And also boxes boxes boxes boxes boxes boxes.
And some more boxes.
This weekend has been one of reheated revelations.

1) However much one packs, the volume of ’stuff’ left still to pack will never ever change.

2) No matter how much you love someone and are grateful for their attempts at packing, something in your brain will still tell you that you pack better, and you will endlessly make yourself unpopular by unpacking their boxes and ‘rationalising’ them.

3) While ‘dusting’ may have always seemed a tiresome and fruitless gesture up til now, its usefulness becomes apparent when you move everything at once. Dust is mostly shed skin, isn’t it? I think I could probably compose a few children from the dust in this room.

4) Packing endlessly addles the brain. Dragging onself away from packing to go to the pub doesn’t always help. And the packing done when you back will always need to be, erm, rationalised in the morning.

5) The confusion of the Ikea till will always lead to you leaving at least one thing behind. We owned a bathmat for 5 minutes on Saturday.

6)….

Oh, more stuff. I’ll think about it while I’m packing. He’s just finished a box. I have go and, y’know, rationalise it…

Plans for the weekend, you say?
No, no plans, just the norm. Silly little things.

Well, we are planning Ikea on the saturday morning of a holiday weekend - but that’ll be fine, I’m sure.

That’ll be fine.

Why are you laughing in that cruel, cruel way?

I know I happen to be in love with this chap, but he is fucking funny, so you can’t really blame me.

I was standing in the car park by at the side of our office yesterday afternoon, having a cigarette.

On the street before me, a pigeon was walking.
In an eastwardly direction, if that makes a difference.

He was walking along the pavement, and slightly altered his path at one point so that he was walking toward the road.

He reached the edge of the road, turned slightly, took a crap in the gutter, and walked on.

This is incredible.
A dirty little bird that knows its place. (I’m dreading the amount of people that are now going to come here looking for a mail-order bride…)

But if vermin are going to start being socially responsible, this could lead to many great things…
… Rats taking showers … Squirrels with pooper scoopers … Mice giving each other little mousey vascectomies… Builders buying belts…. Wasps carrying messages, rather than just biting people… Politicians stapling their own ties to their faces (not strictly socially useful, but very funny, and would save me having to do it)…

The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.
Well, not quite, but you have to admit that sounded better than ‘the possibilities are quite literally several‘

…. Little cockroach engineers to build little cockroach motorways to save them the bother of running through kitchens…. Bluebottles signing contracts agreeing not to be sick on your food and then eat it… Gosh, I was right, the possibilities Are endless after all…

First person to know why I’m so hungover today wins a bag of sick.

First person to know why I’m so excited today wins a prize.

Two days of being ill and I’m climbing the walls.

Tired of lying on my back and watching flies circle dance while the TV people quack on about the power of curtain rails and auctions full of ugly ornaments, I’ve migrated to the computer and am playing.

I’m not very good at computer games. That’s not true. I’m very good at computer games. I’m just not very good at very good computer games. Bad computer games, yes, good at those - but good computer games? No good, bad.

Try as I might, I have never really progressed past gameboy level. I constantly hanker after the ability to veg in front of a console for hours on end like so many people - including my beloved - seem to be able to do, but I can’t.

I’m rubbish at:

Driving games: I can’t drive, have no interest in cars and don’t have any sense of direction. All this does not service me well. Basically, when the race starts, I usually go backwards, if I go at all. Then I go sideways. Then I go forwards, but when the track turns a corner I end up driving in tight circles before crashing into all the walls and trying to throw the console out of the window.

Football games: I can never work out which of the little runny men I’m supposed to be being, which way I’m supposed to be kicking or what the point of it all is. Sooner or later I work out how to foul people, and then spend the rest of the time running into other players, kicking them or punching them in the face and seeing how many stupid little men I can get sent off before whoever I’m playing with gets fed up and threatens to throw the console - or more usually, throw me - out of the window.

