*IF Michelle Pfeiffer was a bathroom fitter. Look, I just needed a title that married films and the idea of paying for things, and in particular paying for bathroom fitters, and I liked the title, so let’s all just imagine that Michelle Pfeiffer’s a bathroom fitter for the sake of a pun now, shall we?

This has been bothering me since last night, and, actually for a long time before that, every time I watch an action movie.

Action movies worry me. Not just because they are very shouty and I find shouty things quite worrying - though that is also true - but because they present an anti-social problem with no solution. Or no solution that I have worked out yet. Perhaps you will help.

So the point of action films (as far as I know) is that there are explosions and high speed chases and also fighting and things. But these all take place in - to use the technical word - ‘locations’.

Actually, now I think of it, that’s the normal word as well. How convenient.

Whatever. My point is this:
(I do have a point, honestly; it is this:)

So last night we were watching a particularly violent fight. I don’t know if you’ve seen Star Bournes III: Return of the DeadGuy”
(and return and return and return and return and return of the dead guy. Literally, Matt Damon is possibly made of rubber) - but if you have, you will know there is a particularly violent fight. Or several. Hundred.

During one of them, two men had come crashing through the window of someone’s house, and were busily beating each other to death in a bathroom. My Beloved turned to check that I was all right, what with me being a nervous type and that. He found me staring at the screen, slightly slackjawed and upset-looking.

“Are you ok?” he hissed, worritly.

“Yes, but but but, this is HORRIBLE. I mean…”
I whispered, weakly
“… that is someone’s BATHROOM. They’re RUINING it. Who will FIX it?”
I demanded, quietly.

Writing it down, I’m not sure if it says more about ‘my shameful house-pride’ or ‘The sad decline of Western Society represented in this: that we are thus desensitised to violence and conversely oversensitised to hard furnishings, like bathroom suites and the like’.

It troubled me deeply (the bathroom thing, not the decline of civilisation thing, obv) and it filled our conversation all the way home.

“So the whole thing was an evil plot of the CIA?”

“Yes” he said.

“Who were those guys with the beards, mainly?”

“Yes” He said, patiently. He is used to describing complex bits of film plot that I have missed when my concentration has waned and I have spent some time looking backwards at the rest of the audience for inspiration for later writings.

“And they were caught? The baddies?”

“Yes” he said. (Oh! Sorry if you have not seen it, but please remember it was him who spoiled it for you, not me.)

“So they will have to pay, will they?” I pressed.

“Who?”

“The people who were at fault for the whole thing. They will have to pay damages and reparation and costs to all the people who had their cars smashed up. And the people in Morocco. The ones who need a new bathroom. They will buy them a new bathroom?”

He stopped walking and thought about this hard. Or laughed, or something. I don’t know, he was quite quiet, which can mean either.

“I don’t think so, Anna, no”

“Well why not? Did you SEE the damage that was made to other people’s property in the course of that series of events playing itself out? Lots of people who were just driving to work and got crashed into by a freedom fighter and half a dozen bendy agents”

“Bent agents.”

“Whatever! Or people who had left their car in a car park and are going to come back to the car park to find that someone’s nicked their car and driven it off the roof and the person who DID that is just fine because they’re a good guy - but this poor sod’s car? It’s fucked! Who’s going to get them a new car? And what about the person in Tangiers, they’ve gone off to work one morning, come back that evening, wanting dinner and maybe a shower, but they’re denied that, aren’t they, because not only is there some dead guy in there, but worse still, the whole suite’s been knocked clear out of the wall, so not only will they have to get that replaced and plumbed back in, they have to deal with the fact that someone’s gone and died in there as well. And they smell, you know, dead people. They excavate their bowels, and in a hot country they can start to go off quite quickly. And half their bloody windows are broken too, and there are bullet holes everywhere. Who will pay for all this to be fixed, do you think? And what about all those cars. And we don’t even know yet about victims of stray bullets! There might have been several! Dozens! More! Who will PAY?!”

