fuck it i going to drink nore. i deserve it

wow! bizarre. 10 hours after and the hand still isn't reallu working. I can tyoe again, and certainly hold conversations on the phone, but I'm still fucked.

I can feek ahooting and cramping pains running up my arm, It's not normal.

is 11 too early to go to the bottle shop?

ugh

i have no ideq about what that post of a few moenets a gowas. about the special bloke, but yezs it seemd eal like he was really there. it's all disappearing now, baoutlie 9HOPERFULLY TE PATRALUYTSIS)

shit

the wo furthest fingers away on my left hand will not lift upa nuy more

npt goof,

wat thse fuck did i do.

get occasional feelins of blood ciculation in forearm but that's abt it
PROGREAA

lwft fiddle finger will now lift off of flT PLANEW AGIN

left forearm now feeling very . . active

can i drink moer noe>

t's t`ksn me twwenty minutes to write this pozt. i woke up amd myu lwft hnnd has gone aw`ay. but his worst thing is that i've lost my best friend,

seroiudlyy. when ii woke up i yough thertrs waws a bloke ftawlking to me aboutbnhings like in that fiolm. it soiundszsa funny but it;s bot rdeally.

it m`wkes it fuxking hafed to type `aanyway

i `reaally have overdone it

im 3very scared

I cooked a bitching risotto this evening - just suddenly seemed like the kind of comfort food I needed. Didn't buy anything special, just rummaged through the veggie rack, the store cupboard and the fridge to see what was at hand and made it up as I went.

Here's what was in it :-

1 x fine chopped red onion
1 x grated carrot
2 x fine chopped sticks of celery
200g risotto rice
olive oil
800c vegetable stock
1 x large shredded home made sun dried tomato
3 x shredded white anchovy fillets
2 x large cloves garlic
¼ chile
1 x zest of a lemon
½ x juice of a lemon
40g butter
2 x large handfuls of prawns.
60g grated manchego
40g butter
salt & pepper to taste
basil leaves to dress

MMmmmm mmmmm. Surprisingly delicious what with the whole seafood-cheese thing going on.

CV

I finally got round to writing my CV. I'm always amazed when I read it because on paper I'm completely kick ass. And there aren't even any lies on there, a couple of evasions and a healthy dose of making the most of it, but nothing that isn't basically valid that I can't back up.

And I read as the baddest Information Architect in the Goddam universe. It's just a shame I'm such a fuck up in real life.

Fucked up

Spent the whole weekend in bed. This is because I went out Friday and threw caution to the wind. I was supposed to be going out to dinner on Saturday, but it was all I could do to keep the dry heaves down. Plus the hyperventilating, the paranoia the racing heartrate, and what feels suspiciously like gout as well. What a catch I am.

And speaking of which I'm looking forward to watching what sounds like it's going to be a thoroughly exploitative piece of chav TV tomorrow - Inside Britain's Fattest Man. It's good to watch such things simply so you can have a good sneer at the unfortunate victim subject whilst at the same time wondering just how well your own internal organs would really match up in a head to head.


At least I did think that until I read this, in the fucking Mirror of all unholy places :- "Girlfriend Debs reports that all is well in the bedroom department. 'There's less room in bed, but more to get hold of,' she reports". (Their sub-editing not mine.)

So even Barry Austin, 36, 700lbs (down from his competition weight of 900lbs) and who drinks 20-40 pints in a session has a girlfriend.

Kill me now.

Over designed

I was walking past Busaba Eathai on Store Street a couple of days ago and saw that they had done away with anything so prosaic as a printed menu and had installed a push button electronic version instead :-


Which frankly I think is a bit excessive. Despite it's good reviews this is a very standard sort of a place - nothing is going to surprise, shock or particularly disappoint either. It's all very much by the numbers, so what's with the digital menu?

Sweat

I've worked out what it is about the gym that stinks. It's me. Or at the very least my shorts. I'm not a particularly sweaty kind of bloke in normal life, but the gym really brings out the inner sweater in me. Put it this way, if I was wearing a normal cotton t-shirt then the only bits which might not be 3 tones darker and wringing wet after an hour would be a couple of hemispheres over the hips. Not nice.

