Interlude- as it turns out the phone was disconnected after all...

Peace descends

My landlady has gone back to Cardiff, so that means the heating has been turned back up and life has returned to being more peaceful. Over the weekend she complained a couple of times about how cold the house was. Apparently she had to sleep right down under her duvet, as she was so cold but didn’t seem to realise that she could just turn the heating up a bit.

Yesterday morning she said to me that she thought the phone probably had been switched off because it was making an odd noise. I went and picked up the phone and just said “that’s the dialling tone.” She replied “Is it?” and I assured her that it was perfectly normal. How can someone not know what the dialling tone sounds like??

She also took the opportunity to move several of my things about. Old habits die hard I guess. However, this was one of my landlady’s habits that I was not thrilled to see return:



For some reason I don't think you can actually see the picture but if you click on the picture above it will take you through to the link and then you should be able to see it (I'll try and fix it at some point). Let me just explain what the picture shows anyway. On the left we have the brush to clean the dishes with, on the right we have the implement used to removes the cat’s poos from the litter tray. Hygienic. [Edit: Now managed to reload it, so you should be able to see it]

This could be a new game, I could describe a photo and you have to imagine it.

Busy

It was, as expected, a really busy day yesterday. I had to get up early to drop my car off for a service. When I got there it was all locked up and, despite me double-checking in advance what time they opened, they had given me the wrong time. I managed to persuade a mechanic who was there to take the car keys, as I had to dash off. A taxi came and picked me up and when we were on the way back home I saw a car had gone off the road and was in a sort of ditch at the side of the road. Given the story my friend told me a few days agoabout finding someone dead in a car, I thought I’d better phone the police and ask them to go and have a look (I phoned the police station not 999, I might add) and that all took a while. Then I spoke to BT to see if they would be able to sort out a phone line for me and after a bit of to and froing the answer was “no” due to the annoying phone lines where I live.

By now it was only 9am at which point I had my hair cut and then I made a couple of phone calls and went out to do various chores. These were rather cut short by the garage phoning to say my car was ready, so I hopped on the tube to go and pick it up. I phoned the Transport for London inquiry line on the way to find out what bus I needed to get from the station to the garage and they gave me two alternatives. I walked out of the station and there was the bus. Excellent! So off we set and having never caught that particular bus before I wasn’t entirely sure of the route, but I began to think that it wasn’t taking the route I would have expected at which point I concluded that this was not the right bus. The bus driver hadn’t changed the sign on the bus and was actually on a totally different route…

So then I got off the bus at a place that looked vaguely familiar and I tried to guess which was the direction I needed to head in. Fortunately I was correct and finally made it to the garage just as it was closing. Then I went and did some shopping and then over to my parents’ because my sister and nephew were there. I spent a bit of time with them and then they went home and I went with mum to the supermarket and then back to my parents’ house and had dinner there and fixed their broadband, as it had stopped working (I’m not an expert on computers, my approach tends to be “I wonder what would happen if I pull this cable out” and hope it doesn’t make anything explode). I finally got home about 10.30pm feeling very tired and chatted to my landlady for a while and then went to bed.

My landlady has actually managed to get the phone line reinstated for another month, so hopefully that should be enough time for me to have moved out. I think she felt really bad about having arranged to get it disconnected and so managed to persuade them to keep the service running for another month, which was very kind of her.

I am hoping for a rather quieter day today.

Flanders Field

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Yesterday I announced the two minute silence at work. I realise that Remembrance Day is today but as we don’t work on a Saturday we observed the two minute silence yesterday. It seemed to go ok and rather better than last year when someone forgot to make the announcement at all. I had hoped someone else would do it, because I don’t really like making the announcements, but it fell to me again. Incidentally, that poem by John McCrae is one I always find really moving because it conjures up such clear images in my mind.

Anyway, last night I went with a friend from work to a recording of the Radio 4 programme ‘Clare in the Community’. She doesn’t work on a Friday so was coming from home. So I went for a bit to eat on my own on the way and thought one of the easiest places to go was the crypt at St Martin’s in the Field. It was absolutely packed there so I ended up asking some chap if I could share his table. He turned out to be a really nice bloke and we just sat and chatted and he told me a bit about why he was in London (he was from Utah) and it was really nice to talk to him. Then I went off to meet up with my friend only she was running really late due to major problems on the Northern Line. I ended up having to give her ticket to one of the stewards as it was about to start. She did finally turn up and managed to get in because the recording was running late anyway.

