So is it GMT now, or what?

The clocks went back this weekend. This is a quaint custom which I think was introduced to help farmers during the war. Licensing hours were also introduced as a wartime measure and although these are slowly being eroded, there appears to be no movement on putting clocks one hour forward to announce the arrival of British Summer Time and one hour back, as today, to announce the arrival of British Winter Time.

Personally I’m tremendously grateful for some sort of organised event to announce the official start of winter – you used to be able to tell when winter was upon you by looking at the ‘seasonal’ aisle in the supermarket. BBQs, firelighters and salmonella cures meant that summer was arriving, advent calendars means winter is here and so you had better start eating chocolate now to build up fat reserves to live off when it gets cold.

Now though, with supermarkets battling to get out money and fuck up any sense of a pleasant anticipation of a seasonal event, barely have the Easter eggs vanished than the plastic pumpkins are out.

Thankfully, we can rely on official notification from the water board telling us there is a hosepipe ban to tell us that summer is here, but how about winter? That’s especially true of this year, when the only thing you could say about the summer was that the rain was warmer.

Putting the clocks back adds to the ‘nights are fair drawing in, eh?’ feeling. Meaning it’s dark at four rather than five. This of course means fuck all to me anyhow as at four or five I’m still stuck at the office and look out onto what I swear is an attempt to create a Romanian style housing project – short on charm, heavy on cabbage being used in the construction. It does mean that on the rare occasions I do quit the office early enough to see daylight, I don’t emerge into it blinking and shuffling like a Morlock, but run like hell whooping with joy and spinning like a demented woman in a tampon ad.

Today was rainy and overcast. I didn’t leave the house all day. It was kind of interesting though, to lie prone on the sofa, reading a book and putting off the decision to go for a pee until I really was in quite a lot of pain and watch the light drain out of the sky. Not that there was much light to drain, but with the clouds practically brushing the fucking streetlights, the sky was lit from beneath and showed off a luminescent, orange grey haze.

Bears, I think, have the right idea – set the alarm for spring and dream of your breakfast sporting an orange vest.

Never mind Jane’s Addiction, let me tell you about mine

Addiction used to be simple, you were addicted to drink, or drugs, or gambling. Other behaviour, such as touching your balls in public places can more properly be considered a compulsion. The difference between compulsion and addiction is that compulsions are normally free of charge while addictions are not.

Men make better addicts than women, as they either show imagination or are weaker in character, depending on your point of view. A woman may consider herself addicted to buying shoes, for example, but this is not addiction, this is a hobby. You want addiction…go to a toy shop and watch a man buy a new piece of kit for his ever expanding train-set, studiously ignoring the mewling from his kids as they want to go home and play on their games console while doing crystal meth, sunny delight or something equally as foul.

Conventional addictions can be obvious. The other morning I missed my train. In my defence, I missed it in style – I ran for it and was able to watch it pull out of the station, all that was missing was an animatronic hand on the back carriage flashing the V sign at me. As it was, I was able to get a coffee, take a seat and read my book for twenty minutes while waiting for the next train.

(This, until I came back through my front door that evening, was the best part of my day. This has been, if not the week from hell, at least the week from a suburb of hell.)

From the opposite platform, with the startling acoustic clarity that comes from being in an almost deserted station comes the unmistakable sound of a cork being pulled from a bottle. Across the tracks I can see a chap in a suit taking a pull on what, from this distance, appears to be a bottle of wine he has produced from his briefcase. This is at 8:42 in the morning. I hope it’s something light, like a hock. Good breakfast wine.

My first reaction was to pitch up next to him with two glasses and a cheese platter, but as I had my coffee I stayed put. I might know my way around a drink and, even worse, I know that once I’ve had one there’s a domino effect as my will crumbles and I want another, but even I only rarely drink at breakfast. Or instead of breakfast.

As for my addiction – in a word ‘travain’. This is basically a stripped down sim-city game where you increase the level of your resources and use them to purchase troops and conquer new villages and so on. The difference is it’s on line and multiplayer. Which is charming when you are in an alliance and all getting along, but a royal pain in the arse when you are, as I presently am, engaged in a village vs village war of attrition with an illiterate tosser. Oh yes, you can message one another, which is where you soon learn that the sort of people playing the game can’t spell. As I guess most of them are schoolchildren, this is more worrying still.

I think I’m going to have to cancel my account with the game, I’m rapidly approaching the point where it’s just not fun.

Or better still, close one account, open another under a new name and plot to destroy the tosser in question? Or yet better still, use the time I have invested in playing the sodding game to get my life back. The ultimate ‘I win’…but of course that’s a little empty without being able to hand out the ultimate ‘you lose!’.