Category Archives: life

My diary

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Found my diary from when I was about 15.  Blimey. It is hilariously awful.  My teenage self was clearly on an autism spectrum related path before that path ‘existed’.

I googled ‘diary’;

1. A daily record, usually private, especially of the writer’s own experiences, observations, feelings, attitudes, etc.

2. A book for keeping such a record.

3. A book or pad containing pages marked and arranged in calendar order, in which to note appointments and the like.

Well. My diary is a big fat fail on most of these criteria. About the best I can claim is that I had a book. A book in which I kept a brief, daily record of what I did. Excluding any feelings, observations or attitudes.

A random example entry (verbatim);

Thursday 16th October

M took us in car. Double English – test on Act III. Break. Maths – Essex numeracy test till 12.00. French till lunch. After lunch, library. Miss Martin told us about Merch of Venice trip. R.E; discussion about whether ‘decent’ people should get divorced. Geography; essays back. Walked home. Cooked pizza. Butterscotch Instant Whip. Watched Change of Sex part two. Julia/George bust operation. Slept.

Each entry is pretty much the same but substitute different lessons, teachers and flavours of Instant Whip. And interject a lot of “bored” and “borings” into the lesson descriptions. I suppose there maybe a glimmer of interest for my Southend High school mates. Maybe. But probably not. I find it so random now, looking back, that  I detailed ‘break’, ‘slept’, ‘walked home’. What was the purpose of it? It kind of pre-dates the Ronseal ad campaign. It does what it says on the tin. But the tin says ‘tedious life timetable age 15’.

All I can salvage from it is that I put quotation marks around ‘decent’ in the divorce discussion. Maybe there was a hint of a sociological imagination there.

Zombie night

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Richy went to watch zombie films this evening.

LB combed his hair. He combed his hair all day because he thinks it’s got bits in it.

Tom watched the end of Harry Potter.

Me? I read some Eva Kittay stuff.

And Stan and Bess waited. And watched.

The tiny woman with the chair

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I’ve written before about our neighbourhood in terms of the colourful characters. And posted photos*. One person I haven’t mentioned before is the tiny woman with the chair. Now she, more than Chicken Bone man reading his extreme porn in the Cafe Bonjour, disrupts social space for me. Not in a negative way. But in a “Wow! This is so unusual!” way.

I first saw her about a year ago, when she was sitting on the other side of the road, on a small, white chair, facing a row of parked cars. Bundled up in a thick coat, she was sat back from the curb, leaning forward, unmoving, staring intently ahead. People walked past her, but she remained seemingly focused and undistracted. Was she doing a traffic survey? Or some other functional task? It didn’t seem like it. She just sat.

She was still there later, when I went to the shops.

“Eeek.. ” I wondered, “Should I say hello on my way past?” But she had such a stillness, it seemed intrusive. She was sitting so privately, publicly. A few weeks later, I saw her again, in a different street. Same chair, same stillness. I mentioned her to Richy.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I saw her sitting on the edge of the roundabout on the ring road the other day. Funny.”

Until today, I’ve seen her a few times. Always sitting. In random places. Well random to me, that is. Today was different. Today she was walking up our road. Very slowly, with the chair in one hand. Heading somewhere.

So why am I writing about a tiny woman with a chair?

Because she is breaching social rules in a way that makes visible the rigidity (and possibly the tyranny) of those rules. She is doing something that is so unusual, and yet shouldn’t be. Bit like LB being an unlikely ethnographer of the normal, she is doing nothing remotely wrong. It’s public space, after all. And people sit on their own chairs in other public spaces, in parks or lay-by’s, queuing for the New Year sales or for the launch of new games or gadgets.

Carrying around a chair and hanging out in different parts of the neighbourhood is strangely remarkable. But I wonder why more people don’t do it?

* A mate of mine recently suggested I staged these photos…I didn’t.

