Duster Bloodvessel

The in-laws are coming to stay at the end of next week, which means of course that the hoose needs fumigating.  That's Saturday morning blown out of the water then.  Actually, I always dread this intense episodes of domestic labour, but they'll usually quite rewarding.

Our house is a relative mess, so you can see the progress of your efforts as you go, which eggs the keen amateur housemaid on something remarkable.  It's like painting a white wall a bold dark colour.  Each wave of the roller brings another throb of excitement and feeling of accomplishment.

So, that's it really.  I can't hang about today; I've got to stop at Robert Dyas en route home and stock up on Brillo Pads and caustic soda.

Ned Kelly in boxers

I suppose it had to happen: I've been nominated to do the bucket of ice water challenge.  For the benefit of our future selves I should explain.  Social media (look it up) has had one of its periodic tsunamis of charidee craziness lately.  Basically one has to pour a bucket of ice water over oneself and upload the film of the deed to Facebook, like a slapstick take on an al-qaeda hostage-execution.  One is then excused from making a donation to whatever charity it was that originally came up with the concept.

My initial gut reaction to this phenomeon was fcuk-off-I-want-nothing-to-do-with-you-all.  But this has now been tempered by the realisation that it might afford me the opportunity to show off in a vaguely creative way.  Sadly, and for reasons too arbitrary for anyone to recall, you're suppose to fulfil your challenge within 24 hours, but that's impossible.  How am I suppose to storyboard an idea, block it and find costumes in 24 hours?  It's not going to happen.  I've had to post a message on Facebook to the effect that I've fired the original director and am busily finding a replacement.  The studio won't like it, but there you go.

I also need to download some video-editing software and find appropriate music.  I quite fancy a bit of gypsy jazz.  Too cheesy, you say?  Yes, perhaps you're right.

Live and let DIY

As a homeowner (I say homeowner - technically the bank is the homeowner and kindly allows me and Mrs O to live in it) I have occasion to perform small maintainence tasks around the old pile from time to time.  I do these things not because they are easy but because I am mean.  Well, not mean per se.  It's just that I get nervous with tradesmen in the house, so I prefer to have a bash at them myself.

I have no real idea what people who use their hands for a living are talking about.  This is an unusual scenario for me as, if I might blow my own trombone for a mo, am pretty switched-on.  Not much gets past me then.  But when some hairy 20-year-old (ahem) electrician tells me I need to give him five hundred pounds for "parts", I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  Clearly I want my house to work, and so will cough up under duress.  However, the part of my brain that deals with duplicity (let's call it The Weasel Plateau, shall we?) lights up at moments like this and tries to smite me into protesting.  When I don't, I spend the rest of the day fretting and am guaranteed to suffer from anxiety dreams.  You know the kind of mundane nightmare where you have to eat an entire boiled cocker spaniel at a black tie dinner because you didn't stipulate the vegetarian option on the RSVP and don't want now to make a fuss.

Anyhoos, I've taken on another task recently.  I'm installing a water butt in the front garden.  You'd think this a piece of piss, wouldn't you?  But no - it involves massive drill bits, saws and running water, albeit not under mains pressure.  I suppose I could get someone in the do this for me, but that would mean putting up with all manner of plumbing fanny.  And I'm not having that.

Camp Bastion

Mrs O and I went camping at the weekend, as is our wont at the end of August.  Sadly, the summer ended a little prematurely this year in England, so the weather alternated between air frost and torrential rain the entire time.

The final day of the trip, Bank Holiday Monday, was worthy of especial note.  It started raining at about 10am and gently ramped the action up until lunchtime, by which time it would have brought down an albatross.  We had intended to have a mooch to the coast after breakfast, but you couldn't really get out of the car without a full-face crash helmet, so decided against it.  Instead we thundered back to London to do some utility shopping.

There are fewer more spirit-sapping experiences than being in the B&Q in Leyton on a Bank Holiday Monday in the p1ssing rain.  People were slumped in corners writing war poetry.  It was that bleak.  The dead-eyed staff didn't help much either, shuffling about trying not to catch anyone's attention.  The whole thing was miserable on an industrial scale.

Next year we're taking the tent to Doha.

