More on the train

Sat on the train this morning with, apparently, my ‘chav magnet’ turned on. Chavvy brother and sister sat next to me and in the space of a half hour journey managed to make two telephone calls, send a message to a stranger in the carriage by Bluetooth send a txt msg or two and re-create the Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin using glove puppets while filming it on their camera-phones.

Okay, so I made the last bit up but it would have been great if they did. It would also have been great if the girl could lose three stone and wash her hair, but that’s not going to happen either.

I was going to post my usual style of blog entry pissing and moaning about life in the carriage but hey, I could just cut and paste any previous entry, couldn’t I. So instead, I’m going to post something enthusiastic.

There’s a lot to be enthusiastic about. The air at the moment is moist but spring-like. Because of my guttering I now don’t care if it rains and I’m happy when it doesn’t - talk about the best of both worlds. My gardener reports that my ‘Winston Churchill’ daffodils are coming out and very cheerful they look too.

Other reasons to be cheerful - exiting the stately pile this morning a neighbour asked if I wanted a lift in her shiny red sports car. I declined and strolled to the train station and I’m glad to be offered a lift but even gladder I declined as I saw her rocket past me at about 900mph, a speed which would have resulted in my digging my fingernails into her dashboard and exclaiming something along the lines of ‘fucking hell! Slow down!’ while testing the scotchguarding on her seats.

One of the main reasons I’m cheerful is that my iPod is working again and this morning like some Marvel superhero I was able to raise my sonic shield as the Chavs babbled away. It was a double pleasure as not only was I cocooned in my wee world of noise, but I had the Stone Roses in my ears. I was nearly squirming with joy although restrained myself because that is the sort of behaviour that leads to stares, court appearances and ultimately being led from the back of a police van with a blanket over your head.

And now I’m going to stop myself before I start sounding like one of those chain e mails that have pictures of puppies and end with ‘send this to ten people you think need cheering up’. Thinking about it, there must somewhere be a picture of a puppy about to step on a land-mine that you send to ten people who have been too damn chirpy by half recently and need a good dose of misery.

Roll on Easter

Easter egg hunt? I’ll tell you what a f**king Easter Egg hunt is - it’s leaving the purchase of the egg for your wife to the last minute and finding that everywhere, and I mean everywhere, has sold out. They’ve sold out of the bargain ones, they’ve even sold out of the ones that come with a free Rolls Royce they’re so expensive.

Give the shop assistants their due, once they saw the panic in my eyes they didn’t actually laugh at me, although to be fair their obvious pity was a lot worse.

Compromised in the end with some decent chocs but it’s just not the same goddammit. Especially as I was the proud recipient of a TARDIS Easter egg to go with the darlek one I had consumed some weeks earlier. Obviously I hoped that the TARDIS box would indeed prove to be bigger on the inside than on the outside, but apparently not.

Rushing from shop to shop and coming up eggless aside, I suppose there have only ever been two major disappointments for me about Easter eggs.

The first is that they appear not to do them in ceramic mugs any more. When I was a kid they always did a ceramic mug with ‘Cadbury’ or similar written on it, with the egg sitting just so in the centre. This, I believe is an excellent way to collect not just calories but crockery too.

But the number 1 all time major disappointment must be the first time I picked up a Cadbury Cream Egg Easter egg and just knew from the weight that, unlike its smaller brethren, it was not full of fondant goo (or ‘yolk’ as it might also be known).

Can you imagine how sick eating one of those would make you?

Hummm - next year I might well do an experiment - I wonder how many regular cream eggs you’d have to empty of their contents to fill a regular Easter egg? Surely this is worth investing anything up to twenty quid to find out. You’d make more flogging the f**ker on eBay.

The more I think about it the better an idea it sounds. It would be the reversal of a childhood expectation that led to an adult disappointment. I mean, imagine if all such disappointments were so easily reversed. Okay, off the top of my head the only other major ones I can think of are that nobody has invented lightsabers or hoverboards yet, but at least the solution to this one is within my grasp!

Bags o' Bible

Christian on the train this morning. Even before she pulled her bible from her handbag I could tell. Nobody wears a coat quite like a Christian. It’s as if virtue can be preserved under layers of wool. What the hell is it with Christians and anoraks? Do they think they repel lions or sin or something.

Down she sat next to me, as I sipped at my first coffee of the day and read my book. Rummage rummage rummage in her handbag and out comes the bible and a pamphlet that, based on my experience of this sort of thing, discusses a certain passage from the good book and ‘explains’ it.

It’s like a very small book group.

