Tuesday: Lunchtime

A businessman, enthraled by his book, wanders across a busy London street, without looking left, or, for that matter, right.

He has his nose too deeply buired in ‘Country of the blind’ to care that he lives in the ‘City of the permanently about to be run over by a bus’. I was about to suggest that after ‘Country of the Blind’ he read ‘Village of the damned’. Since he clearly is. Damned to be flattened. It’s nobody’s fault but his own.

I could also suggest. ‘Town of the Twats’. He should read that. If it doesn’t exist, it should. I could write it.

‘Suburb of the Stupid’
‘Hamlet of the doofballs’
‘Holiday resort of the Morons’
‘Gated community of the Gits’.

All of a sudden my imaginary list of ‘Other works by Anna Pickard’ is getting quite long. I have work to do, clearly.

‘Borough of the brainless’
‘Street of the donkheads’
‘Avenue of the Arseholes’

‘Province of the pointless’

The British Airways ‘fast bag drop’ counter is a good idea. In Theory.

It seems to be good for
a) busy people
b business people
c) terrorists (or terrists, I think they’re officially known as)
d) disorganised people who turn up at the airport 5 hours before the flight and 3 hours before they’re officially allowed to check in
e) organised people who have turned up to do terrist things because they’re terrists.
f) minor pop stars.

In case you’ve never had the pleasure, it goes a little someting like this;

- You go to a little machine near the airport entrance and insert the card with which you booked online. Having done so, you press a button saying ‘yes I’m whoever this card belongs to’.

- You pick your seat (the one nearest the pilot and/or other terrists are usually available if you arrive early enough)

- Then a message flashes up on screen, asking you if

a) you’re carrying any sharp objects in your hand baggage
b) you packed your bag yourself and
c) if anyone could have interfered with your bag

and you have to answer ‘yes’ to question b and ‘no’ to the others and it is very important that YOU DO NOT LIE. (Unless you are a terrist and then you CAN lie, because it is in your interest to do so. Clearly)

- If you do not have a bag to drop off for the baggage hold, you then process through the check-point, x-ray bit and then onto the plane, and (if my experience in Glasgow and Heathrow this week was correct), not have to show your passport at all. Not passport or any form of ID or anything at all. Not even once. Not even a bit.

I suppose it helps if you are white and female and have a practicedly cute ‘what me, occifer?‘ smile.

- If you do have a bag that you want to drop off into the baggage hold thing, you must queue up at the ‘fast bag drop’ desk, where you are supposed to drop your bag, fast. You will stand in front of this desk at the ‘queue here for the fast bag drop’ sign for eight minutes while two blonde women with hairdo-facelifts stare at you uncomprehendingly and wave at you occasionally indicating that they can’t be arsed to talk to you, until a sudden random point, when they can be arsed to talk to you. (N.B. when this point comes, they won’t ask to see your passport - I’m just mentioning this so you don’t bother to look for it for four hours like I did. You don’t need it. Really.)

While you wait for the high-cheeked lip-glossed gormless sisters to finish describing their rose-scented stools to each other - or whatever it is they’re doing - and let you drop your bag, a minor pop band will turn up at the desk next to you, and check in.

This is the perfect thing to distract the pull-faced guppies long enough to break their conversation, allowing you to rush in and drop your bag - or, alternatively, be told that it clearly never needed dropping in the first place and that you’ve been standing like a lemon for nine minutes for no reason.

Minor pop phenomenomenomenoms have their uses in that way.

I was star-struck though, for a whole few minutes.
I mean, I can’t promise that exactly the same thing would happen, that you would be struck down by minor popship if you stood in the fast track terrism queue of British Airways Glasgow, but it might happen.

Just in case, the first thing to look out for is the weasel-faced woman with the guinea pig…

tbc

She fell into a little hole and felt a little sad in there for a while.

One minute she was walking along, just fine, and the next, she’d fallen into a sad-hole, the type she’d probably dug herself for the sake of catching sads in. Or heffalumps.

Within a few moments of her saying so, other people had clambered into her hole. She’d never realised how cavernous her hole could be. She’d thought it was only a little hole, but my, so full of nice people and cheese and wine and chocolate - what an enormous, capatious hole she discovered she had! All-comers, it would seem, were welcome in her hole.
Ahem.
Enough.