He didn’t know.

We batted around the idea that after a official indictment process there might be room for some kind of civil suit, brought by individuals in a precedent setting kind of way, or by the whole group in an Erin Brockovich kind of way.

We did consider that possibly some of it might be covered by insurance, but overall that seemed unlikely.
The owners of the cars that kept getting ‘used’ by the hero were unlikely to be covered by third party insurance for him no matter how many identities he had.
The unfortunate householders with no more bathroom (and no more bathroom with a dead guy in at that) were going to find it hard to argue Act of God in a violent suite-destruction of a film that no one vaguely God-like was in.

The whole thing troubles me. These people rush about, saving the world, their loved ones, their arses, whatever, with absolutely NO regard whatsoever for other people’s personal safety or property. Have you seen how fast people drive during those car chases when they have to stop some bomb going off or whatever? It is RECKLESS, I tell you.

So I would like to know, if there are any great legal minds out there, who would be the person to pay for the damages that have been caused to all these blameless bystanders without any cars, or bathrooms or windows, or some other random thing? How are these people supposed to rebuild their lives once the world has been saved, or whatever was going on this time around?

I feel very sorry for them.

The bystanders.

It is a real overlooking, I think. On the part of the people investigating the CIA and the people who make films.

So you think on that, will you, greater minds than I? Think on the blame problem.

And in the meantime, I will be over here, writing a script about some plucky and beautiful young lawyer who agrees to take up the case of a whole crowd of people victimised by some destructive dogooder who’s saved the planet and trashed their stuff in the doing.

And in my script, the beautiful and plucky young (ish) (about 30 probably) lawyer will take on their case pro bono, because she is a good person, and because she cares about the little people. And because she’s nice. And witty, and a bit clever, although not clever-clever, and it could be said she doesn’t have a very long concentration span. And she will also be really quite similar to me, obviously. Though in the film, she may look a little more like someone prettier, like Julia Stiles. Or Kate Winslet. Or Michelle Pfeiffer**.

And in the end, she will win the case for all the little people and the bystanders, and they will all get new (possibly electric or hybrid) cars, and they will get good medical treatment for the stray bullets and runnings overs they have suffered, and they will get new windows, their laundry returned to them, their doors replaced. And they will get new bathrooms. Oh yes, they will have new bathrooms, all.

**See? It all comes back to Michelle Pfeiffer. Like in the title.
You doubted me, I know it.
I doubted myself, even. But it all comes back to Michelle Pfeiffer in the end.
Motto to live by.

You know it’s true.

I just went to the cinema. I don’t go often, which is a shame, but I do like to go occasionally. Usually to screenings of things that have already been on for a while, because, you know, there will be more choice of places to sit, and less twats.

Or so I thought.

Two minutes before the film started, two people walked in. One carried his coat in his hand, and, under the coat a (not very) mysterious-shaped squareness. They sat down, in the front row, the row in front of us.

And then withdrew two medium sized pizzas. And a large bottle of cheap lemonade. The kind made out of thin plastic that goes POP every time you drink out of the bottle which, fairly clearly, was exactly what they were going to be doing. And Pizza.

Two pizzas. Now, I haven’t been to the cinema in clearly FAR TOO LONG, because when did this become a thing that happens? Is this what “Dinner and a Movie” IS, nowadays? Because if so, then thank fuck I’m never planning on dating again, that’s all I can say.

Popcorn’s always been a movie food. I wasn’t ALL there with nachos, because where are people going to wipe their fingers from all the gooey gooey stuff? Yes, on the damn seats. I bit my lip when they introduced stinky hot dogs, because let’s face it, most people have finished those by the time they get to the screen, but TAKING YOUR OWN PIZZA IN? REALLY? Is this what happens now? Is this all right?

