This is the end.

Of the week.

Had you going there, for about a second, yes? yes? no.

Ooh! I’ve just realised! It’s my birthday in less than two weeks!

OOOOOOH!

I am all out of joint.

Mind everywhere.

Going to a wedding.
Not mine.

Boy, I always seem to be saying that.

This week has been, and you’ll have to excuse me
a filthy collection of pooters and beer
Oh, pooters and beer and flats and earl grey tea
I did write some stuff, but I didn’t write here

I meant to, I want to, I really have tried
but every time i come even quite close
i discover that my own writing time is denied
because something’s to do. Or I don’t feel verbose.

Today I sat next to the smelliest man
That the world’s ever seen (or probably ’smelt’)
And next month if all goes to perfect plan
We’ll move into a flat (it would make you heart melt

If you saw it. It’s gorgeous, and dinky and wee
With a garden, a bedroom that’s comically small
and just perfect. A flat for beloved and me)
Oh christ, I apologise, you’re starting to pall

And complaining of nausea, i’ll finish right here
There really are things I’ll remember to post
That are funny, not sicky, and in the next mere
spare five minutes, whatever, lunchtime, the most

time I have I’ll write
here
I swear.
New job.
flats.
people.
weddings.

That’s a thing. Why does everyone in the world seem to get married in one year? How does that happen? Is it extreme and wierd that I’m going to a double figured number of weddings in a ten month period? Or is it just called the ‘mid-twenties’?

If I’m being really a little quiet this week, it’s because

a) I started my new job on monday

b) I have a stupid amount of social things to do this week and

c) when i’m not doing either of those things I’m viewing flats and

d) If I do have any more time at all for writing it’s on uborka, Where I’m guesting for a week with my friend Ann. The first bit, no, second, I did is here. Scroll down for the rest….

This morning

He: Come with me to shop for some shirts at lunchtime.
She: Why?
He: Because I want some new shirts.
She: I hate shopping.
He: I know. So do I. Come with me to buy some shirts.
She: No. I Don’t wannoo. And you can’t make me.

At Lunchtime
He: Come with me to buy some shirts.
She: No.
He: Oh alright then.
pause
He: Come with me…
She: Where are we going?
He: I’m not telling you. Its A Surprise….
She: OooooooooH!

And off they wander, he leading, she following excitedly.

Guess what my ’surprise expedition’ was?
(more…)

We were thinking of going to Ikea, yesterday.
I tend to think of going to Ikea most weekends, actually, but that’s my warped idea of a great day out, what can I say…

But now I’m glad we didn’t.
In fact, I’m thinking of never going to Ikea again, after discovering that accusing to one newspaper, any one Ikea store will have around 7 million customers on any given Sunday.

That’s right, that’s approximately one in every 8 people in the UK, visiting any one of the dozen stores in the UK.

Do the maths, and this starts to get perplexing.
12 stores, 7 million people in each? Surely you end up with almost 30million people more than live in this country already?

Are people immigrating simply to visit Ikea on Sunday, leaving again and coming back for the next weekend because they’ve run out of tealights?

How in the world do we need this much furniture?

Oh…

No…

Hang on…

It looks like 7 Million was a little bit of an over-estimate.
They meant to say 5,000. You can see how they might have got the two confused.

I love newspaper corrections.
Especially when they’re longer than the actual article….

Spot the difference.

Oh hang on, I think someone already did…

Yes, it’s all gone a bit movable-typesville on little.red.boat, courtesy of the help of the lovliest of sisters (meg - mine), and it’s an exciting day.

I’m busily creating a billion categories (I’m stopping short of a ‘posts about not being able to think of anything to write’ category, though god knows it would be bulging) and am wading through the archives trying to give scrappy little fripperies ‘tittle-thingies’ which is hard.

Here is the thing, though. If any one of you lovely people have linked to a post in the past, it just isn’t going to work any more.

Something about ’shtml’ or ‘pcp’ or something, so if you want it to work, you might want to change it.
If you don’t want it to work, that’s ok, I’m easy, I don’t mind.

But do feel free to have a look around, tell me if anything doesn’t work, or if you can think of any categories (bear in mind I’m working very very slowly through the archives, backwards…) or, you know, just leave a comment about it if you’d like to.
If you wouldn’t like to, that’s ok, no pressure.

I’m very very very tired.
Can you tell?