The programme was very good. I have never seen a radio programme (or TV programme for that matter) filmed before. I will be interested to hear it when it goes out on the radio. They ran through it all in one take and then they would re-record any bits that hadn’t gone quite right, even if it was just a sentence.

My landlady is back for the weekend. She came back last night, so I had to remember to turn the heating down before I left for work. She has the thermostat set at 15 degrees, which as the thermostat is in the kitchen (which is quite hot) it means that the heating is off even when the rest of the house is cold. So in my rebellious ways I turned the heating up but am obviously too much of a chicken to let my landlady find out and so will have a chilly weekend.

She told me last night that she has arranged for the broadband, cable TV and phone to be disconnected as of today. I am not too impressed about the phone, particularly as she had agreed she would leave it connected. Just to add insult to injury, she will still be paying for another month even though there will be no service available. Anyway, this may mean I don’t have an internet connection for a bit, so if I am a bit quiet on the blogging front that is why.

Busy day ahead – but please don’t mistake ‘busy’ for ‘interesting’.

Tragedy, humour and cleanliness

I got an e-mail from a friend the other day to say that her brother had been driving someone home in the early hours of the morning and suddenly realised there was a car on its side in the road in front of him. He had to swerve to avoid it and then pulled over and stopped. He and his friend got out to see what had happened and when they went and looked in the car saw that the driver was still in the car and was very obviously dead. They called the various emergency services but, as expected, the man was declared dead at the scene. It seems that the driver struck a tree when he was driving and was killed. I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been to be the first person on the scene of a fatal car accident.

On a rather more humorous, but not entirely dissimilar note, I saw this recently and couldn’t help but laugh out loud at it. I should, of course, be defending women drivers but there are times when there isn’t much you can say to redress the balance. Who would have thought that it could be so dangerous buying petrol? You’re warned not to smoke or to use your mobile phone but now they’ll have to put up signs to remind drivers to keep all four tyres on the ground.

We’re still in the process of trying to work out where to go for a work Christmas meal. We’ve now got two options, only yesterday we discovered the second option was closed by the council because it has such poor hygiene standards in the kitchen. However, it is about to reopen and so we are still considering going there, as it was the most popular option until we found out about the mouse infestation. I figure that probably the safest time to fly is after a plane crash because airlines would be much more vigilant, so surely the safest time to eat at a restaurant is when it has just been given permission to reopen because it must have been given a clean bill of health and be at its optimum cleanliness. Right??

Progress

As a follow on from yesterday’s post, it actually turned out to be a pretty good day in terms of working out whether I do actually have some redeeming characteristics in terms of being a friend (I may be *slightly* exaggerating about how concerned I am about my ability to be a decent friend). Anyway, on the way into work my oldest friend texted me – we’ve been friends since we were three – and said that she really urgently needed to speak to me because she was really nervous about moving house.

We arranged to speak at lunch time and when she phoned she told me that she was suddenly panicking about a place she was about to sign a contract to rent. We just spent a bit of time talking through the worst possible scenario and I was trying to help her see that even with that there was a way to deal with it. By the end of the conversation she told me that she felt lots better and she then went and signed the contract last night. She sent me a text later to say thanks and to ask me to meet up for a cup of tea really soon. Woo hoo! I can give good advice and someone does actually still want to speak to me!

Anyway, on the way home my mind was sort of mulling things over and I got home and was about to go and have a shower when my mobile rang and it was a friend I haven’t spoken to in months. He’d called for a catch up and to tell me he had got engaged. We chatted for a while and caught up on each others’ news. Later I sent him a text to tell him that it had been really good to chat and he sent me back a really nice text telling me that talking to me had made him realise how much he’d missed me and that we really need to stay in much better contact.

I will actually continue to think things through because I still reckon I need to get my head together a bit, but it was really good to have two friends in the space of a day, unknowingly, say some things that reminded me that I do have good friends and there are people who appreciate me as I am.

