ow ow ow ow ow ow

Everything hurts My cement burns woke me up at 6, I rang NHS Direct at 7.30, and was sitting in A&E on their advice by 8.30.

By 10 (having understood that cement burn plus sunburn = Bad News) I had been discharged and walked in the door at home with two arms bandaged up to the elbow and one in a sling. Mick the builder quivered. Please don't tell your mother, he said, she'll fucking kill me. I reckon she'd kill me too, that's why I rang NHS Direct rather than her (she is a nurse, but from the fierce Old School).

He barrowed sand through. I read my book. I will survive.

joella

Post I am determined not to have to edit in the morning

Cement can burn you. It can really hurt. Doing thirteen mixes of concrete is not at all bad (I am told by Mick the builder, who knows about these things), especially if you are a girl. But it will send you to the pharmacist after two days and he will tell you to wear gloves. Which will get you called a girl, but, I guess, in a good way.

joella

What a wonderful world

Mick the builder is here. At the moment he is in the other room having an intense grass-fuelled debate with M about obscure Philip K Dick books. Earlier, he and I went out for beers -- at the Eagle & Child so he could indulge his Tolkien obsession, and then at the Turf so I could indulge my Oxford one. We walked back along Queens Lane and he admired the brickwork.

Tomorrow, I am due to get up at 7.30 and then learn how to mix concrete. I am steadily earning my passage off Golgafrincham Ark B.

joella

From inflatable sofas to vegetable samosas...    
   


... there's nowhere quite like Womad. How could I have thought of not going? More when I've recharged myself.

joella

Low level anxiety caused by low lying cloud
 
After work today, and after calling the builder's merchants to order supplies for Mick the builder for next week, and after buying snacks and drinks for seven or is it eight, and after finding plastic flowers from somewhere at S's instruction, I am off to Womad.
 
Theoretically, it is all under control. I was ordered out of the advance party because I get too stressed, so when I turn up there the posse should be firmly encamped and all I have to do is chill out. How lovely the advance party are.
 
And the weather forecast isn't too bad. So what am I worried about? Well, the sky was the colour of a seasick elephant this morning, and it's still cloud cloud cloud as far as the eye can see. Last year it pissed down, and I didn't like it.  Well, it's in the hands of the gods now. Back on Monday.

joella

I love a (posh) man in (high ranking) uniform 
  
A fire alarm at Glasgow airport had hordes of the great unwashed hanging out on the pavement in the drizzle whinging about pints of Stella left half undrunk. Once the all clear was given, there was a huge queue for the (heightened) security clearance -- lots of random bag checks, shoe-sole examinations etc.
 
Quite understandably, we never got to find out why the alarm went off, but in these post 9/11 days it doesn't take much to get you looking sidelong at other people's shoes and giving bearded men (even ginger ones with kilts on) hard and slightly paranoid stares.
 
Cue Captain Charm, with a voice like cut glass: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to flight BA 123 to London Heathrow. Slight delay in take off this evening, for which sincere apologies, but apparently there is 'high demand' to land at Heathrow this fine evening. High demand, that's what it says on this piece of paper in front of me. Now I'd argue that there's always high demand, so perhaps another runway might be in order, but no, we are British so we will jolly well make do with what we've got.
 
"I am not flying myself this evening, you instead have the immeasurable privilege of being flown by my co-pilot (insert posh girl's name here), whom actually I am rather annoyed with because she's better at landing than I am and she eats chocolate in the cockpit without offering me any. Anyway, it's bound to be an absolutely splendid flight as soon as those air traffic control people decide to be reasonable and let us get on with it. And now over to the frankly exceptional cabin crew who will I am sure meet every expectation you could possibly have. Trust me."
 
And trust him I did. Seconds later, the estuarine tones of the head of cabin crew came over the intercom, annoucing the safety demonstration in similarly light -- quite probably similarly manufacturedly light -- mood, but he just couldn't compete. When you find yourself in times of trouble, you want a grown up public schoolboy with stripes on his sleeves to make you feel all right.
 
All that breeding, all that training. There's a lot to be said for accomplished posh boys. They'd never come up with anything as vulgar as 'shock and awe'. Not that they need it with their advanced combination of mild disbelief, stiff upper lip, consummate skill and artful understatement.
 
