I have no idea what’s going on. I slept an hour on a plane, I think, and then I did the bad thing and slept on and off all day and… Well. Urgh.

Still. I have been away, in a bunch of really bizarre and beautiful and interesting places. And now I am back, and as soon as I know what day it is and have written up the stuff I have to write up about it by contract, I will tell you about some of the other bits. It was the Deep South. In one 24-hour period it rained 9 inches of rain - thunder, lightning, all that. And then it was very sunny and I got a bit burned. I went bird-spotting, toured battleships, played with my lovely new camera, ate deepfried everything, and got locked in a small room with baby tigers.

How. How did I get here? How?

Whatever.

One photo, for the meantime, until I get my head together …

It wasn’t.

It was just ketchup. But what does that MEAN?

Literally.

Well, not literally literally, unless you count planes.

But I am suddenly going away for a couple of days, quite by surprise.

Mainly I will be eating deep fried matter, and looking at things and saying ‘ah, really?’ and taking notes and asking clever questions - but if I do happen upon some internet it will be my first (or, in all honesty, second) priority to pop in and say hello. Or whatever the equivalent of ‘hello’ is in the place I am visiting.

One interesting thing, I have recently learnt that one chunk of the couple of days we are visiting will be spent in a wildlife sanctuary holding a particular endangered animal that we will be looking for, at, and to - for inspiration, admiration, and material for our eventual articles.

Sadly, I think if they realised how I felt about that particular kind of animal, they may realise that it may end up more endangered when I leave than it was when I arrived.

Anna Pickard, mouse-phobic. In a mouse sanctuary.
I couldn’t ask for better blog material.
Game On, my friends.

I am, on first meeting, an awkward person. I’m apparently nowhere near as awkward externally as I feel internally - but then, only a large mammal with a brain the size of a small vegetable, limbs the size of yule logs and some kind of weird degenerative disease that mainly manifests in communicating in yeses and ums, blushing and drinking too much to compensate until it fell over would actually be as awkward as I am internally. Everyone else seems to think I do fine.

Or at least, that used to be the case.

But that may have been before I started curtsying.

Even the people who used to think I was a perfectly presentable social being have started having their doubts since I started curtsying.

To be fair, I have only done it two times. Or three. Three times. Which is hardly any, in a span of years. But one man’s ‘hardly any’ is another man’s beginning of a worrying trend. Especially if the latter man has started curtsying. And is a lady.

I am not explaining well. I will explain better.

The problem, generally, is that I am not good with social status. I have never understood why one person of higher career standing or wealth or class or whatever should deserve a different level of respect in conversation than another. Either you respect and like people, or you don’t. I do like people in general (apart from those around me on trains, who are generally idiots, obv) and so I treat them with the same amount of courtesy and respect as I would the next person, unless the next person happened to be one of the idiots on this train, in which case I would naturally despise them. (Obv).

However, this is not the way it works.

Apparently, according to the mysterious and unwritten rules that govern offices, businesses and social transactions - which really should be written down at some point, and believe me, when I have a moment, I will get on to it - people must be treated in different ways depending on their relative management standing (to yours, not to, like, the station manager at Brighton station, although he too has his rules), sex, social class, desk distance, age, ‘political’ connections to other people in similar positions, allegiances, common acquaintances and some kind of extra-special complex ‘networking’ rules than no one knows, not even God.

So for example I may make a joke with someone who works on the next bank of desks to mine, when working in an office situation, though if they are my hierarchical superior it should be at my own expense rather than theirs, and I should avoid touching - such as laying a hand on their arm - while telling the joke. I should greet them with an informal wave, even when standing only feet apart, because it is apparently inappropriate to do any other.

IF, however, I see them an hour later outside work, I should greet them with a kiss (on ONE cheek only, we are not close) (or foreign, or pretentious) because we are both female and our partners, now present, are shaking hands. My partner apparently outranks hers, but I’d be fast asleep before you explained to me how. She, meanwhile, IS fast asleep. On my shoulder, which is apparently fine as we are now best buds after that joke earlier of which she was - lets face it - the punchline.

The next day she will nod to my small informal finger wave once more. What with her being my superior and that.

I have friends I work with who - if I was going out for lunch with them in the course of a work day, and talking about work, I would have no physical contact with. If we are planning on talking about things other than work, we will kiss on the cheek, possibly two - because we ARE pretentious (and, in some cases, foreign too! Two for two! Although I should note it’s not actually pretentious if you are foreign. ‘Foreign’ is also a term that seemed much funnier when I used it once several paragraphs ago and now just doesn’t at all).

