Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Busy

I have work coming out of my ears at the moment. Heaps and piles and mountains of it. This isn't the carefree life I envisaged when I was small. I wanted to be a hairdresser, or a lollipop lady, or any number of other glamorous jobs. My stepsister wanted to be a nurse, until she was bought a book on nursing and realised that she would have to wipe bottoms and wash willies and that sort of thing. When I had Small Person I abruptly decided (as I'm pretty sure a number of other exhausted, drugged women do) that I really, really wanted to be a midwife. And apart from being rubbish at science, extremely squeamish and unwilling to work shifts on the grounds that I'd never be able to work out my TV schedule effectively, I'd have been great at it. But here I sit, surrounded by piles of meaningless paper that I will action and put somewhere else. How very rewarding.

What did you want to be when you grew up? And did you make it? Go on, make me envious. It's not like my day could get any worse.

Carry on.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Bored

Me and Small Person are watching Top of the Pops. She is scathing in her condemnation of The Police doing Roxanne ("he sounds like a girl, Mummy") and I can't really fault her. I can't bear Sting. I can't stand the horrible cod-reggae droning, the persistent do-gooding (I wouldn't mind but it's all so ultimately inconsequential - see also Bono), the smug, self-satisfied presence of the man. Horrid.

That aside, Sunday sucks. It's an oft-discussed topic here in Blogland, but I can't help but add my two pennorth. It's a hangover from being eleven. You've had your Sunday lunch. You've played with your Spirograph, listened to Now That's What I Call Music 7, written "I love Howard Jones" on your bookbag and had a bath. Now it's time for your mum to burn your ears with the hairdryer during Songs of Praise and there might be time for a mint Viscount (they're posh, you know) before bed. When I was young, the mere mention of preparing for Monday would elicit a sulk so monumental it made Mariah Carey's tantrum on hearing that there were no more gold-plated baby marmosets to play with seem inconsequential. I utterly, utterly resented the five minutes it would take me to prepare my bag for Monday morning. And it's no different now. I have grudgingly done dinner money and forked over the ransom I pay the childminder. I have polished Small Person's shoes and ensured that clean uniform is ready. I have made her a packed lunch for tomorrow and am currently creating a Thai green chicken curry for myself (fast, low-fat and delicious. How very Good Housekeeping). The net effect of this frenzied activity is a barely-suppressed urge to flounce around the flat, swinging my arms and muttering "oh, for god's sake" under my breath whilst glaring malevolently from beneath my overlong fringe. Except these days, I'm the grownup and I have all this to look forward to with a child of my own. That'll fucking teach me.

Carry on.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Random

I know everyone else does this, but it's a constant source of amusement (and some concern - I can't even think about publishing some of them) to me. I am of course referring to the search terms that end up sending people here. I feel sorry for all the people looking for information on how to deal with their verrucas. I worry about everyone who actually wants information on chime bars (and there are a lot). Some of them, however, are just plain weird, and I present a selection of my favourites:

  • Spacehopper Race
  • Sausage baby sleepsuit (??)
  • Hasselhoff Berlin Wall flashing jacket (weird)
  • Hasselhoff Stefan Dennis (weirder)
  • Carol Vorderman as Cher (not on my blog, thank you)
  • Chiming device pelvic exercise (I might search that one myself)
  • Lifeguard application West Wittering (eh?)
  • Pussycat Dolls trannies rumour (about a million of these)
  • Things to do while pooing (I have no suggestions, sorry)

I still can't beat one from Donna's stats though. Someone found their way there after Googling for "slag wellies". What a beautiful mental image.

Carry on.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Fear

There's some sort of contingency training going on this morning. The nature of the business requires that every employee is contractually obliged to be trained in how to talk down to grieving relatives in the event of a disaster. I loathe contingency training. It's just so creepy. They get the local Samaritans to ring up and pretend that they can't find their Grandma, and I always want to say "look, let's just level with each other. You haven't really lost contact with a close family member, and I couldn't care less. Let's just tick the right boxes on the sheet and say no more about it". Honestly, I once had a protracted argument with someone pretending that their mother had rung them to say she'd had a small dog in her suitcase and could someone go back for it? Talk about a waste of my time.

