Proving, as ever, that we at least attempt to be the perfect houseguests, my beloved and I had the following conversation on Sunday Morning at the lovely house in which we had stayed the night before:

- “You were a while.”
- “I was in the toilet.”
- “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
- “Well, yes. Anyway. And I got a bit paranoid, in case everyone was going in there before we left the house, so I wanted to spray some air freshener. Or something. In case there was someone just waiting to come in.”
- “Right…”
- “So I picked up a can from beside the sink, because it looked like deodorant”
- “…”
- “…And it wasn’t deodorant. It was shaving gel. And it came out in a long, aerial blue stream, all the way across the bathroom.”
- “Oh. Um…”

Only the first 5% of the time upstairs, it transpired, had been toilet time. The rest had been spent cleaning shaving foam off the toilet lid. And the tiles. And the wall.

Ladies and gentlemen: check the label before you push the button.

Thinking, breathing deeply, trying to rationalise something out. Please excuse me.

1. Things that are nice about the internet
a) Pictures of kittens.
b) Wikipedia.
c) Real-time rainbow location tracking devices.
d) You can buy any kind of hat you can imagine. Hats made of fabric, hats made of plastic, made of fur, hats made of meat, hats made of other hats. Hats that are very small, hats that are giant. Hats for your cat. Hats made of cat. Seriously, there isn’t a hat that you could want that you cannot find on the internet. It’s a miracle.
e) The glory of email.
f) Finding people with similar interests that you can hang out with. Even if they’re on the other side of the world and you only get to hang out with them in cyberspace, it’s completely amazing.
g) The little bite-sized glimpses of people’s lives that twitter gives you.
h) Shopping sites that deliver that THING you want, the very morning after you suddenly decided you wanted it, and then realised that no shop within three hundred miles would stock it.
i) Epic tales of unicorns in love.
j) The ability for people to find and support small businesses thousands of miles away through charitable innovations like the amazing Kiva.com.
k) Blogs. When I started this one, they were basically the whole of the internet to me. I now realise they’re the tiniest grain on the tiniest corner of the tiniest corner of the internet, but don’t care at all. Blogging means a ridiculous amount to me.
l) Pictures of kittens with words written on the bottom.
m) The ways that people find to circumnavigate censorship and bring about real political change through mediums that the traditional media used to dismiss as pointless wastes of time. [NB: point (l) is not necessarily closely connected to point (m)]
n) Ordering flowers for a sick friend half a world away.
o) Brilliantly beautiful and funny, and sociable and time-eating online games. Like, you know, ones like Glitch.com. Well, like that one will be when it launches, I mean.
p) Video chatting with your family.
q) Finding out what that tv series was called that you used to love when you were four that you remember vividly, but can’t quite recall the title of.
r) … Then finding that you can listen to the theme tune of the thing that brings your childhood rushing back to you. And whole episodes. Because someone out there loved it enough to take the time to put it online.
s) Pandas sneezing. (And because you can’t see it too many times: Here. Go on. Look.
t) Knowing what your hotel’s going to be like before you get there.
u) Maps with a street view of places you used to live.
v) The ability to look up old friends, and find new ones.
w)Travelling vicariously. Looking at pictures of ridiculous thunderstorms you may never see.
x) The support that people can give each other, whether in living with depression, going through big changes, losing a loved one, serious illness - people band together in groups all over the internet being supportive to each other - people they’ve never seen, and will never get to meet.
y) The ability to find delivery food, order, and pay without ever having to do that terrifying ‘phone’ thing.
z) Listening to radio programmes people told you about but that you missed. Ten years ago, you would have said “Oh bugger, I missed that.” Now you get to listen to it, and talk about it with them.
aa) Non-scary shopping. With decent return policy.
bb) Real connections with nice people. Connections that sometimes turn into physical connections, be they postcards from holiday (me), a pint (me) or a wedding ring (not me, don’t get over-excited, seriously you guys, you’ll just leap on anything and think it’s a hint, won’t you?).
cc) Laughing until your stomach hurts about a typo or a misplaced apostrophe.
dd) Learning about things you never knew existed. Looking up one little fact for a piece of work you’re doing and finding yourself three hours later reading biographical information about specific llamas who appeared in Russian screwball comedies of the soviet age. Or polydactyl cats.
ee) The joke that didn’t exist yesterday and that suddenly, EVERYONE knows.
ff) The world that it has opened up for so many, many people.

