Hello, Tom here. Apologies for not doing this earlier, but I’ve been a very busy man. But Hildegunn, the girl who kind of sits diagonally opposite Anna at work, said somebody had posted a message saying she was missing Anna, so felt very bad and thought I should write something.

Just got back from the airport, where I said goodbye to my brother, who’s going to Australia for a year with his mate. Little bit boring, to be honest with you. I turned up early and had to make an two hours’ worth of conversation with various people. Wasn’t too bad with my brother because we could talk about stuff like growing up together and how we used to live in the same house and how we had the same parents and stuff.

Anyway, I had to talk to various of my brother’s mate’s relatives about Australia because I went there for a year once. Well, Australia was OK, but it wasn’t that great.

I had an unfortunate incident with an Aussie woman there once. I’d noticed my mate’s girlfriend casting glances in my direction, this had never really happened to me before. I’d cast looks at my mate’s girlfriends. But it had never come to anything apart from me being punched into a bath. But I’d got a bit of a tan and everyone looks alright with a tan, so this girl started looking at me.

I formulated a clever plot to avoid this woman becasue my mate was large and I had a girlfriend. Whenever she was around I would sit very still, be quiet and not look at her. What with me being a small man, I hoped she wouldn’t notice me.

Bah, how disgracefully wrong could I be? She told me she liked me because I was quiet and acted like I wasn’t bothered. All those years thinking up impressive things to say to women and all I needed to do was go down the tanning salon and then hang around not saying anything.

In the meantime, I split up with my girlfriend because she slept with her ex-boyfriend and I had a lot of unresolved anger because I coulsn’t beat him up because I think she once said something about one of her exes being good at karate and I was fairly sure it was him because he he looked like one of those angry geeky blokes who practices martial arts to get back at people who have wronged them. To tell you the truth, he looked a bit like me.

I had a yellow belt in tae-kwando, but they only taught me rubbish stuff like bowing and none of the good stuff like flying kicks and how to break wood just by looking at it. So I couldn’t fight him.

Well, my mate’s girlfriend was around and I’d see her now and again even though she’d try and flirt with me by cutting off my bellybutton hair and other things that kind of unsettled me.

And eventually we ended up in a club and she’d kind of split up with my mate, I think. And we were on the dancefloor, and I was in a hot country and had a suntan and I think you’re supposed to do stuff like get off with your mate’s kind-of-girlfriends because you’ve got a tan and you’ll never look better and heat is supposed to be all passionate and sensual and maybe a little bit corrupting. So you’re allowed to do bad things.

It was a disturbing experience being with this girl. Now, I was no catch. I was the kind of man who’d get off with his mate’s girlfriends and there were reasons my girlfriend had shagged her possibly more sympathetic ex. But every few seconds this girl would stop getting off with me and shout “NAHH-YEAH” in my face and smack her pelvis into mine. Well, I felt a little bit scared. I said I had to go to the toilets and hid in their for a while and then sneaked out of the club and ran home.

I woke up the next day feeling kind of sad and lonely in a barren country under a hot sun and missing my girlfriend, who smelt of skin cream and never shouted “NAHH-YEAH” and made me run into toilets. So I vowed to get her back. And I tried, and I even flew back to Britain. But I didn’t get back with her. And I spent my last six months in Australia looking at waves and swimming in the sea at dawn because in movies people do that and discover how they can make their lives better, when really I should have been doing stuff that people in hot countries do like sit on porches sweating.

Still, served me right really, for being rude to my mate and dismissing women just becasue they shout “NAAH-YEAH” at you. But me and my mate made up and we once hit golfballs into the ocean near Bondi beach at sunset and laughed and I felt like I had learned something, which was hitting golfballs into the sunset is good because you feel like you’re in a happy ending to a movie.

So that’s why I didn’t think Australia was that great.

I spend a lot of time with my friend Tom. Because I have to.

Tom sits opposite me at work.I always know he’s there - although with two computer screens between us, most conversation takes the form of email or shouting - mainly because he throws orange peel and pencils at me.

He drinks vodka and orange, and my beloved and Tom can talk about football for hours.
I usually take the newspaper if I’m going to the pub with my beloved and Tom.