Fighting games: I generally haven’t got enough room in this tiny little brain to remember the word for a fork, let alone remember the complex combination of buttons you need to know just to punch someone in the nuts.
At university I used to play computer fighting games with someone who had spent some time testing them for a living. He hated playing with me, because while he was tactically pressing the right things in order to play on my characters weaknesses, I was pressing all the buttons at once while swearing.
I always won.
He hated that.

Sim games: A few months ago, we bought The Sims and, for a short time, I developed a bit of a problem. It was while playing, when I realised I knew I wanted to go to the toilet only because I was actually visualising a thought bubble with a picture of a toilet in it appearing above my head, that I decided it may have gone too far.
I was also, at the time, planning a series of articles on ‘How to beat depression by treating yourself as your own Sim’, which never got written, because I was too busy playing The Sims.
Good thing too. They would have been terrible. Although I’m sure that it’s been done before; there’s a lot of shonky home-grown self-help to be had along the lines of listening to yourself and visualising your needs. Even if your needs are split pretty equally between ‘toilet’, ‘pillow’ and ‘television’.
My Sim-addiction ended once and for all the day we bought an upgrade for the game. It all became far too complicated and I couldn’t cope. Too many decisions. It was all starting to look a little too much like free will. Except I was never given the choice ‘punch this person in the nuts?‘, and, since that was generally what I wanted to do to the characters, I swore a lot, tried to throw the console out of the window and moved on.
Well, I say moved on. I went and watched teleision. It’s what the little bubble above my head was telling me to do.

I’m better now.
I no longer obey the little pictures above my head. Now when they feature pictures of toilets, I sometimes go to bed, instead, just to show them.
Sometimes this isn’t a very good idea. Still.

What was my point?

Ah yes.

Shooting games: While I like seeing people’s head explode as much as the next anti-gun liberal, I just can’t get my (as yet unexploded) head around these games. Not only is there rarely any chance to reason with people before you start shooting at each other, you can’t even apologise afterward. And British people still play these things?
You could at least make it so one of the buttons increased feelings of guilt on a remorse-o-meter in the corner of the screen. It could be optional. Anyway, I don’t like them. And it’s not because of the guns, actually.
It’s because they’re 3D and I’m easily confused. More later on this.

Flying games: or rather ‘Crashing and exploding games’. Rubbish.

3D Games: Yes, Yes, I know these are supposed to be better, supposed to ‘increase the realism’ of games, but I hate them.
Come on. I’m pretending to be a Mutated Blue Hedgehog with a best mate who’s a Fox who’s smaller Than Me and I’m freeing my little animal friends by jumping on the heads of the metal robot bodies they’re encased in… And you think realism is important to me in games?
Mainly, I can’t play 3D games because I can’t deal with multi-angle views. Just when I think I know what I’m doing, I press a button by mistake and suddenly I’m looking at myself from half a mile away, have no idea which way I was going and run straight of a cliff. Then the computer game resets me to my last saved point. And I run straight off a different cliff.
And then I throw the console out of the window and go back to the games I actually like And am Not Rubbish at.

I will write about those in part two.

fine. fine. fine. shaky vomitting feverish. asleep. headachey achey ick. Meh.

I have seen advertisments on the television, I am sure, for moisturisers boasting about their capacity to be absorbed into one’s skin. In my general way, with advertisments, I cannot remember which moisturisers these might be.

Adverts pass over the surface of my mind without penetration, like a moisuriser that doesn’t absorb into one’s skin, or like something that passes over the surface of something without penetration. Maybe like a hovercraft. Or a doctor.

Anyway, whichever moisturisers these good ones are, they aren’t they one that I’ve got. Because it’s rubbish. Or it may be the type of soap I’ve been using. That’s what might be rubbish. Actually, I’m starting to think that it’s the combination of the two. Let me explain.

On Thursday morning I awoke at the normal time, went to the bathroom, did the toilet thing, brushed my teeth, plucked my eyebrows and yadda-yadda-girl-stuff.

