The other half and I own a double bed - one which we are not very good at sharing....

He likes mounds of pillows, I like 1 rather old, manky, fairly flat one and we spend all night pushing the pillows about trying to get comfortable. He likes kicking the duvet off when he gets hot, whilst I have to sleep with something covering me all the time. He likes to pull the duvet up over his head and snuggle down under it, I have to tuck it under my chin as I cannot sleep with anything over my face for fear of suffocating and when it's cold we both like rolling ourselves up in the duvet like a big sausage and can get quite competitive over who gets the most duvet, even when asleep.

One duvet, 2 people, lots of weird sleeping positions and habits, does not a good nights sleep make...and don't even get me started on the snoring.... So a couple of months ago we treated ourselves to a luxourius goose feather and down, big, fluffy, squidgey, kingsize duvet. It's supposed to be cool when its hot and warm when it's cold and it's bigger than the bed and therefore big enough for us to both chuck it about and fight over it all night and crucially still have enough duvet to be happy!

So far so good...

Then the cats discovered the duvet...previously happy to commandeer (and cover with fluff) the settee and cushions downstairs and uninterested in our bed unless they are coming to remind us its time to get up and feed them, now they want the bed too. Preferably at night. And when we are in it. Oh and they also want to sprawl out on the big squashy, warm comfortable duvet too and it'd be good if we could move over out of the way so they get more space.

Previous 2 nights we've gone to bed when the cats are out and I've woken up to find myself curled in a little ball, the other half hanging off the far edge of the bed and the 2 cats sprawled out on top of the duvet, dead to the world in the middle and impossible to move (just how much heavier does a cat get when its asleep?). Attempts to shut the bedroom door have yeilded little, except a lack of sleep for us whilst they persistently scratch and meow. Kicking them off the bed gives a few minutes grace, but I think they just wait for us to fall back to sleep and then get back on the bed and set about pushing us off again.

So its back to square 1 and a tour de force for the duvet, but this time, I fear we may be losing...

To remember...

2008-03-12T22:17:00.004Z

I went to a memorial service earlier this week. Not only was it a beautiful service with great rousing sing a long hymns, but it was a true reflection and moving tribute to the person we were there to remember.

One bit of it stood out for me - a reading. Not something I'd ever heard before although I was later told it's a popular choice for this kind of event, but I thought it was lovely, not least as our recipient had been a keen yachtsman, but also because of the succinct and moving imagery and I thought I'd share it....

I am standing on the ocean shore. A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her until she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says,“She is gone”.

Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her and just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.

The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says “She is gone” there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout “There she comes!” (What is dying? Bishop Brent)

Envy

2008-03-06T17:50:00.001Z

"So do you miss us?" they all chorused, before I even had time to put my bag down, take my coat off and get to the bar. It was a dinner, drinks and a catch up night out with my former colleagues in a little place just off the Charing Cross road.

Do I miss them? I wasn't sure and didn't know what to say, so I went to the bar and bought myself some thinking time and being of analytical mind, decided to assess the facts:

I now earn twice as much as I used to and have more holiday, shorter working hours and a flexi time scheme that actually works and we are encouraged to use.

I only have about the 1/3 of the work I used to do, but I have to make more decisions and work on a national rather than regional basis, so no more half arsed decision making because I'm tired/hungover/can't be arsed.

It's more challenging work, which interests me, is certainly stretching me and my skills and as a result I get much more satisfaction out of it. But the processes are a bit bureaucratic and organisation tends towards the hierarchical. At least it means I won't end up ever having to do something which is really my boss's job or even her boss's, which used to happen. A lot.

I have competent enthusiastic staff, who get stuck into things, stay late if they have to and give me finished pieces of work back instead of waiting for me to hand hold them through the simplest of tasks for days on end, then have the cheek to tell me they still have no idea how to do it and in their appraisal that I don't help them enough.

My commute is now 30 minutes shorter so I get longer in bed of a morning and a full evening at home....even if I do have to use the Victoria line...

I picked up my caiprihana and as I wandered to the table wondered how to break it to them....But when I got back they were gossiping about all the stuff that had happened since I left and how much they missed me, which quickly became apparent was not so much about me, but the fact they were now having to do all the work that I used to do, which they had discovered was actually rather a lot and some of it quite stressful and time consuming.