So to counteract this I bought a bunch of sweat-away, perspo-wick space-fabric exercise gear that claims to be made out of butterfly wings or something and doesn't show the sweat. And if you're paying £22.95 for a t-shirt you can screw up into something the size of a golf ball, so it bloody should. And it does. It doesn't feel any nicer, but it doesn't show and after washing takes about ½ an hour to dry.

The only problem is the shorts. They're clean, I'm clean, but about 1 hour 15 minutes in they start to develop an odour that I can only describe as quite repellant. I'm assuming it's some sort of chemical reaction between the Nike Dri-Fit Polyester® and Pan Sweat®. So ladies, if you want to buzz me at the gym I suggest you get in early, cos otherwise it's not going to be a delight or a joy.

Goats

Why aren't goats prouder of themselves and more generally celebrated? I mean they are pretty cool really. I must weigh a good 50% more than this guy, and I haven't got any horns to speak of at all :-


If I had a pair like him, you'd know about it I can tell you. How kicking would that be . . .

Don't ask me why I've been going around taking pictures of goats, just accept it ok. And to prove there's nothing wrong with me, here's a pictue of a Llama :-

Charming Estonians

God it's lovely after Joanna's been - the fridge smells like a summer meadow, the kitchen is devoid of dirty crockery, the carpets are hoovered, the cushions on the sofa are plumped., the bath is sparkling . . . heaven, basically.

Actually I think I might be developing a slight thing for her. Her acne's cleared up wonderfully, though she is still (unsurprisingly) a good inch or so taller than me, so it's swings and roundabouts really . . .

Ponce

After the gym I went to Waitrose, the most lovely supermarket known to mankind. No really, there is no actual full sized supermarket chain (I'm excluding micro chains like Fresh and Wild) anywhere. It's way better in quality than the biggies (Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisson's, Asda - in decreasing order of loveliness) and it has a proper variety of ingredients, other than, say, M&S, which is great, but is all about food assembly really.

It is however, a little bit on the spenny side. Here's Pan's shopping :-

ITEM	PRICE (£)
The Guardian	0.60
Goats Milk Semi-Skim 1L	1.19
Badoit Sparkling Water	0.92
Apple & Elderflower Juice 1L	1.45
Tomato Juice 1L	1.45
Beefsteak Tomatoes	2.75
Mackerel	1.65
Manchego	2.10
Pigeon Breasts	4.29
Fresh Rosemary	0.75
Anchovy Fillets	2.99
Coubtry Loaf	2.50
Mango	1.29
Nectarines	0.78
TOTAL	24.71

£24.71 on what for fucks sake - nearly 3 quid on tomatos, and there weren't that many of them. £2.50 on a loaf of bread. I mean it's good bread, better, it's fantastic bread, but still, bread at £5/Kg, I ask you.

Not going to stop me shopping there though. At least the mackerel was cheap.

Anger

God I was *so* angry yesterday, and I can't figure out why . . . must be some sort of chemical thing. Maybe I'm hormonal . . .

Gym

Did two hours at the gym today, very hard going. I really stank by the end of it - lovely.

Apology

Yesterday I was complaining about the mundanity of other people's blogs, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stone, I mean I'm blogging about my laundry and goint to the gym ffs.

Boat

Tomorrow I'm going on a boat.

SO2

You'd think I'd have learnt by now that if you happily eat your way through a pint and a half of lentils a significant proportion of them are going to be corporally eliminated in gasceous form. Just nobody smoke, OK.

Laundry

Pan has gone laundry mad. I can't stop doing it, but more keeps coming out of the wordwork / vast 6 box laundry basket. When it's all done I'll post you some lovely pictures. Actually it's not the doing of the laundry that turns me on, it's the ordered rows of socks and pants and t-shirts you gain along the way, instead of crumpled bags of shit. Does that make me autistic? Definitely borderline. Timmmyyyy!!

