To blog or not to blog

Good morrow fair reader, for you are most welcome in my little cloud amid the blogosphere. I trust this day finds you full of joy with a spring in your step and the careless gambol of a new-born lamb? No? Drink more water – they say that’s the answer!

I have to report on a development on the FuxTunes front – that “wonder-software” that completely screwed up my iTunes music collection – and there were some tracks in there I’d never be able to replace, I mean, Joe Dulce and “Shaddap You Face”, René and Renato’s timeless “Save Your Love”, Barry Manilow’s “Bermuda Triange” (It’s his birthday today so I DEMAND that you stop what you are doing and sing at least the chorus from Copacobana – and don’t try to tell me you don’t know the words…

• “At the Copa, Copacabana,
• The hottest spot north of Havana,
• At the Copa, Copacbana,
• Music and passion were always the fashion,
• At the Copa….they fell in love”

You’ll be singing that all day now – God I’m a bastard!) Well, true to my word I did write to the company who distribute the software, explaining my grievance and only just falling short of suggesting that I should visit their offices and leave them in a similar state to the post-apocalyptic disaster area that their software seemed to think was appropriate for my music. This is what their website proclaims:

FixTunes is an easy and powerful program that will fix any missing or misspelled song details, add album artwork, remove duplicates songs and organize your music.

Now doesn’t THAT sound fantastic?! I told you yesterday about the reality though and the text should in fact read:

FuxTunes is a difficult and annoying program that will take ages to run, thus slowing down your computer to the point of un-usability, fuck any missing or misspelled song details as well as ones that are perfectly correct, add album artwork but not necessarily for the right album and if you already have the right artwork it will probably remove that too, remove random songs and completely un-organize your music.

But I do pride myself in being able to take the moral high ground. When you’re 5ft 4’ (ish, it fluctuates) you tend to opt for the higher path whenever one is available, as a matter of course, if only for the novelty value of seeing people’s heads instead of being roughly at nipple height, and I will say now, in writing, that Kelly the very nice lady at FuxTunes has actually refunded the cost of the software. Halleluiah. Choirs of over-excited angels sing in praise, like they’ve each drunk a litre of Sunny-D at the Last Night of the Proms. Triumphant seraphim proclaim the existence of one good soul on Earth. Cherubs are, as I write, swooping around the room, playing flutes and harps. The Angel Gabriel is knocking on the door, which either means proof of divine intervention or possibly I’m due an immaculate conception! (Or maybe that jam I had at breakfast had started to ferment a bit and I’m in the early stages of something akin to an acid trip?) So, well done Kelly at cloudbrain.com and thank you (but no, I won’t be trying your pending new version when it comes out).

Something I will try though is the TweetDeck app for the iPhone – I like twittering twaddle, although half the time I don’t know what I am doing! I’m an unashamed celebrity stalker – follow lots of the lovvies. Just found Sue Perkins (apt I guess as we watched her in Supersize Me the other day), but when I saw her tweet I didn’t recognise her from her username and nearly blocked her. Well, she’s @sueperkins – I misread it completely and thought she was a brand of cigarettes, @superkings! Doh! I must be tea-deficient, need a cuppa. OMG, just had a dreadful thought: we’re off to Hungary on Friday for the weekend – what if they don’t have proper tea there?!? Shit, will have to add tea-bags to my packing list, or we could end up drinking some local concoction made from dried courgette strained through the perforated skin of an Aubergine. Or maybe my preconceptions of Hungarian cuisine will be proved wrong. Well, not wrong, I don’t do wrong, lets just say “in need of an upgrade”.

It’s as black as your hat here at the moment, and hats off to the weather which looks like it’ll pour down at the drop of a hat! Enough to make you throw your hat in. But you don’t need to listen to this old hat; I’m talking through my hat anyway, which is what comes of being as mad as a hatter! (Do you think I ran a bit too far with the hat metaphors? Sorry, I got a bee in my bonnet!) Seriously though, it’s dark, cold, windy and generally very gloomy today; a far cry from the glorious sunshine of yesterday. That is the yesterday that I spent indoors, unable to enjoy the splendid weather, in hospital, hanging around for hours in the sweltering heat waiting for blood test results and to see my oncology consultant. Why couldn’t yesterday have been miserable and today nice and sunny? But hey, this is England and the last thing we should expect is cooperative meteorology! However, despite being baked alive in the hospital waiting room, yesterday’s visit did prove worthwhile.

You may recall that since early February I have been waiting for a PET scan. In simple terms they inject you with glucose laced with radiation. Cancerous cells need more energy than normal cells, so they use more of the glucose and consequently cause concentrations of the radiation – ‘hot spots’ that can then be detected. Most other scans, Ultrasound, MRI, CT etc look for hard tissue mass, but not necessarily active cancer. Because my lymphoma was so widespread, in my soft tissue and my bones, my consultant (who I shall call Dr Dolittle – not for his ability to talk to animals but for reasons that will soon be revealed) said back in February that he thought I should have a PET scan to make sure that the cancer had been eradicated. This had to be done at a different hospital – Christies – as it is a specialised test but, he reassured me, because it is so specialised there is practically no waiting list and he would see me for the results in three weeks time. No appointment arrived, despite me camping out at the letter box each day waiting for the post. I contacted Dr Dolittle and he said he would chase it. Four more weeks passed and still no date from Christies. At my next check-up I (diplomatically and with much sensitivity) suggested that maybe Christies had lost my details and Dr Dolittle went a shade of red best left to very ripe tomatoes, and said that he had in fact not arranged the appointment. Ooops – he’d do that straight away. I shall edit out a few more check-ups for the sake of a jaunty narrative and with absolute faith that you can fill in the blanks yourselves. In the intervening months I have had armfuls of blood taken, several other tests and repeat ultrasound scans – as a reaction to raised enzymes and some damage to my liver which will eventually need treatment but not for a year or so. So at yesterday’s check-up the subject of the PET scan was raised once again. This time Dr Dolittle said that “I don’t think you need to have that now. Your blood test results are looking much better, your white cell production is recovering well [chemo destroys your bone marrow and thus your ability to produce antibodies], your ultrasound was totally clear, there is no evidence of cancer at all, so we’ll not request the PET scan. No need.” Now, this is fantastic news, don’t get me wrong, and I’m over the moon, but does that not rather smack of an admission that four months later and he had still not actually put me forward for the scan? That’s four months of worrying, thinking “He wouldn’t’ be sending me for this ‘specialised’ test if he didn’t think there was a chance that there may still be active cancer on my body” He was effectively saying so much time has passed now that I must be okay because I’ve not got worse! Well, I suppose ‘leave him and see if he dies’ is one diagnostic technique in the NHS arsenal – actually Hugh Laurie uses it all the time in ‘House’ but you kinda don’t want to think that actually happens. Still, the Do Little approach is probably quite cost-effective and I’m sure I have had more than my fair share of NHS expenditure over the last year – and a personal thanks to everyone for paying taxes that has made this possible. You all helped save my life. I mean that. Thank you!