Smarmy Man: Hello. Sorry I’m late.
anna: That’s alright, I was just taking a chance to have a proper look at the Arsenal stadium. Big isn’t it?
Smarmy Man: Yes. I think that’s one of the things that gives the property character.
anna: Character. Yes. It must be quite loud, being only twenty yards away.
Smarmy man: Loud? Nonono, hardly at all. You’ll barely notice it. Erm. Ahem. Shall we go in?
anna: mm.

(Door opening noises. One set of keys, one door. The front door of the actual flat is reached. Keys jangle. Attemted unlocking noises. Keys jangle again. Impatient key in lock noises. Keys jangle again

Smarmy man: Always the way, isn’t it?
anna: You just locked it again, I think.
Smarmy man: ha ha ha… Oh. Yes. There we go. After you.

(Noise as anna squeezes past man and sidles into flat.)

anna: What’s this? Is this the living room?
Smarmy man: Yes. A nice size, isn’t it.
anna: Well, yes, but… You know on your documentation and website and things - the picture makes it look quite different.
Smarmy man: Does it? Well, i suppose it does. Perhaps it’s taken from this angle over here.
anna: I’m not entirely sure the angle would make it look like a bigger room. In the picture it looked like a much bigger room.
Smarmy man: Oh no, it ofen can… Cameras, eh…
anna: With a fireplace.
Smarmy man: The landlord has been renovating…
anna: And twice as many windows.
Smarmy man: Hm. You may have a point. I admit, we had been wondering about that.
anna: But you decided to keep it on the advert anyway.
Smarmy man: Well, I think it might be the flat upstairs…
anna: Is the flat upstairs for rent?
Smarmy man: No.

Awkward silence.

anna: So, the rest of the flat is through here, is it?
Smarmy man: Yes. This is the bedroom.
anna: Yes.
Smarmy man: It’s got a wardrobe.
anna: mm. And the Kitchen?
Smarmy man: Through here, and then there’s the bathroom beyond.
anna: What a nice shower.
Smarmy man: Would you like to see the garden?
anna: mm.

(The garden was described in their details as a ’stunning, secluded and private rear garden’. It should, of course, have been better described as a ‘nettle-filled grass patch where other people’s cats poo, with rickety fencing where there’s fencing at all’)

Smarmy man: It needs work.
anna: Doesn’t it. Do you think having the fence fallen down at the end there could be a security risk?
Smarmy man: Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so.
anna: Really?
Smarmy man: The landlord’s renovating.
anna: I’ll just have another look inside.
Smarmy man: Yes do. There storage space in the hallway.
anna: This door handle just fell off.
Smarmy man: Ha ha. Yes. Renovating. Landlord.
anna: Yes.
Smarmy man: Is there anything else you wanted to look at?
anna: No, no. No. No, I think I’ve seen it. All. But thank you.

uncomfortable pause

anna: We’ll. erm. Ring you. I’ll have to speak to my boyfriend. But we’ll ring you. If he wants to see it. Thank you. Ta ra, then. Lovely to meet you again.
Smarmy man: Can I give you a lift?
anna: No.

About six minutes, all told, in and out.
Are flat viewings supposed to be six minutes long?
Not that I think I could have stayed in there for more than six minutes.
We shan’t be renting it, by the way.

How’s a girl supposed to fill two days of holiday without her internet?
What do you mean the sun’s shining?
Outside?
Whu? Wheresat?

Oh alright, I’ll go and frisk, I suppose, if you insist.

How are you?
Happy friday.

Who fancies a pint?
Oh! Are you at work! Oh dear.
Well, what about after work?

To spend the next hour being a genius.
I will sit here doing my work as usual, but having great thoughts.
I wonder if anyone will notice.

Then I think I might be gay for an hour.

I will rest, over lunch, I think, because the effort of pretending is great, particularly if no-one notices.

After lunch I think I will pretend to be a giraffe. A giraffe working on a computer.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
So Yesterday I have this idea. In fact it’s been a plan for quite a while.
Having spent almost everyday for almost three years writing this thing, I decided it might be nice to have a hard copy.
Just so, you know, I felt like it was real, if i could hold the weight of everything I had written in my hands, then it might all feel a bit more like I’d actually done something.

There were other, less floaty reasons.
1 - The site has covered a huge and changing period. I’d like to read about what happened to me in it.
2 - I don’t really enjoy the things I write, I don’t really find them very funny, until at least a couple of months later. So…
3 - I’d like to go through the whole bloody thing with a big red pen, deciding what worked, and what didn’t. That’s what this is supposed to be for, after all, practice. And if I can look at it on the page, I can look at it objectively, with an editors eye. And work out how I can get paid for this shit. Well, that’s the idea, anyway.

