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Clearly there is a reason why February 29th doesn’t normally exist, and why we sensibly avoid it three years out of every four, because today February 29th has been fucking with me and I have had it with this stupid date.
It all started when I got into the office to discover that all of our IT systems had been altered overnight, and not in a good way. Apparently, the changes represent an improvement, but I don’t quite see how it is an improvement that now everything takes three times as long to load, I can’t access half my folders, and when I type, my fingers are three-strokes ahead of what’s appearing on screen. This last issue is the worst – it feels like the typing equivalent of wading through treacle, as the cursor on the screen drags and stumbles despite the best efforts of my fingers to hurry it forwards.
Computer problems at work are so debilitating. You take for granted that your computer will work exactly as it always has done, that everything will be where you expect it to be, and when things change it’s so jarring, and everything becomes such a monumental effort. It’s like being out for a night on the town in really painful shoes, and you start calculating the necessity of every step – I don’t really need to go to the loo right now; it’s all the way over there, it will hurt too much. This is the same. I don’t really need to deal with that email; it hurts my head, it will all be too much of an ordeal. My computer is giving my brain blisters, is what it is, and I am unwilling to create any friction that isn’t absolutely necessary.
So I have had a day of frustration and impotent rage and brain blisters, and I have actually caught myself literally gnashing my teeth a couple of times. I am beginning to understand the appeal of hard liquor. But then I read this blog post, and it made me realise (facile realisation as it is) that there are people out there coping with troubles that are off-the-scale compared to my petty computer whining, and more humbling still, they are doing it with vastly more grace and eloquence. So stop reading this, and go and read Sweet | Salty instead, because it will do your soul good.
I’m still annoyed with February 29th though. Get lost February 29th – piss off back into the murky dateless ether whence you came and don’t come back until 2012.
Hello internet! I’m sorry for disappearing for a few days – I have been away on a work trip and staying in a hotel where the broadband cost 25p a minute. Although they very kindly said that after the first hour, it was free, which you would bloody well expect when the first hour costs £15. So, no internet for me. I had to resort to old fashioned entertainment like reading a book, and also, mourning the loss of my youthful memories.
If that last bit sounds a tad overly-dramatic then trust me, it’s not. You see my work trip was in Lancaster, a small northern town just in-land from the west coast of England with a very nice university, where I just so happened to graduate six years ago. However, it seems that since I’ve been gone the university powers-that-be have seen fit to make some pretty significant changes to the campus I remember. And this was a shock I was not prepared for.
It seemed at first that not very much had changed. The nights out are still identical, right down to the drinks specials. (A Stiff’un, in case you’re wondering, is four shots of vodka in a pint glass, filled up with Red Bull – a couple of those and you can’t feel your face):
And they are still indulging in that peculiar behaviour of dating things by the weeks of the semester, rather than with actual dates:
So as I wandered the campus I was happily thinking to myself that not all that much had changed. Not really. A couple of things had been painted, maybe, but I could live with that. So I decided to walk up to the northern end of campus to see the dorm buildings I’d lived in, maybe peek through the windows of my old rooms and see what the latest trends were in undergraduate posters. But I was in for a nasty shock. The building I lived in in third year is gone. Just, it’s gone. And they haven’t even put up a little memorial plaque or anything. Just a big hole and some diggers.
And the building I lived in in first year, the very first place I lived when I left home, the place where I came of age, is empty and scheduled for demolition.
I don’t know if I can express how sad this makes me feel. These places were so special to me; I had such happy times in them. I know that the building above isn’t so pretty, and the rooms were old and dingy and definitely not en-suite, and you had to share a kitchen with thirty people, but that building right there is where I grew up. It hurts my heart to see it a condemned shell. Seriously, my heart actually hurts.
After taking these photos I was feeling most despondent, and rather in need of a Stiff’un to tell the truth (although it wasn’t Wednesday so I was out of luck) so I caught the bus into Lancaster town centre and met up with a friend for a very nice dinner, which made me feel rather better. I don’t think I’ll go back to Lancaster again, unless work demands it of course. It’s too strange, too disorientating, to see something that remains one way in your memory suddenly, irrevocably, altered in reality. You really can’t ever go home again.