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You may recall that yesterday I talked about some software to reorganise my iTunes music library and I used the analogy of a shed or spare room, a little cluttered, half-piles of stuff, bit untidy and needing a good sort out? Well that is exactly what this software is supposed to do. Although now, having run it overnight and for most of yesterday I see that the results on my music library are roughly akin to the impact of allowing two rutting stags loose in aforementioned shed, after calling each of them a bit of a girl and questioning the moral rectitude of their mothers! Chaos – complete disaster! Piles of poo everywhere, bits of blood and guts sprayed liberally around the landscape and any semblance or organisation now shot to kingdom come! I have quite a few compilation albums, greatest hits collections and so on. So it has taken each song, worked out which album it originally came from, created that album and shoved the song in there. So now, instead of “Now that’s what I call music 50” I have 25 albums each with a single track, each by a different artist. Oh, and for most of THOSE albums it hasn’t found the right artwork! So let my lesson be a warning to you – never use a thing called FixTunes . I think they meant FuxTunes! And what really gets my goat is we actually PAID for this crap. I’m going to write a letter. It will probably be very long, but have in it lots of very short words (although I may choose to jumble the words a bit, remove a few, change some others, disassemble all sentences into their constituent nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs etc and then spit them out with acute unawareness of any sort of common sense. So, to start, “Sir dear, software shit your is. Arse your up it stick. Load what a of wank. “

Maybe this is all punishment for something bad I did in a previous existence? Maybe I inflicted some terrible ill on humankind and this is Karma (I assume not of the chameleon variety) putting things right. I do sometimes get a weird feeling that I have lived before. Not Déjà Vu, more complex than that. For example just occasionally I could kill for a cigarette, I need the hit, I know what it feels like to take the first drag after a long wait for a roll-up. But I’ve never smoked in my life. Not once. So there is no way I could know these things. And I’ve described them to a smoker before and told I was spot on with what I was saying. So, a smoker in a previous life then. Someone who caused immeasurable suffering to the people of this fair isle and who’s spirit is destined to forever inhabit the bodies of those prone to misadventure, unreliable network access, dodgy software and a “Chinese Woman Opposite” with a knicker exposure fetish. Got it. I must have been Sir Walter Raleigh – he of the alleged tobacco, potato and chopper bike fame. Come to think of it, we had some spuds the other day that were decidedly dodgy. Now this makes sense – I mean, he would be destined to an endless life of torturous misery; think how much damage has been done by cigarettes, either in terms of national health or even such things as increased costs on the fire brigade and the inflated costs of sofas which now all have to be retardant! Still I suppose it is all part of the rich tapestry (now dutifully fire-proofed and certified to British standards of spark retardancy) of life. And don’t get me started on the evils of the potato! Vegetables that grow eyes? THAT’s not natural! Hell they come from the same family as Deadly Nightshade (the clue there is in the name… Deadly!) and if ingested in sufficient quantities (well, green spuds anyway) they contain poisons that can cause vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches and even paralysis of the central nervous system. It’s true. It says it on the interweb. What’s more, and follow my logic here, if Raleigh (or whoever) hadn’t introduced potatoes to Britain then there could have been no potatoes to get blight in Ireland, no famine caused by lost potato crops, no mass migration, especially not to America and probably Americans would still be galloping around on horses, eating Bison, living in Teepees (I watch QI – I know the difference between a Teepee and a Wigwam) killing each other with bows and arrows and adopting silly names like Flying Red Bull and Makes Noise of Heap Big Flatulence. Which seems to me to be a far better way for them to carry on that they have been doing of late! I shouldn’t come over as so racist. I do like some Americans – Marge Simpson, Stewie from Family Guy, Bambi…

And whilst I’m paddling round the subject of potatoes, like a signet caught in a whirlpool, I’m reminded that my step father once grew blue potatoes – honestly. No kidding. If you don’t believe me, ask him. He’ll tell you all about them. For hours. Best have a wee before you start the conversation. You don’t need to listen, just nod in the right places. It can be a good time to do other mental activities while your brain isn’t fully engaged – maybe the world’s biggest suduko puzzle, or perhaps solve a couple of complex mathematical equations that have been bugging you since childhood. Point being, any conversation with my Step Father requires only physical presence, so daydreaming is encouraged, and in fact more conducive to your ongoing sanity. People have gestated babies in the time it can take him to tell a story. And carrots were originally purple. Don’t believe me? Here – have a look at this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1991768.stm – there you see! We’ve just bred the purple out in favour of the expected orange colouring. Sometimes you can still see a faint purple tinge at the top of the carrot where the leaves sprout. And THAT my friends is called genetic engineering – breeding one trait out and one trait in. Its just that we have been doing it for hundreds of years instead of in a lab over a matter of weeks. Same difference though. Nobody questions whether or not orange carrots are supposed to be in the food chain. Who know what damage they are doing! Hell, the purple colour could contain a chemical which, upon prolonged exposure, would protect us from cancer, the common cold – or maybe give us superpowers! Think of THAT next time you make a stew or eat a slice of carrot cake and go all prim and proper on whether or not we should clone sheep. Don’t you think THEY have been modified over the years to produce either the best wool or the best chops? I had better rest my case before I start on global warming!