Tom has a slight Birmingham accent - which just makes him funnier. Funny people are funnier when they have funny accents. Not that I’m saying the Birmingham accent is ‘funny’. Oh no, hang on, I am.
Tom’s most overused word is ‘alright’.
Whether he’s had the best day of his life, or a day of hell, it will be described as ‘alright’. If he was taken to dinner and bought the nectar of the gods, or a poo sandwich, he would describe his lunch date as ‘alright’, if the most beautiful woman in the world walked through the door, she would be best described as ‘alright’. It’s all in the intonation. By the intonation you discover that ‘alright’, apparently, means about 362 different things.

One of the nicest things Tom has ever sais to me was this:
“Hey, Anna.
Saw a woman on the bus this morning that looked exactly like you in twenty years time.
She was alright.”

My favourite Tom story is this:
“Mate of mine was having sex with this Australian girl. And they’re going at it - they’re in the middle of having sex - and she suddenly pipes up…” (He puts on an appalling high-pitched Australian squawky voice.) ” …’Hey, Shorty?! Have you slimed yet, or d’ya’wanna whack it up me shitter?”

The reason I’m telling you all of the above is this.
In an act of either utter stupidity or genius, I’ve given Tom the keys to the boat while I’m on holiday for the next week and a half. So if you see anyone writing here from now until the beginning of December, it’s not me, it’s Tom. He may not write anything- so laid back it’s like he’s on one of those things where you lie back all the way until you flip upside down - but if he does, he does.
Be nice to him.
And Tom, if you read this, post something, and remember to turn the comments on, like I showed you.

In the meantime, here’s the best postcard I’ve ever bought. Coincidentally, I bought it in Cyprus. It is, therefore, a postcard from Cyprus.

It’s the fact that the cat looks so desperately unimpressed that I love.

Meanwhile, I’m going on holiday to read books and write stuff.

I forgot to scan the back of the postcard.
Now you’ll never know what it says.

Someone reached this site this morning by typing ‘What you don’t want to hear on a plane’. And while that led them to this post (oddly, I was expecting it to have led to this one…)

This got me thinking about the things I wouldn’t want to hear on a plane.

Ten things you wouldn’t want to hear on a plane

1. Celine Dion on loop
2. A compilation of The Backstreet Boys, Nsync, Boyzone, Gareth ‘punchable’ Gates and, in fact all the contestants of Pop Idol EVER, including the 30th place runners up.
3. The words ‘Yipee-ky-ay, motherfucker’
4. The sound of your own liver exploding (it would go ‘pthththth’ in a kind of wet way)
5. Two orange cabin ladies trying to remember where the emergency crew parachutes might be.
6. The words “your inflight movie today will be Catch Me if You Can”.
   Because it’s rubbish.
7. The music of Mariah Carey
8. The sound of an approaching herd of bison in full stampede.
9. The pilot saying he’s just popping out.
10. Geri Halliwell

And, possibly, the engine blowing up.

Occasionally, I say something about the amusing things people type into google in order to end up at this site. The last time I did this, a couple of people asked how I knew how people had got to the site, and I neglected to answer in the comments. Bad Anna.

I have - and pardon me, those people who know all this and better than me - a little button that tells me how many people visit the site, and how they get here. My little button has always been both a morbid fascination and a source of great excitement to me, and I find myself clicking on it many times daily, although sometimes I try to cut down, for fear it will make me go blind (computer screen bad for eyes etc). This is how I know.

It tells me how many people, and at what time, and where they were referred from (other people’s sites, or google or whatever) and what country they were in, and how many people revisit during the day, and what kind of computer they were using, and all sorts of other technical information which I frankly wouldn’t care about even if I did know what the hell it meant.

And most of the time I believe my little button to be telling me lies, and sometimes it makes me sad, but it is an addiction, a strong one, and now I can’t remember why I was talking about it except to answer a question and - I suppose - as a preambled post-script to a post I haven’t written yet but will write in a minute to bury this one.

I hope that answers someone’s question.

Apologies if I’ve just taught my grandmother how to suck software.

