We have a new addition to the family.

I’ve been meaning to mention it, it is a matter of some pride, but haven’t wanted to say anything because we gained our new family member properly on Friday, and seem to have mislaid him since.

Little Boris Johnson is around three inches in length, and weighs approximately ‘not much’. He’s dark green in colour (he gets that from his dad) and has big round beautiful eyes. A bit like a frog’s eyes, really. Also, he has webbed feet, and some appearance of wartyness, although we don’t like to make a big thing of it, as it upsets him.

I encountered him in the garden on Friday night, trying to hide behind a drainpipe, and immediately took him to my heart. Not literally, of course, that would have meant picking him up, and that would have been disgusting.

He was there for only seconds, and then he was gone, shivering behind the hosepipe, and although I couldn’t even tell if he was frog or toad, I took quite a liking to him.

But where is he now? We haven’t got a pond, no rockery, where did he come from?
Where does he go? Do toads do drains? Has he come into the house, maybe?

I worry.

Little Boris Johnson is endearing, in a slimy kind of way, and while I certainly wouldn’t want him in government, I don’t mind having him in the garden.

If anyone sees a toad, or, you know, a frog or whatever, wandering the streets, looking a little lost, then… Well, I doubt it’s Little Boris Johnson, because that would be improbable beyond belief, but tell that little frog/toad/thing that if they happen to see Little Boris Johnson, he should find some way of letting me know he’s alright.

That he hasn’t, you know, croaked.
Although I suppose that would be a good sign.

Terribly fond, I am. In that ‘only saw him for a couple of seconds wouldn’t touch him if you paid me kind of way’.

There’s nothing I like more than bad pieces of art being thorougly masacred by reviewers.

I don’t know why, I suppose I’m just mean that way.

I know critics can sometimes be prejudiced or unfair, etc, etc, that said, this is ace;

Review of an exhibition in London - He can keep his bloody awful pile of 10th-rate tat in his garage for all I care.

I fell off the bed.

And yes, it was all terribly innocent and yes I do feel stupid and Yes, I will tell you how if you promise not to think me klutzy.

Our bedroom, you have to understand, is tiny and wee.
It doesn’t matter too much, it’s only for going to bed in, after all.
But it is, when all’s said, tiny and wee, and not big enough to swing a cat, some trousers or, it turns out, an Anna, in.

Although, as I have mentioned, the bedroom is a room for going to bed in, it has another important use; as the main thoroughfare to the bathroom.

As there is scant little space at the end of the bed to move around, I have therefore decided that by far the best way to get to and from the bathroom is by commando roll across the bed.

On thursday night, however, this was my downfall.
Quite lidderally.
I rolled, I rolled, I rolled too far I fell go bang and pop goes the shoulder.

And it’s the same as same is always. I scream, I shout, my right arm joint sits on the edge of my shoulder socket and I can feel it and then with an almost involuntary action my left hand is grasping my right shoulder and something makes me twist my right shoulder the right way and my arms sits back in the socket and suddenly all is well.

Well, I say ‘all is well’. There’s then the obligatory half hour of shock and crying, and then it takes around three days to regain full movement in my arm. But other than that it’s all good.

It’s stupid. I first dislocated my left shoulder almost ten years ago. It took four hours and two hospitals to put it back in place, and, when told to wear a sling for three months, I wore it for two weeks because it had stopped hurting. They never told me that wearing the sling would make the cartilage grow back.

As a result, my left shoulder came out again, a couple of years later, and then again, and then again, and then… well, I don’t know when the right one started to join in the fun, but it did.

I don’t know why it did, either. I have this mental image of my arms being joined in the middle with an elastic band like an old doll, and when the band got loose, they both just started to fall out. At least they’ll never do it at the same time. Although I have it in mind that at some point the band will snap and they’ll just fall off.

On friday, in work, unable to pick up even a notebook with my right arm - although as long as I could keep it at my side and move the mouse about, that was fine - nice colleauges asked me why I hadn’t gone to the hospital.

A good question - to which the answer is this;
What would they have said at the hospital?
They would have said:
a; You’ve dislocated your shoulder. But it’s back in now.
(I knew that)
b; Don’t move your arm too much.
(I wasn’t planning on it. Because I couldn’t)
c; Are you drunk?
(Yes, arent you? England were playing and then we lost in a penalty shoot out. What? You didn’t see it? It was tragic, although no more some thn usual. Have you got any beer around here?)