Next I shall consider how to bring about world peace. On current form I should have an answer by tomorrow - but maybe give me a couple of days’ leeway.

Thinking

“There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in after years, no matter how genuine.”

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

Of late I feel as though my relationships with some people are not as I would hope. There was obviously the stuff with A which has made me think about things, but that’s not typical and was a side-effect of having had a romantic relationship more than anything else. But then there was my friend who I had a run in with several weeks ago, who basically told me to get lost by sending me an e-mail that was somewhat scathing of me. I don’t actually accept most of what was said in that e-mail and had we been able to talk about it things would have looked different (that doesn’t mean it would have been resolved, just that we would have been dealing with reality rather than perception borne of having wound each other up a lot). Then there’s another friend who I was just getting to know and suddenly it all seems to have died a death (through silence rather than anything else). I suppose on my part I realised that I was probably not actually doing my friend any good, so I took a step back and have left it to them to do whatever they want to do. I don’t want to make people feel hassled or unhappy, but these days I seem to find myself scratching my head a bit about it all.

I also look at my more long-standing friendships and see how I have neglected a number of those, and on top of all of that I think I am beginning to wonder if it is possible to get any real depth in friendships these days – and if it is, how do you achieve it??

Don’t get me wrong, I do have good friends. I have friends who know the very worst about me and have been there for me in really difficult times. But somehow I feel as though I have lost the plot a bit and am just not doing a very good job of being a decent friend to people and that somehow I have got my priorities and expectations skewed. Not that things being a bit of a mess is entirely down to me, but the bit that is down to me is what I am responsible for and can do something about. So, I’m going to take some time to think these things through over the next few weeks, some of which I will probably write about here on occasion, in the hope that I can work out if I can do things better. I can’t promise it will all make sense but hopefully by the end I will at least feel as though I have got somewhere. For me, half the battle is gaining understanding, when I have that then I can at least recognise what it is that I am dealing with and maybe somehow change it. I am someone who believes that anyone can change, myself included.

Maybe that William Styron quote is right and you reach a certain age where you just cannot expect to have friendships that are as meaningful or have those qualities that you get from friends you have known since you were a child. I hope not, but we shall see.

Desperate Times

With the advent of speed-dating, internet dating sites and seemingly most of the free London papers you get on the tube running columns where you can try and make contact with the man or woman of your dreams that you have spotted on the tube, you’d think that the lonely hearts ad was getting a bit too old fashioned for most. But it seems that it is still the ideal place for the eccentric to find the person of their dreams. Given my current lack of love life, I might have to resort to such things myself, although my advert would probably have to say something like “If you’re breathing you’ll do. So desperate that can’t even resort to using charm anymore (31).” I can’t imagine why I am still single.

Anyway, the London Review of Books has published a book of some of the more memorable lonely hearts ads that they have run over the years. I’m guessing that most of these people are still single, so if you think you may have found your soul mate then don’t be shy - send them a reply.

'List your ten favourite albums... I just want to know if there's anything worth keeping when we finally break up. Practical, forward thinking man, 35.'

'Employed in publishing? Me too. Stay the hell away. Man on the inside seeks woman on the outside who likes milling around hospitals guessing the illnesses of out-patients. 30-35. Leeds.'

'I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out and covered in too much tahini. Before long I'll have discarded you on the pavement of life, but until then you're the perfect complement to a perfect evening. Man, 32, rarely produces winning metaphors.'

'Your buying me dinner doesn't mean I'll have sex with you. I probably will have sex with you, though. Honesty not an issue with opportunistic male, 38.'

'Are you Kate Bush? Write to obsessive man (36). Note, people who aren't Kate Bush need not respond.'

'Stroganoff. Boysenberry. Frangipani. Words with their origins in people's names. If your name has produced its own entry in the OED then I'll make love to you. If it hasn't, I probably will anyway, but I'll only want you for your body. Man of too few distractions, 32.'

'Ploughing the loneliest furrow. Nineteen personal ads and counting. Only one reply. It was my mother telling me not to forget the bread on my way home from B&Q. Man, 51.'

