The Boy Wonder as a Boy

Yesterday we spent the whole evening drinking Lynchburg Lemonades and going through the Boy Wonder's school books from his formative years, a process which left us both on the verge of seizures at various points of the night. For some reason, it appears that the Boy Wonder has barely changed in the last 20+ years meaning his project on 'A Treasure Hunt' featured a banjo, there was a very informative little side-bar about Leo Fender in completely unrelated story and pictures of guitars adorn the pages of most of his work books. The main difference between the young Boy Wonder and that of the present day is the fact that, as a callow youth, the Boy Wonder was convinced he could skateboard. From what I can gather from all concerned, there was no evidence to support this belief but still his stories are peppered with tales of derring do undertaken by skateboarding protagonists (who are called Keith with inexplicable frequency) and almost every character has cause to do an ollie at some point. Tragically, there was even one story about a talking roll of Flypaper Grip Tape trying to wake up a Ray Barbee Deck for a chat, which made me laugh so hard I thought I was going to swallow my tongue. As entertaining as the products of the Boy Wonder's imagination are, there is something intrinsically engaging about his writing style. He points out that he finds it hard to write about things he has seen as 'I haven't a very good memory' and describes his artistic shortcomings when it comes to pastille work as 'substantially over the top with blending colours'. His way with words was charmingly old fashioned at that age, making his reflections on his own abilities seem exceptionally insightful. Coupled with the fact that his handwriting was considerably better between the ages of 7 and 10 than it is now, we have uncovered quite the treasure trove of entertainment.

Pros and cons of digital vs old school photography

After a frustrating day of ordering prints from an online photo company I was pondering the oft bemoaned cliche and wondering whether people do actually look more at pictures they had printed and put into albums than they do digital images. I would guess that they don't actually, as the advent of Facebook, online photo sharing websites etc people do go online (and by people I'm also including friends of friends) and look at other people's photos which they probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. I particularly like the fact that the makers of digital cameras seem to have universally agreed that the noise of a traditional camera is vital to the photographer's enjoyment of the process meaning that even the crappy phone on my camera ruins every attempt at a surreptitious snap with a little clicking noise. The main (or possibly only) downside I can see to digital photography is relinquishing the excitement of getting back an envelope of photos hoping it'll be crammed with great pictures. This comes with the converse benefit of knowing beforehand that you're not about to become the proud owner of 24 shots that look like they were taken from the inside of a pocket.

Susan Boyle

I've been completely astonished by the way the media have handled Susan Boyle. The Boy Wonder and I saw her original audition on X Factor, and at the time we wondered why everyone assumed that because she wasn't physically attractive she would also be unable to sing. Despite the success of thousands of plain, odd-looking and downright unattractive people in all areas of expertise, it seems that there is now an assumption that we are all complicit in a mind-set that cannot contemplate the idea of someone who doesn't conform to the media's narrow idea of 'beauty' as being anything other than worthless, talentless and worth only pity, scorn and derision. I particularly don't like the way everyone who mentions her in the media includes the rest of us in their prejudice, acting as though a person who didn't assume the woman couldn't sing couldn't exist, and anyone who said they didn't is obviously lying. I resent being lumped in with a bunch of witless idiots who have apparently never realised that the correlation between physical attractiveness and talent has been entirely fabricated by Hollywood and advertising executives.

Songs from the musical Mr Punch

When I was about 7 or 8 I was involved in a performance of a musical based on the life of Mr Punch. I have no idea why - it wasn't through school, but seemed to be something to do with local theatre as rehearsals (and presumably the performance which I can't remember) took place in the theatre of the local public school where I ended up going in the sixth form. There are a few things which I remember in vivid detail - a girl called Claudia was the character of Scaramouche (or whoever it was that played the fiddle) and one of my roles as an extra was to pretend to sell something. I picked embroidery thread as my grandmother had a lot of it, and I was very pleased to be able to take a beautifully coloured array of silks with me every day to play with when I wasn't needed. I have been completely unable to locate any information about the musical or any of the songs, but this is another topic on which I will be grilling my mother for any further snippets of insight she might be able to provide. All I remember are solitary verses of a couple of the songs: The Arm of the Law The arm of the law is very very very very long The arm of the law is very very very very strong The arm of the law Is never never wrong And quite infallible I play on my Fiddle (Scaramouche?) I play on my fiddle La la la, la la la, la la la la la la, la la My song is a riddle La la la, la la la, la la la la la la, la la I do not play high I do not play low I don't need a string And I don't need a bow I play on my fiddle La la la, la la la, la la la la la la la, la la I asked the Mother about this and she has a very vague recollection of the whole thing, which (once I had finished remonstrating with her over the cruel way in which she has cast what would have been a fine performance from me out of her memory) I took to be an encouraging sign - no doubt she will now share this feat of memory with all the other village people and hopefully someone will come up with something a little more tangible to go on than my half remembered lyrics and brightly coloured embroidery silk.

Songs I thought everyone knew

There are quite a lot of songs that I thought everyone knew, and have only been disabused of the notion by the consistently blank look on the Boy Wonder's face whenever I sing them. A lot of them have specific religious overtones which I put down to the fact that they were taught to me by my Mum, the primary school music teacher, but I still like them, mostly because they include such odd concepts. These include: The Rain Song On Monday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t go to school today,” he said “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” Chorus: Antonio! Antonio! it’s raining, it’s raining again!” On Tuesday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t play football today,” he said. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” On Wednesday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t go shopping today,” he said, “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” On Thursday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t go swimming today,” he said, “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” On Friday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t paint the house today,” he said, “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” On Saturday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t sweep the floor today,” he said, “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” On Sunday morning he got up. “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” “I can’t cook the dinner today,” he said, “It’s raining, it’s raining again!” (by John Parry apparently) Any Time You Need a Calypso Any time you need a calypso here is what you must to do first of all you need a rhythm so shake a little, shake a little, shake a little shaker and you bang a drum and you sing and strum and then there's a calypso for you The inexplicable voting song Vote, vote, vote for Bloggle In comes Boy Wonder at the door Boy Wonder is the one that we all like best So we don't need Bloggle any more, shut the door. What Will You Do Today What will you do today to keep the classroom tidy Come along surprise me - what'll you do today I'll sweep up the pencil sharpenings and I'll put them in the bin And I'll put it very tidily away Have You Seen the Pussycat? Have you seen the pussycat sitting on the wall? Have you heard his beautiful purr? (Prrrr) Have you seen the lion walking through the xxx? Have you heard his terrible roar? (ROAR!) One so big, one so small Our heavenly father cares for them all One so big, one so small Our heavenly father cares Have you seen the children coming home from school? Have you heard them shout 'Hooray'? (Hooray!) Have you see the grown-ups coming home from work? Saying 'What a horrible day' (What a horrible day) The Butterfly Song If I was a butterfly I'd thank you Lord for giving me wings If I was a Robin in a tree, I'd thank you Lord that I could sing If I was a fish in the sea, I'd wiggle my tail and I'd giggle with glee, But I just thank you Father for making me me. Chorus: Well you gave me a heart And you gave me a smile You gave me Jesus and made me your child So I just thank you Father for making me me. If I was an elephant, I'd thank you Lord by raising my trunk If I was a kangaroo, You know I'd hop right up to you If I was an octopus, I'd thank you Father for my good looks But I just thank you Father for making me me If I was a fuzzy wuzzy bear, I'd thank you Lord for my fuzzy wuzzy hair. If I was a wiggly worm, I'd thank you Lord that I could squirm If I was a crocodile, I'd thank you Lord for my big smile But I just thank you Father for making me me I Cannot Come (this one has so many opportunities for hilarity, I'm surprised anyone ever actually put it into a book of songs for schools) A certain man held a feast On his fine estate in town He laid a festive table He wore a wedding gown He sent invitations To his neighbours far and wide But when the meal was ready, Each of them replied: I cannot come, I cannot come to the banquet, Don't trouble me now I have married a wife, I have bought me a cow, I have fields and commitments That cost a pretty sum Pray, hold me excused, I cannot come! The master rose up in anger, Called his servants by name Said: "Go into the town, Fetch the blind and the lame Fetch the peasant and pauper For this I have willed My banquet must be crowded And my table must be filled." I cannot come, I cannot come to the banquet, Don't trouble me now I have married a wife, I have bought me a cow, I have fields and commitments That cost a pretty sum Pray, hold me excused, I cannot come! When all the poor had assembled, There were still rooms to spare So the master demanded: "Go search everywhere To the highways and the byways And force them to come in My table must be filled before The banquet can begin!" I cannot come, I cannot come to the banquet, Don't trouble me now I have married a wife, I have bought me a cow, I have fields and commitments That cost a pretty sum Pray, hold me excused, I cannot come! Now God has written a lesson For the rest of mankind: If we are slow in responding He may leave us behind. He is preparing a banquet For that great and glorious day, When the Lord and Master calls Us be careful not to say: I cannot come, I cannot come to the banquet, Don't trouble me now I have married a wife, I have bought me a cow, I have fields and commitments That cost a pretty sum Pray, hold me excused, I cannot come! The Good Samaritan (from memory - this one had an incongruously jaunty tune and made use of some pretty tired rhymes. I will try and find more lyrics when I go back to the rentals for Christmas) Once a man set out to go Down the road to Jericho On the way he was attacked By some thieves who hurt his back Something something something i Left him lying there to die Everybody's Building All over the world, Everywhere, where the sun shines And where the white snow gleams In the green green forests and by the streams Hands are busy, plans are made And slowly, slowly, somewhere somebody's house is made Everybody's building, everybody's building, everybody's building day by day Everybody's building everybody's building, everybody's building in a diiiiiiiiifferent way It's the Springs up in the Mountains (from Come and Praise?) It's the springs up in the mountains That make rivers for the plains That do xxxxx in the cities till they reach the sea again And the rivers make the oceans and the oceans make the rain And we all have to live in one world Now the Green Blade Riseth Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain, Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain; Love lives again, that with the dead has been: Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green. In the grave they laid him, love whom men had slain, Thinking that never he would wake again. Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen: Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green, Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain, He that for three days in the grave had lain. Quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen: Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green. When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain, Thy touch can call us back to life again; Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been: Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green This is just a snippet which me and my brother used to sing in a manner which was probably a lot less holy and respectful than was intended (or maybe not!) Bright dawned the morning on Gethsemane's cave? Mary Magdalene came to weep at the grave What did she find when she came full of care The stone rolled away and her saviour not there! Mary, Mary weeping at the tomb Along came Jesus and he took away her gloom ETA - After a brief grilling from me last night, my Mum has promised to try and find sources for some of these songs, so hopefully I will be reunited with the correct words soon!