And what's more, he was right. The landing was superb: in over the east of London, gentle low cruise along the Thames checking out the sights, and a touchdown you almost didn't feel. She really knew what she was doing. Which seemed a fitting end to an interesting day arguing the finer points of gender equality work. Of which I am glad, as until that point I was feeling remarkably politically incorrect with my unashamed appreciation of her colleague.
 
joella

Underwhelming e-experience
 
I am killing time at Heathrow Terminal 1. Decided to experiment with one of those email and internet kiosks you see next to payphones these days. Hmmm. First of all I couldn't get into Hotmail (3 minutes wasted) , then getting into Blogger took several more minutes, as I watched my 15 minutes running steadily out in the helpful countdown in the corner.  You can't open another window to try loading something else, so you just have to stand there like a lemon.
 
[next day, at home]
So I managed to save to draft by accident, then I tried to publish, and waited another three minutes watching the spinning IE globe, then my money ran out. I decided not to try again: a pound of my hard-earned cash and 15 minutes of my ever decreasing life for 87 words does not seem like good ROI to me.
 
joella

hEY YA!
 
Hey, the Blogger interface is all different!  THa'ts not a fair thing to do to a driunk person.
 
I've had a lovely weekend so far, fixed some plumbing (still dangerously at 100% success rate, can only go downhill) and then splendid meal out with A&D eating veggie Chinese food that M doesn't agree with, being fake (eg fake duck, fake chicken etc, despite being Chinese tradition *and* um somehitng else I can't remember).
 
oh arse. did write something interesting about OutKast, about urban vs rural, about life generally, but the fucking PC rebooted, as it does all the time at the moment.
 
Could be just as well. time to go to bed and enjoy having it all to myself (M away being a rock star by the sea).
 
joella
 

Grumpelstiltskin

Recipe for a grumpy Thursday:

Several glasses of white wine
Sudden onset period pain
Three pints of Stella
Two Nurofen Plus
One very late night

Shake up together and then leave to settle.

Around lunchtime, a hot vegetable samosa can be added, followed by a laughably inadequate cup of Ayurvedic Detox herbal tea.

Can I go home yet?

joella

Tactical fish soup

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, someone taught me how to make fish soup. It came originally, I believe, from a Sainsbury's recipe card, which she adapted, and I have adapted it in turn.

It is based around white fish -- as good as you can find -- tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil and fresh herbs. It takes about an hour to cook and fragrant steam fills the house as you all get hungrier.

I turn to it often when M's daughters come round. It is splendid yet hard to cock up, helping me appear both bountiful and accomplished. Every woman should have such a dish at her disposal.

joella

Love and marriage

... go together like a horse and carriage, they say. Which don't often go together these days, let's face it, but we all still love a good wedding. Public displays of optimism, says my uncle, himself a married man.

And the one we went to on Friday was a genuinely lovely one, celebrating a relationship no one could but wish to see stay the distance. Watching the bride's father, down from the North East, looking at C with a huge smile on his face as he started his speech and saying 'My bonny daughter...' was a heart warming moment, and I felt a little pang that my sister and I have thus far (and quite possibly permanently) deprived our own father of the opportunity to do the dad thing at a wedding.

Weddings are also hugely social and generally pretty drunken. Acquaintances are made and renewed, but equally fights may be had, and rifts born or buried. This particular one saw M and my Significant Ex talking for the first time in over six years... something I wouldn't have predicted and which all parties had to work at to handle well. But I think we all did (both work at it and handle it well).

Similarly, the hen night saw me engaging with two people I hadn't spoken to for nearly as long. One of them (let's call her A) was friendly -- certainly friendlier than I expected -- the other (B) was Frosty the Snowman. The one who was friendly was the one I had done the falling out with, the chilly one was the one who fell out with me. Which was interesting... I would have expected A to have residual pissed-offness with me for being a cow and B to be feeling that time had gone by and how much could it really matter anymore.

As with international relations, the aggressor is usually the aggrieved with big guns and an attitude, and it's up to the underdog to disarm them by behaving in a civil and non-inflammatory fashion. And if you refuse to disarm under these circumstances (as I have been known to in my time), you sure have some issues.

