Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3)

Call it Winter Blues. Call it SAD. Call it vitamin D deficiency. Call it what you like (being “misog” in Blake household parlance) but I’ve been feeling down and out for the last week or so. I’m not the only one. I know my good lady wife is too.

Suddenly it all seems... not exactly too much, just not enough. We’re both sick of chasing our own coat-tails financially. There can be nothing more galling than turning up to a job (that makes you sigh) every day to earn not enough money to cover all the bills. It is truly demoralizing.

And we feel tired. Deep winter tired. I suspect we should be hibernating. Curled up in a warm cave stocked with hot chocolate, sausages & mash and a host of other tasty comfort foods. My DVD collection wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

The winter is just not a great place to be.

But I’m trying to be cheerful.

Well, if not exactly cheerful (this is me we’re talking about after all) then I’m at least I’m trying to count my blessings.

I have a wonderful wife. Too wonderful rumbustious boys. A roof over our heads. Karen and I have both completed an accountancy course (ACCA) and a degree course respectively over the last few months – Karen is merely awaiting her final results (out in Feb). I’ve nearly completed the first rewrite of my novel – next step will be sourcing an agent. It’s very early days yet but we calculated than we’ve paid off about £9k from our mortgage.

So if we’re not rich in money we’re at least rich in assets and home comforts. And we’re not going to starve.

But a bit of elasticity would be nice. A holiday would be nice (I’m not even thinking “abroad”). To be able to buy a luxury item once in a while without feeling guilty would be nice.

*Sigh*

Although I’m not sure if it will help we have a financial advisor coming round to visit us this evening. Somebody independent and professional to take on board our haemorrhaging fortunes to see if they can apply a tourniquet. If nothing else she might be able to get us a better deal on our mortgage, I suppose. I’m not holding my breath though. I can’t help suspecting it will merely result in a tightening up of moolah elsewhere. Swings and roundabouts as they say.

Sorry. I’m meant to be being positive. Reasons to be cheerful and all that.

Ahem. At least she’s not a bailiff.

There, is that close enough?

2nd Class Stamp

Before the commencement of work-based employment activities this morning I nipped across the road to the post office to collect a parcel that hadn’t been delivered yesterday (how I love receiving those big red “You Were Out” cards with the big offended tick placed in the “returned to post office” tick-box... how dare I not be at home when the postman calls).

A usual there was a small queue ahead of me and the guy at the front was plainly banging his head against a brick wall in his endeavours to get his parcel located.

“Can you not trace it from the barcode?” He asked. He had this nugget of information on a scrappy piece of paper that he kept waving at the white whiskered postal worker behind the counter.

Mr Postal Worker – who, if I’m honest looked like he’d been rejected from Last Of The Summer Wine for being too wintry and vinegary – scanned a glazed eyeball over the paper, grimaced like he was beholding a snot encrusted handkerchief and grumbled, ”No. It’s an international barcode.” He then harrumphed and sighed like he was explaining the concept of cause and effect to a brain damaged monkey.

Monkey fall from tree. Monkey hurt head.

“Yes but...” said the customer (doing a sterling job to keep his temper), “It’s been sent recorded delivery. You must be able to trace it surely?”

“I know it’s recorded.” Said Mr Evil Postal Worker and shifted on his feet like a bull about to charge down an injured matador. “But it’s an international bar code, isn’t it?” Cue another sigh and the stomping of hooves.

Meanwhile my queue colleagues and I were now beginning to shift uncomfortably on our feet. As I waited (silently praying that the man’s parcel could be located without bloodshed) my eyes couldn’t help noticing all the “abusive customers” warning posters that were plastered all over the small parcel collection office. You know the kind: the post office reserves the right to refuse to serve customers who are abusive and threatening...

A copy of this poster was glued to the wall, to the serving hatch window and to the counter top upon which the customer had thrown his piece of scrappy paper.

It made me wonder if perhaps the parcel collection office had a lot of trouble with disgruntled customers. Hmm.

In the end the customer had to ask outright that someone be telephoned to see if the barcode could be traced somehow so the location of his lost parcel could be identified.

At this point the postal worker flung down his mug of tea, flung up the telephone and proceeded to have a grumpy telephone conversation with the postal worker on the other end of the line. This involved the barcode number being repeated out loud, a little louder each time, in a tone of voice that suggested that the person on the other end of the telephone was... yes, you guessed it, a brain damaged monkey with a defective hearing aid.

MONKEY FALL FROM TREE! MONKEY HURT HEAD!

The telephone was then flung down so hard it bounced out of the cradle and onto the floor. The bull was not happy and stomped off to find customer no.2’s parcel.