So anyway, there are currently about four hundred people crammed into the MD's office. It's like one of those record attempts from the eighties where they see how many students you can fit in a phone box. Naturally there aren't enough chairs to go round, so a member of the contingency planning team has taken it upon himself to be Chair Monitor. Frankly, it's terrifying. It's like one of those weird arty foreign films where you're not sure what's happening but it's horrible and you feel a bit sick but don't know why. He keeps emerging from the office (where people are sitting on each other's laps with their faces pressed against the glass) and sort of staring round the room in search of his next victim chair. He's doing ponderous blinking, like a lizard but in a pink shirt, and when he spots a likely candidate he sort of homes in on it and wheels it verrrry, verrrry sloooowly across the office. I can't bear it. The thready, haunting sound of chair wheels lazily squeaking will blow through dreams of lurking shapes and unimaginable horror tonight, you mark my words.

Brr. Carry on.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Happy

The Other Half is on his way back from Hamburg a day early. Woo!

I totally beat that man in the Audi on that roundabout just now. Yay!

Happiness rules. Yeah. In Your Face, mother.

Carry on.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Futile

It has been well documented on this blog that the relationship between my mother and her children is rocky, to say the least. Well, brace yourselves, because I need to have another crack at externalising the impotent rage this constant war of attrition engenders in me.

As I may have mentioned before, mine and Fifi’s (and our brother Bobs’) parents did a swap with my Australian Stepsister’s (AS’s) parents when we were all sort of small. AS and I ended up with my mother and AS’s father, whilst Fifi, Bobs and impending smallest sister won our father and AS’s mother. Just your typical seventies wife swap. Nothing to see here. Around five or six years ago, AS had a heart to heart with her mother (my stepmother – are you keeping up at the back?) regarding my mother’s treatment of AS when we were small. As a result of this, both AS and my stepmother severed all ties with my mother. Despite the fact that my loyalties might seem to obviously lie with my mother, I am firmly on the side of AS. Imagine it, if you can. AS was four years old. An only child, she was abruptly separated from her mother and sent to live with her father, a new stepsister (me) and a stepmother. This sort of thing happens all the time, and I’m sure that occasionally it has a happy ending. Except that my mother isn’t really predisposed towards kindness, and has no clue when it comes to empathy. Instead of doing all she could to ease AS into her new family, and reassuring all the children concerned that this could be a success, she instead treated AS worse than you or I would treat an animal. Please bear in mind that at this stage three children were without their natural mother. Fifi and Bobs were lucky enough to be living with my stepmother who I am closer to these days than I am to my own mother. Impending smallest sister also came up trumps. Which left AS and I adrift in the heavy seas of our parents’ marriage.

From the outset, battle lines were firmly drawn. I was three when all this happened, and my mother made it clear to me from the outset that it was me and her against my stepdad and AS. I’m not clear on exactly what went on at the beginning as I was very young, but I remember AS being fed bread and water (for refusing to eat - it still staggers me that at no point did anyone consider that two small children were traumatized and maybe needed some nurturing), being ignored for no reason that she or I could fathom, and being generally treated with contempt. This continued in one form or another (ours was a tempestuous household, ruled by fear, alcoholism and violent arguments) until AS and I left home (somewhat involuntarily) as soon as we could. We struggled on uneasily in our fractured family unit until, as I’ve said, things were brought sharply into focus with my stepmother learning exactly how my mother had treated AS as a child. The outcome was inevitable – my mother was effectively disowned by AS, and told in no uncertain terms by my stepmother that she was no longer welcome in their house, or around them at all. Any decent person might at this point have tried to understand and acknowledge what had led to this ultimatum. Not my mother though.

My mother’s immediate reaction was to trot out the “poor me”. As time has gone on and as her mind has grown more fixated on the past, so she has become obsessed with old, dead relationships. AS and her husband have just become the proud parents of a baby boy. My mother is relentless in her enquiries over his health, AS’s situation, her husband’s family. It’s impossible to spend more than five minutes in her company without deflecting questions, whether about this, or my father (who she has been divorced from for thirty years), or my stepfather (AS’s dad, who my mother divorced ten years ago and hasn’t spoken to since). The fact of the matter is that my mother is losing her marbles, and sadly none of her children care enough to be upset by it. She consistently puts Fifi and I in impossible situations regarding her incessant interest in people who have cut her off. Our brother Bobs lives in America and will spend the next few years desperately fending off suggestions of a visit from her, as he can’t stand spending time with her. Things are going to come to a head in the next few days, as she has asked Fifi to give her a picture of AS’s new baby. Fifi can’t do that, and has had to explain gently to our mother why this is. My mother will ring me and cry.