Blogosphere

The Guardian and The Observer have been great supporters of blogging for some time, but something about their reportage rubs me up the wrong way. It's partly that the blogs they eulogise claiming hundreds or thousands of daily readers seem to me to be no better than my own (readership : 3 on a good day) or indeed many, even the majority of other blogs out there. It's partly the way they seem to present getting a lot of readers and peer recognition as a sort of goal that bloggers per se are aiming at. I suppose it's partly inevitable that journalists, even with the best will in the world, find it hard to understand that many bloggers genuinely don't care who or how many people are reading their blog. Ok, they understand this point intellectually, but they still don't 'get it'. It's weird.

On the subject of blogs I've been reading them for a long time, and have come to the conclusion that there is little correlation between the interestingness of a blog, it's quality, and how many people read it. I mean I never particularly saw what was special about Belle de Jour but now it's bigger than Jesus. But I'm probably in a minority there. Some of the bitterest, funniest, most entertaining blogs seem to get no readers at all, whereas another that springs to mind (and this is just an example of many) is so unbearably dull that I have sometimes wonderd if it was a piss take. A red letter day entry would read something like this :-

Had to pick up Jill's dry cleaning so didn't get to my desk till nearly 8.15. Tchuh - slacking! Got the 'tricky' deposition done and had lunch with Mike and Darren from Corporate .They've both been billing some big hours on the TV takeover thing and are super stoked. Go Guys! Picked up some milk at the station on my way home - by the way I've found that the 7.56 is a bit more reliable than the 7.35, so I've been aiming for this one lately. The guy didn't have my regular 2 pint semi skimmed so I got a pint of skimmed to tide me over. Anyway I got home about eight thirty and Jill came over to pick up her laundry. We got chinese and watched Friends. It was nice.

But it never has less than 30 posts in the comment section. Every day!! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU DRIVEL SPEWING DULLARD. I know it's super childish to poke fun/paper bags full of dog shit at other people, and especially my fellow bloggers. After all, shouldn't we all be supporting each other and displaying solidarity within the blogosphere, and hey, if I don't like it I don't have to read it, right? But that's not the point. These numpties seem to be enjoying bovine success and satisfaction in everything they do from writing a memo to getting a new 'super hot' partner, and boy do they seem happy to write about their interior dialogue-free lives. Of course there aren't any rules for writing a blog, and of course there shouldn't be either, but surely, surely blogs written by people with even the slightest smattering of self awareness are more interesting than the people who report their stress, anger and rage free lives like they were detailing how to construct a self-assembly wardrobe.

And the bit that I really can't bear is that most people seem happier to read this shit than interesting blogs. And by interesting blogs I mean mine.

Of course the alternative solution is that they're all correct and this blog really is boring. But that can't be right. Can it? Basically I just don't like blogs written by happy well adjusted people. If you're that fucking content why not piss off and have some more cats or whatever it is you do and stop boring the living crap out of me? I don't want to read about how you are having a great time and everything is peachy. I want to read that the bailiffs came round, reposessed your scabby flea infested home (which all the same was all you had), threw all your stuff onto the pavement and a huge bag of porn split open in front of a bus full of 10 year olds. From the school where you teach. Well, taught, because when the head hears about this, you're never going to work in this town again. Or any other for that matter.

But my all number time pet hate number one loathing is saved for people who write about how simply divine, how wonderful, how uniquely fantastic their partners are, and what a lucky, blessed boy/girl they are to have them. Especially when 3 months before they were writing about someone else in exactly the same way and will have most likely be moving on again soon. I'm reaching for my pills just writing that line above.

Of course I do have some self awareness and my interior monologue dialog is only too strong. By the way that strikeout is not an affection I did genuinely write 'interior monologue' the first time round. How Freudian. Anyway, all that self knowledge tells me that this particular diatribe is fulled pretty much 100% by jealousy, and jealousy of all those people out there for whom life seems an entirely effortless exercise. The important question you have to ask youself is this :

"Are you jealous of them because

a) they have loving partners and wildly exciting sex lives, meaningful careers, tax efficient saving plans, low cost mortgages and never go more than 6 months without a dental check up whilst you are very much no longer young, very much alone, a cigarette paper away from destitution, and are no more likely to change your life around than you are to grow wings and fly up Alvin Stardust's bell-bottom, or

b) their blogs get more hits than yours?