Playing games

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Now. I ain’t no politician. And I don’t claim to know an awful lot about the structure and process of British politics. Well, barely anything really.

But I do know that, unless you are an exceptional person, if you have the life experience of – very rich family, public school and Oxbridge education (most likely studying PPE) and straight into politics – you ain’t really going to know diddly squit about anything other than being very rich and privileged. Nothing.

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Twitter; what’s the point?

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I love Twitter. But lots of people I know, don’t. They don’t get it. They hold onto facebook as a space for sharing stuff with chosen, monitored and policed others. Facebook is more intimate, apparently, and isn’t about stalking Scoph, Stephen Fry or Justin Beiber. Facebook doesn’t restrict status updates to 140 characters. What can you say in 140 characters for fuck’s sake? Well, I’ll come back to that..

I went to a social media talk recently by an expert from York University. He strongly cautioned against our increasing over reliance on social media, saying it would lead to us all creating very narrow social lives, funnelling down, bookmarking our favourite websites and increasingly closing ourselves off to broader social experiences. Facebook can do that. We select certain people that we allow into our circle and can even restrict levels of access to our personal lives. It is static, dated and restrictive.

Twitter smashes things wide open. Even though we choose who we follow, once we follow people, we can’t choose what they retweet to us. So if I was to follow 100 people, and they each followed a hundred people, and so on and so on (I ain’t no mathematician so I’m not even going to attempt to develop this equation/sum), that means I am potentially open to shedloads of information, in bite size pieces.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you twitter doubters say. What-effer. You can interact via email or facebook. Not as fast or as effectively. Increasingly, Twitter is part of media stories about particular events. Twitfeed is feeding into live tv and news coverage. It’s forcing governments, institutions, people to be more accountable. Through Twitter, a recent petition against proposed NHS reform has got over 170,000 signatures in a few days. Through Twitter a group of disabled people were able to raise funding, research, write up and disseminate their report into the proposed Welfare Reform Bill. Through Twitter (not through the BBC or other media channels) we know that Andrew Lansley’s recent trip to the Royal Free ended up with him being chased by a doc down the corridor to the words “Your bill is rubbish. And you know it!” Through Twitter, people are able to demonstrate and provide evidence of lies, deceit and cheating (largely by the current UK government at the mo’).

What can you tweet in 140 characters? Well, a lot. You’ve just got to be concise, pithy and cut out so much crap that we usually produce/circulate. It’s a liberating experience.

Twitter is what you make it. Depending on who you follow. It can be supportive, political, social, entertaining, funny, informative, creative and always fresh.

Finally, for mates that have shouted ‘help!, I don’t know how to use it’.. here are a few things that I’ve learnt in the last few months (or days;);

  • Use bit ly to shorten web links you want to tweet.
  • Don’t get overly hung up on what you tweet – just have fun
  • At first you are tweeting to yourself, but people will start to follow you
  • Don’t get hung up on numbers…
  • … but if your followers start to unfollow you en masse, you may want to revisit your tweet content 😉
  • #ff means follow Friday and is a way of sharing ‘good’ people to follow

Now, if someone wants to let me know the best way to manage lists, that would be great.

Stan, glaucoma and the car key

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Stan became blind in one eye this week. Suddenly. Well pretty much overnight really. Some sort of inherited Jack Russell glaucoma. After a couple of days on emergency drops to try and rescue the damaged eye, but also reduce the pressure in his other eye, I took him back to the eye vet in a nearby town at lunchtime.

We arrived 10 minutes early, so I took him to a nearby park for a walk. He’s obsessive about having sticks thrown for him, so I wandered around a bit, chucking a stick for him.  There was only one other person on the other side of the park. Walking up and down, in a weird way, looking at the ground. Occasionally he or she seemed to be picking something up. They didn’t have a dog or anything, so it was a bit odd. We kept our distance.

Half an hour later, the vet recommended an injection to the back of the eye to deaden it, and Stan was led off, tail wagging, to surgery.