They quizzed me endlessly about my new job and how I was getting on and I tried not be too upbeat about it, until my former boss said with an edge of disappointment in her voice 'so you don't miss us at all then? There must be something you miss?'

'Well...' I said hurriedly thinking, desperately trying to think of something. 'Although there are more shops on Tottenham Court Road, the local newsagents on aren't a patch on the ones in Lower Marsh - they don't even have the full range of just juice or a big selection of crisps' I feebly added thinking fondly of the little newsagent shop we used to frequent each lunchtime which was the mecca of hard to find snack foods, such as all 3 flavours of wheat crunchies, Discos, Worcester sauce crisps and seemingly the only place in the UK selling the highly elusive cranberry just juice...

They all sat back and exchanged triumphant looks and smiles. 'So' said my former boss 'you've crossed the river to your new swanky job and you can't even find a decent packet of crisps to have for your lunch?' 'Pretty much' I said, glad to have got them off the scent of my successful escape 'although not at the moment, as I've given them up for Lent'...and with that all conversation about my new job came to an end...

Table Manners

2008-03-03T18:43:00.001Z

Last week, I had to attend a working lunch.

It was one of those bland, hotel 'all kinds of fillings but largely sloppy mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce' sandwich lunch things to accompany an 'air your views' meeting to make some of our more whiny partners feel loved and as though we would actually deign to take their views into account.

Just to make it more exciting, I wasn't even participating in the meeting as such, I was there to take the minutes and to shadow one of my colleagues to learn about the particular sector he is responsible for, which I will take over when he moves onto a more exciting and lucrative line of work next month.

As the conversation got more whiny and people droned on and on making ludicrous suggestions of how they should be able to short cut public funding rules so they don't actually have to be accountable for any money they might receive, I zoned out and took stock of the people round the table.

Everyone was struggling with the sandwiches - the fillings were a bit too runny and messy to eat politely. Some people were taking tiny bites and mopping up spillage with copious amount of napkin after each mouthful, others had abandoned the more unmanageable options - mainly egg mayo and prawn in Rose Marie sauce - whilst the few unselfconscious ones battled on gamely, shovelling it in, disregarding the mess.

A highly stylish and poised woman, who had been desperately trying for 2 minutes to get a miniature Mediterranean roast veg tortilla wrap into her mouth without it unravelling and pinging its slimy contents down her linen suit, gave up, threw it down on her plate, got up and collected a fork from the buffet table over the other side of the room.

She then ate the rest of her lunch using the fork, delicately chopping up the offending items and sweeping them into her mouth with no salad fallout. Within a few minutes, she'd eaten the lot and pushed her plate and fork aside.

The man sitting next to her had hardly touched his food, instead concentrating on making the points he'd come to make, after all heated finger pointing and eating sandwiches don't really go together. But once his self indulgent monologue had been delivered and all the hand waving was done, he attacked his food with gusto and quickly became embroiled in the 'I'm hungry and want to eat but can't seem to do it politely or without making a mess' dilemma.

After a couple of minutes battle, to my utter horror and surprise, he picked up the discarded fork from the woman next to him and used it as she had done to eat his lunch. She politely looked away and pretended not to notice.

Even though they were both from well known arch rivals, I wondered if maybe unknown to the professional world they inhabited, they were lovers. After all I'd think nothing of picking up the other half's fork and using it, not in public of course, but at home maybe, if say ALL the other cutlery and potential food eating implements, we owned were in the dishwasher and I couldn't eat with my fingers.

I asked my colleague later if they were an item and he laughed. 'Are you mad?' he said 'their companies are arch rivals, they'd never get away with it and anyway I only introduced them to one another this morning!'

I'd like to think what I saw was a subconscious, unwitting faux pas accidentally displaying the intimacy of star crossed lovers torn apart by industrial rivalry, but I fear it was just really disgusting table manners!

And the award goes to...

2008-02-25T18:00:00.000Z

The other half is up for an award for the webby stuff he does at work. He came home last week full of excitement about the nomination and being shortlisted and the thought of attending a black tie function and receiving an award presented by Fiona Phillips of GMTV.