I'm just having a bad day. Normal service will be resumed at some future point, no doubt. And yes I am aware that my last 2 posts were about cauliflower cheese and hanging the washing out. And, yes, some 'I'm a happy camper' blogs are pretty good, I read them and I like them.

But most of them aren't, so stop being so fucking literal and look at the bigger picture, alright?

Buggering bollocking ball-bag bollocks. Oh fuck it all.

Bastard gym.

God - it's all a bit of an imposition isn't it? Not only does gym dude make you do an hour and a half multi train nightmare which leaves you wondering if you're going to vomit then die, or whether it's possible to die and then throw up, he then tells you that a) you have really weak abs & glutes and b) your general fitness is shockingly low and he's both surprised and diappointed and c) (and this is the real kicker) what you really need is a personal trainer.

Whatever happend to a spot of gentle encouragement? You know something along the lines of 'well done', 'good work' that sort of thing. If I wanted to be told I was a disgrace to mankind and no stronger than a kitten with osteoporosis I would have joined the bloody army, wouldn't I.

And you have to pay £6/month extra if you want towels. Which seems a bit steep if you're already shelling out £49/month. Which I know isn't that much gym wise, but still . . .

It's the quadruple whammy of feeling like shit, paying through the nose, being told you're a big sack of lard and then being expected to pay for towels as well that gets me. Tchhuh.

I'm just feeling grumpy because the gym regime is kicking in again and I'm at the worst stage. It will get better. Probably.

Cheese Sauce

Yesterday I cooked cauliflower cheese comfort food. It may have looked like shit :-


but it was utterly delicious. Trick to making a delicious and smooth white sauce - heat the milk with some finely chopped challotes, pink peppercorns and a baylief before passing it through a strainer and adding it to the butter and flour emulsion, and then cook it very slowly and keep stirring. Add the cheese very finely grated at the end and then stir in to make sure it's properly melted in, Make sure that the fat doesn't seperate out by keeping stirring and using a very low heat.

So yet again the England cricket team are putting us through the ringer. Honestly, it's like having teeth pulled. I can hardly watch. And it's only going to get worse.

Thank Christ it's turning into a traditional English summer and pissing it down :-

I just wish I'd remembered to take the washing in.

Though as I got home about 4am last night in something of a state and found half my flat and a bunch of their friends still up and e'd off there heads, no-one was in a fit state to do anything, let alone take the washing in.

There were some very unhappy campers this morning, myself included. Sore heads all round. Got to go and do it all over again in an hour and half as well. Ack.

This has taken me bloody ages so far, and it's still far from perfect. Maybe I should just pretend that the inconsistencies are deliberate - artistic, like.

Nothing wrong with the composition or the original elements, it's just the execution that's a bit dodgy.

Went to Greenwich with my Godson on Monday. Lovely day out and took many photos, none of which came out properly. One that's not too bad :-

Eggs

If someone put four boiled eggs in front of you it would seem like quite a lot, wouldn't it? But if you make scrambled eggs with 4 eggs, plus of course butter and milk, then it doesn't seem like much at all does it?

Mould

As you can guess I just ate 4 eggs worth of scrambled eggs on toast. I was going to have bacon as well, but it appeared to have some sort of mould growing on it. Now I'm pretty much as adventurous with food as it's usual to get, certainly I wouldn't think twice about cutting some mould off a piece of fruit or a slice of bread, and cheese of course is meant to be mouldy. But bacon? I mean it looked like it would rinse right off, it's only been there a coupla weeks and it smelled OK . . . but I binned it anyway. It's a shame because you can see what delicious organic free range fatty bacon it was - check out the marbling.

Am I being unnecessarily lily livered about this or was it a wise decision? Hard to say isn't it.

Or am I completely losing what marbles I ever posessed?

Cigarettes

I haven't had a fag for approximately 140 hours and the desperation is starting to show. Be strong young Jedi, you can defeat the dark side, although frankly I'm feeling more like Chandler at the moment : Ye Gods dark mother, let me suckle once more at your smoky teat.