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Monday and a rude awakening to the week. No doubt a portent of things to come! We ordered some more membership cards for the club night – think credit card without the financial ruin! They arrived this morning, not long after David had left for work and I’d fallen back into a deep sleep – dreaming about wall-papering in some bazaar metaphorical way. Cracks in my life I want to cover over? Possibly, but NOT with burgundy flock! Never! Anyway, I’m poised with plumb line and paste brush when the doorbell rang with the seeming volume of a full concert orchestra. Why does Interlink deliver here so early? We must be near a hub.

Still, there have been worse Mondays than this. Ask the Boomtown Rats! Or The Bangles for that matter – they seemed to have a similar problem with Mondays! For example, on this day in 2002 a near earth asteroid – 2002 MN – missed the Earth by 75,000 miles (120,000 km), about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. In astronomical terms that is a midges’’ dick away! OK, technically 15th June 2002 wasn’t a Monday, just in case anyone out there was pedantic enough to check (heck, I was!), but the date is right and it’s the thought that counts. Unless you’re about to be struck by an asteroid, in which case worrying about which day of the week it is will probably not figure highly on your to-do list! Still, it makes you think how fragile everything really is when compared to the cosmic forces at play all around us. I blame Newton – if he’d not invented gravity we’d all have been in ignorant bliss of such matters! Gravity just pulls you down!

Speaking of to-do lists, I was in seventh heaven yesterday when I found an app for the iPhone that is designed to generate holiday packing lists. It’s very good, everything sub-categorised to within an inch of its life, things to do in advance, people to inform, things to take (all broken down into further sub-divisions) – pure bliss. Packing trousers? What length? Shorts, ½ length, or full-length? Casual or formal? Need a belt? What colour? I suspect if I kept drilling down I could specify at a molecular level! I’m gratified that finally someone else has understood the correct way to plan a trip abroad. They must have got wind of my way of doing things and decided to share this invaluable wisdom in the form of an app. Of course, I wasn’t credited, at least not on the high level list of people who had input to the production of the app, but I’m sure that somewhere in there my name will appear – maybe at sub-atomic level?

Our network seems to be up and down like a manic depressive on a trampoline. Starting to think the problem is the isp, pissing about with the connectivity during the daytime. Brand new router, more technology than NASA, makes theUSS Enterprise look like a 1960s sci-fi space ship (er, ok, got me on that one) – Or… maybe there is something more sinister afoot. “Chinese Woman Opposite” – her of the knickers-in-the-window fame – maybe she has somehow tapped into the fibre-optic cable and is using it to conduct the latest phase in her world domination plan. The knickers in the window being some sort of secret message to her ‘underworld’ associates. Big red pants means “I have the weapon primed” and small blue ones mean “Advance to stage two”. My (world wide) web has been infiltreated!

I also found a tool to ‘fix’ my iTunes library – remove repetition, fill in blank information about songs, download the correct album art, generally tidy up the mess that has accumulated over the years. Think of my iTunes library a bit like the spare room, garage, or shed. Bunged full of stuff that one day I will have paramount need to access, but arranged in ‘sort-of groups’ – you know, a pile of similar stuff here and a pile of other similar stuff there. Some piles have duplicates, some have things missing. Some piles are just the stuff that didn’t seem to belong in any other piles. Well this software promises that I’ll have a wonderfully organised library, with everything correctly arranged and up to date. I am yet to be convinced as already it seems to have taken some tracks out of their original albums (which were correct) and put them in brand new ones. I told you – I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS!!!

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Yesterday was, despite all weather forecasts, a lovely day – sunny and not a spot of the promised rain. As expected it was fraught with challenges, although I have to say that these were met mostly by David! The dishwasher played up, door refused to close, no obvious reason why. David emptied it and cleaned the sills, jiggled and joggled and put it back together again without really doing anything and it was fine. Praise be – I was half expecting to have to get a new one. And they are two of life’s luxuries I never want to be without – A David AND a Dishwasher. I do love it when he’s here. Weekends are so much easier, just having him around.

Cats have collectively decided to stop eating about half the varieties for food we give them. They go through fads like that but it ends up costing a fortune when the suddenly just go off something. 9 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskers, my arse! Sometimes, maybe, but not today thanks very much and how dare you feed us such shit?! Not even I am that fussy!

Did a job that I’ve wanted to sort for ages but have been putting off. For Christmas, David bought me a lovely new watch, but the metal strap was far too big and needed some links removing. I’d waited and waited to do this, mostly because when I came out of hospital I was SO thin, my arms were like sticks and had no flesh on them at all. I’ve been trying to put on weight and get back to a more reasonable body shape – ‘Ethiopian/catwalk model’ really didn’t suit me. I could write pages about standing in front of a mirror and crying because I was unrecognisable. That was such a horrible experience, so scary, so very scary. But, hey, that was then and this is now, and there are only two photos in existence of me from that time, both of which are kept well under locks. So now as I’m getting better I have finally had the links in the watch removed and I get to wear it. It feels so good to have a watch back on my wrist. I’m one of those weird people who wear a watch on the ‘wrong’ hand. I’m right-handed and most ‘righties’ tend to wear their watch on the left wrist – I have mine on the right. Why? When I was at Art College and did a fair bit of painting at an easel, I held the paint palette in the left hand, so turning it over to see the time would have resulted in paint all over the floor!
Takes me back, all that talk of painting. It has been far too long since I did anything like that. I’ll have to look out a few of my pictures, or take a few photos. I did a nice series of Star Trek paintings once – only small, but each one linked to the next in an endless loop, so you could display them in line starting with any one of them and the set would still make a full frieze. I’ll fish out a few others and post in the next few days.