All the bands I've seen

I thought it would be interesting (for me alone of course) to list all the bands/artists I have seen so that when I'm old and senile, assuming I can remember my log in to this blog, I will be able to reminisce about all the fun times I assume I had. I'm only including bands I have paid or chosen to see as the number of bands I have seen through no fault of my own is probably much larger and more worrying than those I actually chose to listen to. BB King Dr John and the Lower 911 Gov't Mule Metallica Megadeth The Rolling Stones Robert Cray Fun Lovin' Criminals John Otway John Martyn Soundgarden The North Mississippi Allstars The Suweto Gospel Choir Buddy Guy Guy Clarke Tony Joe White Mavis Staples (and the Mussle Shoals Rythm Section) Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen Albert Lee Buena Vista Social Club REM Blur Sparks Humphrey Lyttleton Kings of Leon The Suweto Gospel Choir

Papa Grows Funk

The Black Crowes

The Alman Brothers

Dumpsterphunk

Alan Toussaint

Buckwheat Zydeco

Earth, Wind and Fire

My campaign to teach men how lucky they are to be able to wee standing up

Last week I gave a very impassioned presentation to the Gift, the subject of which was how he should never take his ability to wee standing up for granted. The claim that started this (which in fairness was perfectly understandable) was that as he rarely avails himself of the ability to wee outside, he doesn't feel he really benefits from his manly plumbing. This was my cue to expound on this topic, and explain how outdoor weeing is only a very minor benefit of the whole male-centric plumbing arrangement. Because the Gift and I have been to festivals together, I was able to draw on our mutual experience of skanky toilets (and a rather graphically elaborate mime which I suspect may have scared him a little bit!) to demonstrate the level of physical contact that one must endure when standing is not an option. I mentioned the enourmous pressure of trying to hover over a rancid hole whilst hitching up your trousers so that the bottoms don't dangle in anything revolting, the awkwardness of trying to detatch toilet roll (should there even be any!) with one hand whilst trying to trouser hitch and balance and the Sophie's Choice style decision between a toilet with a light, one with a seat and one with toilet roll. We touched briefly on the perils of weeing in a bush (everyone knows someone who's really good at it, but I have never managed it without weeing on my feet), and at that point I relented and ersted my case. I genuinely think that men's blase attitude towards their physical advantages is one of the things that annoys me most about the horrors of female toilet arrangements - I might be doing battle against an encroaching tide of effluent, but the thing that annoys me most is that I know the men next door aren't giving a second thought to whether they need to take emergency tissues into the loo with them. If we have sons, I will bring them up to be evangelical about their luck, which will probably make their weird names seem like a secondary source of bullying material eventually.

Office Shredder

It seems to be a truth universally recognised that an office shredder is like the opposite of a tardis - no matter how big it looks from the outside, its innards will barely have the capacity needed to contain a single sheet of shredded A4. There is also a ratio between frequency of shredder use and ability to unblock/empty the shredder which means that the poor unfortunate who shreds one sheet of paper a month will inevitably end up with the top half sticking out, a grinding whirring noise coming from within and the opportunity to do severe damage to their fingers trying to rectify the situation, whilst regular shredders will claim not to know how to empty it and will flee at the first sign of trouble to either abuse an alternative shredder or resort to scissors in an attempt to cover-up their hopelessness.

Why is UK country so lame?

Blues music in this country has traditionally failed to live up to the standards of the original black blues singers, which is understandable because we don't have that heritage over here. However, country music has always been the preserve of red neck white guys living in isolated rural areas, so why can't we replicate that in the UK? In particular, why is the festival featured on Ceol Country on BBC Alba so unfailingly poor? I know it's only a small Scottish festival, but even the members of the bands looked like they wouldn't pay to see their performance, and the liveliest thing we saw over the entire series was the octagenarian line dance troupe who stamped away with a graceless vigour that suggested the music was secondary to the fact that there was something to do in their remote part of Scotland which they would not miss come hell or high water. Good on them I say - the views of the audience make that show.

Hot shit

Why is hot shit better than cold shit? I can't think of any situation where the temperature of the shit would have a significant impact on my response to it. I suppose if I was buried up to my neck in shit, my preferences for the shit's temperature might vary depending on the weather, but it would be of minimal concern compared to how I might extricate myself from said shit itself. I suppose it's one of those phrases that has evolved without people giving it much thought, but now I have, I will be more careful about my useage in future.

How to create a fun vacuum

Simply take: 50 people that you spend time with only because you are paid to Your boss Free alcohol Ice skating mix vigorously and try to avoid getting either fired or so depressed that you throw yourself onto the ice in an attempt to commit chilly suicide at the feet of a colleague. I was quite happy to hear the anticipatory chatter as everyone got excited about the free drink (as though some acidic wine and weak beer were going to bestow magical properties upon an evening's entertainment) but the morning after is awash with tales of vomit on the bus, German sausage and the peculiar belief that I would be regretting my decision not to come. I have tried to keep to myself the fact that I would rather be rolled in squid and fed to carnivorous sea-beasts to preserve some element of conviviality with my colleagues, but it's only a matter of time before I make free with the shittily decorated chocolate logs and choke someone to death with plastic holly.

If I was starting a band...

I would use one, many or all of these band names and alter egos: Spatchcock Fuck Sticks and the Stinky Poles Widdershins and the Jazz Hands

The New Boy thinks the Boy Wonder's Weird

As a freelancer, the Boy Wonder has had occasion to return to the company he used to work for, and whilst they seem to be systematically making everyone who knows how to do anything redundant, they have taken on a new boy. The Boy Wonder has reported to me that the New Boy thinks he's weird, although he's not sure why. On a separate note, Dan confirmed Ben's theory that the TV looks weird when he's blowing a raspberry.

Funny Words

Opt - it's so little and once you've said, thought or heard it a few times (which one does in the world of permission marketing) it becomes ridiculous really quickly. Punctual - should mean something more dangerous than it does (although an unhealthy obsession with punctuality could be considered a disease). Ladle - this may be the quickest word to lose sense when repeated over and over again, though closely contended by 'ketchup'.

Am I the neighbour people tell horror stories about?

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and talking about the various crazy neighbours we have all had over the years. We relived the hilarity of a drunken Boy Wonder deciding to talk to the people we occasionally saw naked (and saw us naked, let's not forget the really awkward part!) when he saw them in the pub, and discussed the merits of living next door to a drug dealer (very good neighbours - strange smell in their daughter's bedroom!). We were talking about shared gardens and I told the story of when we lived in the top flat of a converted house with no access to the garden. It was summer ball season and I had gone to one while the Boy Wonder was playing at another, so I had come in at around 6am, absolutely knackered. Outside, parading along the fence in the downstairs garden was a wailing cat, so I opened the window to shout at it, which had no impact but was at least easy to do. Once I had exhausted my enthusiasm for shouting, I decided to go for something with a little more impact and after a little spirited rooting around in the drawers I came across some old party poppers. 'These will do the job' I thought to myself, and so I was terribly disappointed when the earsplitting noise I had anticipated was a little damp squibbish and failed to arouse any response from the bloody cat. So not only was I not asleep and slightly drunk, but I was becoming increasingly convinced that the cat was deliberately mocking me, so I decided that I would try appealing to a different sense and formulated a plan to throw dried pasta at it in the hope of startling it off its perch on the fence, or at least breaking its concentration and forcing it to re-evaluate its choices of hobby. In a similar fashion to the party popper, I could envisage all this taking place within the space of around two minutes with me landing a few choice shots and putting the whole thing behind me. What actually happened was that I discovered how difficult it is to accurately throw pasta across a 10m garden at a 45 degree angle from a sash window at a small, moving target - very. One last attempt I thought, and stamping back to the bedroom I decided to revisit my original plan of startling the damn thing with a loud noise, and the option which presented itself to me was a good hard slam of the large sash window in the bedroom which at least faced the garden fence. I gave it a whack, the glass cracked and the cat's basic position of 'Fuck You human!' was established. Once I had had some sleep, I realised that not only was the window now broken (I accidentally made this less of a problem, on which more later) but our downstairs neighbours now had a garden full of dried pasta and party streamers. This is exactly the kind of thing you read on websites 'I came home one day to find my garden looked as though a group of impatient Italians had been partying in it - WTF?' or find out from your friends about their neighbours. Having said that, it's done now, and out current neighbours have won all the prizes going for inappropriate behaviour, so I feel sure they have no tales to tell of our exploits which wouldn't be met with disbelief or outright hilarity!

The Gift

The Gift has started saying 'Wik', which cracks me up!