'Slut in the kitchen, chef in the bedroom. Woman with mixed priorities (37) seeks man who can toss a good salad.'

'Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.'

'Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth.'

Sparkling

It was a fairly busy weekend. Yesterday I went over to a friend’s house to watch some fireworks. There were meant to be about 10 of us but some people cancelled, so there were in the end. But that was fine. We ate some fresh cooked Argentinian pastie things (you’ll be relived to hear that I don’t work in marketing!) and then watched some fireworks and had some sparklers. Now, as a child I am sure I was warned about the various horrors connected with fireworks and sparklers and watched various public information films about the serious consequences of not being careful with them. So, I probably should have learned that it is important to hold on to a sparkler reasonably tightly, but I obviously wasn’t paying enough attention that day as last night a sparkler flew out of my hand and ended up between the feet of someone else, who leaped away from it. People do make a fuss about being set on fire. Suffice to say I was not allowed any more sparklers.

I spoke to my sister earlier in the day. Her in-laws had been over, which had been interesting. The other day my sister’s mother in law sent her an e-mail saying they were going to come over yesterday. My sister forwarded the e-mail to her husband and said “Groan. If we have to...” Except she hadn’t forwarded it... Instead she’d hit reply and sent the e-mail back to her mother in law. Oh dear... My brother in law tried to convince his step-mum that it was a joke and my sister had expected her to come back with a suitable reply. Judging by the look she got from her mother in law when they turned up yesterday my sister was not entirely convinced that the explanation had been believed.

This weekend I also noticed quite how much Christmas seems to be upon us. When I was in London on Saturday loads of shops already had their Christmas decorations up and there were a couple of buskers playing Christmas carols. There are also lots of adverts on TV that seem to be Christmas related. It’s the beginning of November! I’m not impressed and almost feel like boycotting any shop that is already geared up for Christmas but as that would probably mean that I would have to make all my Christmas presents from items I found on the street, that probably isn’t entirely practical.

Counting

So I went to the climate change rally ‘I Count’ (apologies for the not very good photo). It was actually really impressive how many people turned up, I think it was about 25,000. However, the organisers made the dire mistake of getting Simon Amstell to do a lot of the links. I have never been that keen on him but I now think he is an idiot and a bigot. He told some of the most inappropriate jokes and must have offended pretty much everyone who was there with at least one of his jokes. For example, he kept saying that because he was Jewish, he was one of the ‘chosen people’ so it didn’t really matter about climate change as he would be alright. I’m sure people breathed a collective sigh of relief about that.

He said many awful things but one of the worst was when he said “I’ve come up with the solution to climate change. There are too many people in the world. We need to get rid of some of them.” My mind started to wander through all the things he might come up with. I hadn’t considered the possibility he came up with though - that being “Next time someone comes to you with the ‘good news’ that they’re pregnant, don’t congratulate them, instead spit in their face and tell them how selfish they are.” Despite Trafalgar Square being filled with thousands of people the tumbleweed still rolled on through, as silence descended in response to his ‘humour’. There were jokes about Anne Frank, Princess Diana, Muslims. The list goes on…

People heckled and booed him and he kept saying “it’s humour, I’m using irony to bring us together.” As I said to a woman standing next to me, the main irony was that his humour was indeed drawing us together - by uniting us all against him. Still at least it got me talking to various people who were there as well as we all despaired at how someone could be that offensive and somehow think he was doing a good job. Another woman standing near me said “I have never wanted to heckle anyone in my life, but I *really* want to heckle him.”

Anyway, it’s probably not really the point to have gone to a rally and have the main focus on the terrible MC. It was actually quite inspiring to see that many people all together saying that they wanted to make a difference. Whilst it was about putting pressure on governments to make changes, it was also about saying that each of us as individuals can make a difference – by buying from companies that support the climate, switching things like TVs off instead of leaving them on standby, having a bath with someone else to save water. Oh hang on, baths use up lots of water, better make that showering with someone else. So there’s a few ways you could start to make a difference. I leave it to you to decide which you might be able to do.