Here’s a thing about me: I am bad at all sports. I have no hand/eye coordination, I can’t run fast, my upper-body strength is feeble, and I am shamefully unfit. Thankfully, as a grown up, being bad at sports is not that much of a handicap. I am not regularly called upon, in the routine of my daily life, to throw a javelin or compete in a netball tournament, and for this I give hearty thanks to any deity that cares to take the credit. But a friend and I were reminiscing recently about the years when the routine of our day was regularly interrupted by demands that we go and put on some unflattering outfit and run around a field for an hour waving a stick or similar. I’m talking about school sports. Oh the dreadful memories…
I’m struggling to decide which was worse – netball or hockey. Both were played in the winter, which meant both involved standing around outside in freezing temperatures while inadequately dressed. I think possibly netball has the edge because the rules are so nonsensical. What kind of game stipulates that as soon as you catch the ball you aren’t allowed to move, except to pivot on one foot, causing all around you to scream “Pivot! Pivot!” in a manic fashion? It is patently ridiculous. Also I am pretty sure I missed the lesson when they sat everybody down and explained the actual rules of netball, because I never knew them. All I knew was that every Wednesday afternoon somebody would fling an orange vest at me with some mysterious initials on it – C, or GS, or WA – initials that apparently meant something to everybody else but were unfathomable to me, and then I would spend a confusing hour trying to get out of the way while being yelled at by my more-competitive classmates.
Hockey was pretty terrible too. I am wary of any game that involves protective leg-wear. Although I could at least understand the general principles – hit the ball with your stick and try to get it into the goal – but I was so afraid of being clobbered round the knees with a hockey stick, or getting beaned by a (very very hard) hockey ball, that I spent most of my time running in the opposite direction to the direction of play and begging people not to hurt me.
It’s a good job I was funny and chatty, or my classmates would have hated me. As it was I was the joke of sports lessons; the one nobody wanted on their team. Summer games were better. I liked tennis, because even though I sucked at it, it didn’t involve playing on teams, so I wasn’t making other people angry with me. And rounders – a bizarre English combination of cricket and baseball – was somehow always more light-hearted and fun than hockey and netball. Nobody really cared if you messed up, it was summer after all. We were all just happy to be outside and working on our tans.
But the true horror of summer was athletics, a whole series of arbitrary challenges and tortures – throw this pointy thing, jump over this obstacle, hurl this heavy object, and now do it all again, only harder, faster and further. Oh, and then run around the track three times for NO GOOD REASON, but we’ll time you anyway and make you feel bad for being slow. Man I hated athletics, and it was all made worse because they made us take our gym skirts off. Why I do not know – I hardly think it was the aerodynamic drag of my gym skirt standing between me and a career as an Olympic hurdler. So we were all cavorting around the sports field in gym knickers, eyeing up each other’s thighs disparagingly (did I mention I went to an all-girls school? Yeah) and trying to outdo each other in various bizarre and nonsensical activities.
When I think back on school sports lessons, I could not be more grateful that my teenage years are forever behind me. No matter how annoying my job is, at least I can rest safe in the knowledge that I will never again be judged by my ability to get a ball into or over a net. And that is a very comforting realisation indeed.
So, did I mention that J and I are going to Las Vegas at the beginning of April? We are! This has come about because we are both huge USA-philes, and first bonded over our love of Americana when, two months after we started dating, J whisked me away to San Francisco and then Lake Tahoe for Valentine’s Day. It was around this point that I figured he was a keeper.
Since then we haven’t gone a year without a trip to North America, and this year it’s Vegas. I’m so excited to go there with J, because he, like me, thoroughly appreciates the slightly trashier side of American culture. I think this attitude can be summed up by our decision, last summer, to spend our last day in California at the Jelly Belly Factory, rather than touring Napa Valley wineries. And what a good choice it was too:
But what I’m most excited about is the food. I am a connoisseur of American junk food. I could (and will) eat Goldfish Crackers all day long, washed down with Double-Stuff Oreos and Reese’s pieces. The continual reinventions of the M&M and the Skittle (you can get chocolate Skittles now!) delight me, and I would like to shake by the hand the person who came up with the Milano Cookie. I love the chain restaurants too! I have been known to travel across state lines to get to a Chili’s. Oh, chicken ranch sandwich, you shall be mine again! Soon! In April!
(There are a couple of Chili’s franchises in the UK now but they are frankly not the same, because they don’t put ranch dressing on the chicken ranch sandwich, which, wtf UK Chili’s? Now it’s just a damn chicken sandwich – WHERE IS THE FUN IN THAT?)
My only criticism of American junk food is that the chocolate kind of sucks. Hershey’s tastes like the hamster treats my friend used to give to her beloved Harry, which I once tried on a dare. And I am appalled that the Hershey company has bought the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk branding and slaps it on its own chocolate now. PEOPLE OF THE USA: That shit is not Cadbury’s. Trust me. If it says Hershey’s anywhere on the wrapper then back away slowly. Send me your address; I will personally mail you a bar of the real stuff (I’m serious! I consider it a service to snacking). But be careful, once you try it you will be forever spoiled for your country’s pale imitation.
