Hi there! You look great. I have almost too much to spill – there may be dribbling.

February started with bronchitis and ended in a new job; like Dickens, but with Netflix and Kleenex Balsam.

Not only were the lovely team at Papercraft just heartwarmingly nice about me leaving, but mega editor Jenny created two gorgeous fabric birds, inspired by (and frankly much better than) the tinfoil birds I made ages ago. So cute!



Even better, Jenny’s taken time out from her rigorous schedule of being fabulous and interfering with moose to post a free template for those birdykins, so you can make ‘em yourself. I know, right? Thank you Jenny! Now it’s time to take a long, hard look at your own boss and shout ‘Hey boss! Where my birds at?’

So now I’m working on the fantabulous The Making Spot, Future’s all-newish craft website. Whee! Quick, click over there and wonder at the amazing jumpers. Do it!

In other news, the boy turns 32 tomorrow, and will celebrate by working late, late, late. C’est la vie des Phins. I have no idea if that French is correct.

Goodnight, lovely peeps x

Contains spoilers for series 2 of Sherlock.

Everyone loves Sherlock, right? Of course they do. Let’s relieve our shaky Sherlock withdrawal symptoms with some idle speculation about those thrilling final scenes in The Reichenbach Fall. It’ll be fun!*

*Disclaimer: Fun not guaranteed.

Shoddy synopsis
Sherlock’s shiny-haired nemesis, Jim Moriarty, carries out a series of bonkers crimes (Lovely box of Mercury Street? Pass me a purple one!) designed for Sherlock to solve quickly, prompting the police to suspect Sherlock himself of being a master criminal. Meanwhile, Jim’s been undercover as an undercover actor (stay with me), selling his ‘story’ to a tabloid reporter who can’t wait to out Sherlock as a massive fraud. Crikey! Sherlock gets arrested on suspicion of, um, everything, then poor Watson gets arrested for assaulting an officer, then they both run away and it’s terribly exciting.

Anyway, stuff happens and Sherlock and Moriarty end up on the roof of St Bart’s hospital. Moriarty says that he wants Sherlock to be seen throwing himself off the building. And if he doesn’t, Watson (no!), Mrs Hudson (eep!), and Lestrade (…whatever) will be killed by masked gunmen. Sherlock foolishly points out that he could force Moriarty to call off the gunmen, at which point Moriarty takes the surprising step of shooting himself in the head. Fair play.

The only way out is down! Watson arrives at the scene just in time to receive a phoned-in suicide note from Sherlock then watch him throw himself off the roof. Woe and suffering abounds.

Later, Mrs Hudson and Watson visit Sherlock’s grave and relate their deep sorrow/thoughts on fridge hygiene. But wait, who’s that watching them? It is Sherlock! Who is totally alive!

What an awesomepants episode. Do watch it now if you haven’t already. Done? Good.

Cake or death? Or bin lorry?
Did Sherlock really fake his own death? If so, how? Let’s look at the evidence:

Exhibit A: Molly fakes
This one seems straightforward; prior to his rooftop deathfest showdown, Sherlock asked lovely morgue technician Molly to help him out. So it seems likely that either she provided a Sherlookalike corpse for identification and burial purposes, or she faked a death certificate for him. Nice work, Molly.


A stunning breakout performance from Molly’s cherry-motif cardigan. Bravo!

Exhibit B: The doppelgänger effect
Or was there a living Sherlock double in play? The kidnapped girl recognised his hunky chiselled face immediately. Hmm.

OMG cheekbones squee!!!1!!

Exhibit C: Mind over (brain) matter
Sherlock insisted that Watson stand in a particular spot to witness his suicide. A spot where, usefully, he couldn’t actually see Sherlock hit the ground.

Stand where I tell you, Watson! Now dance. Dance, I say!

Also, when Watson ran towards the scene of the brainsplatter, a bike ran him over, rendering him woozy and confused. Dude can’t catch a break.

Think once, think twice, think possible concussion.

Exhibit D: Bin lorry of doom
If you’re going to jump off a roof, survive and flee the scene quickly, then leaping into an open-topped bin lorry is surely the way to do it. This little lorry was parked right next to the body, pulling away seconds later.

A bin lorry that’s just visited a hospital: only marginally more welcoming than solid pavement.

Exhibit E: Helping hands
Wow, those paramedics certainly got there quickly! And look at all those people ‘helpfully’ keeping Dr Watson away. Perhaps the body is an alive-Sherlock, splattered with gore by his faithful homeless pals. They don’t seem keen on Watson taking Sherlock’s pulse.

What’s so funny, Smiley McSmilersons?!


Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock. Smooshed detective.

Exhibit F: What the papers say
My initial feeling was that Sherlock had chucked Moriarty over the edge, dressed in his clothes. We clearly saw Sherlock’s face on the ground, though, so it doesn’t feel plausible. But! You’d think the papers would splash with Sherlock AND Moriarty dead? Old Jim doesn’t get a look in.

I shall not…clown.

That’s all I’ve got. What do you think? Feel free to share your theories in the comments below! Sherlock-related theories, I mean. I’m not really interested in crop circles or Paul McCartney.

This is my eighth of twelve lovely but busy working days, so I only have brainspace to show you a couple of pics. Nice, though, aren’t they?

Dad’s birthday cake, inside the gorgeous stand that the boy gave me:



Me and Lu manning (ladying?) the PaperCraft inspirations Cake & Take stand at the Olympia yesterday.



That’s it! xxx

The boy and I have a strange relationship with money. On the large scale, we’re pretty sensible. We’ve never had an expensive holiday, our wedding cost less than a grand, we’ve both worked hard in grown-up jobs since graduating and so on. Despite (or because of) this, neither of us has ever been good at day-to-day money. Fancy coffees on a Monday. Off to the pictures at the weekend. The BeneFit make-up counter when Maybelline would do. Etc.

Partly it’s a ‘sod it, we’ve earned it’ attitude, which is obviously ridiculous. I’m also slightly aware of the ‘mean Scot’ stereotype, and never want to seem stingy with my cash when among my mostly non-Scot friends.

ANYWAY. This month we’ve slipped into a kind of competitive frugality. It was never agreed, but suddenly we’re both ultra-tight with what we spend. It’s getting ridiculous.

‘It’s raining, shall we get the bus?’
‘NO! Let’s walk!’
‘Let’s have these noodles, they’re only £1!’
‘Let’s have THESE noodles, they’re only 28p!
‘Shall we buy a coffee this morning?’
‘NO, let’s just walk past and smell the shop.’
‘NO! Let’s just say the word ‘coffee’ over and over until we feel like we’ve had one!’
‘Let’s look at a photo of a coffee on the internet!’

Etc. I’ve no idea what’s prompted this; we don’t have any more or less money than usual. But I suppose it can’t be a bad thing. The (imaginary) Milkybars are on me!

Why hello, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

I’ve got a full two weeks off work, and I’m very much enjoying the peace and quiet. After what’s been a rather stressful and fractious year, I was determined the boy and I would have a lovely Christmas Day, so spent the first week of my holiday cleaning, shopping and cooking so the day itself would be an easy peasy roast-the-turkey-and-heat-stuff-up affair.

These things never photograph well, but I can assure you it was delicious! For the food geeks among you, I did Jamie Oliver’s get-ahead gravy (amazing), Christmas butter (Christmassy), and the chestnut sprouts recipe from the December issue of his mag (sadly foiled by lack of sprouts – I had to use cabbage). I’m not really much of a cook, so I was pretty pleased with my Christmas dinner.



Because we’re big softies, we chose a turkey that’d had some kind of yuppie life, with massages and cooked breakfasts and holidays in the Algarve. That turkey had a better life than most humans. It’d only been roughly plucked, though, which meant I spent Christmas Eve with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a stoic expression.

We also had gigantic slabs of The Cake. It’s very good, though oddly you can barely taste the half-bottle of brandy I poured in.



One thing I didn’t plan for was the death of our fridge-freezer late on Christmas Eve. Not a disaster, in the grand scheme of things, but I was a little bit heartbroken to see all my painstakingly prepared food starting to spoil and our breakfast prosecco getting warm and our ice cubes melting. We ferried everything out to the car boot and crossed our fingers that it wouldn’t freeze solid in the snowy night.

We’re getting the new fridge-freezer tomorrow, which after a week without one is terribly exciting. Chris has made a pile of ice cube trays and booze he’s planning to put in there as soon as is scientifically sensible. Hooray for cold drinks!

Tomorrow is also Hogmanay, which means I’ll get drunk too early, have a headache by midnight and fall asleep during Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. Tradition!

I was born in 1980, which I’ve always liked – I reckon when I’m ancient, it’ll be easy to work out how old I am.

Anyway, the point is that I recently turned 30, huzzah!

All year there have been vague plans for a fabulous party to mark the occasion, but due to mine and Chris’ crazy deadlines of late, it just wasn’t going to happen. Happily, though, I work with a bunch of lovely people who go out of their way to make a massive fuss over birthdays. Check it out:



Cakemaster and all-round domestic goddess Angela made this amazing three-tier tower of monster cupcakes. Each one is different, with features made of Smarties, marshmallows, chocolate buttons and other deliciousness. Raaarrr!



Mega editor Jenny crafted a flock of tinfoil birds, while Lu made tiny bunting for their beaks. Hello!



There were also the pinkest flowers in town! Then we went out to lunch where there were fab presents and handmade cards and just a massive, head-swelling fuss.

Thank you to everyone who sent lovely presents and cards, you are obviously GREAT.

Next, Christmas! Have a very merry one, you gorgeous peeps. See you on the other side. x

Winter wonderland
I say a lot of horrid things about our flat, but I really can’t fault the views from the living room windows. Today the garden and the trees are all covered in snow and it’s just lovely. I haven’t taken a photo, though; you’ll just have to imagine it.

In honour of the snow, I was allowed to open my birthday present a few days early. It’s a king-sized, dual-control electric blanket and it’s one of my favourite presents ever. Yesterday I cranked it up to its maximum heat setting and let myself cook like a cinema hotdog. Delicious.

Cake care & feeding
I can’t believe I haven’t told you about The Cake. Back in October, my colleague Angela told me that she was preparing to make her Christmas cake, explaining that was important to let it mature and to feed it brandy for a while before before Christmas. I didn’t know anything about cake-making, but I was very interested in Angela’s words of cakey wisdom.

The next day, because Angela is awesome, she brought me a large tupperware container filled with her leftover ingredients, a small cake tin and a printed recipe. A cake kit! So I whipped up my first ever Christmas cake, filled with brandy-soaked fruit, brown sugar, treacle and spices. Mmm!



When it was done, I wrapped it up and hid it under the table. Every couple of weeks, the boy and I open it up, spoon over some brandy, then pack it away again. It smells incredible! I suspect one slice will put us over the drink-drive limit, and two in quick succession will possibly render us unconscious, but – hey! – it’s for Christmas! I’ll post a pic when it’s finally decorated.

Everyone bake a cake! You won’t regret it.

Hooray, the boy’s magazine has gone to press and we’ve managed to have a relaxing weekend for the first time in three months. It’s currently 3.42pm and I’m still sitting in pyjamas.

Last Tuesday my dad came to Bristol for a flying visit and said he enjoyed my last twenties tale, so here’s another one for your entertainment. It’s less amusing than the previous one, but what do you want from me, hm? Vultures.

Tales from my Twenties: The Government Reception

Now, some of you may find this hard to believe, but in my teaching days I was considered something of a tip-top, on-the-ball, educatin’ whizkid. Being both freakishly young and reasonably versed in current pedagogical thinking, it was decided that I would represent our school at a government reception during which a white paper would be released into the wild.

So my name was passed on to whoever-the-hell organises government receptions, presumably my entire backstory was crosschecked until they located my tonsils in an Aberdeen childrens’ ward, and eventually I received the fanciest invitation I’ve ever seen. At the very bottom of the invitation, there was some information about the dress code; I only remember that the men’s dress code was of the straightforward ‘wear a suit’ variety, and the women’s was very confusing, to the point that I bought and returned about five outfits before finally begging an Oasis shop assistant to pick something out and sell it to me.

Anyway, the day came. I stood on Piccadilly in the drizzle and wolfed down a Costa sandwich, then checked my teeth in a shop window and clippy-clopped towards Lancaster House.

Lancaster House is a house in the same way Ben Nevis is a hill. It’s a gigantic, ornate mansion that has stood in for Buckingham Palace in various flouncy costume dramas. Apparently it’s got rather a grand facade, but I never saw it; I had been instructed to approach it from the back, on foot, and report to the police checkpoint for my invitation and passport to be checked. The police were rather twinkly and friendly, quickly waving me toward the glossy black door. There was no one else around, but I am freakishly punctual and quite used to being the first person at parties.

The door opened as I walked towards it, revealing a smartly-dressed doorman and a magnificent hallway. There aren’t many pictures of the interior of Lancaster House, but this painting is a pretty accurate representation.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Good evening,’ said the doorman, ‘The cloakrooms are on the right.’

‘Excellent, thank you.’ As far as I was concerned, a cloakroom was a place to leave your coat. Or cloak, if you prefer. I hadn’t brought a coat, but figured if a trip to the cloakroom was the done thing, then I’d better go there. Maybe I could drop off my handbag.

Dear readers I’m sure you already know this, but if you find yourself in a schmancy, non-school context, ‘cloakrooms’ means ‘toilets’. Rather than make the doorman think I was a total oddball, I had to stand in the ladies’ lavatories for five minutes, staring at the mirror until an appropriate amount of time had passed to go back into the hallway.

Anyway, I was soon surrounded by very excitable middle-aged ladies and a few grumpy, politically-charged men. We were seated in a room with TV cameras before the Education Secretary hustled in, made a bafflingly opaque speech, fielded a few questions and hustled out again. It was over in minutes.

Afterwards, there was a champagne reception with finger food where the MPs and teachers could mingle and discuss education policy. Now, I like a glass of champagne as much as the next person, but when I’m in work-mode, talking to government officials and surrounded by cameras, I’d rather just have a glass of water, thanks. Not so for many of the other guests. They threw back glasses of wine, ate scallop after scallop, dropped pancetta down their blouses and generally had a grand old time.

I was cornered by an MP I’d never heard of, but he was content to talk at length about his various media projects while I nodded and fended off the scallops. After a while, when the champagne drinkers started to get giggly and the politically-charged guys started to get argumentative, I slipped out of a side door, past the police checkpoint and on to a night bus back to New Cross.

No moral, but possibly a few etiquette lessons in that one. Cloakrooms are sometimes toilets. MPs provide their own small talk. Scallops are not finger food.

Tap!
At long flipping last, I’m allowed to talk about the boy’s new job. He’s launching a new magazine for iOS devices, and it’s going to be rockingly awesome. I’m very proud of him. Look out for the first issue of Tap! Then insist that all of your iPod/iPhone/iPad-owning friends buy it by the armful. They’ll thank you for it.

Friday night Fry
We both had fun saying hello to Stephen Fry at his book event here in Bath. We asked him to sign our book to ‘The Phins’ and he said, in a delightfully Fryesque way, ‘Well, I hope the Phins enjoy it, every one of them.’



The book is excellent, by the way, but do make sure you read this one first. I think it’s even better.

Divine
As far as I’m concerned, Saturday nights are for staying in, wearing pyjamas and drinking sparkling alcoholic drinks. Now and then, however, I can be lured out by something exciting like the Neil Hannon gig in Bristol yesterday.

As a rule, I hate gigs. Especially standing ones. They’re hot and you get jostled and, when you’re 5’3, you can see almost nothing. But this was fantastic; witty and indulgent and up-close. Go and see The Divine Comedy if you get the chance, you won’t regret it.

This is the only photo the boy took; the empty stage from the back of the room. Atmospheric!



Tales from my Twenties
My lack of interesting things to talk about recently has been a bit depressing, so in the run up to my birthday I’ve decided to fill the rest of November with some Tales from my Twenties. I can’t promise they’ll be interesting, but at least they’ll be here for posterity when I’m old and forgetful.

Let’s go! This one’s a bit namedrop-tastic, but we’ve already had a Stephen Fry encounter, so let’s just make that the theme of this post:

Tales from my Twenties: HMV
When I first moved to London, I applied for a postgraduate teaching course that started in September, but needed a job to pay the rent in the meantime. Despite my wobbly grasp of classical music, I secured a full-time job in the classics department of HMV Oxford Circus, which turned out to be one of the best and maddest jobs I have ever held.

The classics staff were mostly graduates from elite music schools who could play entire Bach sonatas from memory and formed string quartets in their spare time. One of the till girls used to double her weekly salary by busking with her cello on Bankside each Sunday.

Both better and more frightening than the staff were the customers, who divided into Celebrity and Quite Mad (never both, surprisingly). Due to the store’s proximity to Broadcasting House, I had to learn to act casual when faced with BBC legends and other niche telly people, and I was TERRIBLE at it. I just stared blushingly at the till as I served John Peel, Paul Merton, John Suchet, Ben Miller and lots of other people I’d grown up watching and listening to. If I had to interact with them I went to pieces – my brain’s survival mechanism has now blocked out the most humiliating episodes, but I still have flashbacks of having to perform a random credit card check on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. At one point, Madonna came in to do an in-store gig. I stood within spitting distance of her, she a millionaire rapping badly about lattes, me a minimum wage earner wearing a polyester polo shirt, and pondered idly the events that had brought us to the same place.

The Quite Mad customers were (and possibly still are) famous in their own right within the store. There was a lady who came in almost daily with a cat perched on her shoulders. A well-spoken gent who always wanted the earliest music he could find; having exhausted our range of medieval music groups, he asked if we had any prehistoric recordings – not contemporary imaginings of prehistoric music, you understand, but recordings of music made in prehistoric times. Quite mad.

My favourite customer was a very elderly gentleman who dearly wanted to buy a very specific 1940s recording of a particular classical piece. A few of us turned the store upside down looking for it, grumbling all the while about all the work the fussy old duffer was causing us. Of course, when the CD turned up, the cover showed a black and white still from the recording showing the man himself conducting the orchestra. He was the JR Hartley of the classical world! I wish I could remember his name.

Here ends my tale of working in HMV. There is no moral other than this: if you want to work in a shop, work in HMV. Everyone is clever, crazy or famed, and you get a good staff discount too.

It is September! Perhaps one day I’ll stop starting all my posts by announcing the month, but let’s not hold our collective breath. Here are just a few of my frankly dazzling thoughts:

Old
I know intellectually that I’m in no way old. But that doesn’t stop me from dyeing my grey hair, wearing glasses so strong they’d give a normal person x-ray vision, and confusing younger people in pubs by referencing Gordon the Gopher and Bertha*.

Lentils
I don’t usually cook lentils, but I made this for the boy last weekend and it was delicious. The salsa’s a bit of a faff, but if you make loads, you can freeze a bit to heat up next time. Old-person tip!

Time off
I’m hotly anticipating my week-off later this month. Chris is too busy to join me, sadly, but I plan to decorate the spare room, sew shoddy dresses and visit Bristol. We moved to Bath in 2007 and so far have had zero desire to visit Bristol, despite being only 15 minutes away by train. We tend to go to London for shopping expeditions and stay in Bath for culinary adventures, but I feel we’ve neglected poor Bristol. If anyone has any top recommendations for what a skint lone woman can do in Bristol, let me know.

That’s it! Have a cosy, crispy September weekend, you lovely people.

*Peroni-fuelled synopsis: ‘Bertha was a big factory machine. She could make anything, and it came out of her mouth.’ That was a weird show, am I right?

Lots of things! You don’t have to read them, though. Why not take this opportunity to catch up on your knitting, or take the rubbish out? I won’t hold it against you.

Tedious weekend rundown

Last weekend was a little bit bonkers, in that I was shocked at how much you can cram into two days if you really try.

On Saturday we went with aunties Sheila and Isla to celebrate my cousin Alis’ 14th birthday. We all went to Crockadoodledo and painted bowls and mugs and teapots and a dish for Alis’ new puppy. The gentle people of Crockadoodledo were very friendly when faced with a party of whooping Scottish ladies (and Chris) and had no problem with us eating cakes, blowing out candles and stealing paint pots from other tables.

That evening, we went to The Coachmakers in London, where Jamie had turned 30, put on a waistcoat and ordered a number of beverages. We gave him a large model of a Rancor fighting Luke Skywalker, which seemed insane when we were on the Tube but made perfect sense when every bloke in the pub went ‘OOOH’.

As we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, we left Jim’s party at a scandalously-early 10pm and went in search of food. WITH EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WHOLE OF LONDON. Ed’s Diner was jumpin’ but we managed to get a seat and ordered burgers and fries and onion rings and massive Cokes. This is the manic face of a woman who’s been up for 16 hours and just walked several miles in heels.



I really wanted one of those boozy milkshakes, but feared it would tip me over the edge.

