Struck Down

I have contracted an unpleasant stomach-bug that has necessitated many violent trips to the bathroom.  On some occasions I made it successfully, some not.  The highlight of today was desperate puking into a sink full of dishes.

The suspected source of the infection is a barbecue I attended on Saturday, where the host’s first statement upon seeing us was ‘Don’t get too close!  I’ve got a dreadful stomach upset.‘  I am trying very hard not to be irate that the host didn’t cancel the engagement, let alone recuse himself from food preparation.

Lo, on Monday morning at about 2am, I experienced extreme nausea and cold sweats followed by unmentionable bathroom visitations.  Suffice to say that at 6am on Monday morning I had consigned one pair of pyjamas to the laundry and was attempting through a sheen of dribble to cleanse the bathroom without waking K-man.

There has been some improvement in one sense: yesterday I was physically unable to get out of bed until midday, and made it only as far as the sofa before collapsing in front of a marathon of Judge Judy.  You know you’ve seen too many episodes of Judge Judy when you question her respect for her own precedents.  Today I have been up and about, done some editing work, and was able to keep pure water down.  No solid food will digest at all.

I don’t believe in using medication to cover up the symptoms: I want to know if my body is in trouble so I can treat it effectively with rest and relaxation rather than chowing down on a pepperoni pizza and attempting a gruelling hour-long commute.  However, this makes for uncomfortable research into healing involving consumption of dry crackers and peppermint tea.  So far, it’s not going well.

Most galling is that today I was scheduled to attend a court hearing (public gallery) where the sociopath (and I mean that literally) who has made my family’s life miserable for over a year will hopefully finally be exposed as the no-good lying embezzling bastard that he is.  I was really looking forward to seeing him squirm, but apparently my mother views my stomach upset as godly intervention.  She has been quietly terrified all along that I would go, and he would figure out who I am (we’ve never met) and make my life hell for ever more.  That’s not to say that she doesn’t sympathise with my pain, but that she’s thinking long-term.  These people are dangerous and you should stay the hell away from them, she said.

She has a point. Next time I’m invited to a barbecue I will absent myself when it becomes clear that I’m walking into a poison zone.

Boudoir Beautification: Nearly There

After  three months of living in the spare bedroom, we are back in the Boudoir!  Principal reasons for the lack of progress are: it takes a long time to get stuff made to measure and shipped from China; K-man’s broken wrist needed to heal; and I said I wasn’t helping any more with DIY and I meant it.

Let’s recap: we started with top to toe magenta, a huge triple-wardrobe that had to be pushed side-on into an alcove, fire-hazard ceiling tiles in the bay window, and flowery old-lady curtains. Our furniture was too big for the room, the colour induced insomnia, and the cracks in the ceiling could have fit one entire Victoria Beckham inside them.

We conducted an interim stripping job, and then life got in the way.  For a very long time.  We sold our bedroom furniture on e-bay, except that little Victorian pine chest of drawers which has gone back to my parents from whence it came.

And now, I bring you the next stage! This stage is called Most of it is Done So Despite Our Best Intentions Let’s Leave It As Is For At Least Five Years.

First things first, actual construction projects. An electrician moved the sockets to sensible places, and accidentally knocked a hole through to the study.  It took him twice as long to complete the job as his estimate, and I wanted to punch him.

Once the triple-wardrobe had been dispensed to two of the stupidest people I’ve ever met, the way was clear for the built-in wardrobes.  I despise built-in, preferring to scour the universe for the perfect item of free-standing furniture.  This is because I have never stayed in the same house for more than four or five years, and when I leave, my shit comes with me.  It didn’t make sense to me to buy something that you can’t take with you, when portable options are available.

Well, it turns out that most modern furniture isn’t constructed with 1930s alcoves in mind.  It proved astonishingly difficult to find either a single wardrobe large enough to make the most of the space, or a double wardrobe small enough to fit.  Anything that did fit was either ugly, expensive, or both.

Built-in was the way to go.  The problem with built-in is that most of it looks like it came straight from the plasticised nightmare of a dystopian minimalist.

As luck would have it, there are a number of powerful internet-based search engines that can occasionally be persuaded to find the person you are looking for.  The person we were looking for arrived at our house, spoke very little, listened to my vague description and watched my general arm-waving, and exercised his psychic powers.  I think I know your want, he said in a thick Hungarian accent, and started pulling out photographs of his previous work to show me.

He certainly did know exactly my want, and here it is:

And here it is again, in the other alcove:

He measured the space and sent very detailed drawings by email.  Eight weeks later, he and two colleagues installed these two hand-built cupboards in one 9-hour day.  I love supporting local craftsmen, so it fills my heart with joy to tell  you that the aggregate cost of these cupboards was cheaper than one OK-quality wardrobe from a trusted furniture supplier that ships their shit in from China.  And for that bargain price, we chose exactly what we wanted rather than having to put up with what is available.

Instead of the flowery curtains, we now have plantation shutters in our bay window:

These were expensive enough that we had to give it serious thought before committing.  They also have a 10-week lead-time because they are made to measure in China and shipped from there.  But, I am glad we spent the cash and waited the wait.

Our new bed is made to look like antique metal, and is the sturdiest version we could find.

The wallpaper is by Next.  We wanted a kind of modern country feel to this room, and I saw this wallpaper while I was furtively leafing through a copy of one of those magazines that exists to make us all feel inadequate.  I love this wallpaper, and the feature wall approach means it’s not overwhelming.  The cleanliness of the rest of the decor means the look doesn’t tip over into twee.