Planet Mars

I've really been enjoying the UPN syndicated show Veronica Mars , but I have a couple of issues. The first is fairly minor. I posted a few days ago about how American teenagers all seem to have huge beds, but Veronica Mars was the exception, but I'm afraid I was rather jumping the gun. What kind of a father buys his daughter a water bed I ask myself? No normal one that's for sure. I've actually only watched about half the episodes, so perhaps this too is going to come back and bite me in the ass . . .

The second is about the weird lighting policy on the show. I mean it's one thing to go for eerily realistic, but there are limits . . . I supposes it doesn't help that leading lady Kristen Bell, (referred to by Jonathan Bernstein in the Guardian as "an actress so slight she looks like a bowel movement might break her in half") has all the natural flesh tones of a two day old cadaver, but still, they really should learn to use a light meter or invest in a tiny amout of post production :-

As she appears on the show :-


After a little colour correction from Pan.


Other than that it's a great show.

And still the boy can't sleep. I've now been awake for, like forever. It's driving me nuts.

Cocteau Twins

In a vain attempt to rectify this I've been sorting out my iPod which included listening to some albums I haven't listened to for, er, dunno, a long long time. 15 years minimum. One that is still utterly fantastic is Treasure by the ever wonderful Cocteau Twins. I can't believe I've left it so long without listening to this - it's just superb.

Weird, lovely, beautiful. Nothing comes close, go buy it. Go on. GO ON.

No, really, I mean it.

Yoghurt

Lemon flavoured yoghurt shouldn't work should it? But it does. I've just eaten 4 of them so I should know.

Missing, presumed satiated.

My flatmate hasn't been home in 3 days and hasn't been answering her phone. My other flatmate made the interesting observation that by the time you start wondering where people are if anything has happened to them they've already been turned tableaux vivant a la J-L0 :-


or married off to Satan like Mia Sara :-


or more prosaically converted into economy meat pies :-


So what's the point in worrying about them?

Absent flatmate was kind enough to send us an email eventually so at least we know she's not a human shaped outline on the M25 somewhere. Actually I wasn't worried in the least as I was pretty certain I knew where she was all along but other flatmate seems strangely put out. I think it's got more to do with some people swanning off and having a lot of high octane sex with people they've only just met and leaving certain other flatmates sitting at home on the couch with no one to play with than anything else.

Still, 3 days without a change of clothes - that's a hell of a walk of shame.

I wasn't going to talk about this. After all, what do I know that no-one else does, but I somehow got dragged in anyway.

Katrina

My friend who is on some sort of beach/blonde/sex/alcohol holiday in Turkey texted me to say : "What the fuck is going on in America?"

I was assuming that her question was more than a general enquiry and this turned out to be the case as evidenced by her follow up text : "Oh my god! They're treated like 3rd world country. Just caught a snippet on CNN in the hostel."

P'raps not the most pc way of presenting the information, but I think you get her drift. It was quite hard to come up with a suitable reply in the text format, but in the end I settled for : "Usual madness - no one gives a damn about anyone else until it's too late."

OK, not exactly a towering feat of analysis, but better than the average journalistic response which seems to be "Wow - no one knows what to do and they've all gone goddam crazy". Closely followed by "someone (but not me - preferrably the govermint) should do something." In some sense I have some sympathy for George W. I mean not as much as I have for the people who are now dead / homeless and who didn't vote for the jackass in the first place [ U.S. House - Louisiana District 2 - William J. Jefferson * (D) 172,931 (79%), Arthur "Art" L. Schwertz (R) 46,029 (21%) (Washington Post) and by the way, finding that information was not that easy - getting the raw data was simple, but how to find out which district is which? Get a map of Louisiana, get a congressional district map, and mentally lay one on top of the other - doesn't seem to have ever occurred to anyone to simply point out that District 2 is New Orleans.] But sympathy for Bush anyway.

