For those interested in this kind of thing, here are some statistics:

Three years ago today I wrote the first post on this blog.
(It read ‘Look! Meg? Is it working’ and was addressed only to my darling sister who’d set something up for me that I had no idea what to to do with)

For dull tangent roll over here.

In these three years of writing this blurnal I have been to three countries in two continents. Unless you count Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales as four different countries, In which case I’ve been to five countries in two continents. And not to Wales once.

In these three years I have kissed two people and fallen in love with one.

That’s a lie, kind of. If you look into the early archives of this blurnal, you’ll find I had a tendancy to fall in teen-love three times a day with anyone I saw. It was fun. I’d still be doing that now if the most wonderful man in the world hadn’t come along and taken my heart from all of them, causing me to make the rash decision never to fall in love with anyone else ever again. Party-pooper.

In these three years I’ve had three haircuts.
I fucking hate hairdressers.

In these three years I’ve moved from an island measuring 4 miles by 1 with a population of 200, back to a city and back to university (whole masters degree thing) and then down to London. I seem to be raising my population tolerance exponentially. I’m thinking of Sao Paulo next, Bejing, or perhaps Mexico City.

In these three years I’ve had nine jobs, including part time, temping and other. I’ve had two passports, three cashcards, four attempts at dieting. I’ve had six bedrooms. Five homes.

In these three years I’ve had more conversations with strangers than I ever would have thought possible or most people think safe. They’ve all been lovely. Blurnals are good things for that.

In these three years I’ve probably said ‘I’ more times than anyone should in their life. Unless they’ve written 124 volumes of autobiography.
Which, in a way (and we’re talking quantity, very not quality, here), I probably have.

In these three years this blurnal’s been more important to me than quite a lot of other stuff. It’s been my stable element, and my discipline, and i’ve thought I’d give up a bunch of times. And I never could.

I didn’t want this post to be so long.

I just wanted to say;

‘It’s not a big deal. It’s just been three years, that’s all’

.. people I have worked with.

The running man.

I think of this only because there’s someone around me that rings the running man bell.

I was thinking about this subject, and about how, through natural instinct, I watch people all day and how, as a very nony-nonymous (that’s very non-anonymous for those who can’t hear me enjoy saying the first version out loud) I don’t talk about those people, because it’s rude, but BY GOD HOW MUCH I’D LIKE TO.

I decided on a compromise. I would talk about people I used to work with instead, because they were just as funny, I just don’t think about them any more. But I should. Because they were funny. All people are funny.

One was the running man.

I used to work on in a very long office in an arts organisation.
Every several weeks, the marketing team, far up the other end of the office, brought in a trouble-shooting super-dooper more-than-amazing freelance man.

I think that was his official title.

And every time you walked past him on the way to the bathroom he’d be saying something important, or shouting into a phone, or nodding sagely. They paid him by the hour to nod sagely, I think.

He only turned into a lunatic when he stood up.
Because past my desk was the smoking room, and the water, and it was difficult for him to make time for these things in his day.
So he’d run. Fast.

You’d be sitting, at your desk, doign the things you did, when all of a sudden boom boom Boom BOom BOOm BOOM BOOM footsteps would thunder up behind you, past you, throwing you out of your seat and all your work out of your hands and out of your head and all because MY GOD, HE NEEDED A GLASS OF WATER!

NOW!

If it was executive style running, I could have understood. Unfortunately, it was pre-pubescent girl running, with flapping hands and flailing hair, and little legs kicking up behind him.

In retrospect, I wish I’d got someone at the other end of the room to call me when he set off. Perhaps that way I mightn’t have pooed myself quite so often when he thundered up behind me. Or wee-ed myself so often when he girly-flapped past me.

Eventually he must have found himself in another contract in another office, because one day, all of a sudden, the running stopped. Perhaps he ran away. Perhaps somebody killed him. I don’t know.

(Incidentally, I’d like to point out that any references to me soiling myself in any way, wee, poo, etc, were entirely fictional)

(Well, apart from that one time)

Running man, I salute you.
Your time was clearly very very important.

I thought brand new glasses were supposed to make you feel better?

They are, right? Hm? Right??

Then why did mine just make me vomit?

… where I live

The A-Z supermarket is open 24 hours a day.

And it’s not really called ‘The A-Z supermarket’.

I’m not being secretive, I just don’t know what it is called. From the second I moved to the area, I called it the A-Z, and that’s all it’s been called ever since. Beloved has tried to talk me out of it, I’ve tried to work out why I do it, but there’s nothing can be done. Een when someone tells me the real name, I can’t remember it. It’s ‘The A-Z supermarket’. That’s what I’m calling it, and that’s all there is to it.

I’d be able to understand if the supermarket was pretty comprehensive, and sold Everything (from a-z), but it doesn’t. It sells a lot of Halloumi, many staples of Turkish cuisine, 25 types of tinned or jarred tomatoes, and no sanitary towels. It sells bad pasta, white bread, no fizzy water, 1700 different types of pickles, one box of unconvincing free-range eggs, some frozen heinz baked beans pizzas (which never seem to move out of the same position in the same freezer) and 1 litre paw-paw juice.