I did the things that women do in the morning, ending with the ever-popular ‘thinking that I really should have bothered with breakfast, while putting my make up on’. After putting my make up on, I went to wash my hands, using the handmade soap next to the sink.

After washing my hands and returning to the bedroom, I remembered that in the last few days my hands have been feeling a little dry, so I squeezed some moisturiser into my palm, and coated my hands. I rubbed it in.

The moisturiser remained on the surface of my hands.

I waited, and rubbed them together again. The moisturiser moved around a little bit.

Needing to get to work, I picked my coat up with my teeth, not wanting to stain it, and rolled my hands into slimy club-fists to get them through the arms.

I’m starting to think that there was a layer of gelatine on my hands, preventing the moisturiser from soaking in, if that’s possible.

Whatever the cause, it took me a couple of minutes to get out of the back door, finding, as I unfortunately was that while my hand was turning an awful lot, the handle was turning hardly at all.
And by the time I decided to get a tea towel to turn the handle with, the handle was so slathered in moisturiser that the door still took some time to open. And then the teatowel was covered in moisturiser and soap.
Not my problem, we’re moving out in two weeks.

I rushed to the bus stop, and got on the bus. On the top deck of an old London bus (stairs and way out at the back), I took a seat near the front and listened to the radio. I was going to read my book, but even contemplating taking it out of my bag seemed to stain the cover, so I left it in there.

Twenty mintues later, I attempted to laeve the bus at the stop nearest work. So did a lot of other people.
As is usual, I was one of the first people to head toward the back of the bus to get off. The bus still bouncing along happily, I grabbed on to every balance pole on the way down the aisle. Quite quickly, I noticed that I was leaving a not insubstantial residue on each pole.

I noticed this because the person behind me walking toward the stairs had tried to grab the pole for balance, found the pole inexplicably slippy, lost their grip and careered into the back of me.

For once, my apology was not just because I’m over-politely British. It was because it was completely and utterly my fault. I didn’t tell him that, though.

But that’s alright, because I got my comeuppance only seconds later. I was standing on the stairs, waiting for the bus to pull up at my stop.

Well I say I was standing on the stairs. I certainly started off standing on the stairs. But quite gradually, and more so with every bump, I realised that I was more Leaning on the stairs. That while my feet were staying in the same place, on the same step, my hands, holding onto the rail on either side, were slowly but surely moving down the handrail toward the bottom of the stairs.

By the time I realised this I was probably around 15° off centre. By the time the bus actually pulled up, I was, at around a 48°degree lean, considering doing a double back flip off the rails. It was the only way I could have got out with any dignity.

Clearly, I didn’t. And by this, and by the fact that I’ve just informed the world of it too, I realise that finally, and after a long process of whittling down, finally, I have No Dignity At All.

Hurrah for that!
Let’s those of us that are able to pick up glassware go and get pissed.
(Today that’s me too)

Yesterday I realised I’ve become entrenched in cityness.

I was on a late shift, and didn’t realise I was on my own on our office floor, I thought one man was still behind me, a man with a penchant for obscure and interesting ringtones for his mobile phone.

I was typing away, and soon was aware of the soft sound of beautiful birdsong.
“Ooooh, that’s clever” I thought “It must be polyphonic”

It was a couple more minutes before I realised that it was, y’know, a bird. Singing.

Isn’t reading great? Not the place - though I’m sure it’s alright. The activity.

Just the whole ‘having a book and reading it’ thing. Brilliant. Because if there weren’t books, right, you’d have to read other things, like orange juice cartons, and badges and stuff. And that would be, like, really boring. Because they’re dead short. And they only generally say ‘orange juice’.
The cartons, I mean. Not the badges.

I’ve been reading now for about 23 years, during which time I’ve read lots and lots of books and orange juice cartons. Many of the cartons were better than the books. But the books, I discovered, weren’t as good at holding orange juice.

I like books, and I read them very quickly. I devour them, you might say, like orange juice.
I finished a book this morning in fact. A book that has taken me about Four Centuries to finish.