Things that are not so nice about the internet.
1) Random cunty shitworms who know nothing about you or your personal circumstances, but don’t let that stop them leaving deeply personal, poisonous comments on your site.

Yes. That is decided. The internet is a truly marvellous place, and I love it very much. And that is the point I have decided to settle upon.
On balance.
Good.

I’m drinking sleepy tea. It’s a cunning plan, you see, to convince my body that what it wants - what it wants more than anything else in the whole wide world is sleep. Body: you are tired. Brain: you want to go to sleep. Eyes: You desperately wish to shut. Work: you do not want to be thought about right now. Ears: you do not want to examine every noise around the house. Body: You just desperately - desperately in a happy way - want to sleep.
Is that working?

No.

Well, it is NOW, but the second I close down this computer, go upstairs and actually slip under the duvet? Not a chance. That is just not the way it works.

This is how it works:

My Beloved goes up to bed. He’ll read, if he wants to, a few pages, or play a short game of something on his phone, and then put his head on the pillow, manage a few sentences of conversation before he slips into a heavy, happy, deep deep sleep. Immediately. Seriously. Within SECONDS.
I am so very jealous of this, it’s ridiculous.

Bigcat, seeing that My Beloved is going to bed, will have raced him up there, and jumped on the bed to enjoy the CRAZY TRIPPY CATPARTY of a body climbing under the stripy duvet cover. She will get utterly overexcited by this, freak out when someone tries to pet her while ON the duvet cover, squawk, and bolt down the stairs at around 80mph, barely skimming the carpet on the way. She will do sixteen laps of the house before charging back up to the bedroom, curling up next to my feet, and falling into a rock-like slumber.

I will have gone to bed at some point during Bigcat’s spazmatronic grand prix, and lie there, playing some mindless game or readinga few pages while My Beloved starts to snore gently next to me. After half an hour or so, I will feel myself starting to fall asleep, so plump my pillows, scootch down, and turn out the light.

This, of course, is then Smallcat’s nighttime routine begins. You will hear her jump onto the (very low) bed, with a little meep as she gets a little winded (only has short legs). As she walks up the duvet, she will start to purr. Loudly. Really loudly. By the time she reaches the top of your bed, and is standing on your shoulder, she will be purring at about the volume of a bulldozer. A giant bulldozer with enormous speakers mounted on it pumping out bulldozer noises. She will nose-butt you several times. In this instance, it means ‘Butting you in the nose with her nose’. This is not to say that she will not at any point have her butt near your nose - that is also possible - but mainly she wants to hit her nose against your nose, while pounding your shoulder.
Still, only a couple of minutes of that, and you can usually persuade her to curl up and sleep.

For about six minutes. And then she will meep, get up as if having forgotten something, and run off downstairs.
She will reappear with a toy in her mouth, and drop it near the bed. I will ignore it. She will run off downstairs.
She will reappear with a slipper in her mouth, and drop it near the bed. I will ignore it. She will sit and look at me proudly, every time I open my eyes.

At this, point, I’ll suddenly decide I need the bathroom.
I’ll come back up, and now completely untired again, I’ll turn on the light, read some more, play another round of solitaire, turn out the light and then lie there in the dark, worrying about the next morning’s work, fretting about things far off in the future, panicking about something someone said ages ago. And how my friend is and if she’s sleeping. And what that noise is. And whether the door’s locked. And what I’m going to do with my life. And whether I was supposed to do something with my taxes. And whether I’m going to become a hoarder. And if there were any emails I needed to reply to.

And at this point, one of two things can happen: either I turn on the light again… or there’s a small meep as Widget jumps up on the bed, and comes padding up the duvet.

Or, no, that makes it sound terrible.
The third option: she jumps up, and curls up with her sister, next to my legs. And there, eventually, we go to sleep.

Eventually.
I may have another cup of sleepy tea before we start.
I’m totally sure that this time it will work.
Mhm.
Yup.

In answer to the request for a post on “Historical personages who inspire and/or fascinate me”, by Electrical Dragon, in response to this post.