The ‘idea, anyway’, however, has hit several snaglets:
a - I don’t know if I have enough ink cartridges.
b - I don’t know if I have enough paper. I don’t, for that matter, know if I can afford enough paper.
c - I think I may have written too much.
d - I’ll have to copy and paste it, reformat it, swap it all around so it goes forwards not backwards, and this all seems like a pain in the nuts, if I had nuts, which I don’t.
e - Actually, this is the killer. Everything else is academic. There’s no broadband at home. There’s a ‘fault’ on the ‘line’, which will be fixed approximately as my holiday draws to a close.

Bugger.
It was a good idea though. Apart from all the reasons it was a bad idea.

I just had an idea!
Apart from viewing a few flats, I previously didn’t know what I was going to do with my little home-holiday this week.
I do now!
I’m going to print out my whole site, everything I’ve written for the last three years!
I’ve been meaning to for ages!
You can tell how excited I am, usually I’d practice severe self-censorship on admitting to such a geeky idea, as well as punishing myself severely for overuse of exclamation marks, but I don’t care!

Woo!
Gon’ make myself a little.red.book!

That sounds familiar.

Who cares!

metorologists meteoroleogists weatherpeoples

Today I have worn my big cuddly parka into work, because apparently by lunchtime, there will be thunder and lightning and all the sorts of falling wetness associated with that.
They said, last night on the telly, and then this morning on the radio, that it would be ‘cloudy but ok’ this morning, “and then Boy will the shitty stuff kick in” (©BBC News).
I was hot, on the bus, because the beautiful spring sunshine was blasting through the windows.
I was hot, walking down the street, because it was lovely weather. Really really really lovely.

This is my new sensible thing, I think. Generally, my heart would be telling me to bring out all the clothing I own with flowers on and skip happily down the pavement like a gambolling lamb. But, here I am, on my way to the office, wearing my parka because the weather people said I should.

Why should I capitulate to the whims of the weather people anyway?

They may have a few extra hours of looking at pictures of clouds at university, they may have got jobs at the main weather centre of Britain, or whatever it’s called, they may have nice hair and shapely legs (and the women aren’t bad either) but I don’t see why that should mean they’re allowed to decide what the weather is.

It’s not fair. They say what the weather’s going to be like, and then it is like that.
And I have to deal with the consequences.
They may be feeling a bit sad, or want to get out of a barbeque they don’t want to go to, and so they decide that it’s going to rain later today, and then it does, because they said it would.

If I worked there, would I be allowed to decide what the weather is?
Could I be sitting around in the office one tuesday and say: “You know what? I feel like building a snowman. I’m going to say that it’s going to snow tomorrow, and then it will, because I say so.” And then it would, because I did.

I think that’s a good idea. I think I would be a very good weatherperson.
Because of the whole seasonal-affected thing. I think I would make it sunny all the time, raining enough to make things grow and be all pretty and green (mainly rainign at night, obviously), and then every now and again, for a bit of respite, we would have snow. Every few weeks, say. For about two days, and then as soon as it started to get dull, I would appear on television and say: “Here is the ‘forecast’, it is going to be very sunny and hot.”

And then it would be, because I said so.
That is a plan.
A plan, I tell you. If you have any requests, let me know.

I have today’s post to write
I haven’t got much time
And as the quickest thing I do
I’ll do the bastard thing in rhyme.

I have have a little headache
It’s right behind my face
Which strictly is ‘ache in my head’
Although i suspect that it sounded like it wasn’t, because I specified the face thing, but it is in my head behind my face and anyway wherever it is I wish it wasn’t there at all. That would be ace.

I don’t know why I’ve got it
it may well be the screen.
which is pretty fucking inconvenient
more so than it might have been

Because I got this job last week
and now ‘pooters are my life
And I’m very happy about that or I would be
if it didn’t feel like there was a tiny mouse scraping its name on the inside of my skull. With a very big knife.

There were things I was planning to write here
but now I think that they
have turned to mush and dribbled
slowly out of my left ear in a frankly rather unpleasant fashion way.