Ahem. I’m going to bed. But I needed to get that off my chest. Pizza. Taking your own takeaway pizza INTO the damn cinema. You know what? You’re not at home! You’re not in a pizza ‘restauant’ (which, incidentally, can have you served and out of there in under half an hour, and you can have conversation, you might think about it next time) You’re not round at your mates house …. You’re in the cinema! With other people! Other people that you don’t know, who have paid for … Sorry. Right.

Anyway, yes, the movie was very good. Jason Bourne was very tough, he was apparently made of teflon, he looked very butch and very tired and he Smelled Of Stuffed Crust Mighty Meaty.

I’m totally sticking to television from now on.

I cannot, for the life of me, type the word ‘just’.

See, I’ve jsut - ARG! - had to stop, right there, in that first sentence, and take it really slowly, because if I type that word at my normal speed - which is pretty hella-fast and reasonably hella-accurate for how fast it is, thanky very much - it will only come out as jsut. ARG!

I cannot correct this. It is, sadly, one of my ‘tic’ words that I use far too often anyway.

This means I spend more time than I should in incandescent rages at my inability to put on letter (u) in front of another (whichever one it’s supposed to go in front of). So, you know, that’s it. ‘ARG’.

Sorry, the post under this one was the one I meant to write this evening. I jsut (ARG! Seriously - not doing this on purpose to demonstrate, I cannot bloody help it) got really cross about the jsut thing. Arg. Go and read that other post. It has content.

Arg.

“Now, the thing about the tax allowances for the income band you’re talking about, is that … Sorry, do you know about this already?” The smiley accountant enquired of me, smilingly.

“What?”

“About what I was just saying. About the tax bands and the excess penalties for income regrading increments… Did you know about these already?”

He waved some papers around for emphasis. I think they were the same papers he had just been waving about a couple of sentences previously, but it was hard to tell. They had numbers on. Little numbers. Lots of them.

“Oh, yes. I mean no. No.”

“I just don’t want to patronise you by telling you things you already know.” Said the kindly accountant, kindly.

I had to put him at his ease. It was my duty as someone who was probably going to be paying him quite a lot of money.

“Please, don’t worry about that. On no account must you think I know anything at all. Think of me, when it comes to any of this, as a tiny, tiny child, wide eyed at your feet, begging for your nuggets of financial brilliance.”

I didn’t really say that.

But perhaps I should have done. Instead I made some friendly ‘Uhuh!’ noise, and smiled like a simpleton. I think he got my measure when, a minute later, I brought out the bank statements and bills that I’d brought as proof of address and handed them over, unopened.

“Do you mind if I open them?” Asked the mild-mannered accountant, mildly. “Only it’s easier to photocopy them if we do…”

“Open them?” I replied, as if the concept of opening these vile little missives had never crossed my mind - or had and had been decided to be far too untidy a concept. “Oh yes, you should open them. Probably. I don’t know what they say” I said, needlessly.

It was recommended to me (by someone who knows me very well, we might gather) that since I was having to move into this self-employed status thing, I should probably, and with some sense of urgency, get myself an accountant as soon as I went freelanceish.

So I did. I had the people around me who are cool enough to know self-employed people of a certain type to ask them for their advice and recommendations, if they had any, of accountants in the Brighton area.

‘This guy …’ one friend of my beloved suggested, ‘… He’s really good. So good that every time I go around to see him I expect to see him chucking filing cabinets out of the window while the police try and get through the front door - but no, it’s all comepletely legal! He’s brilliant!’

And so he might be. And as soon as someone can explain to me what he does, I do, or in fact any of them - whoever ‘they’ are - do, I will be convinced of that brilliance. In the meantime, I am convinced mainly that he seems a nice and smiley man.

As far as I am aware, he is now in the process of ordering me some kind of VAT. Then, when the time is appropriate, I will place all my receipts and other pieces of paper in and out of envelopes IN his vat, and then he will wave his hands over them, reciting some special words and sections of accountancy manuals, and then some, you know, magic happens, and I pay some vague amount of money to someone, somewhere, and give some to him as well, for being lovely.