Thanks to the Last Minute Secret Hotels thingy, we ended up staying at the Park Lane Hotel for cheap. The room was teensy and quite basic, but the hotel itself is in an ace location on Piccadilly, and has the lovely Palm Court, a proper 1920s Art Deco bar. Sunday was our 5th wedding anniversary, so we went down early-afternoon and ordered cocktails; the shakey-shakey and buzzy-blending of which may have destroyed the tranquil afternoon teas of many American tourists. SORRY TOURISTS. Here’s the boy, looking like a man who’s just spent ten years living with a woman who can’t operate her own television. Happy anniversary!



After that we walked for miles and went to see the BP Portrait Award exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which is excellent. And free! Go and see it, I promise you’ll come away inspired.

Accepting being the crazy lady

Cope’s recent post is a good illustration of my current renown among friends and colleagues for being something of a feminist killjoy. Poor Cope has been accused several times of sexism-by-blogpost and Chris’ editor Graham delights in goading me from time to time with talk of pink iPods and the like.

It’s difficult; I was raised to be polite and try my best to be respectful of different views, even if I don’t agree with them. When I was a teacher, though, my headmaster knocked an interesting message into my skull: ‘By ignoring it, you’re condoning it.’ He was actually talking about violations of the uniform rules at the time, but it really stuck with me.

Until about a year ago, the only thing I’d stick my neck out for, conversationally, was racism. On any other disagreeable matter I’d sit tight-lipped and seething until the moment passed.

Then I met a guy who was casually homophobic in everyday conversation. The first few times, I just coughed and turned away when he made outrageously sweeping generalisations or jokes about our gay acquaintances, but then my old headmaster’s words started to haunt me. By ignoring it, I was condoning it. This guy thought that I agreed with him. He thought his point of view was acceptable. The next time it happened, I told him to shut the fuck up. I may even have mused aloud on why exactly he was so obsessed with gay men. It’s possible that my voice was slightly raised to embarrass him in public. Either way, he never raised the issue of sexual preference with me again and it felt pretty good.

After that, I decided to speak up every time I heard a friend say anything socially antiquated and unacceptable. Thankfully, in my tiny Bath world, racism and homophobia only very rarely rear their heads, but frustratingly, sexism and misogyny are absolutely rife. And I just can’t let it pass.

I don’t hate men. I just want some men to stop talking about women as something other. I don’t hate women either. I just want some women to stop claiming pole dancing is empowering. Look here’s David Mitchell to lighten the tone!

Male or female, if you know you’re about to say something sexist, just don’t say it. You’re a relic.

More Holmes!

Okay, since Sherlock ended I’ve had to read a bunch of my old Conan Doyle books, and I’ve decided I want two things for the next series: more disguises and Irene Adler. Let’s make it happen, internet.

That’s it. Next weekend we are headed to beautiful Dorset for the Wedding of the Year! Expect photos. And cake.

Things here on the Ribble have been very quiet of late, mainly because I’ve been ploughing all my blogging energies into the PaperCraft inspirations blog. Look, you can watch our little iPhone video and everything! Here’s the rest of my August news:

Birthdays
It’s been a bonkers summer of birthdays; my grandma was 80, Linda turned 60, Jim’s about to be 30 and Alis is a shocking 14. Consequently I’ve spent a spectacular number of weekends catching flights and eating cake, like lottery winner gone rogue.

Sherlock
A few people have emailed and Tweeted to ask what I think of the latest Sherlock series and if there will be a Sherlock-cap (or a Caps-lock, as Brennan suggested in a moment of genius).

I must confess that as a big fan of the Conan Doyle stories, I was a bit concerned about the idea of a modern day adaptation; you know, in case they had Holmes ride a scooter or dance at a nightclub or something else insanely out of character. But OF COURSE I needn’t have worried!

There have been two episodes so far and they’ve been ace. I love the Baker Street flat and Holmes’ droll voice and the deep-into-London locations. Modern stuff that could’ve been cheesy, like the texting and emails, seem quite alright for a character that craves speedy logic.

Weirdly, the only bits that make me wince are the things that veer too knowingly to the source – the ‘three-patch problem’ was a clanger, for example.

So yeah, I’m a bit too late for Sherlock-caps, but maybe that would be fun if there’s a Christmas special or something.

Anniversary
It’s our anniversary this weekend, can you believe it’s a whopping five years since my ‘holy shit, we got married’ blog post? I might dig it out of the archives, just for fun.

Oh look, it’s July! My month has mainly been consumed by childhood flashbacks:

My friend John
One of those lovely Facebook things happened; I suddenly made contact with my friend John from school. How delightful! John remembers how my mum used to insist on offering him loads of food when he came to the house, and that one of our teachers used to pay us a fiver to hoover his car on Friday afternoons. We both remember that the car stank of tobacco, and once we found a bunch of flowers in the boot. I don’t know if John remembers that it was a red Henry hoover*, or that we had to plug it in through the nursery window and loads of cranky post-nap toddlers would watch our car-hoovering antics.

*Bloody hell, I’ve discovered there’s a whole family of Henry hoovers! Truly there was never a happier ending to a Facebook reunion story.

Upping and Downing
As of next weekend, I’ll have seen my parents a record three times in two months. I don’t think I saw them this much when I was actually living with them.

Sing cuccu!
My brain has selected Sumer Is Icumen In as a kind of aural screensaver. We had to learn this in primary school, which in retrospect was a conspicuously English song for a Gaelic-teaching Highland classroom, but whatever. I worry about the people on the bus who find themselves sitting too close to a woman humming the song from The Wicker Man under her breath. Sorry, bus peeps!

April is the cruellest month, although this April does seem to be a particularly dastardly one. The only way to feel more cheerful about tramping about in the rain is to do so in a pair of top-notch groovy shoes. The boy surprised me last week with this totally hoopy pair of silver glitter Converse lace-ups, and now the pavement is my discotheque.



In other news, I am wildly excited about the new series of Doctor Who starting. Chris has challenged me to ‘Whocap’ the entire series, which, given my poor short-term memory and expositionary skills, ought to be of use to no one but entertaining to all. Join me tomorrow and help fill in the gaps!

May your next 30 years be full of:



Friendly dogs



Sophisticated dinner conversation



Dazzling technological experiments



Windy beachy fun



And really cool shoes.

Hip hip hooray!

xxx

Shockingly, it’s the boy’s 30th birthday this weekend. We are heading to London to celebrate. Brace yourselves, Londoners; we’ve been going slowly, properly, real ale, full moon, West Country bonkers over the last few months. I’m not sure we can integrate back into civilian life at this point.

In other news, here is a picture of a breakfast Chris made for me in recent weeks. I believe my instructions were ‘don’t put too much cereal in the bowl’.

My lovely colleagues treated me to a set of pink moustaches to cheer me up this week. Angela took a picture. Nice, huh?



Have a groovy weekend! x

Oh hello, how’s things? Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Not wearing black. Or brown.
The long dark winter has inspired me to wear more funky colour, and it’s kind of fun. I’ve now got a purple coat and a lime-green sweater and a stripey knitted hat. And golden shoes. I heartily recommend wearing colourful clothes if you’re in a winter funk.

Grappling with feminism
I thought adolescent-style world-grumps would disappear as I got older, but instead I’m getting more grumpy. I don’t like hearing my lovely and beautiful female friends talking about their bodies with disgust. I don’t like that even the most successful female pop stars on MTV are still half-naked in their videos. I don’t like the word ‘hot’. I don’t like that the Guardian website’s ‘Women’ tab is located in the ‘Life & Style’ pages. Oh dear. I’ve become a ranty blogger. Let’s move on.

Visiting a con
I went to the SFX Weekender to assist the boy, who was handling the awards presentation. It was cool.

All these people really like Ianto off Torchwood:



And here’s me next to the Tardis of Love, in which two attendees were discovered, ahem, in flagrante delicto.



As you can see, I am regenerating.

Hey, have you read The Mousehunter books by top author and illustrator Alex Milway? If not, go and read them right now. I can wait.

Finished? Good, let’s move on.

So a few months ago I said I’d help Alex make a few mice for his Extraordinary Mouse Roadshow. Predictably, I only managed to make one mouse, but I’m pretty pleased with it.



He is a Methuselah Mouse, the oldest mouse known to mouse collectors, and this is the (slightly tedious) story of his making. You can click each picture for a bigger version on Flickr. If you literally have nothing better to do, or are unhealthily interested in papier mâché.



I didn’t want to buy new materials to make Methuselah Mouse; I wanted everything about him to be a bit old and musty. Also, I am cheap. So I dug some old bits of wire out of my craft stash and built a mouse skeleton using some x-ray images I found online as reference. Yes, I am now a person who has Googled ‘mouse x-ray skeleton bones’, and that’s something I’ll have to learn to live with.

Alex’s mice have longish claws and snouts, so I exaggerated these bits in my model. Once I was happy with the wire skeleton, I wrapped his limbs and ribs with layers of newsprint and masking tape to flesh him out a bit.



Poor mousey was wobbly as hell during this stage, and I kept returning from work to find him faceplanted on the carpet. I had to get a layer of papier mâché on him quick-smart! The best thing to use for papier mâché is wallpaper paste, but I was too lazy to go to Homebase, so I used a 50/50 mix of water and PVA glue. Little squares of newsprint were soaked in the glue and slowly built up over the hips, legs and ribs.



Ears! The only way to describe this stage is ‘form paper into ears’, which isn’t terribly useful.



Er, then I forgot to take any pictures of him for a while. In order, I found some beady eyes and pressed them on to the paper face, then he got a coating of PVA mixed with plaster, which looked all lumpy and mad. I could’ve sanded him, but I quite liked the rough-and-ready look.



Then he got a covering of wispy wool tops. Cute, right? Around this time, Chris and I developed a kind of obsession with the mouse and kept narrating the action using a high-pitched mouse voice eg. “Eek eek! I am all fluffy now! Look at my ears! I like cheese!” etc. We are easily entertained.



Lastly, I painted his paws and nose with acrylic paint. I left the ends of his wire ribs sticking out, for an extra-ancient effect, so they got a coating of white paint for good measure.



And he made his perilous journey to Penge through the mail. What a hero!

Look out for this Methuselah Mouse in a bookstore near you!

Wow, loads of things have happened in December. To start with, I turned 29 years old and the boy took me to London for an exciting weekend of eating ribs at Bodean’s and spotting Mika and Huw Edwards (not at the same time).

Despite such adventures, I’ve been in a dreadful funk all month and shall now gloss over this fact with a gallery of Scottish pictures. Huzzah!

Here is me with one of Chris’ new kitten brothers.



If you’re suffering a winter funk, kittens are a surefire cheer-up! This fella and his partner-in-chaos spent our entire visit chasing our shadows, curling up on our knees, sticking their faces in our cereal bowls and disrupting perfectly good games of Trivial Pursuit:



I also spent much time admiring the Palnackie chickens, whose main interests are hot water and brussels sprouts. The cold doesn’t really seem to bother them; they just hustle up into their coop and sleep through whatever the thermometer throws at them.



Then we went to my ma and pa’s and there was just arseloads of snow. Apparently it’d been snowing every day for a week, and everyone was understandably sick of digging out their cars. Having been away from this hardcore climate for most of our adult lives, and forgetting just how difficult knee-deep snow is to walk in, Chris and I went straight out for a mini hike.



Also, Gra and I made a MAGNIFICENT SNOW QUEEN:








Look upon the snow queen’s beauty and despair! Unfortunately, we built her looking into our parents’ bedroom, so now they have to suffer her piercing stare in the darkness every time they go to close the curtains.



Not to be outdone, my dad disappeared into the front garden to make a ... well, it started off as a Sphinx, but quickly morphed into a Wallace and Gromit-style giant were-rabbit. Arrrrgh!





Chris doesn’t look particularly impressed.

On the drive home, high in the hills outside Glasgow, temperatures dropped to -11°C and poor Carlos suffered terribly. His (anti-freeze!) screen wash froze solid, icicles formed on his roof and the condensation on the inside of his windows froze in little starbursts all around us. It was very beautiful, and only slightly hairy. The saddest part was the lonely sheep standing about by the motorway, scraping with their hooves to find grass.

Tonight is Hogmanay, and the boy and I will say a thankful ‘piss off’ to 2009. Have a lovely evening, everyone – see you on the other side! x

Today the centre of Historic Bath ground to a halt for possibly the most exciting event in recent history; Nicolas Cage turned on our Christmas lights. Exciting, right? I tried to summon up a bit of Cage-fever in the office by writing ‘OMG’ on this picture of him and then sticking it to the noticeboard, but it didn’t really fly. Frankly we’re not going to be impressed until the reanimated corpse of Elvis Presley turns on our Christmas lights.

In other news, our kitchen flooded and a plumber had to come. Oh the glamour.

Kissu!

How did it get to be November? I suppose mainly our linear concept of time is responsible. It’s been a traumatic few weeks here in the Poringe. First, Carlos’ nose got smashed to smithereens and he had to go away for cars-metic surgery* and then we all got manky colds and had to hang around leaking facial fluids all over the place. Sorry, that was an unnecessarily gross description of a cold.

Still, things are looking up in a Christmassy kind of way. I am excited! Is it time to put our tree up yet? What about now? Now? Now? In a minute or two, yeah? Great.

Obviously I have no news to share, so in the manner of a crap clip-style episode of a long-running sitcom, why not hark back to the glory days of the Ribble by reliving my favourite ever post? The comments still make me laugh out loud, although perhaps you had to be there, in a New Cross flat, eating rice and Googling ‘Crupdum2’.

Nighty x

*HA! I am hilarious.

One of my favourite things to see in the West Country is the fallow deer herd at Dyrham Park. I love how they are almost the same colour as the scrubby grass:



And I love that they’re not-at-all afraid of humans. This buck wandered out in front of us as we climbed the hill back to the car park. He looks like he stepped out of a storybook!

We had a lovely Saturday night/Sunday morning with Cope in Cardiff, where we made some experimental bread and made a holy pilgrimage to Cardiff Bay, Home of Barrowman. Eating lunch in Cafe Rouge, the boy suddenly noticed a long white hair floating in the wind. Cope quickly spotted another one and I was utterly perturbed.

When we got home, I made the boy take a picture. Once I stood in the light, he said ‘God, you’ve got loads!’ and, sure enough, there were several strands of white spread all the way along my parting.

Of course, living with a man who started balding in his late teens, it’s difficult to get any sympathy for sudden hair-whitening. The only consolation is that, while it makes me feel old, I bet it makes my parents feel ruddy ancient. SORRY!

Here are some grainy cameraphone shots from our trip to Brighton yesterday, where the boy was covering the opening of the new Apple store. While he went off to the press preview I toddled off for a walk on the seafront.



There’s a special corner of my heart reserved for Brighton; we used to come here on daytrips when London got hot and insane. It seemed very quaint then, although compared to Bath it feels like a bustling metropolis. I was on the pier at 8.30am, and it was delightfully empty, with lots of places to sit on the sunny side and watch happy dogs jumping around in the waves. Dogs love beaches!



The beach is very pebbly and I don’t usually bother going into the water, but when I arrived it was low tide, so took my sandals off and had a paddle along the sand. Lovely!

Oh Christ, I’ve been away for ages. What the hell have I been doing? I mean, just what exactly has been SO IMPORTANT that I haven’t been able to update this site for such a ludicrously long time? WHAT?

Mostly, I’ve been letting my hair grow very large and cumbersome, scaring children with my upper arms and leaning on gates like this:



Crazy, I know. And it’s not only pointless personal websites that have been allowed to fester during this protracted bout of gate-leaning, no! I have also failed to do any drawing or crafting or French-refreshering or writing or reading. I don’t know why. I have a creeping suspicion that my bountiful creativity in the past may have been inextricably linked to being permanently stressed out of my mind. But, I suppose if I have to choose between sanity and anatomical embroideries, sanity wins by a nose.

It’s barely worth telling you about everything that’s happened in the last month or so, partly because it’s old news and partly because it’s fairly boring. In brief: We snapped and booked a holiday, Historic Bath got hot as a bastard, Carlos developed a terrible smell and the boy got special sunglasses that give him the power of x-ray vision.

Anyway, I won’t get all panicky about when I’ll be back, like this is the internet equivalent of Awakenings or something. I’ll come back later and tell you the tale of Carlos’ smell and the Curious Incident of the Doors in the Night Time. Or maybe I won’t. Argh, you can’t trust anyone, least of all easily-distracted Scottish women with gate-leaning to get on with.

Kissu!

I’d been holding off on posting until our amazing bathroom renovations were finished, but frankly we may all grow old and wither before they’re finished, so I shall just get on with it.

The Mother Country
I went to the Mother Country, where we went on the Royal Yacht Britannia and marvelled at the royal luxury livin’. Fact: there was no double bed on the yacht until Prince Charles had one put in for his honeymoon. The best part of the yacht is below decks, in the crew quarters, where they slept crammed in like sardines and drank in a fantastic mess room where Di allegedly joined them for a snifter one evening.

Care and Feeding of Builders
We’ve had to buy in lots of hilariously stereotypical builder food. They like white bread, Hob Nobs and sugary tea. Chris says he has also witnessed them whistling in that warbly builder way. Can we keep one, mummy?

Wolverine
Went to see Wolverine, became obsessed with his manly ways and haircut. I want a wolfy hairdo!

Er, the boy’s just given me a stiff drink and a bowl of plantain crisps, so I shall bid you adieu and return with tales of bathroom genius.

Adieu!

What ho! I’m surprised that Wodehouse: A Life has such mediocre reviews on Amazon, as I’ve been reading it this week and finding it pretty interesting stuff.

We’ve had a fun Easter, watching Doctor Who and riding in a hot air balloon. What more can you ask for of a weekend, really? We’ve also been watching far too much Jonathan Creek, to the point that the boy managed to predict whodunnit-and-how within the first five minutes of the last episode. Nice work! Perhaps he is amateur sleuthing in his spare time.

Bath is covered in blossom, all white and pink and lovely. When we were in London we saw a stunning display of cherry blossom-themed sweets in the Minamoto Kitchoan on Piccadilly, which is totally worth checking out, you Londonites.





Those little jellies in the top right corner had real and amazingly red cherries trapped inside, while the rice cakes on the bottom were wrapped with a blossom inside a leaf. Magical! We didn’t buy any, mainly because they were too beautiful to eat.

My bloggy absence of late is mainly because I’ve been spending all available internet time on OTAT10 planning. I’m gunning hard for the Maldives, a location so wildly out of our league that it’s almost certain to end in tears. Hey ho!

Haven’t been drawing or sewing at all lately, although I’m not sure why as I have bags of time now, more than I did when I was cranking out enormous embroideries and slippers and puppets. Decided to make an effort by keeping a nice sketchbook and some super-fancy pencils next to my bed, and have drawn some vaguely pleasing if wildly out-of-character things just before sleeping – robots, monsters, houses on stilts and a person with a balloon, so far.

It’s interesting to draw out of my head though, something that at art school is only slightly less frowned upon than weeing on the studio floor. Actually, someone at my art school did wee on the studio floor, only much worse, and submitted it for marking. Good times.

The boy sent me a link to the ol’ homestead on all-new Google London street view, which made me feel all odd. Someone has put very ugly curtains up in our living room, and you can still see the slightly bare bit of wall where the New Cross Road sign fell off.

In other news, the boy and I are currently involved in a healthy livin’, money saving pact in which we walk home from work in the evening instead of getting the bus. It’s only about 2 miles, but up a ridiculous incline that gets gradually steeper and steeper until we’re almost crawling. If my trousers don’t fit better by Saturday I’m going on a pie-bender at The Raven.

The boy gave me a new camera gizmo to try out, and I inadvertently captured a perfect 40 second snapshot of our married life. I make pointless requests, the boy follows them without question, we talk to the car and I piss myself laughing for no good reason.

Lots of things have happened, and yet I have not told you lovely people about any of them. Unless you are on Twitter, in which case I’ve told you about all of them, in real time, in excruciating detail. Anyway. In order:

Everyone’s favourite Welsh-speaking American came to Bath and we played mini-golf. It was pretty great. Cope won, mainly due to his hardcore mini-golfing technique. There is a picture of me too, but it is not nearly as inspiring.

The boy turned 29 and bankrolled a madcap London visit to celebrate. We stayed at the beautiful Athenaeum hotel and were treated to the sight of our dinky Carlos being valet-parked by a doorman in a bowler hat. Hilarious. Adorably, all the boy wanted for his birthday was a rack of ribs at the Texas Embassy and an ice cream for afters. Done.

Happy birthday, you lovely man!

Today is my dad’s birthday. Happy birthday Dad! I hope you have an excellent day. Buying cards for my dad highlights a severe gap in the manly card market; you can buy loads of cards with golf, beer and football on them, but hardly any featuring, say, codebreaking, rocket science and mole-killing. Get with it, Hallmark!

In other news, the melting of the snow has left me too bereft to blog for most of February. Notable events include the boy buying a Wii, the sky being lighter at night and all of my internal organs combusting due to the cuteness of bebeh Brennan.

Work is sweet, to the point that I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it out loud. I heart you, Future!

Sometimes I miss New Cross very badly. I miss it when I hear the Eastenders theme tune, or a siren, or when I play Monopoly or see a red bus. But sometimes I wake up and our street looks so very beautiful that my eyes almost combust.
That’s our drive from the living room window. It always looks lovely, but in the snow it is especially Narnia-esque. See that driveway across the road? A man comes out of there three times a day to walk a massive racing greyhound. All winter, the dog has been wearing a red coat with a white fur trim, like it’s a canine Father Christmas or something. Weird.