The telephone rang. He belligerently ignored it until his business with customer no.2 was complete and then once again wrenched the telephone up to his white whiskered ear. He listened silently. Flung the telephone back down and told the exasperated customer with the scrappy piece of paper that his parcel was at “Jubilee Station” and “hasn’t yet moved from there”.

Where was Jubilee Station? A shrug of the shoulders answered that query followed by a gleeful “we can’t do anything about it until it reaches here (here being Leamington Post Office). Your best bet is to speak to someone at Jubilee Station.”

And that was it. Customer interaction complete. Scrappy paper man left shaking his head and muttering sundry imprecations to the deaf, brain damaged gods of the Great British postal service.

It was then my turn. I looked at the “abusive customers” poster on the counter and honestly thought about it for a moment but, in the end, decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Besides which, although Mr Grumpy Postal Worker had taken my red card my parcel was brought to me a by a nice female postal worker with an incredibly long, thin ponytail, a big smile on her face and a disposition to talk pleasantly about the weather.

Despite the wind, rain and grey clouds outside she was like a breath of fresh air.

The Miser’s Touch

I’m at odds with the world today. I don’t know what it or I have done but we’re not on good terms. The atmosphere is decidedly chilled.

I’m not sure who started it and I’m not sure when it will end but we’re heading for certain bloodshed.

It seemed to start when I got up this morning. The world was deliberately obtuse and uncooperative. Things wouldn’t open properly. Things would fall out of my hands. Things would spill. Other things, evil cupboardy things, would mysteriously open at malicious angles and crack me passing blows on the head.

I cottoned on pretty quickly. Let’s face it when a campaign is being waged against you it doesn’t take long for the signs to become self-evident.

For my part I have responded with rapid fire door slamming, aerial bombardments of stomping and carpet bombing with high explosive expletives. I have an everlasting supply of the latter so if this is to be a war of attrition, world, you’d better be in for the long haul.

Please don’t worry about me, people, I can hold my own. But it is, I admit, a lonely stance. My biggest enemy is my own paranoia. I am eyeing old friends with suspicion. Have they been converted? Brainwashed? Programmed against me? Sleeper agents waiting for the trigger word...? My computer, my mobile phone, even my MP3 player – their shiny buttons look like teeth this morning. I’m not sure I can trust their electrical impulses to remain loyal. The world is urging them to foul up. To lose or corrupt data. To crash.

Even the toaster is looking at me belligerently.

What have I done? What have I done?

I’ve gone over it all in my head but I can’t think of a damned thing. Was I too rough with the oven? Has the world taken the size of my carbon footprint personally?

Why are you picking on me and not Jeremy Clarkson?

The world is so unfair!

Well, enough is enough!

If it’s a fight you want, world, you can have one! Put ‘em up or shut up!

Hubris

“The 13th has never been unlucky for me. Never. I’ve never had a bad experience with the number 13. Not once. Not ever. I’m immune to it.”

Even as I typed those words last Friday I was reminded of a poem by Roger McGough (can’t remember which one, sorry) where he talks about being afraid to tempt fate in case fate, tempted, one day weakens... but I shrugged it off anyway with a cavalier laugh and got on with cocking my snook at the universe. You can’t touch me, I thought to myself. I’m immune. Y’hear me? Immune! You can’t touch me with your so-called Friday 13th bad vibe!

Somewhere in the very centre of the universe an omniscient mind heard me and had an inclination...

And by the end of the day Friday 13th was going all out to prove just how unlucky it could be.

All was fine until it came time to head home. Of course this is the moment where you desperately want things to run smoothly. You can practically smell your evening meal being cooked. You can almost feel the warm cosy embrace of your sofa wrapping itself around you and calling you to submit to end-of-week TV-soothed slumber.

You just want to get out of the office and escape while the going is good.

Last Friday, the 13th, the going was decidedly not good. As I was literally on my way to the exit doors I was called to the men’s public toilets. A cubicle was occupied and the patron was refusing to respond to all calls to vacate the premises. I had no choice but to force the door. Inside I found a young male slumped over, completely unconscious, his trousers around his ankles and his head face down on his knobbly knees. He absolutely could not be roused by anything we did. It didn’t look good. One of my colleagues recommended we try smelling salts until I pointed out that, given the ever present stench of the urinals, if he wasn’t compos mentis now with the ambient bio-fall-out irradiating his nasal hairs a tiny little smell in a bottle was hardly going to kick-start his cerebral cortex.