1) If the doorbell rings in the morning, it is the postman. There is only one way to ensure that he is still there when you open the door.
If you are dressed, and pootling about, and go to answer the door, he will be gone.
If you are at the other end of the house, and half walk, half fall to the door, finding your keys and shouting HANG ON, HANG ON, WAIT, I’M JUST COMING, you will open the door, and he will be gone.
If you are not dressed, and you hurry to get dressed and run to answer the door, he will be gone.
If you are not dressed, and you open the door in your underwear, thinking instead it is your beloved, forgotten his keys, not only will it still be the postman with your package, but he will have all his friends with him. And all your friends. And your boss. And a camera. Near nudity is thus the only way to avoid a trip to the left packages depot.
Also, why do you have a door in your underwear? You dirty heffer.

2) Should you be on a bus and a very smelly/crazy person boards, the seat next to yours will be the only free seat. They will sit in it. In fact, the busyness of the rest of the bus is a matter of irrelevance. Even if every other seat on the bus is free, and has a sign on it saying ‘Crazy/smelly people welcome here!’ they will sit next to you, or in front of you, or behind you, lean into you, and want to be your friend. Smellily.
If you find this never happens to you, it may well be that you are either smelly or crazy. I would check, if I were you. You could ask that stranger sitting next to you on the bus. In all likelihood, they’ll probably say you’re not smelly or crazy at all. In fact, they probably want to be your friend. Really.

3) If you are wearing white, and no matter how careful you are, you will get food on you. Even if you’re wearing a bib. Even if you’re eating white food, and it isn’t even drippy white food. Say you’re eating raw cauliflower florets. You will think you are safe, look down half an hour later, and discover you have a penny sized rich tomato sauce circle on your left breast. You know who put it there? The rich tomato sauce stain fairy.
Why? To remind you of your humanity and reinvigorate your humility. To remind you of your vulnerability and your place within society.
The rich-tomato-sauce-stain-fairy wants to demonstrate to you that your sense of humour, resiliant personality and debt to pathos is more important than your sense of self-importance or any standing based on image alone. That you matter in the world as a person, no matter your outward show.
Little bastard.

4) If you read blogs on any kind of regular basis, you will have more of a familiarity with cliche, stereotype and other people’s bellybuttons than your forefathers would ever have thought possible and/or desirable. Especially comedy cliche. On this blog anyway, it seems.
Still, we all love a cliche. Even if cliche doesn’t really rhyme with much, that I can think of. That usually makes things even better.
Nietzsche loved a good cliche, I hear.

See what I mean? No good rhymey words.

5) If you are soon to go on holiday, you will develop a world-beater of a cold. You will suddely play host to a stinking whorey bastard of a virus, tickling the inside of your nose, which it is in a good position to do, as it is crouching inside your head, wrapping itself in your brain, and farting. It is sticking a clawed foot down your throat, and using your tender vocal cords to scratch between its scabby, cough-calloused little viral toes.
It knows you are going to go on holiday. It could smell the expectant joy from miles away and made for you like an enormous piece of snot dropped from a 98th floor balcony. It has entered your head with the same visceral ickiess.
It has suckered itself into your frontal lobes, and vomitted in your sinuses.
You will not feel well.

These things are inevitable, human, uneviable and ‘CHOO. Excuse me. SNIFF.
Sorry.

I hab a code.
Snot fun.

At All.

‘CHOO.

Update: Tuesday morning

I Said ‘CHOO!

Or…
Possibly the world’s worst photograph. Ever

Right. Well. Everyone seemed to express their creativity with the last of my rubbish photograph collection - very amusingly, I have to admit, well done, and thank you greatly - So I offer another.
And this is harder. Because I don’t think I’ve even told a story about this one.

So. Here.

Please - and if you’re very good I’ll tell you - What the hell is this poorly lit abomination supposed to be?

Yes.
Subtle should be spelt suttle. It just should.
It surely means you’re being ‘under’ something. The ’sub’ would suggest this. But under what? Under ‘tle’? What is tle?
Is ‘tle’ a normal state of obviousness? Because if I’m being tle most of the time, then surely when I’m being overobvious the I’m being surtle - sur meaning above, and that. Surtle.
Which sounds a little like turtle.
Which, actually, is therefore good. I mean, turtles always make it over-obvious that they’re turtles, and no harm ever becomes them. Apart from the extinction things. Hm.
May be Turtles should be more subtlely surtle.

