High pressure international jet-set what-have-you

I'm usually pretty good at keeping regular vides in my appointments diary.  I don't like being on the meter constantly, especially when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself.  Other people appear to love being ordered hither and yon in the name of leisure, but they, madam, are perverts.  I'll have no truck with it.

Having said all that, which I just have (see above), events do conspire from time to time to cause me to spread my considerable talents and charisma a bit thin.  The next week is a case in point.  I'm already up against it at work.  This our busy period.  On Friday I have to leave the office early in order to dash to Heathrow for a flight to Berlin.  We're in Germany until Monday.  Back to work Tuesday.  On Wednesday I witnessing the marriage of a friend.  Back to work Thursday, a day full of back-to-back meetings.  Work again on Friday.  An archery lesson on Saturday and we're collecting some hops as part of a local brewery scheme on Sunday morning.  Still, it's all good fun I suppose.

I might have mentioned before now that I've given up beer for Lent.  I will have to forgo this fast for the duration of our stay in Berlin though.  Germany produces some splendid beers, not the fizzy lager piss with which you're no doubt familiar, but proper beer.  I was particularly taken on our last trip there with a kraut jollop called "winterboch".  It's a dark, flavoursome ale they produce for the cold winter months.  It's super.  I cannot and will not not drink it.  Nein, nein und thrice nein.

What was I up to then?

Unusually for a Sunday, I went to bed early last night.  The missus and I met her parents, who were in town for the weekend, and had a slap-up lunch.  A couple of glasses of wine and two lovely courses left us both feeling replete and soporific.

We managed to stay awake long enough to pop out in the early evening for an additional brace of sherries, and that was that.  Come 10.30, I was flagging like an RAF ground crew member during the Berlin airlift, so I ran upstairs and  leapt into bed at speed, both feet off the ground, like Roy Keane in his pomp.  I was asleep in a heatbeat.  It was with some surprise and disappointment then that I awoke this mornng feeling shattered.  I had slept solidly for eight hours, which I consider to be my side of the bargain kept.  So what happened to the quality of my sleep during those many small hours?  I must have been thrashing about the whole time, like a giant confused fish.  Perhaps it was the mushy peas that set me off?

Today is a trying day, work-wise, which has added to my woes.  I'm alone in the office and there's loads of exacting, mission-critical work to wade through.  The upshot is a tired, gittery self.  I'm not at my best when T&G, not even close.  Expansive and loquacious is my metier.  And that is thin on the ground this afternoon.

Star In A Reasonably-Priced Siatica

My sister rang me the other evening.  She wanted my sage advice about sciatica, specifically how to cure it.  The reason she rang me is because I have a bit of previous when it comes to this oh-so debilitating condition.  The funny (peculiar, not ha-ha, definitely not ha-ha) thing is I too was suffering from the same malady.  It took me about twenty minutes to hobble to the phone because of it.

I first succumbed to it several years ago after hurting my back.  It manifested itself by freezing up my right calf (it was like a lump of granite) and sending shooting pains down my right hamstring - well, one of them anyway.  It sounds quite minor, jotted down like that, but, believe me, it's anything but.  It's excruciating when it's acute, and extremely dispiriting.

After this episode, it came back to haunt me periodically - never, thankfully, as severely as the first time.  And being something of an autodidact, I set about reading all the available literature on alleviating the symptoms.  Some of it (a lot of it actually) is twaddle.  But I have managed to cherry pick some gems over the years, and it from this arsenal that I was able to help out the sib.

World Book Day Of The Jackel

I suspect this will go down badly, but chocks away nonetheless.  It's World Book Day.  What's not to like?  I, myself, am something of a bibliophile.  I read constantly, and I do tend to fetishize books I esteem highly.  I have a large collection of the buggers at home to illustrate this fact.  Too many, as it happens.  When in a new town, I always seek out the nearest bookshop, and there I can spend hours, simply flicking through the tomes.  I, I think it fair to say, like books more than the man on the Clapham omnibus.  Unless that man is Melvyn Bragg.  But I take issue with WBD.  Why?  Because it's a classic example of avoidance behaviour.

Parents these days, with their usual manic overreactions to events such as this, go to enormous lengths to dress their wretched progeny up as characters from their favourite books.  But how much reading are these same children doing, both at school and extra-murally?  Surely, that should be purpose of WBD.