I went out to the car park, without a waggy tail. Only to find out I’d lost the car key.

“Fuckingshittosswank.” It was freezing and I couldn’t work out where it could be. I decided to retrace my steps to the park and started walking along slowly, scanning the grass carefully.

“What do you think she’s doing?” I heard a girl say. I turned round to see a couple with a dog, looking at me as if I was mad.  I started to explain but they walked carefully away from me.

Postscript: I eventually found the car key near the goal post. I shouted to the couple but they pretended they didn’t hear me.

PPS: Rich and LB have gone to collect Stan.

PPS: Stan is home, very cheerful and chirpy 🙂

The anti-vegetarian cookery class

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Where to begin with this one?  First no names, probably. So…I went to a vegetarian cookery class on Saturday with mate, Gina (pseudonym). Two previous classes had been fun, hands on, chatty with nosh and a glass of wine at the end. All good. We thought.

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Get off the bus, missus (2)

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I’ve been ‘commuting’* for about six months now since our department moved into town next to the station. Twenty minute bus ride to the High Street and a 10 minute walk or a 30 minute bus ride all the way there.

Who’d have thought such a short, local journey could be eventful? First there was “Get off the bus, missus”.  And here is the sequel. As usual, freshly hatched but, to keep things lively, a different bus company.

So I caught the bus to the station this morning. Sat upstairs, all cosy at the back. Busying myself on my ipad.

“HELLO! HELLO! Everyone on the bus! Hello, this the driver!”

Silence.

“HELLO! This is the driver speaking to everyone on the bus!”

Silence. Way too awkward to shout back “Hello”. Shudder.

“I’m running very late so those of you who plan to go to the station, it would be great if you could get off on the High Street and catch the next bus.”

Eh? What?

Two minutes later the bus juddered to a halt at the bottom of the High Street.

“HELLO. ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? THIS IS THE DRIVER. GET OFF THE BUS. EVERYONE. OFF THE BUS NOW.”

Cripes. We all shuffled towards the staircase.

“GET.OFF.THE. BUS!”

“No. I won’t”, I said, jokingly to the people queuing up next to me.

Silence.

* Not sure if it counts as a commute when it’s about a 5 mile journey, but it’s a bus ride instead of walking.

The Killing

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We started to watch The Killing last week, about 12 years after the rest of the country. On Monday morning, after 11 episodes over five nights, Rich realised he could do cracking impressions of the main characters.  Given that he only does two other impressions (Mick Jagger and Jeff Goldblum in The Fly) badly, it was very funny.

That evening, I was in the kitchen when I could hear some distant shouting outside. We live in a lively area at times, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Tom appeared in the kitchen doorway, hovering nervously.

“What is it?” I said.
“I think there’s someone at the door.”

I went into the hall and could see a very short figure shouting something through the letterbox in a very deep voice.

“EEEEEEK…” I thought, “Maybe someone’s been stabbed or something.”

I quickly shut the dogs and Tom in the living room and opened the front door.

It was Richy, bending over.

“WHATTHEHELLAREYOUDOING?????”
“Shouting “Troels!”* through the letterbox,”
“WHY?”
“I thought you’d find it funny,” he said. “You laughed this morning.”

Shrek modelling my Sarasiobhan Lund Christmas jumper

*Troels Hartmann is the key murder suspect at the moment (no spoilers please).

The blocked toilet

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Eight hours left of 2011, so here is a toilet tale to round off the year.  I’ve always been a bit scatological.  This is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “an interest in or preoccupation with excrement and excretion”. OK. I find the topic interesting, sometimes funny, diverting and love the taboos surrounding all things pooh-related/matter out of place. More harshly, the Cambridge Dictionary definition is “showing an extreme and unpleasant interest in solid waste and sex”. Wow. A lovely example of pejorative, value laden, interpretations of words and language, wrapped up in an authoritative, comprehensive (‘neutral’) text.

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