Our other recent furniture acquisition was from our local vintage/junk shop.  It was so cheap I cannot remember how much it cost.  It’s serving as K-man’s bedside cupboard. He hit the relative jack-pot, and I am bitter considering it was he who let go our previous bedside cupboards at a knock-down price.

This is the little cupboard thing we stumbled across on a weekend away, and it goes perfectly in the room.  The mirror is one we have had for years, and have no idea where it was purchased.  The colour on the wall is Wild Mushroom by Next.  I was skeptical since it looked too dark and pink in a tester space, but K-man talked me into it.  It changes with the light, shifting between muted pinky-grey-brown hues.

The astute among you will note the carpet.  We desperately needed carpet back down, for noise-reduction, warmth, and shard-protection.  We looked at huge rugs, but could not find anything of the required size at a price we could stomach.  This is super-cheap felt-backed carpet that K-man cut to fit and laid himself with a craft knife, a staple gun, and a few hours.  it’s not quite a perfect fit but it is close enough.  It will serve until we get the whole house re-carpeted (a couple of years).  As long as we don’t rub up against it too much, it’s fine.  The stripes were the least-offensive option in the price-bracket and while they’re far from ideal, they don’t jar too much.

There are still some things I am not entirely happy with.  The fireplace isn’t quite so vile now the colour on the walls somehow disguises its pinkness, but still:

The question is what we do with it.  Options are to leave it, paint it off-white, or replace it with something similar to this:

Black might either be too harsh, or go well with the bed-frame.  I can’t decide.  We could always paint it if it’s not right.  The off-putting thing is that with the living room fireplace, the process was horrific and expensive.  We paid £600 for someone to fit it, and they did so badly.  Also, the tiled monstrosity is original to the house, and I don’t hate it as much as the shit-smear that used to be in the living room.  I hate to rip out original features.  What would you do, internet?

Questions also arise about my bedside cabinet:

It really is that orange, and it does not look right with the more neutral tones of the bedroom.  It was a parental hand-me-down, and we think it’s 1930s or maybe 1940s.  It is a good solid cupboard with a shelf inside, and I like everything except the colour.  It’s covered in what seems to be a kind of varnish (I don’t think shellac, but it could be), and I’m sure I am jinxing myself even as I type this, but it cannot be too hard to strip down with some hideous chemical.  Then I would have two options: either stain it dark like K-man’s, or paint it a neutral colour and fake ‘distress’ it.  What would you do with it?

So, the tour’s finished.  I hope you enjoyed it!  Home improvements are off the table again until autumn, but then I think we might look at the study.  That was another temporary paint-job (to cover up a sea-mural) but we could use the space far more effectively.

Watching Television With My Parents

BBC Test card from my childhood.

Television featured large in my childhood and teenage years.  I couldn’t begin to calculate the number of hours I’ve watched with my face a couple of feet from the screen, and lo, my eyes are still round and functional.

I even adored the black and white TV that was carefully tuned using the twin methods of precision dial-turning and of adjusting the foil sail attached to the aerial.  So desperate was I to watch TV, that I have been known to watch snooker on a black and white set.  I would get up early on weekends and wait for the test-card to disappear and the cartoons to start.  Other activities were planned around the next episode of Star Fleet, since there was no way to watch it later.  One of my earliest TV memories is watching enraptured as Boris Becker (a child!) won Wimbledon for the first time.

Visiting family in the USA meant an added bonus of the sheer wealth of television on offer.  One grandmother had only the basic TV, no cable, and even she had upwards of 40 channels.  The other grandmother had a cable package and it was wall-to-wall Jetsons and Flintstones, transitioning to Baseball in the afternoon and episodes of Roseanne in the early evening.  I think she had over a hundred channels and my brother and I would simply flick through using the remote, eyes goggling at the wonder of it all.

I was in heaven for as long as I could fight off my parents’ demands to switch off and go outside.  Somehow, I still managed to fit in plenty of time to partake of reading, and outdoor activities – perhaps because my every waking moment wasn’t taken up with lessons or enforced socialising, or family visits (my extended family were over 3000 miles away in Chicago).  I had so much time I struggled to fill it.

With a wistful sigh, I say those were the days. Now, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, and too many stations produce 24 hour rolling schedules of constant low-level dribble.  News Tickers make my eyes hurt and are so distracting that focus on the events of the day is impossible.  There is amazing TV out there to watch, for sure, but the activity itself isn’t special and wading through the tripe to find the gem is too much effort.   I hardly ever watch anything at the time it’s broadcast.   Generally, I watch online or  DVDs, or I HD-record and watch later so I can speed through adverts.

At Easter, K-man and I visited my parents.  My parents have become Homeland devotees.  They have no VCR, HD Recorder, unlimited broadband, or patience.  I was informed that when Homeland was on, they would be watching it, and we could do what we wanted but they would be watching Homeland.  This is parental code for AND THERE WILL BE SILENCE.

I was reminded of the fear engendered whenever, as a child, I needed something after bedtime and my parents were watching a programme.   Unless it was a genuine emergency, Televisual Interruptus had better not occur until either an ad break, or the end of the programme.  When my parents were watching something, they were watching it.

Well, I learned that behaviour from them.  I focus absolutely on the programme – think embedded – I need silence from others, and I rarely miss details.  I do not want other people to swan in halfway through and casually enquire as to what is going on.  Who is that and what are they doing?  Fuck off.  K-man’s trick is to fall asleep for ten minutes, wake up suddenly, have no idea what’s happening, and seek an emergency plot précis from yours truly.  Piss off, I tell him, I’m missing this now because of you.  You might think the advent of DVDs and HD-recorder would mean I would simply pause, but that would mean the spell would be broken and enjoyment curtailed.   K-man pauses a two-hour film an average of four times so he can leave the room for whatever reason, and it drives me utterly crazy.

