Well I certainly haven't been doing much on the blog front lately, and that's because I've been busy. And mostly not as pissed off as normal. As I've said before a happy blogger is a dull blogger, though of course there are exceptions.

But anyway I just can't resist blowing my own trumpet for a minute. The reason for this sudden break in radio silence is that a) events are conspiring to piss me off today and b) Pan won a BAFTA! OK, I didn't win it all by myself, just as part of a team, and yes I know it's just an award, but still. IN YOUR FACE, non award winners.

And here's the piccy :-


BTW this is at the lunch we had to celebrate and I'm completely pissed, not to mention in need of a haircut, but frankly, who cares! Just for the record we won it for the Creative Interaction or some such for the openeartharchive, for which yours truly was the IA . . .

I know no-one cares except me, but I just clocked my internet connection at 244 kbs. I dunno where this stands in a global sense, but it's pretty damn good for UK cable.

And that gives me a happy.

So I went to the wedding. And despite all my dire predictions I actually enjoyed myself. Don't think I embarrassed myself, though I did accidentally give my Dad a vision from hell - c 9am appearing at the door of my room wearing only a pair of pants, last night's shirt and a tie knotted somewhere around my shoulder, hair by Crazy Meg of Bedlam, Hell.

Yesterday I had the WORST HANGOVER OF ALL TIME. Still, if you will stay up till 6am drinking single malt what can you expect . . . ack. Seriously thought I was going to die last night, and am still feeling a bit ack.

Never again.

Beautiful venue tho, albeit in the middle of nowhere. Literally.

So I finally got caught up on series one of Veronica Mars which you can only get on Region 1 at the moment.

Some things I'll never understand. You have the best show that's appeared in years and does the BBC pick it up - No. How about C4. Nope. Sky, even? Keep guessing. No Veronica Mars was consigned to Living. Now Living actually has some good shows. OK, it has Veronica Mars and The L Word, but those are both pretty much cream of the crop US wise at the moment, so all power to them, but it's still a shame. Put it this way, while most people who have cable will have Living it's not exactly the kind of channel people rush to programme into their favourites list. In fact I have more reach standing on my roof frisbeeing cardboard head shots of Percy Daggs III off it than Living do.

But what can you do.

Anyhoo, I LUrve Veronica Mars - sure didn't see that series finale coming. Naturally due to the retarded nature of things around here this is still only available in Region 1 but trust me - it's worth it. In fact it's worth buying a multi region DVD player (should you be in the 0.001% of people wo haven't done this already) just to watch this programme.

In fact I'm kinda wondering what is going on with the PTB and their purchasing policies. As far as I can see they majors in this market (BBC & C4) and the minors (ITV & Five) seem to be following a policy of only purchasing what's *popular* rather than making a subjective decision based on their own opinions and buying what's good. So we end up with Lost, 24 (again) and Gray's Anatomy (which is actually wuote good) whilst V.Mars, The L Word and Dead Again (before it got cancelled anyway) are sentenced to the televisual equivalent of Paperboys 11.

Which kinda seems like missing a trick. Nobody knows why some shows just take off and some don't. Look at Dawson's - a non stop fiesta of nausea indusing shite and it was the most popular thing ever. Now given that as a rule 'buzz' does not travel particularly well from one country to another it seems odd to take a shit show which for some unaccountable reason has 'buzz' and spend a fortune recreating it for the UK market, when you could buy a much cheaper show, promote it properly and it'll create it's own buzz. That way people get to watch good shows which cost the networks over here less instead of expensive horse manure.

I just don't understand. And if that's the last time I write that sentence I'll be surprised.

So my doom draws ever closer. What can I say . . . in Serbian there's a word that's used when your relatives force you to eat too much because it's an insult to refuse food. It tanslates as 'Food Terror' It's a pity there isn't a word for Wedding Terror. Ho hum.

Anyway, just cooked a lunch that is so incredibly hot the leftovers are making my eyes water from 4 feet away :-

1 x bunch spring onions
3 x garlic cloves
1 x juice of a lime
1 x golf ball sized piece of fresh HOT ginger, finely chopped
2 x handful prawns
1 x Scotch Bonnet chile

My God . . . .

Anyway, you certainly wouldn't want to eat that lot and then perform an act of great intimacy. Scorchio.

I'm so depressed I can hardly even summon the energy to blog. Not only did I get turned down for a job after and hour and 40 minute interview, they even had the gall to write this :-

Thank you very much for coming in to meet the team here at XXX. As much as
we enjoyed meeting you and thought that you are a capable candidate with
good experience in Taxonomy, we did feel that your strength lies in a more
hands on role and as such we did not feel that you were quite right for our
Taxonomy Manager position which requires a mix of hands on and
managerial/strategic skills.

I suppose they're entitled to their view but I'd be more willing to accept it if they'd actually asked me anything managerial/strategic. 100 minutes of detailed technical questions to which of course I knew more answers than they'd ever even heard of. Cunts. And as for that line 'good experience in Taxonomy' I've forgotten more about taxonomy than those twats will ever know. Actually I don't know why I blanked out their name. Feel free to send them something offensive here.

