Little rollercoasters

Going up.

• Much great food and drink action, including posh dinner at Quod with Significant Ex (bit too much drink action there, to be fair), wonderful spaghetti with tuna balls when we had K&M over for dinner, sublime leek and potato soup on Sunday, pasta bake with Malawian Nali hot sauce to comfort several of us in need of comforting, and at long long last a farmer's market in East Oxford!
  
• Jumper weather. And socks. But still summer. It's a winner with me.
  
• Amazing plumbing success story, in the form of taking out one hot water cylinder (downstairs, somewhere in Burford) and putting in another one (upstairs, same dwelling). No huge mistakes made, no major injuries, all reconnected, everyone happy. Plumbing S and I drove back punching the air to Alanis Morissette and feeling groovy.
  
• A Scanner Darkly. I thought I might be a) bored or b) confused but instead I was c) gripped and d) moved.
  
• Eraser, which provides some of the soundtrack to the above film. Possibly the least accessible album I have ever loved, but love it I do. This is fucked up, fucked up.
  
• Digital TV and radio coverage of Reading/Leeds - the Yeah Yeah Yeahs *and* a bed to sleep in!
  
• Another blinding party chez family M in Old Botley. Yurt: check. Carnival lighting: check. Bison grass vodka: check. Beautiful people: check. DJ who plays Joan Jett: check. Leaving by 1.30 before anyone passes out and while taxis can still be hailed and bread toasted: check. What's not to love?
  

Going down.

• This year's courgette glut, surely the biggest since records began. I do not want to see another one for many months.
• Work still sucks like a sucky thing with extra suction. I attack this at night with Temazepam - what a great drug - but know this is not a viable long term option. During the day I just don't pretend I don't hate it. Eventually this strategy will pay dividends.
  
• Bank Holiday Monday in Ikea, largely to purchase something which was 'in stock' on the website before we left and after we got home, but nowhere in evidence while we were actually there. What the hell were we thinking?
  

On balance... well, there isn't much balance right now. Enjoy the view going up, scream while going down, make sure you're strapped in securely and be glad you spent your teenage summers in training on the Grand National.

joella

Working from home

There was a time when working from home meant lying in bed all day with a giant hangover and your mobile phone next to your head so if anyone rang you could pretend you were sitting at your desk working like mad. When I was splitting up from my Significant Ex I once woke up about six minutes before I was due to interview the marketing director of a large database company. I barely had time to sit up, fight back the existential demons and rinse my mouth out with flat diet Coke before I was plugging in the tape recorder and thanking lucky stars that a) I'd written the questions the day before and b) on the telephone, nobody knows you're wearing an outsize Snoopy T-shirt and smelling like a pub ashtray. Oh, those were the days.

So I am pleased to report that today I am fully dressed and I was sitting at my laptop before 10am, with a field mushroom sandwich inside me and a nice cup of Fairtrade filter coffee in front of me. I have done a load of washing, which is drying healthily on the line, and, perhaps more relevantly, have got really quite a lot of work done. More, in fact, I would wager, than I get done in a normal day at the office at the moment. So that's nice.

Later, I have a teleconference, and then I plan to have a bath before heading out for dinner with the same Significant Ex, who's over on holiday. I'm such a grown up sometimes I can hardly get my head round it.

joella

What colour is my hair?

Still economising, but this time invested in a £1.50 wide tooth comb and a bottle of wine to soften up M so he would help me with the home dye job (still came in at about a tenner all in, which is a third of the salon price).

He wasn't keen initially, as he remembered the time his ex-wife got him to cut her hair and it all went horribly wrong, but he liked the special plastic gloves, which swung it I think.

So I sat on the toilet lid, he snapped on the latex and it all went well until, swinging me round to get a better view of my roots, he said 'so are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?' which made me laugh so hard I got Warmed Terracotta smeared right across my forehead.

It's still all wrapped in the Least Favoured Towel but it has to be better than last time.

joella

Friday

Blood and chocolate and cheese and beans and socks and pyjamas and scotch and honey and ibuprofen and codeine and sofas and blankets and a good book and a film with George Clooney in and M and Tobermory the cuddly lobster.

joella

It's great when you're, er, thirtysomething

... and you're tired and emotional (for which read drunk and premenstrual) and you think, well maybe a bit of Late Junction would be good while I finish off that Tempranillo and contemplate my life.

And your soul is warmed by Fiona Talkington, gently, and you begin to think, you know, could be worse, all you need in life is water and blankets and speakers and broadband.

M appeared later. First there was a big silence, and he thought Radio 3 had broken. I said 'no, it's just a minimalist thing I think' and then there was a noise and he said 'is this Morton Feldman'? After one bar! He was bloody right as well. Later he said 'oh, this is the London Symphonietta playing Aphex Twin'.

How did I get here? Not that it's at all a bad place to be, it's like Womad on Valium, but still.

joella

Stillborn love, passionate dreams, pitiful greed

Sometimes you need something to take you away from your air conditioned view of the Oxford ring road, before you throw yourself at the reinforced glass hoping for something dramatic and blood-drenched but getting only a large bruise on the head and some more feedback on your problem with authority.