The more things change

I finally went over to my parents’ house and set up their new computer for them and got it connected to the internet and so on. It took a while to do it, but mum was really pleased with the end result. I got a Chinese meal for dinner as a reward. It seemed to be an evening to reminisce as my dad took the opportunity to talk about the various holidays that we went on when I was a child and all the things that I did wrong on them. He seemed to think it was funny but I just stopped listening after a while and then went off and finished setting up mum’s computer.

I was looking through some of the things that were in my old bedroom at my parents’ house and found some school reports. My mum and I were reading them and it was really scary how accurate they were and whilst I have become more dedicated to my work now I’m paid for it, my school reports often said how when I was interested in something I was really good at it but when I wasn’t I just couldn’t be bothered. Hmm, don’t recognise that at all...

Anyway, today I plan to go to Trafalgar Square for the climate change rally. The slightly cynical part of me thinks that the only thing that will convince most people to make a change is if they have some financial incentive (not that I am entirely beyond question on this myself). I think most people will use energy more efficiently if it saves them money, but if the incentive is to save the planet for future generations then that is a bit less tangible and people aren’t so interested. I think part of the point of the rally is to show that an individual can make a difference, so I think I’ll wander along and see what difference that might be. Should be interesting.

Side effects

I think I feel a bit despondent about the whole house thing. It’s not that I think that the purchase isn’t going to go through, but I think I just feel sort of frustrated that I am in a situation where someone seems to being avoiding carrying out their legal obligations because they are just really tight. Actually that isn’t what it is, what bothers me is that I feel as though I have had my life on hold for a long time. I have moved home so often that I have been putting off doing things and buying things because I know I will be uprooted again. Finally I have the chance to settle somewhere and I just feel a bit down that there are still obstacles to get through when this bit should be quite straightforward. Anyway, hopefully it won’t be long now until I will be in a place of my own...

I spoke to my boss yesterday morning to see if anyone had bothered to tell him that I have got a new job (until yesterday we hadn’t been in the office at the same time all week) and no-one had, so I told him. We are really good at communication where I work. I also mentioned it to various people in my team, one of whom said to me “stop smiling, you don’t have to look so happy about it!” and then asked me to keep him in mind if any jobs came up that he might be suited to. It would be good if he was part of the team, so I’ll definitely keep him in mind.

After work I went and picked up my anti-malarial tablets from the pharmacist. They cost £40! These tablets are basically meant to have no side-effects, but the heart attack you get from the price surely must count as one. Still the side effect of not taking them might be death, so I suppose it’s a small price to pay.

If you have a creative urge and have always really wanted to write a novel, well maybe here’s your chance. Apparently it is National Novel Writing Month (although I think the ‘national’ bit refers to America, but don’t be picky) and it seems that every November there is a competition to get people to write a 50000 word novel in one month. So if you have the urge to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard - then now is your chance but you’d better get going because we’re already three days into the month. If you write a best seller, do feel free to pass on some of the royalties.

You get nothing for free

I think it is something like eight weeks until Christmas, which means having to think about the work Christmas meal. Someone else in my team is sorting it out and has done a bit of a search on the internet and came up with a restaurant that generally specialises in fish but their Christmas menu has other things too. Anyway, she sent out an e-mail and asked people to vote on whether they wanted to go there and everyone said yes, except the chap who is always looking for something for free... His reply said something like “too much fish and you don’t get a complimentary drink, which is really normal when having a Christmas meal”.

First of all, I have never been for a Christmas meal where we have been given a complimentary drink and the reality is that you would pay for it anyway by them increasing the cost of the menu. The other thing is that the issue isn’t how much fish there is on the menu, it’s whether he would be willing to eat anything that is on the menu – whether fish or something else. We got the distinct feeling that he is expecting the venue to be changed because he doesn’t like it, even though everyone else was fine with it.

I have never known anyone to be so tight and out to get anything he can for free. If you’re at a meeting, he’ll take all the left over bottles of water or plates of biscuits or fill his pockets with the complimentary mints. If you go somewhere for coffee he’ll take all the sachets of sugar or take the shampoo and soap they give you in hotel rooms. I can’t even begin to tell you how devastated he was (and I do mean devastated) at not being able to go to a meeting that would have meant staying overnight in a hotel. He’d already planned his regime for the gym they had there. He was like a little kid moping about for days after that and kept taking people to one side to tell them how unhappy he was. On Monday he said to me that he went home feeling really stressed on Friday because he is *so* upset that he didn’t get to go to the conference. Fortunately my phone rang and that cut the conversation short because my patience is wearing thin and all I can say to him is that he needs to get over it. Now.