I have never been good with money.
I would go as far as to say I have been bad.
Very bad, at times.
Very very bad.
I know things in theory, and I can see what they might possibly mean in practice, but as soon as I’m presented with some cold hard Thing on a piece of paper, with numbers and words and dates and on, I get very confused, and I panic.
It may as well be in Russian.
In fact, I feel quite sure that often, it is, and they’re only doing it to fool me.

Whoever ‘they’ might be.

This time, I am being good.

Though I had it somewhere in mind that ‘having an accountant’ meant something about putting every piece of paper that ever touches your fingers in a large shoebox and then, at a certain time of year, handing them all over and running away.

I am assured this is not the case. My kindly accountant explained in no uncertain terms that I will pay him for the amount of time they have to take sorting out my pieces of paper, and if I keep my pieces of paper - or “paperwork”, for apparently ‘paperwork’ can be on the pooter as well - very nicely and neatly, it will take them less long to process, and I will pay them less.

I think by this point in the meeting he had realised he was communing with a moron, someone with all the financial nous of a nosebleed.

It was most kind of him to explain this so well, I think.
And also sensible.

So I left my meeting with my new Kindly Accountant feeling generally quite buoyant if somewhat confused about the whole accountancy ‘thing’. I immediately phoned my Beloved.

“What a nice man he was!”

“Is he?”

“Yes, he’s lovely. He should be your accountant too. You should phone him and make an appointment, and you should go and see him and speak to him about taxes and things. Perhaps you should go next week?…”

“Um …”

“Yes, let’s do that. And then you can listen to him, and then you …. And then you can tell me what all his kindly words meant.”

“Anna, what confused you? …”

“Anything after I said what I did for a living. That was where we lost each other. That was when I stopped talking, and he started talking. In Russian. I think.”

Whatever, I have an account that I’m siphoning some large percentage of everything into, and I have boxes in which I put different flavours of pieces of paper.

And I’m sure everything will be fine.

This is as financially technical as I get: The day of my appointment with the Kindly Accountant, I came home, and sorted out my filing system. This involved crayons, scissors, and origami paper.

I didn’t mention it at the time, as I was having attacks of the toobusies, but a couple of weeks ago, I spotted an advert in the weekend of a reputable national newspaper, and was so taken by it I was compelled to tear it out and keep it, neatly folded, in my diary.

The advert was for some remarkable garden implements - I hesitate to call them decorations - in the shape of four meerkats, one in a neckerchief. A neckerchief.

It (the ad) was notable for several reasons.
For the mad staring eyes of the usually adorable animals.
For the fact that one of them was depicted, for no reason anyone could tell, in a neckerchief. (A neckerchief!)
For the explanation that they were made out of ‘finest waterproof polyresin’ - or “Plastic”, as most of us know it.
For the realisation that not only were they quite the most unappealling bush adornment since pubic scrunchies, they were also (be still my bouncing heart) ON SPRINGS. Surely the only thing better would have been to have them fitted with motion sensors so that they could slowly turn and watch whoever was walking up the path. Oh, and they’d need glowing eyes then as well, I suppose. Which may drive up the price a little, but I think it would clearly be worth it.

I was enchanted by the advert. These things were terrifying, drug-crazed bouncing abominational representations of the usually-cutest critters of African scrub, and against all rational thought, I loved them. And hated them. And also loved them. Whatever, I tore out the advert, and as I say, I folded it gently, and tucked in the back of my Moleskine.

If you look carefully, you can see that they have spelt the one thing they are trying to sell wrongly about five lines into the text. “The mere cats sit individually…” Bless their socks.

I hoped I would see the meerkats again. Sorry, the ‘mere cats’. Apart from the next day, I mean, when I turned up at a pub to find that two other people I was meeting there had ALSO ripped it out to show to people, so great were those meerkats.
I mean ‘those mere cats.’