This is our other living room window, which looks into the communal garden. It’s testament to how elderly our neighbours are that the snow in the garden has remained totally smooth and untouched for an entire week. Everyone’s too feeble to tramp around in it. Including me.

Er, this isn’t our flat. It’s one of the crazy mansions that line the rest of the street. This is the best mansion, as it has a tower and you can have a good gawp at it from the road (the others are disappointingly hidden from view by trees and walls. Bah.) I have no idea how the builders of our shoddy sixties block got planning permission. Fact: when I walked down the road to take these pictures, some unseen oddball was playing a haunting melody on a penny whistle.

Here’s The Poringe in all its moonlit glory. The boy took this, in his slippers. He is insane. That’s me on the ground floor, looking out of the window and shouting, ‘Put your wellies on, you loon.’ Goodnight!

My tax bill was somewhat larger than I anticipated, setting OTAT10 back considerably. Arsecakes. Still, it’s only money, I shall just have to earn more. Such is the wonder of modern living.

In happier news, I have learned to make risotto and have spent the last week perfecting the skill, mostly standing in the kitchen and shouting in a mock cockney-Italian accent until the boy agrees to eat some risotto and declare it delicious. It really is delicious, though.

Tonight I am sitting watching the temperature drop on my weather widget and hoping for the pretty, pretty snow. Come on, snow.

The boy has gone to Scotland, which was the perfect opportunity to complete my tax return, only I can’t due to a ridiculous administrative cock-up which leaves me waiting for the postman to bring me some tax stuff for days and days, bringing me uncomfortably close to the deadline on Saturday. Oh well.

Instead of doing my taxes I am hanging out in the Poringe, cooking risottos, playing my guitar and reading everything on the internet. Ukulele is on the naughty step in the hall until he can learn to stay in tune for more than five seconds at a time – bad uke!

Tonight is Burns Night. It has a special place in my heart because the only thing I have ever won, ever, is a Burns Competition when I was at school, when I sang John Anderson, My Jo. The prize was a certificate; how lame.

Here’s the fabulous Eddi Reader, in an irritatingly oversized YouTube box, singing it much better than I ever did:

Heart in San Francisco Shocker
The boy has gone away to San Francisco and left me to fend for myself. How very inconsiderate. So far I’ve eaten my weight in Cadbury’s Fingers and one slightly suspect bag of frozen meatballs left over from the great Christmas Eve frenzy. Hm.

Breaking News: It is Winter
I saw snow for the first time here in Historic Bath, which turned our street into a Dickensian wonderland of postcard quaintness for about an hour. Magical. Interestingly, snow is not allowed to lie in Historic Bath for more than one hour BY LAW, as the sheer beauty could render vital public service workers blind with tears of joy. The good news, ladies, is that you can now buy foxy silky thermal vests from Marks & Spencer. Do it, I promise you won’t regret it.

Heartwarming Final Story
Crafty people and the just-plain-nosy can check out my profile on the PaperCraft blog! This is also quite a useful reference tool when my mum asks me what I actually do for a living these days. Thanks, PaperCraft peeps, you rock!

Oh hello, I’m on my lonesome this weekend and growing as mad as a box of frogs. Not mad in a bad way, just mad in terms of watching junk and cooking elaborate lunches and reading Twilight books until my brain dissolves and dribbles from my ears like rice pudding. I know. No, I KNOW. Look, if reading sparkly vampire fluff is wrong, I don’t want to be right. It’s a sickness. A sparkly emo sickness. Perhaps someone should set up a rehab centre.

In other news, the Poringe is so cold that I had to get into bed to get warm. Even under the duvet my legs are all icy. The boy emailed to say the weather in California is ‘glorious’. He’ll feel like a proper charlie if I freeze to death while he’s sunning it up with the sealions. Yeah, that’ll show him.

Happy New Year! 2009 has thrust The Poringe into a frenzy of uncharacteristic optimism, with the boy spending the morning throwing out dozens of pairs of ancient socks and t-shirts and me lying on our bed drawing the routes of interesting trips we could take in 2010 on a hugely flimsy National Geographic fold-out map.

Operation Take A Trip in 2010, or OTAT10, as it shall henceforth awkwardly be abbreviated, is my new all-consuming project. The boy and I have never been on a proper holiday together – one with planes and passports and that doesn’t involve either of us going to a conference – mainly because we never have any actual money. The OTAT10 scheme is an 18 month regimen of saving/nagging/obsessive mapping that ensures we gather the sufficient funds to go on a kick-arse holiday in our 30th year. It’ll be like the Buon Natale on a massive and international scale. Hooray! I tell you all of this, dear Internet, because once I have saved up all of my money to go on holiday, I will feel the sudden urge not to blow it all on something as transient and short-lived as a trip and instead attempt to buy some furniture or a kitchen appliance or dentures. DO NOT LET ME DO THIS. It’s in writing now. Friends don’t let friends buy mattresses with their cash stash.

I go back to work tomorrow, and the boy is off to Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco for a week. BOO.

I’ve asked the boy for a piece of good news to finish off this post, and he says ‘Tell them I’ve just ordered labels for the label-making machine. Soon the flat will be all covered in labels.’ That really IS good news!

Oh look, it’s the last day of December and I’ve done nothing but eat fabulous food, watch fabulous films and walk over fabulously frosty West Country landscapes. Fabulous. Here is a picture of me on Christmas day, apparently over-excited about our ice bucket, or the fact that the waitress found a cracker hat to fit my humungous head. Miracle.



The boy and I are staying in tonight, drinking Prosecco and obsessing over Juliette Binoche. I hope you all have a truly happy Hogmanay and a restful New Year. Cheers!

Last Monday I turned 28 years old, which was lovely. Thank you everyone for the wonderful cards and gifts, which were very thoughtful and beautiful and generous. I had a teensy dinner with the Copes and Alexes on Saturday to celebrate both my birthday and owning a table for the first time in years. It was lovely, here is a short picture story:

How to Have a Birthday Dinner


1. Hoover the Poringe to show off its poringey vibrance.


2. Put the boy in charge of cooking and allow him to buy all of the vegetables in Sainsburys.


3. Make everyone a tin foil bird wearing a party hat, because frankly it's not a party without a hat-wearing bird. Fact: I was going to do a tutorial about making these birds until I realised that Step 1 would be 'Form tin foil into a bird', which really isn't the most helpful advice.


4. Set table. This ginormous paper tablecloth is from Ikea, and I highly recommend it. The next morning I just scrumpled the whole thing up along with the crumbs and candlewax and spills and chucked it in the bin. Eco fail! You can see the birds on the plates.


5. Boot up the Conversation Generator 8000 (patent pending). As you can see, the digital readout signals when the generator is ready to operate at peak efficiency.


6.Put prosecco in an ice bucket and force everyone who enters to have a glass, even people who don't really like prosecco. Now that's good hostessin'! Note: The boy bought this retro ice bucket on eBay, it has a huge dent in it. What happened?!


7. Marvel at the boy's peperonata. There was chicken too, but he didn't take a photo of that.


8. Be charmed by your lovely guests! I wish I had turned my hallway into a police line-up style mugshot booth because they were all so dapper and and attractive. And they brought excellent gifts too, thank you! Here I have just served hot chocolate as a pudding, with serve-yourself squirty cream and Flakes, because who doesn't like squirty cream? Also, I don't know how to make any actual puddings. Even this was a bit beyond me. That's Hannah in the corner, who is lots of fun and made me a card with amazing buttons on it and told us some ooky nursing stories. Alex was good enough to turn up even though he spends every day sitting next to the boy at work. Also, he could talk about the twin topics of rugby and ukuleles, bridging the conversational creek between the Copes and Phins. Well done! The Copes came all the way from Wales, Rachel driving back the same night through dark and icy lanes at two in the morning. Not only this, but they brought me cheese in the shape of a heart, proving that Cope friendship is for life, not just the internet.

The End

Winter babies rejoice, our season is here! Bath is really outdoing itself in the winter wonderland stakes this year, with a carousel added to the market fun. Hooray!

Here is my friend Emerald, who also loves the festive season:



Emerald is my birthday-twin. As she is far too cool to enjoy my boring adult birthday dinner, she graciously invited me to her party this Sunday instead, to paint faces. How could I resist?

Hello! I am once more full-time and fabulous, as long as for 'fabulous' you read 'dishevelled'. New Job is much fun and everyone at Future Towers is ludicrously friendly. I've learned more in four days than I've learned in ages and all is new and interesting. I shall be back soon with more tales of cunning and adventure. Or possibly just more shopping moans.

Today I left teaching, which is a difficult thing to talk about in a concise and sensible way. I've spent the last week dodging the question 'Are you sad to be leaving?' and wobbling over 'Will you miss the kids?' There's not really a yes or no answer.

It's a career that required six years of training and a level of professional dedication that excluded late nights, hangovers, spontaneity and the lightheartedness that generally accompanies one's twenties. It took most of my free time and, in South London, a good chunk of my sanity.

But at the same time, I loved my work. It was creative, interesting, stimulating and taught me more about art than art school ever did. And working with kids of any age is so brilliant and fascinating and hilarious that there's no way to not miss it. I'm proud of my students, and everything that they've achieved, and the things they might achieve in the future.

So that's my ridiculously long and earnest answer to the flippant question I've been fielding all day. Maybe I'll go back to teaching one day, or maybe I won't. I can say for certain, at least, that it was never time wasted.

Onward!

I was looking at frocks on ye olde internets today when I became intensely irate at the fashion 'advice' spewed all over the place by well-meaning bloggers and should-know-better, right-on women's sites. Because almost everywhere I look, ladies are being advised to hide or cover or disguise or generally be ashamed of themselves.

Arms both skinny and chunky should be sleeved, twiggy legs need boots, long necks need necklaces or scarves, pale triceps must be fake-tanned, thick waists need flowy optical illusion, flat chests need bolstering, COVER YOUR SHAME, for chrissakes, won't you think of the children?

Apparently my only hope, as a stumpy sturdy girl, is to wear a plunging v-neck and swaddle the rest of my being in burlap sacking, and then to limp around ringing a bell, shouting 'PUNISH ME, FOR I ENJOY CAKES ON A BI-MONTHLY BASIS AND AM UNDESERVING OF LOVE OR NICE TIGHTS.'

Well screw you, internet. I shall wear sleeveless tops with abandon! And kitten heels! And calf-length boots! And horizontal stripes! Actually, no, that would be awful. But I'll do those other things, and I'll look bloody fabulous while I'm at it.

ppppppttttthhbbbbpppp

Recently my mum told family friend Linda that she would give her the address for this website as it is 'sometimes entertaining'. This damningly faint praise reminds me that things around here have been fairly dull of late, mainly because my life has become a tedious administrative procedure interspersed with sporadic Kir drinking and increasingly bizarre hairstyles.

To break the monotony, I was going to post an outlandish anecdote, full of interesting things like 'Got chased by an enraged milliner' and 'Invented new primary colour' or possibly 'Thought could hear angels in the cupboard, turned out to be family of nesting crickets' but frankly I'm tired and I don't want to string a ridiculous, open-ended fable together lest I regret it in the morning.

Goodnight!

My iBook needs a bit of TLC, so the boy has lent me a Macbook Air to browse with. I'd swear it weighs less than my wallet. It certainly weighs less than my handbag. Apple, with these gravity-defying laptops, you are really spoiling us.

In other news, Scotland was ridiculously cold, the sort of cold where you keep your coat and hat on even inside the car, with the heating on full blast. The swarthy people of Edinburgh coped with it slightly better than I did, although I was vindicated by my mum's cat, who refused to go outside for more than a nanosecond before clawing at the door like a bad feline zombie movie. The good news is that it's time to put on my parka again, which is the closest I can get to going to work in a duvet.

This is my last school holiday ever. I can't help but feel I never really took advantage of them anyway, spending most of my time off either working or thinking about work. I am celebrating this milestone by doing work, hooray! Later next month I'm starting work at the mighty Future Publishing, in the same building as the boy. How very exciting and terrifying.

Today was a low-key end of term, and now I am in my flat with a six-pack of Coke Zero and a carrier bag full of lever arch files. My lovely headteacher has given me something of a reprieve, taking me semi-off-timetable for my remaining two weeks in order to finish some mad-urgent paperwork before I leave. Thanks!

On Sunday I am off to the Mother Country, leaving the boy at home to have a 36 hour Time Team marathon. When he's not eating or sleeping, you can be damned sure he'll be watching Tony Robinson standing in a muddy hole, holding a skull fragment.

In other news, my dad is now using his website to educate, postulate and develop bizarre strands of genetic research. Now that's good blogging!

Have a groovy weekend. x

Much excitement over New Job; even small things like being able to sit down for minutes on end, and allowed to wear trainers and denim, and the blissful knowledge that I'm unlikely to pick up headlice at work. I'm sad, of course, that I won't be singing at 1030 every morning at New Job, although perhaps no one will mind if I stand up once a day and belt out Shine Jesus Shine with full clapping actions in the office.

In other news, we are experiencing the most beautiful autumnal weather here in Historic Bath. Hooray sunshine! Big up leaves! Etc.

That is all.

Most days are kind of similar, then every so often there's an eventful one that leaves you all bewildered and nauseous on the sofa in your bra.

Yesterday I went into work early in order to break it to my headteacher that I had been offered another job and was leaving. She was utterly lovely about it, which somehow made it more traumatic. Then I went about my every day business without telling anyone else because, well, there never seemed to be a good time.

As the day wore on, I began to feel distinctly dreadful. I felt suddenly hot and tired and not-with-it. I recalled that feeling of being suddenly unwell from the time I had The Actual Flu, where I was standing in Trafalgar Square, waiting to meet the boy and my visiting parents, and suddenly I felt so overwhelmingly awful and exhausted that I literally couldn't stand up anymore. I had to sit down, on the ground, next to the supposedly-banished pigeons. I didn't feel as bad as that, at least, and soldiered through the rest of the day like a proper playground martyr.

Having arranged to go out at 8pm, the boy drove me to a friend's house, and we went on to another house, a beautiful one on the other side of the valley, where there was a friendly dog and pyjama'd children and tasteful decor - the exact opposite of The Poringe. I drank two glasses of sparkling wine and outed myself as a soon-to-be school-abandoner. The boy came to pick me up at midnight and was heckled mercilessly by drunk women. He took me home and let me eat his dinner leftovers.

This morning I awoke feeling awful, so awful that even the crystallised ginger didn't help, and I can't think of a synonym for 'awful'. Apparently two glasses of sparkling wine, a resignation and some cold chips are just too much for my constitution.

Still, an eventful Friday, at least. Pip pip!

Today a little boy asked if he could 'keep' a large knee-scab that had been brutally ripped off in a playground fall. Er, okay. I guess it's one for the album.

In other news, I bought a gigantic bag of crystallised ginger the other day and am secretly hoarding it around the flat. Open a cupboard: GINGER? Or a drawer: DELICIOUS GINGER? The boy has not noticed yet, which is odd as I smell distinctly gingery all the time.

Here's a sneaky peek at my linocut.



Linolicious!

The boy and I are huge fans of Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan, and have taken to repeating Bob's words of wisdom* in lilting nasal tones at appropriate moments in life. To amuse each other, we've extended our Bob-repetoire to include dramatic readings of recipes, celebrity gossip and gas bills; if you have to read something depressing, you may as well read it out-loud in the style of a legendary electro-folk singer/songwriter. Imagine my delight, then, upon reading this article. A rich new seam of talking like Bob! How exciting.

In other news, the boy has gone to Cornwall for an overnight sojourn. He has kindly packed the fridge with sensible Marks and Spencer delicacies so that I don't spend 24 hours eating toast and Craisins. Thanks!

*Recent favourite 'Go to the dawg park. Everyone's happier in the presence of a dawg.'

Oh hullo, it's October. Work remains crazy to the point where the boy was packed off to do the weekly shop on his own on Sunday. He delightedly returned having spent half of what we normally do; clearly it's just my lo-carb beer and whimsical fruit-buying habits that blow the budget.

I made an policy decision early on in my blogging career not to get into politics because, er, it invites twatty comments, but I'll break with tradition this once just to ask: Is anyone else heartily sick of hearing about the US elections? The only three pieces of information us cheese-lovin' Europeans really need are 1) who the candidates are, 2) what they stand for and 3) who wins. Enough with the excruciatingly detailed stream of information, mainstream domestic news broadcasters!

In other news, I am making a linocut for the first time since I was at school. The boy is being very helpful, occasionally grabbing the lino out from under me, doodling instructions for cut/don't cut all over it, then thrusting it back. Sometimes he'll even take it off me and cut the fiddly bits. Thanks!

Things here in Historic Bath have been a little on the stressful and grumpy side this weekend, mainly due to the boy having a massive work project on and me still grappling with a confusing timetable and some tediously complex admin. We spent the weekend alternately working and feeling guilty for not working, with the boy in the office all day Saturday and, he predicts, until midnight tonight. It was a timely reminder of why we left London; because every weekend was like this but worse and with added sirens.

In happier news, lots of the designers I interviewed for the Holland Herald over the summer have been in contact to say that they've heard raves about their pieces and requesting issues of the magazine. This is, of course, wonderful to hear, but it's getting increasingly embarrassing having to explain that I am not, in fact, a go-getting, Lois Lane-style media type, but rather a pyjama-wearing, Ikea-kitchen-table-sitting layabout with no access to the actual magazine whatsoever. The peeps at Hetty Rose have put a scan of their snippet up here, which I mention merely to highlight that I love Hetty Rose shoes and fully expect the first one of you to earn a million to buy me a pair of silky, fancy loveliness without delay.

That's it. Apologies for the poorly structured rambling but ... I don't even have an excuse. Bye, loveoo!

A big HAPPY BIRTHDAY is winging through the ether, splitting into two smaller HAPPY BIRTHDAYs which in turn are fluttering their way to two of Europe's grandest capital cities to tickle scalps containing two of the finest minds the Mother Country has ever produced.

So, in alphabetical order, happy birthday to Emma, notorious Malteser fetishist and biscuit-recipe-holder of Berlin. Have a lovely day! Make the work experience kids cater to your every whim! Buy a big pile of Soft Cakes and eat them on my behalf! While I abuse innocent punctuation!

And happy birthday to Graham, computer scientist, speaker of Japanese and fearsome critic of Edinburgh pizza joints. May your birthday be filled with savoury treats and only the finest brand-name beer. Cheers!

Hope all gifts have arrived safely and that neither of you required an ear trumpet to hear the doorbell.

My life has taken a turn for the intolerably sensible recently, with me undertaking such daily tasks as saving money, eating vegetables, washing the dishes and climbing the lateral stepper through entire episodes of Gilmore Girls. All of these things are even more tedious than they sound.

Anyway, the only frivolity on the horizon is my birthday dinner which - Hello, I am insane - is almost three months away. So I am planning my birthday dinner as if it's my last night on Earth, continually bombarding the boy with questions such as 'Do you think I should have ice cream for my birthday dinner?' and 'How do you feel about prosciutto?' and 'Can I put the Christmas tree up for my birthday dinner even though it will technically still be November?' Somehow he has managed so far to nod along and even make helpful suggestions instead of shouting 'SCREW YOUR BIRTHDAY DINNER, WENCH, I'M BUSY,' which, to be honest, he'd be totally justified in doing. I give it another fortnight before he hits me in the face with a Victoria sponge and goes to live with his Other Wife in Abergavenny.

The boy has just told me he will 'give me a review' if I am blogging about my helping him with his work this week. I'm not, but let's pretend in order to get the scoop:

“Wife 2.0 comes with a slew – nay, a veritable raft – of beefed-up features, and offers the perfect balance of support and encouragement to any time-poor hackhusband. It gets out of your way when you just need to get on with the task in hand, but it’s there with hints, tips and nose-wrinkles when the work starts to get you down. It’s the perfect solution for any hackhusband with a to-do list down to his ankles, and I can’t recommend it enough. ★★★★★”
Christopher Phin, September 2008

Hey, five stars! Thanks! I'm not sure which of my features are 'beefed-up', but if he's referring to my arse then the Gilmores can bite me.

September is proving a very slow blog-month, with nothing much to report on either the home or work front. Still, that's never stopped me from clogging up ye olde internets with a few hundred words, eh?

At work I discovered that what was considered a walk-in art cupboard was in actuality a fully functional and totally bitchin' ceramics studio, and thus have spent the week clearing out bags and bags of spider-covered debris. Hey, are those new earrings? No, they are spiders. You should really have that mole looked at! It is a spider. Etc.

In home news, I have decided to channel the bird madness into an amazing Christmas Gift Interactive Art Happening. I am painting a flock of birds and then sending each bird to a new home in the form of a Christmas present. Migrating birds through the postal system! This means that I spend a lot of time like this at the dining table, which looks romantic but is actually very bad for the posture.