Anyway, today I am working from home. I do genuinely have quite a few work things I need to get done, but am not a huge fan of working from home because pretty much anything tends to seem more appealing than actually doing any work. Nut I need to be at home today so that my computer can be delivered. I’m also going to take the opportunity to go to my solicitor’s to sign some documents after which I think I will be able to exchange on purchasing the property (although to be honest I’m not entirely sure). Hopefully I will know more later. It will be kind of weird meeting my solicitor because he is someone I have spoken to quite a lot but have never met and you kind of build up this image of someone in your mind, but he is probably nothing like I imagine. All I really know about him is that he is quite a cheeky Liverpudlian, which isn’t a lot to go on.

I’m also going to do things like check out a local place where I can probably get some kitchen appliances delivered really quickly should I need them and I also need to drop my parents’ new computer (which is being delivered to me at the same time) over to them at some point too and if I have time, set it up for them. But I am going to get lots of work done too. Honest.

Acclimatising

I made it back in one piece from the meeting I had to go to – I was giving yet another talk but it may well be one of the last ones that I have to give in my current job as I’m not sure I have any more lined up in the next few weeks.

For the last couple of days I have felt as though I have had jetlag, which I can only assume is because the clocks changed at the weekend. I don’t think that has ever happened before though and it does strike me as slightly pathetic to be so worn out from a mere one hour time change, particularly as it should have meant I got an extra hour of sleep.

Yesterday I felt really rough and when I got to the hotel I had a bath to have a bit of a relax and then went for dinner. I was chatting to some people and managed to sound vaguely coherent but after we had finished eating I went to bed because I felt so tired. I did try and watch “Without a Trace” but had to switch it off half way through because I couldn’t stay awake. When I woke up today I felt totally fine and I appear to have reacclimatised to GMT. Odd.

Moving Times

So, my landlady has finally gone. I didn’t actually have the chance to say goodbye to her as I went straight from my sister’s to my parents’ house and by the time I got home she’d set off for Cardiff. She’d left me a really nice note though (where she’d crossed out the word ‘birthday’ from the printed message!). A couple of night’s ago she was reading bits of an article to me about the benefits of having a lodger. Some woman had a lodger who was a trainee masseuse and a hairdresser. I assured my landlady that she would always be grateful that I had never attempted to cut her hair and as for giving her a massage… *shudder*.

I was having a nose on the internet the other day and saw that my landlady has once again reduced the asking price for the house. It is now on the market for £70,000 less than the original price. Wow! She really needs to sell it, but I still wouldn’t pay that much for it – not that I have about half a million pounds to spend on a house.

We had actually made some progress on the heating front in that my landlady had set the central heating to come on, but had set it so low that it was never cold enough to trigger the thermostat. So when I got home last night I turned up the thermostat to feel warm for once. I must remember to turn it back down again when she comes back in a couple of weekends time.

I feel as though I should do some “Friends” type montage of our time sharing the house, things like when a few weeks ago when she was talking to me about when she got measured for a bra. I wasn’t that keen to have the conversation at all but when she ended it by saying “I think we wear the same size bras now, so we’d better not get them muddled up”, I decided that it was time to get out of the conversation and not think too hard about the fact that she really had been inspecting my underwear in quite some detail. Or when I got back last night and she had rearranged my food cupboard and had been in my bedroom to leave some stuff on my bed for me to pass on to the cleaner. Or last week when I was standing in the kitchen eating my breakfast and she asked me to make sure that I emptied the cat’s litter tray every morning and evening (as the cat has somehow been left with me rather than going with her…) and then went into great detail about the cat’s bowel movements. I nodded my head to say I would indeed empty the litter tray - while the little voice in my head said that there was no chance I would be doing that unless absolutely necessary. *moving background song comes to a screeching end* Oh how I won’t miss that…

Instead of celebrating my new found freedom, I am away with work tonight rather than at home trashing the place. Life can conspire against you sometimes. So, I’ll be back blogging on Wednesday when I will be ‘working from home’ as my new computer is being delivered. Excellent.