In an odd way, I was looking forward to watching TV with my parents.  I briefed K-man on the rules, advising that even in the event of a rancid fart from someone in the room, noise-making was verboten.

Viewing commenced.  Homeland was OK, as far as I could tell in the first seven minutes.  Seven minutes is the time my father could spend in his chair without needing to perambulate slowly to the kitchen hitting every creaky floorboard on the way, and loudly clatter some pots and pans.  He returned with a bowl of peanuts and then proffered them around with verbal enquiries while plot-points screeched past.

After fifteen minutes, there was an ad break.  My dad sat in his chair and watched four minutes of Eat! This! Buy! This! Watch! This!  

Homeland came back on, and after five minutes, dad got up to go to the bathroom, only to return just in time for another ad-break.  My mother was asleep on the floor.

What. The. Hell?

Someone has abducted my parents and infected them with Hypocrititis before returning them home.  Ingrained teaching runs deep, so in the next ad-break I dared enquire whether they were actually watching the programme, because there was something else I might enjoy on another channel.

Yes, apparently, that is what passes for TV watching these days.  I asked if they recalled what would have happened to my brother or I if we had sneezed during an episode of EastEnders.  This was met with snorts of disbelief and statements along the lines that we kids were always interrupting their television viewing and yet remain alive.  I was accused of being unable to multi-task.   K-man chimed in: you should see her at home – I get yelled at if I even cough during Sons of Anarchy.

ARGH.  It’s not me, it’s you!

Nothing To See Here

If there was a blogging conference on Creating a Boring Waste of Webspace, I could be a keynote speaker.  I wouldn’t have much to say, but I could bob up and down looking dissatisfied for an hour.

I’d like to say that life has been one thrilling roller-coaster after the next, but that would be lying.  Some stuff happened, and some stuff hasn’t happened yet.  So it goes.

Happened:

• I promised myself I would write more frequently.  Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, I love to wordsmith.  Sadly, I’m not one of those folks who can dash off a missive packed with brain-bendingly brilliant prose within a few minutes.  It takes me hours to write even the most basic of sentences, and unless I force myself to be sensible, weeks to decide if I really am happy with it.  Most of the time I’d rather gouge out an eye than re-read what I’ve written.  I need a clear afternoon or evening to get something decent down on keyboard, and even then it’s contingent on having something sufficiently meaningful to say.*
• Project Bedroom is 90% finished.  Pictures are forthcoming, though I will crop out the cheap electricity-conducting temporary carpet we put down to avoid cutting our feet to ribbons on shards of wooden floor.
• After five weeks of stoically resisting my wide-eyed pleading out of the ridiculous desire to keep it ‘clean’, K-man allowed me to draw on his arm-cast.  Just don’t draw a cock and balls, he said, I have to go to work on Monday.  I drew a coffee bean which from some viewing angles looks like a turd.
• I purchased and tried on some shapewear, and I didn’t expire in a puff of indignity.  My circulation is still functioning, and I still have all my limbs.
• Successful extrication of myself from the dull ache of commitment.  I terminated my internship, which was a blessed relief.  A particularly low point was when the team administrator saw fit to lecture me that at this point in my life, experience is SO important.  I pointed out that I am 34 years old, I have worked since I was 16, and that I am doing the internship because I can’t get a job, I would rather do something than nothing, and I like this project.  I didn’t add in a sarcastic tone that I’m not helping out because I am learning anything here – far from it.   Turns out she thought I had just graduated.  I focussed on how this is a massive compliment to my complexion.
• Further academic writing work, now stretching to ridiculous since I stopped being paid over a year ago.  Still nothing actually published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• I’m really into The Voice.  The USA one, not the UK one.  I have whiled away many hours lusting after Adam Levine critically assessing the singers’ performances.

Hasn’t Happened Yet

• Starting my new job.  This experience has been both frustratingly slow, and astonishingly dictatorial.  No part of the process has been designed with the candidates’ perspectives in mind.  I put my application in on 21st January, and last Friday they let me know that paperwork would be with me this Tuesday.  Oh, and I will report to work on 2nd July.  None of this is negotiable, though a reason was proffered when sought: there are lots of people starting and it must all happen when the planets are in direct alignment with the flip-chart in Room 101.  I was tempted to tell them I would be out of the country and unavailable to start until the week after, just to see what would happen.  Would I hear a dull thud as a gant-chart exploded?  But this job means too much to me, and I’m too chicken.  I am not thinking about the fact that the dictats could be indicative of the rest of our employment relationship, or that I am not a person who responds well to dictats at all.  I am grateful just to have this job, even if it is as yet unrealised.
• K-man’s arm-cast hasn’t been taken off yet, but it will be tomorrow, praise lard.  He has been morose in the extreme, and, well, I try to sympathise, but all I can think about is where my next shoulder-massage is coming from and when it might arrive.  Shoulder-massages have rehabilitative value for wrist-breaks.  That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it.
• Owing to advanced medal-winning quality procrastination, I have not tried on the bridesmaid dress I’ll need to wear in five weeks’ time.  I haven’t organised the laminated photos of my brother in embarrassing situations that I promised for this weekend’s hen party.  I haven’t had the dress shortened.  I haven’t managed to muster even a moment’s joy over the prospect of taking two three-hour train rides to partake of hen festivities with people I barely know this weekend.  I’m thinking of starting a support group called Introverts R Us.  We could all watch TV separately and use Twitter to wonder about the sanity of people who think it’s fun to wear amusing Special Occasion T-shirts and hand out cards saying ‘Best Looking Man’ to people in nightclubs.  I’m thinking of having my own T-shirt printed saying ‘This is Really Not My Thing’.
• Posts on snowboarding, Easter with my parents, our new bedroom, and the Olympics tickets I might be unable to use because my new employer doesn’t seem to understand that relationships are inherently bilateral.