My iBook has been all broken and wrong, meaning that we had to take him with us to London last weekend to be dropped off at Laptop Hospital. This was the only low point in an otherwise fabulosa trip, in which the boy wore a wig, I booked us into a South Bank hotel and we attended Lise 'n' Darien's super-fun 70s spectacular. I thought I might be gutted to come back to Historic Bath again, but fortunately the weather was humid and the Tube crammed enough* that I was more than ready for the West Country come Sunday afternoon.

Other news in brief: iBook still wonky, internet access limited, school back in session, tin-foil flock of birds taking over flat.

That is all. If you wish to be entertained further, why not check out my dad's all-new and brilliant blog? Specialist topics include Cycling, Astronomy, Maths, and Why Children Shouldn't Go In Puddles With Their Wellies On.

*Dear All Men,
Please to be looking where you are stepping when standing up on crowded public transport, especially on a Saturday when the vast majority of young women are likely to be wearing flimsy and/or strappy shoes.
Love, My Tragically Bruised Feet. xxx

This summer has turned me into a real No-Fun Phyllis. I've become obsessed with keeping the flat clean, which is so unlike me that I'm amazed the boy hasn't checked to see if there's a man in the walls with a pistol trained on my face or something. Also, I've been doing responsible things such as learning how to reverse park and completing my school work a whole week before I have to. AND I put our ten thousand regular number of empty wine bottles in a plastic crate to put out to the recycling van tomorrow. The worst part about all this is that being organised and tidy has in no way made me more relaxed or good-housewifey. Now I just spend all my time worrying about dropping Bombay Mix on the carpet. BAH.

Here is how to make Kir Royale (Not sure if it should have that last 'e' or not - French speakers plz comment).

Kir Royale
You will need:
1 bottle champagne - Yes, I know. A good cava will suffice.
1 bottle creme de cassis - It's an INVESTMENT okay?
A pretty glass
Chopstick, knitting needle or other implement

Chill champagne until ice cold.
Pour a decent measure of creme de cassis into glass.
Top up with champagne.
Stir with pointy implement.
Enjoy sense of Bombay Mix-worry slipping away in a haze of blackcurranty deliciousness.

What ho! On Wednesday I went to Cardiff and it was great. Cardiff has lots of things that Bath lacks, such as more than ten metres of level pedestrianism, a sea view, transport links and Welsh people. Despite the incessant drizzle and his poor health, Mr Cope was a paragon of hostly virtue, buying me a train ticket, providing umbrella coverage and, most importantly pointing out key Torchwood locations. Thank you! I feel I must pay more attention to Torchwood now, having obviously been utterly remiss in the past. It's worth noting that Cope knows more about John Barrowman than anyone else in the universe, possibly even John Barrowman. Sadly I forgot to take my camera to Cardiff, so instead of posting a photograph of a Welsh landmark, I shall allow you to pause and think of your favourite BBC science fiction drama.

That's enough.

In other news, to make up for the dreadful 'summer' 'holiday' the boy endured a few weeks ago, I am endeavouring to make his Bank Holiday as lovely as possible. I have bought picnic supplies and wine and am cleaning the flat to a sparkly state. I was even thinking of shaving my legs but LET'S NOT GO CRAZY.

Today, in the grand tradition of all school holidays, I am enjoying the tense company of a repair man. This time it's the washing machine that's thrown a hissy fit and gone on strike, three months out of warranty. O electrical appliances, why do you hate me so?

The world of washing machine repair is much more technically advanced that I'd expected; the man arrived with a black box containing a massive laptop and diagnosed the problem by looking at the screen. Weird. Although now he's bailing water using one of my John Lewis hand painted rice bowls, so I guess some aspects of the job will never truly evolve.

In other news, I had a driving lesson with a man named Richard yesterday, it was great. The good thing about having a driving lesson when you've already passed your test is that you're allowed to do things like mount the kerb when parking and drive at 34mph* and no one tells you off. You must have to have nerves of steel to be a driving instructor; Richard barely blinked at my stream of expletives or poor clutch control. What a guy.

*Two examples of why I need driving lessons.

And finally, the triad of exciting events is completed by me going to visit chez Cope in glorious Cardiff tomorrow. It will be the first time I have been to Wales in daylight and without sixty children in tow. Hooray!

Hi! Here is a picture of Phil completing his task with a work of videographic genius that, as an added bonus, features my brother doing unspeakable things to a chicken.


The boy is very cross with me for posting such tiny pictures that you can't read all the words, so I hereby promise I shall reactivate my Flickr account in order that big pictures can be viewed and 'enjoyed' by all.

In other news, I have started adding some stuff to the Tutorials section of this very website. Why not go there now and laugh at my oddly twisted vowels?

This time three years ago, the boy and were hanging out in a hotel in Scotland waiting to get married by the world's most nervous registrar. I was wearing a hundred-quid frock that had been picked by the shop assistant at Jigsaw. Chris was wearing a shirt apparently designed for an adult elk. We had spent the morning watching telly and eating a large cooked breakfast.

We had been living together for five years, through degrees and graduations, unemployment, failed interviews, successful interviews, my PGCE and a move to London that aged us both by decades. When people asked why we were so calm on our wedding day it was simply because it was the easiest thing we'd done together in ages.

I had a lovely romantic photograph of our wedding to post at this juncture, but when I showed it to the boy he mimed retching and suggested this one instead:

It is our most viewed photograph on Flickr. I don't know what that means, but I do know that I'm infinitely glad we became family.

Cheers!

I'm not the camping type, really, but we are financially compromised this summer and, frankly, it's camping or nothing. My camping stipulations include a tent that a) one can stand up in, b) has windows and c) accommodates a couple of folding chairs. Behold, the Orchy 400!

While the boy may mock my insistence on excessive tentiness, you can be damned sure he won't be complaining when it pisses down and we're trapped in that thing for days on end. There are skylights! And lantern-hanging hooks! And separate bedroom and living areas! The Orchy is essentially a super-light replica of our first London flat.

Our kit-list so far comprises red wine (don't need to refrigerate), an in-car laptop charger, bug repellant and sunscreen. We looked at stoves and mess-tins for about five seconds before realising we could never be arsed to use them.

So we're off to Cornwall for a week, hopefully for sea and sand and fish 'n' chips, probably for rain and endless wine-drinking. Cheerio!

Hi! Here is a picture of Alex recommending some films to watch.

Excellent task-completing, young man! I should probably make clear that the depicted DVD collection is merely an artist's impression of Alex's actual film library. I have no idea if he really owns 'Dune' or 'Alf'.

In other news, the last three weeks have been good in an I'm-glad-they're-over kind of way. So many things have happened that I can't remember lots of them. Er ... we went to see piano-driven '90s rocker Ben Folds! We bought a stupid tent that we can't construct! I assumed control of the entire school for a week! And Lise saved my Arts Week by being a dancing genius! Thanks!

Friday sees both the last day of term and the anniversary of my move to Bath. See you then. Bring cake.

Here are the boy's new wellies and Robbie, the dog we walked this morning. I say 'walked', I mean 'trailed behind as he dragged us over several miles of uneven Somerset farmland'. Staffies really seem to like the boy; I wonder if his bald head makes him look like one of the pack?

My mum was down for a few days this week. She had a dreadful cold but, as she is a Scottish mother and unable to relax for more than 2.5 seconds at a time, still managed to scrub our kitchen from top to bottom and get the bus to BHS to buy us a bin. THANKS MUM! Now we own Brillo pads. In other mum news, my mum saw celebrity birdspotter Kate Humble when she was in town.

Meanwhile, I have been utterly swamped at work, but able to keep up by working crazy hours at home and worrying continually. Sadly, I have neither worried nor worked this weekend and achieved precisely nothing. Oh well.

Last night we had a thoroughly brilliant evening at Westonbirt Arboretum watching New Zealand's finest pop/rock beat combo. The gig was squarely aimed at Crowded House's core demographic of Berghaus wearing, toddler wrangling professionals in their mid-forties, with gourmet catering facilities, plentiful portaloos and military-style parking drills. Hoorah! The band themselves were fantastic, too; tight as a drum and indulgent with the ol' timey hits. We love you Crowded House! Here is a photograph I took before we got into trouble for taking photographs:

ETA: PHOTO DISAPPEARED!

Yeah, this is what the world looks like when you're 5' 3.

In other news, the boy and I wore matching kag-in-a-bags and green wellingtons last night. A year in the West Country and any sense of style has gone completely out of the window.

I don't have much to say at the moment. The unfortunate good news is that I have lots more photographs for you:


That's Troy, the Steve McQueen of dogs, moments after his second escape attempt. See how nicely he sits whilst getting his harness reattached, silently plotting his next move. Gabriella is the elderly myopic of the operation, forging tags and immunisation certificates in the dark, taken along for the ride even though she's a bumbling liability.

Next up, check out just how well the infant-me scrubbed up when I wasn't clutching a turnip:

My first day at school. I look pretty perky for someone who is about to spend two decades in education. How cute is my brother, incidentally? He looks like a cartoon character. How come his hair is so stylish while mine looks like it was hacked at by a madman with a bread knife? The smell of that leather satchel really haunts me.

And lastly, this is a photograph taken on Skye and titled JULY '88 KILMUIR:

Wellingtons, anoraks, grimacing, a big wheel. The Highlands may be less of a good holiday destination than you'd imagine.

Please note the following:

Self-made cat mask. Punk rock!
Turnip lantern. We didn't get pumpkins in Scotland until 1995.
Filthy urchin knees.
Out of shot: Orville slippers. That's right, ORVILLE SLIPPERS.

In other news, I totally wish I had this pinafore now. Très chic, non?

I have singularly failed to get even an interview for any of the art teaching jobs I have applied for this term, despite being abundantly qualified and enthusiastically referenced. Dunno why; today I phoned up one of the schools in search of rejection feedback and was not allowed to speak to anyone other than the receptionist. Thanks!

To cheer myself up, I am trying to think of funny things, such as when Chris had a shirt that was white with white stripes, or when I smoked a cigar, or when Cope found his ancestral haemorrhoid shop. Even just typing 'haemorrhoid' made me laugh, so I suppose there's hope. I also laughed thinking about when Darien's cheese was officially a liquid and couldn't go on a plane, but I don't think that story exists on the internet.

Now please join in with the despairing hilarity in the comments - tell us a joke or a story or link to a funny post in your own blog. Or send me an email! I like those too. I'd also like to extend a special Ribbledoot invite to my mother - an avid reader but neglectful commenter - to leave us a good anecdote from me and Gra's childhood too. If you can remember any, that is. I remember mainly vomiting in cars and playing around building sites. Ah, the '80s!

Come on, everyone, if we don't laugh we'll cry.

I don't really talk about The Doctor very much, but essentially my week revolves around that point on a Saturday night when I hang my disbelief up in the cupboard with the ironing board and watch some massively good time-travel. The boy is not such a big Doctor Who fan, but watches it with me anyway. I always get the impression he watches as part of an elaborate social study, as he often comments on the action and how much it may or may not frighten the average impressionable child. He also picks holes in the plot, but nods sagely when a genuine piece of historical fact comes up.

Anyway, a few weeks ago we were watching Doctor Who after the boy had consumed a couple of glasses of red wine. He said nothing for the entire episode, but at the end announced, 'Normally, this is just a high-camp kid's show, but after a glass of wine it becomes ... the full panoply of human emotion played out against the backdrop of all space and time.' Amen, brother.

And now here are some pictures of Nelly, the laziest greyhound in Bath.

I've ended up with rather too many things on the boil this week, from columns to portfolio rejigging to teaching to form filling, and frankly I've become a little frazzled. Although I suppose I should really try to finish that culinary metaphor properly, hang on ... I've got too many things on the boil, and now I've ... what? Bubbled over? Left to steam? Bruised the rosemary and put it in a pop-sock? I don't know.

Still, today at work we made dragons out of clay. That's a pretty fun thing to do for money, right?

This week's dog quickly identified Chris as our pack leader and obediently followed his every move. When I held her lead she just looked at him in a long-suffering way and huffingly agreed to follow as long as he was happy with the arrangement. The love-in was continued as the boy let her undertake some of her favourite activities such as leaning against his legs, bounding through long grass and standing in puddles, looking pathetic.

The boy got my dreadful wheezy illness approximately seventeen minutes after I posted the other night. His was worse, though, because his eyes swelled up like a coupla pink grapefruit. The horror! Although I guess it was more his eyelids than his actual eyeballs, it was pretty gadzooks all the same.

In other news, when I felt better and had started working again, my iBook started kernel panicking every five seconds. Turns out there is some kind of problem with the AirPort module, meaning I can't be online without sitting on the floor and jacking in with an Ethernet cable. WHAT IS THIS, 1998? I'm tethered to the wall like an animal! O woe, alas and alack, etc.

Suckiest 'holiday' ever Y/Y?

Ever since I had The Actual Flu a few years ago, I seem to take colds in a much more wheezy and pathetic way. I don't really know if The Actual Flu and the since-then wheezy colds are related, but I highly recommend that anyone who finds themselves with The Actual Flu seeks medical advice instead of, say, listening to Radio 4 and weeping until their husband comes home and notes that their lips have turned lilac.

Anyway, I am currently suffering from a wheezy, snotty cold and generally feeling sorry for myself. The only upside to this is that the boy has devoted himself to making amazing cold-fighting food, such as yesterday's excellent Chicken Soup Surprise, the surprise being a cup of whisky stirred into the pan. Thanks!

On the phone to my brother earlier, he casually asked if we had discovered the magical properties of the Japanese towel yet. We had not. He suggested we expose it to hot water. We did. Then we found out just how much better Japanese towels are than our boring European ones. The boy has promised to take photographs to post tomorrow ... steel yourselves.

When I took my job it was part-time, but now it's kind-of-full-time-and-actually-a-teensy-bit-more. It's not bad at all, really, but I am heartily looking forward to half term next week*, in which I plan to read a book for more than three minutes without falling asleep. Rock 'n' roll.

*Yes, another one! Ruddy teachers! Etc!

In other news, we have decided for financial reasons only to eat things from our freezer for the rest of the month. Oddly, while I haven't yet reached lasagne saturation point (LSP), I feel like I might throw the next plate of spaghetti I see directly out of the window and into the shrubbery. Pasta hooliganism!

And finally, an all-caps THANK YOU to my brother Gra, who sent us some excellent gifts from his recent Japanese jaunt. We have not yet discovered the magical properties of the towel, but I will report back in due course. Never fear, I shall send your PS3 back post haste!

That's all.

ETA: Another list that made me laugh.

On Friday the boy came to pick me up from work and we sped off to the glorious Bibury Court Hotel, an epic country pile full of eccentric toffs, oddball furniture and whispering Americans. Here is a moose that I became obsessed with:

The boy and I are, as regular readers will know, in our very element in the schmancy hotel environment. A switch flicks, synapses buzz, and our collective unconscious decides that all of those Wodehouse novels that we read in college were merely research and preparation for our inevitable arrival among the shooting classes of the early 1920s. This weekend was no exception. Cocktails were ordered, baths were drawn, rouge was applied and tea was strained by the gallon.

We had a fab time; thank you to the lovely sponsor of our trip. And now I shall watch Doctor Who and pretend I don't have to go to work tomorrow.

One of the good things about shacking up with a life-partner at a relatively young age is that before you grow old together, you grow up together.

I think we smashed that middle barrier sometime this evening, when the boy turned to me clutching a sheet of brown paper with tiny black text all over it. 'THIS IS UNREADABLE!' he exclaimed, all but shoving the offending article up my nostril in disbelief. Nope, you're just gettin' blinder.

Fifty one kids. Six adults. Four days and three long, sleepless nights. I quickly lost all respect for the couples I saw struggling with one or two kids on our day trips. What's the problem? There's only two of them! Look at me, I've got eight in tow!

The kids were actually very well behaved, with the three default moods being a) excited b) tearful c) carsick. I tapped into new reserves of patience and travel-game-inventing.

When the boy came to pick me up last night I could barely keep my eyes open to walk to the car. And now I am about to have a beer and watch Doctor Who and savour the sweet, sweet silence.

At Bath Cats and Dogs Home, you can turn up and volunteer as a dog walker, which is how we ended up walking Buster, the cutest and saddest dog in the world:

Buster had to wear a muzzle in case he tried to bite another dog. Being a dog himself, Buster was singularly unable to understand the concept of a muzzle, and spent many tragic minutes trying and failing to pick up enticing-looking sticks all the way along our walk. He also had to wear a little coat to keep him warm and dry, although we did enjoy his hilarious head-and-tail shake, a kind of crazy bodypopping ending in a 'tthhhhrrrp!' as his hindquarters shivered to a stop.

Buster seemed pretty unfazed by his return to the kennel, although I would happily have smuggled him home under my coat. Bye, Buster, we love you!

I've been operating on crazy-time this week, which means getting up crazy-early then running around and multitasking in a crazy manner until I collapse on the sofa mid-evening and have to be hefted to bed like a big sack of crazy. Next week I'm off on school camp, which fills me with a terrible foreboding. Hilariously, I have been put in charge of bringing sports equipment.

In other news, let's all send some good exam revision vibes to Cope, noted Welsh speaker and tall American. Good luck!

Big shout out to those of you on strike today. I have very much enjoyed the media brouhaha that has ensued. Especially the bits where voxpop morons claim that teachers get three months 'off' every year. Yeah, those longs summers are all about the fun, fun, fun. No tedious weeks of planning or resourcing whatsoever.

In climate news, this morning it rained so much that it soaked through my parka and my shoes, but now it's all sunny and delightful. West country weather, you are crazy.

I have returned from the Mother Country and am back at the Ikea dining table, pretending to write articles. Not much has happened in the last fortnight, except this:



Which is a lot more terrifying than it looks. The deer kept sticking their heads right into the car and snuffling at the gearstick. Longleat Safari Park is pretty great, but I imagine if you're claustrophobic at all it might be a living hell. You're in a car ... but if you get out, a lion will eat you! Monkeys will climb on your face! A deer will lick your hand! Also, at the rhinoceros paddock there's a young man in a tractor, ready to head the rhinos off if they start to charge. What a job! Hours and weeks of tedium with the glimmering potential for an exciting rhino clash.

As you were.

ETA: A Roman centurion just clanked past my window. In full military uniform, including helmet. Ah, Historic Bath.

I'm off work for two weeks, which obviously means I must get up early and spend every hour of the day fretting about work. The good news is that the fretting can be alleviated by a) doing work and b) watching Rustie Lee's Hotsauce on TMF. I missed the beginning of Rustie Lee's Hotsauce, but it seems to involve the terminally cheerful 1980s chefwoman choosing music videos based on her disturbing attraction to men thirty years her junior. It's unaccountably great.

I've been on a teaching course at the University of Bath all day. Oddly, it was hosted by a well-known British sprinter who let me hold his Olympic gold medal. It was amazing, even for me as The Least Sporty Person Who Ever Lived. The PE teacher next to me almost had a coronary episode when I passed it to her.

In other news, HOORAY BST. Yes, we've lost an hour of our lives, but we'll get to live it in Autumn and the nights are all lovely and light again. Maybe the boy will cheer up and stop winding up other sufferers of Obsessive Punctuation Disorder.

Three days left of term, baby.

Freelancing has taken off to a point that I feel like I'm leading a slightly exciting double life. Wiping tables by day, interviewing across time-zones by night! Dawn-til-dusk dogsbody, moonlit word-count wonder! It's been pretty great to stretch my conversational legs in a grown-up capacity, although it's more difficult to discipline myself to do a day's work after I get home from my actual day's work than I anticipated. The lure of Sammy Sung is strong.

The boy and I had a mediocre Easter weekend and spent most of it feeling sorry for the sad loss of our London yuppie lives. The boy, rather brilliantly, decided that the only cure for yuppie-life-withdrawal is just to go out and be a goddamn yuppie again for an evening. The full shebang, suited and booted, frocked and heeled, just the two of us. If you've never been on a night out with the boy, I can thoroughly recommend it. A man eternally out of time, he turns into a bizarre roaring '20s-style swell when faced with white-aproned waiters and a cocktail menu. After a few, if you really encourage him, he might teach you an Edith Piaf song, or make a dreadful pun with the bartender, or tell you what some really dirty words mean.Try it yourself!

Hey, it's Easter! Why not celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord by watching the excellent 1973 adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar? It has some really swingin' tunes that the boy and I became obsessed with back in college. There's nothing like lying in bed shouting 'One of my twelve chosen/will leave to betray me!' at each other in the early morning hours to really kick-start a relationship.

In other news, I am thoroughly enjoying the long weekend and think we should have one every month. Monday holidays are particularly sweet as you bypass the Sunday Afternoon Funk and experience, in effect, another Saturday night. And any Funk deferred to Monday night will be offset by the knowledge that the following 'week' has only four days in it. Oh yes.

Cheers!

There are two cathedrals in Liverpool, and each of them are frickin' spectacular. The boy took a few good photos on his iPhone, if you want to have a gawp.

In other news, HELLO LOVELY PEOPLE who have begun writing me to say they find this website browsable and time-sucky in the nicest possible way. Especially Amanda, who I'm betting wishes she hadn't bothered since she received my beer-enhanced reply. You guys rock.