Yesterday I also took up my new jeans, ready for Hungary on Friday. That seems to have come around very quickly. I should, by now, have several lists on the go. Lists of things to do, lists of things to take, lists of lists I need – I may be a bit anal about such things but we never find ourselves away without something we need. So far though I have been lax: no lists. Ug! Better start scribbling or it is quite possible that the world may come to a very nasty end! Lists for foreign countries that you’veen to are bad enough, but this is somewhere we have never touched foot – funny money, not even the Euro – Thank goodness the iPhone has a currency conversion App. Ahhh – I wonder if it has an App for holiday lists….

Didn’t find anything much more than To-Do lists, but got a little side-tracked downloading a few games. Sorry. Must pay attention. Concentrate. Focus! Games good though – a few word games to keep me busy on the flight and a rollercoaster game which looks like it’ll take some getting used to. I’m used to a keyboard, a mouse or at least a stylus – all this tapping, pinching swiping and flicking the screen is a new language to me and seems akin to undertaking some sort of erotic fingering of my mobile! Maybe the phone gets off on being pinched and flicked and gently caressed but its doing nothing for me!

New stalker today – Francis from Ghana. This one wants £100 for a passport so he can come to England and be my lover! Sometimes I really have to wonder how stupid these people think we are in England. Do any of them ever get the money/visa/sponsorship that they are obviously trying to extort? I shall, of course, be quite polite but spend ages now winding him up. If he wastes my time, I can waste his – for longer and much more humorously. Who shall I be today? The Rev Mike Hunt? Lord Willie Wonker? Ben Dover? Michael Fitzpatrick, or Patrick Fitzmichael? Or maybe I’m the Irish double-glazing salesman Paddy O’Doors? A bit of fun methinks with a parasite from Ghana.

We finished yesterday with a barbecue – only a couple of burgers but somehow you feel like you’re getting something special when it is cooked outside – like you’ve cheated the weather’s predisposition for liquidity! It should be fine today too, so might get the grass cut. Or might not!

Yes, we did go out last night – resplendent in my new jeans and t-shirt – to Legends. That used to be the place to be and is the venue where we hold out club nights. There was a time when you could go out any Saturday night and know there would be a dozen mates out as well, great atmosphere, loads of fun, guaranteed busy. Last night when we arrived there was the two of us and one other punter. More staff than visitors. Makes me so sad. Credit crunch be buggered – this is people who just don’t bother any more. We make a point of trying to support Legends, on the basis of ‘use it or lose it’ but it seems that others don’t have quite the same philosophy. As Joni Mitchell once said, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it.s gone”

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Saturday, and today really is the 13th. I await with trepidation all the little practical jokes the day has in store; expect many, prepared for but a few!

What to tell? Friday continued in much the same vain as it started, poking fun at me and sticking its leg out to trip me up whenever my attention was diverted elsewhere. Little bugger. Network intermittent until David came home with new gizmo, unplugged, plugged, configured, wiggled, pinged, fiddled, swore, coaxed, threatened and generally waved a multitude of magic wands. Thus we now have guaranteed 100% reliable home network and internet access that will never ever fail, astonishing upload and download speeds, file transfer rates that actually exceed the laws of physics and probably a mini-hadron collider poised on the brink of discovering the Higgs Boson particle. (Why did my spell-checker want to change that from hadron to hard on? Such smut!) We’re but a step away from sending out an inverse tachyon pulse through the main deflector array into the quantum singularity causing a cascade of chronotron particles and possibly destroying all life as we know it in this sector of the galaxy! Someone beam me up! Please!

Good day for blog hits yesterday – thanks to everyone who stopped by – it was the busiest day yet. Or was it just that it was Friday and you were all bored? I don’t care; I’m turning into a blog-hits whore, happy to prostitute myself on the back of imagined popularity. Oh, I’m SO cheap! I hope I gave a few laughs at least, if not with me then at me. Feel free to add comments – I can take it! (I only seem to be in a fragile mental state, bordering on a complete meltdown. Honest. The voices keep telling me I’m ok!)

Letter from United Utilities offering to insure my external pluming. I say it’s not the external stuff that needs attention! It’s what is happening inside that is the current cause for scientific speculation, but maybe when they send down a camera we’ll find out if I need extra lagging, or perhaps there’s some sediment that’s settled when my back was turned, maybe a burst valve? Anyway, I’ve been round the U-bend for years. I’ve had a camera go up before, so only seems right I should go for the matching pair and have one go down. God, I hope they use different cameras…

Today I have a real itch to go out and do something fun tonight. I get quite isolated in the house all week, and most weekends our only trips out are to do shopping – hardly fun times. So this urge comes over me from time to time – want to go do something ‘gay’. I don’t mean standing on a bar in the Village dancing to YMCA with the drag queens, I mean just being around other gay people. It can still be quite an isolating world – even with current improvements to legislation, David and I still can’t walk round M&S holding hands. So it is important for us to sometimes get to places where we can do that. Hence the desire for a good night out, but that’s never a good feeling as it usually leads to frustration and dashed hopes. Manchester has really taken a nose-dive in recent months – well the last year or two really. So few places we want to go, no clubs other than our own that we’d like to attend, and if we do make an effort and drag ourselves out (not drag up, drag out!) then the place tends to be practically deserted. Bad show Manchester. Get it sorted. Two gay guys here want a good night out that doesn’t involve ‘camp bingo’, bucket-loads of sequins, floppy hair and straight women on hen nights, “Cos we feel safe here, innit like.” That said, I guess I’m as much an obstacle – can’t really go dancing with a gammy foot that permits about 10 minutes of standing per hour before throbbing to buggery and causing general misery. Gets you down being constantly aware of pain, although some days it is much more manageable than others. Now, as I’m typing this, it is not much more than a tingle, but sometimes you’d think I was having needles stuck in the balls of my foot! Still, shouldn’t complain. It IS getting better, albeit slowly. Not used a wheelchair for three months now, and at least I’m mobile about the house and enough to potter round shops, so that’s a blessing. Long way off disco dancing though, so I guess Essential, the gay(ish) night club tonight is out of the question! Besides, I don’t have anything in gold spandex to wear!