The bottom line is that I can’t stand this. I am an adult. I have a daughter of my own. My mother has consistently let me and her other children down. She relies on us to shore her up emotionally, with no thought that we might be the ones needing some support. Over the years, I have learned to hate her. It saddens me beyond belief to say this. I have friends who have lost their mothers and wish every day for the chance to spend more time with them. Frankly, and this is going to sound terrible, I can’t wait for mine to drop dead and stop making my life a fucking misery.

I would give anything to not feel this way.

Carry on.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Obvious?

As the Other Half is currently mooching round a Hamburg dockyard (draw your own conclusions), I am rather bored. I have been indulging my guilty pleasure of rubbish magazines (we've been here before, haven't we?) and noted with some incredulity an article in the frankly banal "Closer" magazine. Yet another analysis of the are-they-aren't-they-has-she-kicked-him-in-the-balls-yet-why-is-she-still-wearing-terrible-clothes relationship between Jude Law and Sienna Whatsherface has brought us some home truths on the best way to ensure that the man you've ensnared trapped fallen in love with isn't a cheating fucking scumbag. Tracey Cox (how I loathe the phrase "Sexpert") offers the following sound advice:

Want a faithful partner? Research (for "research" read "Tracey Cox's pitiful relationship history") shows you should avoid a man who:
  • Has a history of cheating. If he's done it to others, he'll probably do it to you.

OK. Maybe a fair point. Someone who has no concept of respect or boundaries is probably never going to change. So far, so rational.

  • Has parents who had affairs - he's learnt that's how people behave in relationships. Ditto if his friends cheat.

At this point Tracey's logic begins to spiral a bit. I mean, are you supposed to bellow an enquiry in his ear over the sound of Girls Aloud at Roxy's of a Friday night? ...."so have your parents ever shagged around? I said SHAGGED?"......hardly likely, is it? Neither is a confession that he and his friends indulge in regular foursomes with each other's girlfriends. Just for fun, mind...

  • Is rich. The more cash he has, the more ability he has to seduce and the more attractive he is to other women.

Right. I know that personally I am damp at the very sight of Bill Gates. Geeky chess club looks and social ineptitide aside, the thought of him feebly humping away is more than thrilling when you factor his net worth into the equation. See also Richard Branson. Round about now my suspicions that Ms Cox may have had her fingers burned at some point begin to crystallise.

  • Travels a lot for work. It's a golden opportunity to stray, undetected.

Quite clearly nonsense. Anyone who would believe this is mental. Ahem. But wait, it's getting to the good bit...

  • Drinks lots of coffee or smokes. He wants instant kicks - what an affair gives.

Um. Whatever. At this point reality appears to leg it as some weird undercurrent of "they're all bastards" begins to seep through. I may be naive, but I'm really not prepared to accept that a man's fondness for hot beverages belies a predisposition to infidelity. Again, the suspicion that at some not-too-distant point in the past Tracey Cox has fallen for a serially unfaithful, ugly chainsmoking Starbucks manager who likes an orgy of a weekend begins to surface. And frankly, faced with that sort of evidence who wouldn't proclaim themselves an expert, sorry, "Sexpert" for spotting it? Bitter? I think so. Paging Dr. Freud.....

Carry on.

Facts

  1. I fell down in an Indian restaurant on Friday night.
  2. The Other Half has gone to Hamburg again, leaving me bereft, lonely and bored.
  3. We are moving house in about four weeks.
  4. I am totally unprepared for this, and am currently at DefCon 2 in terms of panic.
  5. The Ex is being nice to me, which is both unsettling and a potential harbinger of doom.
  6. That's the first time I've used the phrase "harbinger of doom". I quite like it.
  7. I'm not going to be able to get this list to run to ten. This makes me uncomfortable.
  8. Oh. Unless I do this.
  9. Carry on.
  10. Get in!! I so rule. Etc.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Poetry