Oh, I don’t bloody know. I’ve just always been rubbish at these things, and, added to shy … well, you just have someone who is fine when they’re in control of a situation, and know what the rules of that situation are supposed to be.

“When someone says this, that means we’re being informal, and it’s alright to call them a twat, because it is funny rather than sackable in this particular situation. (And besides which, they DO happen to be a twat, so everyone will laugh)”

“When someone speaks to you in this tone, it is because they are assuming their professional character, and therefore it is only appropriate to respond to them in *these* terms, because they are your manager in this situation rather than your mate. Even if they ARE being a twat.”

Clearly I find it all a little confusing. But generally, all is fine - I’m a capable social person, with little desire for terrifying ‘networking’ type activities and no one but me would generally know how self-aware I am in these situations.

However, there are so many rules, and so many different situations, that occasionally my brain implodes.

Someone says ‘congratulations!’ for something I have yet only told friends about. If we were in a pub, I would say ‘I know!’ and ‘Yay!’, and possibly clasp their hand. But we are not, and they are being professionalish, so my brain short circuits. Or I meet someone that I have been informal with on email, and feel friendly toward, and we have friends in common, but have never met, and I know them to be superior to me, as well as useful, and interesting, and though I would like to know what to do, I don’t. So my brain implodes.

And I bob my head in acknowledgement, and, without thinking about it, apparently the rest of me as well.

At some point shortly after, I will find some excuse to walk away.

“Did she just CURTSEY?
They will ask my beloved.

“Yes”
He will sigh.

Annually this happens now, and just as my seeester keeps track of flying ant day each year, I in turn can easily keep track of ladybird infestation. And how?

Because they come here, and they tell me about it. The people of Britain have an insatiably need to come here, to this little blog, right here, this one - hello - and tell me they have ladybirds. In their flat. Possibly emanating from their window frames. And there are lots of them, and they don’t know what to do, and can I help.

I can’t.

But this, apparently, is what I get for writing a post that now has ridiculously powerful googlejuice when you search for certain phrases. I have mentioned this before. Because it has happened before. And the more it happens, the worse I feel, the more powerless to help.

So anyway. I need you. I need your help now. Not me, them. THEY need you.

Thing is - I know this blog doesn’t have the biggest amount of readers in the world - I don’t mention base words like ‘usb‘ or ‘libertarianism‘ or ‘economical‘ or ‘winkie‘ often enough for that - but I do like to think of you all as quality readers. Very much so, in fact.

I suspect - though have no way of knowing, of course - that most of you are probably award-winning scientists or doctors or nobel laureates or something (hello Doris!), and know far more than me, which frankly isn’t hard. I have tried to give them a hint with my tag line which, for a while has read ‘Not knowing as much about ladybirds as everyone seems to think I do since 2005‘, which is true. But they have not taken the hint.

So please, if you wouldn’t mind bestowing your biological or entomological knowledge upon these poor, desperate people, could you?

The post in question is here.

And if you can say anything to help them, I’d be - they’d be - much obliged if you would. Because I’m getting a few comments a day on there at the moment. They need you. YOU. They do.

Only help, mind. If you’re going to say anything mean or take the piss out of them, I won’t allow it. But if you are all secretly experts in small coloured winged bugs in your real lives (or even not, I don’t give a shit, if you know ANYTHING at all about the little fucktards) can you help these lost internet souls? Please?

I have a new box. It is a fashionable type of box - possibly the most fashionable kind you can get without surgery. It arrives once a week, and contains fruit, vegetables, and approximately 18 metric tons of middle-classness, as far as I can work out.

Yes, I’ve got an organic box (0898…). I was always assuring my Little Mother that yes, I was eating all the fruit and vegetables I could possibly stomach and oh, yes, if I had the choice I would be getting an organic box, but oh, no, all the commuting meant I couldn’t.

And then I stopped commuting. So on Friday morning, a nice man knocks on the door and he hands me a box, and I hand him a flattened box, and we smile and we nod, and then he buggers off again, and I take my box and bring it inside and look at it for a while and decide not to open it for now, because I made that mistake last week, and was suddenly confronted with a bit of an anticlimax. Or ’some vegetables’.
Some vegetables AND a bit of an anticlimax.

So, all the rumours I’ve heard turn out to be true. Getting a “Locally-sourced blah blah blah something something box” (TM) basically involves getting some of the vegetables you might normally buy, if given the choice, and some other boxes, that you never buy (or, in my case, have never heard of) and they’re not bad looking, but filthy - all covered in dirt, oh the inconvenience, damn them, what do they think we’re going to do, wash them etc.