So big up to A and to M for being, in their different ways, the grown ups of the piece, and to Significant Ex and (if I may) to me, for going with the flow, as far as we were able anyway. And to C&D for having the optimism to get married in the first place and drag us all into the same place at the same time quite simply because what we have in common is holding them in high regard. Oh, and to the Lemon Tree -- what a wonderful venue.

There was more wonderfulness about the weekend, but I have to get myself to bed -- the last few days haven't been noteworthy for their surfeit of sleep, and I think I owe myself eight hours before I even attempt to work...

joella

Take a look around you, boy

Last night, we curled up under a blanket and started watching the awesome Our Friends in the North series on DVD, courtesy of Oxfordshire County Libraries.

One of the tracks on the soundtrack of episode 1 was Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire, a song which hits me right in the soul. Like many protest songs, I heard it first at university, 20 years after it was written, but those were days of protest too (Thatcher, Poll Tax, student loans) and passions were high.

But it hit me even harder because I had recently followed a link to Bloggerheads: The Parting Shot (for Bush the fascist and Blair the appeaser), which uses the same song to protest about Iraq. (And very poetically -- there is something to be said for Flash animations sometimes.)

But what to do with these hit in the soul feelings? At least in the 60s people still believed in politics. I'm not so sure we do anymore.

joella

Holiday snaps

Feeling a bit better. Strange hen night receding, work going surprisingly well, household pow-wow scheduled, Mick the builder definitely coming to do the garden walls. Amazing what a couple of sober days can do for a girl.

Meanwhile, three views of Madeira -- a beautiful place if one aimed more at Generation Blue Rinse than Generation X.


View from the pool



Groovy pink and purple plants in the wonderful Botanical Gardens



Splendid Baileys-and-view after dinner with S on her birthday

joella

The restorative powers of miso and lychees

I've not been in the best of moods since I got back from Madeira. Partly work, partly household dysfunction, partly a majorly hectic week socially. This last is not a bad thing in itself, but if you have the relationship with alcohol that I do then work pressures and household dysfunction create a mental environment where moderation flies out the window. The result is that I've been either drunk or hungover for days. It's not good for the body or the soul.

It reached a peak last night with a hen do that I was kind of ambivalent about. I am kind of ambivalent about hen dos in general, and I was doubly ambivalent about this one -- nothing to do with the imminent marriage, as the couple in question seem very happy together, very much in love and very compatible. No, it was more to do with the gathering itself, which caused me some discomfort. Not sure I can go into it briefly, and not sure I want to go into it at length, but the very brief version is that I drank too much, then went on to another party and drank more.

Basically, for the third night in a row I went to bed with my contact lenses still in.

Luckily, I had nothing planned today. Well, we had a picnic invite, but it rained so it wasn't too hard to miss. I decided not to put myself in a situation where I would come up wanting. Instead, I stayed in bed all day finishing Maps for Lost Lovers, and that was the best thing I could have done.

Around 11 M brought me a cup of miso soup. It is the kind of stuff you feel could sustain life all on its own. I love it. So I began to feel that I might be normal again one day. Around 8 I got dressed and went across the road to the final social engagement of the weekend, which was wine and dessert with some neighbours. I went for the lychees. I don't think I've ever had one before except out of a tin and they were fabulous. For modern day hangover cures, look east.

I meant to avoid the wine but that turned out to be impossible. So I won't wake up tomorrow with that gorgeous feeling of sobriety after excess, but I will hopefully have enough about me to get through the day with at least a semblance of panache rather than groaning lightly and spending too much time in the loo because at least no one talks to you there.

I must remember to buy a freak flag so I can fly it.

joella

Too old for this

Out drinking last night, celebrating the visit of L, who was our tour guide in India, and perhaps also drowning subconscious sorrows at the end of my plumbing course.

Then a two hour meeting this morning about something horrible and technical. And I can't do it, my brain isn't working, I want to be snuffleuppacussed under a duvet with a copy of Hello magazine and some Robinson's barley water.

And a massive weekend approaches, will I survive?

Need a Zen injection.

joella