So we called an ambulance. And therein the farce truly began. The operator took all the details and then asked some bizarre questions along the line of did the injured party have a history of heart trouble, etc. Now bearing in mind I had already explained that the injured party was an unknown member of the public I found this question rather ridiculous. I think the operator picked this up from the mocking pause that I dropped into our conversation. “I still have to ask, sir” he told me smartly.

Did he? Did he really still have to ask when he already knew I had never met the person in the toilets before in my entire life? I realize that most telephone operators work from a script these days but surely there is room for commonsense? Room for people to think independently and realize that sometimes portions of the script can just be dispensed with?

Plainly not.

Anyway. Despite all this guff the ambulance was apparently on its way.

Great, I thought. Blue and twos flashing it’ll be here in 5 minutes and I can get away home.

Not so. 20 minutes later me and my loyal colleagues were still waiting. 25 minutes later we saw a paramedic’s car parked on the other side of the road. Just sitting there. Waiting. What the hell was he doing? Mr Knobbly Knees in the toilet could be choking on his own sputum by now! Why wasn’t he attending to the 999 call I had made? We approached and asked, amazingly politely, if he had indeed come to answer our summons for help. Yes he had, he said, but he couldn’t do anything until his “back-up” had arrived.

Oh. Back-up. A SWAT team was on its way then. Or possibly armed specialist forces. Great.

We had no choice but to back to the building and continue our wait growing more and more sour with each passing minute. We appreciated, loudly, that in today’s world dealing with possible drunks or drug users can be extremely hazardous and a bit of support is probably a necessity but even so... this poor guy could be voiding his entire colon down the bog for all anyone was doing to help him.

And so the wait went on. And on. Made worse by a drunken gang of teens who suddenly appeared and decided to hang around outside the front of the building and empty their bladders over our railings. Charming. The evening was getting better and better.

Finally, 50 minutes after my initial 999 call an ambulance at last sirened into view. Hoo-bloody-ray. At last. Now with two green jacketed body guards flanking him the paramedic boldly stepped into the breach. As I opened the door to let them in one of the teens mumbled something along the lines of: “oh, hey mate, we think one of our friends might be in your toilets...” Cue Beavis and Butthead laughter.

Oh how typical. I managed to marshal my sarcasm (i.e. utilize it) and told him that yes, that was why we had called an ambulance as his so called mate was out stone cold.

“Oh,” said the dazed teen, “is it OK if I come in and watch?”

Come in and watch. Not, how is he? Not, is he OK? Just: can I come in and watch.

I shut the door on him and locked him outside.

15 minutes later the paramedics had got Mr Knobbly Knees up and mobile. He looked as dazed as his erstwhile mates outside. Confused and a little embarrassed too. But I daresay by Saturday he was rather proud of his exploits and was boasting of his advanced state of inebriation to all those of his friends who were not too inebriated themselves to tell him to shut up and go and flush his stupid head down the toilet.

Their job done the ambulance crew melted away into the night, reholstering their standard SWAT team issue revolvers. Don’t thank us; it’s just what we do. Yippee-ki-yay.

Whatever. My colleagues and I headed outside too and wiped the dust from our shoes and headed our separate ways.

I finally arrived home over an hour late, tired, soaked with rain and in a foul mood.

Friday 13th? I shall never mock you again. And that’s a bona fide promise. I have seen the power of the Universe and it scares me.


Postscript: Somewhere at the centre of the universe an omniscient mind wonders perhaps if it has gone too far and decides to offer a little consolation... a small token of recompense.

On my way out to get some milk on Sunday morning I noticed that among the assorted chip wrapping and drinks cartons that the wind constantly deposits on our front lawn a slightly damp but otherwise perfectly intact £5 note.

For moi?

Why, thank you Universe. Apology gratefully accepted.

Q: Where Do All The Little Toasters Go?

A: To Silicon Heaven.

My computer died over the weekend.

The secondary hard drive experienced some kind of coronary during a bout of game playing (that’ll teach me!) and went into catastrophic mechanical failure. In the process it managed to blow the network card, take out my museum-piece floppy disc drive and mangle parts of Windows and Internet Explorer.

Quite how all these components were ever interconnected is beyond me but my computer’s internal biology is now completely irrelevant.

My desktop buddy has been rendered a virtual vegetable as a consequence.

Internet access is impossible. No network card means no modem. Although the router is still working and I can gain access via my wife’s laptop downstairs I, nevertheless, feel cut off and isolated from the virtual world of the World Wide Web.

I can no longer surf as and when I see fit but must (quite rightly) await permission and book a time slot on the laptop.

The loss of the hard drive also means I have lost an immense amount of data and media that I had amassed over the last 10 years. Although I have always been pretty good about backing things up you know what it’s like... You get complacent. You get lazy. You put off until tomorrow what really should have been done today. I’ve undoubtedly lost stuff. Thankfully nothing major or essential but the loss of it still hurts.