This week, my box was particularly exciting - unlike last week, when my box was quite fruity - as it contained several things I quite literally could not identify. By Saturday night I was desperate, and was sending my first-ever picture texts to friends, begging for them to explain what this THING was. “It’s the size of a baby’s head. But solid. And nubbly. I think I may have discovered a vegetable. Or the decapitated head of a tiny mutant child. Pls help me.”

Sadly, I hadn’t. I held in my hand, we eventually discovered, some celeriac, which I had eaten, mashed, but never seen (not an adventurous eater, traditionally. I’m working on that). I had to send a follow up text asking ‘what the stuff that looks like celery might be, then?’ - only to be told that it was probably celery.
And discover one despicable Bloody Mary later that it was fennel.

Still, I’m quite proud of myself, because this I’m finding a new kind of productive to work through sad-holes, because my god, but I’m utilising my box (0898…)

Today, heh-hem, I made Soup, which was lovely and winterish, if eye-wateringly peppery due to a miscalculation and gruel-foolingly lumpy due to a lack of one of those electric blendy things. And also, also - my friends - I made muffins.
I made Courgette Muffins (some may call’em Zucchini, whatevs: as long as you can make muffins out of them, who cares).

And so it begins. I’m quite pleased with my new plan of ‘Finding Some Random Recipe On The Internet’ (which clearly plays second fiddle to the ‘Naming the Vegetables Filling My Box’ plan (0898) which, I’m guessing, is often going to come first by necessity) so I may document some of my variable triumphs here.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to become a bakey-blogger. Because mainly, I still can’t really cook.

But for as long as this weekly-box stubborness pervades, I’ll try and note down some of the nicer things I’ve managed to badly make.

Now. What the fuck am i meant to do with pears. Are there pears? Well whatever. If they are, what the fuck am I supposed to do with them?

I knew it had arrived, when it arrived solidly heavily, and with a couple of days worth of tears last week.

There had been rumbles, and shadows, but by last week, it was beyond reasonable, or, in the case of depression, unreasonable doubt.

For anyone who hasn’t been around here long enough to know that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, I do, and then some.

I won’t, as usual, say very much about it, because this year I am determined to start finding ways to treat it, because I do not want to be this person anymore. It is not pleasant, or productive, or good, or fair.

But in case you notice, me falling into more holes that usual and finding longer to claw out, yes, that’s why, it’ll only be five months or so, stick with me.

I hate this, I really do. Because I get to this time, and one part of me feels the giant sigh that is filling my chest, and pushing tears to a permanent position behind my nose, the thinning of my skin and the dulling of my confidence, and the shortening of my temper and blunting of my wit and it looks around and takes in all the filthy signs of sads that cover me and that one part of me says “Oh! Oh of course! THIS is who I am. I’m this shit sad person. I was being stupid when I thought I could be anything else. Of course. Silly, silly, silly, silly me. Stupid me. This me is the real one.”

So there. That’s how I am. I’m staring into another five months of it and trying to remember how I did this last time. That’s how I am.

I’m trying to work on it, as productively as I can.
Please don’t lets talk about it much, you know I’m not good at that.
I just wanted to warn of the usual patchy blogging.
Please don’t feel you have to advise.
And neither need you think I’m looking for sympathy - not, would so far as to say I’m anti-it, and would really prefer never to hear a pitying noise ever, really. My intention was just a statement of fact.
It’s something I need to do. I need to fix this.

I found this photo while I was up at my mother’s house. You’ll have to excuse the quality, my scanner seems to be upfucked, so I have had to take a picture of the picture with my other camera. Anyway. I found this photo at my mother’s house. It was in a large box, containing loose photos from all sorts of family holidays, celebrations, all the usual schlocktolligans. After staring at it for a moment, it suddenly became one of my favourite pictures of me ever. I will explain why.

This is me and my cousin feeding some horses somewhere near my uncle’s house in Cheshire.

That cute little child in the anorak so innocently proffering the grass to the pretty horsie?
Yeah, that’s not me.

That’s my cousin, younger than me by a year or so. She is a country-girl, or country-ish, who has been around horses and such, and holds out a handful of grass as a treat for the nice friendly animals. She also is very cute. I am the other person feeding horses in the photo.

What do you mean ‘Which other person?’

There, right on the far right hand side, you can see a pair of trembling hands holding a hat, yes? A hat with some grass in it? Yes. That is me feeding the horses.

See, I was a somewhat nervous little child (who has grown into a somewhat nervous woman) and I wasn’t very sure abut the horses. I was scared, because they are large, and powerful, and have enormous teeth, and could kill you without a second’s thought. They are scarier even than cows, and cows, as we all know, are hellascary. They are not as scary as mice, but then nothing is. Still, for a miniature Londoner, who doesn’t see ANY of these wild beasts on a regular basis, I imagine these were quite the scariest things ever.