So anyway. Accompanying my mother on some errands around the Isle of Mull, we turned up at a nice lady’s house to deliver some things, and just as I was peeking around the box of stuff I was carrying to negotiate the path, what should I see in the gateway but this.

A mere cat. A real one, on his spring, IN THE WILD.

This was brilliant. I shuffled up to the nice lady’s door and deposited my box of stuff, making cursory politnesses while backing away, turning, and sidling and sprinting back to the car to get another box. Oh, and my camera. That’s why these are slightly fuzzy. They were taken covertly, snapping at my side while waving polite goodbyes to the nice lady.

The nice lady who bought the mere cats. The someone out there that actually did BUY the bastard things.

And, after all I said, the slights I visited upon the Neckerchief (NECKERCHIEF, though?!) I have to say this one, this shifty fellow doing something morally dubious in the long grass has to be tip top favourite.

He’s at least urinating.

And that’s the least stomach-churning option I’ve come up with, so you should thank me for keeping my quite vile imagination to myself.

*shudders*

Ahoy, me hearties, and a Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day to ye all!

In honour of this, I be postin - for all ye desklubbers - a link to this here beauty of a thing, which I know I post a link to every year, and I’ve no idea from whence it originally came, me laddies, but strike me down if Defective Yeti isn’t a always a fabulous blog, and it’s as good a place from me to think it came from as any. Arrr.

If ye’ll be wanting to joining in with the spirit of Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye’ll be finding a handy glossary of terms ‘ere.

Shiver me timbers, etc! And happy ITLAP Day! Arrrrrr!

My first day as a self employed person, or kind of, went sort of alright. After a few days of holiday, and some other technicalities that I will get my accountant to explain, yesterday was sort of, kind of, my first day as a

It begun well. Oh yes. Beginning was very good. I was very good at beginning. I came back from the gym, the gym being both part of The Plan, and on The List of Things To Do. I made myself a cup of healthy green tea (with things and stuff in that are good for the brain and things), and sat in my newly cleaned and organised study (for cleaning and organising were also on the List Of Things To Do, and also in The Plan). (Are you noticing what I have mainly been doing? I have mainly been employing myself writing lists. Lots of lists)(And Plans). Then I started work, and went tap tap tap tap tap. At lunchtime, I stopped for lunch and made myself an mostly-egg-white omelette (Plan/List) and allowed myself a short break while I hung up some washing and went out to buy some milk. And then I went back to work. Tap-tap-tap tappy-tappy-tap.

At 11pm I was still sitting with my computer, trying to figure out whether I was supposed to stop working or not.

So “Starting Work” - fine, good at that, got that in hand.

“Stopping Again” needs adding to the list.

End of last week, possibly Friday

Dear all,

I realise my postcards so far have been more reflective than informative, so this time I am writing to fill you in with an entirely factual postcard containing everything I know about semi-marine biology.

Ahem.

This is some beachworm poo. Beachworms tunnel through the sand with their mouths open and their bottoms closed, and then when they are full all the way from the very front to the very back, and having extracted all the edible minerals from the sand, they rise to the surface, closed their mouths and open their bottoms and empty themselves out in the way demonstrated above, and always in neat little piles.

The large quantity of neat little sand piles on this beach indicates that there is either one very very hungry sandworm, or many sandworms finding not very much edible in the sand they are processing. Whichever it may be, it is certain fact that all the edible minerals have been removed from the piles left on this beach, and that there is therefore probably very little point in eating them.

Weather is mostly overcast with light showers overnight and sunny spells as the morning progresses. Wish you were here etc.

a
xxx

Postcard from about ten days ago on a Wednesday. The above picture may or may not be a sleeper train

Dear all!

Excuse the shaky typing, but we are aboard a train, and, as you can see from the 100% authentic photographic evidence above, it is very dark. And cramped. And I am a bit drunk.