I mean what exactly did people expect him to do? There's a city mayor, a govenor, senators, congressmen, how come this is his fault? As far as I can see he stood up in November 2004 and basically said : "We're a big bunch of red in tooth and claw, survival of the fittest, rugged individualist, tax dodging good old boys, and if you have to fuck your neighbour to get by, well that's just nature ain't it" and America said "Yup - like the sound of that!"

Well nature has now spoken and oh, what a surprise, the neighbours are fucked. Please don't get me wrong - the result would have been the same with a democrat in charge. It's not about who's competent or not, although being a little quicker off the mark might have helped Bush, and having a touch for public opinion less like the touch of a paedophile for a toddler would have helped him even more. Basically it's this - if you're going to spend your life driving SUVs, voting for massive military spending and at the same time demanding lower taxes and cutting all federal aid programmes, then poor people are going to get fucked. Sorry. You can do all the hand wringing after the event you like, but there it is.

So what is America going to learn from this. My prediction - absolutley fucking nothing. Sure there's going to be an enormous media driven public wallowing in bathetic sentiment, the homeless will this time be fished out of the briny, the levees will be rebuilt, compensation of some sort will be paid, and everyone will start slapping themselves on the back about how after a shaky start the great American spirit of 'can do' and the 'collective will of the great State of Lousiana' triumphed in the face of adversity blah blah-blah forces of evil blah-blah drill for oil in Alaska blah blah-blah blah-blah blah-fucking-blah.

But nothing's really going to change. The next time this happens it'll be somewhere else, and the same shit'll go down - crumbling infrastructure, underfunded public services, a terrified, disenfranchised and alienated underclass stuck in the middle while politicians go on about how driving a car that uses more fuel than a 500 person village in India is their inalienable birth right, conferred by God and protected by the American constitution. And, after all, everyone seems to buy into it - this belief in the American Dream, this insane faith that maybe next year you too can be one of the haves rather than the have nots. Better to live in poverty the rest of your life with a 1 in 10,000 chance of making it big than settle for what can be achieved for everyone right now. And if I do make it big, well that's just God telling me he approves of my choices - "Hey all you people, get back in line and keep dreaming, cos if you stop all the asshole millionaires might have to start working for a living!"

I'm not saying anyone else would have done better, 2 inches of snow is enough to throw us off track over here - but seriously; you guys are really going to have to start looking after eachother a bit better, or this is just going to keep on happening.

OK enough already

Pan is suffering from The Plague. Don't know what it is, but it's not nice - can't sleep, aches, temperature, sneezing, can't swallow, some sort of dumb virus anyway. Nothing too bad . . . am living on hot dogs and lemsip. I love lemsip. I prefer the blackcurrant kind, but it's incredibly hard to get hold of . . . why? Anyway, last night in my fevered state I dreamt that Abraham Lincoln appeared to me as a dancing telephone on an enormouse typewriter made out of teeth. Please tell me there's a rationale for that. I also dreamt that the tube system had gone crazy and had started growing all kind of extra little branches. Weird.

Sometime the most asanine queries float to the top of my head, totally unrelated to anything else. I've watched a lot of TV over the years, and a lot of shitty teen TV at that, and I have a question.

Growing up I didn't have a double bed. I didn't know anyone who did either. Yet every American teenager in a network show seems to have a double bed. Why? Don't their fathers care about encouraging under age sex by providing 5'6" of downy, cottony goodness, as opposed to, say, 3' of nylony discomfort??

The only show to break the rules seems to be Veronica Mars. Her bed is, like, 4'6" max. more like 4' probably. But she does comply to the 'everyone must always use a mac on TV' law :-


I mean I love my mac as much, if not more, than the next man, but it's ubiquitousness on TV when compared to, say, the fact that you see about 1 every 10,000 years in real life is eerie. Has Steve Jobs got some sort of TV executive voodoo shrine / wall o'drug abuse blackmail in his office? Oooh what's that in my closet? Is it 27 pairs of jeans, 42 black crew necks, and what's this - a picture of Joel Silver doing a line of blow off an underage hooker's tits? Surely not!

Anyway, don't answer that question. But do answer this one :-

Did anyone have, or even know anyone who had a double bed when they still lived with their parents?

Thought not.

Why do I think these thoughts? Why? Why? Why?