Urges

The one day I get a chance to have an extra hours sleep for 'free' and I wake up anyway, perhaps aided by my nephew being noisy, as I am at my sister's at the moment.

I went out yesterday morning and I caught the bus home. There was a woman on the bus who was wearing quite a smart suit and was listening to music. Not only was she listening to music, but she was also singing along. Very loudly. Her talent did not extend to making most of the songs recognisable, but I did manage to pick out "Dancing Queen" from her rather dire effort. Mind you she didn't actually seem to know the words, so her very tuneless and loud singing consisted of her singing "You are the dancing Queen" then mumbling a lot then picking out an occasional word that she did remember, so suddenly you'd hear her sing "tambourine" very loudly as well. I'm hoping this is not going to turn into the new noise pollution on public transport.

Then yesterday afternoon, I went over to my sister's, as she was having a few people over to watch a DVD. I took my nephew out for a walk when I got there and left my sister to sort some stuff out. His latest word is obviously "car" because every single car we walked past, including entire rows of parked cars, he would announce that each one was, indeed, a car.

When people turned up later, he started to eat some crisps but hasn't quite perfected the art of chewing, so got a bit stuck in his throat. My sister took him to the kitchen to sort him out, at which point he projectile vomited all over the floor. I went into the kitchen to see if he was ok and he looked really glum and reached out for me to pick him up. That was, of course, a lovely gesture but he was somewhat coated in sick and wasn't smelling too sweet. So I gave him a quick wipe down with a cloth, held my breath a bit and then picked him up and gave him a cuddle. The things you have to do as an aunt.

When I get home later my landlady will either have gone or be in the final stages of packing to move to Cardiff. She is travelling light at the moment because she is just staying in someone's spare room for the first few weeks, but I can feel the urge to do some washing coming on - who would have believed that the thought of doing my washing out of the watchful gaze of an obsessive landlady could be so exciting.

Changes

Things seem to be really hectic at the moment and changing in various ways (for the good I hope). I’ll have to try and remember the various things over the next few days, but the news hot off the press is that I seem to have got a new job - and I didn’t even have to apply for it.

Basically, I went over to speak to my head of unit about something yesterday afternoon and she took the opportunity to tell me about a job that is coming up that she would like me to take on. The job I am doing at the moment will come to a natural pause in January and I was sort of wondering what I was going to do then. It was never that I wouldn’t have had a job but that I could have been very bored and sort of scraping around for work. Anyway, I went and spoke to the chap who would be my new boss (but I would still have the same head of unit) and he explained what it would involve and I said that was all fine and so will start that work in January, although I might do a few bits in advance of that. As far as I know, no-one has told my current boss yet though so I had better mention it to him at some point.

I might still apply for a couple of jobs that are coming up that would mean leaving the organisation I work for, because they would be really interesting. It would probably take so long to get through the long application processes for them that it would be well into next year before I knew one way or the other about them anyway so it does no harm to move across to this job.

So I am hoping for some really engaging work, a nice boss, a new challenge and so on. Things are looking up.

Catching up

I was in Bristol all day yesterday, as I had to speak (very briefly) at a conference. That went fine and after I had done that I dashed out and got a banker’s draft which I dropped off at my solicitor’s on my way into work.

I sent a quick text to a friend when I was on the way to Bristol to see if she was free to meet up, as she worked a couple of minutes walk from the conference. Fortunately she was free and we went for a drink and a catch up before I headed back to London. I’m really glad we did, even though it meant getting home really late, as it probably would have been months before we had the chance to see each other again. We spent a while chatting about a friend of hers offering to lend her £30,000 as a deposit to buy somewhere to live. Very generous, but I said she needed to find out the terms of the deal and more importantly to consider if their friendship was strong enough to survive it if something went wrong with the arrangement somewhere along the line. Good opportunity though (this is the friend who I was going to buy with originally, so I hope she manages to sort something out).