For most of the last year I have had a bit of a thing for Isabella Bird, after visiting the Mull Historical Museum in Tobermory with my lovely little mother. She was included in it (Isabella, not my mother) as her sister, a woman of great faith and charity, had lived in Tobermory for years, and done great works for the poor and unfortunate there. Isabella, meanwhile, had not. Isabella was a sickly child who turned into a sickly adult, only perking up and improving in health when she was given leave to go off travelling somewhere.

And she did. She went all over the place and wrote about it. On her own. Up mountains, into rainforests, across deserts and boldly where no other female traveller at the time went. And was, mainly, breathtakingly rude about the places she went and the people she found there. Not because she was being snarky or trying to be funny about them - just because while she wasn’t an average Victorian woman in the sense that she couldn’t think of anything worse than staying at home in a rainy country and doing what was expected of her, she still wildly disapproved of people who didn’t adhere to her standards of Victorian British Ladyness.

Just go and read The wikipedia page about her. She’s brilliant. One of these days I’d love to recreate, particularly, her journey from California up through the Rocky mountains, where she was grumpy about practically everything, and fell in love with a wild frontier man (but never quite wrote about it, not in the published version, anyway), but I suppose I’ll just have to wait until I can get someone else to pay for it…

- Other people. Including another Victorian woman who wrote a decidedly opinionated and very dismissive guide to the countries of the world without ever actually going to any of them. She’s responsible for something else I want to work on when I have the time, too.

- Jim Henson. I don’t think he counts as a historical personage, as he died within my lifetime I feel odd describing him as such - same goes for Douglas Adams. But I find both of them spectacularly inspiring when it comes to work. They (and the people above) would both be invited to that mythical dinner party that people talk about having, inviting the living, the dead, the famous or the fictional.

Related: thinking about this happened to make me think of the archives. Which I have been thinking about also in the sense of wanting to get them organised by the time this blog turns ten (TEN!) years old later this year. I remembered I had at some point written something about someone I admired from history, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, in fact, who I apparently fell in love with for about a day in 2002. And then there were also…
- Twelve Historical figures I would not invite to a dinner party (And why)
- Ten Fictional figures I would not invite to a dinner party (and also why).
And some people that the luminous Non-working Monkey, in a guest post, said that she, in turn wouldn’t invite to HER dinner party, with her reasons.

I cannot remember whether i’ve ever got around to actually writing this down, but just in case…

One of my favourite script fall-back moments in any television show, play, or film, is the moment when one character, wanting to impress a fact of great significance or moment of great dramatic importance upon another character. And the even better thing is that it’s a thing anyone can do. And, what’s more that once you start doing, you cannot stop.

You just
1) say the thing you want to carry extra weight twice,
2) stating the person’s same inbetween the two times, and,
3) the second time you say whatever it is, you say it slower, and with a sense of grim finality. And maybe a pause for extra effect.

It’s as simple as that, Dear Reader. It’s as simple… as that.

Honestly. It’s the most fun you can have without alcohol. Or helium balloons. Or whatever it is you find fun.

You should try it.
And then try it a few times over. With things that don’t even seem to merit the drama or the significance (“Pass the salt, Graham. Pass. The salt.”, “I’m going to do some photocopying, Jack. I’m going to do some PHOTOCOPYING.”) And once you try it a few times, you will discover, quite soon, how hard it is to stop, and you will come back here, and you will leave me a comment, complaining about the fact that no one takes you seriously anymore, but it’s too damned fun not to do. And you’ll, without even meaning to, say it something like this:

“I just can’t stop, Anna. I just… Can’t. Stop.”

As a comment on this post, Becky Mochaface asked Why is this Epic 3 Wolf shirt so magical and awesome?” as a question for me to answer. THAT shirt. The one with three baying wolves, howling at the moon. Brightly, almost luminously against a black cotton background. Howling at the moon, are they? Or howling for some long lost member of the pack? Who knows. All that is known is that ON the t-shirt, they do howl. Or bay. Bay like no wolf has ever bayed before. ON A T-SHIRT. And it is the topic of this splendiferous item of that Becky Mochaface chose to test me. Well, it’s just too easy, I’m afraid. I ain’t no fool. I know the answer to the question of Why This Particular Shirt is so very awesome.

Because it is, Becky Mochaface. Because it is.