So there was no point going to see any one. I just know what to do about it by now.

The arm thing, I mean, not England’s inability to win penalty shoot-outs. I don’t know what to do about that. And I don’t se any reason to bother a hospital with it. There are people who need to bother them more, surely.

But I do wish they wouldn’t do this. My arms. I wish they wouldn’t dislocate.
Or hurt when they did. If they didn’t do one or the other, that would be nice.

Can someone arrange that, please?

I dislocated my shoulder falling out of bed last night.

I’ll try and expand on that later, but it hurts to type.

I’m going to put a box for links for things I write elsewhere on the side of the blog, but in the meantime;

Here is something which is something what I wrote and something which is like kind of the sort of something I would be proud of if I wrote it which I did.

You should buy the paper. The crossword is good (the quick one, I’m too thick for non-quick)

It also has a good sports section.

Can I just ask - what are guestbooks for?

I’ve been working a bunch of nightshifts, in case you haven’t picked that up.
I can’t remember if I said it at all, which would have helped you pick it up, I suppose.

As part of the job I started a few months ago, I’ve been on the nightshift, learning how it all works. It’s funny, I used to be quite a night person - from working in theatres and things, I guess - and never could imagine how mornings would ever seem reasonable to me.

I mean, they still don’t seem reasonable, but I certainly see a lot more of them, now. And I’ve started to become accustomed to their strange, sunlit ways.

I liked being a night person again, though. I got worried, the first couple of nights, when I couldn’t sleep when I got home. I thought something must be wrong with me. But soon, another owl allayed my fear. No, it was normal to be awake. It was almost desirable, in fact.

Because we have to concentrate up to the very last second - else we’ll get the news wrong and break the internet or break the news and get the internet wrong or something - by the time you get home, your body may be tired, but your mind still feels like bouncing up and down.

And this is where it gets interesting. In the lessons on how to club your mind to sleep.

Working during the day, we often discuss TV, everyone does, yadda yadda, office life. We discuss soaps, or documentaries, or comedies, but generally - you know - prime time fare.

At night, the water-cooler (or coffee machine) discussions are different. We talk about television, yes, but the kind that we watched at 3 or 4am to try to close down. One guy watches programmes about Norwegian architecture or Mongolian terraforming. Another watches Sky Sports news until he drifts off dreaming of dribbling and passing and scoring and hugging the England players and all sorts of other acceptable homo-erotica. Someone else watches the Big Brother contestants sleep, and finds it soothing.

I tried several things. While a highbrow documentary on American lesbian crime-writers was certainly dull enough to kick my brain into neutral, I decided that I needed something lighter, more airy to chew on. I tried shopping channels - which I usually find extremely calming - but discovered them to be full of imported Americans shouting about - and over - power juicers and steam cleaners.

I settled on Colin Fry and his incredible powers of the Sixth Sense. Colin is a psychic, and, as such, can talk to both dead people and stupid people simultaniously.

Colin listens to the dead people, head slightly cocked, then relays what the dead people say to the stupid people, who nod and smile and sometimes cry.

I know, I know, it comforts people to think that the people who are dead are still incredibly interested in the people who are alive (surely they’d have better things to do) but really, over all, it’s quite easy to be cynical. Colin seems to stab around, saying various generic things and asking if anyone in the audience ‘understands’ until some thickbugger vaguely relates whatever he’s said to their own miserable life and sticks their hand up.

Then he - like any other reader of people, Derren Brown, mindreaders, whatever - tells them things that are just vague enough until he manages to focus in on something that makes sense.
Last night he came out with a stunner:
“I’m getting something else - Your mother in law is saying something about a thyroid problem. Have either of you or someone else had a thyroid problem recently?”
Amazingly, one of the women he was talking to had, indeed, a thyroid problem.
I’m not being cruel, I’m just thinking that the fact that they were both the size of sherman tanks (sherman tanks with 18 chins) might have given him a tip-off.

But still. I know it’s nice. Because Colin talks to the dead people, and through colin, the dead people talk to the stupid living people, and they all feel happier and are able to put something to rest - and that has to be looked upon as a kind of good thing.

