Parity

Feb 16 2010

I was at parity the day this word came up. I was level pegging between blogs and the number of days for which I was supposed to have written. Now I'm not. Bugger.

Nor is there really any sensible connection* between the speed people swim and which lane they choose at swimming pools. I went for a swim tonight at the centre near my work, plopped myself into the middle lane (there are two) since I am not a slow coach but clearly couldn't qualify as fast. I'm a brisk average.

Unfortunately, the lane was clogged with the “decrepit average”, or the sloth that dare not speak its name. After a few attempts to work up any head of steam, I stopped in the shallow end and reviewed my options. Both middle lanes seemed just as densely populated with the human equivalent of an oil slick, floating pointlessly about on the surface of the water and doing nothing but harm. I'm pretty sure I saw one fat bloke strangling a cormorant.

The fast lane had human dolphins leaping out of the water in a shower of diamond droplets, grinning broadly and blowing air from the tops of their heads (inflating their swimming caps like novelty balloons). If I tried to swim with them they'd butt me in the gills until I bled.

The solution lay in pride. Not clinging to it. Abandoning it. There was one person in the slow lane. One. And he was probably outstripping most of his “middling” comrades. So I joined him and had a nice swim for 20 minutes before some old ladies got in and started impersonating polar bears swimming between ice floes.

Pride only hurts. It never helps. Guys – you're slow. Embrace it. And if you don't like it, fucking swim faster.

* or between the title word and the contents of this article. What the hell.

Breaking

Feb 15 2010

I nearly reached breaking point today.

This isn't another miserable blog, I promise. But I am struggling to work out why anyone would want to put the air-conditioning on full blast in February other than out of pure sadism.

Had a training course today. I have a complex relationship with training courses, but I can be quite fond of them. This one was a bit painful to start off with because I was massively hung over, and also because the first half of it involved being talked at for about two hours. But mostly because one of the two tutors had decided that February just isn't cold enough all by itself, and was determined to enlist the help of technology in freezing my nuts off.

I suppose it didn't help that one of my colleagues was sitting right under the air-con and was happily wearing a t-shirt for the whole two hours without turning even slightly blue. This may have led the tutor to decide that my increasing histrionics – as I sat huddled, shivering and rocking like Arthur Fowler - were nothing but attention seeking. I had to return from a coffee break wearing a full overcoat, gloves and a pair of borrowed earmuff shapes like the ears of squirrels before she got the hint, and turned the thing up by about two degrees.

Finally escaping this course, I returned to the office to find the man who sits behind me has opened the windows. I know today's 6 degrees was comparatively balmy, but what kind of constitution do you need to have to want a 6 degree breeze blowing up your trouser legs? What does he do in January? Poor ice cubes down his pants? The only rational explanation is that he is a white wine runner, carrying secret stashes of sauvignon blanc around London to nefarious but rich wine connoisseurs. Their enemies patrol London armed to the teeth with bottles of Tesco's own-brand rioja, so the only safe way to keep the wine safe is to keep in in his socks. BUT! He has to deliver it ready to drink, so he must carefully maintain a body temperature of only 5 degrees at all times, which unfortunately means sitting for most of the day in a specially imported bath full of snow, and opening the FUCKING WINDOW and freezing my spleen solid. Bastard.

I've probably offended someone there. And I think I've just driven someone off facebook chat. I might be being over-sensitive, especially since I was being nice. I'd just been pointing out that a friend of mine popped on to chat to say “hello”, and then immediately left, saying that CSI was starting.

Now, I realise that I can't compete until someone starts making spin off versions of me named after major cities. Speedy Miami, perhaps. Or, more likely, Speedy Basingstoke. Now gratifyingly, her response to this was “ha ha ha”

She doesn't say LOL. Now this is a fundamentally brilliant thing, since I'm sorry to say that there is nothing in the entire universe (even saying “in actual fact”) that is more annoying than saying LOL. If I was saved from a certain blazing death by a gorgeous female firefighter who carried me through the licking flames and set me on my feet outside the building as it collapsed in on itself like a woman in a wedding dress sitting on a beanbag., my gratitude would know no bounds until a man from St John's Ambulance said something witty and she answered “LOL”. At which point I would throw myself back into the flames.

So I might have written - as a compliment to her unLOLness - “I find it amazing that otherwise pleasant, intelligent people say LOL, not realising that they might as well just wearing T-shirt saying “I raped your cat””.