And, while well-wishers poured into her hole and good-thinkers stood around it with ropes and human chains, she suddenly found a little door, and it led into the office, and it was only one way, and was piled nose-high with bits of things that HAD TO BE DONE RIGHT NOW. And so she was very very very busy, and couldn’t get back to the hole to tell everyone she was ok, so they sat about and lit a fire and talked amongst themselves.

And drank all the wine, probably.

And all the wine bottles and cheese rind filled up the sadhole which meant that no-one could fall into it again, which was a very nice result, although rather a reflection on the poor waste management and local government landfill policy in this country.

And then she was pulled by the ears out of the office and put onto a plane, where she flew away to a strange and curious land where people managed to live seemingly happy without 24-hour access to broadband internet. The freaks.

Pining for her bouncy ball, her little boat, her mozilla firefox, her lovely littleflat and also for the bloke who seems to hang around it almost all the time, she flew home again.

At some point during the above, she also apparently picked up the habit of talking in third person. Which makes her annoying. I should send the boys round to sort her out - that’ll show you, ‘anna pickard’.

First, second and third person at once.
Brain in stir-fried noodle fuzzbowl confuddleness.

I’m going back to bed.
Hello again.

Well, several words.

This is NotAnna.

Anna away. She on holiday. She ask me to say she not fallen down hole. She going to post soon, from holiday, to remind herself that she still alive. She still alive.

She say thank you for kind words.

Excuse me a second, I seem to have stumbled upon a little sad hole, and, not watching my step properly, fallen in.

I will be out of here in a moment, as soon as I find the door. Or a rope. Or some form of ladder. Or maybe a lift.

I am alright, but if you could throw down some provisions - let’s say some cheese and some wine (mind the bottle, my head is not that strong) - that would be good. While you’re at it, you could throw down a rope. Or a lift. Some form of ladder. Or a door.

The first thing I will do when I get out of this sad hole is to put up a little sign with very big letters to clearly mark where it is. It would be a shame to fall into it again, it is dark and damp and cold, and should be avoided.

I do not like this hole.

hm.

An entry for last week or so ‘Spammers, and why they are complete twunts’ has become far back enough in time for the spam to kick in.

This means I can either
- do what i normally do, delete the comment, shut the comments so no-one else can drop spam in it etc
OR
- leave the comments open and the spam intact, thereby proving my point better than I ever ever could.

hm.
what to do, what to do….

I’m sitting and waiting for bad things to happen… Will update throughout the day to keep you informed.

9.53am: Fill cup from water cooler. Returning to desk, water spills on trousers. Leg damp.

10.09am: Netscape crashes.

10.41: Netscape crashes.

11.02: Anvil falls on head.

11.26 Lottery board rings to confirm I have not won the lottery. They clarify that I have not won it this week or, in fact, ever.

11.28: Attacked by wolves.

11.44: Run out of staples.

12.46: £400 appears in bank account. Origin unknown. Begin to doubt the calendar. May not really be Friday 13th.

13.24: Netscape crashes. Faith reaffirmed in calendar veracity.

And before you hit the ‘back’ button, this isn’t one of my ‘I can’t be arsed to write anything so will cut and paste last year’s post’ moments…

Well, it kind of is, just not with things I posted on here in the first place.

Continuing the ‘I once decided that I was a theatre critic’ post from yesterday, I here present some more reviews. I don’t think you like them, but I don’t care, I’m posting them anyway. I like them.

As before, The shows are rated on the Vodka Tonic scale, representing how many Vodka Tonics the company would have to buy me before I was prepared to recommend their show to a paying punter. The more Vodkas, the worse the show…
(more…)

Last year I was at the Edinburgh festival.

While I was there I saw about 65 shows and wrote reviews of most in my notebook. I went around the smaller venues, trying to find little gems that hadn’t been picked up on by the press, trying to find the diamonds in the poo. And overwhelmingly, I failed to do so.

Most of the things I saw weren’t very good. But I was pretty pleased with some of the reviews I wrote.
At this point I began to realise that I had the makings of a great critic. When you realise that your reviews are the best thing about anything you go and see, it’s time to light the touchpaper on your ego and watch as your career as critic soars toward the stars.

I have decided to upload some of my reviews to this site. I would like to point out that any criticism of the performers is probably, by now, invalid, as they all showed a great deal of promise, and have undoubtably improved enormously in the last twelve months.

Anyway, I just wanted to have these on the site, somewhere, so I knew where they were. Read them, don’t read them, but don’t say I never post anything. This is a big monster. PLease bear in mind, these are last year’s reviews. DO NOT attempt to go and see any of these plays. This is an ENTIRELY USELESS EXERCISE.