Eyes, eyes, baby

I had an eye test this morning.  It was supposed to be a simple contact lens test, but it morphed into a sight test too when it emerged that my prescription had probably changed. 

It was a new optician who performed the test (new to me I mean, not new to the profession) and something in her mien made me uneasy.  It was like I was giving the wrong answers to her diagnostic questions.  "What the fcuk are you talking about?  The green's only clearer than the red if you're a kestrel."

Anyways, it seems the eyes are okay, but during her enquiries behind the iris, my oppie discovered that my cholesterol is probably high.  "You should get a blood test," she told me.  I won't be doing that.  It's not that I've got a death wish or anything; it's just that I've had this condition before.  And the reason it's elevated is because I'm a monster for cheese.

When the old high-cholie was first spotted some years ago, I was stunned.  I'm thin and extremely fit for a man even 15 years my junior.  Also, my diet is exemplary.  How the phuque does someone like me get high cholesterol?  My then GP and I sat in her consulting room pondering this, both of us staring at our feet and scratching the respective noggin.  I then shattered the moment by letting slip that I eat cheese everyday, and had been doing so from about the age of six.  The quack was horrified.

The upshot is I had to bin the curd.  But, as with most addictions, it's crept back without my noticing.  Well, not entirely without my noticing.  I'm well aware that I've been hitting the cheddar a bit hard of late, but "what the hell?" I thought.  So I'm having to go cold cheese turkey again.

Giving Bill Gates a Chinese burn

I've been forced at gunpoint to upgrade to Excel 2007 recently, and I think I can say, hand on heartburn, that it's the biggest heap of sheight I've ever worked with.  One needs to be careful in making judgements of this kind with changing software because it causes the operator to have to shift from one comfort buttock to the other.  The natural reaction to this enforced realinment is to moan.  However, I made this change over a month ago now, and my opinions as to the new version are therefore more measured and objective.  It's hellish. 

It's impossible to memorise the graphic menu system.  And the designations as to where functions sit within it appear to be absolutely arbitrary.  I've tried memorising the new system but to no avail.  I speak as an expert user of Excel - in its 2003 iteration, at any rate.  But now I struggle to perform simple tasks.

In short, it's simply unacceptable.  Not only is the new version sufficiently different from the old as to make it effectively a different application all together, but the new version defaults to not even being able to see 2003 spreadsheets on the hard drive.  Why is this?  Is Microsoft so ashamed of 2003 that it's trying to airbrush it from history?

Microsoft's intractability is symptomatic of a monopoly gone mad.  They are refusing to listen to end-users' concerns.  They don't even dismiss them; they just maintain a lofty disdain and silence.  I've had a fcuking gut-full.  Bill, you have enough money and power.  It ends here, and it ends now.  You butchered DR-DOS and I looked the other way.  More fool me.  I've learned my lesson.  I will destroy the entire company using satire and sarcasm.  I've done it before.  What do you think happened to C&A?

Weasels.

Haaaaaabla Inglayss?

Yawn - well then, that was the weekend, that was.  Mrs O and I are back from our brief sojourn in southern Spain.  We shot off to Andalusia on Friday night.  And, yes, it was murderously hot.

Our first night was spent in Jerez.  In most agreeable clichéd Spanish style, our (complimentary) dinner included a live Flamenco accompaniment.  I don't much care for Flamenco.  I don't wish to sound like an ingrate, but there it is.  It's simply too hysterical for someone raised in England to embrace.  The quality of the musicianship is uniformly high, particularly the guitar playing.  Flamenco guitar playing has a very high entry level in terms of skill.  It's like snooker: you can do it or you sooooo can't.  Flamenco singing, on the other hand, is simply caterwauling masquerading as art.  Yes, it is, and I won't listen to another word on the subject.

After Jerez, we jumped the train to Cádiz, which is on the coast.  Just as well too, because the heat in Jerez could have brought down a camel.  It was excruciating.  But the sea breezes in Cádiz took the edge off to such an extent that one was able to walk sixty yards after sundown without a respirator.  Despite this, one still needed a siesta after lunch for the body to take stock and make sense of matters.