To be honest (and somewhat bizarrely) initially he seemed more excited about the possibility of meeting Fiona Phillips than actually winning the award. Even though for the first 10 minutes of the conversation he couldn't actually remember her name and I only figured out who it was following his impression of her rather lame turn on strictly come dancing.

A few days later and just as I was excitedly turning thoughts to what the other half of a successful web applications designer would wear to a black tie awards dinner when there was the possibility of meeting a GMTV presenter in the flesh, the other half announced disappointingly that partners weren't allowed to go and that he wasn't even sure if he would be allowed to go.

Although he is the developer, shared the design with his boss, the copyright belongs to their employer, so everything he produces at work and therefore any awards it generates don't belong to him. So although he and his boss did all the work on the project, they will be side stepped for the senior liggers and hanger on-ers, who have no knowledge of the product or how it works to go to the prize dinner and collect any award.

You'd have thought if they are good managers they'd politely invite the people who actually did the work as recognition and as an award in itself, even if they didn't let them go up on stage to get it, but apparently not as tickets for the awards do are too expensive and therefore will be limited to key personnel.

I thought he'd be gutted, but he's not. He's chuffed to have been nominated and that's more than enough for him, because it's given him recognition in his workplace for all he's achieved in the last 3 years since taking up the post and he's completely self taught.

'I can't be bothered to fight about it' he said 'and anyway who wants to meet Fiona Phillips?'

'Too right' I replied in a bid to cheer him up.

'It's hardly like it's Kylie giving the award out' he added 'that would have been a different matter entirely'

Inspire me!

2008-02-20T18:08:00.002Z

I haven't been around much lately as I'm all a bit bleugh and can't seem to get myself going or motivated by anything, except possibly to sulk about other people going on holiday or day dream about things I'd rather be doing and places I'd rather be.

To make matters worse I'm not even sure what the problem is. Maybe it's because I seem to be permamently cold at the moment and can't get warm no matter how high I turn the heating up, how many layers I wear or how low I snuggle down under the duvet with the other half and the cat at night. Maybe it's because of the stupid sister thing depleting my energies and making me unnecessarily question myself or maybe I'm just a bit slow and got the January blues a month late.

Normally at times like this I can find a good book to immerse myself in or take comfort in an obsession with some trashy TV programme, rattle myself out of it with a good blast of noisy music or spank some cash on something frivolous.

But my shopping trips have yielded naught apart from some frustration at sizing between different shops and the fashion obsessions of the moment which no matter how many times I try, I soooo cannot wear if I want the other half to come out with me in public with a straight face.

TV has been crap of late and despite limiting ourselves to 2 episodes of The Wire and 1 episode of Band of Brothers a week we're slowly running out of DVDs and Sky+ed stuff to watch and I vowed last week I would not stoop so low as to watch the hideously disappointing Ashes to Ashes again.

There doesn't seem to be any new bands to discover or good CDs about and I've hammered my 3 Xmas ones to death and am sick of them already. Got tickets to see Supergrass in April, but that seems a veeeeery long time away...

I've picked up 3 or 4 books in the last month but nothing has really caught my fancy and I've lost interest and put them down, which is most unlike me. I've taken Hottie up on her suggestion and bought a Jasper Fforde book on Green Metropolis which I'm looking forward to immensely but that's not arrived yet...

I'm just so...so unmotivated by everything and nothing seems to inspire me at the moment. I'm sure you've all had times like this, so what do you presribe*?

* Please do not say crisps or bags of haribo as that's what I gave up for Lent. 2 weeks in and doing great!

Green and red

2008-02-17T11:47:00.001Z

I'm normally fairly happy with my lot, but Friday I was consumed with jealousy when one of my colleagues arrived at work wearing his civvies, with a bulging rucksack on his arm and left at 4.30 to head straight to Heathrow for 3 weeks travelling in Vietnam.

I still couldn't quite get over it yesterday, particularly as it's so cold and frosty, the house is freezing and needs a good clean. So much so I had to leave behind the laundry, washing up and hoovering and went to the shops to treat myself to the new Delia cookbook and a big toblerone to cheer myself up (I actually went to buy a dress but all the ones I tried on made me look frumpy).

The toblerone was fabulous, but Delia's book has made me want to rant - there are lots of interesting ideas and concepts of how to make life easier and it's given me loads of kitchen goddess ideas I want to explore further but it's obvious it's a cleverly timed marketing/advertising dream and I never thought I'd hear St Delia advocating tinned mince beef from M&S and frozen mash!