The World Famous Comfort Cafe

Staffed by a selection of triads and Eastern European mafia members who work together to create the most spectacular (or certainly closest in proximity) fry up you can find, the World Famous Comfort Cafe have gone to the trouble of including their rather lofty claim of international renown right up front so you can see it on the approach. The car park is an awesome expanse of space, with areas allocated to vehicles of any size, from coaches (which we presume all arrive shortly after we leave for decadent lunches and glamorous dinners) to the bikers that we often see revving their engines incessantly outside the place in case nobody has noticed that lurking under their beer guts are some kind of bike which is presumably terribly impressive if you are a fellow biker, but turns out to be less so when you are hungover, sleep deprived and trying to enjoy your breakfast through the fug of exhaust fumes. To further their claims of being World Famous, there are a series of improbable clocks on the back wall displaying the time in Ulan Bator, Montevideo, Casablanca and other far flung places that sound familiar, and then you realise that you have no idea where most of them are and start trying to fight off the hangover fog to work out whether time goes forward or backward as you travel east. There is also the stunning 'garden room' which is a peculiarly constructed extension with massive folding glass doors which we have never seen open in summer, but which house large gaps which let in a lot of chilly air in the winter. At some point, somebody clearly decided that the view should be softened with a lot of creeping plant life, meaning that currently the windows are pretty much covered with vegetation which makes for an odd view but a strangely secluded feel when eating in there (as is our preference when it's too chilly to eat outside). A glance at the clientele that the World Famous Comfort Cafe attracts serves as yet another reminder that you are in a deeply special place - from young families with screeching children to doddery old folks enjoying a nice early lunch (or sometimes afternoon tea by the time we rock up for breakfast) and an assorted array of people who clearly had no idea that the place was there, making you wonder what on earth they were doing on that particular stretch of disused former A road ('the gateway to East Anglia' according to their own website) which is home to a Little Chef (surely the most pointlessly positioned eatery ever) and a petrol station manned by a man in a Ferrari jumpsuit who has trouble distinguishing between genders. Every time we have been we have taken note of the fact that people are enjoying items from the World Famous Comfort Cafe's extensive lunch and dinner menus as well as the classic breakfast fare that keeps us coming back time and time again, including the tiny bottles of wine which they place strategically on top of the counter as you approach to place your order to remind you of why you need so much comforting starch and grease. People unlike me who aren't faddy and set in their culinary ways probably find the process of ordering food very difficult - if you aren't going to order the same thing you had last time, there are a dazzling array of tempting treats all of which follow an apparently random pricing structure (£2.95 for a bowl of cereal and milk, £3.95 for a massive fry up) which is sure to have you gazing up in rapture at the many menus whilst the dark-haired eastern European girl looks at you with the same blanket contempt that people who have been up since 5 always have for those who order breakfast at 2pm. Once you have chosen, you then have to force your brain not to immediately lose your receipt on which is written your order number and without which you will be desperately trying to identify your particular combination of food items as they make their way round in the hands of the triad chef with other diners all peering at it to see if it's theirs too. The food is incredible - it's not so much that there's anything special about the ingredients or how they cook it so much as the fact that they cook it (as opposed to having to cook it yourself), it comes quickly, and it always tastes the same, which is a definite prerequisite for hangover food. The sole fly in the ointment is their slight tendency to run out of orange juice (a must when preserving the sanctity of a hangover breakfast) but this is more than made up with by the fact that they sometimes have Blood Orange juice (it tastes pretty much the same but looks much more dramatic) and the opportunity to taste weird and wonderful combinations of fruit and vegetable juice as a substitute. All in all, the World Famous Comfort Cafe is one of the most extraordinary places I have ever been, and is definitely my favourite venue for eating out (we will have dinner there one day, possibly with the Gift and/or the World Famous Comfort Cafe's newest fanboy, Uptown PJ) plus their faultless dedication to serving breakfast at whatever time you want a la Ken Walker is not only admirable, but demonstrates unfailing dedication to personal freedom.

Things I probably shouldn't have said at work

'You can tell him to suck my hairy bits' will be one of the things I later regret allowing to slip out at work. I suppose it could have been worse - each individual word isn't offensive in and of itself, so I should be grateful for small mercies. Update - my rallying call of 'Who wouldn't want to come into work and see some festive pubes on the wall?' to inspire enthusiasm in the sales team also had a less than stellar effect.

A tragic event

On Monday, as part of our plan to sort out the house this year, the Boy Wonder spent a valiant few hours, no small amount of money, and a goodly level of energy making the inside of our oven sparkle like a brand new 70s brown oven. On Monday evening, I marvelled at the clean wonderland which is now in our kitchen, enjoyed the delight of being able to see through the door, and was confident that the slightly tricky hinge would be fixed by the next evening. On Tuesday however, we had a sudden resurgence of 'fixing it by breaking it' on the Boy Wonder's part (although not at all his fault) which lead to the spanking clean oven being rendered unusable without spending £78 on new hinges or using only the grill section. My immediate response was to buy another oven, followed very shortly by the desire to somehow preserve all the work the Boy Wonder had done and contemplate the option of 'making good' the already ancient oven in favour of spending slightly more on a new oven which would nevertheless be guaranteed to work for a reasonable period afterwards. So, reluctantly, I tried as gently as I could to encourage the Boy Wonder not to feel too bad about the situation and in fairness, he was already thinking along the same lines, but was having trouble reconciling the practical facts with his desire to at least have one chance to enjoy the clean oveny goodness of the existing model. One upside is that, having been living with a substantially old and knackered oven, the process of choosing a new one is made all the more exciting by the impressive array of features which now come as standard. I was half way through an excited moment with the Boy Wonder whereby we rejoiced at the fact that our new oven will have a light inside it, before I realised that EVERY bloody oven has a light in it! Even the clapped out old oven that my Dad had when I was a kid that had to be lit perilously with a match had a fricking light in it! Nonetheless, the level of excitement we have managed to muster about an oven which is four times more efficient, has glass through which it is actually possible to see and a light inside for aiding the view through the clean glass is almost unbelievable! Roll on 'sometime next week' - the peculiarly vague delivery date we've been given by a company with a broken database who seem unwilling to admit that fact, preferring instead to let themselves appear wantonly incompetant instead. Edited to add: Not only did the new oven arrive on Friday morning, meaning we were without an oven for only three nights in total, but on taking the old, spiteful oven with the malevolent hinges to the tip (sorry, household waste recycling centre) the Boy Wonder and Uptown PJ found a Farfisa Organ in a skip which made the collective days of the whole band. Thus the balance of karma has been restored and we still have a new oven which is delightfully lit, enchantingly clean and thus far smells a little bit like chemicals and old fish. It also lead to a sharp increase in my ability to look interested in websites about Farfisa Organs which is an underrated skill in today's modern world.

Amusing misspellings

Some of these come up fairly regularly in the workplace, some are less common, but all make me laugh whenever I type them. Fortunately the time I e-mailed a client and told him I was 'moistly' waiting for the holidays, it was someone who appreciated the entertainment value of the typo and found it amusing rather than offensive.

Promble - Problem Accunts - Accounts Borken - Broken Scared - Sacred Gold - Golf Gift - Git Most - Moist Dong - Doing Teat - Test Dong - doing Discunt - discount

Bateman's - Batman's

It can't just be me

Yesterday I had the unpleasant job of justifying apostrophes to someone who had just uttered the phrase 'We could just strip all the apostrophes out'. At first I was pretty nice as I assumed I had misunderstood what he was suggesting, but when I realised that he really did believe that we could just use the same text without any apostrophes I had to dig my fingers into my knee so hard, I thought I was going to pass out just from the effort of not punching him. I mean, I can understand people not knowing how to use an apostrophe (well, I can't understand it, but I have had to accept that it's true) but a complete disbelief in the absolute necessity of having them is another matter. In the end I composed an impassioned speech which started with a short discourse on the most important elements of apostrophe use, covering the indication of possession and including some wisdom about the contractions. I then went on to point out that even if I never contracted another word and managed to express every concept on the website without the use of the possessive, we would still have to be able to use apostrophes in John o' Groats or 3 o'clock and thus it was an entirely unacceptable pretence at a solution. Fortunately, whilst I fear the finer points of my verbal treatise may have been wasted on someone who came up with the idea in the first place, the sheer vehemence of my argument seemed to scare him into not pursuing the suggestion any further.

Moaning about speed cameras

I don't really understand how people can justify moaning about speed cameras - if you don't speed, you don't get fined. All these people who bang on about it being a stealth tax clearly don't understand the correct meaning of the word 'stealth' - there can be few people in the country who aren't aware of the purpose and consequences of speed cameras so I wouldn't have thought there was anything that stealthy about one of the most talked about systems in the country. And frankly I don't see why we shouldn't tax people who speed - if you are going to impose an arbitrary fine on people to swell underfunded coffers, I don't see why speeders shouldn't be targeted. I would be equally happy if there were a system which imposed fines on anyone breaking the law provided the basis is that people will be able to pay (no point trying to squeeze any money out of those who can't - as the banking system has discovered, fines for having no money don't really work) and people who drive cars fast have at least enough money for a car. The only thing I think is slightly unfair is that people who have either enough time, or enough brass neck will dispute or ignore the fines, and seem by and large to get away with it - if your car isn't registered, you won't get fined so in some ways it penalises those who are honest. However, if you pick and choose which laws you follow then you have to be prepared to accept the consequences of the ones you chose to break.