The loss of my little electric friend has left me more than a little bereft.

I’d had my computer for 10 years and had built it myself to my own spec. It went from a single hard drive beastie to a high-end multi hard drive, disk burning, internet munching monster in the space of 2 years under my careful nurturing and tutelage.

But then I got married, had kids and, I admit, the computer got neglected. The upgrades petered out. I made do with what I had rather than buying shiny new add-ons. As a consequence, it began to slow. It began to struggle with newer programs. The processor speed began to under clock. It couldn’t keep up with what I wanted it to do let alone what the software was asking of it.

I guess that was the beginning of the end really. The day of reckoning was bound to come. And now it has finally arrived and my finger is poised over the switch to the life support machine. I am merely waiting until I have finished harvested its software organs and its data banks for any retrievables.

Call me heartless but I am already in the market for a new computer. A replacement. My wife, God bless her, has not only given me permission but has insisted that I treat myself. An upgrade is long, long overdue. Possibly my wife merely wants her laptop back.

So I will be going to the local computer shop this week to spec myself up a new high end, quad core machine that should be able to levitate off my desk with the sheer speed of its fans.

I feel strangely ambivalent. It’s money I’d rather not be spending right now but I cannot deny that the acquisition of a new computer is very exciting.

The only thing that truly gets me down is the days of work involved getting it all running properly... connecting the modem and router and the other peripheries... getting email and internet access re-established.... getting the software and drivers installed... ‘cos none of this ever runs smoothly. Plus I will have a brand new operating system to contend with: the much vaunted Windows 7 which, yes, I have heard good things about but I would still welcome other people’s opinions on it.

In the meantime I am building a funeral pyre for my poor crippled friend. His mask has fallen off and I have at last seen the face of Darth Vader. The Force has left him. The electronic wheezing is just getting on my wick.

It’s time for him to burn.

P.S. Another milestone. This is my 500th post! Thank you all for reading!

General Hospital & Major Cock-up

I have bored memories as a young child of having to sit through General Hospital because my mother used to enjoy watching it. That and Crown Court were the bane of the afternoons in my early years. I hated them but I do recall being faintly impressed with the dynamic efficiency of the hospital as represented on television. And that impression stayed with me for a long time. I long thought that hospitals were models of precision timing and perfectly coordinated activity.

It’s so disappointing as an adult to realize that like most things in the UK they actually run like two badly oiled bricks.

My granddad has been in the local hospital for most of the summer. He had a fall. Got a chest infection and a water infection. One thing after another and it seemed unlikely he’d ever come out again.

But coming out he is. This Tuesday after lunch apparently despite being unable to walk and therefore unable to care for himself.

He does however have all his marbles and has exercised his right to be sent home. Although some of the family are against this and would rather see him shoehorned into the nearest nursing home I’m of the opinion that as an adult he has a right to make his own decisions and die where he likes. And let’s be honest; that is what this is really about. Thankfully the law is with me on this. As he is fully compos mentis it is his decision and nobody else’s.

Getting him home however is proving to be a nightmare and this is where the badly oiled bricks come into it. I was plagued by phone calls all day Friday (which marred Tom’s 2nd birthday a little). First he was being sent home Wednesday. Then Monday. Then finally Tuesday after lunch. A care package was going to be put into place. Phew – very glad to hear that. 2 care workers 4 times a day will visit him. But before all this can occur he needs to have a hospital bed installed downstairs and a key safe put into the front porch so the care workers can gain access to him as and when.

Could I let them into the house to do all this?

Yes. No problem in theory.

Except that Saturday – the day when all this was supposed to occur – came and went with no sign of the bed arriving and Age Concern who handle the key safe side of things being shut all day.

It’s now Monday and I’m at work and cannot now just drop everything at an hour’s notice (the best the hospital can give me regarding the bed installation) to disappear for God knows how long while they shove a bed into my granddad’s dining room. And then possibly have to make a second journey to the house to meet with the Age Concern handyman (who also hasn’t got back to me yet) to get the key safe installed... because to coordinate the two together into one trip is, well, like trying to drive two badly oiled bricks up a hill.

It really feels like the hospital’s left arm doesn’t know what its right arm is doing... which isn’t what you want from a place whose primary function is to coordinate care...

*Sigh*

Thank God my granddad hasn’t been booked in for a tonsillectomy and an endoscopy... or there might be some very unusual organs in a pickle jar by now.

The Shit Sandwich

The shit sandwich is a day where nothing goes right.