Cadburys Double Choc

2008-02-12T18:41:00.000Z

Whilst perusing the aisles of the local Co-op on Ssturday afternoon to choose some hangover food - for the record it was a vegetable samosa, a pint of full fat milk to make chocolate milkshake and a packet of crumpets - I happened to see the latest edition to the Cadburys Dairy Milk range.

The other half is obsessed with Cadburys (as well as chocolate and sweets in general) so I decided to treat him, seeing as I owed him one as not only had he brought me coffee and paracetamol in bed earlier in the day and made soothing noises, but he had not complained when I'd phoned him from a random railway station (not my usual stop but within driving distance from our home) at 11pm the night before drunkenly demanding to be picked up after "only going out for a couple after work".

Cadburys Double Choc is described as milk chocolate with chocolate flavoured centre. So like a regular dairy milk bar with the chunks filled with a chocolate goo.

I loved the idea of this as both the other half and I love caramel bars and suchlike. If I was in a competition and had to pick a top favourite of goo filled sweet, mine would have to be those little caramel kegs that come in tins of Roses and it takes 25 minutes to pick the gold wrapper off becuase usually the keg has leaked, but I digress.

The other half was suitably pleased with his gift but on reading the wrapper, did wonder what is actually in the chocolate goo that the nutritional breakdown is given per chunk - 40 calories fact fans! - rather than for say, 100g like other foods on the planet.

It was a massive disappointment. The chocolate goo is sick-makingly sweet and a rather disconcerting dark brown colour with an unusual consistency. Not runny like caramel, but more thick and lumpy, not unlike Marmite in texture. When coupled with the sickly sweet cadburys chocolate it was just too much. The other half ate about 120 calories worth then dismissed it as rank.

I felt bad until I heard him retelling the Friday night phone call story to his mate on the phone later that day and he said "She only went out for a couple...a couple of barrels more like!"

Cloverfield

2008-02-09T18:05:00.000Z

If, like me you can't get enough of disaster and monsters then this is the one for you. Not only is there a big monster, there's lots of screaming, frantic running away from big monster, fire, falling buildings, a terribly lame "love" story, which naturally involves going towards the monster...oh and wobbly camera action too.

From the moment we decided to go see the movie, we were warned about the wobbly camera action. 'I couldn't stand it' said a colleague '10 more minutes and I would have been sick'. "DUE TO THE NATURE OF THE HAND-HELD STYLE CAMERAWORK, CUSTOMERS MAY EXPERIENCE SYMPTOMS SIMILAR TO MOTION SICKNESS OR RIDING A ROLLER COASTER" screamed the millions of signs in the cinema foyer. As someone who could never get to the end of the road in the back of the car without a bucket as a child, this did not bode well for me, and although the first 10 minutes of the film were hard going, I soon adjusted and was fine.

The wobbly camera action is an intrinsic part of the film because it makes you feel as though you are there in the maelstrom, trying to escape the monster and as a result it's a fabulous, exhilarating, adrenaline fulled film that left us breathless and when the film ended the cinema was in silence. Yes, of course there are the usual, clicheed, good old 'oh no don't do that!' bits that are de riguer for all monster/disaster movies but, admit it, you'd be disappointed if they weren't in there, wouldn't you?

C- for Effort

2008-02-02T18:01:00.000Z

I should have known that the email wouldn't have been enough. I should have known that the cheery 'it's ok' response I got back and the ensuing fortnight of friendly yet fragile détente was a sham. I should have known because I know her so well and I'm dealing with the most self centred person in the universe who only lets those, who cross her, escape when she has exacted a meticulous revenge or secured her pound of flesh.

Sure enough this week it all blew up again after a seemingly innocuous conversation about doing something in August, when the baby is due in late July. Apparently not only was my reaction to the news back in December not good enough, but the other half and I have not done enough since to "make amends" (her words). This was coupled by some pretty nasty abuse emailed to the other half and myself along with a diatribe about the horrors that will become us if we insist on keeping in touch with the John Simm lookilikey and don't make more of an effort to get along with her new man.