Rah for subtle surtlety.

Anyway. Tell me. What is this shitty snap?

What’s this?

And you people say you want photos?

You ask for, you get.

Quality not included.

Update, the next day. Still can’t think of anything to write.

Yes!
Well done everyone - you bunch of lovely sarcastic fucktards, you.
I was indeed referencing my own post of lastweekorwheever

Oh - and I don’t know how to make te boat wibbly.

There are more pictures, but not many. And I’m not telling you when I’m putting them up.
Yeah. Because you’re going to be that excited about it.

In other news, I am tired.
Very very very tired.
Tired so as to be slightly sad.
I am sleeping and sadding by equal measures.
But otherwise fine, Thank you for asking.
How are you?

One thing I have to tell you about this phonecall - if the phone rings in our house, it’s either my mother or a cold caller on the other end. Hardly anyone else. Hardly anyone else has the number. In the world of mobiles, no one tends to give it out, anymore. So the only people that ever ring are my mother, and people trying to sell us things - the people who lived here before us seem to have been terribly undiscriminating about who had their number. Bastards.
Anyway. I always, always pick up the phone. Because if it’s my mother, I want to speak to her. Unfortunately, 70% of the time it isn’t my mother.
Last Tuesday was one of these times.

Another thing you have to know about this phone call. In August, I went on holiday, and at the end of this month, I’m going on holiday again. Big holiday. But September and October, not completely unreasonably, I think, were dry holiday months for me. The one time we did go away, we went to a small town in the nearby county of Suffolk, to visit my beloved’s family. The entire trip lasted a little over 24 hours.

Tuesday evening. 6:30
Ring ring. ring ring. ring ring
anna: Hello?

On the other side of the line is an incredibly high pitched South African with the most cliched phone voice you can imagine. You know, all squeaks and funny emphasis. Let’s call her Tamsin, Or Timsun, as she would say it, although she said her name so fast I never caught it.

Timsun the annoying South African: Gud eve’ning Madum, I wender if I could just take a few minits of yur time: jist to reassure you, I im not silling anything, I am phoning on behalf of the National Tourist Board, and I wender if I might hiv a few minits of yur prichuss time to ansa a shot quistionaire for us?
Anna: Erm. Yeah, I suppose so. It will be short, right?
Timsun: Aaaw yis. Viry shot.
Anna: Yes. Alright. As long as it’s short.
Timsun: Viry shot. Fist uv all, may I jist ask for reasons of making this surviy is randum is possible; do you live on yir own, or with a husbind, partner, fimily ur housemeat? And if you do not live alone, when was the most recint birthdiy in the house and if it was not yours ind the person is ahver eightin and is prisently it hame, is it possible to talk to this persin?
Anna: No. I mean - erm - yes, I live with someone, and it was his birthday last week, and he’s over eighteen, but he’s not home right now. So you’re going to have to speak to me.
Timsun: Oh.
Anna: Erm … sorry.
Timsun: It’s ah.k. Raaat. I would like t’ ask you abat the most recent holiday you hid.
Anna: Right, well, I went to Scotland in August. At the end of…
Timsun: WAIT. I will ask you a list of quistions, and ONLY THIN you will tell me abat your mest recent holiday, is that clear?
Anna: Erm. Yes.
Timsun: In the minths of Siptimber ind October uf this yir, How miny times have you been on holiday, and by holiday we count any night spint away from your house?
Anna: Well, one, but it wasn’t really a holiday. Only a night away. In October.
Timsun: And did this holiday cummince in the month of October or Siptimber of this yir?
Anna: … ? … October.
Timsun: So how many holidays commenced in Siptimber?
Anna: None. I mean, I haven’t been on holiday at all, but the one night I was away was in October.
Timsun: What? This wasn’t what you sid.
Anna: Yes it was.
Timsun: You said you’d been on holiday, and a weekend away.
Anna: No I didn’t.
Timsun: Yis. Yis you did. I kna you did. Hing on.