Babies

Recently we have been looking at/playing with a lot of babies. Or more accurately two different babies, which is still a big uplift on our daily average. Baby number one is my heathen child, which is the equivalent of a Godchild for those of us who are godless heathens, but unfortunately makes him sound like he was born at some kind of pagan ceremony which is pretty far from the truth. He is the son of my oldest friend who looked so much like his father when he was first born that I found it quite peculiar to hold him. Fortunately, in the last 6 months since we saw him he has grown up a little bit and although he still bears a staggering resemblance to his Dad, he is now much less freakishly identical now making all interaction with him less peculiar. Our first encounter was when he was six weeks old and absolutely chock full of colic, so he was inconsolable for most of the visit albeit still very sweet. Now he is a massive beaming ray of delight, smiling his way through the rigours of daily life, enjoying having the chubbiest thighs in the world and generally being a little blond haired angel. He is the first child for whom I have bought tiny baby clothes because they were cute and I had an excuse to, so is probably going to be responsible for some rash spending over the course of his life as well. Baby number two is the daughter of some of our tiniest friends and is minuscule, much tinier than the Heathen son who is five months younger. She is clearly already of the opinion that tininess should not interfere with her ability to control the world around her, and has perfected an array of growls and threatening behaviour designed to bend her parents, their friends and possibly anyone else around her to her will. It is surprisingly effective, and she is surprisingly cute, which makes her potentially tiny tearaway behaviour endearingly impish. She has massive eyes which, when turned on the Boy Wonder in particular, reduce him to a state of obsequiousness in his desire to make her smile (and me too if I'm honest, but she seems much more taken with the clown-like silhouette of the Boy Wonder). I also had a moment of revelation at my sister-in-law's wedding recently - there was a small child there who must have been around 4 or 5 and was entertainingly well behaved. At some point I found her gleefully making jewellery out of glow sticks and eating sweets. She asked if there were any pink sweets, and I found her a flying saucer which she said she had never tried. One bite later and it was clear she wasn't a convert, so I offered her my hand to spit the partially chewed piece of rice paper into. Admittedly I was slightly drunk, but once I had accepted I was going to eat the untouched part of the flying saucer, it was after only a short period a sticky handed unwillingness to move that I thought 'Oh well, I might as well eat the piece she spat out as well - what else am I going to do with it?' and in it went! I suppose this is the kind of thing that parents give no thought to, but having considered myself quite un child-friendly in many respects, my recent willingness to hold, feed and generally 'sort out' children has revealed hidden depths of either maternal, or at least pseudo maternal instincts which I suppose were bound to kick in eventually. If only the Boy Wonder had a smaller head and a lesser desire to force any offspring we might bear into playing the Hammond Organ it might all seem less terrifying...

Hoodwink

I was listening to the lovely local radio this morning and they were discussing a fascinating sounding book by Adam Jacot de Boinod called The Wonder of Whiffling, which I cannot wait to read and learn about the crazy words that we might lose unless folks (like me presumably) start using them. I then looked at something I had written yesterday which contained the word 'hoodwinked' in it, much to my pleasure at my own use of outdated words! So I thought I would compile a list of words that I really like - here goes: Hoodwinked Footle Discombobulation Poppycock Snib (despite the fact that my family and the Boy Wonder accused me of making it up!) Spurtle Purloined

Married Life

On Saturday night the Boy Wonder and I went out for a birthday meal for our space man friend who has survived to the ripe old age of 32, apparently by pure chance. All was very civilised until the point where he passed out in the foetal position, straddled by a lifesize model of a sheep, with the top half of his body asleep, and his legs dancing away below as though possessed by the weird drunken incarnation of Michael Flatley. However, one of the highlights of my night was when I overheard the Boy Wonder telling saying 'It's great being married - you don't really have to make an effort any more'. Now, I wasn't really concerned about the implication that now, pledged as our troths are, he sees no need to impress me so much as the flagrant lie that he ever made what could even generously be described as 'an effort' before. The night ended up, as so many do when you're a teenager but not so much once you're approaching your 30s, with someone being sick (the Space Man, naturally) and everyone rushing around with various cleaning supplies in an attempt to rectify the problem whilst he called us names and claimed that this was what the teenagers do, so all in all, a succesful evening was had by all!

Rules for eating three dinners

Last week, our friend The Gift came over for dinner along with our singer friend Uptown PJ, and over the course of the evening The Gift took it upon himself to offer advice on the rules for eating three dinners. There are only two rules: 1. Don't make curry your last meal 2. If you're going to eat lasagne, chicken and potatoes, and curry have the curry as your second dinner as (and I quote) 'Chicken's refreshing as far as I'm concerned'.

Sleep

One of the downsides of sleeping like a dead rodent, besides the fact that there are no upsides to it, is the fact that it makes it very difficult to sort out my alarm in the morning. By 'sleeping like a dead rodent' I mean 'sleeping in a similar position to an expired gerbil with my hansd curled up under my chin' rather than a comment on the quality of my unconsciousness - a dreamless sleep such as the dead presumably enjoy is a rare treat for my over-active night-time brain, so I would be less inclined to complain about that. Apparently it's genetic, as my mother, grandmother and I all revert to sleeping with our wrists resting on our chin and our hands curled towards us in an impossibly twisted position. All this means that waking up to an alarm which requires the minutest element of co-ordination is a horrifically unsettling experience, involving as it does the gentle coaching of my numb hands towards the shrieking noise of my phone in the hope that they will get enough feeling back in them to press the right button and not condemn the Boy Wonder to another round of shrieking in ten minutes by accidentally hitting the snooze button. All in all, when added to the normal horrors of having to wake up at a specified time in the morning, the dead rodent hands might be just another sign of the early morning conspiracy against me.

Happy it's here my arse!

One of the more interesting elements of my job is the fact that I get a lot of stuff sent to me which is barely related to what I actually do, affording me a few precious moments each day where I immerse myself in the world of advertising and pretend I'm like Darren from Bewitched. However, today's offering from Whisper is not only irrelevant to my job (not their fault) but offensive shit (definitely their fault). I don't mind the fact that advertising tampons and sanitary towels has traditionally been an excuse to get a load of women wearing white trousers to perform a host of unnaturally exhausting activities as though their underwear contained some kind of life source rather than a sanitary product, but when the companies that make that product start partonising women by telling them how great their periods are, is starts to grate. It finished grating and started seriously grinding my gears when I read this: "Just steer clear of nasty stressful situations for the next few days and you'll be fine!". WHAT??!! Are they seriously suggesting that women are so incapable of normal life that avoiding stress for a few days every month should be considered as an option? Never mind the implication that a woman couldn't possibly have a job or lifestyle in which avoiding stress for a few days simply isn't an option, there is also the underlying accusation that women faced with stress during their periods are going to crumble into wailing puddles and need someone with a Y chromosome (or possibly someone pre- or post- menopausal) to deal with their life until they can manage again.

When typos go bad

It is almost always a big problem to type 'moist' instead of 'most', particularly when writing for work.

Unexpected effects of tiredness

Quiet delight - a state of acceptance which only comes when you have realised your main achievement will be not dropping off into a snooze and hitting your head on the desk and to try anything more taxing would be asking for trouble. Inability to judge speed - makes driving tiresome and terrifying all at once. Slightly soft focus vision - feels like living in the most boring porn film in the world with twinkly edges all over and no peripheral vision to speak of. Sudden amusement at everyone who isn't obviously battling to stay awake - their endeavours seem so pointless when the consequences aren't going to come close to a formal warning for being asleep at their desk. With that hanging over you, why bother about anything else...?

Deal or No Deal

What the fuck?

Dog the Bounty Hunter

This is a show which I was vaguely aware of, but have had no access to since we ditched all our paid TV. When it was featured on Charlie Brooker's excellent show 'You Have Been Watching' I relived all the slightly conflicted feelings I had previously had about it. On the one hand, there is a sense of justice being done where we can see it as they round up bail jumpers on television rather than behind closed doors with pixellated faces, the similarities to 'The Fall Guy' cannot be over looked, and in fairness, Dog himself does seem to be pretty proportionate when apprehending people. On the other hand, there is the salaciousness of watching someone being cornered and brought to justice, the slightly dubious nature of the whole bounty hunting industry in the US and allegations of racism against Dog himself. So, rife with internal conflict, I came up with possibly the best adaptation to an existing show ever - screen it live! That way, the show would take on an interesting bent as criminals are tempted to tune in to check that they don't recognise the outside of their own front door, but knowing at the same time that if they do try to escape, they will miss the opportunity to feature on the show. Either I am a genius, or I have devised a way of tackily exploiting the legal system for entertainment even more than the show's makers were already doing - I used to believe the two were mutually exclusive, but I am coming to realise that might not be so...

Proust may have had a point

There's nothing quite like being in a greenhouse full of warm tomatoes - I think this is one of the childhood memories I would go furthest out of my way to recreate (that and my love of tomatoes generally!). I also have very strong feelings when I smell something which I think is Jasmine. I once had a bottle of this scent which came from a National Trust shop - the bottle was tiny and I was a little overexcited by it, and although I never used it for anything other than taking out and smelling, every so often I get a whiff of something that smells the same and it takes me back instantly.

How can I sound more important?

I'm pretty sure this is becoming more common, or at least I have heard it more: the practice of substituting 'me' with 'myself', and 'you' with 'yourself' as in 'If you could send that to myself please' or 'We can book yourselves in for this weekend'. I can only assume that people who do not understand the English language think it sounds official in some way, or that terror of misusing 'I' or 'me' somehow leads people to thinking that misuse of the reflexive is preferable and will always be considered at least right-ish no matter what the circumstance. Either way, it grates - I would rather hear someone confuse 'I' and 'me' than complicate a sentence with unecessary use of 'myself' or 'yourself'.

Food shame

There are two food related things that make me ashamed of myself: Eating crisp sandwiches (which I have re-christened Chav-wiches to demonstrate that I know this is not an acceptable way to eat)which must be salt and vinegar crisps and nearly always feature when I am ill. It's as though I am anti-nourishing my body! Dropping food on my chest and then eating it - makes me feel like Bart Simpson in the future when he washes himself with a rag on a stick. Wholesome - mmmmmm!

Have a nice day

There are many fascinating things about the British, one being the tradition we have of being euphemistically polite at all costs. Rarely do we let our true feelings show, and we are world-renowned for our attempts at stiff upper-lipped stoicism. So why is the all-American marketing gem of 'Have a nice day' such a bone of contention to Brits?