Why am I telling you about this shop? Why am I so keen on it, why would I adore it so much as to rename it?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the A-Z, it sells booze all night.

I don’t know how they get away with it, I don’t know how they escape getting closed down, but by God, I don’t care, I simply applaud them - Hell, I applaud anyone irresponsible enough to sell me booze when I really don’t need any more booze.

Sure, I applaud them more at the time than I do the next morning, but that’s beside the point…

At least they have the decency to sell headache tablets, orange juice, fizzy pop and complex carbohydrates as well. If you’re going to provide the hangover, you can at least facilitate the cure. That, my friends, is decency.

Or filthy marketing-minded opportunism. That, decency, they’re similar things. Or perhaps I’ve been living in London too long.

Right, dears, it’s time for bed.

Then again, the A-Z’s open….

I’m not sleeping really.

I’m only pretending to be asleep so I don’t have to talk to you.

But you still seem to be sitting there, so unless I want to lie here prentending to snore until my nostrils turn inside out, I’d better (pretend to) wake up and get into some kind of meaningful conversation about this, the worst day there ever was, the day that heralded the passing of time, the way of all things, and, essentially, the end of my life.

It’s all over. I’ve been kidding myself about the longevity of youth, and of lasting happiness, and of the possiblilty of many blossom-filled days to come. It’s all coming to an end. The end is drawing nigh.

That’s right, I went to the optician today.

Eyeglasses.
I have to wear eyeglasses.

Truly, this must be the beginning of the end. And what justice is this? I only lasted 27 years?!
27 years, and then I started falling apart? I thought this wretched shell would hold up a little better than that. But no. It’s all over.

What’s that you say? No, you’re going to have to speak up. No, don’t shout, just pass my ear-trumpet. Thank you. Now, what are you mumbling about?

Glasses aren’t that bad? Tish-tosh and nonsense, young person, I haven’t got where I am today by wearing big speccy spec-specs.

And where am I today, you ask? Cheeky young whippersnapper, just wait til I get my hands on that god-damn zimmer frame and I’ll be after you faster than you can say ‘Anna Pickard that’s an over-blown super-dramatic monster-whiny über-reaction to slight long-sightedness and the need to wear very weak glasses and only having to wear them when only when staring at the computer screen!’.

Or possibly not faster than you can say that. My hips have seized up.

Yeah, stand over there and mock me with your nifty frames.
The ones I tried on today made me look half German, half librarian (both of which are very fine professions. I mean nationalities. Or both. You know, like those professional Germans from the republic of Libraria in that film).

All you smug long-term glasses wearers may look fine and dandy and sweet and lovely in your fun yet fashionable face furniture. I look like a Gerbrarian.

AND I found two white hairs at the weekend. GROWING OUT OF MY HEAD.

The end is, my friends, nigh, it is nigh indeed.
And now, the night is drawing in (as is my life) and I am being advised that it is time to go to bed.
I always thought i would rage, rage against the dying of the light, but, to be fair, I sleepy.

I will see you in the morning. If I live that long.

Now get out of my damned house or I’ll pull this little red cord. It calls the police, you know. Or the AA, I forget. It says on that little sign down there.

Can you read it for me?

I say I’m going to write the first things that come into my head, and then I don’t write anything for a week.

This can mean either one of two things;
a) I was lying.
b) Nothing has come into my head for at least seven days.

Both of these, it must be said, are partly true.
I didn’t mean to lie, but there you are, and so I did and well, there’s not much can be done about it now, etc.
As for things coming into my head - And I’m meaning more in the sense of ‘ideas’ than ‘foreign objects’ - I must admit my brain to be flacid and weak at the moment, I don’t know why, it just is.

I must improve this.

I apologise for my not-very-here-ness, I am here more than you know, only staring at the screen banefully doesn’t seem to get as much done as I might hope.

I am under order to write something every day this week, or be in trouble.

And this I will do.
BUt now I have to go and let someone poke me in the eye.

in the meantime, you could read this….

I like puns.

Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they display a mastery of language, an ability to twist and turn words to amuse and amaze and tickle.

And sometimes they display an incredible ability to replace words with vaguely sound-a-like pig products.

My case in point.

I can’t stop laughing. I have absolutely no idea why.

I think my favourite is

Who is the Federal Reserve Director?
- Allen Green Spam.

But I can’t decide.

Puns sow bad they passed the juncthHAM for ‘good’ a loin time ago and are bacon the road to ‘bad’.

It has finally happened.

This morning, in the second month of my 28th year, I, Anna Pickard, finally Had Enough Sleep.

I didn’t think it was possible.

They told me that one day I ‘d wake up and say; “No, actually, not another five minues”.
But I never believed it to be true.

I think, to celebrate, I will not sleep for a week. Why should I, after all? I don’t *need* it.