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So, it’s Friday 13th today! Ok, ok, I know it is really the 12th, but in all other ways it is without a doubt a Friday 13th. As Mr Spock once said, “A difference that makes no difference, is no difference”! Do you ever have those days when as soon as you get up you know things are going to go wrong, and the day lives up to such expectation?

My major gripe today is technological, something of a theme of late. But before I talk about today any more I’ll bring you up to speed on the remainder of yesterday. You’ll recall I was having major grief with iTunes syncing to the iPhone? Well David, saint that he is, thinks he has now resolved the problem. We have all our music stored on a home server (which is then backed up a zillion times). My iTunes was pointing to the files on the server – fine and dandy, shouldn’t be a problem. But things get a bit more tricky when you take into account the connectivity between my laptop and that server – I link to a switch which links to a router (which connects out to the interweb) and the server also connects back to the router. We have a fair few devices also joined to the network, such as David’s PC and the printer. It seems that iTunes was timing out when trying to sync and we thing (hope and pray) that this was because the connection to the server was falling over. Hold that thought…

This morning I had no internet connection and no connection at all within the home network. With David’s text-message support we’ve managed to bypass the switch and I can now see the world (or you’d not be seeing this). Seems like the switch is kaput and the router is on its last legs. Shopping trip tomorrow I think. But that also explains why iTunes was developing twisted-knicker syndrome!

Did someone mention knickers? “Chinese woman opposite” has only got t-shirts and kiddie dresses hanging in her window today – no large pants. Maybe she didn’t wear any yesterday – dirty cow!

We, on the other hand, have managed three loads of washing (I say ‘we’ because David put one load in the machine last night which was waiting for me to peg out on the line this morning). It’s a beautiful day here at the moment – sunny, warm, bees buzzing, Summery. Our pants are following the more traditional procedure of hanging on a line in the privacy of our back garden.

Just had a letter from the hospital to arrange my endoscopy/gastroscopy (?) – lots of being passed from one departmental phone to the next but eventually got it sorted for 29th June – not long to wait. They try two things, the first is a spray to numb the throat and if that works (whole procedure done in 15 minutes) I can come home and don’t need an escort, but if that is not successful then they give sedation which takes 2 hours and does need a responsible adult to be with me. So I have to assume it won’t work and ask David to take time off work. At least it is progress to knowing if the news is good or bad.

Sweet peas are coming up in their tub, even if the eating peas are not showing any signs. If they don’t get a move on we’ll be having frosts before the pods have formed! Percy Thrower never had these problems, but there again, I don’t have an Italian Sunken Garden to tend. (Blue Peter reference there in case you didn’t know). I once won a Blue Peter badge for entering a “Don’t Drop Litter” poster competition – came runner up. My Mum managed to launder the badge though and it fell to bits. I cried for days. Apparently it was MY fault that SHE didn’t check my jumper before washing it! Parents can have such an odd take on things! I couldn’t be expected to play all day AND do her jobs for her!

I was admonished yesterday because my blog has an adult content warning at the start and as yet the material has not been of an explicit nature. Hmmm. What to do about that? Some rude words maybe? Ok: This morning, while trying to insert my tab into an appropriate flange (bloody self- assembly – I can never get it up!) I discovered I had a nasty prick – maybe from all the screwing I did yesterday. I was having a gay time stroking two pussies – one of them spat at me and the other dribbled a little. Out the window I saw a pair of tits, and heard a noise like a cock being mis-handled. Its a horrible cock – nasty pecker. I rushed out the door to see what the excitement was all about and had to give my knob a really hard twist because it was very stiff. Squeezing up my back passage were two bitches – I don’t know where they had come from; Lesbos maybe? I thrusted forward and tried to poke them with some wood, I but my wood was not long enough. It was all too hard! Next I tried cracking my hands together but the bitches were not worried by the clap. I thought, “What is needed here is a good long bang”. I made a snatch for my tool thinking I’d be successful with a good hammering, but it had a slippery shaft and I dropped it. I’m forever troubled by such weighty boobs! Banging away was ineffective so I grabbed my hose, which I keep near an overgrown bush, but that didn’t work even when I sprayed all over the bitches (they were ugly old dogs). I saw two enormous jugs (each were beautifully rimmed) and whacked them together with an impressive dong. No luck. The jugs I then tossed, like a pair of old balls, over the bush into next door’s garden which is dry and barren, but where I have sometimes seen a beaver. I gave up and went indoors where I had waiting for me two juicy melons and a nice fresh shag, which was only laid yesterday.

And on that note, I’ll bid you all good day!

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All that shimmers is not gold!