*In case you're wondering, I'm not happy with this post but I'm just going to push publish anyway.

Competency Challenge News

On Wednesday, I soaked in a huge bath of negativity miliseconds after I realised that none of my referees had told me that they had been approached by someone wanting to know about my competence.  The potential employer had made a big deal about the necessity of references, and specifically sought permission to contact them before interview.

On Thursday afternoon, I was in the garden attempting to impose order upon chaos.  I left my phone inside because sometimes I just don’t want to talk to people, and I wasn’t supposed to be receiving any important communication before Friday.

Of course, my potential employer called, and I missed the call.  The voicemail said to please return the call tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

I called back immediately, but got voicemail.

What does it mean?   I asked my parents, and K-man.   Responses enabled me to determine that it could be that

• they have a query over some documentation (I wasn’t able to provide everything they asked for)
• I didn’t get the job
• I got the job

My brain had no choice but to go into hyperdrive.

I’ve never been rejected for a job over the phone (it’s usually an email at 5.30pm), and I’ve never been accepted for a job by email.  K-man has been rejected by phone.  My father has issued rejections over the phone, but only for very senior positions with just a few candidates and where some kind of personal touch is required.

If they were going to reject by phone, and got my voicemail, surely the kind-hearted thing to do would be to leave a voicemail to that effect.  No recruiter wants to hear the reaction when they’re delivering a dream-shattering message.  No candidate wants to give a graceful reaction two seconds after their dreams have been shattered.

If it was about documentation, surely a message with the specific query would have been left.

I dared to think I’d got the job, but I was not about to count my chickens.  Nor was I about to get a decent night’s sleep.

Yesterday, I arrived at work in a froth and called from there  – voicemail.  I am beginning to despise voicemail.  I left a message, and tried to focus on my current job.

Eventually, I connected with the recruiter and yes, I got it! Paperwork is on its way to me and should arrive next week.

Words can’t tell you what this means to me.  It’s the first time I will have had secure, full time, permanent employent since early 2009.  It’s a key point in my life.  The monkey is gone from my back.  I’ve been unsubscribing from job-alert emails, and extricating myself as gracefully as possible from as many unwanted obligations as I can.

Just to have one job and not to have to do an ever-increasing string of things I don’t want to do, usually for free, in case one of those things leads to paid employment?  Amazing.  Not to have to feel constant guilt every time I buy something, or spend ten minutes not thinking about trying to find better employment?  Priceless.

Best of all,  I get to fight injustice and obtain redress on an individual level.  I will be paid a living wage to do so, and have plenty of annual leave, and a decent pension.  I have hit the Job Jackpot.

Wow.  I did it.

The Competency Challenge

I applied for a job perfectly suited to me – I am the human embodiment of the person specification for the role. I got as excited as it is possible to get in the knowledge that chances of success are infinitessimal, until I read the detailed recruitment process.

Satan’s minions themselves could not have contrived a more torturous experience.  We’re not talking about a job stacking shelves, but neither is the role SCREAMING MEDICAL EMERGENCY RESCUER.  For the last ten weeks I have been engaged in this process. At times, the stress barometer needle hit hurricane incoming. I shut myself off from the world, because I don’t like to inflict myself on others when I’m like this.

As we know, embodying the person specification does not an automatically successful application make.  These days even the simplest application form – for it is always an application form, and never a CV and covering letter for the jobs that appeal to me – requires a full day to think up and write down examples demonstrating numerous very specific competencies.  Please provide, in no more than 250 words, an example of when you have successfully used influence and persuasion to obtain a positive outcome for an individual or organisation.

I filled in the application form, took a deep breath during which my life flashed before my eyes, and pressed send.

Comfortingly, this is a mass recruitment and the number of positions nudges double digits.  Not so comfortingly, my conservative estimate for the number of applications is in the quadruple digits.  A few months ago I applied for a 0.2FTE six-month fixed term fairly specialised role for which I was also well-suited, and upon not being shortlisted and telephoning for feedback, was told that they had received 265 applications. K-man is a recruiter and once dealt with 600+ applications for one job.  It’s a bear pit.

A few weeks later I received an email asking me to participate in online tests: I had made it through the first cull and now my ‘verbal reasoning’ and ‘inductive reasoning’ would be assessed.  For verbal reasoning you’re given a paragraph of text and after reading it, have to say whether a statement is true, false, or ‘can’t say’.  Inductive reasoning is a pick-the-next-diagram test.  I’m fairly good at inductive reasoning, even the ones with three or four rules to identify. 

The bad news is that a monkey with a cold outperforms me at verbal reasoning. The problem is that the text may contain opinion – “X’s report states that the sun will not rise tomorrow” – and in determining whether the statement “the sun will not rise tomorrow” is true, false, or ‘can’t say’, I naturally pick ‘can’t say’, because whether or not X says it will does not make it so, and I veer toward questioning everything (thanks, dad).  In my view, strictly speaking, further evidence is needed.  The problem is, I usually get that kind of question wrong.

I practised, and practised.  I bitch-slapped the part of my brain that delves beneath the face value of statements.  Some of the test instructions say ‘true’ equates to ‘is a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence in front of you’, which is more philosophically pleasing when considering the nature of truth, but doesn’t really help me with my root failing.  

Then, I discovered I had booked a holiday overseas during the scheduled interview time.  The potential employer said flexibility was unlikely but advised me to take the tests and then we’d talk if I got an interview.