Cádiz, which really is the greatest place on Earth, has an upbeat and practical approach to the summer heat.  During the summer months, the entire town wanders down to the beach after sundown of a Saturday, laden with food and drink.  Then they all have a massive barbecue/piss-up.  It's a joy to behold.  All generations, from babies to nonagenarians, are represented.  And the Andalusians' attitude to drink helps the convivial atmos.  They love to get a bit pissed-up, but never legless.  Consequently there is no bad blood or scrapping.  Looking at the whole affair last Saturday, I couldn't help but be struck by the thought of what utter carnage would ensue if the English ever tried such an event.

This trip was fleeting one, however.  We arrived on Friday evening and flew home on Monday evening.  Still it was enough to recharge the old batteries.  Also my boss went off on leave on the very day that I returned to the office.  He's off to the highlands of Scotland on a stag hunt.  Horses for courses and all that notwithstanding, what kind of person does that in the name of R&R?  So you've chosen to drive 400 miles in a Land Rover in order to crawl on your front over a peat bog whilst being eaten alive by midges in order to shoot a one tonne wild animal in the head?  What kind of fcuking postcard would one send home to the loved ones from a mini break of that nature?  The brain boggles.

Vacation

I typing this at my soon-to-be deserted desk in the office.  Today is a half-day as Mrs O and I are off on hols this afternoon.  I'm shooting off at 12.30 (a little over an hour's time).  The plan is to hook up with the spouseuse at Stansted, and then to jet off to Jerez.

Normally we rent apartments when we're away, but as this is a mini-break, we're staying in hotels.  Luckily, southern Spain is relatively cheap so we can stretch to four and five-star hotels for the duration.  But staying in places like this unnerves me.  I'll be honest with you: I'm a low-born cock-er-knee urchin at heart.  I know I carry myself with a world-weary and distrait sophistication, but that's all bullsh1t.  In fact I'm an impostor in polite society.  And the staff at posh hotels can spot rotters like me, even ones from abroad, from about 700 yards.  This puts me on the back foot.  I feel ill-at-ease all the time.  Should I tip this chap?  If so, how much etc.  It's a decidedly first world problem, I grant you, but it is a worry.

Soy posh, sí.

Have A3 boarding pass, will travel

Mrs O and I are off for a long weekend in southern Spain tomorrow.  We're doing a greatest-hits tour of the places we know well - Jerez and Cadiz.  I adore Andalusia; it's so vital and so brutal.  We've never been there this early in the year, and it's going to be bastard-hot.

We normally head down to Al-Andalus in late September at the earliest.  Even then it's generally scorching.  I've a photo from Jerez of one of those giant thermometers you get outside pharmacies (pharmacists, why?).  It reads 39 degrees.  So presumably in August it's like sitting in an inglenook fireplace whilst dressed like a Norwegian trawler man.  Oh, well, the hotel has a pool, and Cadiz is on the Atlantic, so what's the worst that can happen to a pasty London Irish weed, comme moi?

The greatest pleasure on Earth has to be cowering from the relentless heat of an Andalusian day until the sun begins its descent and then heading off to a sheltered bar somewhere that has a view of the sea or a river and sipping a freezing-cold fino sherry.  The astringent quality slakes the thirst no nothing else I've ever quaffed.  Suddenly, the limbs lighten and the brain springs back into life for a few hours.  Colours appear more vivid and you just want to embrace life.  Necking Guinness whilst listening to sean nos in a dark pub in the west of Ireland is fantastic, but it doesn't get close to this.  Nosirree.

Your eyelids are growing heavy...can you hear me? Hello?

God save us, I'm tired.  Not a major revelation, I grant you, but this time is different.  I'm really frazzled.  It's an odd conflation of circumstances that's brought this about.  I'm sleeping plenty, but the sleep is very frivolous in nature.  Well, that's my assumption anyways.  I think I'm right in saying that REM sleep is the fella that Mr Brain needs for refreshment.  I've not been getting enough (or any) of that.

I've no real idea why this is.  Diet?  That hasn't changed.  Age?  Hmm...I am a little older than I was, say, 14 months ago.  Whatever it is, shallow sleep is a callous bedfellow; it lulls you into thinking you're going to have a blinding day: in tray decimated, colleagues lost in admiration etc., when in fact you'll spend the waking hours rubbing your eyes with the backs of your clenched fists and trembling.