Tamsin reads through all the answers and questions so far. Although she is not directly speaking to me, I can hear her lips moving, a sotto voce version of the whole conversation, the whole last four minutes in real time, and, in the far distance, I believe I may be able to hear the monkey in her brain turning a little handle.

Timsun: Hing on, I just have to reset the quistions. Raht. In the munths of Siptimber ind October, haa miny holidays….

We went through the same questions again, and further managed to establish that I had been away for WAN night, that I had been staying ‘WITH FRINDS OR FIMILY’, and importantly that There Was No Way in the World That This Was Going to be a ‘VIRY SHOT’ Call. So let us pass a bit of time for you, reader. Imagine you are me. You have stupidly agreed to answer a phone survey. Answering the phone, you propped yourself on the arm of the sofa, your legs stretched out and crossed in front of you. Although this is slightly comfortable, you thought it was going to be for a VIRY SHOT TOIM.

Now, it seems increasingly likely that you will soon topple sideways off the sofa arm and into the bin. There is very little you can do to help this. Plus, you are talking to the woman with the most annoying voice in the world, and she is starting to make you laugh. You prospects are not good.

Gradually, we worked out the yes, I had been to Suffolk before, and that it hadn’t been hard to decide on the location for this, our one-night Octber commencing holiday…

Timsun: Did you, or your husbind, partner or na, hang on, you said you lived with a partner, didn’t you? Did you or your partner use iny of the following to pick your destination: Internit, brouchures, tillytixt, tillyvision, trivle agents, or other?
Anna: As I said, we went to his mum’s house.
Timsun: I’m sorry it his to be something from the list. Did you use internit, tillytixt, tillyvision, brouchures, trivle agents, other?
Anna: Erm. We used the fact that we were going to see his family, and if we’d gone anywhere else, they wouldn’t have been there. So… erm… I’m thinking that’s ‘Other’ is it?
Timsun: Thank you… ‘Other’. Right. I’m going to give you a list of ictivities, and I’d like you to give me a brief ‘Yis’ or ‘No’ to each. Is that clear?
Anna: Yes, but we were only there for a night. We didn’t do anything. Can we skip this bit?
Timsun: I Will Give You a List of Ictivities, You Will Ansa ‘Yis‘ or ‘No’. IS THAT CLEAR?

Anna: … yes …

I would like to point out, once more, that we had spent less than 24 hours on this ‘holiday’. I would like to point out that I had told her it wasn’t a holiday, and that I was forced to talk about it by Miss Survey Nazi 2004, and that yes, I had already mentioned to her that all we’d done was Go Out for an Indian Meal, and Drink LOTS of TEA.

Timsun: Skiing?
Anna: No.
Timsun: Snowboarding?
Anna: No.
Timsun: White Water rafting?
Anna: … No
Timsun: Scuba diving?

Reader, thirty more questions pass. As none of these questions are ‘Did you go for a curry at the only local Indian restaurant with a spare table’, all my answers, unsurprisingly, were

Anna: No
Timsun: Sky diving, parachuting or hing-gliding?
Anna:No.
Timsun: Birdorotherwildlife-watching?
Anna: No.
Timsun: Windsurfing, yotting or ather baating ictivities.
Anna: …
Timsun: Hello?
Anna: …. Sorry … Hang on … I’ll be alright in a minute …
Timsun: What’s so fanny?
Anna: (Snorts with laughter again. Sniffs. composes herself) Sorry. I was trying to remember if Suffolk was landlocked - I don’t think it … is … Hang on … no, I’m better. Go on.
Timsun: THINKyou. Windsurfing, yotting or ather baating?
Anna: (Barely hanging on.) …. no …
Timsun: Ah-k. Look. This is the last one uv those quistions. I promise Raaht? You are fanny. Raaht. Last one. Promise. Ah-k. Pony Trekking?
Anna: No.
Timsun: See? Thit wasn’t sah hard? Raaht. Nah I’m going to read aat a list of events you might have attended, and I’d like you to answer ‘yis’ or ‘no’ to each one. Ah-k? While you were on your holiday, did you attend… A Ballet? An Opera? … STOP LAUGHING, Ms Packard!