Please do enjoy. I shall do them some at a time.

Here we go.

The shows are rated on the Vodka Tonic scale, representing how many Vodka Tonics the company would have to buy me before I was prepared to recommend their show to a paying punter. The more Vodkas, the worse the show…
(more…)

or so the old song goes.

NB The other, apparently, was in the Albert Hall. Although personally, I think that’s bollocks.
Or perhaps bollock.

I, also, only have one ball.

Not that I’m trying to claim similarities with Adolf Hitler. I mean, I may only have one ball, but at least mine is 65cm in diameter.
I’d like to see him goose-step with this baby stuffed into his lederhosen.

To clarify, my ball is… no, hang on, I should go back a few steps.

A few weeks ago, I was having trouble writing anything. I decided that really, deep down, the problem was not a tiredness or stressedness or sadness things, but the fact that I had, most definitely, The Wrong Chair.

The chair for our computer at home was a fold-up wooden thing. It was slightly too high for the desk, and I felt like I was looking over the keyboard (and it was staring up at me in a ungrateful teenage fashion, its distain for me proved the fact that it refused to reproduce the letter ‘h’) more importantly, I couldn’t cross my legs.

I often sit with my legs crossed. It’s bad, apparently. You know, like a meditating thing. Or a fishing gnome. Or a cheap statue of a chubby Buddha brought back from Goa. Or a child in assembly. I’ve a habit for crossing my legs.

And I’ve come to associate the position with the ‘only position in which I can write’. I don’t know why. In my mind, it may have been something to do with the circulation of air to my lady-garden. I have no idea. I have no idea how my mind works. I just look after it.

Anyway. The chair became a sticking point. Not that I stuck to the chair. I wasn’t so desperate to get air circulation that I sat nekkid. But I maintained that I couldn’t write properly til we bought a new chair.

We didn’t buy a new chair, however. We bought C$Brand=Reebok>C$cip=16842&categoryId=16842″>an enormous ball.

My brother and his wife had one when we went up to visit. It’s comfy for her, apparently, what with the whole pregnant thing. Although not up the duff, I absolutely fell in love with it.

It may be called a ‘gym ball’, but I’ve absolutely no intention of doing anything constructive on it. Apart from writing. Especially not exercise. That would be ridiculous.

It’s just… it’s just… do you remember when you were a kid, how happy it made you, playing on a spacehopper? Or, better still, how simply having a helium filled balloon tied to your wrist produced a wide smile until whenever it started to sink?

Well, bloons still do make me happy. Buy me a helium bloon and I’ll tie it to my finger and I’ll still have that smile. Same goes with my new ball/bloon.

It’s a little bouncy, it’s comfy, I can’t stop my circulation by sitting Buddha-like on it, it allows for essential oxygen, you know, all over, and, most importantly, I sit up straight, the pooter in plain sight, balance right, posture right, and write.
I can write, or I feel like I can (although probably more important things changed that I’m ignoring).

And so I sit here. On my magic bloon.
I wonder what else I can do now?…

Summer, I love, but I hate being a sweatpig in the horrid, horrid, sleepless, icky, thick-aired, grump-making blug.

And London is One Big Blug, this evening.
Sweaty and sleepless we are, in it.

Love summer, hate sweat. And humidity. I’ve been advised not to holiday in Singapore. Or in a baked potato.

Dreams are wonderful things. I love to dream. I love the order my mind tries to make of the world in rest. I love the fact that other people dream. I love that they get to experience the same pleasures of their own imagination as I do. What I don’t love - and I don’t love it a whole fuckbunch - are the words ‘ooh, listen, I had this dream last night, what do you think it meant…’

Pear (the fruit) = a womb/the virgin mary

As far as I’m concerned, dreams are just your mind filing away the things that passed through your mind and got jumbled up during the day. You see a thing, you talk to a person, you remember a task - you go to sleep, and suddenly bam, all these things come together when you stop being busy. Your mind sorts through them, makes pretty pictures with them, and then puts them away.

Eating macaroni = Small losses (financial)

Certainly they can mean something. If you dream that you’ve become pregnant by your boss, you throw your baby out of the window and then suddenly discover that your office is the cockpit of a plane that you don’t know how to control - then I’ll take a wild guess that you don’t like your job, feel like you have too much work to do with too little support, but don’t know what you might do with your life anyway. Its not a happy dream. But it’s not rocket science.