Today the sun was very shiny
And the scent of spring was everywhere
And it really did make me very happy
Well, it did until I got this motherfucking headache, then I was grumpy, but I think that’s only fair. Well, I don’t think the fact I have the headache is fair. It is deeply unfair. I think the fact that I’m cunting grumpy about it is fair. I’d also like to point out that this is still the last line of this stanza, and yes, it still rhymes, because I keep saying the word ‘fair’. Which rhymes with ‘everywhere’. Anyone who says lines have to scan is a fascist bastard. So there.

I think perhaps I’ll go to bed
And curl up in the dark
And put a flangel on my head
And dream of an enormous shark

Attacking me voraciously
And starting with my head
And biting out the headache first
Then stopping long before I’m dead

I have an awful feeling
that’s not medically sound
Though strictly I’d be fast asleep and dreaming and shit
So it doesn’t make a difference. Fuck rhyming.

I keep saying that I’m going
And now I really should
I’ve asked beloved to cut my head off
And he said he probably could

Although not until the morning.
So I’ll go to bed til then
And, at some point, I might even get to sleep, god willing,
I mean, I’m sure the little mouse in head thing might die down after a wile, a tiny mouse’s tiny arms are going to get tired after a while with that big knife, or alternatively he’ll bore a hole straight through, and actually, that sounds quite probable, I think he may. It’s now just a question of when*.

*‘When’ rhymed with ‘then’, oh for crying out loud, I’ve truly lost it, I’m going to bed before my brain explodes. This keyboard is rubbish enough already without bits of sinew in it.
Hands up who’s feeling really really sorry for themselves over a really really small ailment.
Put your hand down, at the back, you know nothing of pain.
Oh, alright then.

*…Puts it down again. Because it hurts the hurty head….*

End.

Press release on behalf of Anna Pickard.

Claims that I am a cynic, or that I have previously Been a cynic, have been widely reported in the tabloid media this week, alongside supposed ‘cynical’ text messages that I have apparently sent to certain people.

These claims are ludicrous, absurd, and unsubstantiated, and the parties claiming to have evidence of my alleged cynicism have no solid evidence to prove their case.

Because of this lack of evidence, I intend to sue all parties concerned, until they retract their allegations of cynicism, or manage to produce concrete evidence of their claims.

Now it’s not like me to write about David and Victoria Beckham, but I do find myself greatly amused by their current unhappinesses. Gosh that sounds awful. Who cares.

Basically, for anyone who hasn’t heard about this - and well done you, I can only assume you’re American - David Beckham, a not-bad footballer (soccer player) with a penchant for silly hairdos, is married to Victoria Beckham, a stick. Victoria used to be in the Spice girls, but isn’t anymore. That’s the kind of famous we’re talking about.
The British tabloid media believes that the Great British populace is obsessed with the Beckhams every twitch, which, and I can only speak for myself here, is utter bollocks. I really couldn’t give a monkey’s bell-end about the Beckhams.

Aaaaaaanyway.
There are allegations flying around the tabloid newspapers (henceforward referred to as the ’shit’ newspapers) from women claiming they’ve had flings, or affairs, or whatever, with David. I don’t know the terminology the shitpapers used, I assume perhaps that he was accused of having ‘knobbed’ them, or alleged to have enjoyed some extra-marital ‘biffing’.
David and Victoria meanwhile, on the well-dressed side of stressed, beautifully pale and serious looking and lapping up the publicity, have appeared many many times, and said very little.

When they have talked about the allegations, and I refer to David in particular, they have called them ‘ludicrous’, ’shocking’, ‘absurd’ and ‘unsubstantiated’.

Not once have the allegations been called ‘untrue’ by the couple.

A lot of words have been used, the most serious, I suppose, being ‘unsubstantiated’ which, in this context it would seem, means ‘you haven’t got the evidence to back this up’.

I just get a little suspicious, I suppose, when all that is required in a situation is to say;
‘No, I didn’t do it, these allegations are untrue, completely false, I have never cheated on my wife, ever.’

And instead, you use every other word you can think of but never deny that it happened.
Because if you actually denied it, then at some point you’d have to admit that you lied.
If it’s true, which, let’s face it, it probably is.
People cheat on each other, it just happens.

Call me a cynic, but it’s true.
I just wish they wouldn’t lie so much about it.

And I wish, oh how I wish, that tv and magazines and shitpapers wouldn’t presume that I need to be deluged with information about someone who kicks for a living deciding to put his willy in one rich stick rather than another rich stick.

Because I don’t.
I really, really don’t.