Good gig, bad gig

Good gigs that might not have been : Guy Clarke when he didn't play the only song we knew of his but turned out to be generally awesome anyway; Tony Joe White at spyderfest when he was announced about 5 minutes before he actually found his way through the incredibly thick fog into the tent, but was still wearing sunglasses when he did appear. Gigs that should have been good: Tony Joe White and Mavis Staples and the Muscle Shoals Rythym Section, where they showboated and vamped their way through the whole performance and didn't really bring the funk; Dr John in Amsterdam when the fuckin saxophonist played way too much; when we went to see BB King and super ugly guitarist Gary Moore was his support and overran with his shitty widdly guitar solos so that BB King had to cut his set short to finish on time

Relationship Advice Cliches

I really hate the way 'universally accepted' relationship advice takes the form of cliches which are actually impossible to live by. Some examples which particularly rile me are: 1. Couples who don't row have an unhealthy relationship It's possible that couples who do row made this up to make themselves seem more normal, but I think it's more likely that everyone has their own level of rowing which suits them and they should stick to it. I'm not going to instigate rows so I can have a 'healthy' relationship. 2. Doing things separately keeps the relationship fresh Not sure if this counts when you both want to do things together - I have made attempts to force myself to do things without the Boy Wonder before, and after nearly ten years, I think I am qualified to say that there's nothing more pointless. 3. You should marry someone you can live with, not someone you can't live without The implied exclusivity that one person can't be both pisses me right off. 4. The exciting toe tingling will wear off Then maybe you should too - people who aren't still excited to see each other, or would prefer to spend more time apart should stop telling other people that they must be stupid and immature (although I would probably concede this one in my case) to expect the loved-up stage of their relationship to last. 5. Don't stay with someone because you're scared of being alone The only reason I'm scared of being alone is because I know how much more fun it is to be with the Boy Wonder! 6. Realtionships need work Maybe yours does - mine doesn't. Reading this back, I think I am just fed up of people trying to somehow make out that happy relationships are wrong and that people who enjoy spending time with their partners are either brazen liars, deluded naifs or childish fools who will learn one day that you're not in a proper relationship unless it makes you unhappy. Well screw them and the horse they rode in on.

Trash Talkers

I have recently become aware of people who say really stupid things, such as this: '[if you're}...good to me and help me out then I will return the favour 10 times over. You try to be nasty with me, you have just reincarnated the devil and you are going to see hell.' I'm not sure whether they really think that others will be terrified that bad things will actually happen to them at the hands of these weirdos, but from what I can gather this person's idea of showing someone hell is a very strongly worded letter with a threat of court action. To my mind, this is entirely appropriate considering the circumstances, but I don't know why there was a need to be quite so superlative about the personality traits that lead them to this course of action. Why is being so bipolar about it something you want to shout about? I would never consider it worth publicly announcing that when faced with a problem, I try to take a path which is relatively easy and weigh up whether the likely benefits will warrant the effort and energy spent. I can't begin to imagine how annoying it would be to live with some asshat who's constantly trying to project an image of some kind of Terminator character who uses the power of objective judgement to mete out unrelenting justice to anyone who stands in their way. Maybe I should just stop trying to help idiots on message boards - it's a little like a festering spot that I just can't help picking even though I know that it's only going to get worse and that nobody wants to look at it but for some reason I am drawn to them with an inexorable and depressing fascination.

How would it be...?

How would it be to be a bee?

Books I have no desire to read

1. The Lord of the Rings 2. The Hobbit 3. Any Harry Potter books (may not escape these if we have kids, but not interested myself) 4. Dune (or any variant thereof, although I'm prepared to be purasuaded on this) 5. Watership Down 6. Anything by Stephen King, or any other horror style book - I don't like horror films as I get too excited and have huge adrenaline comedowns which make me feel sick and dizzy, so a book, where the suspense lasts even longer, may have long term side effects on my health.

Books I wanted to read and then did

1. Moby Dick - Herman Melville 2. Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham 3. Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift 4. Silas Marner - George Eliot 5. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 6. Animal Farm - George Orwell 7. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 8. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 9. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf 10. Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak 11. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 12. The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger 13. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 14. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 15. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut 16. The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot 17. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome 18. Three Men on the Bummel - Jerome K Jerome 19. The French Lieutenant's Woman - Fowles Surely there are more? I have been on a programme of alternating classics with 'other' for years now, and I can only think of 15 books that I have read?

Ringing people on speakerphone

Why do people feel the need to call comeone, put their phone on speakerphone, and then subject everyone in the office to the sound of the phone ringing? Is it less annoying to be waiting when you can annoy your colleagues? Are you under the impression that other people are going to be impressed with your phoning skills? Or do you genuinely not understand that it's really annoying to put your own desire not to have to handle the phone above others' desire not to have to listen to yet another annoying noise in the course of their day?

The boy who did just enough

I discussed with my brother last night, in the course of one of our too rare phonecalls, the fact that nobody really admits the realities of working life particularly to youngsters, and thus the idea of 'neutra-vational' kids' books was born. I'm pretty sure that a significant number of people have based their lives on a carefully balanced ability to do just enough to get by - no extra hours and extra stress, but not happy to do nothing either. The concept of doing just enough seems one which is either ignored by those super motivated individuals who like to spend their time telling everyone how to be just like them, or dismissed as the mindset of the lazy. Presumably highly motivated people have an unfair advantage in 'selling' their way of life, because by their very nature they are keen to earn more money, organise others and use their time effectively, and what could combine these three passions more efficiently than a career in motivational speaking? Conversely, those who do just enough to get by probably never consider that they have made a 'lifestyle choice' thinking of it instead as a way to get all the crap stuff done without it cutting into your free time too much. There is definitely a scale of perceived 'worthiness' for pass times - watching films seems to be considered a far worthier use of time than watching TV for example. People will say they are really into films, and are perceived as art enthusiasts, whereas very few people would say that they are really into TV, and those that do are considered lesser somehow as though the length of a programme (which for me is the only difference) makes the difference between art and trash. Reading has a more subtle scale as it's so much more solitary, so you can read 'worthy' books, but then you have to tell people about them, whereas reading a 'trashy' book is unlikely to make the conversational grade unless someone else is reading it too. Then there's the matter of careers. There are plenty of careers which terrify me - anything medical, teaching, air traffic control and the like where tuning out for half an hour to collect your thoughts simply isn't an option. You can't make a class of 6 year olds do something quiet requiring no input from you just because you haven't really got a handle on the day and can't work out how to get yourself going. You can't nip off from your monitor to get some Lucozade to keep your eyes open if that 1 minute break could cause untold numbers of planes to crash into the very tower which contains that fridge. And you can't get half way through heart surgery, realise you haven't paid your car tax and nip off to sort it out online for 5 minutes before carrying on. I don't think I could live like this, and that is one of the reasons these careers aren't ones that you just 'fall into' like my job. You can't start off as an administrator for a hospital and then by a series of lucky breaks end up elbow deep in someone's chest cavity just because it turned out you knew where everything was kept and wouldn't need as much training as someone new. However, these are jobs that you have to really want to do, and given that I naturally assume that anyone who actively wants to work is either lucky enough to have a job that coincides with their hobby or mental (which is essentially the difference between the Boy Wonder wanting to make a living from playing the guitar, and undertaking private veterinary work on your kitchen table), I find the whole thing a bit confusing. This is probably how I managed to leave university with no more idea of what I wanted to do as a job than I had when I began my A-levels. But who tells you about the jobs that most people do? My current job simply didn't exist when I was at school, so even the most motivational teacher would have been hard-pressed to give me a head start in online marketing. It wouldn't have mattered though - I spent the formative years of my life being told I was not 'reaching my full potential' only to find that this is something actively encouraged in a work environment. My current job allows me to reach my potential within the confines of the potential of others, either from a technical, business or interest level point of view. I think telling children that working harder is better is not only setting them up for a future of work/life balance issues, but misleading them into thinking that most jobs actually appreciate the potential of an employee rather than hoping they will not cause trouble, challenge the status quo or upset those who wish to maintain their position of 'doing just enough'. I am happy to do just enough, but if I weren't, I would be an individual thwarted at every turn by the limits of my colleagues, our budget and the near-obsessive greed of my boss. Fortunately, I am happy to do what I can and avoid anything that will frustrate or annoy me on the grounds that I get paid the same whether I give myself an ulcer or not, and if it comes to it, I would much rather be at home with the Boy Wonder and a pint than worrying myself over something which will make someone else rich. My brother and I were struck with a fervour at the idea that children should be encouraged not to really stretch themselves - the overwhelming odds against their efforts being recognised or providing any level of personal satisfaction mean that a life spent enjoying yourself, working as much as you need to to do so and trying not to worry about things must be just as satisfying as climbing Everest and coming home with a blackened stump where your toes used to be. So, to celebrate this, we came up with the idea of 'The Boy Who Did Just Enough'. If only either of us could be bothered to write it, it could be good...

More food weirdness

There are certain meals which I have to eat in specific ways: Fry-ups - these have to be carefully divided up to ensure that there is a piece of every item in every mouthful. I can estimate the number of pieces any given ingredient will be split into, and plan ahead accordingly. Meals with peas/sweetcorn/beans/carrots - vegetables must be consumed first - strays must be hunted down, lurkers must be wheedled out from their crannies, and nothing can be consumed until the veg is eaten. Spag Bol - this must be eaten with spoon and fork with evenly distributed sauce to pasta ratios. Sometimes I wonder whether I have some deep seated issues, and then I speak to other people about food and realise I am actually quite low-maintenance in comparison, so I should just shut up and be grateful!

