Toe twister

I ordered a pair of tights online; big thick woolly ones for that snuggly Winter feeling as you skip through crisp November breezes, laughing at the shivering souls in their flimsy nylons, and for that sticky, sweaty feeling on overcrowded tube trains as you gaze enviously at the sensible souls in breathable nylons. Yesterday the tights arrived, and I excitedly tore open the packet. So woolly! So warm! Oh look, turned heels! Wait a minute........that doesn't look quite right. The heels were turned so that the feet pointed in opposite directions. Were I to contort my legs into the position dictated by the ergonomic structure of these tights, any attempts to walk would result in me turning in sad little circles, like a cat treading out a nest in a duvet.

Life lessons

Today I have learned that if you put into the tumble drier an item of clothing which is covered with little stick-on diamantes, this will no longer be the case upon removal, while everything which accompanied it in there will have achieved a state of spangly adornment.

It's so unfair

I now have both internet and TV in the new flat. It's been several weeks without them, so it's nice to be reconnected.

The very efficient engineer who came to set up to these things kept referring to my new tivo box as a him. "He's just updating now, so don't switch him off for an hour or so". I think it was just a language thing, as he wasn't a native English speaker, but I now find myself thinking of the box as a him. He's quite friendly, suggesting things he thinks I might want to watch.

Update......I just tried to put on a recorded program, and he's asking me for a PIN to watch it because it's before 9pm. He's not friendly at all. It was all an act. He's actually an overbearing parent. I don't have a PIN and I don't need one! I'm 27 years old and I just want to watch Hellboy!

Dulce et Decorum est.....

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.
                               Wilfred Owen

This is always a contentious issue, and I may struggle to make myself clear here, so bear with me.

On a simple level, I consider myself a pacifist. On a more complicated level I recognise that sometimes it is necessary to fight, and I will do so to protect myself or a friend. Taking that to a global scale, 'protecting one's friends' means (to me at least) fighting for those who are suffering under tyranny or oppression, and whose basic human rights are violated on a daily basis. However, I do not concede that this is the reason for the involvement of this country in all of the wars it is currently or recently engaged in. To my, admittedly limited, understanding, a lot of the fighting our army does seems to be less about 'protecting our friends' and more about 'knocking down the kid with the glasses and nicking his lunch money'. When power and money are stronger factors than freedom and democracy, I cannot bring myself to back the war. Still, I wear my poppy, and I observed the minute's silence today, because I give my support and my respect to those who fight for the right reasons, and to the dwindling number who had no choice but to fight. If that necessitates allowing the bullies and the oil-grubbers to believe that they share in that respect then so be it. It's worth it to pay tribute to those who have lost their lives, their health or their loved ones in pursuit of the greater good.

At long last!

I moved house. These may be some of the nicest words I ever been able to type. After all the hassle leading up to the move, I am so relieved to be there at last. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done. How one person has managed to accumulate the sheer volume of stuff that I have is a mystery, and it's all crammed into the seeming hundreds of cardboard boxes which currently comprise the dominant decorative statement of my new pad. The fact that a goodly number of these boxes are labelled with such concise descriptions as 'clothes stuff', 'stuff' and 'little boxes of stuff' will probably not help the unpacking project. However, I already have a guest booked in for a few nights in the near future, so I have to try and enforce a little order!


Tonight will be my first night alone in the flat, now that my poor exhausted parents have escaped the weekend-long gulag experience that is helping their fretful and incompetent daughter to move house. I'm excited about coming back to what is now my home and starting my new routine. Also to pottering about over the next few weeks and making it feel like mine; all the little things like organising my kitchen cupboards the way I want them, and spreading my ever-present array of pretty but pointless knick-knacks throughout the space.

Of course, I'm fairly exhausted from such joys as the freshly smashed window over the front door, having to remove half of a different door frame to get the sofa in, and the cat catching a baby mouse in the flat on my first morning there, so it's entirely possible that I'll get home, look at the boxes and make an executive decision to just go to bed. No........I can see my mother's headteacher stare......the one that so strongly influenced my finely honed and terrifying librarian stare, and firmly declares that I must have discipline. I hereby promise I will unpack one box before dinner, another before my evening G&T, and a third before I go to bed. This way organisation lies!

To answer your questions

I often quite enjoy the stats page of this blog, which allows me to see the searches that have led people to me. Amongst this week's offerings were two gems:

"Librarians with anger problems"
and
"How to make bathtime fun for cats"

I'm thrilled that their requests for information will have led them to me, as I am clearly an expert on both subjects. For the record, all librarians have anger management problems because the very act of walking into a library transforms precisely 76% of the public into moronic, aggresive neanderthals with an over-inflated view of their own self-importance and a conviction that counter staff rank at approximately the level of the average Victorian scullery maid, and the best way to make bathtime fun for cats is to fill your tub with an array of shiny tropical fish. Now you know.

And for something a little cheerier

As I stood outside work, waiting for the green man so I could cross the road, a teeny tiny elderly lady with a wispy beard peered up at me and asked "Can I cross the road with you?". "Of course you can!" I replied gleefully, proffering my arm in a chivalrous fashion. Helping a little old lady across the road is such a perfect cliche of a good deed that it is an utter joy!

I should be so lucky

I don't like it when people say the world is out to get them. It is blatantly illogical to attribute intent and malice to what is clearly pure chance. However, while statistically a dice thrown repeatedly should land on each side an approximately equal number of times, it is still perfectly feasible that you could score a one twenty times in a row. Thus, while my friend Spike could, as I told her once, fall into a bucket of shit and come up smelling of freesias, I am continually dogged by set-backs and frustration. When your every endeavour, large or small, is thwarted by other peoples' incompetency, idiocy or plain old spite, it does begin to feel like the aforementioned planet has it in for you.

A simple attempt to place an order with a company with a reputation for reliability ends, for many, in the hassle-free delivery of the purchased items. For me, it will hopefully still end in delivery, but it takes a detour via random order cancellation, lying customer services personnel and the replacement of a four hour delivery slot with a seven hour delivery slot. I grit my teeth.

Then I try to book a removals company. I make an online request for Saturday 5th November. They call me.
Man: Did you want Saturday 3rd or Monday 5th?
Me: No, Saturday 5th.
Man: Saturday's the 3rd.
Me: Oh. (check calender) Wait, no it's not, it's the 5th.
Man: (patronisingly) I promise you it's the 3rd. I'm looking at a calendar.
Me: So am I. Are you looking at November?
Man: (angrily) Yes, of course!
Me: 2011?
Man: ................Oh.
I book a different removal company and start grinding my teeth.

Next I wangle getting off work an hour early in exchange for working through my lunchbreak, so that I can go and collect the keys to my new flat. I hike up the high street, looking for the estate agent's. After a while I spot a rare street number over a shop door and realise I've gone too far. How did I manage to miss the office? I backtrack, and eventually spot it; with the signs removed, whitewashed windows and no furniture. What?! I call them. They've moved offices and not bothered to tell me, or to update the contact information in their email signatures for that matter. I now haven't got time to to get all the way across the borough before they close, and have wasted hours of my evening travelling around London to no purpose. I bang my head against a brick wall and inadvertently knock loose several teeth.

Can anyone blame me for feeling a little like the world is setting challenges for me at times?