I love the general emails that go round the whole company when there's something important to say. "You've left your lights on, green Fiesta with rusty wing and bronzed baby shoe hanging from rear-view mirror"; "A dirty brown bobble hat was left on the bus. It has a soup stain on the front and smells of sheep. Please claim it if it is yours"; "Whoever is not flushing the downstairs toilet should be aware that the Reception staff will be taking swabs this afternoon in an attempt to identify the culprit". That sort of thing. Today's, however, transcends the mundanity of courgettes for sale, poor hygiene and flat batteries and touches the very heart of the human condition and all its futility. I arrived this morning to find the following nestling in my inbox, gently trembling like a newborn faun, and was moved enough to share it with you. I present it exactly as I, and the rest of the company, received it:

A black tie with white diagonal stripes has been found
On the path in Olympus close.
It is now in the postroom
Thank you.


Beautiful. So moving, yet with a strength that belies the delicacy of the structure.

Carry on.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Irrational

No. 596 in an interchangeable list of thousands of irrational fears is the fear that I might drown. It's literally the worst thing I can think of. Apart from suffocating, or burning, or getting shot, or being in a plane crash, or being trampled to death by cows*, or getting run over. But the really irrational part of my drowning fear (I am not much fun to be around when on a ship, what with my constant checking of how big the waves are, my endless obsession with how big they might get and my conviction that we are sinking) is that sometimes I worry that I could drown while drinking a glass of water. You know when you're really, really thirsty? So you get a great big glass of water? Well sometimes I'm so thirsty that I can't stop drinking the water even though I really, really need to breathe. And all the while I'm thinking "blimey, I really need to breathe. So I should stop drinking for a second and breathe, probably". Except I can't stop. I'm guessing that I probably can't actually drown this way, but it's always scary** nonetheless.

Carry on.

* This happens. It happens quite a lot. Cows are scary. Fact.
** What?? So there aren't things that you find scary that would make me point at you and laugh?

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Confusion

I'm having one of those days today where I keep seeing people who look familiar to me. I spend a few minutes trying to figure out where I know them from, then realise I don't actually recognise them at all. Yet at first glance I'm convinced I know them. What's that all about?

Carry on.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Obsession

I love David Hasselhoff.

As an icon of cheesy, over-coiffed nonsense he really is a world-beater. You just can't top Knight Rider for a piss-poor attempt at an "action" series (come on - it made the A-Team look like Apocalypse Now), and as for Baywatch, well, I could watch the Hoff staggering up and down a beach all day long. It's worth it just to see him in action, doing that thing known as "Hoffing" which is where you puff your chest out and round your shoulders in an attempt to draw attention away from your saggy stomach and chicken legs. Utilised by middle-aged men the world over in beach situations, this pose surely deserves more recognition.

I love that he has superstar status in Germany. It's just beautiful that a third-rate actor is adored by an entire nation for his dubious singing skills and complete lack of self-awareness. I love his massive hair, his over-inflated ego, his truly horrific photo back-catalogue and his terrible clothes. I even have a conspiracy theory regarding the "Cool Water" aftershave. I mean, come on. Davidoff? A water connection? It's obvious that it's a Baywatch side-project and you've all been fooled. Not me though. Oh no. My scrapbook, coathanger radio and tinfoil hat keep me bang up to date with all David's projects. And now his wife is on the way out, he will surely be mine. Oh yes.

Carry on.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Sentimental (and long. Sorry)

This weekend the Other Half and I have been clearing out our various abodes in order to streamline our belongings for moving. The work on the new house (must think of a witty name for it) is steaming ahead and we should be in in around six weeks. It's incredible how fast things are moving - the house has gone from being a scaffolded building site to a complete house in a very short space of time and it's a bit unnerving, albeit in a good way.

The amount of junk I brought with me to this flat when I left the Ex is a bit of a worry. I don't mean to give the impression that Small Person and I have to weave our way to the bathroom between six-foot stacks of old newspapers or anything, but I did manage to fill eight or nine black sacks with clothes for the charity shop and general crap for the tip. And I still have to clear out all my old paperwork (shred most of it, I hope) and take some books to the charity shop. Small Person has agreed that we will go through her toys and books and decide what to take and what to give to "children who don't have as much" - luckily she is used to this as we do it after every Christmas and birthday so it shouldn't be too traumatic. All in all, we should be sorted fairly soon.