I dare say parents and woolly educationalists will point to a nebulous connection that's been teased out by some PhD. student somewhere, suggesting that dressing up as Stig of the Dump increases a child's aggregate career earnings by 25% or something.  Actually, there probably is a correlation, but that's only because the whole thing is so class-driven.  Middle class parents in this country go passive-aggressive bourgeois ape-shit for this stuff.  You can tell they're absolutely frantic that their child will simply not be dressed like the rest of the herd, and also that his or her costume will bespeak an elegant, effortless and forensic intelligence.  This is easier said than done of course, which is why they all have minor stress-induced strokes trying to select and then construct a suitable outfit.

It's at times like this that I wish I had children.  I'd dress the offspring as one of Henry Chinaski's slattern pissed-up girlfriends from "Women" or "Post Office".  This would present the teachers with a problem because Bukowski is a serious artist, so it's a valid choice.  And yet there's a 10-year-old boy in the class who looks like a drunk Bette Middler tribute act.  What would the school do?  Send the child home?  I'd make mince of them in the local paper if they did.  No, he's staying.  What do you mean you haven't read it?  Spent too long dressing-up instead?  I thought as much.

Arrows by any other name

I had a rush of bee to the aitch yesterday and booked myself onto an archery taster course.  I've always hankered after trying archery.  It's one of those things that I ear-marked out years ago as potentially fun and therefore something to do later in life (whenever that is), along with yachting, fencing, bodybuilding, mescaline and sake.  As is par for the course with me, having made the commitment to do it was sufficient for my unconscious brain to assume we had in fact done it in reality.  I realised a couple of weeks ago that we hadn't; hence, the decisive action.

I don't know why I vacillate like this.  It's ridiculous really.  I suspect it's to do with my inability to appreciate that time changes one and one's material circs.  I always bank on things staying just the way they have been for the last 20 years or so, i.e. my being realitively wealthy and relatively fit.  That's also why I struggle when I'm injured.  My mind just cannot compute that it's a symptom of aging.  But I am aging.  I'm also probably at the high water mark of my career earnings.  That's a depressing thought.  So, I need to act in this charmed window, and act I have.  I'm not too sure about the mescaline now.  I can't do hangovers any more.

Nostalgia

I hooked up with an old friend on Facebook earlier today.  So far - so ordinaire.  I say friend, but in reality we were part of a large cohort of then recent graduates who worked for the University of London Exam Board for a time in  the mid-nineties.  

It was a joyous time for all concerned.  The weather was good; the pop music was good.  And all of us knew we had a long and carefree summer ahead of us, our last in all probability, before the po-faced and sober realities of middle-class adult life kicked-in.  Michelle, my new FB pal, was part of that golden generation, as was I.  We weren't particularly close, but she was a really kind and good companion to have during those weeks and months - funny, generous and wise.  So when I saw her name on a mutual friend's FB timeline, I had a Proustian swell of happy memories.  I spoke to her a few moments ago.  She lives in Exeter, like an grown up might.

I really dislike nostalgia.  I gives me the yips.  I find it difficult to stop the flow of thought and images once I've given in to a bout of mental-over-shoulder-peerage.  It's like my brain is struggling to process all the data I've asked it to dredge up at once, like Excel having a spazz when you exceed a million rows or something.

Gorge North

Well, we had a simply splendid weekend in YERK-shuh.  The weather was pretty good too - better than forecast anyways.  We rolled in to York Station at 9.30 Friday evening, immediately stopped at the pub in the station, which is lovely, and had a sharpener.  Thence to the hotel.  Bags dumped, and off to a pub nearby that we hadn't previously patronised.  It, like every pub I've ever sought shelter in in York, was super - cosy and with a great range of ales.

On Saturday, we caught the trans-Pennine train to Hebden Bridge.  HB is to lesbians what Brighton is to gay men.  It a glorious town, nestling in the cleavage of The Calder Valley.  We mooched around there for a few hours, browsing and eating cake.  Lovely.

Saturday night back in York was greatest hits tour of pubs we knew and some virgin ones that Mrs O had specced-out.  We ended the night with a splendid curry.  The more I see of Yorkshire, the more I like it.  Like Steve Bushemi.