Patient (and to my mind completely unnecessary) explanation, long-winded (and again to my mind unecessary) apologies for perceived faults in a bid to restore some peace and then out and out reasoning on my part have failed when faced with the heaving emotional mass that is an irrational, selfish, hormone frenzied, pregnant woman.

So I talked it over with my mum who is awe struck at finally becoming a Grandma and therefore happily moved to the dark side, said 'she's feeling a bit sensitive about it all at the moment and she's emotional with the pregnancy so probably doesn't mean anything by it. She only wants you to make a fuss of her and the baby and I think you could both try a bit harder'.

I almost cut through my tongue in the effort to bite back the response which included the fact that I'm not one of those people who makes a fuss over anyone and they all know it so why would I start now. We are over 200 miles away so spending time getting to know someone is going to be quite difficult anyway irrespective of the circumstances of that person coming into my life. She's been abusive and downright rude to the other half (which to my mind is unforgiveable - be rude to me by all means, but not him). Throughout January we've been working long hours and transport is crap so by the time we're home and fed of an evening there's just enough time to chat to oneanother or watch tv for an hour before collapsing into bed. And on top of all that I heard that someone I know suddenly died this week. So maybe taking some time out to cossett someone for no other reason than that's what they expect, is not quite top of my list of priorities at the moment.

Instead I chose to make an exasperated noise befitting my state of mind and gave up trying to discuss it, which was apparently later construed by "the irrational one" as a sure indication of my culpability.

Days later and it's still not resolved and I'm laying low in a bid for her to maybe see some sense or until I absolutely have to pick up the phone and garner some energy to battle it out. As the other half pointed out if it wasn't so stupid, emotionally draining and irritating, it would be absolutely hysterical...

My Illuminating Past

2008-01-29T18:09:00.000Z

Rewind to random weekend in October 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 -1987...

Every year it was exactly the same. It's autumn, it's started getting dark at about 3.30pm, it's probably freezing cold and if not blustery, then blowing a downright gale on the coast, so what better way to spend a Saturday night than driving to Blackpool to go through the illuminations.

My Grandma, always joined us for this trip, even though most years she'd only been in Blackpool not 4 weeks earlier on her annual trip to my Auntie and assorted friends in Fleetwood and from where she'd send us cute kitten postcards with random, non sequiturs of her week like: 'Elsie had an ice cream on the prom', 'The seagulls are big this year' or 'Marjorie won £2 at the bingo and treated us to afternoon tea'.

Grandma coming along was a mixed blessing as it meant space on the back seat was compromised but she always brought some sweets, which would magically appear at the first glimpse of the tower.

The journey to Blackpool was not complete without a trip past the windmill and the 'who can spot the tower first competition' which my sister would always lose as she insisted on calling out for a large pylon just outside Preston.

Once we got there and joined the limping traffic along the seafront we'd gaze in wonder, usually through pouring rain and gale force winds dangerously whipping the lights about and laugh when we spotted a dead bulb. At some point in the journey someone would wonder how many bulbs there were and how long it took to replace the dead ones each night, then we'd fearlessly cross the tram lines at Fleetwood - this bit always scared me to death as a child - and all go off for fish and chips before the journey home.

I thought about this today as I heard that some of Blackpool illuminations are for sale at auction tomorrow. It made me a little sad at first but then I had a look at the catalogue and saw it was all stuff from recent years and I realised if I was going to buy anything from the illuminations, then I'd only really want the illuminated rocket tram, but I doubt it'd fit in our shed!

More money than sense?

2008-01-25T22:07:00.000Z

I came home from work on Tuesday to a complicated message on the ansaphone from my travel insurance company, the gist of which was the manager of my local Jane Norman shop had been in touch with them to say she had found my purse in her shop and their card was in it.

Once I'd got over the initial confusion (I hate Jane Norman and never ever venture in there! Why is my travel insurance company calling to tell me this?) and spoken to the nice travel insurance rep, who explained that due to data protection she hadn't given out my number and instead decided to call me herself to check it out as it sounded weird, I was delighted that my purse had resurfaced. Although having said that, the other half had just bought me a gorgeous leather replacement (which is far nicer than the one I'd lost and, ahem, found again) and even more delighted I now don't have to pay £22 for a replacement driving licence, when it wasn't my fault I lost it in the first place.