Today I am writing various things and making some more wire birds. I'd really rather make a wire stag, but given space constraints, I guess I'll stick to the birds. Here, for the curious, is an inexplicably tiny photo of my embroidered heart for the Art of the Stitch competition last summer. Didn't get a place, but at least received a box of amazing threads from the sponsor people at Anchor. Cheers!

Yesterday was dressing-up day at work. I dressed up as Professor Trelawney, but no one knew who I was supposed to be. In fact, I have the sneaking suspicion that most of the staff just thought it was another one of my wacky hair days. Oh well.

Tomorrow the boy and I are driving to Liverpool to see a concert in the cathedral. Exciting! I wonder if my in-laws will notice that I have put on weight and not plucked my eyebrows in three months? Blargh! Witness the full genetic horror I bring to the family line!

In other news, I am simultaneously obsessed with and rubbish at SingStar.

It is cold, wet and windy here in Historic Bath™, which means I have spent the weekend doing only three things in fairly constant rotation.

Rawking
The boy bought me SingStar to play on the PS3 and we have both become obsessed with becoming the Ultimate Uptown Girl Champions. SingStar would be so much better if we lived in an isolated farmhouse miles from civilisation. It's difficult to throw your best shapes when you live in a ground floor flat. Also, Scottish rapping = funny.

Reading American Gods
If, like me, you tried to read the free version of American Gods a week ago and got face-smackingly frustrated at the torturously slow loading speeds, try again! It's much faster now and you won't be sorry. It's the only book I've read in ages where I feel genuinely surprised at everything that happens. On page 30 I had to shut my laptop, think for a moment and announce 'Well I didn't see that coming,' to the room at large. Which was empty, and didn't reply. Exciting.

Developing Lost Theories
The poor boy hasn't been able to enjoy a second of our downloaded Lost series 3 episodes due to my constant prattling about What Might Be Going On. I also have theories on when best to enjoy the principle Lost characters: Sawyer (wet), Desmond (blowy), Jack (drunk), Kate (silent), Hurley (driving), French Chick (punchy), Jacob (from behind the sofa).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Christopher David, noted techno-journalist, husband extraordinaire, speaker of sexy schoolboy French and red wine drinker. The boy turns a surprisingly-young 28 years old today, and has celebrated so far by buying a new book and eating Tic Tacs noisily. Rock on.

Everyone send him some birthday love and advice on What To Do When You're 28 Other Than Wait To Be 30. Because frankly I couldn't find that one in Waterstones.

Everyone send some love to the boy's Nana, who turns 80 tomorrow. Happy birthday Nana! I know that all of you who have been lucky enough to sample Kiddie Crack Tablet™ will want to mark this occasion.

The boy has gone to Scotland for Nana's birthday party tomorrow, so I am all alone making crazy-but-delicious dinner concoctions. Today's theme was 'Freezer Delights', which constituted a bowl of roasted parsnips and a margarita pizza. Why not try it yourself?

Now I am watching The Hits' Top 50 Massive Million Sellers, featuring Dexy's Midnight Runners. Why was it a surprise to anyone that Kevin Rowland went a bit odd?

And now it's Celine Dion, in the days before she had her face botoxed into a rictus of feigned empathy.

Next someone called Anton du Beke is talking. I wish we had proper MTV.

Oh look, it's Friday. As weeks-off go, this one has been something of a stressy non-event. To make up for the endless parade of workmen and tedious chores that have hampered my holiday so far, the boy bought me a mountain of delicious M&S snacks and left them in the fridge for me to enjoy today. Then he set the telly to record lots of my favourite trashy television overnight. Then he got up early and tidied the flat so that I had literally nothing to do other than slob around in my pyjamas. Then he went uncomplainingly off to work. THANKS! Attention all other husbands: The new standards for husbandiness have been set! Get with the program!

In other news, I have just bought a EuroMillions lottery ticket. Come on lucky seven!

Me: He is singing with a woman out of the Gossip.
The Boy: What is 'the Gossip'?

Much geek excitement today as we shared pub-space with Kryten. The boy knew far more about Kryten than I did, mainly due to his worrying enthusiasm for Scrapheap Challenge, and momentarily entertained the notion of strutting up to Kryten and talking to him about Macs. Thankfully we both managed to stay at our table and kept our spying fairly discreet. Discreet except for the bathroom-stall periscope I installed. ONLY JOKING.

In other news, I am off work for half-term this week. Huzzah! Sadly our fridge-freezer is on the blink, putting paid to my excellent soup-making plans. I'll just have to think of something else to make. (Top hats!)

Much fun was had by all at this month's Philm Club. You can recreate the experience by making your very own Top Hat snacks!

Ingredients:
1 bag marshmallows
1 tube Smarties (why are they hexagonal now?!)
1 large bar Green & Black's 72% dark cooking chocolate
1 large bar cheapo supermarket chocolate
Roll baking parchment

Method:
Roll baking parchment onto worktop to make a non-stick surface. Rip open bag of marshmallows and tip Smarties into a cup, this will make it easier later on when you're spazzing around with a pan of piping hot chocolate, see?

Break chocolate into little bits and put in a pan over a low heat. NEWSFLASH: you don't have to melt the chocolate over hot water! I had no idea! The boy has blasted away all my chocolate-melting preconceptions! Crazy. Anyway, do that, then stir the chocolate until it becomes all silky and delicious-looking. Mmm.

Use a spoon to blob large dollops of chocolate onto the baking parchment. Put a marshmallow on each of the blobs. Put another dollop of chocolate on each of the marshmallows and add a Smartie. Obviously if you are of a creative bent you can make double or even triple-decker Top Hats. Leave to harden for a couple of hours. Peel off baking parchment, put on plate.

Amaze your friends and family with the delicious taste sensation of your Top Hat platter!

In the continuing drama of Our Minky Flat, a horrible damp patch has appeared on the hall floor and is soaking slowly toward our bedroom door. While this supports my assertion that the previous tenant was an actual corpse, I feel none of my usual smug satisfaction.

The good news? It's our landlord's problem. HOORAY!

In other news, I need to think of some classic '80s snackfood to serve at our Ghostbusters Philm Club. So far I've thought of 'top hats' and cheese-on-cocktail-sticks hedgehog (which the boy says is more '70s). What did you eat in the '80s? Other than phenylalanine and BSE?

Christmas+San Francisco+Tax Bill = Financial Ruin. I am poorer than a church mouse and narrowly avoiding bank charges. Stupid Bath and its stupid tiny employment pool.
Here is a list of things you can do when you have no money and there's another month til payday:

Invent new kinds of sandwiches.
Recount your past yuppie glory days to old women at bus stops.
Howl at a photo of the moon.
Learn Bob Dylan songs on the guitar.
Eat a lot of staffroom biscuits.

Hey ho, it passes the time. Bye then!

Five hundred squids! Note to self: make more use of binmen and the NHS.

In other news, those of you who are either ex-art schoolers or in the midst of various degrees might enjoy this poster project in which graphic design students in their final year designed advice posters for new first years. Nice.

Okay, something mad has happened to my fonts. I'll take that as a sign to stop typing and do the dishes.

Oh, look! This is the first day in 20 days that I haven't had to wake up, get up and go somewhere at an ungodly hour. I feel giddy.

No real news other than a crazed working week making up all the hours I missed while I was away, and the higher-than-usual consumption of Innocent banana and coconut smoothies. Waking at 6am when your brain thinks it's 10pm apparently leads to the complete inability to face solid food.

Today I have to fill in my tax return - boo. The good news is that the tax return people (and their benevolent overlord, Adam Hart-Davis) must be used to dealing with utter cretins like me, because the steps are laid out and explained the simplest possible language, with the most important words in bold so you can't possibly miss them. Also, if you do it online, you don't even have to find the right page in the form; it just springs up magically on your screen. Such convenience!

As I have nothing further to tell you, here's a clip of Bernard Black doing his tax return. Ma!

It's just after 4pm as I write this, but thanks to the wonder of international time zones I have been awake for 25 hours and counting. Unfortunately, this face-melting jetlag is only compounding the crushing despair I feel at being back in Blighty. We left palm trees and cloudless blue skies in California and flew for hours over snow-capped mountain ranges and twinkling towns and the mighty Atlantic only to land in drizzly Heathrow, greeted by surly baggage handlers and facing a three-mile stagger to the car park. It was all I could do not to turn around and get on the first available flight out again.

Anyway, I'm sure the post-trip malaise will wear off soon and we'll be back to crochet and Carlos before you know it. Here are some photographs (and an inexplicable gap) in the meantime:

Excitable Scotswoman makes spectacle of self in tram-riding palm-tree photograph shocker.


Chris made us walk up that hill. It was steep.


Lunch at the In-N-Out. Those are good burgers, dude.

San Francisco is sunny and lovely.
Everyone is friendly to me even when I am clearly a media event n00b.
I am learning how to overtip and eat meat. Haven't seen a vegetable in three days.
Telly is bonkers and unfathomable in a good way.
California much better than Bath. Would stay here forever if scary immigration men hadn't scanned my fingerprints and eyeballs. Oh well.

I glimpsed over the boy's shoulder just now as he was submitting a product review by email and caught this gem:

Alex, I nominate you as the cake buyer for the week I'm away. Remember that everyone goes nuts for those soft buns – 99p for 5!

Obviously I laughed so hard that my lungs almost fell out, and the boy felt compelled to elaborate on the cakes in question. 'They're just those Marks and Spencer iced bun things,' he explained, a look of rapture in his eyes. 'Only a pound, but they're ... disproportionately delicious. Maybe that should be their new slogan.'

Ah, simple pleasures.

The boy and I have never translated particularly well to American soil. With the vocabulary of PG Wodehouse as enacted by The Broons, the fashion sense of retired geography teachers, and a list of interests that includes 'tweed' and 'data storage', we have never blended well in transatlantic situations. On our last trip to New York, we bumbled through Manhattan like Denholm Elliot in The Last Crusade, demanding civilised sit-down cafés and pleasant smoking areas and waiters with manners. Hopeless.

But! Despite our ludicrous past attempts at transcontinental travel, next weekend we are headed for San Francisco to report on the celebrated Macworld Conference and Expo. We will be there for a week and I am excited beyond measure. Much Californian wardrobe confusion abounds, so I reach out to all of you American blog-lurkers to ask some important questions such as:

Should I bring my parka?
Will I be cold?
Where can I find a brilliant yarn store?
Can you recommend any genius telly for me to watch at night?

Answers by comment or contact form, prize of a postcard featuring my brilliant 'drawings' for anyone foolish enough to send me their address.

In other news, back to work tomorrow. Ho hum.

When I complained to my brother about having to complete a tax return he mused "The man on the advert says that 'tax doesn't have to be taxing'. Except that it does ... tax, by its very nature, is taxing." Which frankly I think should be the new motto of HM Revenue and Customs. Hi! Happy New Year! Let's begin a new paragraph!

This morning the boy went back to work, but not before waking me to recount today's most ludicrous story on BBC Breakfast, in which a roving reporter had been dispatched to examine a woman's pants*. We both find ourselves increasingly incensed at the 'news' items on BBC Breakfast, particularly when they are relayed by bumbling Bill Turnbull, a man who behaves as if he's been carjacked, bundled into a van, attacked with panstick and forced to present breakfast television at gunpoint. I think the problem is that we didn't have a telly at the moment the show changed from a cornflakes-and-atrocities serious news program to a scarlet sofa-based grinfest, so we can't really assimilate properly. Our mutual loathing of 'Strictly' stems from BBC Breakfast, which follows the winners and losers with ludicrously detailed updates occurring throughout the morning. It's utterly infuriating.

All of which explains why we don't really watch much television. Too much emotional investment.

*Incidentally, I find it vaguely offensive that they keep being referred to as 'giant'. Large, maybe, or ample, but surely they can't be classified as giant until a family of three have camped under them, or they've been hoisted up the rigging of a stricken tea clipper to save the lives of a hundred beleaguered sailors.

In soup news, I am making some broth-type chickeny soup. I put in two mugs of lentils, but now when I stir it I can't find the lentils anywhere. Where have they gone?

Today we went for a walk on the cold and drizzly Solway Coast and saw this festive robin chap:



Dapper! We also saw some holly:



And so to dinner and ale and general Christmassy excitement. Cheers!

Yesterday we drove to the Mother Country, which meant six hours of eating Liquorice Allsorts, inventing new swearwords and singing Les Champs-Élysées over and over again until I wanted to throw myself under a juggernaut.

We arrived in one piece, however, and are enjoying delicious food, roaring fires and picturesque winter scenery. This morning I went out to take a photograph of the sheep camouflaged in the frost-encrusted field next door and there was much muttering about 'city folk' from the kitchen.

Photographs tomorrow.

Big shout-out to my dad, who outed himself as a reader of this website on the phone yesterday. Hi dad! Everyone go and look at his excellent Flickr photo of Edinburgh! Also, you can see a bonus picture of our old dog in his icon. And a mathematically accurate drawing of his back garden, if you're interested. Nice.

In further sartorial news, I am now the proud owner of these Dr Marten biker boots. Now I shall amass an army of parka'd, booted Mods and we will roam the streets of Bath looking for other similarly outmoded nouveau-Rockers to start a fight with.

When not stomping around town, I have been papier mache-ing and sanding my wire birds. They're much sturdier now, and I've been using claycrete instead of the normal paste-and-newspaper malarkey, so the whole business is much quicker. I'm intending to collage and gold leaf them before painting with a high-gloss varnish, but I'm worried that they'll look crap so I'm holding off for a while.

Last day of school tomorrow, and in an employment first, I'm not a burned-out, braindead, end of term basketcase. Hooray!

Understanding of the Bath Look is dripping slowly into my consciousness. After a decade of kitschy, woollen granny coats, I've now gone out and bought a parka of modern space age fibres. The Bath Look has no truck with whimsical coats. The parka features a sensible hood and multiple zips and is ludicrously warm. The only downside to it is that I've spent most of the afternoon stomping around the flat shouting 'look deep into the parka!' at no one in particular.

In other news, I bought the boy a vintage fedora similar to the one featured in the corner of his website header. Unfortunately, it's far too small, but this has done nothing to dissuade him from wearing it. The tiny fedora has been perched on his head, wobbling and ridiculous, for all household chores, meals and administrative tasks since yesterday. I'll try to take a photograph so you can share in the hilarity.

I've emerged from my three-month creative funk and begun doing some artwork again. I've been making paper and wire birds that I thought were lifesized until the boy informed me that they were laughably huge. Every time they are moved around the flat, from table to airing cupboard and back, I say 'cheep cheep cheep' in the manner of an excitable starling. Curiously, the boy has not yet bludgeoned me to death with a pan.

I've also begun experimental embroidered illustrations for a mini-story that I browbeat Cope into writing for this specific purpose. I have only spent two nights on this so far and already I can feel the telltale spasms of crippling RSI and am squinting like a mole in the moonlight. Hooray stereotypical artistic suffering!

I suppose I should really add some photographs of these thrilling masterpieces-in-progress, but frankly my real reason for posting was simply to plug this hilarious website that the boy and I have been laughing ourselves sick over all week. Warning: the more you scroll, the more ludicrous it gets.

In other news: Le weekend!

Hello. Thanks to everyone who sent lovely cards and gifts last week – you guys rock!

Having a Saturday birthday was pretty sweet. The boy and I went to see The Darjeeling Limited and had lunch in a ludicrously packed pub in town.

The only downside to Saturday was that Bath Christmas Market opened and as, insanely, it has decided to close on the 9th, everyone in the South-Western quadrant of the United Kingdom decided to come along. Anyone planning on a visit this week be sure to come armed with an electric baton and no sense of personal space.

On Sunday the boy valiantly accompanied me to a 5-year-old's party to do face painting. If there's anything funnier than a room full of snotty, tear-streaked tigers eating jam sandwiches, I've yet to see it. The boy painted a blonde moptop toddler who, after half an hour of running around, looked uncannily like Elaine Paige at the end of Cats.

In other news, our house is an utter shambles.

Last night we went to the Copes' for a spectacular Thanksgiving dinner. Americans know how to eat! Thank you Copes, we had a great time! Many and varied Welshfolk were pleasant enough to put up with our combined social ineptitude, in particular our ignorance of organised sports and Strictly Come Dancing. Mercifully, the boy was driving and I remained sober in solidarity with him, avoiding total idiocy by a narrow squeak.

Today, perhaps as punishment for offending strangers with my art 'skills', I woke up with horrific sinus-and-throat pain and really hot eyes. The boy originally mocked my hot eyes* but soon rallied round when it became clear I wouldn't get up without lashings of sympathy and hair-patting. Thanks.

*Me: '...and my feet are cold.'
Boy: 'Oh dear. If only you could put your feet on your eyes.'

In other news, this is my last week of being 26. I can't really rate or slate 26 as an age. It was completely adequate.

The boy and I did some RAWKING on Sunday* when we went to see the Foo Fighters courtesy of the crazy cats at NEC. I outed myself as a media event n00b by being utterly enthralled by the whole thing, especially the Tuscan Style sandwiches and special lip-reading barman.

The O2 is an amazing venue, I hadn't the faintest concept of how big it'd be. The boy accurately described the sound of the vast crowd as like waves breaking on a shore, and the Foos managed to fill what is essentially a gigantic tent in an alternately huge and intimate way. Dave Grohl mocked us 'posh motherfuckers in the boxes' which was funny, although I'm sure Mr Dave has partaken of his own share of corporate hospitality.

*In as much as a bald man and a supply teacher can ever truly rawk.

However is the boy going to visit his Other Wife when I can watch him all day long? Didn't think it through, you fool! As I watch now, the good folks at Future towers are eating gigantic roundy things that look a bit like doughnuts. And laughing. Making a magazine sure is 'taxing'.

In other news, I am getting these guys to make me a pair of jeans and am very excited. Imagine! Jeans that don't trail along the ground/gape at the waist/flatten the arse/pinch the hips! Sure, they may have a hinky website, but who cares when you're wearing the pants of your dreams? Yowza.

And finally, is it wrong to find passive aggressive notes quite so funny?

Hi! I have lots of pictures to show you, only I can't show you them because I upgraded to Leopard because the boy made me and now I am too idiotic to operate my own laptop. Leopard is pretty fun though; don't let my stupidity put you off.

In other news, hooray November! Bath is shaping up to be a fairytale winter town, with all the little alleyways strung with tasteful lights and the Christmas market starting on the 29th. There'd better be augmented hot chocolate or all my girlish dreams will be shattered. Also, I have discovered that my birthday falls on a Saturday this year. It's been sixteen years since I last had a non-school birthday, I'm not sure I can handle the excitement. Start embroidering your celebratory pantaloons now!

And finally, news that could bring our marriage to its very knees. New Boosh. November 15th. BBC Three. Oh yes.

ETA: OMG you can watch the first episode online! And I have to go to work in ... 90 seconds.

Living in London, as the boy often observes, was a bit like having a stunning but impossibly high-maintenance mistress. We loved her with the burning fire of a thousand suns, but she kept us locked in a dingy little room and never let us sleep. She offered opportunities and excitement beyond our wildest dreams, then took all our money and mocked our lack of stamina. And, of course, she was very beautiful indeed, making every other town look dowdy and frumpy in comparison.

There is a part of me, and I'm sure a part of the boy, that just can't quite let go. If London really was our recently-dumped mistress, then our jaunt through last week was the equivalent of a drunken midnight phone call. I'd like to use the end of this metaphor to create an uncomfortable photographic juxtaposition:



Thanks. That's the carousel in Covent Garden, a place we never went before we moved. Proof that we really are just tourists in our former hometown. Sob.

To dampen our collective grief, the boy took a few days off so we could do the things we never did when we lived in the city. Namely, drive to Dorset and look at geological marvels. Here is the boy hiking the coastal path from Lulworth Cove to Durdle Door, which is a pretty spectacular thing to do on a beautiful autumn morning.



The boy and I aren't really from hiking stock, as evidenced by our hilarious hiking 'gear'. Note the boy looks vaguely at home, if a bit Oxbridge-ish, with his duffel coat and chucks, but somehow I managed even to make my walking stick look vaguely out of place. Hellew! I say, it's a bit blowy up here for a pashmina! Do you know if there's a cafe?

On the way to the coast, we went to see Stonehenge, which is a lot taller than I thought it would be. I imagine that Stonehenge is very beautiful and peaceful on the summer solstice, but I can recommend a dark October afternoon. Just before closing time, with howling wind and whippy rain, it really felt like the edge of the universe.

Yesterday we went to see Stardust (noisy link), which is brilliant although quite different from the book. There's a lot more sex and violence in the book, and a lot less cross-dressing.

In addition to feeding my current Gaiman-mania, Stardust also afforded me the bizarre experience of witnessing my childhood stomping ground on the big screen. At ten I believed myself to live in the most boring, isolated corner of the universe. The idea of Michelle Pfeiffer striding around our dog-walking spots would have been utterly ludicrous.