My boss returned from his summer hols yesterday.  He must have been on the lash like Caligula during it too because he currently on one of this God-forgive-me purgative diets.  No caffeine, no booze - just tofu and crab apples or something.  People amaze me in their mediaeval credulity in these matters.  How the phuck is that regime supposed to do one any long term good?  You can't possibly keep it up, so what the goal of the process?  At the end of it your spirit will have been crushed and it's straight back on the Sambuca and Wagon Wheels.  

I'm quite thin, so people occasionally ask me what the secret is.  My answer is always the same: keep a food diary.  Take a look over it after a month or so.  There'll be some disgusting little habit in there that's causing the damage.  Make a small change to correct this.  If you're eating five choccy biscuits with your morning coffee, have two.  Then give yourself months for this little change to take effect, which it will.  Don't go mental and give up chocolate all together.  This is kind of stunt my sister used to pull and it always fails, unless you're David Blaine.  Which she assuredly isn't.

Death in the afternoon

I had one of those disconcerting and bewildering experiences last night.  I awoke in the small hours and trotted off to the bog for a whizz.  One does this on auto-pilot of course - not quite sleeping, not quite awake, but in that marshmallowy hinterland between the real and the imagined.  I have the radio going all night as a matter of course, and just as I resumed my station in the nuptial bed the news broke that Robin Williams had been found dead.

My head started whirling as I tried to process the information.  Luckily, I quickly fell asleep again, and this morning couldn't be sure if it were true.  It was of course.  Shock.  I didn't care for Robin Williams' films for the most part.  The World According to Garp was wonderful, but other than that, I thought they were ill-disciplined star-vehicles.  However, that is not to detract from Williams' talent.  I loved Mork & Mindy when I was a child, absolutely loved it.  He spoke to me via that character in a very direct and fundamental way - in a way that I hadn't fully appreciated until I heard of his death.  What an extraordinary life that is, to be able to move millions of impressionable minds in the that benign and joyful way.

It's particularly painful to reflect then that this man, whose work spread such happiness, was himself deeply unhappy.  He must have been in an extraordinary amount of pain to act as he did.  Goodbye, Robin.  And thank-you.

Treble-Digit Co-efficient of Arse

Mrs O and I ended-up in Hackney Wick yesterday afternoon.  For those of you who aren't au fait with the east of the capital (of England), I ought to contextualise HW somewhat.  The London 2012 Olympic site sits in a huge swathe of river valley in London's east end.  Previously this site was home to a lot of down-at-heel industrial businesses.  But during the 70s and 80s the businesses either went jugs up or relocated outside London, so the area fell into serious disrepair.  

The residential areas that abutted this wasteland were, unsurprisingly, fairly shitty in their own right, thanks to their proximity to this eyesore.  Stratford, Bow, south Leyton - none of them would set the pulse racing, unless it was from fear of molestation from n'er-do-wells.  Hackney Wick sits to to the south east of the Olympic site, and is an odd place because it's always been rather beloved by the tattooed-graduate-set, who make a bee-line for London as soon as Durham University confers a degree on them.  This is probably due to its name.  It may have Hackney in the title, but Hackney it ain't.

So while the rest of this shabby cohort of districts have tidied themselves up, courtesy of the Olympic money and the need to persuade the rest of the country that they're no longer effectively open prisons, Hackney Wick has rested on its laurels rather.  And who can blame it?  The graduates still come.

To my cock-er-knee eye, however, it's an absolute shithole, HW.  It's looks appalling.  It's like being in an episode of The Sweeney, one of bleaker, nihilistic ones too.  Shirley to goodness Britain's young things will cop on to themselves soon and relocate to nearby Stratford instead?  I suppose, however, that would require them getting some self-awareness and then getting their thumbs out of their derrieres, and that's no going to happen.

Briton's got talent

I've been having something of crisis of confidence as regards my musical abilities since I returned from the Cambridge Folk Festival earlier in the week.  The problem is I come away infused with resolve to master my instrument, the guitar.  However, as soon as I get one in the hands, the vide between my desires and my abilities opens up to remind me I'm not going to be the new Richard Thompson any time soon.