11th June. Where did THAT come from? I think someone’s got a big tombola drum full of dates and is plucking them at random. It can’t be 11th June already, surely?! (And I didn’t call you Shirley)

Well, according to the calculations of Eratosthenes, today marks the anniversary of the sacking of Troy in 1184 BC – so beware Greeks bearing gifts! (The actual quote is “Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” – or “Whatever it is, I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts.”) That thought prompted me to take a photo of my Trojan Cow…

A fair few years ago now, well Summer 2004, Manchester welcomed the CowParade – it is a huge international event held in over 50 cities worldwide since 1999 including Chicago (1999), New York City (2000), London (2002), Tokyo (2003), and Brussels (2003). Dublin (2003), Prague (2004), and Stockholm (2004), Mexico City (2005), Sao Paulo (2005), Buenos Aires (2006), Boston (2006) Paris (2006), Milan (2007, and Istanbul (2007). Possibly odd concept, but great fun: life-size model cows are decorated by local people, artists, schools etc and placed around the city, outside shopping centres, at airports, abseiling down the side of buildings (seriously). Huge fun to try to spot them. Lots of money raised for good causes too as they sell off the full-sized models afterwards. I think there is currently a parade in Hong Kong, with planned events in Rome and Lima, Peru, on the horizon. If you’re interested, the main web page for more information is http://www.cowparade.com/ and more details of the Manchester event can be found at http://manchester.cowparade.com/ which includes some in-situ photos just in case you don’t believe me. Actually, hand on there just a cotton-pick’en minute, I can do better than that! When David and I went on holiday to Gran Canaria in the Summer of ‘04 there was a cow at Manchester Airport – Alphadite – the Goddess of Shopping! Some of them have fantastic names – I’ve mentioned the Trojan Cow, but how about TutenCowMoo-n, Moo-lin the wizard, Al Cow-pone the gangster, one celebrating local Salford ‘Matchstick Man’ LS Lowry – Cow-ry, D.I.S.C.O.W. – resplendent in gold sequins, which stood in Canal Street, Moo-dolf the red-nosed reindeer, Cow-liflower, Moo-lin Rouge… the list of pun names goes on for ages, a bit like me really! You can buy porcelain and plastic miniature replicas of some of the designs. We’ve got a whole collection of them although sadly at the moment they are mostly kept in the loft.

So, I bet you are all waiting with baited breath to hear how my new relationship is panning out. You know David and I are currently opening our partnership up a little, for some variety and extra excitement. We both now have ’significant others’. Things seems to be going better for David than for me. I think he is falling in love. Me, its not so easy. You see, David likes to have a good fiddle, he’s not afraid to try new things, be adventurous. With me, well, I’m happy enough to plod along, better-the-devil-you-know style. My new commitment, I have to say, isn’t turning out too well. Maybe just the strangeness of unfamiliarity, or maybe I’m just too darn old to embrace change. Of course I’m talking about the iPhones here. What did you think I meant?

I’m not a bunny of the happy variety. Having loads of problems syncing my phone to iTunes, which either times out or just hangs. I’m not trying to do anything clever at all – just sync my calendar, contacts and a single playlist, and be able to transfer photos between the laptop and the phone. Simples. That is what it is supposed to do. I’ve not fiddled, I’ve not installed anything that hasn’t come directly from Apple (like they let you anyway!), I’m really not asking it to do half of what it is supposed to be designed for. It’s like having a dishwasher that you have to coax into working each time, stroking its ego, telling it how beautiful it is, and then only washing mugs in it, in case it doesn’t like pans or cutlery! I knew this was all a huge mistake. Took me ages this morning to tease the Cow photo off the phone. Gentle persuasion, screaming and in the end a threat to throw the whole thing in the compost bin (the best place for rotten Apples if you ask me) and eventually, with obvious resentment and massive reluctance it deigned to let me have MY photo!

That said and to be fair, I had other problems last night following a Windows update which screwed up the right speaker on my laptop – made a rasping sound every time an audio file was played (so every ping of the computer was followed by the PC equivalent of a hacking cough). Had to rollback to a previous backup from prior to the update. What is more, David discovered that this was a known issue with the update, but MS had decided to roll it out anyway. Well thank you very much Mr Gates, you annoying little American Twerp.

Two pairs of knickers today hanging in window of “Chinese woman opposite”. I’ll not try to take a photo – you KNOW I’m telling the truth and I don’t think my nerves can take another battle with the shitePhone! I need a cup of tea.

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So, Wednesday slipped in without too much fuss or an abundance of lubrication. I’m sure old Woden would have been proud of himself. And a date in history to be reckoned with, or not, depending on how bored you are I guess:

1834 – HMS Beagle/Charles Darwin sails Pacific Ocean – think he’s the bloke wot discovered monkeys
1916 – Great Arab Revolt begin – so much potential for ‘revolting’ jokes here, but I’ll not stoop
1939 – Barney Bear, cartoon character, by MGM, debuts – That was no boo-boo!
1957 – Harold MacMillan becomes British PM – so there’s historical precedent for a change of leadership on this day. Mr Brown, take heed!
1977 – Apple Computer ships its 1st Apple II – spooky – just got an iPhone! I still maintain Macs are best suited to dirty old men

And it’s Judy Garland’s birthday. She’d be 87, but still scared of lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Yesterday started out with promise, as so many days often do, but had a very real slump around lunchtime when I was poorly sick again. Don’t know what is causing this – it is most peculiar! No real notice – this time I was sitting in the garden, sling-shot in hand, waiting for unsuspecting slugs to dare show themselves – and blop, there I am, with pre-nausea mouth-watering and unable to coax breakfast back down again. Oh well, maybe slugs like macerated poached egg on toast. Not looking forward to endoscopy, whenever that happens, as have terrible gag reflex anyway and even cleaning my teeth too far to the back of my mouth can end up with unpleasantness. Also, naturally, worried that they might find something else wrong with me. Doctor seemed to suspect an ulcer, which would be fine and dandy to cure. Send me good thoughts and healing energy and lets get this thing sorted! The gardening time was also spent sowing out the pea seeds that I soaked yesterday. They swelled up fine, to look like just-podded peas, so I’m hoping that extra umph will give them a chance to germinate quickly (or at all). Some outside, some on kitchen windowsill, some uncovered, some in plastic bags for heat and moisture retention. Think I have covered most bases. Bound to fail!