On the way back I chatted to another friend on the phone who moved up to Yorkshire a while ago. We had a good catch up, despite losing the signal on several occasions and hopefully I will go and visit at some point next year. So it was a really nice evening of catching up with people.

The guard on the train made various announcements including telling people they needed to retain the tickets because “revenue protection barriers” were in operation. In my day, those used to be called “ticket barriers”...

Reckless

It seems as though I might finally be getting there on buying my new place. I think I might be able to exchange next week. I just need to do little things like come up with a massive deposit cheque to give to my solicitors.

Things seem to have been dragging on for ages. The vendor seems to keep thinking it’s down to me, I think it’s down to the freeholder and the freeholder seems to think they don’t need to do anything. Anyway, due to some vague decisiveness on my part, it looks like there will be some decent progress shortly and hopefully I’ll have moved in a couple of weeks. Not a moment too soon by the sounds of it, as I overheard my landlady telling someone that she is going to arrange a house share. It’s definitely time to move.

Given that I am about to spend a lot of money, in fact more money than I actually own, on buying somewhere to live, some may raise an eyebrow that I ordered a brand new computer yesterday (and one for my parents too). But that’s the reckless kind of girl that I am. Let me illustrate quite how reckless I am these days. Wait for it… *deep breath*. I ate half an Easter egg last night.

Steady yourself now.

Firm Foundations

The other day I noticed that my phone was pretty full of messages so I flicked through them and deleted several. While I was doing that I got to some messages I was sent by a friend with whom I had somewhat of a run in recently.

I am someone who tends to find moments of clarity about things. I can have thoughts whirring around in my head and suddenly I’ll gain some understanding. It isn’t necessarily that it in any way resolves the situation, but just gaining that understanding is something that makes a huge difference to me and I get this sense of ‘peace’ about the situation. I suppose it is important to me to understand what I’m dealing with so that, even if that turns out to be something bad, at least I do then know that. I think that sense of not knowing really gets to me and sort of scares me and so I have to slowly work it through in my mind and find out what is going on. I have had several moments of clarity about this situation and actually feel totally fine about it, but still it’s important to me to work out why things ended up such a mess. If we ignore history we are condemned to repeat it, as they say.

Anyway, I can see that while there was always this sort of ‘tension’ in our friendship, it went into a very sudden decline. Looking at the text messages rather illustrated this and gave me one of those moments of clarity. The thing I realised was that there was no real foundation to our friendship, so when we hit a rough patch there was nowhere to go back to and nothing to draw on in order to ride out the storm.

It is actually really unusual for me to argue with friends and so generally I don’t have to look to those foundations. Instead kind of take them for granted as a natural part of the friendship, but they usually get built up over time anyway. I mean things like understanding, trust, respect, empathy, being supportive and so on. But if you don’t put the foundations in place you potentially end up in situations that mean exactly the opposite marks out the relationship - so instead you *don’t* trust each other, or show understanding or any of those other qualities. Then when things maybe get a bit tough those negative qualities get magnified and you try and look at it objectively, which can be difficult when things are tense, and you end up thinking “But why would I want to do this?? Why would I want to go through this to try and fix something that actually isn’t very edifying??” and you have to ask yourself those more personal questions too, like “When have they ever learned that they could trust me or that I respect them or any of those other things that are fundamental to a proper friendship?” You look at the reality and realise there is nothing to save because the foundations were not put in place from the beginning.

Now there are a lot of reasons for that in this particular situation and I can see how things ended up getting a bit out of hand, but I’m not entirely sure that I know how to prevent that in future situations. Some of the answer I think is probably my natural reserve, which usually means that I do things in a ‘considered’ way (my, how exciting that sounds!). As a separate but connected point, my friend was rather more of a ‘living in the moment’ sort of person and those two things don’t necessarily mix all that well. So we were a bit at odds with each other and were doing things at a different pace. Friendship should be relaxed and enjoyable, it often is far more than that too, but it shouldn’t really be something that involves a lot of argument and disagreement because that isn’t good for anyone. A lot of those things are kind of obvious statements that I could have told you anyway, but it’s getting that understanding about the importance of foundations that has made the difference. If you build something on sand, when the storms come it will be washed away.