As you can see I don't take rejection well. And speaking of which - it's not just me, I have scientifically proved this by having recently been rejected on a truly Olympian scale.

That's it I am officially going to die alone and be eaten by Alsations. You can only keep kidding yourself that everything's going to work out in the end for so long before you just have to accept that it's most likely not going to. And even worse than that I'm going to my cousin's wedding next week. That may not sound terrible, but it is. First up, I HATE weddings. The whole cheesy queasy repetitive obnoxious bullshit makes me sick to my stomach, and here's one where I won't even know anyone. Except my fucking family. Holy Christ.

Maybe I'm being too cynical. Perhaps I'll meet the love of my life.

Yeah. Like that's going to happen

I'm looking forward to the Tory party election. Let's face it, the only candidate about whom Labour will be even slightly concerned is Ken Clarke, and it looks like he's for the chop.

It looks, incredibly, like the Tories are going to lurch even further to the right, which is good in making them even more unelectable, but bad in that then allows Labour to do even more of it's crazy shit . . .

Fucking funny anyway . . . someone once said that the Labour Party 1983 manifesto was the longest suicide note in history . . . now look whos talking. We're 8 years into the New Labour revolution, and what are the Tories doing - electing DD.

This is the equivalent of Labour electing, ooh, er, Derek Hatton as leader in 1987.

Morons, your bus is leaving ;-)

Opera

It's been a busy couple of weeks - I've been carbo loading on culture. Weds week went off to the ENO to see The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, and this after going to The Garden to see La Funcella Del West week before. Anyway, it was a hideous train wreck (Bitter Tears that is). Which is a shame because the story is pretty good, but who can take 3 hours of monotone stacatto sung speech and a jingly jangly 'modern' score that at no point showed the slightest sign of actually breaking into a song.

Dinner

Been eating a lot of big grown up dinners lately - went to Fino on Saturday. This place has picked up some bad reviews but I really couldn't fault it. Excellent service, beautiful space, great food, tasty vino, but at £25 quid a bottle you expect something quite palatable. For me the high points were the lamb, the clams, the fillet of beef and the pigs cheeks, which were spectacular. Honourable mentions also to the octopus, the bruscetta and the salted chiles. There was some other stuff I didn't bother eating as well : omelette, salad, that sort of thing and the squid was a bit overcooked but you can't win em all. Overall : excellent.

Last night went to meet Hari for a quick one at the god awful Fire Station, as Waterloo is the most convenient for both of us. After a quick pint standing on a major thoroughfare in the pissing rain which was vaguely reminiscent of a low rent Mega City 1 she suggested we repair round the corner to this little Eastern European place she knows. So we pitch up at bloody Baltic and get stuck into another serious gastronomic and alcoholic experience. Had some fantastic smoked eel with bacon and then some sort of mystery meat claiming to be veal sweetbreads. Don't know what it really was but wasn't much like a gland with the taste and consistency of chicken crossed with blancmange, that's for sure. Couple of beers each, bottle of decent plonk, couple extra glasses, couple of cocktails, espressos, extra fags and it's suddenly £120 of your earth currency units. Still, money well spent, though next time might pick my main course a bit more carefully. Hari was looking particularly charming in her new lace up fuck-me boots, sort of like a cross between a slightly world weary Katy Holmes and HBC in Fight Club. Only hopefully not germinating Tom Cruise's demon seed.

And what's all that about? What's wrong with the woman. It's beyond all sense isn't it? I'm not sure who she should be going out with, YT excluded, but I know she could do a fuck of a lot better than fucking Maverick. Jeeezuz.

Creek

In a bizarre form of self flagellation and in the hope of coming to some understanding about all this I watched Dawson's Creek season one, and what the world already knows was only too clearly demonstrated. Pacey & Joey : funny and cool. Jen : highly slapable, but you'd probably still go there. Dawson : fugly munter who should be terminated with totally unnecessary excessively bloody force immediately. There is no way on this earth that two 'hotties' (ugh) like Jen & Joey would hurl themselves at this self absorbed idiot who has, to quote, got an e.t. doll on his desk. I can only assume that the original writer was in some way trying to re-invent his own adolescence, the way it played out in his head not reality, where girls really do want to go out with sensitive withdrawn wimps instead of muscle bound, hard drinking, dope smoking idiots. Idiots with cars.

Also an award for the silliest diaolgue of all time : episode twelve (The Beauty Contest)

Jen : Why is it that every time I pay you a compliment you act like I'm hitting on you?
Joey : I dunno. It just feels weird I guess. I mean, I know I'm not pretty.

Ahuh.

I realise I'm about 10 years too late to be getting into a strop about Dawson's creek, but, hey, so what. And even though it drives me crazy it really shows up junk like The O.C. for the rather shoddy fare it really is. Still . . . .