Eventually we got to the end of the questions. There were a lot, A Lot, A LOT of questions, each more nonsensical than the last, and half way through I was laughing so hard, I started crying, and we had to wait for a while for that to pass, but eventually it did, and…

Timsun: Noh, Ms Packard. For the sake of other research, although I promise your details will niver git used inywhere else, it would be ixtremely useful if I could ask a few quistions abaat your haaashold, is that ah-k?
Anna: Yeah, why not, sure, whatever, go ahead.
Timsun: Think you, Ms Packard, this is viry helpful of you. Nah, Aat of you and your partner, who is the head of haaashold?
Anna: I’m sorry?
Timsun: Who earns more, Ms Packard?
Anna: He earns more, a little. He’s worked at the same job longer than me and…
Timsun: So who is in charge of washing and cleaning?
Anna: Well, we both work - he just earns more. And we both clean and…
Timsun: I’ll just say you then, will I? That’s easier, isn’t it.
Anna: …
Timsun: And what type of job does your partner do?
Anna: He’s a journalist.
Timsun: And what does that involve?
Anna: He. Erm. He writes. And then it gets printed in a paper. He’s a journalist. I don’t know how to describe it. Journalist.
Timsun: And is that manual, or non-manual labour?
Anna: Apart from his arse and his fingers, which get pretty worked out, I’d say non-manual.
Timsun: And I’d just like to ask a couple of questions about education level. Is your partner educated to degree level, or to above degree level, such as having a masters degree?
Anna: I’m educated above degree level. I have a masters degree.
Timsun: Thit doesn’t mitter.
Anna: I thought it did. Doesn’t it?
Timsun: Nah, it disn’t, not at all. Your partner, is he edu…
Anna: Degree level.
Timsun: Think you.

And so it went on.
By the time we’d ascertained that my partner was very happy with his lot, he was nearly home. He’d phoned, leaving work, just before she rang, and I said I’d answer her questions in order to fill a small portion of the forty minutes it would takefor him to get home. Eventually, she filled it all.

Timsun Well, Ms packard, I would like to think you for taking part in this survey, and my name is inaudible-mumbling and if you hiv any complaints or quistions you can speak to my supervisor more-inaudible-mumbling on this-phonenumber-i’m-going-to-say-far-toofast-for-you-tohear. And may I ask, would it be alright if we contacted you in connection with future surveys?

No. I said.

No, it’s been so much fun this time, I said, I wouldn’t want to sully the memory by doing it again, I said.

I wish this conversation was made up, all of it, but it isn’t. I’ve been carrying it around in my head like precious blog-baggage for five days.
Sorry it was so long.
Believe me, the conversation was so much longer.

So. Much. Longer.
Sorry to make you sit through the whole thing.

But I had to sit through it the first time round, AND this time round.
No sympathy for you.

I’m the number one google return for mad oil rig bloke who has own country

Which is funny.
I would have expected it to be someone a bit more, y’know, George Bush-ish.

At the Ronald Reagan Ranting Republican Centre, Washington DC, thousands of people are chanting in the middle of the night…

“FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!”.

And the possiblilty that the evil, feeble-minded inbred monkey sonavabitch will stay in the White House looks strong.

But ‘Four more years‘?
No.
That’s just so not going to happen.
It just won’t.

Because. We’ll. Probably. All. Die. First.

Good morning, everyone!

Last night, I discovered that someone had been copy and pasting my content into their blog. In bulk. Every single entry (bar one, I think) that I found, was copied from this site (this site with the copyright thing on the sidebar? mm) and posted with no attribution. So I commented on her top post.

“Ace. Really good.

You know, it reminds me of something I wrote once.

here. (and at that point I linked back to when I’d written exactly the same thing right on this site, a few months ago)

I’m sure my readers would love the kind of writing you’re posting here - I’m happy to link to you - maybe we could exchange links? Maybe they’ll leave some comments.

Maybe that would make up for the ‘you completely infringing my copyright’ thing?