In other news, I am off work for a week and a half. Here is my to-do list:

Clean house
Plan meals around T4
Eat weight in Crunchy Nut Cornflakes
Make pumpkin pie
Feel wistful
Complain bitterly

Suggestions/alterations to the usual address.

Today I have been on a course! It was a very good course with biscuits and everything. We learned how to write. Not how to write in a creative sense, with similes and metaphors and such like, but how to physically write. It was pretty amazing.

We learned how to sit at a desk and hold a pencil and form the letters in the air. We had to copy from the board in Welsh. We had to take Greek dictation. We had to write with our feet on the floor, then with our feet wrapped around the chair legs, then left-handed with our eyes closed. We wrote while chewing and while listening to music. Then we watched DVDs of other people writing and analysed them.

Then we got more biscuits. All in all, a good day.

No news today, but I'm feeling a certain pressure to post since the boy's paean, so here is a photo of a drawing of a lady. Please note that I was too lazy to scan in my sketchbook properly even though I am actually SITTING NEXT TO a scanner. My sloth knows no bounds.

Room temperature update: hot enough to roast a suckling pig.

The boy has gone to Germany for Oktoberfest. Or possibly he's taken a few days out to watch the leaves turn with his Other Family. Either way, I am alone again and grumpy as all hell. Here are some of my current grumps:

Night storage radiators
I have spent the last four days alternately shivering cold and AS HOT AS THE SUN ITSELF. This is because night storage radiators require the householder to psychically predict the next day's temperature, wind chill and cloud cover in order to set the overnight 'store'. While admittedly it is possible to check the weather in the general area using that 'television' device that you young people are so fond of, our flat happens to be perched on top of a precipice high above Historic Bath and thus has its own unique microclimate which is utterly impossible to predict by any modern method. Of course, if you asked one of our neighbours they'd say things like 'Ar, hang a skinned cat by the ear on yonder lintle; if his eyes glow copper, the morrow will be fair indeed.' But, honestly, our neighbours are crazy.

Now I've spent so long grumbling about storage radiators that I've forgotten what the rest of my issues were. Apart from the obvious. Issues, I mean.

In other news: do you like my new website layout? The boy made it by scanning in lots of things from my sewing box. Clever! I guess he felt guilty about the whole bigamy thing. I am hoping to add some textiles tutorials and embroidery patterns soon but, you know, I'm hoping to do a lot of things soon. Like clean my bathroom and learn to drive without screaming.

Tonight we went to gawp at Neil Gaiman and listen to him say interesting and witty things. It was pretty great. He read bits of his works in progress and then spoke in a thoughtful manner about how the plots might unfold, as if he wasn't entirely sure himself. He was disarmingly open and somehow managed to answer the audience questions in a refreshing way even though I'm sure he'd been asked them a zillion times before.

The boy and I didn't manage to get our questions answered, even though I waved my shiny cracker ring around to attract attention*. Shame, because the boy had an excellent and insightful question that would have changed the course of literary history. My question, however, would have been along the lines of 'When are you going to kiss my face?', so all's well that ends well, I suppose. Or all's well that doesn't end with a restraining order, anyway.

Other facts about our Neil Gaiman encounter:

• Neil Gaiman has very shiny boots. The boy said it was so people could look up his trousers.
  
• We counted three children at this Children's Literary Festival event ...
  
• ... but loads of goths.
  
• We didn't get anything signed, because we were too dim to realise this was a possibility. Survival of the signing-queue fittest!
  

Check out this cameraphone snap that the boy has generously donated. Neil Gaiman's aura of lovely genius can clearly be seen floating to the left of shot. Or possibly it's dry ice. We'll never know.

*Apparently Neil Gaiman is not a magpie.

I think I'm so badass with my kitschy fashion 'sense', but it only takes a small child to blast through the bohemian veneer:

Small child: Where did you get your ring?
Me: (Proudly) In London, at a market.
Small child: It looks like it's from a cracker!
Me: ...

In other news, I am somewhat poorly, the boy is back from Paris, and the flat is very cold indeed.

ETA: The boy has just demonstrated his usefulness by solving two of the problems mentioned above by making me a hot toddy. I am now warm and toasty and feel like my sinuses have been cleared by a snowplough. THANKS!

The boy's hot toddy recipe:
1 measure of single malt whisky
2 slices of lemon
Good squeeze of Marks and Spencer honey
Hot water
Put whisky and honey in fancy tumbler of some kind. Top up with hot water from kettle. Squeeze in 1 slice lemon. Perch other slice of lemon on side of glass for added comedy value. Stir. Give to wife. Feel virtuous. Make lewd jokes about 'giving it to wife' when you read this.

#473: Ten Bird Roast
The subject of a turkey stuffed with a goose and eight other birds comes up frequently in our flat. I often propose it as main course when people come for dinner. The boy insists that if we do serve it, we must put a chicken's egg in the very middle, so that when it is carved "a bird flies out". I say the bird would die in the oven, but the boy insists that the bird would be comfortably incubated throughout.

The concept is extrapolated to other foodstuffs when the need arises; if I require a packed lunch for work, I may request a ham sandwich inside a ciabatta inside a pitta bread inside a baguette, for example. And for my birthday in December, I fully expect a cupcake inside a muffin inside a battenburg inside a victoria sponge.

I don't know who taught us about Ten Bird Roasts, but I'd like to find that person and PUT THEM INSIDE A GOOSE for a while.

This week the boy is in gay Paris for Apple Expo. By 'Apple' we can assume he meant 'taking'. And for 'Expo' you can read 'my Other Family to Disneyland'. Damn them. Once again I am at home with an amazing array of mad-assed things to eat in his absence. I have already decided to take all my meals in Lazy Susan format - if it can't be eaten from a revolving tray, I'm not interested.

Let's all give a big birthday shout-out to my brother Gra and my loveliest friend Emma:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRA AND EMMA! \\0\0/0//

I have sent you both birthday things, but they might not have reached you yet. This is because I am lame in every way. Here are some Gra-n-Emma birthday facts:

Graham is 24! I can't even think about how old this makes me. Fact: Gra has magic, Dr Doolittle-esque bird-taming powers. If you ever have a panicky sparrow in your kitchen, Gra will simply stride over, pick it up and release it into the garden. Amazing! Also, he can get cats out of old women's houses.

Emma is 27! Holy crapola! Fact: Emma knows all the words to Tainted Love. She might think she doesn't at first, but then she actually does. '80s genius.

Historic Bath has got somewhat cold and autumnal of late, and neither the boy nor I really understand the mysterious ways of the night storage radiator. On Tuesday I sat and wrote my 'User column at the dining table, wearing the boy's kilt socks over my jeans and wrapped up to my ears in a huge scarf. After a fashion I began to feel rather vintage and Dickensian in my chill, and when the boy came into the room I began to bang at the keyboard with much vigour, booming 'It was the BEST of times, it was the WORST of times ...' in a pompous way, prompting him to ask if I required a pair of fingerless gloves. Which I TOTALLY DO, by the way.

Today I am knackered and my feet are frigging killing me. This is pretty shameful as my new job is only part-time, although in my defence it is also somewhat more physical than my last job. There is much in the way of running around and carrying tables and crouching down to talk to very tiny people. Being part-time has inevitably caused people to ask what I do with my afternoons. Oddly, I become very cagey and embarrassed when asked this and mutter into my cleavage until my interrogator gets confused and changes the subject. Unlike Cope, who sensibly wears his writer badge with pride, I'm just too embarrassed to tell people that I sew things and type words for money. The boy would probably tell you this is my Calvinist childhood talking - 'ARTIST, is it? Aye, ye'll be needin' a propur job afore ye have bai-rins, though. Ah'll jist pit the mince on!' Etc.

The boy is going out for a work thing tonight. I say he's going out for a work thing, but frankly I have no evidence of this. He could be going to visit his other wife and family in Aberystwyth for all I know. I bet she makes him brilliant packed lunches. Bitch.

The boy is off to Germany on the first of many business trips tomorrow. Pantwettingly, this will be my first night alone in the new flat. We all know how much I enjoy the culinary opportunities that his absences afford, but the new flat is mighty creepy.

It's big, for a start, and much more rambling than either of the London flats, with a long narrow hallway and jump-y out corners. And there are lots of cupboards for murderers to hide in once they've negotiated the easy 4ft hop into any one of our man-sized, ground floor windows. And the noises! In London there was the reassuring cacophony of sirens, buses and Peckham gang wars 24 hours a day. A night in our genteel Bath neighbourhood involves four hours of total silence broken in the dead of night by a fox being buggered by Satan himself, a sound so otherworldly that I fully expect the faerie folk to come and carry me off as a kind of lunar sacrifice to the god of squinty-toothed swearing.

Ah well. I'm sure I'll soon get used to it, and at least we now have a freezer and a plentiful supply of frozen delicacies for me to investigate. Tomorrow I plan to have a meal composed entirely of onion rings and houmous.

Back to work tomorrow. Hey-ho.

Sometimes my copy of Empire magazine has very frightening or gory film stills in it, the sort of images that cause me to switch on all the lights at 3am and demand water and Radio 4. Imagine my relief then, when I opened this month's issue to find that the boy had gone through with a black marker and blocked out all the zombies, corpses and severed limbs he could find. He also put a heart around anything he thought I might especially like; Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig and a dog, mainly. Thanks! You are hilarious.

In other news, New Job is not bad, flat is crawling with wiggins and my hair is gigantic.

At the weekend we went to the national arboretum, which is like a really civilised forest. Totally level, neat grassy paths and an excellent café - everything the boy and I look for in our 'outdoor' pursuits. Thankfully the arboretum is pretty massive, so it's easy to get away from the hoards of dawdling morons and find lovely peaceful places to walk. You can also see lovely exotic trees like this Japanese maple that I snapped with my cameraphone.

In other news, I am anxiously trying to adopt the Bath Look before I start work next week. I can't quite get a handle on what the Bath Look is; it seems to involve floaty layers and a lot of tanned ankle. And there's something about the hair as well. I feel a bit formal and conspicuous in my London clothes, they're too severe. Anyone who can reduce the Bath Look to a formula wins a chewy cookie.

And finally: I made felt in our sink this morning and now the whole house smells like wet dog.

All summer I've been grappling with terrible and ridiculous nightmares. Limbs and bodies and snakes and beasties, scary noises and sweaty awakenings. I can only assume that this is a response to moving house, these being my first utterly dark and completely silent nights in many years. The boy doesn't seem to have been affected, though, so that theory could be mince. Whatever the reason, I am too sleepy to do anything worth reporting.

The only interesting thing that I'm trying to get finished started is my entry for the Art of the Stitch competition. First prize four grand! I swing between thinking my entry idea is either crap or brilliant, but - hey! - you've gotta be in it to win it, as they say.

Bank holiday weekend, hooray! I start my new job in ten days, but I'm not worried. Naive? Probably.

The other night I laughed so much at this List of Unlikely Disasters that I cried a bit and the boy took my laptop away.

In driving news, I am supposed to take Carlos to Sainsbury's on my own today. Place your bets now on whether I will:
a) Make it there in one piece but suffer a panic attack in the car park.
b) Crash or damage Carlos to such an extent that the boy will divorce me.
c) Get arrested
d) Die.

In dinner news, we are having steak. Yeehar.

Have you seen Carlos, our lovely car? Ooh, but he is a beauty. The boy and I are so in love with him that we open the curtains at night and shout goodnight before we go to sleep. I think the boy would actually go out in his slippers and kiss his shiny bonnet if I weren't around.

If you have been 'lucky' enough to witness my directorial debut, you may have caught an excerpt of one of my driving lessons. It's the bit where Chris gives me gentle encouragement and I shout 'shut up' in an angry way. I have actually held a driving license for almost ten years, it's just that I haven't, you know, driven for at least six of those. The good news is that my driving lessons now involve less foul-mouthed marital discord and more white knuckle rides through Historic Bath.

In other news, I have developed a bizarre Internet Crush on fantasy author Neil Gaiman despite never having read any of his books except Coraline* which scared the bejezus out of me when I was poor and living in an attic. Has this happened to anyone else? The Internet Crush part, I mean, not the living in an attic part. Perhaps there is some sort of hypnotic undercurrent to Harper Collins' website user interface.

That is all.

*Jim gave me this book because he said Coraline reminded him of me. I thought this was sweet until much later when he told me that it was because Coraline gets a pizza for her dinner when she gets hungry. What?!

How are you? Here is another unordered, unedited list of braindribble:

Non-mental holiday shocker
This is the first summer holiday I have ever properly switched off. No anxious pacing. No panicky midnight lesson planning. No physical nausea at those Woolworths 'back to school' ads. I've downgraded my herbal remedies from brandy-laced Rescue Remedy to harmless Badger Balm*, which smells much nicer than the title suggests. I always thought it was the epic 'alone-time' of August that brought the crazy to the yard, but apparently not.

*Notice the inaccurate packaging on the front of Badger Balm. Aren't badgers nocturnal? How is this badger going to forage undetected during daylight hours? Or cross busy daytime roads? What if he becomes a social outcast? Get it together, Badger Balm.

Rockumentary
The boy has given me a dinky DV camera to try out. I now have many hours of shaky, Mike Leigh style docu-footage of life in our flat. I can't BELIEVE how often and how elaborately I swear. Sorry guys. I will get the boy to edit down some of my searing social commentary so you can share the love tedium orange carpet.

Two years and sixty seven months
Yesterday marked two years since the boy and I stopped being groovy bohemian sinners and became family. I can't honestly claim to have had many good ideas, but I reckon that one was a humdinger. Here is my annual puke-making anniversary photograph:

What do you mean, 'blow chunks'? Yes, okay, you can go now.

Bath is to New Cross what Veuve Clicquot is to Kia-Ora. The boy and I have gone from being the neighbourhood dandies to the local foul-mouthed tramps. Everything is beautiful; buildings, views, beer, people. I feel quite shocked that we've landed here after five years of rough and tumble in South London.

Moving was a living hell, and I'm having a hard time shifting down a gear. The art of relaxation is much underrated.

Back soon!

Teaching is a particularly difficult job to leave because, while the adults can handle it, a few of the kids can't. Today most of my students were pretty cheerful about the situation, but a few were withdrawn and one (6th former!) even cried.

Still there have been beautiful gifts and cards and far too much wine for one person to drink. My classroom has been gutted, my desk cleared for the first time in three years and my whiteboard washed shiny-clean. Chairs on desks, folders shredded, thank you and goodnight. This afternoon lots of people asked if I was excited about moving, happy to be leaving, sad to be leaving, looking forward to some time off or whatever. To be honest, I feel nothing at all other than utterly knackered.

All I want to do tomorrow is lie in bed with my new book (squee!) and wait until I feel like myself again. But! It's time to pack and scrub and label and lift and carry and assemble. Jesus. The only thing that's currently keeping me going is a permanent loop of Jenny Don't Be Hasty which I view as a kind of oddly specific message from the universe rather than a jaunty music track that I got for free with a Coca-Cola/iTunes promotion. Hooray grandiose delusions!

The boy is here! To celebrate, we went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which was so brilliant that it was all I could do not to stand up in the middle of the packed cinema and shout 'THIS IS GREAT.' The best part was the return of Gary 'Kiss My Face' Oldman, who was all done up in a natty pinstriped suit ensemble. Why doesn't he just kiss my face and get it over with?

London has got all humid and uncomfortable, and there's only a week left of work. I've packed literally nothing but I've drunk two beers. Ah well.

Took some students to see the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery today. I wasn't expecting much, to be honest, but it was genuinely spectacular. Our kids spent much of their time groping around in the Blind Light installation, staggering out from time to time, looking like they'd been in a tropical rainforest. The installation itself comprises a large glass room filled with thick white fog. From the outside, you can see creepy silhouettes appearing and disappearing, moving in slow motion as if they're underwater. Of course I went in! I'd have been a muppet not to.

Inside was literally thrilling. Once the door closes there is total whiteout, so you can barely see your own outstretched hand. Not wanting to look a ninny, I began to creep forward, quickly becoming utterly disorientated. Some people were in pairs, holding hands, but I think it's better to go in alone. The sensation of being in an infinite white void, surrounded by garbled conversations, starting to soak through with condensation and vague panic was frickin' amazing. I heard one of the kids call out '...is this what heaven is like?' I replied that I thought it was more like a coma.

After that, there were amazing wire sculptures and more interactive installations and finally we ran out onto the viewing platforms to see all 31 of the Event Horizon blokes, staring us down from all over the place.

Sadly we weren't allowed to take pictures in the exhibition, so here is a crappy cameraphone snap of my souvenir Blind Light Cloud Dome:



Antony, I salute you. You crazy rich sculptor man.

Things are trundling along here, in the way that steam rollers trundle over hot tar. It's painful. Still two weeks until the end of term and my life is one giant Crunchy Nut Cluster.

The flat is still sitting unpacked, we are being screwed over by our removal firm and the landlord keeps trailing prospective tenants into the place to look at my stuff scornfully. Every weekend sees some relative or friend or other person who wants to stay in London for free crashing on my sofa and using my towels and demanding tea and cereal and other things that I don't eat. I have to get a special permit for the removal van to park on the Red Route, and even then I'm not sure how I'm supposed to stop people parking in the bay before the removal blokes get here. Maybe lie down in it? Stand in it naked, screaming obscenities?

In other, equally-stressful-but-slightly-good news, I got offered a job in a Bath school yesterday and I have taken it. It's a massive step down financially, but frankly I'm delighted. The hours are 9am-1pm which means only TEN MORE 5.45am get-ups left! The prospect of a normal adult bedtime is so very exciting. Perhaps I can start watching ER again. I hope Corday's gone, the irritating moo.

Being without the boy is dreadful. I saw him last night after my job interview and it was great. He cooked me brilliant food and said weird things like 'Hey, you're in a bath, in Bath ... YOU'RE IN A PARADOX!' which made me laugh. I can't wait to live with the boy again, things are just so much fun.

My mother calls most nights to check that I haven't been mugged, kidnapped or blown up on my way home from work. This is much less comforting than she might think.

Life without the boy goes on in a continual see-saw of tedium and anxious palpitation. We finally have a removal company who have agreed to take on our ludicrous little stairway and Red Route parking so thank Crunchie for that.

Five weeks left of work and the pace is hectic. Marking, moderating, teaching, packing up my classroom. Three years of accumulated stuff to come home on the train, save me jebus. The GCSE girls don't know I'm going. Not sure I'll get a chance to tell them now, ah well.

All you far-flung folks will know it's at times like these you miss your family and friends. Oh for a dad to come round in his car and help me load up my books and sewing machine. My kingdom for an aunt to have me over for Sunday lunch. My back teeth for a lovely girl friend to whisk off for Saturday cinema and cocktails.

But there is television! And bathing! And sweet, sweet internets! And our lovely new flat, devoid of sirens and gun crime, large enough to fit this place twice over. Fucking brilliant.

Gra and I have both gone slightly stir crazy. We've eaten loads and loads of rice; perhaps carbs have something to do with the madness. Or perhaps it's the constant worry and anxiety of employment / money / exams / moving / the futility of life.

Today while watching the film Big Fish, we decided to Google the actor Billy Crudup to find out what else he'd been in. Sadly I made a typo and ended up searching for 'Billy Crupdum' and we fell about laughing for at least two minutes. Which is a really long time to laugh about something that's not really funny. At all.

Then Chris phoned and described a shirt he owns as 'white with white stripes' and I laughed so much I almost puked. SORRY.

Come to the Cabaret
On Saturday night we went to see Cabaret starring Pussy Galore and Constable Goody. The show was brilliant and poignant and as funny as anyone can realistically make the fall of Berlin to Nazism, and I heartily recommend it. The only bad thing was the stupid audience who found the sight of BOTTOMS thigh-slappingly hilarious, even in the context of a gas chamber. Fuckwits.

Crap Trains
Gra and I are currently trapped on a shamefully oversold GNER train to Edinburgh to visit the parental units. Our crappy seats are thrown into perspective when I consider that there are actual mothers with children sitting on the floor in the corridor. Even the first class toilets are swimming in piss and Gra has to eat a cheese toastie with spinach and tomato because they've run out of normal ones. We were delayed by an hour because of overrunning engineering works. I can't believe I paid actual money for this.

Half Term
Half term is once again upon us, meaning that there are only seven school weeks until unemployment. Whee!

The last week has been fairly horrendous, at least one of the most horrendous weeks since The Great Influenza Outbreak or perhaps even The PGCE Debacle of 2003. Holding it together without the boy has been much more difficult than I anticipated, partly because I just miss him a lot, partly because he is such an excellent cook and I think I'm getting scurvy. Moving was physically exhausting and mentally strenuous, and to go from a lost weekend into another week of exams has brought me to my knees.

The good news is that Gra is back in the country. Hi Gra! Today I felt very proud because not only did I roast a chicken, but Gra claimed it to be the best chicken he'd ever eaten. Woo! Gra and I have been hanging out on his sofa bed, eating Chinese food and watching a lot of television, kind of like living in a terrible bedsit. It's been great.

One more week until half term. Tomorrow I will be meeting the candidates who want to fill my position when I'm gone. IS THAT THE FOETAL POSITION? CRYING?