While I was clearing the wardrobe in the spare room I came across some of Small Person's clothes from her babyhood. There's the blanket she was wrapped in and the tiny hat she wore when the Ex and I brought her home from the hospital at two days old, a couple of weeny, soft beanie hats, and a very small, very soft, cottony sleepsuit. I held the sleepsuit up and marvelled that the beautiful, sparky, lunatic, infuriating, funny and just plain wonderful creature I'm so lucky to call my daughter used to be so tiny. Without knowing what had hit me I found myself in tears and I've been trying to understand why.

I've talked before about how the Ex and I weren't suited - how we argued, how there was no respect in our relationship and how I always yearned for something more. That said, Small Person was very much wanted. I literally woke up one morning at the age of twenty five and decided that what I really had to do right now was have a baby. Although I was ill throughout, I loved being pregnant. I'll never forget the feeling of awe and astonishment I felt when I held my newborn daughter for the first time. Looking down at her angry little face and feeling the warm weight of her in my arms, I felt almost complete. I won't pretend it was easy - anyone who has had a baby knows that they do more to expose any cracks in a relationship than effect a miraculous cure for any problems, but all the same I revelled in being somebody's mother. She has taken the separation of our family in her stride, and despite my feelings about the Ex I have absolutely no doubt that he loves her as much as I do; he's just stupider.

I know that I won't have any more children. I love the Other Half very much, and just as he respects my point of view I have to respect his. We are ridiculously happy, and I am incredibly lucky to have Small Person and to have found such happiness in my personal life. All the same, I think that the sight and feel of that tiny sleepsuit brought home the finality of it. I will never feel a baby kicking inside me again. I won't experience the pain and sheer heady euphoria of giving birth to someone. I take my baby fixes where I can get them, and know that on a rational level I prefer not to be getting up four times a night and changing dirty nappies at a rate of knots. All the same, it hurts. Sometimes it hurts a whole lot, but isn't that just life?

Ah, Sunday. You can always count on Sunday for long, snivelling, self-pitying posts. That'll teach you for stopping by.

Carry on.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Quiet

See, I was going to do a whole post about how this woman I work with says colonic irrigation is great, and not embarrassing or weird or anything, and how I just don't feel comfortable with the idea of saying hello to someone and then having them put a tube up your bottom and flush your insides out and then talk with you about the weather and have you booked your holiday yet this year and did you see the state of Carol Vorderman yesterday, talk about your turkey neck, while bits of poo sort of whoosh out of you and down the tube like kids on a water slide, and what if it makes a noise, and how odd I find it that somebody would even want to do that for a living, I mean, did the careers officer ask them if they had any ideas and they said yes, actually, I want to put tubes up people's bottoms and chat politely to them while poo washes out and the careers officer said a-ha, I have just the very thing....

But then I remembered that nobody reads this on a Friday so I decided not to bother.

Carry on.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Betrayed

There was nothing on the telly last night (I can’t get used to the luxury of Sky at the Other Half’s house and stick to the main four channels out of habit) so I made him watch a programme about celebrity fitness videos. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a vapid, slack-jawed moron and will sit through anything with “celebrity” in the title. It was a light-hearted (for "light-hearted" read "crap, unfunny"), deconstruction of the genre, aiming to sift the wheat from the chaff in terms of actual effectiveness. First up was Cher’s "A New Attitude" video from 1992. At this point, a horrific, hitherto repressed memory surfaced. You see, I bought that video and the requisite exercise step in 1992. I was nineteen, and my dress size was only one number behind my age. I fell upon Cher’s promise to make me thin like a fat girl on a free buffet, and coveted visions of the slender, lithe creature I would doubtless become. For about two weeks I wheezed, sweated and lumbered around my living room in a hopeless attempt to keep up. The exercises were absolute torture, but I thought this was because I was extremely lardy and unfit. Eventually, it became clear that if I were to complete the whole thing I would need a crash team standing by with oxygen and chocolate hobnobs, so I quit. A failure. Pathetic. The shame of not even being able to do a home fitness video haunted me until I joined a step class a couple of years later and lost about four stone.

Except it transpires that even six-stone plastic surgeon junkie Cher couldn’t do the bloody exercises. The video was filmed in three-minute segments so that Madam could stop for a breather before being powdered, watered and having her wig tightened for another go.