I’m really really glad if you like what I write. I’d be very very flattered if you linked to me. But as point four of your own university ‘how to…’ says:

‘You shouldn’t reproduce large quantities of material from elsewhere on the internet on your blog. Text and images that you find on other web sites are almost never legally reproducible on your own blog, even if you say where you got the text or images from. It’s far better to link to the material so that people can visit the site it came from and look at it there.’

And you shouldn’t pretend it’s your own. You’d do this with essays, too?”

I linked to her blog, my lovely sister got equally pissed off, also commented, and people have gone over and made comments, and I’ve complained to the university, my sister emailed, I think, and it’s possible my beloved went through the comments of every post and linked to the original, when I’d gone to bed, but I think Ms Barton, as I believe her to be called, probably got the idea now, or I would hope she has.

If she hasn’t, she’s really very very much stupider than I previously thought. And I already thought she must be pretty stupid.

She’s a new blogger. It could be argued that she didn’t know this wasn’t the right thing to do. But since the Terms and Conditions of her university run blogging site clearly state that this is not a good thing to do, and since she’s gone as far as changing some names in the posts to make them more applicable to her life, I have to think that she’s not really as naive as all that. When you change a name, you know you’re doing something bad, surely.

I know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
But what does that make stealing?

Update:
The very nice people at the university in charge of the whole university-blogging type thing have been in contact, and apologised on behalf of their student. And were very nice, generally. And every piece of stolen material has now been removed from the good woman’s site. So that’ll be Every Piece of Material Full Stop then…

*sigh*

Second news related thing of the day.

I do, I know, have a naive understanding of law enforcement, and scant understanding of guns and gun control, but I cannot begin to understand this story.

Background: Two members of the armed police division, five years ago, shot a man carrying a table leg in a bag, having been told that what has was actually carrying was- well here’s a quote:

‘The two officers fired the shots after mistakenly being informed that Mr Stanley - a Scottish painter and decorator who lived in London - was an Irishman with a sawn-off shotgun.’

There was one inquiry already, at which it was decided that nothing should happen to the two policemen (as far as I can gather, a sitting committee in the mid-1980’s decided this would be the general thing that happened when people shot people by mistake, that there would be no automatic suspension pending inquiry - ok, we take this as a given). At the most recent inquiry, however, it seems that a jury decided that the policemen should be held accountable. So the two policemen have been suspeded while a decision is taken whether they should have to undergo criminal proscecution.

At this news, an undisclosed number of armed police are kind of striking, refusing to carry their guns on duty, because they’re angry that their colleagues have been suspended prior to the possibility of further action.

Ok. So. The ‘happy liberal’ side of my brain is having a bit of a tough time with the ‘devils advocate surely there’s a logical reason for everything’ side of my brain.

The ‘happy floppy liberal’ anna says: ‘Oooh! What good news, there are less people with guns on the street!’

The ‘devils advocate there must be a good reason for everything’ anna, says: ‘Ah, but these are the nice people, the people who are protecting you, silly anna’

Floppy happy liberal anna seems surprised that someone might want to hurt her: ‘Oh dear! Which people are they protecting me from?’

The devils advocate anna tuts: ‘Why, from the dangerous people with the guns who shoot you for no reason, of course…’

Floppy anna: ‘The people with guns who shoot you in the head for carrying table legs on no strong evidence are protecting me from the people with guns who might shoot me for no reason?’

Devil’s Anna: ‘erm … yes’

… Oh. Well who’s going to protect me from them?

I understand, I do, I really do, that we need some armed police for some reason. We do. But I don’t understand why there’s anger that that there some has to be some form of establishing accountability. I know it’s aive. I’m sorry for being naive.

But if law enforcement are given firearms, and they shoot someone, and there are questions over whether they were at risk, or the information they’ve recieved on that person is shaky, or whatever, I don’t know, or if there’s any question about whether a firearm should have been used in that situation at all, then I would prefer that there was an accepted practice of inquiry, and yes, suspesion of the people that did the shooting until the thing is sorted out. They didn’t shoot to disable the risk. They shot to kill.

If an innocent person has been killed, or an unarmed guilty person that could otherwise have been brought to justice in a proper court, then… I don’t know. I realise I’m probably wrong, I’m sorry. I know very little about these things.