I've been watching Hex lately and I've really been enjoying it. OK, it's very derivative, mostly of Buffy but that's not a big problem. Hex is set in an English boarding school and is about the usual girl (Cassie : the ever lovely Christina Cole ) who comes into mysterious poweres etc etc, and despite being as fit as you like is generally derided as a nutcase outcast :


The usual selection of oddballs are here in fairly predictable proportions, but because this is England and meant for an English audiance we can actually say it like it is, so for example everyone drinks, everyone smokes, and everyone has sex, be they good, bad or teacher, which is a lot closer to reality than yer average tv prog. Plus in Roxanne and Leon we have a traditional pair of Queen Bitch and Nasty Rich Kid Psycho who are genuinely mean, vile and threatening :-

This is a fairly standard line from Leon after a spot of opportunistic sexual assault :-

"You want to be careful Cassie. If you don't get a good oiling soon, you'll rust shut."

The only problem is that they only made 6 episodes in the first season, and 6 in the second! I mean what the fuck is the point of that! How can you have a season with only 6 episodes. I dunno. Fawlty Towers only had 6 episodes per season, but that was a) A work of comic genius (yawn) and b) The 1970s rather than an enjoyable but totally derivative piece of teen horror fluff.

And it didn't have any totally gratuitous shower and lesbian scenes.

Trust me, you really don't want these two picking you out of the crowd.

Fucking Bollocking Ball Bag Gym. Fucker.

I don't know why I even bother going. I mean it makes no difference anyway. All I'm doing is shedding £55 a month and not the good pounds either.

Lunch today : a quite revolting salad of my own concoction : Cous cous, tomatoes, celery, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pigeon breasts. Sounds good, but trust me, it didn't really work. And I had a Vanilla Coke - diet naturally, but still inherently EVIL.

American Socialists

I was just thinking about why American's keep electing Republicans even though it's so patently not in their own best interests, and realised that Gramsci had his finger on the button 100 years ago. This from Wiki explaining Cultural Hegemony :-

Gramsci argued that the failure of the workers to make anti-capitalist revolution was due to the successful capture of the workers' ideology, self-understanding, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling) culture. In other words, the perspective of the ruling class had been absorbed by the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies hegemonic cultural innovations such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture had indoctrinated workers to a false consciousness. Instead of working towards a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs (according to Marxists), workers in "advanced" societies were listening to the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, seeking consumer opportunities and middle-class status, embracing an individualist ethos of success through competition, and/or accepting the guidance of bourgeois religious leaders.

And that pretty much hits the nail on the head as far as I can see. So where does that get us? Absolutely nowhere unfortunately. Let's face it, you can probably be arrested for reading Gramsci in the Red States these days. And that's not a joke. It could come under the heading of 'programme related activity' (bad thoughts). After all, if hanging around by the side of a road looking a bit hairy can get you unlimited detention in Guantanamo Bay who knows what reading a book by a revolutionary socialist (and an Italian to boot) would get you? Death by public stoning perhaps?

Of course it doesn't help that many recent immigrants to the USA only have decadent and corrupt governments to compare the US experience with and so are only too happy to vote for the party that says it's going to leave them alone the most. Of course the way US politics is going at the moment there'll soon be little real difference between Congress and The Democratic Republic of South Backscratcher.

Don't believe me - read up on just where elected representatives are getting their bribes from these days.

Gymocological Anomoly

There are 58 machines in the cardio room at my gym. Only 4 of them are steppers. Today there were 6 people in the room - 3 women on respectively a cycle and two treadmills, and 3 blokes, all of us lined up like ducks in a row on the steppers.

Fortunately that's where the similarity ended. One was about 185 years old and looked like he was about to keel over at any moment, one was a sort of beardy goth metellar type and of course then there was the Noble Panster.

61 storeys and every last one climded listening to C&W : Alisson Krauss, Dolly, The Dixie Chicks, Brad Paisley . . . is there no end to my crimes.

Now that everything is cleaned up my desk seems strangely empty. Because I'm used to being so hemmed in and now I've tidied everything away and moved what's left around I can't touch type properly. You get used to the visual location of the screen and the gubbins around it to know where to place your fingers. When all that changes it takes, well, about as long as it took to type this paragraph to get used to the new set up.

I've been having some sort of Autumn spring clean over the last couple of weeks and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The books, CDs, DVDs, games, pictures and hardware were easy, all the fluffy stuff less so. Everything I don't wear anymore is now safely boxed away to be taken to the charity shop at some point, and everything else is either racked (shirts, jackets, waistcoats, trousers and suits), placed in drawers (socks, underwear) or sitting in clean/non clean piles (t-shirts, jeans, shorts, towels, linen, jumpers).

But don't get me started on ties, belts, gloves, hats, scarves, sock suspenders, spats and combinations. Not to mention knick-knacks, momentos, gee-gaws, souvenirs, tat, rubbish and bibelots. Alright , I made some of those up, but the problem really is what to do with all the miscellaneous stuff. A big pile of towels, 24 books on architecture and 200 CDs : no problem. A pair of wooly mittens, a jar of loose screws and a badge saying "Radio B92 NAD BEOGRADAM" : what the fuck am I meant to do with that??

Life really does reflect taxonomy in this wayl. The gross bulk of stuff is straightforward enough to categorise, but it's all to easy to end up with a huge file / box, just marked 'miscellaneous' if you're not careful.

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.