Lifting, carrying, driving, walking, signing, walking, lifting, carrying, driving. What a weekend. We finally closed the deal on our new Bath flat, just in the nick of time for the boy starting his new job tomorrow. The new flat is very different from our current one, the main difference being the lack of screaming traffic and frightening criminals outside. This is our new living room view:


Pretty nice. Apparently there is a gardener, how civilised.

I'm hoping that West Country folk will start endearing themselves to me a bit more once I actually move there. So far everyone we've met is either a) crazy, b) humourless or c) very angry at us outsiders lurking around. The poor boy got a particularly harsh lecture from a taxi driver today. Come on, West Countrymen, I know some of you must be lovely. Let's hug!

I'm back in Londres now, where I'll be until the end of July. We're in the middle of exams and my contract is watertight, baby. It's pretty sad to think of the boy rattling around in that big empty flat on his own, though. Here he is at his desk, connecting to the hive mind:

Everyone send him lots of emails!

Night then x

There has been much tentative excitement brewing in the flat of late. Excitement, possibly laced with doom at the clusterfuck we have brought down upon us. But! It's all in a good cause and features a number of dramatic storylines:

Excitement!
I am leaving my job! Leaving! My! Job! Can you imagine? Because I certainly can't. The oddest part is that I have to finish out the academic year, so it won't really be happening until the end of July. Leaving! Etc.

Adventure!
We are leaving London. O London, city of sweet depravity. How I will miss you and your excellent and unfairly maligned public transport system. We are moving to historic Bath, cultured home of studenty types and organic cafes. What this means for our already mangled accents I can only imagine.

Sorrow
And all this because the boy has got a new job at Future publishing. Nice! Sadly the job starts in two weeks, meaning I will be living it up, New Cross stylee, on my own for two months. Poo. Imagine how lonely I'll get. Imagine how many packets of Capri Sun I'll consume.

So that's what's going down. This move will be my fifth in five years, baby! Rock on.

I've been offline for a while, mainly because Mr I. Book is in laptop hospital having his Airport card fixed. I miss him very much, especially when I wake up of a morning and want to catch up with all the world's atrocities without leaving my snuggly duvet. Le sigh. Hunky man at the Apple Store assures me that he will be all patched up soon. Meanwhile, I am using the boy's highly complex multimedia workstation, which features an array of hubs and mice and KVM switchers that buzz disconcertingly. The Dell keyboard requires very HARD TYPING from all fingers, which makes me feel like I am writing an angry letter to Points of View.

Nothing new to report, which frankly makes me wonder why I carry on with this charade. Never mind, here are some thought-nuggets:

Sell everything you own for amazing skin
Tired of permanently looking like the mangy lovechild of Bryan Adams and Dirty Den, I finally caved in to Bliss's extravagant claims and ordered some of their overpriced skincare products. Merciful heavens, but they're amazing! I have the skin of a normal adult human! It's possible that Bliss cosmetics will become my own personal crack hell.

Survivor of Japan fish/rice regime to recover in South London
My brother Graham is coming to stay in a few weeks following his nine month internship in rural Japan. Graham's dormitory serves fish and rice for every meal, including breakfast, and I think it's starting to get to him. Apparently M&Ms have become like currency amongst the intern population and he cycles about 6 miles to buy Special K, the only available breakfast cereal. What are the odds of him going completely doolally in New Cross Sainsburys the minute he touches down? I'm thinking of preparing sushi for his welcome home dinner, just for a laugh. (Not really, Gra.)

Here is a cameraphone photo of a drawing of a Barnacle Goose. This goose has been through four levels of interpretation, if you include my eyeball. Imagine the Xerox-like levels of degradation! The boy would be able to make this look all amazing and get rid of the golden glare from the lamp using his amazing Photoshop skillz, but frankly I can't be bothered monkeying around with the 'Adjust Levels' buttons. I'm a busy woman.

In other interfering-with-fowl news, check out this chicken I roasted:

There's a lemon up its arse and everything! And thyme! I am disproportionately pleased with my ability to put a raw chicken in an oven for 90 minutes. I'm not sure this bodes well for the rest of my adult life.

We have been on holiday! Here is me with my holiday squint on:

Sadly this picture was not actually taken on holiday but in a beer garden in South London. Our proper holiday photographs are all of ducks. Witness:

Both the boy and I developed a bizarre obsession with the quacky feckers and now boast the world's largest private collection of duck images. I'll post some of my drawings later unless you send me cash. Lots of cash.

O the gilded glamour! The buzzy exhaustion of the socially successful! Three nights out in a row; more than doubling my night-out quota for the rest of the year. On Wednesday we went to the Royal Albert Hall to see Russell Brand and Noel Fielding, which was simultaneously brilliant and surreal. To my art-schoolish delight, '90s student icon Stewart Lee made a surprise appearance in the second half. No one at my work knows who Stewart Lee is, though, which kind of took the edge off my anecdote the next day. The show was opened by faux folk star Merriman Weir singing this song, which is really worth listening to all the way through if you can be arsed or if you are my brother:



On Thursday the boy and I then went ahp Lahndan to Helen's bookclub which has the most complex rules of any bookclub ever. We don't all read the same book, oh no! We all read different books then talk about them then swap them then vote on what other books we want to buy then buy them. It's very exciting! Sadly all of Helen's friend's are boarding school and Cambridge educated, and I don't really feel much able to step up to the literary plate. Fuck it, though, we all get to drink big mochas.

On Friday, after a day of edgy teaching, I went out again but I couldn't really tell you much about it. There was a glass of wine and a very good piece of rare tuna involved, though, so it must've been good.

And now I'm off for two weeks. YIPPEE!

You don't know stress until you've escorted 60 children around the British Museum. Don't touch that! You can't eat in here! Shh! No laughing at the bottoms! The good news is that this was my last school visit of the year. No one died, no one got lost, no one got injured, no one got abducted and no priceless cultural gems got tagged. Thank Crunchie.

Next week, the boy and I are attending a number of glittering events which are sure to get me all overexcited. On Wednesday we are going to see The Goth Detectives at the Royal Albert Hall, on Thursday I shall embarrass myself in the company of Cambridge graduates at Helen's book club, and on Friday I am attending a seafood restaurant with some work people. This sort of hardcore socialising turns me into a gibbering lunatic at the best of times. How will I fare going out on consecutive school nights?

Finally, I did this quiz that Brad recommended* and was dismayed to find out that NO ONE in America has my name. How can this be? I know I should feel sort of special and unique, but in reality it's rather lonely. Sob. Perhaps some of you will have more luck:

*Not only do I still read Brad, but I also take his life advice on board.

Hey I haven't seen you in ages! Here are some things that I am too lazy to link together in prose format:

Happy Birthday!
The boy turned 27 last week, happy birthday to him! I gave him a boxed set of Pocket Penguins. These are books, sadly, not small flightless birds, but I think he still likes them. No one at my work can believe the boy is only 27, although everyone is too embarrassed to tell me their guesstimated age. 35? 47? 82? We'll never know.

Sicky sickness
I've been ill twice this month. This MONTH! Perhaps it is one long illness with a few days of rude health as one of its symptoms. Stoically, I've continued to work through this lurgy because of exam prep. Here's to spreading germs around!

Art
I have started a new painting, the first proper, on-canvas painting I've done in years. It's hilarious.

Thing 1: Beauty
Today I got ludicrously choked up whilst talking about a photograph I had taken of a sarcophagus. Because it was so very, very beautiful. And literally ancient. Thankfully my students are used to this sort of thing and continue to take notes as I dissolve into artistic raptures over painted stone.

Thing 2: Sibling Rivalry
South London shout-out to my brother who is now officially a boffin. He also now rivals me in terms of letters-after-name, although I will have to do a character-count to determine the winner of the Best Offspring Award for certain. I think this should be awarded by my mother in the form of a giant cauldron of tomatoey mince with 'put the heating on' iced on top in Smash.

Thing 3: Women who Love Smocks Too Much
I want to hand wash my smock, right? But I also want to have a long, relaxing bath. Oh, what to do? Yes, I am going to share a bath with my smock. Shut up, I'm not all that dirty.

Finally got new glasses at Vision Express today. My old glasses literally fell to pieces last summer and I've been wearing contact lenses ever since. If there's one thing worse than getting up at five thirty, it's getting up at five thirty and poking yourself in the eyeballs. Hooray spectacles! The boy took this picture of my new glasses - he thinks they make me look more intelligent. This supports my assertion that my face, while technically proportionate, has a kind of bovine stupidity about it.

The other day, the boy and I were making stupid faces at each other when the boy proposed we begin an online 'funny face competition' which would involve voting and photographs. Something about this being the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard combined with the boy repeating the words 'funny face competition' over and over just made me utterly hysterical. Every time I think he's forgotten about it, he tells me about some widget or other that will allow a poll on this site 'for the funny face competition'. The boy seems to have mistaken my website for The Beano. What is wrong with him?

In other news, Helen was telling me she went to see Hot Fuzz at the cinema and she somehow ended up sitting next to Simon Pegg. How strange. How very strange.

Flares are back, yeah baby. Not that I ever stopped wearing flares, but it means that the end is in sight for skinny jeans, thank Christ. No one looks good in skinny jeans, except the tapeworm-skinny. Everyone else just looks like they've been piped into a sausage casing. In other fashion news: smocks! I bought my first smock on Thursday and have been wearing it ever since. It's amazing. It's quite difficult to choose the correct smock; length, fabric and pleatiness must be carefully assessed in order to avoid looking pregnant, but once the perfect smock has been located there's no going back. Hobbes was right!

In movie news, I went to see Hot Fuzz on Friday, which was a lot of fun although surprisingly violent. Yesterday we went to see Music and Lyrics, which was enjoyable in a Saturday afternoon kind of way. While we were waiting for the film to start, an advert came on for some kind of shampoo, it might have been Sunsilk. It was the sort of ad that featured strong, confident women bonding at a pyjama party and singing into their hairbrushes; you know the type of thing. Anyway, the boy was so offended by the ad that he began to energetically parody it right there in the cinema, dancing with jazz-hands, throwing his non-existent hair around and finally enacting the complex mime of removing his bra and setting fire to it. I've never seen this sort of low-level anarchism in him before but it was bloody funny.

One of my favourite things in the world is when people come to stay and then blog about it. Seriously! There is something satisfying about having someone confirm the lunacy of our existence. Susan's recent chronicle of her New Cross stay is an excellent guide for any future flat-dwellers. Here is a summary:

Bring earplugs
Unless you enjoy the sound of sirens, Cockney streetfighting and eyebleeding drum 'n' bass. We keepin' it real!

I am like a ghost
You genuinely may not see me for your entire visit. But you might hear me creeping around in the dead of night getting ready for work. Or you might hear me lurking in the shadows of your room, watching you sleep. Watching ... and taking Polaroids.

We have no mirrors
The #1 complaint of all guests. What can I say? Between us, the boy and I are balding, myopic, pale, overweight Scots with the fashion sense of elderly astronomy professors. We hate mirrors. Susan should count herself lucky that she got a mirror at all – Cope had to check his hair in the back of a CD. Now that's initiative!

London will make you cry
No matter what happens, you will end your trip feeling as if you have been stretched on a rack, had the skin flayed from your feet and been beaten about the neck and torso with a large Christmas ham. There is no way of preventing this feeling - just be glad that you have a home to return to. Because we fecking live here.

Somehow I've managed to limp to the half-term finish line. Although I guess as it's only half-term it's not really a finish line as such, more just a pit stop. Or perhaps I'm mixing sporting metaphors in a confused manner. Anyway, what's important is that the last fortnight has been utterly horrific, workwise, and now it is over. Huzzah!

Lots of things have happened, no doubt I might tell you about some of them when my mental faculties have returned. Susan came to visit! Even though I barely saw her thanks to my ludicrous sleep schedule! The boy went to Barcelona! Which really sucked ass! Etc! But the most exciting Ribbledoot headline is that this morning we took delivery of this:

Dr D. Washer! Never again do I have to refuse to scrub the boy's beloved griddle pan. We can use the KitchenAid blender with impunity. We have become part of Western Society. O happy day!

Rock on.

The other day, I drew a few pictures of the mushrooms I had saved from the mushroom soup. I was inanely proud of these retarded etchings and presented them to the boy with great ceremony. The boy, because he knows I am 'special', heaped praise on the mushroom drawings, dubbing the page 'Aspects of Mushroom'. Approximately 5 seconds later, I had composed a short song entitled 'Aspects of Mushroom' which ended with the inspired lines 'aspects of mushroom, aspects of mushroom/if you like mushrooms, this is for you.'

Such ludicrous domestic scenes are happening with increasing frequency in our relationship. I used to think that it took decades of co-habitation to become so complicit in eccentricity that the outside world stopped having any real meaning, but now I know the bitter truth.

Two days ago, as we made our way back from Sainsbury's laden with groceries, the boy stopped and pointed at the ground. 'Look,' he said, pointing at a small rock on the pavement, 'some flint.' We both looked at the flint for a moment, chewing the buttermilk pancakes that the boy had liberated from his carrier bag moments earlier. I'm afraid that I rather lost my head, making a right-turn down the alleyway of squaredom, man. 'I am twenty six years old! And I am eating buttermilk pancakes in the street! While my husband points out interesting rocks! THIS IS NOT HOW MY LIFE WAS SUPPOSED TO PAN OUT,' I shrieked, somewhat hysterically. The boy was nonplussed. He thinks buttermilk pancakes are a snack for any time, any place.

We have a lovely new student teacher who is very hard working and earnest and makes me feel ASHAMED of myself. Sorry, student teacher, do not judge me too harshly until you have walked a mile in my teacher-slacks. Which are from The Gap, if you're wondering, and are the best forty quid I ever spent.

The boy made it back from the New World in one piece, bearing Fritos and Hershey and a Californian head cold. It's pretty great to have him back, not least because I can stop worrying about falling asleep in the bath. He also brought me a small jar of Grey Poupon room service mustard, which we both find inexplicably hilarious.

In mushroom news, I have a yellow oyster mushroom in the fridge which I might do a drawing of later. Or I might not.

All Americans take the piss! Ah, you guys.

The boy is, as we speak, flying over the Atlantic. Or possibly bobbing in it, given the horrific weather we are currently enduring. As a 'hilarious' joke, my boss hid my keys and made me think that I would be locked out of my flat for a week. Thanks! Your tax dollars at work!

No other news other than my tempting the fates by leaving our Christmas tree up past Saturday. Doom! Also, is it wrong to find crying while eating quite as funny as I do?

Hello everyone, happy new year! How are you? You look great! Check out my new upbeat demeanour, do you think it will last to the end of the post? Who knows and, more importantly, who cares? This first paragraph is really turning into a punctuation frenzy.

The boy went back to work today, which to me seems horrific and uncivilised. Everyone knows that 2nd January is a public holiday for Scots due to our genetic predisposition for hard liquor and general all-night revelry on the 31st. Ah well. As it turns out, we weren't invited to any parties and couldn't be arsed to have one of our own anyway. We ended up watching War of the Worlds on the projector until midnight, which lent a disturbingly apocalyptic edge to the evening. Or it would've done if the boy hadn't kept singing themes from Jeff Wayne's musical version over the top of the action.

I go back to work tomorrow. So far I have spent my day self-medicating with herbal remedies and Innocent smoothies. Here, for those of you who missed it first time round, is a recipe for use with Innocent smoothies.

Jeff Colada
Ingredients:
1 large bottle Innocent pineapple, coconut and banana smoothie
1 smallish bottle Bacardi rum

Pour measure of rum into some kind of fancy glass. Fill rest of glass with Innocent drink. Stir with spoon or chopstick or cotton bud. Drink. Sing Pina Colada song until spouse threatens divorce. Repeat ad nauseam.

Don't say I never give you anything.

2007 pretty much sucks so far, although perhaps I haven't given it a chance. This is traditionally the time of year that I pick up an enormous pile of holiday brochures and spend a week gradually downgrading from three weeks in Madagascar to four days at Center Parcs. I used to get depressed about this when everyone I knew seemed to be on an exotic Gap Year, but now that I am older and more mature I realise that it doesn't matter because Center Parcs fucking rocks.

That is all.

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas etc! I hope you have all had suitably decadent and calorie-laden celebrations so far. I can now confirm that spending Christmas in a hotel is the greatest gift that money can buy. Instead of waking up on some rickety put-you-up to familial chaos and sprout-peeling duties, you get to wake up here:

Pretty sweet, no? Please note how this bed is wide enough for three pillows in a row and sports a jaunty festive comforter. At the end of the amazing bed is a large television and a phone which connects you to the magic food man who brings you food on a tray. Genius.

Edinburgh is very beautiful at Christmas. The boy took this photograph of the skating rink and funfair in Princes Street Gardens, also home of the excellent German Market where you can buy hot chocolate with rum in it. I'm just sayin'. You can see the castle lit up in the background of this photo, which I only really mention for Cope, who likes castles.

The boy and I are now in Palnackie, of Coast fame. Palnackie is the loveliest and most picturesque place in the universe. My father-in-law smoked a trout in honour of our visit and I was handed a sloe gin on arrival. What more can I say? The drive South was drizzly and quiet, although the boy kept us entertained by suggesting alternate messages for the LED police messageboards we kept passing:

Merry Christmas
Don't Drink and Drive
Drug Driving: it's not worth it
Love your wife and family
Thou shalt not kill
Masturbating makes you blind

You get the idea. Back home to London on Thursday and, inexplicably, we can't wait. Hope everyone is warm and well and getting their groove on as applicable.

Cheers!

The boy and I are decamping to Scotland for the festive season. In possibly the best two hundred quid I've ever spent, we have booked into a luxury hotel in Edinburgh instead of staying at my folks house. I feel that any guilt I have over such a decadent and Londonite move will be immediately salved by Christmas Eve room service and those teeny tiny Molton Brown shampoos. Rock on.

On Boxing Day we are taking my dad's car (because Dads don't really need cars) to the beautiful Solway Coast in order to visit the boy's relatives and stare at the ocean, smoking pipes.

We are packing a freakish amount of technology and spent last night syncing iPods and burning DVDs onto hard drives and backing-up laptops and winding up cables. We are kind of like the Borg, in a way.

To the Motherland, and don't spare the horses!

Holy mother, our flat has suddenly got very cold indeed. The flat is at least a hundred years old and has those kind of single-glazed, wooden-framed windows that allow the polar maritime air to whistle freely through the building, creating atmospheric draughts and miniature eddies that dance around our sleeping forms. I am currently wearing all of my normal clothes, a large fluffy robe and a blanket in order to prevent hypothermia from setting in. I really hope I don't have to wee at any time in the near future, I really can't be bothered.

Here is an actual conversation the boy and I had about one of our Christmas cards which I think illustrates why neither of us ever had much success with flatmates:

Look, the cat says 'meow', the dog says 'woof', but the mouse ... IS MUTE!
He says nothing! He should say 'meep meep'.
And look, the artist can only draw cats, look at the dog -
He has a cat's face! And weird, stick-like legs.
Anyway, mice say 'squeak', not 'meep'.
So who's it from?

What is wrong with us? We appear to be collectively straddling the fine line between 'quirky' and 'special'. Why did either of us see fit to angst over the mute cartoon mouse? And why bother critiquing the artist's rendering of a dog wearing a Santa hat? What is the point? What is the bloody point?

In other news, I have missed the last posting date for all of my Christmas presents. This means I am going to bad sister/cousin/niece/friend hell. All of those hells. At once. SORRY EVERYONE.

And that's why I don't like cricket.

Off work and like a new woman. It always takes me a few days to stop waking up pre-dawn and prowling the flat like a caged beast, but I'm adjusting quite well so far. Predicting my post-term psychosis, the boy bought me some very exciting trainers to roam around South London in. Thanks! I don't so much 'run' as 'ramble erratically', but the exciting trainers are so bouncy and sporty-looking that I feel like some kind of Olympian. Rock on.

We spent the weekend on Oxford Street and Covent Garden which is a ROOKIE MISTAKE. What were we thinking? At least we bought loads of Christmas presents, although most of them are glass and/or very heavy and thus completely inappropriate for transportation to Scotland next weekend. Ah well.

Expect lots more posting this week due to lack of friends and life outside of work. Hooray!

Today at work I got some board cleaner on my contact lens and spent the whole day all blurry. I had to refer to students as 'Blonde hair ... curly blond hair! Next to boy! Yes, you!' I'm such a pro.

In other news, this is my last ever 'User column. Please note that I got the word 'fucking' published in a magazine. My mother will be so proud. Now I can retire from the heady world of publishing with all of my ambitions fulfilled.

Two days left before we finish for Christmas. Thank Christ. Literally.

Quick, identify the early-90s indie lyric; if you Google it you're a loser.

OH DEAR. I have lost my door keys, so the boy lent me his and now I have to stay awake until he comes home so that I can buzz him in. I know it's only 9.20pm, but remember that I operate on Bucharest time and can barely make it through dinner without nodding off.