I'd hit enter before I remembered how much of a cat lover my friend was. Seconds later the green dot had turned grey.

I will keep breaking things.

Reactivated

Feb 14 2010

All that has been reactivated is my anger, which is probably not the emotion that it's most constructive for me to hang on to. But I do worry. I just nearly started a fight.

Well, I say “started” - at the time I was of the view that driving round the corner at high speed in front of me without indicating because you were too busy talking on your mobile is pretty much starting the fight, but I suppose some people would say shouting abuse and gesticulating at the driver as he scoots past your face is not the most constructive response.

He then screeched to a halt, slammed (what appeared to be his mum's) car into reverse to come back round the corner again and demand to know what my problem was. At this point I realised that he had a friend in the passenger seat. A sensible man (especially one as puny as me) would have backed down.

Though I'm not sure if that's true. I think if I had shown any weakness they would probably have got out of the car. Instead I took a moment to shout at them like a red-eyed nutjob some more before I walked away.

Thus cunningly presenting the image of a ranting lunatic who was probably off his face on mind altering drugs, I was able to encourage them to drive away. The stupid hat, ragged trousers and tramp-beard probably all helped here.

I should probably not do that again, though. Time to get this out of my system and reactivate peace and, like, love. Y'know.

But do not pick a fight with a lonely man on Valentine's Day. You will lose.

Prodigality

13 Feb 2010

Sometimes it's very hard to match one's mood to the random word given. Valentine's is approaching fast, and oddly I'm not really think that much about the wider world, and am being very introspective (and taking a nice long soak in self-pity). In particular I am reminding myself that I will be alone on the day purely because of my own choices and actions. This will not make me feel any better. Did I have something that I should have invested more in? Was I as profligate and prodigal as City banker? Who will bail me out of this emotional recession?

Yes, we get ourselves into these things half the time. And in the end you just have to stick your hand up and say “I have fucked up on 37 different levels – it is no one's fault but mine, deal with it”. This is an unfashionable point of view.

I suppose if you're happy for any stretch of time, it is very easy to forget what it's like when you are not. A bit like those MPs who thought it would be a good use of public funds to sort out their duck houses and moats; they had no idea why anyone would object. So maybe I'll promise myself that – when, inevitably, I'm less cheesed off than I am now – that I invest and save and don't piss happiness away.

That would be a bonus.

Muckraking

12 Feb 2010

I probably need to add a disclaimer every now and again pointing out the general principle of writing a piece every day based on random word generation. Otherwise people will rightly question why I exist. I know I do.

I’ve been trying to put this random word off. I needed to be in a proper angry mood, but instead I’ve just been depressed, followed by chipper (thanks to a nice evening – don’t worry it soon wore off). Cos there’s no point talking about the word “muckraking” without at the very least being a teensy bit annoyed. You can’t just be sad about it.

“I saw some muckraking today” (sigh)

Doesn’t work.

But I can probably get a bit worked up if I consider how muckraking cheapens life and democracy and important things like suet pudding. Not the sort of raking that leads to the exposure of that fiend Vernon Kay who finds himself caught up in shock headlines like:

“Man in ‘attracted to pretty model with huge breasts’ shock”.

Tess Daly will maybe take some reassurance in that the page 3 girl in question looks a bit like her. Except, y’know, younger. With a flatter stomach and no stretch marks.

Hmm. OK, maybe not.

Right. Back to the point.

Which was?

As we know, the chances of it turning out that Vernon Kay did no such thing and that the story only works because all three points of this allegedly sordid triangle happen to sound suspiciously northern are quite high. Back in October a documentary team of celebrity-news hoaxers blew their own cover to reveal that they had been feeding hilariously stupid stories to the tabloid press for months. Given that their stories were normally based on the flimsiest original premise and had then been distorted and twisted to the point of ludicrousness, it was faintly alarming how many times their stories had not only been picked up, but further embellished by the newspapers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/14/starsuckers-tabloids-hoax-celebrities

Stories about Amy Winehouse’s hair don’t have any wider significance than making stupid people laugh at Amy Winehouse (she’ll live) and less stupid people laugh at shit newspapers (sadly so will they). But we’ve got an election coming up, and people have already started to make shit up. It's difficult enough to challenge the idea that the UK has the worst debt in the G7 (nowhere near), but at least that's economics – famously difficult for everyone to get their heads around, particularly bankers, it seems. Now we seem to have the Conservative Party – who most of the time don't seem to have any policies and arguing that there's no particular reason for them to have any yet – attacking Labour for a policy that has not only been yet to be implemented, there's no evidence that it was ever going to be.