But, apart from the chocolate, I am quite certain the USA is the ruler of the junk-food world, and the reason why I am sort of kind of dieting right now is so that I can gorge myself with impunity the minute I get through passport control in Vegas. Stand back airport purveyors of fine American snack-foods. Plattie’s coming.
Today J and I drove out to the New Forest for Sunday lunch. I love the New Forest – it’s only an hour or so outside of London but it feels like a different world, all tiny villages and beautiful scenery and ponies! Wild New Forest ponies! It was a gorgeous, sunny crisp day. The perfect sort of day for getting out of the city.
When J was little he used to go on camping holidays with his family in the New Forest, and he was allowed to go to this fancy hotel, The Balmer Lawn, for ice-creams, but never for lunch because it was too expensive. So today we had lunch at The Balmer Lawn, and very nice it was too.
Afterwards we went and found some New Forest ponies to bother. They are appealingly fluffy but not nearly as interested in having their noses stroked as they are in eating gorse…
And then we marvelled at the liveliness of the New Forest social scene.
A needlework fiesta no less. I wanted to go and investigate further but the sign didn’t actually appear to lead anywhere. What a tease!
And then we drove home with Bon Jovi’s greatest hits on the car stereo and sang along at the tops of our voices.
It was brilliant. Boo! to work tomorrow.
Happy Valentine’s Day my lovelies! In recognition of the occasion, you can go over to Pop Vultures and read my review of the world’s most excruciating show about sex, courtesy of the BBC: Sex… With Mum and Dad.
(Nope, not kidding. It’s really a show).
Last week our dishwasher broke, which was an occasion of great sadness in the Plattie household, since J and I are both utter ponces when it comes to doing dishes. When I first moved in with J, I remember being undecided which I was happier about – the fact that I was living with my beloved, or the fact that he had a MACHINE which, get this, washes dishes FOR YOU. It was the first time in my life I had lived with a dishwasher, and it was quite a while before I would allow anybody else to load it. Dinner guests would offer to help clean up and I would have to protest, ‘No, don’t worry, I’ll do it. I want to do it.’ And then they would think I was just being polite, and they’d still try to help, until I would crack and end up yelling, ‘No. Look, it’s MY dishwasher. BACK THE HELL OFF.’
So, it died last week. A slow, agonising death of gradually washing things less and less well, until I was finally forced to admit that all it was doing was moving the dirt around. J offered to fix it, but since his idea of ‘fixing it’ was to open it up, stare at it in a bemused fashion for a few minutes, and then announce that he didn’t know what was wrong, this didn’t get us very far. So we did what we should have just done in the first place. We hopped on the internet and ordered a shiny new one.
The shiny new dishwasher was delivered this morning, which meant that yesterday evening we had to get the old broken dishwasher out of the kitchen. Incidentally, J decided to start tackling this job at 9.45 in the evening, just about the time I was beginning to contemplate pyjamas. It didn’t seem like that big a job though – just pull it out from under the worktop, undo the water pipes, and retire to bed to dream happy dreams of effortlessly clean plates. Except, well, we didn’t realise at that stage that when our kitchen floor was tiled, the tiler, in his infinite wisdom, had grouted the dishwasher to the floor. (WHY?) So, first of all J had to chip away at the grout with a screwdriver. And that’s when we realised that the bastard thing was sitting about half an inch below the level of the floor tiles, necessitating a lift-up-pull-forwards type of manoeuvre in order to get it to budge. And the main problem with this was that there was nothing on the front of the dishwasher to grab onto in order to do such a thing. (Curse our trendy stainless-steel minimalist tastes.)
Long story short, J pulled it so hard he broke the door off (My man – see his biceps ripple!) and then we were even more screwed because we had a doorless-dishwasher stuck in a hole, no other means of grabbing onto it to pull it out of the hole, and a small collection of very clean peas sitting in the bottom of it looking, I don’t know how to properly explain this, slightly smug. We stared at it for a few moments, before deciding that we were clearly under-qualified for the job, and we would probably do the least amount of harm by just leaving it and going to bed.
The new dishwasher was delivered this morning. It is sitting in all its shiny, efficient, dish-cleaning newness, still unwrapped, in the study. J will be spending the day combing the internet for dishwasher-removal specialists. I really, really hope that that’s a thing.
For Christmas, because she is a woman of infinite taste, Teabelly got me the Season 1 DVD boxed set of Beverly Hills 90210. Since then we have been getting together once every week or so for long binge sessions of early ’90s nostalgia. We watched the last episode on Saturday, and now we’re eagerly awaiting the delivery of Season 2 from those lovely people at Amazon.