Thanks then Cher. Thanks for making all us fat girls feel even worse than we already did as we lurched helplessly from lunge to grapevine before getting our fat feet tangled up in the laces on our hi-top pink reeboks and crawling off to the biscuit tin in a weeping, red-faced fit of despair. Thanks for dangling the unattainable in front of us, doing your weird smug alien smile and generating waves of carefree happiness even as we fell over the pouffe for the third time in twenty minutes and nursed another stitch. I hope the g-string you wore in the Turn Back Time video chafed your crack and gave you thrush. Witch.

Carry on.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Shame

So anyway, my stepsister’s twenty-somethingth birthday party was on a hot August Sunday afternoon. I was nineteen or twenty, and my super-straight boyfriend and I drove over to her house to join in the celebrations. As I wasn’t driving home, I drank a lot of beer. There were also a couple of spliffs going round, and as the boyfriend was dead set against that sort of thing I had a few sneaky tokes while he wasn’t looking. Except it was super-strong grass and by the time we were ready to leave I was completely and utterly wasted. On the way home, we drove through the village I grew up in. It was about three years after I’d left home, and while approaching my childhood home I noticed that the bungalow next door that my godmother lived in had gone, and that a detached house now stood in its place. Being off my face, I decided that the best thing to do would be to go and knock on the door of my old house and see if they knew what had happened to poor old Auntie Win.

The nice lady who opened the front door was most sympathetic as she explained that poor old Auntie Win had died the year before and that the new house had only been up for a couple of months. I explained that I used to live in the nice lady’s house, and at this point I can only assume that her judgement was as impaired as mine, as, despite the fact that it was 6pm on a Sunday afternoon and I was dishevelled, wobbly and reeking of beer with my eyes rolling around in my head like balls in a bingo machine, she invited me to come and have a look round the house to “see what they’d done with it”. Naturally I enthusiastically accepted, and regrettably I have almost total recall of what came next.

The following twenty minutes or so saw me stumbling round my childhood home (trailed by a panicky boyfriend), loudly exclaiming at how much SMALLER it all seemed than when I was little (funny, that), and variously hiccupping and bouncing lightly off the walls. On seeing my childhood bedroom I was, like, astonished to see that the nice lady’s small son’s bed was exactly where mine had been and went on for ages about how totally, like, weird that was, convinced that some sort of universal synchronicity was at work. By now the nice lady’s face was sort of frozen in a rictus of fear, and the boyfriend was almost in tears as he cheerfully suggested that perhaps we ought to be off now.

I don’t even think the nice lady noticed me falling down the stairs on the way out, so relieved was she that we were leaving.

The horror.

Carry on.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Panic

I'm a bit scared about the whole bird flu thing.

I know it's irrational. I know it's nothing more than scaremongering on behalf of the media who, the Daily Mail aside, ought to know better (I exclude the Mail from the knowing-better thing as they clearly don't and there's really no point getting all worked up about it as they'll just blithely continue with their random country-set poison pen journalism). I know that next year we'll all be worrying about meteors, or giant cockroaches intent on taking over the world, or pig measles or something but for now it's just giving me a vague feeling of unease. I've read The Stand, you see, and since I am highly suggestible and have a turbocharged Worst Case Scenariometer constantly running in my head, I need something to take my mind off it.

So, in the spirit of cheerful things to think about, please step up to the comments and offer your most embarrassing moment. If I get enough, tomorrow will bring you the story of the worst thing I ever did, ever.

Carry on.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Dull

Friday's visit to the Ex was, as I suspected, a dramatic re-enactment of How Poor I Am, complete with the heating switched off and threatening letters from the bank, etc. No mention of stopping maintenance payments though - it was more a complicated preamble to a monologue* on the subject of Why I Must Transport A Small Skinny Six Year Old On The Back Of A Large Dangerous Motorcycle. I held firm though, and as a result we are absolutely no further forward, and I now have even more guilt regarding my new-found knowledge that Small Person spends her time at her Dad's in freezing misery. Sweet.

In other news, can we all please join hands and make a fervent wish to our personal gods to ensure that New Boss fails his driving test this afternoon? Lovely Assistant and I are hoping that if he fails again he'll get fed up with the train-and-two-buses journey to work every day and leave us alone.

Carry on.