Fortunately those wonderful people at mydavidcameron.com have wasted no time in using the Tories abject failure to get the tone of their poster campaigns right to undermine the campaign, but where are we headed when a party that refuses to tell us their own policies are attacking the other parties by making shit up? It's not like there are serious issues to debate in the real world. Is this election taking place in Narnia?

At the least the objects of Vernon's attention were real.

Emulsify

11 Feb 2010

You're kidding? My word of the day is emulsify?

Arse-dolphins.

To digress. There are few innocuous words in the language that cannot be turned into a mild epithet by adding the word “arse” in front of them. Arse-biscuits, arse-badgers, arse-noodles, arse-carpets, arse-biros etc. You get the general idea.

Similarly there are quite a few words that suddenly become oddly, though indefinably, disturbing when you prefix them with “man” (I think it comes from terms like “man fat”), but we'll gloss over them and try and get back to spreading our man-emulsion.

See?

Emulsification seems to involve binding together oil and water, something which I remember from physics is supposed to be very difficult. If this is true then emulsify is much more interesting word than I thought, since it describes a minor miracle of existence. It's just never really going to get the attention of splitting the atom or cloning, because none of those things are used to make a type of domestic paint that frequently comes in magnolia.

Unless someone knows of a nuclear weapon in “hint of forest glade”, in which case I take it all back.

But if oil and water can be bound together, perhaps there's hope for a lot of things. We could emulsify the Conservatives with some coherent policies, the England cricket team with a world class fast bowler, Michael McIntyre with some jokes and me with some sort of optimism about the future.

But possibly that is pushing it too far, and we should stick to a nice, non-drip finish.

S.

Ochre

10 Feb 2010

Secret Santa has a lot to answer for. Or he would of he was real. In fact there’s a redundant clause there somewhere – how much more secret can you get than being a fictitious being?

I shouldn’t complain. But since when has that stopped me? Last year the fictitious being let the side down completely. He (or possibly she) bought me a Brian Johnston book, presumably on the very hard to work out assumption that “I like cricket”. Well yes, I do. Mostly playing it, often watching it, very, very seldom reading about it. Especially as this particular book wasn’t even about cricket but was about his experiences as a radio stand in for Thora Hird. Some people who didn’t know me that well gave me some very odd looks as Johnners’ face emerged slowly from the wrapping paper. Does he have the full DVD collection of all 362 years of “Last of the Summer Wine”? They pondered.

This year (or last year, strictly speaking) things looked up. Mr S Santa (or Secret to his friends) noted I like to travel. Or possibly noted that I like to travel constantly to exactly the same place every single time. So very likely as a subtle hint, I was given the “1000 Place To See Before You Die”* desk calendar, which does very well to fit 1000 places into 365 days. This is great, since it has some great photos and a little bit of information about each place, some of it useful, some of it absolutely not. Unfortunately, a colleague has taken to having an information sharing protocol with his “This Day in History” desktop calendar, and insists on swapping ‘interesting’ stories about the invention of the steam hedgehog with me showing him a picture of Guadeloupe.

But sometimes the mindlessness of the writing makes my calendar reach new heights of brilliance. Today’s was the spectacular ochre-coloured minaret of Muscat, which included this phrase:

“Although the new blends with the old, the city has resisted the modernism of sky-scrapers and rush hours”

I’m imagining the planning meeting right now.

“We’ve had this planning application.”

“What’s it for? A dome?”

“No, that was last week?”

“How about a minaret?”

“Not that either. We already have 37.”

“It’s not a skyscraper, is it? I hate those. Unless it’s a really big minaret.”

“No, not a skyscraper.”

“Then what are we talking about here?”

“A rush hour.”

“How do they work then?”

“Well, apparently it’s all in this guide book “Form Rush Hours with Love””.

“Well. I don’t like the sound of it. Just because everyone else has one doesn’t mean we must. Let’s ban rush hours for ever!”

If only Ken Livingstone had thought of it he’d never have needed the Congestion Charge.

S.

* I’d be much more intrigued by the sequel…