Spent some time working on a few more t-short designs and sent them off in first draft for my mate to see. Hope he likes. Was a very sketchy brief. Speaking of briefs (as often I seem to do these days), three pairs on display in window opposite yesterday. So that’s 6 pairs in 2 days – which seems an excessive daily throughput by anyone’s standards. And I’ve seen the ads on telly for knicker bolt-ons designed for ladies with leaky pluming, so she can’t blame a faulty valve on her flow regulator causing conspicuous pooling either, least not in my book! While I was fiddling around with PaintShop I re-visited the poster I’d designed for our club night which coincides with Manchester Pride in August. (Friday 28th for our night and that weekend for the Pride march if you want to come along and throw fruit at the passing, er, fruit!) Made some of the text 3D with bevelled edges. Looks quite good, so I went on and produced a postcard version too, suitable for promo in advance of the event. Pride is our busiest night but also our most costly. The cats, bless them, are currently fast asleep on David’s sofa, in the 69 position, with their heads up each other’s arses. They may just be gay.

We got the iPhones! I wasn’t sure if O2 would give us a contract, having previously been on Orange and with with a credit rating that must be “You’re having a laugh” or maybe “There’s less risk involved in flying Air France”! But no problemo! All sorted. We had to leave hefty deposits (that could sound rude), but we’ll get that back after 3 months. I have to say that so far the iPhone has not in any way lived up to my expectations. Which is a good thing! I was expecting it to be awful, feature-deprived, troublesome and fussy, but so far it has failed to tick any of these boxes. It even syncs to my laptop (and therefore my calendar, contacts and web favourites) without any difficulty. Different interface to anything I have used before but it is generally quite intuitive. Great screen size and the photo quality is much better than the HTC Touch I’ve been using to date. The garden image was taken this morning. Can’t complain at the quality from a phone camera. I’ve got things set up for Facebook and Twitter, so can update on the move, and the photo integration to both seems very straightforward. Maybe there will be some good photo opportunities in Hungary and I can upload a few decent pictures during the trip. Can’t change the image resolution though and need an app for any manipulation, but its not MEANT to be a laptop/PC replacement. Web browsing is cool – FAR superior to the HTC, faster and renders pages properly.

if I have any faults they would be:

• Keyboard not fantastic and easy to miss-key. That might just be that I need to get used to it.
• No on-phone file management. Seems odd that. Yes you can manage photos, apps, music and video via iTunes but there is nothing to deal with other types of documents. Methinks an app-search is required

Just been having a fiddle, as you do, with Flight Control. OMG! How hard?! I’ll have RSI before the end of the day! Beef casserole for dinner – or stew if you don’t profess delusions of grandeur! David’s out training, so it has to be a quick turn-round and so something that just needs whipping out of the oven and spooning into a bowl is ideal.’Spose I’d better do some spuds though, ‘ya wee maan’ being from ‘de emerald isle’, so he is. But he’s NOT Irish!

Need to do lots more playing so I may add a bit more to this entry later today or if not, then tomorrow.

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Tuesday anyone? I seem to have a spare one if anybody lost theirs. This one has started sunny but holds little promise. Tuesday officially most depressing day of the week, which I always think is a cheery thought to start the day!

Yesterday was kinda uneventful, which to be honest is absolutely fine! As I’ve said many times before, we’ve had more than enough edge-of-the-commode excitement over the last year for boring to seem positively blissful! David contacted the person at his work who is organising the Budapest trip, to ask a list of questions and her reply was very reassuring. I think now she has a better understanding of my level of disability she’ll do everything she can to make things easy for us – taxis instead of walking places etc. I feel so much better about things now and hopefully, we’ll be able to have a great time without me needing to spend the duration in pain!

Garden is looking well, although the peas have just not germinated (I had a broddle around in the pots yesterday and no sign of anything) so I’m trying a different tack and have had some seed soaking in water for 24 hours. That may just give them the encouragement to buck their ideas up and start growing. Will plant later. I’ll post a pic or two later in the week, weather permitting. Other stuff is doing well, although lots of slugs about. Won’t be long until I can pull some radishes, if the slimy buggers don’t get them first. The ‘pet-friendly’ slug pellets seem to be of no use at all so I’m on slug patrol. Pick it, unstick it, flick it! Threw one over the fence yesterday just as a jogger was going past. So will watch out on news tonight for story of mysterious flying invertebrates discovered in Salford Suburbs! I blame the jogger. Too fit you see. If it had been me you’d have heard the puffing, wheezing and panting well in advance. Not that I’m going to be jogging any time soon. Just about manage a sort of flailing stumble if I try to do much more than shuffle!

Thought I’d show you the Google Maps view of our little empire. I’ve marked the corner of the tennis courts on all three images for a frame of reference. (Click on the picture for a bigger version) For somewhere 2 miles from the city centre it is remarkably rural here! We back onto a fitness centre (exclusive use of residents, pool, gym, sauna, very nice) and tennis courts, around which the unfortunate jogger found himself molested!

There used to be low-rise flats here but they were knocked down sometime in the 80s I think. Now it is very open and green. The tennis court at least means we’ll never have any building out the back that can overlook us, and sitting in the garden it can feel remarkably like you are in the countryside.

Beyond the court there is a field and then the river Irwell which bends in a huge horseshoe forming a U shaped area of field/wasteland. This U shape forms part of the flood defences for the river – they just let it fill up into an enormous lake, but that protects the lower-lying houses (including ours). It is quite spectacular when it does flood and pretty scary. I would tell you about the huge dike that also holds back the waters, but she doesn’t like the publicity. We’re apparently only a very low risk for flooding and the home contents insurance is assessed based on a scale, 1 – very likely to flood, 2 – possibility of flooding, 3 – very little likelihood of flooding. We’re rated 3, and that means no need for extra flood protection premiums and so on. Still, we have a large inflatable mattress to hand just in case!