The online testing system hates Macs, so K-man had to bring home a laptop from his office. This pisses me off, because it is hardly as though Macs are new and revolutionary at this stage of the 21st century.

The test was horrible.  I had to answer 50 questions in 40 minutes, and I thought I was going quite quickly when I looked up to see half the time left and a ‘progress’ bar showing I had completed 14 questions.  Gah!  I panicked, and started giving myself ten seconds to think about things – towards the end I was narrowing to two options and just taking a punt. 

I still didn’t finish.  I thought for sure I’d blown it. Never mind, I thought, at least I don’t have to choose between an interview and a holiday.  K-man told me they make those tests impossible on purpose; it doesn’t help recruiters make decisions if everyone gets 100%.  I didn’t believe him.

Two weeks later, wonders will never cease, I got invited to interview.  I decided to go on holiday and fly back early to attend the interview.  A coach would pick me up from the top of a mountain at 4.15am and take me to the airport, and a cheap flight would whisk me home.  I would be back by lunchtime the day before the interview.

I bought a new suit, prepared all my documentation (passport, driving license, degree certificates, proof of my NI number), and packed lots of revision and preparation information.  Sadly, because I was at one point led to believe there might be flexibility in interview timing, by the time I booked my appointment all the decent slots had gone.  I ended up with one that meant I had to fall out of bed at 5.45am to make it on time.

Snowboarding was great, but I was pretty bruised and battered, and had severe chin-chafing from my coat by the time I was ready to go home.  I looked beaten and I hurt, although the most serious injury sustained was when I walked into the corner of an open window-pane. 

I was outside the pickup location at 4am.  The coach failed to show up at the top of the mountain. Thanks very much useless excuse for a coach company, I would yes indeed miss my flight home. I will cut the very, very long story short and say that eight hours later I made it to the airport and at significant expense booked onto the next flight to the London area (although not the same arrival destination) and arrived home a murky puddle of exhaustion in the early evening. 

When I arrived at the interview two other candidates were there at the same time, enabling me to surmise that I am in the last 36-or-fewer candidates.  We went into a room and carried out a 1.5 hour written test, before being separated to face an interview panel and the dreaded ‘competency’ questions.  There was an internal candidate in my group – damn you, internal candidate you were really lovely, and I hope we BOTH get jobs.

The written test was similar to tasks I’ve carried out professionally before, and while I wouldn’t say I walked it my usually-reliable internal post-mortem only picked up a couple of things I missed.  My interview didn’t go badly, but that’s all I can say with confidence.  The panel gave off zero clues: there was no pleasantry, nicey-nicey, or laughing.  There was barely any smiling.

For the first time ever, I restrained myself from attempting to relieve a po-faced situation I am finding stressful by cracking a ‘joke’ or making a leftfield wry remark.  Personal growth!  I haz competency!

At least I hope so.  I really want the job.  Apart from the fact that the internal candidate told me the organisation is filled with wonderful people and the best place she has ever worked, I just want to be able to stop looking, to stop agreeing to things people ask me to do even though I don’t want to in case there’s a good opportunity at the end of the line.  I want security.  I don’t want to juggle three slippery fish anymore. 

On holiday someone told me that at this stage, the recruiters will have decided you can do the job.  The only question is whether they think you can do it better than a sufficient proportion of the other candidates.

I’ll find out on Friday at the earliest.

The Boudoir Beautification Project

You know when you’re tired, and out of nowhere one of your eyeballs spasms for a few seconds?  The reason we could afford to buy the Suburban Mansion was that every single surface upon which gaze was cast led to eye-spasm and involuntary cursing.

Making our surroundings look less as though they’ve been paint-balled, tarred, and feathered is a labour of really quite ongoing love.  The master bedroom is getting its dose of TLC as I write this.  Let’s recap: what follows is a photo that might cause eyeball seizure.  If you can remember the pinkness from reading about it back in the day, you may wish to look away now.

One day we woke up and couldn’t take it any more, so we painted the walls and removed the carpet, enabling temporary relief for the last 18 months.

Every so often, usually when I needed to dispense with some rage, I would attack those hideous glued-down floor-tiles, until only the space under the bed was not tile-free.

The original plan was to clear all the floor-tiles, belt-sand the wood, and stain it deep brown.  My imagination basked in the glory of a stream of home decoration magazine shoots, and people fawning over the lovely non-dustmite-harbouring natural feel of my home.

Impracticality bites like a crocodile, folks.  The sad truth is that without a carpet plus underlay, a person sitting in the room below needs earplugs to cope with the sound of a mouse creeping its way across the floorboards in the bedroom.  Our already-cool house becomes a fridge.  I wailed, but had to admit the floorboard idea was not going to work.  We assessed the options, which included insulation between the ceiling and floor (too expensive with no guarantee of success), laying new wood on top (raises the floor level in this room to an unacceptable degree compared with the hallway; the floor looks flat but bows upward in the middle), and finally, carpet plus underlay.

We want the same flooring in the whole house (apart from the kitchen and bathroom) so we would either have to go through expensive hell to have all the floors under-insulated, or new floor on top (with attendant levelling difficulties), or take the easier cheaper path of least resistance.

Carpet it is.

This frees us from fighting the glue, which we now believe is bitumen, across the remaining four rooms of the house.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen!  How swiftly the noble goal of back-to-shell redecorating is abandoned!

Everyone knows carpet is the last thing on the decor list, so meanwhile we’re concentrating on the wall and ceiling combination in the bedroom.

I know you’re not going to believe this, but my suggestion was that we simply call up the APPT and arrange for him to come to smooth, skim and line the walls that are full of irregularities and cracks.