I duly called the shop to make arrangements to collect the purse. "Oh you're the lady who lost her purse in here' said the Jane Norman manager. 'I didn't lose it, it was stolen from me in La Senza' I clarified just in case she thought I was daft enough to lose my purse down the back of a clothing rail and do nothing about it. 'Oh' she said 'there's still cash in it so we thought you'd just left it here'. This, was even more confusing.

When I collected the purse, I went through it. The cards were untouched, which I would have expected as it was likely I was hit on by a petty, opportunist thief. Naturally, as you would expect, the £30 in notes were gone but surprisingly £6.57 in loose change was still there.

Now call me stupid but if you were deperate for cash and had gone to the trouble of slashing someone's bag with a knife in a busy shopping centre to steal their purse, wouldn't you take ALL the money out of the purse?

Whilst I concede £6.57 isn't a great deal, you can still buy lots of stuff with it and putting it together with the notes would have made tidy sum for a few minutes work. I can only assume thieves nowadays don't sully themselves with coins and slack change. Yet I can think of loads of stuff I could buy with £6.57...in fact I'm going to use it to buy a couple of pints down the pub for the other half and me tonight and I will still have enough left for a packet of nuts.

First we had thieves stopping to have a biscuit now we have thieves who don't take what they've stolen. At the risk of sounding, god forbid, like a Daily Mail reader or I'm turning into my dad, whatever next? If it were me I'd have snapped that £6.57 right up...

Gone to the dogs?

2008-01-22T17:33:00.000Z

Kirsty and Phil always say if there's loads of estate agents and coffee shops then the place is on the up.

Round the corner from me, a self serve, coin operated dog washing shop has opened - the first of its kind in the UK - I'm speechless as to what it could mean and who would use it....I can't say I've noticed loads of dog owners and seeing as we are in suburbia, there's not even that many places nearby where your dog has got so filthy, it needs a bath in a special shop! Any ideas?

Some girls have all the luck

2008-01-19T17:39:00.000Z

It's said that bad things tend to come in 3s....

First there was the escalator fall - embarrassing, not to mention painful - then today I had my purse stolen. I'd popped into town with the other half, who needed to go to the post office. Whilst he queued for ever and a day with the pensioners, I pottered around the shops. It was raining and the shops were busy and crowded and filled with people carrying umbrellas held at strange, poke your eye out angles.

Whilst fighting my way out of La Senza, I felt a pull on my bag and when I got outside, realised the bag had been cut open and my purse had been taken. Cue much hassle of cancelling bank cards, trying to make myself understood to the Indian call centre of abbey national, listening to the whine of the La Senza manager when it transpired it was only 1 of 3 shops with no CCTV in the town centre and how this happened all the time in there and much painful embarrassment in the interview with shopping centre security men and later the police:

Big burly middle-aged Security Man: "where were you when it happened?"
NM: "I was in La Senza"
SM: "That's the ladies underwear shop isn't it?"
NM: "er yes..."
SM: "and whereabouts in the shop were you when it happened?"
NM *blushing furiously* "By that Valentine's frilly knicker display"

I wouldn't care but I never normally go in there - I'm more of an M&S girl, but with the current escalator arse/leg injury I couldn't be bothered to slowly limp up the stairs to their lingerie department and opted for La Senza as it was on the ground floor.

Later the other half bought me a coffee and patted me on the head like a small dog. "It's not your week" he said "I'll have to think of something to cheer you up". Yay, I thought. "Not underwear though" I said "I''ve had enough of that today".

Much later he said "I have a surprise for you, I've decided to treat you to a night out". I had visions of a delicious meal out, a lovely hotel or a night on the town. He dragged me upstairs to the PC and proudly pointed at the screen where the ticketmaster website was open and 2 tickets had been purchased for an event....

I was quite excited by now and all thoughts of my victim status gone. What could it be? A comedy evening? A gig with my favourite band? A theatre night? No, a ticket to Wembly to see Whitesnake and Def Leppard in June...

Surely that's the third thing? It's got to be, hasn't it? Tell me it is....

Modern Etiquette

2008-01-16T18:37:00.001Z

There have been a couple of times this week when I've wondered about modern etiquette. I like to think I'm polite and well mannered, but not being posh or interested enough to own a Debretts book (although I serious doubt the scenarios I'm about to describe are in there), I'd be interested on your thoughts and opinions too.