When such occasions arise, reach for your headphones and your latest eBay bargain, close your email, close your eyes and sing yourself lots more gypsy love songs. He might have a rep (not entirely undeserved, from what I read) as a grumpy old Sufist misogynist bastard, but there's no one to touch him for passion and venom and not a word wasted.

Onwards!

joella

Sunday: macro, meso, micro

Macro: rejoiced, briefly, at ceasefire news.

Meso: did two loads of washing with new Ecoballs, hoping they do not equal Ecobollocks.

Micro: remembered how effective flaming Sambuca is as a post-curry digestif.

joella

I'm a black man! I could never be a veteran!

I had my performance review today. Apparently I have a problem with authority. Fair point, kinda, but I suddenly got a little glimpse of why middle class white kids listen to black ghetto music.

Went to pub, had several Discoveries (it's great to stand at the bar and say 'can I have a Discovery please?'), then came home to throw myself round the room to Black Steel at neighbour-bothering volume. I am no poet (in fact, you could say I have a problem with poetry), so I leave my thought for the day to Public Enemy.

I got a letter from the government the other day
Opened it and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me givin' a damn, I said never
Here is a land that never gave a damn
About a brother like myself
Because I never did
I wasn't with it, but just that very minute
It occurred to me
The suckers had authority

Cold sweatin' as I dwell in my cell
How long has it been?
They got me sittin' in the state pen
I gotta get out, but that thought was thought before
I contemplated a plan on the cell floor

I'm not a fugitive on the run
But a brother like me begun, to be another one
Public enemy servin' time, they drew the line y'all
They criticize me for some crime

I got a letter, I got a letter, I got a letter
Picture me given' a damn, I said never

Nevertheless they could not understand
That I'm a black man, and I could never be a veteran
On the strength of situations, I'm real
I got a raw deal, so I'm lookin' for the steel


joella

I try. But not *that* hard.

joella

Glimmer of light

J the plumber came round last night. He looked at the bust shower and confirmed that it is proper bust - this was reassuring as if it had been merely temporarily laid up I would have felt a fool. He told me what to replace it with (we only have 6mm earth cable, which limits the permitted kilowattage, fact fans) and said he would come back to help me fit it. So far, so good.

But even better, I then got out my City & Guilds 6129 Scheme Plumbing Certificate folder, showed him what I've done and said 'so if I can swing it with work (big if) can I get some work experience with you?' You might need a Land Rover, he said. You what? I said. Apparently they are good for getting out in the middle of winter, when all other plumbers are frozen in, and also good for pulling up hedges when you need to dig up burst water mains.

I think I might start slow, I said. Maybe a small van? He said yes, that was fine, as long as I can get myself to Didcot of a morning. That sounds feasible. And so in one evening, my world potentially turned on its axis. Someone might give me a job as a plumber. Even if they don't pay me for it at first. For a middle class girl with more hours of gender training than plumbing experience under her toolbelt, that's quite something.

I took him out to the shed to inspect the blowtorch head I bought off Ebay but have not yet used because I don't know what kind of gas to get for it. Is this *your* shed? he said. Oh yes, I said, rootling through drawers of steel wool and solder reels, while surrounded by deckchairs, kindling made from old fences, and cocoa shell mulch. I think you're my perfect woman, he said.

It feels like there might be everything to play for all of a sudden. As Mike Harding once said, it's hard being a cowboy in Rochdale - but if that's what you are, maybe you should just get those spurs on your clogs.

joella

Overcast

I find August an oppressive month. You're supposed to be lithe and smooth and tanned and running around visiting areas of outstanding natural beauty then having barbecues afterwards. This doesn't happen to me. Instead I feel lardy and lumpy and pallid, and I lie around in bed reading novels, picking my toenails and wishing it would rain. I have SAD in reverse.

joella

Knobheads and joss sticks

I'm trying to spend less money. I'm not a particularly profligate person, and ginormous mortgage aside I am pretty much debt free, but I'm preparing myself for a future with a smaller income. Just in case I need to run screaming from the building.

It's not going too badly - I have been borrowing books instead of buying them, drinking Vinho Verde (£2.99 at Tesco!), and I brought my own lunch in twice this week.

But I think I may be going leetle crazy. I found myself in Lloyds Pharmacy in Botley (crazy enough, you might say) wandering up and down unfamiliar aisles full of bargain toiletries looking for deodorant. Which I found, but I somehow also bought a bottle of Yardley Sandalwood Eau de Toilette, surely the ultimate low-budget old lady perfume.

It was an exemplary impulse buy: unnecessary to the point of bizarre. I am not an old lady, and I do not need any perfume. It's also a spectacularly hideous bottle, and does not go with the Neal's Yard minimalist chic look I am trying to cultivate in the bathroom. I have been wearing it anyway, and M tells me I smell like a big joss stick. I fear he may be right.

So I was wafting around in a sandalwood old lady daze this morning when I heard our media people talking loudly (they don't talk any other way) about a knobhead. That's a bit rude, I thought, as I walked past with my breakfast (Frazzles! 40p!).

I walked past again a bit later and someone said 'we must make sure it *looks* like a knobhead'. I frowned and thought a bit harder, and realised they were on about an Op Ed.

I must keep an eye out for it.

joella