When I worked in a crisp packing factory (for three days) I went home each night and dreamt of packing crisps. In my dream, I didn’t really enjoy it very much.

Rocket (going up) = yay! happy marriage. Rocket (going down) = oh dear…

I just find dream dictionaries amusing. For me, I can pretty much work out what my dreams might mean, because I know what I associate things with, I know what I did and saw yesterday, I know what I think about and what I try not to think about. Dream dictionaries, on the other hand, are like 1 in 12 horoscopes. Meaningless. How can this silly book know what ravioli means to me? To be honest, it doesn’t mean anything, but if it did, it probably wouldn’t be ‘the need to visit home’. It might be if I was a member of a prominent Italian pasta family, but I’m not. I wish I was. I would have lots of free pasta.

I don’t want to write it off, though.

Not a good thing to write things off. So I’ve come up with a plan.

Believing that dreams are simply the product of the day’s events and experiences, and not wanting to write off that things seen in dreams might be good omens and shit, I have settled on the following plan.

I shall force myself to do and look at the things that the book says to dream of will bring me stuff. What an appallingly structured sentence. Apologies.
Plan this:
1) book says dream ‘thing’ means manifestatio of later ’stuff’? Then
2) look at thing
3) dream of thing
4) get stuff!
5) profit!

The book says that seeing a baby elephant in one’s dream means that incredible good luck is coming your way. I have covered my room in pictures of baby elephants, and for the next week, I have the hire of a tame baby elephant to sit in my bedroom, so that it’s the last thing I see before I go to sleep.

Dreaming of corn means a certain visit to a far off land? Right you are, son, my under-nancies are stuffed with sweetcorn and I thoroughly expect this to lead to me jetting off to the Maldives even if I don’t have the damn money.

To dream of signing your name signifies you’re soon to be wed, it reads. Oh dear. Lordy. I don’t know what the landlord will say, but they won’t be recieving any cheques anytime soon.

And dreaming of eating a block of lard means career enhancement, you say. A girls got to do what a girls got to do…

is not that I’ve suddenly had an influx of visitors looking for a vile cam-girl site called ‘little april’

What makes me laugh is that when they see my site on google, it says ‘little red boat, april archive, Beef encounters….‘

And that really seems to spur them on. It’s a post about not blogging enough, for goodness’ sake.

I wish it had been a post about hair-trigger-penised adolescent fuckwits. that would have been better.

I realise this is not edifying, or a great piece of writing, or any of that bollocks, but give me leave to ask, just once: How is it that spammers, and, yes, comment spammers in particular right now, think they’re going to improve their business and business world standing by annoying the living crap out o the rest of the online world?

Quite apart from the fact that I don’t now - nor will ever - want to buy viagra from their poxy rat-poison bargain basement - or buy viagra at all - , or procure from them a bigger penis - being quite happy with the almost non-, nay, completely non-existent penis I have naturally - but when I manage to have half an hour of downtime in which I think I might manage to sit down and write something, I do not want to spend that precious time going through posts one by one and removing from each comments written by illiterate worth-free acned no-hopers with no friends and no genitals who have sent a robot to drop their little stinking spammy faeces all over my site.

You know what’s going to happen to these people? They’re going to hell. My dad’s a minister, and he can arrange that sort of thing.

(I always wanted to say that. In primary school there was a little girl who would always say ‘My dad’s a policeman and he can send you to prison’. It was only years later I realised I had a trump card. The line ‘Well my dad’s a vicar and he can send you TO HELL’ has so much more panache. Anyway…)

They’re going to hell. Particularly the twunt who left 60 comments on old posts reading - ahem - “NICE SITE FATTY, WHY NOT TRY HERE” with a hyperlink to their own ‘dangerous chemicals for stupid and desperate people depository’ It wasn’t called that, but it should have been. Trade descriptions act and all.

I was not only annoyed by the sheer number of comments, but by the assault on me personally. I mean - how did they know, the bastards? So, several thousand clicks and the closing down of the comment facility on several hundred posts later, I am annoyed, and upset, and want to find a spammer just so I can punch them.

Because if I can’t find a spammer, I will simply have to punch some spam, because it is close, linguistically. And then I will have cheap pink luncheon meat on my knuckles, and my anger will still not have abated.
It will simply be anger that smells of spam.

Still. At least they liked the site.