Actually that isn’t enough for a shit sandwich. It’s a day when everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And all the things that can go wrong delight in their wrongness at exactly the same time.

You get a deluge of wrongness.

If you’re feeling ill and have slept badly the night before that’s even better because then the shit sandwich becomes a club shit sandwich.

Extra big filling. With mayo. Ooh great. Just for me? How kind.

The club shit sandwich also has vicious peppercorns in it that lodge painfully between your teeth and gums like explosive grit. You carry the taste around with you all day. So much so that everything else you experience on that day also begins to taste like shit. It’s like the shit sandwich is spreading or... even worse... breeding.

And shit sandwich begat shit sandwich and its name was 12th January 2009...

The last thing you want to be doing when chowing down on a shit sandwich is gnashing your teeth but alas the Biblical allusions demand that this is done. So you gnash. And gnash. And it’s shit.

And it’s all yours.

Because people will share your lunch, your politics, your office stapler, your darkest secrets but nobody – nobody at all – will willingly share a shit sandwich with you. If you’re packing a shit sandwich you’re eating alone. It’s got your name all over it. Just your name. Just you.

Yes sirree. Sure looks good but if you don’t mind I’ll just stick with this here ham and lettuce... mm mm!

And you can’t blame them. You can’t blame them at all. Everybody gets a shit sandwich every now and then. It’s the way of the world. When it’s your turn to get a shit sandwich it isn’t a cup that can be passed on to someone else.

It’s bequeathed to you by life itself. You’ve just got to grit your teeth and make your way through it. Neck it down right to the last few flaky crumbs of the crust and hope that tomorrow it finds itself in someone else’s lunch box.

Because a shit sandwich isn’t like lightning. There’s no law that says it can’t strike in the same place twice...

There is after all such a thing as a double-decker shit sandwich...

*Sigh*

Pray for me, people. Pray for me.

I’m really not sure I have the stomach for it.

Thursday’s Weather

I’ve had the glums for last few days – a combination of work dross, lack of sleep, a bad back and the interminably grey skies that have sat over the entire country like a giant pie crust.

What kind of filling are we, I wonder? Steak and kidney? Chicken and mushroom? Beef and onion?

I have no idea and as you can imagine pondering such questions has done little to improve my mood.

However, I can’t deny that there is something comforting about the featureless grey skies that have lidded my world for the last three days. Maybe I’m only saying that because I’m English and we English are secretly proud when our weather proves to be even more mundane and dreary than our European cousins think it.

For some reason it takes me back to my junior school days... huddling in the playground wearing a home knitted bobble hat and those annoying mittens tied together by a giant piece of string, watching the world go by over the other side of the school fence, thinking how lucky all the grown ups were to be able to go about their lives without having to be stuck at school all day...

I seem to recall that for a short period in 1980 there was a huge thunderstorm nearly every Thursday afternoon. Forked lightning and everything. It sticks in my mind only because the headmaster at the time – the evil Mr Enoch – informed us that Thursday was named after Thor, the Norse god of Thunder (hence Thor’s Day) and so the thunderstorms were all rather apt.

Sigh. I’m so glad I came out of school with something embedded in my skull (other than a thrown chalk rubber).

And now I sit at work, watching the world go by outside my window and think how lucky all the kids are to be attending school rather than sitting here behind my desk grubbing at interminable paperwork and trying to diffuse the latest plumbing disaster to hit the public toilets...

Is that amused hammering I can hear in the distance...?

No Bean Monday

Do you ever have one of those days when nothing major goes wrong, nothing especially disastrous occurs but nevertheless the day is a mega crap one?

I had one yesterday.

I didn’t get half an hour to myself at work – there was always someone around wanting something or needing my attention. Nothing particularly difficult or traumatic but I just didn’t need or want any of it.

I also found it difficult to be creative despite feeling in a creative mood. It took me nearly 90 minutes to “get into” my novel and then I only produced a measly 600 words. OK. It’s not going to be the end the world but it’s frustrating.

And then there was lunchtime.

Lunchtime summed up the entire day. I decided to treat myself by going to Mr Spud, the local purveyor of that fine English traditional meal, the hot potato. A nice hot spud with a chilli con carne filling was just what I needed to cheer me up and break the malaise of misery that had laid its broad hands upon my shoulders.

Only when I get to be served I get the dregs from the chilli pot. Instead of starting a new pot the seller merely tipped up the sparse remains of the old and slopped it all over my spud. The result was I was the only spud purchaser that day whose chilli contained not one single kidney bean.

And I love kidney beans. For me they are the highlights of a chilli.

Some days, it seems, it’s plainly not worth the effort of getting out of bed...