Here's a bit of braindribble:

Northern Lights
As discussed by lovely Susan, it is indeed possible to see the Northern Lights in Scotland at particular times of the year. Lots of people spend lots of money roaming around trying to see the Northern Lights, but I was lucky enough to see them as a kid before I knew that they were quite rare. I can report that the Northern Lights are both weird and spooky and make you think aliens are about to land if you're 8 and have no understanding of basic physics.

Beads and Ribbons
Are pretty much all I want for Christmas. I'm like the simple peasant folk of yore in that way. Props to Emma for sending me some lovely German birthday beads. THANKS!

Advent
Yesterday I bought the boy a Cadbury's advent calendar AND a giant chewy cookie from Sainsbury's and he has opened neither. What gives? Is he secretly in fitness training for an Olympic Event? 100m Palm piloting? Freestyle biro modem-restarting? Is he just trying to make me look like a greedy trougher?

Friday
Never in the history of mankind has a Friday been quite so hotly anticipated. BRING IT.

ETA For Susan:

Rollers!

Yesterday I turned 26 years old, which was fun.

The good thing about working with kids is that they enjoy making a big deal over birthdays, so with careful planning you can spend the entire day eating cakes made or bought by harassed parents with better things to do. Thanks, harassed parents!

The bad thing about working with kids is that they are very bad judges of age. My Year 10s guessed that I was 31, and a Year 11 said 'just think, Miss, only another ten years until you're Nifty Fifty'. Whatever.

Thank you to everyone who sent cards and presents and emails; you are most kind.

Three weeks left of term and all sorts of crazy hi-skool shit is going down. Today was apparently Bring Your Addled Hormones to Work day, and we spent much of the morning breaking up fights and ushering crying people into the office. We were sufficiently rattled that we entered departmental lockdown at lunchtime and shut ourselves in an empty room for a bit of peace.

In other news, I have been a terrible wife this week. The boy and I take it in turns to cook, you see. While the boy has been producing culinary masterpieces such as seared tuna and tomato pasta and medallion steak and green vegetables, my last offering was a packet of Walkers Sensations chicken and thyme crisps and a bar of chocolate. Bon appetit! SORRY. You married it.

The Polar Bear.

He's a freakin' tiny genius.

Autumn in London is lovely. Tourists go home, everything cools down and life is slightly slower. The boy and I took an amble to Surrey Quays, home of crap shopping and our closest Burger King. I am strangely comforted by crap shopping centres, possibly from growing up in a series of small working class towns where the biggest Saturday thrill you can expect is 2 tops for £8 in Dorothy Perkins. Here is an annotated picture of the crap shopping centre. Tweenies!

We also went to see The Prestige, which is pretty good in a violent and downbeat way. Hugh Jackman is not nearly as hunky without his adamantine skeleton.

Wow, these recent posts have been appalling. Sorry about that.

Teacher/journo interface last night as a gang of us went to see Casino Royale at the Odeon Leicester Square. Generally I can take or leave James Bond, and I wasn't really that bothered about going to see it, but it was pretty freaking excellent. Daniel Craig can really take a punch.

I utterly destroyed any kudos that I had built up in the Dennis camp by claiming that there was an epilator among the gadgets in Bond's car. OF COURSE I MEANT A DEFIBRILLATOR. Although he was very smooth-chested, so you never know. Perhaps you are supposed to use the epilator before the defibrillator to help conductivity.

Tired, tired, tired. I'm now leaving the house in the dark and coming home in the dark, which makes me feel like some sort of hero even though my hours haven't changed at all.

On Monday I took 25 students into London to see a day of lectures by amazing artists including Eileen Cooper and my beloved Grayson. The artists were fantastic, talking about their experiences and answering some very odd questions. Textiles genius Rosalind Wyatt did a live calligraphy demonstration and then spent ages signing students' names onto their sketchbooks using her special Indian ink. Grayson Perry deftly tackled teenage heckles about his transvestism with humour and good grace. The man is a potting god.

I have now officially retired from the blessed 'User, which is pretty sad. Please ensure that you write to the magazine saying that I was the finest writer ever committed to print, and that you have now gouged your own eyes out as there is nothing left worth reading anymore.

The other bad news is that it's only WEDNESDAY.

Hey, why not make these very easy pocketbook slippers? I did this one on Saturday. I will get the boy to take a proper photo when I''ve done the pair, as it is surprisingly hard to photograph your own feet.

In other news: work, cold, London, the boy, blah blah etc.

Take my job, no take it
Work is like rubbing my brain all over with a cheese grater for ten hours a day, then patting it with a washcloth soaked in white spirit for the other fourteen. Tomorrow I have to take a PSD session on mental health. Irony abounds.

Stats
Apparently the vast majority of Ribble readers are American. Hello Americans! Join in the commenting fun! Also, October stats show I've lost 20 of my regular visitors. I've driven them away with my grumbling and crochet-talk. COME BACK, I CAN CHANGE!

Friendship = Gifts
Why not be my friend? I will make you things like this and this. Special consideration given to applicants from the London area who can quote extensively from The Big Lebowski and/or cult BBC3 sitcoms.

A big smackity kiss to all the lovely people at the MacUser awards last night, particularly those that were 'lucky' enough to be seated next to me. Special props to the second nicest man in the world, who managed to smooth over some horrendous conversational glitches and pretended not to notice my appauling table manners. I've sent Tim some of my skilfully executed artwork to say thanks for being such a great table buddy. Because that's not weird. Here are some photos of the awards; also one of us looking odd.

Today I am roasting a chicken and doing some embroidery. The boy has banned me from watching The Mighty Boosh on the grounds that it was making me crazy. Fair enough.

It's only a month 'til my birthday! Perhaps 26 will be the age when people finally stop saying 'bloody hell' when they find out how old I am, then calculating exactly what they were doing (graduating, having children, smoking crack) when I was still staggering around playgroup, gumming Rusks.

The Boosh
The boy made the terrible mistake of buying me The Mighty Boosh on DVD after I raved about the radio version. Now he too has been sucked in and we can spend hours at a time trapped in a loop of odd phrases like 'my navigational skills are second to none' and 'fish finger the size of a garage'. Sounds harmless, but two grown adults lying in the dark shouting 'I'm Old Gregg' at each other is a recipe for couples counselling down the line, mark my words.

Stupid Girls' Clothes
Yesterday I walked into Hobbs and spent an obscene amount of money on a fancy rig for the 'User awards on Thursday. The kind of money that makes you feel dizzy as you hand over your plastic. I felt violated. I also bought high heeled shoes that will probably slowly crush my feet to a bloody pulp but that make my legs look about four inches longer. Ah well.

Half Term
Yes, a mere month-and-a-half after my epic six week summer break, I have this week off for half term. Bloody teachers, don't know they're born, etc. I plan to spend the next five days lying down quietly.

We were invited to a party entitled 'Back to the '90s' this weekend. The idea was that everyone should dress as they actually dressed in the '90s, meaning that most guests turned up in flannel shirts and ripped jeans and started pogoing around to The Pixies.

Predictably, such faithful devotion to fact was ridiculous to the boy and I, who quickly decided that our personal theme was 'how we wish we looked in the '90s'. The boy used Friends circa 1997 as his style reference and donned a rather fetching sweater vest and preppy rolled-sleeved shirt ('Could I be any more '90s?') I decided that I missed my calling as a Goth, dyed my hair red and applied copious quantities of black make up.

I enjoyed being a Goth so much that I applied my black eyeshadow again today and pushed a trolley around Waitrose looking like the undead. Check out this amazing Dragon Fruit that I got in the fresh produce area. It has a sticker on it which says 'cut open to reveal a sweet, tender pulp'. Why bother when it looks so frickin' amazing as it is?


Props to the boy for taking this genius photo of me and the dragon fruit. Photoshop may or may not have been employed on my monobrow.

I have been crocheting with this coloured scientific wire. Groovy, huh? I bought loads of scientific wire at The Bead Store in Soho. It comes in lots of funky colours including, improbably, fuchsia. I wonder if scientists ever actually use scientific wire these days?

The boy has been very patient in his admiration of my crocheted wire, even when I shove the spiky little bundles in front of his computer screen and exclaim 'LOOK WHAT I MADE' every 23 minutes. He takes each one in his fingers and proclaims its wonderment to all of South London. Perhaps he is on Lithium or something.

These green beaded rounds remind me of anemones. I think I'll make loads of them and turn them into a crazy anemone necklace. Hey, there's that woman! With the necklace! Do you think she's in some way 'special'?

That is all.

Whee! Slides at Tate Modern
Londoners! Why not check out this stunning interactive artwork by Carsten Holler this weekend? Not sure I'll work up the nerve to go on these as they are very five floors high and ruddy fast. Tempting, though ... maybe a stiff drink at the bar will steady my nerve.

Artworld's Most Influential Not Actually Artists
Disappointing and yet comfortingly predictable.

Turner Prize-Winning Transvestite Potter Unprepared for Fangirling
Oh yes. I am taking some 6th Formers to a lecture by Grayson Perry, The Sexiest Ceramicist Ever. Sadly (for Grayson), there is an opportunity to 'meet the artist' afterwards. Embarrassingly (for my students), I'm not sure I will be able to stop myself from screaming and clutching at his lovely leather jacket. Oh Grayson. You and your angsty pots.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone. Please think of me naked tomorrow morning when you are snuggled up in bed. x

I've said to Nik that I will stop writing my columns at the end of the year. This is pretty sad; not only did I get paid for sitting on my couch typing nonsense into a Word document, but it was good to do something that wasn't school related on a regular basis.

But! I shall find solace in the tiny miracles:
Amazing sunrises from the station platform.
Cold weather.
Wearing a winter coat.
Ocado, The Finest Online Delivery Service On Earth™.
Hot baths.
Chocolate Digestives.
The boy's fuzzy scalp.

Today I calculated how many days old I am and was surprised to find I'm only in the nine-thousands. Knowing that I've managed to achieve bipedal locomotion, passable English and rudimentary driving skills in under ten thousand days makes me feel oddly elated. If I manage to live to the increasingly-attainable age of 80, I've still got another 19,724 days left to master avant garde tailoring and holding my liquor.

It is stormy today in London. Thunder and lightning, hail and whippy rain. My Sunday funks are alleviated by bad weather and am celebrating my staying in and watching lots of Doctor Who. Oh Doctor. I'm adding the Doctor to my List of Fictional Characters I Have Bizarre Crushes On But Whose Corresponding Actors I Am Ambivalent About. Other list members include Wolverine, Han Solo and Bertie Wooster. Now that's a dinner party!

The boy has just gone to the launderette despite the pissing rain and scary lightning. His quest for clean pants is thwarted not by inclement weather nor by big puddles. Legend.

Tomorrow is Monday again. Bring it.

Here is a photograph of my still-half-finished watercolour. I can't quite be bothered to do any more, though, so it may just stay half-finished. The painting is about life-size, giving you an idea of how dinky my new sketchbook is. Cute, no?

The boy and I have decided to use our technological power for good rather than evil and have set up a kitschy film club. The sad thing about our film club is that we will only be able to have a few people round due to our tiny spare room and lack of chairs/places to put chairs. The other sad thing about our film club is that perhaps no one will come, and the boy and I will be left sitting on our own watching DVDs on a massive scale surrounded by Doritos and beers. So ... normal state of affairs, then.

Read about our film club here. Also read my film reviews which took freaking AGES, by the way.

The boy and I are making an effort to combat the freakish working hours we seem to have developed. On Sunday (Sunday! I went out on a Sunday night! When I had to get up at 5.45 on Monday! Am I not your new heroine?) we went to the Sunday Night Film Club at the fancy Charlotte Street Hotel. It was brilliant and plushy and leathery.

This weekend we are hoping to go to legendary jazz venue Ronnie Scott's in Soho, which looks very exciting. They don't do tickets, you know, they put your name on the freakin' guest list, baby. Van-fucking-Morrison is playing on Sunday.

Anyway, due to this galavanting about on top of general crapness, I'd like to apologise in advance to both Gra and Ms S. M. Cow, as I am making you both presents which currently look extremely unlikely to arrive in either Japan or Berlin by Sunday. SORRY I AM A LAME SISTER/FRIEND I promise to get these off to you as soon as poss. xxx

Pensions
I have a pension! I thought having a pension would be depressing, but it seems to have awoken the frugal Scotswoman in me. Every time I get a payslip I check the pension contribs box and cackle madly at the money amassing for my decadent retirement of cruises and calorific cocktails.

Spawning
Someone else at work has announced upcoming babyness. Maybe there really is something in the water. Conspiracy! Knitting is no longer a hobby but a frantic production line.

Dental Health
The boy bought expensive RetarDex dental rinse. Having used it this evening, I would like to out RetarDex as the Emperor's New Mouthwash. If it looks, smells and tastes like water, maybe it is. Water with fertility drugs in it ... conspiracy!

That is all.

The boy is obsessed with Unique Selling Points (USPs). I'm not sure if this is because he worked for a time as a graphic designer or because he is some sort of as-yet undiagnosed autistic savant.

He bought me some 'Soft Cakes' in Germany, which are like Jaffa Cakes but more orangey, and wouldn't let me have any until I could quote their oddly-translated USPs from memory. In the end I quite enjoyed shouting 'TASTE! PRICE! VERY NICE!' every time I fancied a biscuit, but still, quite dysfunctional. I'm so glad we don't have children, although possibly if we trained dogs we could be millionaires.

Sometimes he assigns USPs to mad, non-purchasable things like people and cities and ways of falling asleep. A few days ago I was struggling with a subject for my 'User column when the boy tried to help:
'Just remember your USP: you're young and optimistic! Write young.'
'What's Tony's USP?'
'He's old and curmudgeonly.'
'What about Banks?'
[pause]
'He's funky and tech-savvy.'*
'Oh.'

In the boy's world, everything is just one spray-mount away from a global media campaign and promotional giveaway.

In related news, I'd like to take this opportunity to pimp my brother's new blog. Gra's unique selling point is that he is the only member of our family to live in Japan and be a computer scientist, yo.

*Telephone conversation while writing this post
'What's Banksy's USP again?
'He's savvy and he looks like Iain Banks'
'That's not a very catchy USP!'
'It's a good USP for everyone except Iain Banks.'
' ... '
'Iain Banks's USP is just 'IS IAIN BANKS''
'You are insane.'

Woe is me! Alas and alack! When the boy went to Germany he bought me a Marks and Spencer Scrummy Lemon Cheesecake to eat in his absence. What's that you say? Confusing food with love? Cheesecake acting as bizarre husband substitute? Yes, yes, but listen, I haven't got to the most shocking part yet:

I FORGOT TO EAT IT.

Oh how I used to long for the day when I would be willowy and beautiful and people would say to me 'oh, how do you manage it?' and I would chuckle merrily and exclaim 'why I simply forget to eat, darling!' and I would be interesting and bohemian, but now I know the sordid truth. The only thing worse than eating Scrummy Lemon Cheesecake for four days in a row with no other discernible source of vitamins or minerals is FORGETTING to eat Scrummy Lemon Cheesecake for four days in a row then finding it all mouldy-but-still delicious-looking at the back of the fridge and thinking of all the wasted, wasted Scrumminess.

Tomorrow is an INSET day, which means we have to go to work but there will be no students there. This is a pretty decent way to ease back into Work Mode; come in for a day, find your bearings, wear jeans, then have two days off to recover from the shock. I don't feel too bad about things at the moment and am even cautiously optimistic about it all.

My current major concern about is going back to the 5.30 get-ups. Six short weeks ago I thought nothing of staggering out of bed at sunrise, washing, dressing (badly, it has to be said), eating, commuting for an hour, setting up a classroom, attending a staff meeting and sitting down to teach all before 8.30. These days I'm lucky if I get my contact lenses in before lunchtime.

Can't we come in to some money? If only this was 1956. I could spend my days sewing and wearing headscarves and causing lesbian scandals and attempting suicide in hotel rooms on John C Reilly's birthday*. Stupid emancipation.

The boy is off to Berlin tomorrow 'on business'. Pah! He must think I'm some kind of moron! We all know that by 'on' he means 'writhing on' and by 'business' he means 'a raised platform as amazing German ladyboys in gimp masks throw jelly at me'. Bastard.**

No pictures today, I just can't be arsed.

*It's possible have confused the year 1956 with the movie 'The Hours'.
**This paragraph has been wholly invented for comic effect and in no way reflects the professional conduct of my husband.

The boy and I have had lots of flat-sleepers of late. My mum, Gra, the boy's parents, uncle Stan - folks just can't get enough of swingin' New Cross.

And now the Copes are coming (probably)! This is very exciting in lots of ways. So many opportunities to make unfunny jokes and swear too much! So many boring teaching stories to tell! A whole new audience to marvel at my poorly finished crochet! Huzzah and hurrah indeed. I am busy tidying up in honour of their arrival. And by 'busy' I mean 'not doing any'. Copes: hope your tetanus shots are up to date.

In other news, check out these groovy vintage buttons I bought on eBay. I got a 500g bag of 'em! There's some massive Bakelite buttons, little glass buttons and buttons with weird shapes carved out, like the one with a heron standing on a riverbank. If you need a button, I'm your lady!


I am now the sort of person who buys buttons in bulk off eBay. There is no going back; save yourselves.

Aggressively marketed beer:
Kronenbourg Blanc
Aggressive marketing:
Bus stops and double-decker buses. Aimed squarely at bus-going demographic.
Unique selling points:
'Refreshing', 'fruity', 'from France'. Has sexy white bottle. Pretends is not really beer.
Tastes like:
Fruit. Cider. The French. Hazy Mediterranean nights with a man named Benoît, eating lobster with your hands. Espadrilles. Euphoria.
Does it take the edge off?
Oh yes.

Did you see? I got 'hacked' by some kind of crazy fundamentalist with terrible spelling! It was fun for all the family.

So yeah, also I've been mucking about with the template and haven't really found a good way of archiving posts yet. I guess the moral of today's post is that my site sux0rs LOL.

Ah well. I have choc ices!

Because I am rude and absent minded, I have not yet said thank you to everyone who has wished us a happy anniversary. Thank you! I was very surprised by the number of cards we got from people who were nice enough to travel to the arse-end of nowhere for our wedding in the first place, and then lots of other people left lovely comments on the boy's Flickr photos and on this very site. Touched! The only thing that weirded me out slightly was that we got cards from relatives saying things like 'congratulations on your first year together' as if the five years before that were just a crazy medical experiment or something. But! Lovely cards and comments, thank you thank you everyone, you rock!

As we were in Devon on our anniversary itself, we spent a breezy evening at the beach eating spectacular fish 'n' chips with an expensive bottle of wine. I wore my wedding dress and a denim jacket, the boy wore a cufflinked shirt with Birkenstocks, it was all class, baby.

You may be aware that today is results day. Oh I could tell you all about exam results and how they work and what happens if mine aren't good enough but what good would come of it? No good at all I say!

Instead, here is a picture of Pointy Kitty. As you can see, he is pimpin' it big style in his marabou and satin crib, yo. If you want to make your own pointy kitty, you can get the pattern here. It is very easy even if you have not used a sewing pattern before. Think of the pussy army you could amass!

ETA: The boy says Pointy Kitty is 'sinister'.

Today I am having a quiet rebellion. I have done no dishes or tidying or picking up. In fact, I have actively made a mess, strewing needles and threads and bits of fabric all over the floor with scant regard for the next person to walk through the living room barefoot. I went to a nearby coffee shop and bought a coffee, sipped it for five minutes then threw it away because LAWKS I'LL GIVE YOU THE £1.20 and I didn't much fancy it anymore. I haven't got anything for our dinner. I wanted to make something on the sewing machine just for the hell of it; not for school or an interview or a portfolio, just for a laugh. I made a cat and stuffed it with yellow wool which looks weirdly and yet appropriately like stuffed-cat-intestines.

I shan't post a picture of the cat yet as it doesn't have any eyes. Instead, here are my new shoes. The boy saw them in the window of the Birkenstock shop in Covent Garden and dove in to buy them for me. Or maybe he just walked in, I'm not sure. What a guy! Also, they are made of felt.

Rumours of my complete mental collapse have been greatly exaggerated. Sure, maybe I started plucking feathers from my pillow, swearing at innocent pedestrians and worshipping the desk fan as a kind of crude false idol, but who's the real lunatic? Who are we to say what's 'normal'? Look, if I want to use iWeb I will, okay? Why don't you just marry Rapidweaver if you love it so much? Jesus.

It's good to be back, right?

How do you like my bitchin' new website? I actually lost the iWeb/Rapidweaver battle, but this template seems to rock the homespun vibe while maintaining my techno credentials, so all's well that ends well. Sorry about the whole password thing, but it seems rather necessary to keep my freakishly blog-savvy students out of my braindribble. Ah well.

How've you been? I am three weeks into my six week break, meaning this is the calmest I ever get. I'm still slightly crazy-eyed on public transport, but I'm relaxed enough to sleep for TEN HOURS at a time! Decadence on a par with the last days of Rome, I know. The boy and I have just been to Devon, a place of sand and sea and crispy batter. It did wonders for both of us and I am now fully able to time-manage my days without a bell ringing every hour. Sweet mercy.