Shouldn’t people be allowed to make up their own minds? At most all you need is a glossary, though if you’re too stupid to know what ‘begat’ means are you really going to be able to cope with complex issues such as the existence of an intangible supreme being? Maybe that’s where the pamphlet comes in. My issue with it is that it’s easy to influence these sorts of minds. If somebody is looking for answers and you write in your pamphlet ‘hitherto Joshaua came to the stalactites and said unto them, thou shall not call to thy ass on Tuesday means that all proper Christians should dress drably and pucker their mouths like a cats arse’ then the credulous are going to believe them.

Can you imagine what a book group would be like if it discussed the bible? Somebody would get as far as ‘I think ***** was gay’ and would probably end up being stoned so hard they could be mistaken for a rockery.

Coats and elbows, that was what she mostly appeared to be made up of. I have learned however not to complain of being elbowed in the ribs by the devout. Partly because they might use it as the start of a conversation about faith (i.e. my lack of) bust mostly because they may very well have god on their side.

Flicking the bean

Back at the gym this morning for the first time in a long time and the rowing machine was a bit of a fag as I had to reach over my pot belly in order to get to the ‘oars’. Huffed and puffed away while wondering if rowing machines in Greek gyms are arranged like ancient galleys with rowers stacked one on top of the other.

The two results of my visit was the only thing that got a real work out was my deodorant and that now, at lunch time, I’m hungry enough to eat fresh fox from the bonnet of a mad motorist. Luckily I have tuna and anchovy (pucker up people!) on white so know that at any moment I can fall on that like something from a wildlife documentary.

Read somewhere once that hunger is man’s natural state (mine, I have to admit, is slightly drunk/hungover/feeling a little queasy from eating all those crisps) and that not so many years ago man would walk about the plains famished, then knock a mastodon over the head and eat until he could eat no more, then lie there and wonder when somebody is going to hurry up and invent the dishwasher while licking mastodon fat off of his fingers.

Being hungry, it’s said, concentrates the mind. This, I think, is bollocks, as otherwise countries that experience famine would have been first to the moon. What it concentrates the mind on is your next meal.

However, if, like me, you decide to down a beaker of coffee as an appetite suppressant, you find that you are unable to concentrate on anything much. Indeed, it becomes a little difficult to pilot a train of thought all the way from the sidings to the station without the sort of derailment that generates enquiries and, more importantly, folk songs.

The trick is to time your lunch so that you don’t end up with your blood sugar in your boots, only having enough energy to be irritated at people.

Two things coffee does for sure - gives you (false) energy to type a lot faster than normal and hence gives spellchecker one hell of a work out.

I'm not loving it you tossers!

Lots of stuff in the UK press at the moment about Eric Schlosser’s new book about the giant evil vile corporation that is McDs. I have no beef (geddit?) with McDs itself…or at least I used not to.

I used to enjoy my Big Mac as much as the next teenager, after all, how else am I going to maintain a complexion that was 70% grease and 30% pus. I even overlooked the way that it made me feel sort of queasy afterwards, putting this down to inhaling a huge soggy bun full of ground up testicles and flavour enhancer in about seven seconds.

I read ‘fast food nation’. I got upset about rainforests. I moved on.

I read ‘McLibel’ and got a bit more upset and that upset stayed with me for a bit longer. What that case proved was that McDs exploited children. This was proved. In court. It’s a fact. Now the world doesn’t have a problem with exploiting children (hey, those kids do a great job stitching my sneakers) but I have started to worry about the effect that McDs has on society.

This is because of…litter. I line miles from the nearest McDs…so how the blistering arse do I have McDs wrappers in my front garden? Somebody must actually pick up their food, drive or walk to my neighbourhood and THEN toss the stuff out of the car.

QED - the people who eat at McDs are anti-social gits.

They must be, it’s the only way the litter can get into my front yard.

Enough is enough. I’ve got the address of their head office in the UK and I’m posting the damn stuff back to them from now on. If they can chip chip chip away at decent behaviour bit by bit until tossers believe its okay to toss their tossing wrappers at my house, then I can chip back by posting them their litter back.

I like big butts

Like a socially defective youngster pimping his Ford Fiesta I have augmented my shed. It now has guttering and a rain butt.

It’s a small shed so the guttering is also on rather a small scale, but with the water situation the way it is here I’ve decided to make sure I make the most of every drop for the garden.

So, two hours of sweating and swearing revealed two things. The first is that my shed is on a slope meaning that when I first installed and tested my guttering I was rewarded with the sight of water apparently flowing uphill (guttering now at an extreme angle to get it to flow into the butt). The second is that having guttering and a water butt gives you a fresh perspective on rain. Now you look out of the window and don’t think ‘arse, and I was going to sit outside today drinking beer and reading instead of doing same in the house’. Instead you think - cool, I wonder how much water I’m getting in my butt?