See, some people mocked when I said I was going to have my last day at work followed by my leaving drinks, followed immediately by the night train to Glasgow, but to them I say ‘Ha! I have shown YOU! Apart from My Beloved leaving his laptop in the pub, along with the charging lead for mine and other essential things he needed, it has all gone Swimmingly! So what do you say now?!” And then I will ignore whatever they say next in the blissful knowledge that I have shown them, and am as right as ever.

Do you know that if you plan far enough in advance you can get these things called ‘Bargain Berths’ for £19? And you get to lie down all the way up the country, which in theory is much cheaper than usual. AND you get breakfast, offered to you upon your embarkment by an efficient if somewhat surly train person. I don’t know if they are less surly if you pay more for the ticket. ”

“As it a Barrrrgan Berrrrth?’ They say, with disdain. Yes, you say. “Brrrekfust in the morrnin. Tea, Coffee, Orange Juice.” Oooh, lovely, you say. “NO,” they say “Whuch ONE?” And if you don’t answer correctly they probably make you sleep in the toilet or something, which, in common with all train toilets, flushes one time out of six and has four sheets of toilet paper per jourrrney.

Anyway, it’s very good, because the environment smiles upon you and you get a big tick in Al Gore’s book of people who’ve been good this year, and you wake up hours and hours nearer to where you most want to be, and then you’re in the islands by lunchtime, hurrah.

Weather is out there, but in the dark, so difficult to record with any degree of certainty. Glad you’re not here, as it’s quite cramped enough with just the two of us, thanks.

a
xxx

A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday

Dear all,

Well, here we are, celebrating the glory of facial hair at the 2007 Beardy Tash Bonanza, being held, luckily for us, in Brighton.

Though the initial temptation had been to turn up for the parade and nothing else, we decided that since the next competition is not for two years, and then in Alaska, it was a life experience we could not possibly miss out on. For the first hour we were unsure about spending the vast majority of the day cheering men for their ability to grow hair where men are meant to grow hair, but after being presented with moustaches of our own, and realising that it was possible to sneak out and sneak back in with vast amounts of alcohol, we got very much more into it.

By mid afternoon, I was shouting ‘COME ON NUMBER SEVEN BEARD!’ with the best of them, and by the time the finals rolled around I was rolling up to second placed mutton-choppers and passionately telling them that They Was Robbed, Mate. Which they seemed very pleased by, even though I couldn’t put my finger on a direct German translation of the phrase.

The whole thing was terribly jolly, with lots of pictures being taken of the men with impressive beards on their own, but, weirdly, even more pictures being taken of men with beards posing with this lovely but unfortunate young couple who had the bad judgement to fall drunkenly and heavily asleep next to a busy thoroughfare.

Anyway. Weather is outside, but generally overcast and mild. Wish you were here etc.

a
xxx

PS - here is proof that we were really there at all.

And here I am being sad. I am sad because my moustache is losing its essential glue.

I think it is the saddest face I have ever pulled.

I have been remiss. There was I, with blithe promises of postcards during my brief hiating, and postcards you have had none. Which while it makes the hiatus more hiatey, is no good in terms of me keeping my word.

So over the weekend I will present some retrospective postcards to fill the gap.

They might come thick and fast, so if you come late to the postcard party, don’t just comment on the top one, comment on anything you desire to, just you go right ahead etc, be at your leisure, hurrah.

1) Because I miss it.
2) I’m getting all twitchy.
3) I’m about to start my new life as a self-employed writerer-thing, and I need somewhere to write for myself again.
4) I miss you lot. Seriously.
5) Life has calmed down. I am feeling better.
6) Because my mother said I had to. She said if I don’t, she’s going to have to ring me Every Single Day to find out what I’ve been doing. In Full. No one wants that.
7) Because it’s ma’blog, dammit. It IS me. Yes, that’s tragic, so what?
8) I’m addicted.
9) There were some things I had to tell you. I’ll tell you in a minute. Oh, nothing important. Mainly beans.
10) It is time.

Yay! Yay blog. Yay.