Yesterday I also spent a bit of time playing with some t-shirt designs for a friend – a job I have been promising to do for ages but never felt too inspired. Came up with about a dozen options with a few more ideas yet to try. At least it keeps me thinking about design so my creative juices don’t dry up completely. David was kick-boxing last night but came home early as there were not enough stopping for the second session. I was terrible and spent ages teasing him about going to get the iPhones, which he almost sacrificed his training to go and do. Fingers crossed we’ll get them tonight if all goes through with the payment plan approval etc. So no doubt tomorrow I’ll have decided I hate mine and will have something to rant about!

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Well, it’s Monday. Sunny, despite the forecast and dry, at least for the time being.

Last night was quite chilled – we seemed to spend a fair while looking for interesting iPhone apps. Well, free ones anyway as I won’t spend any money until we have the phones in our hands! But have found a few games and some tools – a couple of Twitter apps to try as well. That said I quite like the funky Twitter app on my current phone, so I have a benchmark against which to test any new ones. We played hairdressers last night too. If I get a chance to snap a pic of the results I will do so and publish on here. It was a big session; trimming the tips of the Mohawk (or else it is too long and I end up with go-faster stripes on the ceiling of my car), shaving the non-Mohawk parts David’s head, trying to coax the whole thing back into a straight line (after a few trims it can wander and looks more like a meandering river than a straight-cut stripe) and then going at it with the peroxide! David has naturally very dark hair so it usually takes two bleaches if we want to avoid a sort of apricot mid-stage. It is a complete kerfuffle but looks good when it is done. I was complacent this time though and missed the opportunity to press my groin against his elbow and ask, “Have you been on your holidays yet?” in appropriate hairdresser camp.

We had a take-away for dinner – I cook most days so it is a treat for me to not have to worry and it usually leaves enough for lunch the next day which saves too. On the way there, just as you have come off the estate, you drive up Littleton Road, quite a wide arterial road into Salford although not too busy out side of rush hour. They have, for the last three months, been putting in a pedestrian crossing – pelican variety. I have to laugh though. The beacons are not yet activated, so covered in black bags. Fair enough I guess. But the funny thing is that the actual crossing area – the zebra stripes, is fenced off so you can’t use it. You can cross anywhere else on the road, unrestricted, running into whatever traffic you like, but NOT on the actual crossing. You can’t see that well from the photo, but how mad is that? I guess, because the beacons are not working, if anyone crossed there and there was an accident, the council would be liable, so the very obvious crossing area, which is raised and for which you have to slow down in a car anyway, and even without the beacons is probably the safest crossing point on the road, is out of bounds! Ludicrous.

I recently had a fantastic reply to a complaint I sent to Sainsburys. I’m a bit of a pedant when it comes to language, and especially when used in TV advertising. I am usually pretty quick to spot advertising ‘escape clauses’ – where the claim they seem to be making is not actually what they are saying. I especially like “Nothing works faster than X” – so use NOTHING – it works faster than X and is a damn sight cheaper! Sainsburys recently ran an add for new potatoes which they said would be available for “a few short weeks”. Well that was red rag to a bull and I sent emails off to their marketing department and the company responsible for the advert. All very tongue-in-cheek, but it made the point. My email and the reply below!

To whom it may concern, (and please pass this on to the relevant manager)

I write in reference to a Sainsbury’s TV ad campaign which is currently running in the North West UK region, and for which I believe you may be responsible.

I am confused. According to this current advertising campaign, Sainsbury’s have new potatoes available at their best for, “a few short weeks”. This causes me some concern as I have always believed that the length of any given week is the same as all the others. In what way are you able to shorten these weeks? Can you please explain exactly which part of the week is being sacrificed? I hope the shrinkage is happening during the standard working week. I’m sure people would be most disgruntled if they found out that some of their weekend had been removed.

My initial thought was that maybe Sainsbury’s was in conspiracy with the Government; by reducing the length of a week one could naturally assume that this would also represent savings in many areas, such as fuel used for heating and lighting, hours worked by government bodies, the Police, and other Service agencies, however upon further reflection I feel that this would have an economically detrimental impact, with people having less time to spend money in the shops and consequently boost our country’s fortunes within world financial arenas.

My next concern was that maybe this was in some way linked with the current MP expenses debacle. Has Hazel Blears been stealing minutes from the usual 24/7 pattern, as well as fixing her expenses?

Of course, you may be suggesting Einstein’s theory of relativity here, however that would imply that humankind is due to leave the Earth and travel faster than light speed, and indeed, upon our return to Earth it would appear that less time had passed for us than for the earth-bound Sainsbury’s stores. However I suspect that the costs of achieving this would probably outweigh the savings on the odd bag of potatoes.

I am gratified to hear that this anomaly is only expect to last for a few of these shortened weeks, but please will you let me know if this is in fact planned to be an annual event, such as daylight saving times, and indeed whether Sainsbury’s plans to return the missing temporal quotient, perhaps during a few LONG weeks in the Winter?

Please can we have our old week-length back? I’m rather fond of it.

Dear Mr Perrett

Thanks for your email about our recent TV advert. I can understand your concern about the short weeks we mention.

I’d like to assure you that we are not part of a government conspiracy to reduce costs, nor are we helping MPs to claim time along with their expenses. If we were dabbling with Einstein’s theories, we certainly wouldn’t want to reduce the weekends because we know this wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interests.

As I’m sure you’re aware, time flies when you’re having fun. What you might not know is that time also flies when you’re growing new potatoes. This, of course, is to do with the perception of time passing and this was what we were referring to when we talked about the short weeks. Sadly, we don’t yet have the technology to alter actual time so you can rest assured that weeks will remain at the standard length of 7 days.

I’m grateful to you for making us aware of the confusion our advert caused and I hope you will enjoy our new potatoes during the few regular length weeks that they are at their best.

Yours sincerely

Jodi Hollingsworth

Executive Office

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