K-man’s suggestion was that I grow a giant tree of patience in my soul, and permit him to carry out the works himself during evenings and weekends.  We would save a packet (that we would then apparently spend on an unnecessary vehicle) and I would not be required to become ill at the very sight of the APPT on day 14 of delay.  Also, K-man believes he can do as good a job as the APPT, albeit in seven times as long.  After competency-related promise-extraction, I agreed.

We moved all of our things into the spare bedroom three weeks ago, and work commenced.

This is the bay window, where once there were polystyrene ceiling tiles holding up the plaster, and flowery old-lady curtains.  They had to go, not only for aesthetic reasons but also because our home-buyer survey identified them as a serious fire-risk (shh, not a word to my mother).  Now, there is plaster-board and expertly – very slowly – applied filler and sealant where once there were cracks.  In approximately a century, our made to measure plantation shutters will be fitted.

Yeah baby, I love a layer of plaster-dust over everything.

The time came to attempt to put lining paper on the ceiling by ourselves, with no previous experience.  But for the lack of canned laughter, it could have been a poorly-written sitcom.  I would hold one end of the gloopy 12-foot length of paper above my head, and K-man would endeavour to make his end stick to the ceiling.  As he progressed along the length towards me, it would come unstuck behind him.  Like a scene from Pantomime Alien, I’d yell shit! look behind you, and he’d turn around just in time to be gruesomely smothered to death under swathes of sticky paper.   A strategy involving a long-handled broom and a shit-ton of extra paste was deployed, and the ceiling is fully papered.  It only took two days.

I would have helped to paint the ceiling for more than five minutes, too, but K-man chose to wait until my back was turned before hastily and passive-aggressively re-doing the parts I’d painted.  Harsh words were exchanged, and hence-forth I shall not be assisting with the home-improvements.  This may seem like laziness on my part, but I call it marriage-saving.

The dusky pink paint-splotch that looks odd in the photo above will be the colour of some of the walls.  The plan is:

• built-in wardrobes in the two alcoves either side of the fireplace
• about the fire-place: painting it, since I don’t hate the shape
• electrician to put electric sockets in sensible places
• plantation shutters
• natural-coloured carpet ultimately, but large rugs in the meantime to stop us impaling our feet on wood-shards
• one wall of bird-oriented wall-paper (sounds horrific, but isn’t)
• wrought-iron bedstead
• the cupboard thingy we bought in November

We have found a man to build our wardrobes; he can barely speak English and I find his name utterly unpronounceable, but he comes with great references and if pictures of his work are anything to go by, he’ll do us a solid job of excellence and individual design.  He’s scheduled to complete the job in mid-March.

So, the Boudoir Beautification Project is approximately half-way through.  And if anyone in control of this situation is listening?  I’ve had enough disasters for 2012 thanks – please leave this room alone, OK?

The Show Must Go On

Six weeks into this year, my interim assessment is that it sucks.  Minor trauma plus minor trauma equals astonishing sense of unfairness.  On the bonus side, I got my annual bout of illness over with during the first week of January.

First, allow me to expound on the self-made miseries.  Well, what the hell, I’m going to be true about it: K-man made these miseries.  It was nothing to do with me when he put our car on autotrader.com because he’d identified a new car he swore he needed.  Something about the size of his testicles, I don’t know what.  We use our car once a week at most, but for reasons to do with stones I don’t possess it behoves us to spend £6,000 on a piece of metal that spends 98% of its time on the driveway.  Don’t ask me; I just live here.

He made a hat-tip at ‘consultation’ and put Vern on the market, selling and arranging collection within a 24 hour period, for a price that was borderline insulting to Vern’s dignity.  The pre-car research on the proposed new car was only completed after he sold our old car. Things were discovered, worrying things, about the proposed new car having a fake service history.  What now, fool, when we need a car?  Oh yes, now we’re pressured buyers: a great big unavoidable horror.  Car salesmen can SMELL pressure. 

Yes, I’ve been skating close to the thin mental line lately.

Next up is the Bedroom Furniture Debacle.  The bedroom was next on the list of things in the home to participate in the destruction of my surroundings, a project that’s going really well.  Remember the bannister?  Months later, this is what it looks like now:

My best guess is that the white stuff in the middle is nuclear-bunker-grade heat-protective coating. It will not budge.  If President Obama needs protection from Iran’s unhinged, he should come to my house and crouch behind my bannister.

We moved out of our bedroom three weeks ago and it’s in a state of disarray that will be brought to you in another post.  Our furniture is too big for the room so was put up for sale.  The enormous triple-wardrobe was the priority, but ultimately we needed to rid ourselves of the rustic solid oak bed and bedside tables we got in New Zealand too.  We discussed and agreed a sale price that would prevent me feeling aggrieved (I like this furniture and we paid a wadge for it).

K-man operated the eBay and somehow fucked up the equation that exists between ‘buy now’ and ‘minimum bid’.  Our solid oak king-size bed and two bedside tables that we lavished cash and care on were sold for a price so low I had to fight back tears.

Next up, the trauma visited upon us from outside our control.

Finding that one’s bicycle has been stolen is never pleasant.  I can attest that it’s particularly unpleasant when one is returning home at 1am on a freezing cold night having had too much to drink.  I searched the bike park in vain for my bike, clinging to the hope that I had, like all the other times, simply forgotten where I’d left it.  I saw a cut cable lock and with a sinking feeling put my combination in.  It sprang open, and so did  my tear-ducts.

To a cyclist, no bike you’ve had for any length of time is just a bike.  We’ve seen penguins, fallen off curbs, been blown into oncoming traffic, got back up, and travelled on together.  I loved my bike.  I reported the theft of my buddy to the police.