Maybe if I had any experience with violent crime, I would feel differently. Unfortunately, my only experience is with tablelegs.
(more…)

Preoccupied with news today.
There seems to be a lot of it, although turning on the news, or opening a paper, one would think that All the News In The World concerned little holes being punched in little bits of paper and a nation of people trying to decide between a short evil idiot monkey twat and a tall non-charisma-ed policy-vague haunted tree lookalike, a task I envy them not at all. Although, you know, personally I’d keep away from the little monkey bastard. But I don’t get to vote, so who cares?

So, just to prove there is Other news…

Including the information that today:

‘The Queen and Prince Philip are making a State visit to Germany, which is sure to provoke a load of tired, unfunny jokes about freeloading immigrants finally being sent back where they belong. ‘

Good. I like that joke.

Sleep was disrupted last night.
I think I may have been jetlagged from the move back to GMT from British summertime.
Delicate constitution, you see. Very Jane Austen.

For the last two hours of the night though, I watched a movie. And not any movie, I watched the new Bridget Jones Diary movie, whatever it’s called - ‘Bridget Jones 2: Diarise Harder’ or something. I watched the movie in my head. The whole thing. Renée Zellweger was in it, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant and a cast of thousands. It was pretty exciting.

Particularly considering that I’ve never read the book, have no idea what happens, and really hated the bits of the first book that I read. I saw the first movie, under duress - also under a duvet, as far as I recall, being ill and lacking the strength to reach the remote - And have no wish to see the sequel. The one that’s out at the moment. ‘Diarise another day’ or something.

But for some reason, that was what my sub-conscious decided to screen on my inbound flight to Monday morning airport today. A completely made-up, self-written, self-directed and self-cast version of ‘Bridget Jones: Diarise with a vengence’, or whatever the fuck it’s called. I was even in it.

The plot, as far as I can remember, went something like this:

Colin Firth, who we saw end happily ever after with big-squinty-face-zellweger at the end of the first movie, has spent the last 4 years in prison, for killing some people she wanted dead. This was never really gone into in the dream. The Hugh Grant character, who’d been caught sleeping with young boys, was back in the picture, and eager to get married. There was some comic relief, in the form of some clowns, and monkeys, and a hansome gay best friend, who I think I’ve carried over from the first movie but seemed to serve little purpose save for fulfilling some form of chiche quotient, which, as far as I remember was his main purpose in the real film too.

And then there was a really long coach journey with lots of very old people, a lot of mud, a windswept yorkshire moor where lemon-sucking-Zellweger wanted to get married wearing woolly hat with a pom-pom on it, a torn wedding dress and clutching her fatherless baby to her breast. I don’t know where the fatherless baby came into it either. But it was Very Sad.

These kind of dreams intrigue me though. Because I know that I can wake up after the half an hour and think “No, I don’t like where this is going, this is a bad dream, something nicer should happen”, and then I go back to sleep and change the course of what was happening so that things get slightly better. It’s good mental exercise. And mean that ncie things mainly happen to people in my dreams.

I have to admit, I didn’t make things go that much better for Old Squintface though. It’s not her fault, I suppose, it’s just the whole media: ‘thin person puts on small amount of weight looks almost normal let’s call her a porker/thin person then loses miniscule amount of weight, returns to skeletal, let’s all applaud’ routine that annoys me.

Anyway. Everything worked out ok. Colin Firth got his girl, once he’d been released from Prison (on conditional release, I think), and I think Hugh Grant’s character may have been killed by a Javelin or other field equipment, like a discus or something. That bit’s a little hazy.
Unfortunately.

It was first class. And I landed in Monday morning feeling like I’d had value for sleep.

So there we are. My nightly dreamservice provider has saved me the time and cost of having to go and see that Bridget Jones abomination. And perhaps you too, if you choose to believe that my version was probably quite close to the real ‘Bridget Jones 2: Die, Piggy piggy, die die diarise’ - it undoubtably was - then you won’t have to bother either.

No really, it’s fine. My pleasure.
Please return your headphones to the flightcrew passing through the cabin.