Scenario 1 - When to take off your hat
It's winter-time and some days it's been cold and wet of late - the ideal time to wear your hat. Some hats are woolly and designed to keep your head warm and some hats are fashion accessories designed to make you look fabulous or grubby and drug-addled if you are Pete Doherty, but do you take your hat off when you get inside?

One of the young, trendy things in the office has been wearing a variety of hats for the last 2 weeks - ALL DAY. We've had a beret, a cloche type hat and a trilby. Imagine trying to keep a straight face whilst someone across the office is sitting at their desk preparing a PowerPoint presentation wearing a trilby...strange? I think so...

Scenario 2 - When faced with someone getting under your feet
It rained all day on Tuesday and Warren Street tube station was soggy and slippy. One minute I was getting on the escalator down to the Victoria line, the next my foot went from under me, I heard someone shout 'ow', which turned out to me, and I was suddenly lying on the escalator looking at the (hideous and filthy) ceiling and my leg hurt. A lot.

How did the other escalator travellers behave? Most ignored me, the stern-looking, middle aged man I found myself looking up at who had been behind me, poked me with his umbrella and said 'well get up then you are blocking the escalator' whilst people behind him tutted and sighed loudly to signal their displeasure at the hold up. In disbelief I stared at him and thought about giving him a piece of my mind, when I realised I might get to the bottom and be sucked into the escalator itself before I did so. The lovely Italian man who I'd ended up lying next to, lifted me up out of the irate people's way and made sure I was ok whilst about 40 people ran past us making a fuss about the 'hold up'. I appreciate it was rush hour and in London, but unnecessarily rude and shameful behaviour? Most definitely...

Conversation Intercom - 2

2008-01-14T18:32:00.000Z

The email reply I wanted to send:

Dear little sis
Under the circumstances, I cannot believe you are asking me this question, but since you did, it's only courteous that I reply.

Why did your news go down like a lead balloon? I cannot believe that anyone who heard your 'announcement' has excitedly jumped up and down and hugged you both to death. Especially when all I can think about doing, is pinning you to a wall by your hair and beating you round the head in a bid to knock some sense into you, whilst shouting incredibly slowly like you may be deaf, foreign or stupid ...'Are You Insane?'...

You have only been together 9 months, 5 of which you were both living with and married to other people, one of whom, can I remind you, still insists on texting her ex husband drunkenly at 4am. Your relationship hardly started on the best grounds and whilst I'm sure with the best will in the world you want it to work, if we're honest the basis for your new life was lies, deceit, upset and mayhem. Why get yourself into the position where you are adding yet more confusion, upset and grist for the mill for bitter exes?

You've always called me cold hearted because I don't buy into your romantic, mills and boon-esque vision of love or let my heart rule my head and for me spontaneity is usually something planned less than a week. However having seen your version of things - lying and cheating to someone you supposedly love, only owning up when challenged to do so (just how long would it have gone on otherwise?), then moving your new love interest into your former marital home not 3 months later! - I'm quite happy being Ms Frosty!

'There's never a right time to have a baby' you said in your defence. I agree in that there is no right time and yes these things do happen and, when they do, you have to get on with them, but these things are also avoidable unless you are aiming for a spot on Jeremy Kyle's sofa. And whether you like it or not, you're both still married and have got a responsibility to your exes and, above all, his children, who are old enough to understand what's happening. Have you not thought about that?

I don't want to wish ill on you, we all make our own decisions, some of them daft, and live by them. But when I think about what you had 12 months ago, I can't help but think you've thrown so much away and I hope you don't come to live to regret it in another 12 months time. I really wish you'd been a bit less foolhardy, taken some time to think about what you wanted and been a bit more honest....we all deserved much better from you, especially when all we want is the very best for you.
Your big sis x

------------------------------------------------------------------
The email reply I actually sent:

Dear sis
[insert random pleasantries about family, weather etc here]

Well I guess it was such a surprise - all very sudden and unexpected. Your announcement was a bit quick of the mark too - we'd hardly sat down after our 4 hour marathon M6 journey. Sorry if you didn't get the reaction you wanted, I think we were a bit tired and confused, not to mention shocked! To be honest I was also emotionally drained after feigning love for the hideous satin, frilly 'work' blouse the cat had ostensibly bought me for Xmas! As you said at the time, it's very early days yet and I'm sure once we've got over the shock and got used to the idea, we'll be more excited

Nm x

Conversation Intercom - 1

2008-01-10T18:00:00.000Z

Each family has it's own way of doing things and it's own way of communicating. The other half's family like to all deal with stuff immediately and stand about 3 inches apart and scream at one another, each raising their voices louder and louder over one another until they feel their point has been made adequately, then they brew a pot of tea and it's all over with.