Describe the bike, blah blah, where did you leave it, blah, was there CCTV, blah blah investigate I’m not really listening anymore but then and how would you describe your ethnicity?

What?

Are you black, white, asian? 

The police person on the phone does not know me, and does not know that questions like that coming out of nowhere, even when I’m drunk, especially when I’m drunk, and already upset are not something I’m going to let fly.  Way to make a bad situation worse, Flow Chart voice.

Is that relevant?  I shot out before I could stop myself.  Would you NOT investigate the crime I’ve just been a victim of because I fit, or did not fit, a certain racial profile?  

Nomadamnotatallyoudon’thavetoanswergovernmentstatisticsblah.

Because, that’s certainly the implication OFFICER.

Doyouwishnottoanswer?

Would you like my gender, age, or other profile information for the government statistics? 

Uh, no.

In that case you can put me down as human.

I’m really pleasant when I’ve had too much to drink and been the victim of a crime.

Next up: the following week, K-man was riding home on his un-stolen bike and got hit by a car.  The bike ended up under the wheels of the car, and he bounced off the bonnet.  He’s fine; cuts and bruises only (though the bike was a write-off).  Mostly, he was shaking and fragile with shock.  Thank lard it was a small car that hit him, and that it was not going faster.  He made eye contact with the driver before the collision (she definitely saw him), he had right of way, and she should have stopped and she knew it.  Her foot ‘slipped off the brake’ apparently, so she simply drove into him at a roundabout.  A witness helped pick K-man up and escorted him home to make sure he was OK.

Then, back from a weekend in the country during a cold-snap and snow, our heating broke.  It’s always a bad sign when you can see your breath in the hallway, and in sub-zero temperatures frozen pipes mean you have to eat your Ha! Boiler insurance! What a con! words and call the Fuck My Wallet line.  £500 later, I’m seriously considering becoming a heating engineer.

Everything you ever wanted to know about my frame of mind by this point is represented by this picture of Jesus, our formerly vibrant house plant:

What’s a girl to do when the first six weeks of a year have removed her colour and rendered her incapable of even a glimmer of sparkle?  Why, run off to Paris, of course!  My friend JR might not be a doctor, but he knew, it turns out, that I was in parlous trouble in the doldrums department without me even having to mention it.  And, because he is somehow psychic and knew without me ever having breathed to anyone how much I wanted to go there, he surprised me with tickets to this place:

It's the Star Ship Enterprise, in chandelier form!

In one weekend, I regained my sense of being alive.  My vibrancy came back, I smoked some cigarettes, ate a bucket of french lard, glammed around Paris, and remembered all the good shit I’ve seen and done, all the people I loved, love, and almost lost, and who I am privileged to know.

Icarus

Wildlife and greenery are two of the reasons living in the ‘burbs is beginning to seem not that bad.  London has creatures, but they tend to belong to the genus revolting varmint: sewer rats, mangy urban foxes, one-legged pigeons with half a beak, the little mice that live on the underground, and Lolita the flea-ridden aggressive cat with one ear who lived in a bush outside my parents’ house for years and yowled at passers-by.  Oh, and the hairy hand-sized spider I once found in my house when I lived near a fruit-stall that shipped fruit in apparently directly from the jungle.

My garden contains a range of more palatable creatures.  We’ve been here a shade short of two years, and seen a middle-class looking fox and a huge hedgehog snuffling around at the bottom of the garden.  Then there are the birds.

I love the birds.  I give the more regular visitors names, though really I am naming the species because there are probably hundreds of them visiting and I call them all the same thing.  Our garden has so far hosted a variety of the ubiquitous Little Brown Birds that are everywhere no matter where you go across the globe.

Regular guests are Fatty and Soames, the gargantuan well-fed wood pigeons who live in the trees at the bottom of the garden.  They fall down onto the lawn every so often to feed, and then are too lazy to really put much effort into getting back up to their perch.  It is touch and go whether they will actually make it each time.  They’re named after Nicholas Soames MP, a parliamentarian of astonishing girth, who is (perhaps not so affectionately) known colloquially as ‘Fatty Soames’.  I refer the honourable reader to the answer the Independent gave when questioned about Mr. Soames a moment ago.

We also have a bunch of tits: coal tits, great tits, and blue tits.  Only the latter are interesting enough and frequent enough to deserve a name, and we call them Bert and Ernie.

I could never take a photo this good, but I don't know who did.

There’s also a Wren, who is easily the cutest bird on the block.  It’s called Tweet, and let me tell you Tweet is the Christina Aguilera of the bird world: I have no idea how something that tiny can produce a sound that big.  It’s beautiful to listen to.

Again, anonymous photo: credit - the Internet

More unusual birds we’ve been lucky enough to see in our garden are the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, doing its best to beat some steel into submission.  I’m going to open up the naming competition here because I can’t think of anything better than Woody and that’s just wrong.

Photo Credit: Derek Belsey

About every three months or so, I’ll see a jay:

Photo credit, Steve Round

We have a few chaffinches, but they’re not as great as they think they are.  Last week, and this is really quite something because these guys are fairly rare, we had a Bullfinch.

Photo Credit Ray Wilson

This is a male, but I think I saw his partner a few days previously because what looked like a tiny jay flapped past.

Then there are the robins, gang-members of bird-land, who show up any time you go into the garden and start moving things about so they can stare you down and frighten you off.

Photo credit, the Internet

There, I think I covered everyone.  Oh, no, the crows, jackdaws, and magpies.  And doves.  You get the picture: we have significant birdlife.