My butt even has a lid so with luck the water will not be flavoured with, for instance, cat or pigeon.

One bit that might need some tinkering is that at the moment the downpipe just feeds into the lid of the butt. When the water is going like the Zambizi in spate (unlikely) I wonder what sort of noise it will make thundering into what is basically an enormous echo chamber. Drip THUD Drip THUD Drip THUD Drip THUD. I suppose I will find out when the neighbours post a note, or dog excrement, through the letter-box.

Departure

I don't usually like just posting a link istead of a post, but this blog represents all that is true, noble and right.

http://russelldavies.typepad.com/eggbaconchipsandbeans/

Taking less water with it

I’m bristling and bridling at the way the utilility companies are currently raising prices for gas and electricity and the wonderful water company has introduced a hose pipe ban meaning it’s illegal to water your garden with a hose but it’s apparently all right for them to make a fat profit (spending same on eating roasted lark stuffed with diamonds off of platinum plates no doubt) while millions of gallons of water is wasted every day with leaks. So we have well watered gutters but brown gardens.

This is England. We need rolling lawns that are green. Where else is one supposed to practise one’s putting, polish up one’s croquet swing and most important of all, stagger about on when pissed as a fart on gin. Who the flip wants a ‘Mediterranean garden’ - which some believe to be growing basil in pots but I know actually means a dusty patch of earth with a forlorn goat tethered in the middle of it.

If the MDs of the water, gas and electricity companies actually dressed to represent their policies, then they’d swagger about in masks, three cornered hats and my quarterly bills would say ‘stand and deliver’ instead of ‘why not pay by direct debit?’.

Which is why I’ve been thinking about self build and regeneration. Self build because I like the idea of building my own house and microgeneration because I think the idea of wind turbines is cool. And I’m tight. Also, if you cover your new house in enough photovoltaic panels and windmills, you never have to pay those blood sucking electricity companies again. As for water, guttering and a 500 gallon tank should do the job.

The possible flaw in this is that one would probably have to go to a green architect to get the best of integrating microgeneration into a new build and I suspect it would not impress if I was to say ‘oh yea, and I want a hot tub too’. Still, I’m sure you can have an eco-friendly hot tub. One could heat it with goats or something.

Llamarama drama

Giving some thought recently to interest thresholds and formalising the process of tuning in and out of conversations.

I’m aware that my endlessly banging on about wireless broadband and, topic du jour, microgeneration, is endlessly fascinating and I can see that occasionally friends in the pub are so interested that their eyes sort of glaze over with interest or they become so excited about it that they vanish to the loos for extended periods.

What it may come down to is that wind turbines and generating electricity from pigs may not be everybody’s cup of Bovril. Do most of us then carry round a mental interest threshold which, when the level of comment being addressed to us dips below, trips a switch in our heads.

Formally, I call this my llama mixing desk. Imagine an audio mixing desk with two slide controls. One increases and decreases the volume of the speak, the other controls the volume of any internal monolog that might be ticking along in your head.

So, for instance, somebody appears at my desk and starts talking about something. Sometimes they can get as far as seven or eight seconds in before my interest threshold is tripped and I fade down their conversation i.e. ‘and so you see the problem we have is the financing of the project in the first, second and third quarter, we are hoping that by offsetting the start-up costs we can….’ And find myself fading up on something like, for example ‘llamas are interesting, aren’t they, I wonder if they’re related to camels, I wonder what they taste like. I think you can get llama wool - are they like sheep?...’ and so on, occasionally fading down one conversation and fading up another.

The unfortunate result is that often you have somebody standing at your desk looking at you expectantly and you realise you’ve been thinking about nothing but llamas for the last ten minutes and you’ve just been asked a question.

Luckily, all men who have ever been on a date with a woman are trained to constantly keep free a part of their brain that’s like a solid state recorder that can retrieve and replay the last ten seconds of a conversation. This is often a question. Sometimes it’s ‘…so is that what you think?’ and you can safely go with yes. Sometimes it’s ‘so is that okay’ and things get tricky. Default answer is ‘what would the implications be?’

Visual clues are folders if it’s a business question, never answer yes or they are transferred to your desk and you find yourself helming the PROJECT OF DOOM. If at home, the prop will often be a catalogue full of soft furnishings. Beware, any positive grunting could mean an end to your dreams of a 70 inch plasma telly and the sudden appearance of a new sofa.

Pass me my number four fowling piece

I think that the last time I lost my temper was when Johnny Bentweasle stole my smarties in primary school and I went at him with a craft knife…as it was a kiddies craft knife this had no effect but it’s the thought that counts.

I can now add another level to my totem of temper tantrums.