But, nervous as I was, I was clearly still willing to attempt to engage with the ‘feeding horses’ concept. Most likely my mother was standing just behind me, reminding me how much I liked a certain story book with horses in, and how much more exciting it must therefore be to actually feed a real horse.

Sadly, she can’t get me to actually hold the grass in my hand, no, that would quite obviously (in my mind) lead to the early loss of most of my lower arm. I can picture it now. I had a very good point. So I put the grass in my rainhat, and the horse could eat out of that. The only remaining problem is that, clearly, no one could persuade me to move close enough for the horse to be able to reach the hat and thus be fed from it.

And my solution? - I think this is why I love this photo so much - I am THROWING the grass, FROM the hat, AT the horse. If you look carefully, you can see the blur of movement where the grass is flying through the air. That’s my idea of communing with nature. That’s as far as I get toward Doolittleness. That’s it.

I love it. It’s just so very accurate to me now. It’s very me. And infinitely sensible, too. Huge, murderous wild, angry beasts they obviously were - just look at them. My city instincts were as keen then as they are still - anything that lives and breathes in the world and yet doesn’t appreciate the beauty of a fancy coffee and the weekend papers is frankly never to be trusted.

Anyway, I was suddenly reminded of this when someone told me I have to go horseriding for some work related thing in a couple of months. That, obviously, is going to be brilliant. I quite literally can’t wait. Let’s have a look at that photo again.

Terrifying, I’m sure you’ll agree. That hoss clearly has a murderous look in his eye.

Thanks to someone sending me a link to a cartoon site, I lost a good few hours the other day.

There was one that I found very inspiring, though, though I’m not sure I can put my finger on why.
I just did. Very much.

- When I was studying, I used to wake up feeling ready and prepared for my day, knowing that I’d read all the required reading for that day’s class. It was often only on the bus - sometimes not until the third question of the class - that I would realise that I had dreamt of reading, after falling asleep in the first few pages. I had not a clue what actually happened.

- When I worked in a crisp factory, I used to dream I was packing crisps. This, in the four hours sleep between getting home and having to get up again. When I woke, mentally exhausted from packing things into boxes, I got up and did it again. Don’t feel too sorry for me, I only did it for three days. Fuckin’ students, eh?

- When I worked as a craft worker, I led candle-making sessions in my head, dealing with the people I’d see the next day, tidying things away, waking up to find there was still mess.

- The last few years, I would sleep heavily and dream that I was adding layouts to pages, ticking widget options and copying scribbling IDs, adding links, uploading furniture and checking and rechecking the sitebuilding I’d done in my dreams to make sure it all would work on the live site.* Stumbling bleary eyed into work, I would start rechecking my checking of the whole thing to discover it hadn’t been done.

- Now, I’m having new dreams. I dream that I am looking at my shiny new corkboard, covered in little tatty bits of paper detailing the things I have to do, by which day, and how many words they are. I take a piece of paper, and sit down to think at my computer. Then in several more hours, I drift in and out of sleep, composing the world’s most perfect little piece on the project I have elected to work on. I make nice little turns of phrase, silly little pieces of wordplay so huggably clever that, generally, I end up turning off the alarm and allowing myself another ten minutes sleep, because I know I now have twenty minutes less work when I do get up.

And then I get up. I try noting down some of the gems that swum around my brain as I drifted between sleep and the snooze button. Aaaaaaaaand I realise they’re not very clever. They’re all right, but they’re a bit obvious, really.

But quite beside that, they happen to be about a television programme I don’t have to write about at all, or an event that wasn’t on my diary of things to write about.

And most usually - take my word, this is the thing that’s killing me - because They Do Not Exist. Not even slightly. Not only am I writing things which aren’t as goos as my semi-conscious self might believe, but they’re for non-existent projects on non-existent subjects.

The thing that’s driving me insane is that I can’t work that out when it happens again, and it does happen around half the nights of the week. I can’t tell myself to get out of my damn bed because this time, like last time, it’s all bollocks, because I just don’t think to, curled up, my finger on the snuz.

And no, I can’t put a sign up on my bedside table reminding myself to ‘Stop Writing, It’s All In Your Head’, because that might put my sleepy head off as well, and that’s when I come up with the good (relatively good) shit.

It is a quandary. I like my head. I just wish the snooze-happy brain within it wasn’t so bloody-minded, and so utterly utterly wrong so utterly utterly much of the time.

(more…)