No, I’m exaggerating. Not four centuries. It’s been four months, which is a very very long time with me and a book.
It’s not even a long book. But it is very , Very complicated.

It’s a murder mystery. Great so far, all well and good, one of my favourite types of book - Early to mid-twentieth-century crime fiction: Edmund Crispin, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers, Michael Innes - I’m lapping it up.

This one, however, had me stumped. I think the problem was that I was reading it for 15 minute periods on the bus. But the pages were so densely packed with complex analytical and logical psychological deductions and antiquated academic reasoning and Really Hard Stuff and long words that I would only get through about 5 every day.

But then, every morning, when I picked it up it would be very complicated. It would be impossible to tie the bit I started at to whichever bit I had read 24 hours previously, so I would have to Go Back Two Pages to remind myself what had just happened.

So while I thought I was progressing at a rate of 5 pages a day, it was actually 2 pages; because I would re-read two pages before the one I’d actually got to, and then at some point have to flick back to the first chapter and try and find a bit that actually told me who everyone was, because I’d forgotten.

Still, last night, I decided to sit down and read the last few chapters in a one-er, to at least get some satisfaction out of the damned thing. I had thought the murderer was one person, then a different person, then the first person, then I didn’t care for a while, and then I thought it might be somone else entirely. I thought I knew, basically, what I was going to get.
What I got, however, was this:

“Haveland phoned up Umpleby pretending to be Empson, therefore providing the porter with reason to think that Empson had an appointment with Umpleby about the forged papers. When Umpleby came out of his rooms, thinking he was going to see Empson, he was called from the Orchard gardens, again by Haveland, this time pretending to be Pownall. There, he shot him, left by him the revolver with Empsons fingerprints upon it, and went back to his room.
Mr Titlow found the body at 10.40 and unfortunately concluded that Mr Pownall was the murderer. Thereupon he took the extraordinary course he did [dragging the body from Gardens to Pownall's rooms] to ensure that Pownall would not escape.
But in doing so he roused Pownall from sleep. And the latter, discovering the murder, concluded first and rightly that Haveland was the perpetrator, and secondly and incorrectly that it was Haveland who had attempted to incriminate him. Acting rapidly on the plan he now formed, he had body and bones in the president’s lodging by 10.50, just in time to be discovered by Empson.
And Empson, having seen Titlow hauling the body into the Pownell’s rooms and alarmed by the discovery of the spurious phone call, concluded that Titlow had murdered Umpleby and was plotting to involve Haveland and possibly himself, in ruin.
He therefore evolved his plan to incriminate Titlow - who, however, on bursting into the president’s study discovered the device of the faked shot in time to obliterate almost every trace of it….

And that, gentlemen, is the simple truth of it all.”

What?

Now, I’m a big fan of complex murder mysteries, but this is taking the piss, no?

Taking the piss. Clearly.

Ooh.
And apologies if you found this page on a search for Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes.
That was who did it.

Believe me, I have saved you A Lot Of Time.

just thinking and waiting and generally being slightly cross.

I can’t find a picture of a chicken on a skateboard anywhere.

The internet is officially bollocks.

I’m going to write and complain.

I’ve always wanted to have curly hair, but I just don’t.
It’s straight as your mum, it’s as thick as the hair on a man-bears man-breasts, and, at the moment, as long as the day, because of my general fear of hairdressers.

For a short time last week, however, I did have curly hair.
I went to a wedding, and, preparing beforehand, I discovered a bottle of spray - some kind of ‘curl enhancing spray’. Reading the back of this bottle revealed that this spray would ‘enhance my natural curls’

Knowing full well that I have less natural curls than a large box of chopsticks, I dampened my hair, and covered it thoroughly in this spray.

What it should have said on the back is ‘enhances the natural curls in your hair, unless you don’t have any curls in your hair, in which case will have as much effect as coating your tresses in a combination of glue, semen, nail varnish and yak pee.’

It’s taken me three washes to get it out.
I’ve just been meaning to write something about that, but haven’t been able to think of anything to write. I’ll let you know when I do.