Books I want to read

1. A prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 2. Anna Karennina and War and Peace - Tolstoy 3. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 4. More Sartre generally (Being and Nothingness, actually finishing Nausea) 5. Some Descartes 6. For Whom the Bell Tolls (I started this a while ago and only got to about page 7, but OCD laws dictate that I now finish it come what may!) 7. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera 8. Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevski 9. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig(think I might regret this one!). 10. Don Quixote - Cervantes 11. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 12. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (so keen to read this after listening to the tapes when I was a kid that I just went and ordered it - can't wait!) I will add more as I think of them, and hopefully some of them will soon appear on the list of 'Books I wanted to read and Did' list. Update to reveal that I am cheating and already listening to one of these (Tom Sawyer) as an audio book - a much easier way to digest some of the weightier tomes I have promised myself I would read, but also fun to listen to real Americans reading classic American literature like Tom Sawyer, although I have yet to hear enough to know whether I actually enjoy the book or not.

Why?

Why were the Ninja turtles names after artists? Why do people always cite the same novels when asked for the best opening line - 1984, Pride and Prejudice, a Tale of Two Cities and the one about bloody Manderley? Why don't people use their indicators to indicate where they're going? Why does the post person come half way through the afternoon during the week, but never fails to wake us up at 8am at the weekends? Why can I never remember the name of a single song I want to add to my playlists when I get to Finetune? Why do people say 'getting along like a house on fire'?

Fix it by breaking it

The Boy Wonder has a brilliant technique he uses to ascertain the seriousness of technological failure in our household appliances. I call this process 'Fix it by breaking it' and it usually involves a little swearing from him, followed by some laughter from me, then some more in depth swearing from him and finally my collapse into giggles whilst asking 'have you fixed it by breaking it yet?'. Despite the fact that the Boy Wonder is very good at most technological things, something about our TV service or websites which require the user to follow simple instructions send him into a state of complete denial about his abilities and render me useless through laughing. I try to help by pointing out how much better it was before he started fixing it, or reminding him of how long since he started fixing it, which I think he appreciates.

Things I hope to do with my future children

I often see, hear and think about things that would be really cool to do with kids, and since my anger at ageism is unlikley to manifest itself in a way that is actually practical, I thought I would capture my ideas of things I hope to do with my kids one day: Midnight treasure hunts - half an hour tramping round the woods in the dark following clues and finding something fun hidden away just for them. I secretly wish someone would wake me up for something like this, so am already quite excited about that one. Camping in the back garden - my brother is the indoorsy type, so never really made any demands for this kind of thing, and I didn't want to stay out there on my own, so this is another thing that I would like to have done myself. What other point is there to having kids? Time capsules - the Blue Peter ones were always so boring, presumably because they were for someone else to find, but I prefer the idea of ones for their future selves to remind them of how much they have changed. Messages in a bottle/balloon - who wouldn't want their words of wisdom to be released into the world? Might actually do this myself next time I'm near the sea. Keep scrapbooks - I am a part-time hoarder, and I reckon that if I can bring kids up to keep only what can be taped to a page of sugar paper then we might not have to have a room full of crap in our house. Visit to the Houses of Parliament - I would like to bring up my children with an interest in the world around them, plus I missed the class trip myself, so have never been in. Watch a trial/court case - obviously nothing too disturbing, but I think thinking about all the things that were considered too scary for me compared to the things my iagination dreamed up, I think sheltering kids from this kind of thing is counterproductive as it does mean they have a silver screen idea of what goes on in the world. Sure there are more, but now I'm trying to think of them, they're slipping away, so I will have to come back and add them as and when they occur to me.

Bing

Microsoft e-mailed me today to let me know about their new search engine, two days after I had already played with it on the advice of one of my many geeky updates I get from the world of online every day. I'm not impressed. I can't see the point of having another search engine which is not as good as Google, but I particularly can't see the point of one which seems designed to give its users less control over their results. I know I am unnaturally in love with Google, but I'm not sure to whom Bing is designed to appeal, plus it took me a long time to use 'Google' as a verb, and I am certainly not going to give up Googling things to start 'Binging' them instead.

Grange Hill

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch Grange Hill by my mother in case it made me too scared to go to secondary school. I remember thinking that secondary school must be really dramatic if it was anything like the illicitly watched snippets I saw at people's houses. Despite the fact I think I had already gained an understanding of how TV and real life weren't necessarily identical, my Mum wanted to ensure that secondary school was something to be embraced. I was also specifically forbidden from watching The Bill, which presumably was either to make sure I wasn't too scared of the police to commit crimes, or to protect me from the overexcitement of people shouting at each other woodenly about crimes which always turn out to be intricately interconnected with one another and fortunately reach complete resolution by the end of the episode (unless it's a two parter where you can guarantee a cliffhanging volte-face at the end of the first half). I assume I will probably impose arbitrary rules on our future children's viewing habits, but I like to believe that I will at least embrace the arbritraryness and pick forbidden programmes based on the font of the titles, the name of the lead character or something equally fatuous.

Ageism

When the sun shines and the days are long, it seems pointlessly perverse to continue the winter tradition of staying in bed till it gets dark watching TV, so I make more valiant efforts than usual to scour our hand-delivered copy of our local parish magazine for events that might get us out of the house and encourage us to appreciate our local environs. Usually there are plenty of activities that suit my requirements for entertainment and learning, but without fail I find myself thwarted and angry when I read the 'small print' and discover that pond dipping is only for accompanied children, that bug spotting is for under 9s, and that only families are welcome to come along to 'spring fun' featuring biscuit decorating, ladybird hats and other stimulating-sounding fun. I feel aggrieved that this kind of thing is only for kids - I'm sure I could turn up, but a) I'm not sure the Boy Wonder would want to be the only 30 year old accompanying his 28 year old wife to an event intended for small children so I would have to go on my own and b) Kids ruin stuff when you're trying to have fun - they scare animals, make noise, get leakage on stuff I might want to touch and generally demand that they should be at the front/first to go whenever something good happens, so people like me are supposed to 'hold back' and let them, even if I have been waiting longest. So screw kids, and screw the people who put on events which even have a suggested age group - all I want is to crouch down and poke around looking at bugs and pond life without people acting as though I should have had enough of that when I was a kid.

Hair bear bunch

I had my hair cut today - about two thirds of it is gone, meaning it is no longer down to my arse, but just below my shoulders. I was a bit terrified, but the girl who cut it was, as I always find with hairdressers, really nice. She pandered to the fact that I kept saying I didn't know what I wanted, she didn't seem too put out that I turned up looking like an angry tomato after a rather brisk walk down from the office, and she cut my hair (as far I can tell at least) very well. I got back to the office and everyone was very nice about it, which was also a good sign, and none of them believed that the Boy Wonder wouldn't notice the change, and in fairness, I wasn't as confident as I sounded. I got home, with hair tied up (thinking I would make it a bit harder for him!) and spent a few minutes doing nothing out of the ordinary, then a few more minutes turning my head away from him so he could see the teeny tiny ponytail I had. When that didn't get a comment, I took it down and started flapping it about before going in for the kill with a request to scratch my back. As he was scratching my now hairless back, he actually made a comment about someone's hair on TV - I did give him a few seconds to make the connection, but was too impatient to wait any more, so I finally said 'I'm guessing you're not going to mention the fact that I have had nearly all my hair cut off' which apparently triggered the synapses which deal with observation, prompting him to say 'I was just thinking that your hair was different!'. I have to say, whilst I think I am delightfully low maintenance, even I was a little surprised that he didn't notice, but not at all offended, which I think is hard for other people to understand. But I am happy to live with someone who isn't observant about my looks - it means I can get away with wearing a pair of paint-covered pyjama bottoms around the house most of the time, leave my crazy hair to do what it wants, lie around unshowered with greasy hair when I'm hungover and prance around in clothes with holes in them without worrying what he thinks, which I think is well worth the somewhat-less-than-annual hair-noticing debacle!

What do cows hunt?

Last weekend, the Boy Wonder and I toddled down to Brighton to visit our friends, and, save for a slight delay while we dealt with the antics in Naughty Pets Corner, we made it down without any difficulty. We arrived at about 2.30, had begun drinking by 3 and were down on the pier feeding 2p pieces into those moving shelf machines trying to win more 2ps and the occasional packet of sweets. We then moved on to more advanced machines which pay out in tickets, and having won over 400 tickets (largely due to impressive precision on the part of the two doctors on the team) we chose to redeem them for a 'Time Projecting' Batman watch which, as one might imagine, projects the time and the Batman logo onto a wall not more than 1.5 meters away, and only in complete darkness. We returned home to a lovely meal (which was very grown up - roast duck, fancy veg and everything!) and post prandial entertainment in the form of 'parlour games' (as described by our gracious host). On the grounds that neither the Boy Wonder nor I can draw to save our lives, we opted for 'Articulate' over 'Pictionary', which was a good choice as it offered plenty of opportunity for fun describing words and concepts to each other. Widely regarded as the favourites (and both from the slightly inebriated mouth of our surgeon host) were: 'Cows have them' 'Horns?' 'No, they wear them' 'Bells?' 'No - something cows hunt' 'Wha....?' (The answer turned out to be 'Sheepskin') and, possibly even less helpful: 'Hit me with your...' 'Rhythm Stick?' 'No.' (ongoing silence until we look at the card to find that he was trying to describe 'A Plank of Wood'. We were also asked if we wanted to 'quiche' out, a term which we assume is derived from the original verb 'to crash out' but was admirably styled out by our drunken host who explained at some length that he was referring to a state of existence similar to that of a quiche, before trying to encourage us to go out clubbing at 2am before falling asleep in all his clothes. Fortunately his wife is well used to these antics and didn't hold it against us that we did encourage him more than was strictly necessary...