But the thought that it might give people false hope, or that it might affect them badly, or affect relationships they have with people still alive, that worries me.

Doesn’t worry me enough to stop me drifting off by the time the credits roll, mind.

People should be more careful in their picture/headline juxtoposition.
I’m sitting in work watching streaming news on, I don’t know, Sky or something.

They’re sitting around discussing the front pages of tomorrow’s newspapers which are, of course, all a mixture of ‘Football Joy’ and ‘Actual News Seriousness’.

To this end, the current front page of the Daily Mail carries an enormous headline covering half the page, reading ‘The babies who lived after botched abortions’, next to a huge half page picture of Wayne Rooney looking for all the world like an enormous happy baby.

Now I know I probably shouldn’t find that funny, but I do.

There’s a certain behaviour one expects from a person wearing a flag of St George draped around their shoulders.

A lot of the things one might expect, to be fair, might include anti-social and lairy behaviour but quite apart from that, one would, at the moment expect the bearer of the lag to have a passing interest in football.

It would seem that this is not always the case.

Last week - whenever it was, thursday? - we tipped out of the office and watched the England-Switzerland match in a cheap and rather horrible pub next door. It was one of those enormous cavernous places, a Huge pulldown screen, and a room absolutely packed with people.

Sitting at a table at the back of the room, with a fine view of the crowd and the screen, I have to admit for at least half the time, for the boring bits, which were many, I was watching a girl on the table in front of us far more intently than the screen.

I was amused by her. I was confused by her. I had absolutely no idea what she was doing there.

In a ‘Where’s Wally‘ book she would have been picked out, immediately, as Wally. Or as a wally, or something.

She was sitting, you see, wearing a large English flag draped around her shoulders. And also a pair of much smaller England flags, on springs, attached to her head. And she was wearing bunches held by red and white bands, and had a tiny painted flag on her cheek.

And, most importantly, she had No Interest in the football Whatsoever.
She was sitting, the only person in the room facing away from the screen, with elbows resting on the table, reading Harry Potter, looking annoyed every time anyone shouted.

And they did shout, rather a lot. They even cheered when England scored. She didn’t like that at all.

Next to her was her boyfriend, and the table was filled with - it appeared - his friends. Every time something happened on screen that was exciting, he would turn around and talk to them about it. At this, she would tap him on the shoulder repeatedly until he turned to face her, and then pull a puppydog face until he kissed her - often causing him to miss the next shot on goal, or whatever.

If he pulled away to watch she pouted, and complained that he hated kissing her, or that she’d run out of beer, and certainly wouldn’t drink from his glass for fear of germs.

You have to understand - all of this was being played out directly in front of me - it seemingly impossible not to watch them, just as it was seemingly impossible that someone so annying actually existed.

And you know what? It wasn’t even the pouting and the puppying that were the most annoying. It was the fact that she’d gone for all the glamour of being an football fan, when clearly it wasn’t something that she gave a fig about.

Fine, yes, do sit there and read while the football’s on, I often do - but why go for all the outward show?

Anyway. I’m just grumpy because the football will be starting tonight just as I walk into work.
And she’ll be in the pub. With her bloody deelyboppers and her brick of childrens literature.

I’m just jealous.

Bloody hell, I know gmail are being very magnanimous in offering me a billion invitations to join, but frankly, I don’t have that many friends.

I have invited everyone that I can think of.
Does anyone want an invite to gmail?
I have - erm - three, at the moment. First come first served, unless anyone starts offering money. Or drugs.

Caffeine, specifically.

I have more than three friends by the way. They just don’t want the gmail I keep thrusting at them. Oddballs.

So, anyone?

later

Good god, they seem to have given me more invitations. They must like me.

1. England losing at football is a bad thing in general - particularly healthwise. Monday morning, the morning after, I suffered from several bad after-effects of a game played half like men and half like morons. England losing gave me an appalling headache, a gluey gammy sick-mouth, general wooziness and a heavy inability to get out of bed.

   Bloody football - I tell you, it’s no good for your health. Luckily though, I can tell you that 8 bottles of budvar and a vodka tonic seem to have no ill physical effects whatsoever.