I like the birds and I want them in my garden (apart from the crows, jackdaws, and magpies – they can fuck off).  So I put food out to encourage them to visit.  England doesn’t really have critters that are an actual risk to you.  There might be a few mildly-poisonous snakes about, but you’re not going to find them in your garden because you left food out.

However. There is something that while cute, creates a dull ache in the rectal region if you’re interested in attracting birds.  We see these little puffballs of pain every day from our window, battling to get an unfair share of what’s left out for the little people.  Oh, they look all warm and fuzzy, but these are the greedy, grasping bankers of the animal kingdom.

Thank you, USA.

They are a menace, and not only because they’ve all but wiped out the indigenous and much more lovely Red Squirrel in the UK.  No, they have an astonishing willingness to straight-arm the entitlements of others into their gobs with nary a second thought.  They will go to extraordinary lengths.

To wit, this weekend we bought a new bird-feeding pole device.  We wondered how long it would take before the vultures-in-disguise arrived.  It took about an hour.

Photo Credit, K-man

K-man isn’t blessed with a steady hand and seemingly can’t comprehend auto-focus, but you get the idea.

This last is my favourite, because it perfectly illustrates what happens if you’re too greedy and lean out too far.  You Augustus Gloop your way four feet to the floor below, approximately two seconds after someone takes a photo of your impending doom.

I have christened this squirrel Icarus.  Hello, Icarus, I’m laughing at you! 

This weekend I’m going to grease that pole.  You may have won the battle Icarus, but you will not win the war.

 

The Embodiment of a Cliché

Every so often I extract my Feminist Card from my back pocket and think about what’s important.  This becomes especially vital in times of  Feminist Trial where, like a talisman, the Feminist Card focuses me on my world: a world where hair, make-up, and conformist pressures are alien and viewed from afar with suitable disdain.

This year’s Feminist Trial is not, in the spectrum of Global Feminist Trials, particularly upsetting or challenging.  In the spectrum of Nic’s Feminist Trials, however, it’s in the file marked ‘Extremely Painful’.

I am to be a bridesmaid.

Yes, I agreed to do it.  It’s not the first time, or even the second.  Why did I agree?  How do you refuse someone who is asking you to share in a day that’s extremely important to them?  It’s an honour.

In my world, bridesmaid duties don’t inherently require OMG hair OMG make-up OMG dress panic OMG OMG OMG yay!!!! x 1000 LOL. 

My world, it turns out, isn’t inhabited by much of a population.  A key absentee from my world’s populace is the bride.

I understand bridal desire to be overtly conformist about weddings.  It would be a brave woman indeed who chose the day she is to occupy a significantly heightened, be-pedestalled, centre-of-attention, photographed-for-posterity position to experiment with non-conformity.  I’ve been a bride.  I was spectacularly sucked in to the My Special Day Conflict of 2004, and didn’t emerge with my dignity fully intact.  I get it.

I don’t have to like it.  But I have to participate in it, with a smile and plenty of grace.   Phase 1 was bridal dress shopping, necessitating a weekend trip to the bride’s town and several appointments with openly snooty wedding dress shop assistants.  I nearly said something very sneering indeed to the shop assistant who said the bride’s hair was ‘very greasy’, but I remembered: smile and be graceful.  Phase 1 was completed, and the bride will look stunning.

Phase 2 is bridesmaid dress shopping.  So it was that I was summonsed to central London.  Why oh why do brides choose to inflict pre-Christmas dress-shopping on their bridesmaids?  This is the second time I’ve been through it, and Oxford Circus in mid-December is the tenth circle of hell, yet there I found myself, trying to look like I was smiling and being full of grace rather than hotly grimacing.

My  fear was that we would be unable to find a dress that makes me look even close to attractive, or that the bride likes.  I want the bride to have nice photos – I have no desire to be the person who ruins them.  For entirely selfish reasons, I want to look at least semi-decent.  I’m struggling with that because I thought I’d grown out of it, but it turns out there’s a scratch on my Feminist Card.

Happy days!  The second dress we tried on was fine and the bride liked it very much.  I was imagining a relaxing lunch and some corollary non-dress shopping to ease the last minute Christmas gift panic, when the bride suggested we keep going in case something better should appear.

I smiled, and looked graceful, and agreed.

In a department store a short jaunt away, I finally solved the 127-button puzzle and got into what had appeared on the hanger to be a slinky satin number.  I looked at myself in the mirror.

Maybe I’m slightly overweight; I tend not to think about it very much.  This dress, being made of clingy weird fake satin, stuck to every lump and bump.  Surely, surely I am not really that fat, I muttered.  I shut my eyes and opened them again, because it must have been an optical illusion.  It wasn’t.  The dress is the sartorial equivalent of the fun-fair mirror nobody loves.

Never mind!  I thought to myself, she’ll hate it too.  I cast aside the changing-room curtain with a flourish, expecting her to recoil in horror and demand that I remove all thoughts of that dress from my memory forth-with.

I didn’t even have time to open my mouth before she gasped.  She liked it. No, she loved it.   It’s the one.  Smiling and being graceful, I expressed mild and carefully-worded concern that perhaps this dress makes me look like the Heffalump’s fatter cousin.

All I need, apparently, is some support underwear.  All the celebrities are supported in this way – didn’t I know?  Nobody looks good in this type of dress without help.

Naturally.

I reported to a trusted colleague, who informs me that in addition to being horrifically uncomfortable, support underwear simply serves to re-position the issue from A to B, where B is the under-bust and under-arm region.  Fabulous.

So, I’m going to be eating lentils, salad, cardboard and dust between now and the summer.  And my future features support-underwear shopping.  The bride thinks we might do this together.  I think I might buy it from the internet and then sit in a dimly-lit room, crying.