Naughty Pets Corner

Having had the hedgehog for over six months, we thought we have experienced all the varieties of naughtiness he was capable of, but (as we always find when we think an animal has been as naughty as it can) we were wrong. We were due to go down to Brighton for the weekend to see our scarily responsible doctor friends and as usual, the getting up and getting going stage of the day was taking a bit longer than expected. So while the Boy Wonder was in the shower I went down to clean out the hedgehog so he would smell as fragrant as possible on our return - I took out the heating pad, towel and bowl to wash and it was only once they were out that I realised that there was a suspiciously small array of places where he could still be. After a little frantic scrabbling through poo covered newspaper and some curious thoughts about how a hedgehog could accidentally shrink down to a size which could still be sheltering in the box, I was sure he was officially missing. I shouted up to the Boy Wonder who was a little confused as to why I was shrieking up the stairs and went back to being frantic around the kitchen, searching under the gas fire, down the side of the dishwasher and contemplating whether he could have got into the pan cupboard and down the gap between the kitchen and the cellar. I searched under the sofas and looked into every crack and crevice that could house a spiky little escapologist. I even considered the chance that he may have been stolen, imagining some vigilante looking through the window, misunderstanding the situation and 'liberating' him. Fortunately the Boy Wonder came down and, with his usual calm, collected approach to things, started rooting around under the furniture with the broom handle. A few seconds later he started laughing as his poking revealed that Hoggle was curled up inside an old slipper of his which has been under the dresser for at least a couple of years. Somehow he had managed to get out of his box (didn't know that was an option - he'd never done it before!) and make the heroic two meter journey to under the dresser where he clearly felt some synergy with the Boy Wonder's stinky slipper and decided to make it into a sleeping bag. I was worried that he was trapped due to the direction of his spines, but after I spent a careful five minutes cutting the back of the slipper open and peeling him out, he spent the following five minutes snuggling himself back in there like a big grey banana. This little routine meant that not only did we have the best excuse for being late ever ('Sorry we're going to be late - the hedgehog's escaped'), but also the fun of clearing everything off the dresser which was almost entirely offset by the cutest pictures even taken of a really dusty floor.

Uneccessary specifics of dreams

Last night I had my usual round of peculiar night time experiences, but this time with an odd emphasis on the specific: At one point the Boy Wonder took some salad out of the fridge to eat, and I was a bit worried that it had been in there so long that it would have gone bad, but I didn't want to say so in case I gave the impression that I thought he was incapable of working that out for himself. A colleague of mine asked how fast a person could walk a mile - I answered that average walking speed was 4mph, but then said a mile should take 20 minutes to walk. As I sat there, I wanted to correct myself to say 'of course, at 4 mph a mile should take 15 minutes, but I meant that he should allow 20 minutes to be sure' and when the moment passed, I was really annoyed with myself for not speaking up. I sometimes wonder whether my night brain is trying to make me the sort of person who pays attention to detail that I sometimes want to be whilst I am awake. But if this is all it can offer, then it can bog off as I already have the ability to worry about tiny details that I am pretty sure (objectively) nobody else would even notice - it's other details (remembering dates, tasks and information) that I need to brush up on. I also seem to remember something about sharing the details of your dreams and how fascinating it can be for others...

'Suck it and see'

Is there a more annoying phrase for people to use at work? I mean, there's plenty of management speak that really pisses me off, but something about the image of my most repugnant colleagues sucking anything makes me want to tear my eyeballs out and pour bleach through the holes into my brain.

Will it do my bit of grey?

Am I the only person who thinks that line in whatever hair dye ad it is sounds a bit rude?

Overheard in my house

Me (coming downstairs): 'What are you doing?' Boy Wonder: 'Just looking at tambourines on E-bay...' It's a good job we found each other.

Naughty Pets - Mogbad

I loved Mogbad very much, so much so that I wrote a song about my love for him to convince the Boy Wonder to let us foster him which went thus (to the tune of 'A Very Good Year' by Frank Sinatra): When I was 27, I met a very nice cat A very nice cat, who was very sad His name was Mogbad However, his appeal did not extend to impressive displays of intellect, resulting in the following rules being written in an attempt to 'train' him: * Dribbling may be a sign of your pleasure, but please don't feel the need to share your joy with the contents of my bag * Just because you fell off the sofa and we laughed does not mean you have the right to anchor yourself to my leg to save future embarrasment. In fact, if you fall asleep in an odd position, it is rarely acceptable to use my skin to grapple your way back to safety. * Although you are funny when you have catnip, jumping on top of the fridge and eating an entire box while I am at work will probably make you feel queasy and paranoid. Do not inflict your come-down on me by alternately hiding in the waste paper bin and attacking used tissues and then lolling around in doorways staring at cupboards. * If the stairs have always baffled you, but you have taken the plunge and decided to see what's up there, don't try to hide your adventuring spirit by shooting under the bed when you're rumbled and then sneezing in the dust for 20 minutes before emerging with fluff in your whiskers. *I asked the vet and he said there is NO reason for you to be licking soot from the fireplace. I did tell him that I thought you were super intelligent and capable of identifying minerals which were lacking in your diet, but, as you may you recall, he laughed and said he thought you were just a bit stupid. Because it was during my spirited defence of your intelligence that you fell out of the scales and off the examining table, I decided not to pursue the matter, but I don't think I am to blame for his opinion of you. *Also, the fire in the grate today is about as hot as it was yesterday when you burnt your nose on it. It will be that hot again tomorrow, and every day from then on until the weather is warmer, whilst the available sympathy levels will diminish every time you do it. Please don't be offended if we laugh at you. *I know you're a bit old a creaky, so don't be surprised if I am not impressed that you found a dead mouse and brought it home - I am well aware that you are too slow, stupid and lazy to catch anything which was alive, and so whilst you are welcome to do whatever you want to it outside, stop bringing it through the catflap every half an hour in the hope that I will be moved to raptures by your achievement. * The cats next door can get back out of the shed via the hole in the back panel, whereas you seem unable to navigate it, so it might be best if you didn't follow them in there. However it was sweet watching them trying to 'explain' to you how to get out while you sat there looking confused and crying. * If you play that game where you jump in and out of the box, it will eventually flip up and trap you underneath. If urgent rescue is such a priority this time, you shouldn't have just fallen asleep under there last time as it gave us the impression you weren't that bothered. * This is the most important one, so pay attention: I know that I wanted you to stop weeing in that plant, but I do NOT remember endorsing the use of the 8 way plug extension next to it as a suitable alternative. Continued weeing on it will have one of two outcomes a) you will get electrocuted and I will come home to find a dead moggy covered in wee behind the TV b) I will get a call from the fire brigade telling me that they have had to put my house out and curiously the point of the fire's origin seems to be a dead moggy covered in wee behind the TV. Neither of these scenarios appeal to me, so please use the cat flap you walked past to access more suitable territories for relieving yourself.

100 things (71 - 80)

These ten will be dedicated to the things I don't like about myself, not in a spirit of being down, just because I thought I would do the next 10 about things I like about myself, and starting with the bad is a better way round to do it. 71. I am very bad at keeping in touch with most people - I can never work out whether it's because I just don't have that much in common with them or whether it is just a social awkwardness thing about leaving it for so long that I then feel like I should have some big news to share when I do and I will never live up to the length of time it has taken to get in touch. I believe this to be genetic as my brother is exactly the same, only much worse. 72. I am lazy. I tend to think of it as laid back, but as my weight creeps up and the filing mounts and even the things I want to do don't get done, I really have to accept that I am a lazy person. I do the least amount possible to get by unless I am really inspired by something (although this mostly relates to my working life rather than my personal life). I don't feel bad about it most of the time, but occasionally I do wonder whether life will drift past me as I lie in bed and whether I will regret the time I have spent watching detective dramas in years to come. 73. I can be a horrible bitch, and when drunk, even more so. Despite the fact that I generally like people and get on with them, I do find myself drawn to their negative points, probably because I see the same negatives in myself, which bring me on to: 74. I am pretty hypocritical. I hate it when I can see someone using a trick or technique I use to get by, which is possibly because I am scared that I am that transparent and that people are looking at me and thinking the same thing. I also judge people on their looks, assuming people who are pretty will be vain and making wild asssumptions about people who spend any time or money on their appearance. 75. I have an overinflated sense of my own uniqueness. When Derren Brown did his show about pretending to be psychic and pretended to be able to analyse people's personalities from a personal item of theirs but when it came down to it they all had the same description, I immediately thought: 'that would have caught me out'. Not that I believe in psychic ability, or would have thought that he had somehow divined the inner workings of my mind, but I am convinced that all my foibles and insecurities are specific to myself and assume that other people all know what they are doing and I'm the only one who isn't sure. However, this also means I think that I am cooler than I am and get frustrated with people who don't appreciate the same things as me because I can't believe they will settle for the 'crap' they like when there's so much good stuff out there. 76. I can be very manipulative, which annoys me because I never really realise I'm doing it and it's only afterwards that I think 'that wasn't really called for, I should have just admitted that I was wrong instead of trying to spread the blame' by which time it's too late to change it. 77. I can be really uptight - despite having a pretty laid back attitude to most things, there are some aspects of life which really grind my gears and I find it impossible to chill out about them, such as unwashed hands, the whole other people eating thing and numerous other petty irrelevances. 78. I am nervous and inhibited in many aspect of my life, and despite attempts to 'face my fears' they all seem so petty and pathetic that I can't even bring myself to think about them most of the time. 79. I am very worried about being like my Dad, who never passes up an opportunity to get a laugh, even if it means saying something hurtful about someone. I know I sometimes take it too far with the Boy Wonder and it makes a hole in my heart when I turn fun into annoyance by taking it one step beyond amusing. 80. I have an immense talent for self-pity masked as introspection and reflection whereby I lose all sense of proportion, blowing small incidents up into terrible tragedies as though feeling bad about something absolves me from the responsiblity of having said or done it.

43 things

It's been a year since I started an account on 43 things, and as yet I have only 8 items on my list, one of which I have completed and that was about getting married which I was going to do anyway! I don't think it's so much that I lack ambition as that I am reluctant to put down things that I am not sure I will achieve, whereas I suspect the point of the excercise is to put down things that you want to do regardless of whether you can see a way that they will happen. So, rather self-fulfillingly I am going to add 'think of 43 things I want to do' to my list, which will hopefully inspire me to think of more goals, and be a bit more generous with myself!