2. Nightshifts are pleasant when the weather is hot. A day napping in the garden can be sweetly followed by a night working in relative coolness. They are, of course, also anti-social and knackering and wierd. I always used to be night people. Now night people are a little odd. Also, nightshifts are a bitch to write blogposts in.
   It’s spurty - busywise. I have a feeling this might be a very short list.

3. The flat is lovely. And all is well, apart from the fact that we haven’t got any bloody internet connection yet. Which is horrid and debilitating and icky. How is one supposed to know anything without google? Brain? I don’t have a brain anymore. I deleted the URL to my brain when I discovered google.
   If someone could e-mail me the link to my brain that would be great.
   Although I won’t be able to read it, of course, having no bloody internet.
   When I will be able to read it again, I won’t need it because I’ll have the bloody internet.
   I’m confused; you see how confused I get without the home access to the internet? Also it’s 2am.

4. It’s great to have a pretty garden, but shit when you realise you’re probably only going to kill it.

   later…

5. I’ve just realised that the amount I don’t know about the pope is quite staggering. I think that’s what I shall do tomorrow. I shall find out about the pope. No, hang on, no internet. I’ll nap, instead. I’m sure the pope won’t mind me not knowing anything about him for one more day.
   Actually, is he dead? Ooh, I feel awful.

6. I like people who have expression lines on their face. No matter what cosmetic companies seem to think I should like. I don’t mind if smiling gives me smily eyes. ‘Surgery can wait’? Surgery can wait a bloody long time, frankly.
7. I wish I were a cartoon character. I think it would be nice to be able

   later still

8. My cab should be arriving soon. The tiredest. Go home now. No time for blog, Dr Jones. Go home. Boo hiss no time for blogs.

*snore*

Sorry.

Hi, though.

It may have escaped your notice (it’s clearly escaped my mind), but I haven’t been posting as often recently.

Due to a couple of things - very very busyness at work (although to my credit I now know more about Latvia’s national football team than I ever expected I would)(or wanted to), and the fact that we’re moving house tomorrow.

I have never, never Not lived in a house share. And although I’ve been living with my beloved for the last 8 months - tomorrow, for the first time, we’ll be moving into our own little rented flat. Just the two of us.

This is unbearably exciting.

Now, no longer will there be murmured annoyances and deeply held grudges about people never doing the washing up, now there are only us two, and if we don’t do the washing up, we will be able to have the following conversation:

a: You haven’t done the washing up.
b: neither have you.
a: point.

And it’s all *ours* you see, and there’s no-one else in it! That’s the point!

I can watch the worst television in the world and never feel the need to watch it hiding in our room, because there’s no-one else to see - and he *knows already* how dross-ful I like my television!
I can invite people round without worrying about inconveniencing anyone!

I can sleep without knowing I’m going to be woken up!
I won’t have to wait in a queue for a shower! Hell, I can go to the toilet in my underwear!

I can cook things that smell thoroughly and - Oh, hang on, sorry, I just realised that when I said ‘I can go to the toilet in my underwear’ some people may have understood that to mean that I wanted to move so I could wet myself in peace. What I meant was that I don’t have to get fully dressed to move around the house anymore. That was what I meant.

It just feels so very very Grown-Up.

And… No, I’ve lost my thread. Sorry, I’ve been writing this three words at a time while cleaning and packing and reorganising things. I’m excited, i’m full of dust and I’m anxious all at once.

But excited, and xcited, and excited most of all.

There’s going to be radio silence around here for a few days at least.
We don’t know where our next broadband is coming from, and I’m off work until the middle of next week, to boot.

In the meantime I hope you are happy, as I generally hope people are happy, and, as usual, I suggest you go and read people who *do* bother to update their sites (and probably would even if they were moving house, the clever swine).

I’ll be back. I’m moving house. It’s happy.

I know it isn’t very enlightening for anyone else when I do this, but:

fuckity fuckity fuckity fuckity fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck.

Arse!

Arse arse arse arse arse.

Fuck.
Fuck. Fucking fucky fuckity fucking fuck-fuck.
Fucking Arse.

Wanky wanky wanky wanky wanky wanky wank-wank.

Wanky fuckity Arse.

Right.
That’s that out of the way.

Back to work.

Thank you.