Following the spectacular I.T. nightmare of Friday, I arrived at the office to see three suited types in the lobby handing out leaflets. Two were young and well dressed (I smell contractors) the third had his best M&S suit on and dodgy facial hair. So basically we have two blokes who got into IT for the money and a token technical type who’s only experience of IT was probably running a paedophile web-site.

I grab the leaflet. It’s headed ‘before you log in’. I turn.

‘Are you guys from (crapcompany)?’
‘Yes.’ Smiles.
‘Bit of a nightmare on Friday wasn’t it’.
‘Yes, there were [smirk] some problems.’

Red mist.

I can’t clearly recall what I said. Somewhere in there was a remark about their MD driving a BMW and a total lack of customer care. I’m aware that they drew back from me the same way their faces fell away from their frozen smiles and that they crossed their arms.

I stopped long enough to say: ‘this is usually the point where I say it’s not personal’. Breath. ‘But it is, because the standard of service you provided was shocking and it’s your fault’

‘So how many help desk staff do you have?’
‘Six’
‘For over 1,000 people?’
‘That’s the industry standard.’
‘And is having no service, at all, industry standard too? It might be your standard, but it’s not ours. We have a tradition of excellence here. We’re not private sector and we’re motivated by profit not service. Unlike you.’

With a ‘have a nice day’ I was off, the blood thumping in my ears so loud I could hardly hear the theme from ‘Rocky’ when I thummed it into my iPod and ran up the stairs to my office to it.

Bunch of wasters.

I had hoped that they’d get it in the neck from everyone but it appears that most people just took their leaflet and said nothing, although news of my rant has circulated (oops). Obviously went for a few beers at lunchtime to recover shattered emotional frame and recounted to friends, who oooh’d and ahhh’d at the right bits before announcing that my anger was only marginally misdirected. Sod it, they had six people on the help desk, they had only four people to act as floorwalkers sorting out problems (let’s say ten minutes for every desk, times 1,000 members of staff divided by four = it’ll be Easter before we’re back to anything like normal) but they have three people handing out leaflets?

I’m told this is ‘customer after-care’. Obviously, when you fuck up as often as this company, you need more people telling staff about it than you do fixing it.

Something else for the weekend

The green in the bathroom is just starting to disappear, finally, under three coats of the sort of paint I believe they use to waterproof the undersides of battleships. It was not the restful green of forest glades, rather, it was the green of Romanian mental asylum waiting rooms. Now it's replaceed by white and until i adjust the difference is so great that it's like being inside an ice cube it's so white. It's whiter than a porn star's smile, that's how white it is.

All this painting (paint in hair, paint under fingernails, paint bloody everywhere) means that in order to flush the sinuses of an evening you have to drink a lot of wine. This I did last night.

Alcohol and the intrenet do not a good combination make. When your defenses are down and you are more than usually open to suggestibility, it's easy to wander from the telly to the computer and buy an album in under a minute. this I did, with less than sixty seconds from an advert basicallly saying 'buy this' to my doinhg it.

the good news is that the album itself is excellent, it's called 'takk' and it's by some Icelandic ambient prog rock group. Not an easy listen or a dance floor filler but it is the siort of thing that rewards effort and it's nice to think that somebody out there is making music for adults. On-line reviews include words like 'soundscape', which makes one worry a bit, but it's not all that bad, 'soundscape' conjouring up images of earnest types with long hair and band tour tee shirts from the 70s.

Maybe I am now an ageing hippy git.

Can you say 'catastrophic'?

Very possibly, but you would not have been able to write it on your PC or e mail it yesterday at work.

The first day of our new IT service provider coming in. Some genius decides that the last day of the financial year and a working day is the ideal time to turn all of our IT over to the new provider. This means that over 1,000 people are being looked after, not by the folk who have been in since the beginning, have developed an excellent service culture, were picking up an AWARD for their service a few weeks ago and who basically built the system, but by a private contractor.

Result - no computer service, all day.

Actually, that's an exaggeration, we could fire up internet explorer. This was good because being unable to write anything or access any files or e mail, at least we could cruise for cool stuff on eBay.

The new help desk was a joke and, as the seriousness of the situation sank in and people went off home early, there was what can only be described as an ugly mood. This was not helped by the shocking wait to get through to the new 'help desk' who were no help at all.

Oh there was anger, oh there was scowling and, for once, when we got on to the help desk it was no longer one of us who we may meet later in a the office or the canteen, because they've all been sacked. It was some employee of the new company. Normally our complaints, if we have any, are moderated by 'look, I know it's not your fault'. This time it was and I think by mid-afternoon the new providers may have picked up on the fact that we were not amused.