Don't get me wrong: I am a decent musician, just not a great one.  And that hurts when you esteem music and musicianship as much as I do.  I'm like Salieri, me.  Tosser.

I can't believe it's not clutter

Mrs O and I are having a bit of a furniture realignment chez nous.  These things, as they are wont to, evolve organically.  Firstly, I decided to build a new bookshelf from planks of mdf and bricks.  I know it's a student cliché, but it's miles cheaper than buying a decent bookshelf and it looks da biznizz.  Once I'd done this, she suggested I might like to move our desk into the alcove behind the telly in the other corner of the room.  This meant dismantling another bookshelf and moving that.  This I did last night.  We'll give it a couple of days to bed in.  It's a little difficult to judge the aesthetic impact of the change just yet because the front room is covered in, as yet, unused house bricks and planks.  I'll take a position on the matter over the weekend.

The one unhelpful conclusion I was able to draw from the week's manoeuvres was that we have way too much stuff, just oceans and oceans of sheight.  I have something of a hoarding gene.  Luckily I noticed this as a boy and, not wishing to turn into a bearded friendless nutter in later life, I determined to keep it in check.  Generally, I do a good job of this, but it's always helpful to have a quick stocktake every few years.  Mrs O isn't very zen when it comes to chucking away old newspapers and wrapping paper either, so we're an incendiary combination.  I told her in no uncertain terms last evening, we have to jettison some ballast or we're not going to cut in polite society much longer.

We live, just the two of us, in a reasonably large house.  And that's part of the problem.  It's the first house we've owned after five years of flat dwelling.  Living in a flat concentrates the mind.  No garden, no shed, no cellar, no loft - either you're in charge or your belongings are.  When we moved to a slightly smaller flat about four years ago, we gave 13 stuffed carrier bags full of books to the local Oxfam.  But books are still the main problem.  They're everywhere at home: on work surfaces, all over the floor, in the two toilets, on the hob, the sofa, the telly, you name it.  If we had a dog, he'd be covered in books, the poor blighter.  But not having books all over the house is a symbol of twattery, and I'm loathe to be accused of that.

I'll have to throw away the sofa instead.  Squatting supposed to be very good for one anyway.  Could someone tell the wife?

Silly Season

There was almost literally nothing to watch or listen to in England last evening.  Radio 4 had a gob on and broadcast back-to-back bleak documentaries.  They kicked-off with some wretched paean to business, presented by former CBI chief Digby Jones.  This scintillating hour consisted of the Digster gadding about the Black Country (on expenses one supposes) , talking to self-important Tory-voting yammies about why business is a force for good on Earth and not simply a necessary evil, which is what most of us, rightly, believe.  People who take extreme positions on business, or the market, or whatever are collosal arseholes, and need to be shunned by polite society.  They, both left and right, should be sent to Rockall to establish who's right once and for all.  That should lighten the load for the rest of us.

After this, they broadcast a white-knuckle piece of reportage that set out to convince me I was probably suffering from an overabundance of iron in the system, and/or paranoid schizophrenia.  I'm actually only mildly neurotic.  This manifests itself in a minor case OCD that only rears its nut when I'm  washing-up.  I'm quite slovenly by nature in most matters, but when it comes to cleaning crockery and the like, I go mental, like an impoverished cockney Howard Hughes.

Beeb, see me.  Must do better.

Joyous fatigue

I've just returned from the Cambridge Folk Festival.  It's always an absolute pleasure, this event.  The music is gerr-ate of course, but it's the ancillary things that really make this festival stand out.  The people one meets are just lovely - right-thinking, friendly and driven by the desire to be and to do good.  I always leave the place with my faith in humanity restored.  That's probably more important to me than the quality of the music available.

Having said that, the music is always brilliant.  It's so good in fact that I always come away with feelings of colossal inadequacy.  There is so much raw talent in folk.  Even the foothills of success are awash with young players who just leave you for dead.  It really takes something to make a mark in this world.  It's a testament to the love and passion that these players possess for the form that they continue to play folk when any one of them could wander into a pop band and realise a professional career with no problems at all.

My hat is off.