Moonbow

Last night as we were faffing about feeding the animals the Boy Wonder called me outside to look at the moon, and lo and behold we witnessed a moonbow. Now, I was vaguely aware of such a thing existing, but I hadn't seen one (or possibly just hadn't looked properly). The Boy Wonder managed to take a photo which I will post as soon as I work out how, but it's a weird effect as the moonbow looks like a product of the shot rather than the subject of the photo itself. It's odd - I never realised that I wanted to see one (as you can tell because it's not on my 43 things) but now I have, I'm glad I did.

Conceptual laundry basket problem

The fact that the Boy Wonder and I don't really row, I put down to the fact that there are a few things he does which I have chosen to find endearing rather than infuriating. For example, he has a peculiar habit of putting teaspoons in the sink, despite the fact that he's making coffee closer to the dishwasher. But his tenuous understanding of the idea of a laundry basket is one which is easier to enjoy. We have a relatively large laundry basket in our bedroom, which I have come to think of as a place where laundry goes. The Boy Wonder on the other hand, seems to view 'laundry basket' as a kind of concept which encompasses any area containing dirty laundry. This belief is, in turn, responsible for the phenomenon of 'sock nests', little fluffy piles of used socks which often germinate in recently removed shoes before sending out shoots and spores to corners by the sofa and heaps in the kitchen. Occasionally, some plucky sock will actually start colonising the washing machine, inevitably hiding in there just before a white wash goes in. Edit - reading this back I have realised that this post makes it sound as though my saint-like patience is the only thing stopping us from a quickie divorce which is definitely not the case. Not only do I have an array of infuriating habits which I am sure the Boy Wonder ignores with equal if not enhanced levels of maturity, but we actually just get along very well too.

My own personal hell!

I think I must have been guilty of some kind of hubris in recent times because today I was plunged into my own personal hell. Not only did we have a long presentation where they adhered to the tried and tested method of 'Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them' which I, in my confidence at my own abilities, find very frustrating to have to sit through, but the torture didn't end there. After a five minute break (don't worry - the directors had expensive sandwiches delivered, so it didn't really matter that the meeting was a whopping four hours long) we came back only for crisps to be offered around. It's no secret that the sound of eating is one of my least favourite, but the sound of 15 people surrounding me and subjecting me to the sound of crunching, slurping and slobbering away made me feel as though my brain was going to burst out of my head. However I have realised that it's people I am ambivalent about that provoke the strongest reactions - I can listen to loud eating on the part of someone I choose to spend time with without too much trouble, but people I work with is an entirely different matter. Another reason why I should work at home I think, and one which I could never really cite on a CV.

Procrastination

I inherited a veritably awesome ability to procrastinate from my mother. Despite being a very motivated and dedicated person for 80% of the time, something about a task without a deadline renders her completely incapable of activity. I have inherited this trait and can easily spend hours thinking about doing something, worrying that I have not done it, and planning how best to remedy the situation, without actually managing to make any headway into the task at hand, even though it often would take five minutes to complete. I have no idea why I continue to procrastinate about things - I know that getting it over and done with will be a relief and that the thought of doing something is always worse than the reality, but somehow this makes no difference. I am only really motivated at times when I can't possibly complete a task - I will clear out cupboards, fill bags of stuff to take to the charity shop, and then drive around with the bags in my car for months. At this very moment, I posses a passport application form which is complete and just needs sending, but has been in the living room for weeks. At least I am better than my brother who convinces himself that the longer he has put something off the better it needs to be when he finally does it, wrapping himself up in layers of inadequate feelings that render him incapable of any activity. I do wonder whether I somehow find it comforting to know what it is that I need to do, and believe that the devil I know will inevitably be better than the next chore which requires my attention. Maybe I am just lazy and my mind is getting fed up with reminding me of the things I should be doing. Adult life is surprisingly more full of responsibility than I expected, and this is bearing in mind that I really have as few responibilities as it is possible to at the moment. Fortunately I am much better at donig things for other people - the Boy Wonder needed a nwe tyre and it was done in a day, whereas my new tyres had to wait two months. I hope that this will be the case with our children as I dread having to admit that I have failed to complete some important form or made a vital phonecall which will impact on them. Mind you, my Mum never let her powers of super-procrastination affect us, so hopefully that aspect of it is genetic as well.

Learning at work

One of the beauties of my job, apart from the fact that almost nobody in the company actually understands what I do, is that I have managed to appropriate the tasks I want to do whilst avoiding those which don't really interest me, which is particularly pleasant at the moment as I am writing copy for a brochure about the UK's National Parks, which essentially means reading stuff about the parks themselves, and then regurgitating it in brochure appropriate tones and in bite-size chunks with snappily encouraging asides and the occasional witty (no puns - that's one step too far) remark. During the course of this I have learnt a fair amount about our national parks, not least that the features which make them different from one another are few and far betwen unless you want to go into the latin names of the species that can be found there. I learnt briefly about fishing while I was trying to work out whether angling was just fishing (it is - the angle is the hook) but had to stop when I saw pictures. I have learnt some stuff about cars (Enzo is a pretty cool name for someone who makes cars that people are so boring about), some stuff about dolphins and reindeer and plenty of less edifying things about where small airfields are around the country and the things women let strangers do to them in the name of beauty. All in all however, I just like to learn things, and despite the drawbacks of my job, I am glad I manage to make learning a part of it.

100 things (61 - 70)

61. I love local radio, which plays host to a delightful selection of crazy people with crazier opinions who love nothing more than to voice them on air, often between the hours of midnight and four am. We are lucky enough to be able to pick up Radio Cambridgeshire and 3 Counties Radio at our house, so not only can we enjoy the dulcet tones of Jeremy Sallis, but we can also tune in to Ern and Vern for some late night single entendre action. I rarely listen to any other live radio and cannot understand how people don't actually know about local BBC services, let alone enjoy them in all their glory! 62. I could eat crisps until my arteries clog and I keel over, but I don't out of concern for my health. Technically I am limited to one packet a day, although sometimes this extends to one really large packet, which is offset by the days where I don't eat any. I generally prefer savoury snacks to sweet, and my tolerance for crisps is far greater than my tolerance for chocolate. 63. I don't like ice-cream or cake and feel as though this in some way makes me freakish, particularly since last night I caught about 10 minutes of an episode of Friends in which Ross was actively mocked for not liking ice-cream as though it's the same as not liking air. 64. I don't have any irrational fears - all my slightly peculiar dislikes (sticky hands, poorly maintained toilets etc) are relatively well managed, and I don't have panic attacks or anything. I'm not scared of insects, in fact I actively like most kinds of bugs, I'm not great with heights but only when I feel precarious, so I can cope with most situations and can overcome most cases of vertigo with by thinking logically and forcing myself to suck it up. I like all animals, don't mind any particular form of transport, I don't exactly enjoy spending time in hospitals or going to the dentist, but I don't even really get nervous about either, and the only things I am really scared of is stuff you should be scared of like people I love suffering, so I assume that's pretty much normal and everyone has to put up with it. It's weird because a part of me would like to conquer something inside myself, but I really am not sure if any of my particular foibles would count. 65. If I could live with a pet, I would love to be a trainer for guide dog puppies. I don't think I could ever get a kitten or a puppy as the Boy Wonder and I are both more inclined towards going to an animal shelter and taking home the cat or dog which nobody else wants or that has a slightly gammy element to it. As such, I think that getting involved in guide dog puppy training would be a brilliant way to have a puppy for a period of time and then replace it with another puppy. It's not ideal - obviously I would have to consider whether I would be able to actually give a puppy up, but I do think that if I knew I was doing it for someone who needs the help a seeing eye or hearing dog could offer, I could probably manage it. 66. I love doing things on Friday nights - it feels like a bonus weekend day and I can easily forget a day at work after a couple of hours being sociable. It's really easy to lie around on a Friday night, but unfortunately it does feel a little bit too much like every other weeknight, whereas going out on Friday night makes Saturday feel like Sunday and then you have a bonus weekend day to enjoy before the horrors of work on a Monday. 67. I would like to wear dungarees, but fear the connotations as I already look butch enough without adding to the lesbian accessories. The practicalities of going to the loo are a little hairy, but I would put up with that for the fun of having a pouch to keep sweets in. I have consistently forbidden the Boy Wonder to have anything to do with dungarees, so it's wildly hypocritical to even lust after them myself, but I cannot pretend that I don't think about them and sometimes I'm literally wearing them in my dreams... 68. I am intolerant of PMS/PMT which makes me a little uncomfortable. On the one hand, I refuse to see it as an acceptable excuse for rudeness and poor behaviour, but having never suffered from it myself, I wonder whether I am a little harsh on those who do. However, I have suffered many other symptoms of PMS and have felt irritable and ratty, but never used it as an excuse for being unreasonable. I am frequently unreasonable for no reason which I am quite happy with, but I don't see how your personality can be completely altered once a month without there being any inner moment of thinking 'I seem to be taking this a little seriously/I think I am overreacting/maybe this is not worth the bother'. But then I can't really be bothered with rows generally, so maybe this is more to do with that than PMS. 69. Is the funniest number, and if I haven't grown out of finding it amusing by now then I doubt I will. 70. I am learning geography. When I was at school we did environmental geography which was pretty interesting, but really only taught me about rocks breaking and oxbow lakes, whereas I would actually like to learn a bit about where stuff is in the world. Last week I got a TV quiz question about oceans right based on actual knowledge rather than wild guesswork, which was a treat, and I put this down to the fact that I bought the Boy Wonder a map of the world which now lives in our bedroom and helpfully transmits knowledge to my brain through sheer power of its presence in the room.