My family prefer to just not mention it, for as long as is deemed necessary, sometimes never at all and sometimes not until they absolutely, on pain of death, have to.

For example, rewind to 1995 when my dad had some kind of weird mid-life crisis and upped and left. My mum was upset, but me, my sister and her never really spoke about it. Then I ran away to Germany for 6 months, we all got on with other stuff and we didn't really talk about it, except vaguely, or really see one another for the best part of 2 years. All very unhealthy, rather strange and a bit Bobby Ewing dreamlike, especially now that he and my mother made up and have been back together for the last 5 years and started their life together all over again.

And no, we hardly ever speak of it, although a few years ago, after a few whiskys my dad did try to explain what was going on in his head at the time to the other half and ex-brother-in-law John Simm lookilikey, when my sister walked in on them and was so horrified that he felt he could explain it to 'strangers rather than family' (her words) that that was the end of that, and me and her never did get to the bottom of it.

As a result the Monkeys are all sulky, grudge bearing, door slamming, well 'I just won't speak to you then' non communicators (you can imagine the fun the other half and I have had trying to develop our "own" communication style, can't you?). And, as you can probably imagine, the Monkeys have all taken to modern communication methods like ducks to water (or maybe more appropriately monkeys to trees).

No longer do we need to bear our grudges all alone, garnering hatred and hostility or whinging to whoever will listen about just how hard done by we are, knowing we'll never really confront it and it'll all just blow over in time. Now we seethe about it for a few days, then fire off an obnoxious email or rude text knowing that we are instigating some kind of response, getting our own back or stirring it up how we want, but crucially without actually having to face the pain of being in the same room as one another.

Needless to say, my sister and I are the worst. Like all siblings, after many years of practising trying to kill one another, constantly fighting, scrapping or having the screaming hab-dabs over sod all, we know exactly what gets each another riled and how to push one another's buttons as quickly and as hard as possible to get that immediate reaction.

So it came as absolutely no surprise to me when I received an email from her on Thursday afternoon last week questioning my behaviour over Christmas and asking me to explain exactly why her news seemed to go down like a lead balloon with me and the other half....

To be continued...but unfortunately not until next week as I'm off to visit some friends this weekend...sorry - I didn't do this on purpose honestly!

My Bargain

2008-01-07T18:42:00.000Z

I don't like sales. I can't see the point of them and I can't be doing with the crowded shops, queuing, fighting over something dredged up from the back of the warehouse and I'm certainly not going to leave the comfort of my bed 4 hours early for a bargain. So I avoided the sales, then I went back to work.

I set off along Tottenham Court Road one lunchhour last week and, as it didn't look too busy, decided to pop into the well known, stylish homeware and furniture shop. Before the madness of the Christmas shopping period, I'd been mooching about in there eyeing up a variety of stuff - all of which had been ruled out as too expensive, the other half wouldn't go for it or I couldn't justify spending that much on it.

The sale stuff had been picked over and there wasn't much left, but at the back I spotted the magnetic notice boards, I'd had my eye on and discounted as over-priced, reduced from £28 to £8.40. I snapped one up and rushed to the till.

The sales assistant scanned the barcode. "Oh" she said and looked at me clutching a grubby £10 in my hand "it's actually £18.40 not £8.40. This one has the wrong label on". "But they were all priced at £8.40" I said in a whiny voice. She went to investigate and speak to a supervisor. She returned and said "it's supposed to be £18.40, they were labelled up wrongly" and just as I was getting ready to argue the case unwilling to let my super bargain slip through my fingers, she added "but you saw it at this price, it's our mistake so I'll sell it to you at £8.40" and rang up the sale.

So here it is, my super bargain, complete with random picture of the other half as a child!