* They are all monologues. Living with the Ex was like being at a seven year long Alan Bennett play. Only really, really dull. Imagine listening to John Major talking about agricultural policy for seven years and you're not even nearly close to how dull it was. Really.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Sigh

Ah, Friday. Friday, Friday, Friday. The weekend stretches ahead like a shimmering vision of loveliness, full of promises of glorious things to come.

*sound of needle scraping off the edge of one of those old-fashioned vinyl record things (ask your dad)*

What a pity then that, before the Other Half and I can plunge headlong into the cool refreshing waters of Nothing Much To Do, I have to visit the Ex. I received a plaintive text at midnight last night asking me to call round this evening. He even said please, which is always a worry. Repeated enquiries yielded no information whatsoever, save that whatever it is can't be discussed on the phone. Knowing the Ex as I do, this has something to do with money. I am fully expecting a lengthy, incoherent monologue, probably with tears, explaining that he is poverty-stricken and laying the blame entirely at my door for having had the audacity to leave him and to expect him to pay maintenance towards his daughter's upbringing. I'm not going to justify my leaving, nor will I feel guilt regarding the payments he makes. These payments, in addition to supporting our child (to the extent that I provide toothpaste, vitamins and shampoo for her visits to him as he won't on the grounds that "that's what he pays me for"), are also by way of compensation for me not forcing him to sell the house. And before all the angry jilted fathers get up on their soapboxes and rant about an unfair society that allows women to recklessly have children and expect everything in return when the relationship falls apart, I'd just like to state clearly for the record that I couldn't give a fuck. This is my situation, and given that the Ex in question has just returned from a lengthy sojourn to New Zealand, owns a house that is worth a hundred grand more than when we bought it and earns considerably more than me (there are children in Filipino sweatshops earning considerably more than me, but I get more tea breaks so ner), I'm damn well going to have a rant at the impending Poor Me You Ruined My Life that I'm going to have to sit through this evening.

Either that or he's planning to stab me to death and leave me out for the dustmen. Still, at least it's pizza* for tea.

Carry on.

* This is not just a pizza. This is a fat-free, taste-free, cardboardy parody of a pizza designed to make you feel both bloated and hungry within fifteen minutes of eating it. Fucking diet. And fucking Marks and Spencer with their wish-fulfillment bollocks. Gah.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Questions

  1. Why is it so fucking cold in here? Seriously, my tiny hands are frozen and I have the nose of a healthy labrador. In protest, I have donned the dusty, ill-fitting cardigan that has languished on the back of my chair for the last three years, but nobody seems to have noticed.
  2. Why does the Ex consider that it will be a sound idea for him to take his car off the road this summer and ferry our six-year-old daughter around on the back of his motorbike? I have nothing against bikes, or bikers, but I am vehemently against a tiny fragile girl being endangered in that way. When she's bigger I have absolutely no problem with it - it's the her-being-six part that does my head in.
  3. Why am I not thin yet? I'm bored of dieting already and need a kebab and five pints of Stella, stat.
  4. Is it going home time yet?
  5. Is it wholly unreasonable of me to expect that everyone else on the road should just GETTHEFUCKOUTOFMYWAY when I'm in a hurry of a morning? I mean, I'd do the same for them (except I wouldn't, obviously).
  6. Are we there yet?
  7. Where can I engage the services of a large burly man with access to large musical instruments in order that, by the old-school device of dropping a piano on him, the Ex question need no longer apply?

Carry on.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Fat.

So, a new year then. Today heralded a return to work (although I have tomorrow off as Small Person’s school doesn’t start back until Friday (stupid school) and frankly this month I chose keeping a roof over our heads over forking out seventy quid for three day’s childminding) and it just feels weird. In my real life (the one that I presume I am living quite happily in another dimension….some days it’s only the thought of that that keeps me going) I am, as is only proper, sufficiently rich that I pass my days in a heady fluff of rich-people-pursuits such as sitting around a lot, flicking idly through glossy magazines and laughing at the poor. In this life, however, the daily grind rumbles remorselessly on and so I am once more skulking and sulking at my desk.

The one good thing about being back at work is the fact that I can finally stop eating. I am so fat it’s ridiculous. I don't even want to walk across the office for fear that things will fall off people's desks as I thunder past. I am existing on fruit and water today, and possibly forever.

How long will it take me to lose three stone, do you think? I am suspecting it may be faster to just cut off a leg. Or two.

Carry on.

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