Today, walking up the stairs and reaching the top floor after a meeting, in the middle of another one of those days, in an unending series of those days, I found that the builders had gone out onto the roof, leaving the sky exposed.

I stood underneath their ladder, and tipped my face, and was rained on for about a minute, before returning to my desk and carrying on with all the things that had to be done.

It made me feel better. By about one billion per cent.
Which was only a slight return.
But made a great diference.

I realise that people may have heard of this already, but
this is just a dreadful story
And not in Any way funny at all.

Idiots aren’t funny, remember that.
Even when they do shoot themselves in the goolies and then have to go to prison for it.

I am confused by a sign outside an estate agents.
It is a large attention-grabbing sign. I can see it from the bus window.

it says

“Sell your home here for £999 (plus vat)”

Why would anyone take them up on that?
That’s rubbish.
I mean, here, in London, they probably bought it for more than 250k, why would they then want to sell it for under a thousand pounds?

This is bad investment advice indeed.

Unless…. oh, hang on…

I don’t know what the dream was, that’s the thing that’s confusing me most.

I know I dreamt a lot last night, but I have no idea what led me to wake up and have the following conversation with my beloved.

Me: Hey! Hey! HEY!

He: Nurgle. Snuk. What?

Me: They’ve been doing experiments, right, to try and produce a half human, half bee child. The scientists have. They’ve been doing them. The experiments, I mean. They got a woman in, and they got the woman and the bee to have sex.

He: Uh? Ugr? What happened? Did it work?

Me: No. The lady got stung in the muff.

He: Ur?

Me: I know. I could have told them that might happen. Although I think it may have been a dream. Is the alarm set? I’m going back to sleep.

(pause)

snore

He: Urgh?

Listening to BBC Radio 4 the other morning - or, y’know, last week or whatever, the story isn’t time specific, I was just giving a short rant some kind of conversational setting - something on the news had me very confused.

Talking about the ’stop and search’ statistics, the newsreader kept referring a particular period over which the statistics were collated.

That wasn’t the problem. That’s efficient reportage.

The problem was that the period she kept mentioning was ‘twenty-oh-two to twenty-oh-three’ (meaning last year and the year before, rather than a mid-evening minute long slot, which would have been an awfully high concentration of stopping and searching).

But I haven’t heard anyone else on the BBC, or, in fact, anyone else at all referring to the year dates of the present decade in this way. Is it a thing? Do we do that now? If the BBC are now saying we’re in the year ‘twenty-oh-four’ rather than ‘two thousand and four’, do we all have to start doing it?

Is it a thing? Or was she alone?
I don’t mind, I just need to know.

We make a cute but infuriating couple, the two of us.

Picky by nature and pedantic for a living, you can’t slip a misplaced apostrophe or superfluous comma between us without getting a well-deserved kick in the colon. I’m quite short though, so I might just punch you in the semi-colon.

We’re both annoyingly particular and particularly passionate about language, you see.

And that’s funny, really, because my typing is as sloppy as you can get, and I seem to have missed a few classes on English sentence and paragraph construction somewhere down the line, so I’ve got little room to whine. But whine I do. There’s always room for a good whine.
Merlot is a good wine.

But that’s different, it’s spelt differently, and it doesn’t even count as a pun, because puns have an outside chance of being funny, and that was just rubbish.

Anyway. Watching television or reading the Sunday papers with me isn’t really as relaxing as it should be, and I’m lucky to have found someone to put up with it.

For example, since I came home, I have read half a newspaper and half-watched a whole television.

And been mini-annoyed a whole half-dozen times. In Neighbours, Susan Kennedy, after picking out a dvd to watch, put it in the dvd player, so to watch it. But you’d think she would have removed it from its box first, wouldn’t you? Because I frankly don’t think it’s going to work, otherwise. How stupid do they suppose their viewers to be, exactly?
Actually, in the case of Neighbours, they’d probably be justified in thinking ‘quite stupid indeed’.

Anyway.

In the paper - and it was saturday’s paper, because I haven’t got round to reading it yet - there were two obvious typos, a split infinitive, a wildly confused quote (Marlon Brando said ‘I coulda been a contender…’ while playing Stanley Kowalski in On the Waterfront? What?) and a badly cropped picture that made it look like someone had five legs. Or they may have had five legs. I don’t know.

And then I came to the internet, and found perhaps the most over written first line of a news story that I’ve ever seen in my life.

Oh. Now I can’t find it.

If I can find it, I’ll finish this post…

Here we are - now it’s not the subject matter I’m ranting at, it’s the style.:

Being molested by a priest left ***** ******* with nobody to confess to. But what he could not find at the confessional as a boy, ******* hoped he would find in court as a man.

If you read it out loud in a deep rumbling american voice (as I did, unadvisedly, in the office), it sounds like possibly the worst trailer in the world, for possibly the worst tv movie ever.

On a serious note, it’s also a hideously Hollywood style of journalism that shows no respect or compassion for anyone involved.

But I didn’t want to end the post there, I wanted to end it on something funny.

[Insert something funny of your choice here.]