I never watched the show when it actually aired, largely because I was 10 when it began, and still under strict parental television control. (No more than one hour a day, BBC only, don’t sit too close to the screen, can’t you do something constructive with your time, you’ll get square eyes, what’s this rubbish?) But I’m glad, now, that I didn’t watch it when it was current, because there’s a danger I might have taken it seriously, and not recognised it for the rich comic brilliance of melodrama and poorly-thought-through outfits that it actually is.
The fashion horrors are plentiful, and I could expound upon them at length, but I will restrain myself by asking only this: High-waisted jeans? Why? I just don’t understand how they were ever considered to be a good idea – they make even the slenderest of girls look bulgy and squat. But more entertaining than the fashion, even, are the wafer-thin plots with the ill-concealed moral messages – don’t be racist! don’t have unprotected sex! don’t rape – it’s not nice! Tell me, people who watched this show as it aired, was it ever considered to be serious drama? Or was it always a complete joke? Because Teabelly and I are utterly unable to watch it without shrieking in derision.
I understand that in later seasons they dispensed entirely with the idea of moral lessons, and also with the idea that anybody cared what happened to the parents in the show (for which I say a hearty ‘thank-goodness’, having been permanently scarred by the sight of Jim Walsh’s chest hair) so I’m looking forward to the episodes when everybody just starts shamelessly sleeping with everybody else and nobody ‘learns’ anything from it. But for now we are still at the stage where Brandon has a tediously humbling experience which he then proceeds to immediately forget about before the next episode; Brenda keeps trying to express her independence and then (again, tediously) learns to appreciate her parents; and Dylan hardly shows up at all except to look moody and then announce that he can’t participate in whatever event the episode is focused around because he’s going surfing. Luckily, even when you can see the plot twists coming a mile away, the show can still thrill and surprise you with an unexpectedly revealing male crop-top, or a deeply regrettable camel-toe legging incident.
If you want to wander even further down early ’90s TV memory lane, I heartily recommend Jess’s Beverly Hills 90210 recaps over at Pop Vultures. I will be happily reliving the cheesy glory there until Season 2 lands on my doormat.
Number 1
J: I’m having a bit of an existential crisis.
P: Why?
J: I just accidentally swallowed a bit of mouthwash.
P: And that is causing you to ponder the nature of existence?
J: A bit.
P: Have you ever heard of anybody dying from mouthwash poisoning?
J: Well, no. But maybe it was covered up!
P: Sweetheart, I promise if you die of mouthwash poisoning, I will expose the truth.
J: That’s not very comforting.
Number 2
P: Molly, why are you in a box?
M: I have my reasons.
P: OK, but you look kind of stupid. Just sitting there. In a box.
M: Shut up Mummy I am being AN ENIGMA.
P: An enigma?
M: Yes.
P: OK, but I need to put the box outside now, with the recycling.
M: You can’t recycle it! It’s my enigma box! This is my whole act!
P: OK fine. You can keep it. But I’m taking a photo of you and putting it on my blog.
M: You don’t scare me; you’re not really that funny. You’ll probably try make some sort of gag about Schrodinger’s cat, but you won’t be able to make it work.
P: You know me too well.
M: The enigma has spoken.
I wish I had more interesting talents. I can’t sing or dance, I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag, I can play precisely two tunes on the piano, and one of them is Mary Had a Little Lamb, which only has three notes in it. I can’t speak any foreign languages fluently, and I can’t draw. I can mend a sock but I couldn’t sew a dress. I can knit, as long as all that’s required is a long, flat, piece of knitting with no fiddly bits. I can make people laugh, but normally only when I’m telling them something funny that J said. I am terrible at all sports, laughably bad at anything that involves hand/eye coordination, and lamentably rubbish at driving. I am a mediocre cook.
But you know what I’m really good at? I mean, really good? The one thing I can do better than anybody else I know, or even anybody else I’ve heard of? Minute taking. I am a kick ass minute-taker. My minutes will knock the socks off anybody else’s minutes, every time. Drop me into a meeting with twenty people in it, all of them disagreeing vociferously and talking over one another for four hours straight, and the next day I’ll present you with a beautifully-crafted written record of the whole thing, with actions highlighted in red and headings in bold. I won’t even use a tape recorder, and I won’t miss a thing.
But who cares about minute taking? Even I don’t care about it, and I’m the one who was born with this peculiar talent. I’m not saying it’s not useful, but couldn’t I have been given a more interesting gift? I’d take the ability to spin plates over the ability to take good minutes – at least it’s entertaining. Nobody’s ever going to tune in on a Saturday evening to watch Minute Idol, which is a shame, because I would totally win that show. When I die they won’t put a blue plaque on my house saying ‘Here lived Lizzie, minute-taker extraordinaire – she wasn’t afraid to use the active voice’. It’s deeply unfair. I would like to take my talent back and exchange it for another one please. Anybody want to trade?
