Of massages, goats, wildness and, like, so?

Good-o, said M, this morning, as I announced I was off to have a massage. Maybe you'll come back in a good mood. Piss off, I said. Exactly, he said.

How would you like to feel afterwards, asked the nice Australian lady as I was taking my clothes off. In a good mood, I said. She went away and mixed up some clary sage and some wild
marjoram, then got to work with her forearms.

As I was lying there a conversation about goats that I had forgotten about came back to me, which prompted me to think about a friend of mine who is buying some of her relatives a pile of poo this Christmas. The double-edged gift that gives twice! How splendid. The only thing better is temporarily emigrating to a Hindu country until the stakes are lowered, wrapped in tinsel and put back in the attic for another year. As this is exactly how I plan to spend the festive season, I did indeed emerge in a good mood, and float dreamily home for rye bread and sheep's cheese.

I then prepared my iPod for a drive to Winchester with Plumbing S and her daughter. Shuffle can produce items that scare children, but all that choice is too overwhelming, so I made up some playlists based on all the songs I have in iTunes with titles which start with the same word.

First go: Wild

Wild Children - Van Morrison
Wild Goose - Kate Rusby
Wild Horses - The Rolling Stones
Wild Jack Hammer - The Bevis Frond
Wild Life - INXS
Wild Night - Van Morrison (hey, he's pretty wild!)
Wild Star - Transvision Vamp
Wild Wood - Paul Weller
Wild World - Cat Stevens

Second go: So

So Hard - Pet Shop Boys
So Here I Come - Neneh Cherry
So Lonely - The Police
So Long Ago - The Coral
So Much More - Beth Orton
So Nice - Andy Williams
So Tough - The Slits
So What - Ani DiFranco
So Young - The Stone Roses

As it was we had to listen to The Best Disco Album In The World Ever all the way there, but it could have been worse. Glad to know that young hearts still run free.

joella

I'm finding it harder to be a gentleman every day

M heard back from the lawyers he should have gone to see ten years ago. They said:

Dear M,

Thanks for sending us copies of your correspondence with your scary ex-wife. We can confirm the following:

1. She is proper scary
2. You should have come to see us ten years ago
3. You did officially get done
4. She's not going to budge an inch without a court order
5. You might get one, but you might not, and either way it would cost you a screaming fortune

We therefore recommend the following course of action:

1. Go and get very pissed
2. Berate yourself for a few weeks
3. Be thankful that you're not married to her anymore
4. Don't do it again

We are pleased to note, however, that your taste in women seems to have improved recently.

Yours sincerely

Hard, Rain, Gonna and Fall.

The chilblains are deigning to communicate with him again following this development, but it's with pretty much the same la-la-la-can't-hear-you conditions as before. In fact, I think it's worse, because he did try and say something after years of long-game silence, and if the lawyers had written a different letter I think they'd still be ignoring his calls. Well, I guess the long game is better than no game if you're a parent, but hey, I'm not, and I'm not playing it anymore.

I had a long chat with R the hairdresser about it when I was up north. His children didn't speak to him for years after he left his wife. You get to the point, he said, where you just think 'well, they can piss off'. I think I've got there, I said. Not forever, probably, but for a while.

And on that unusually sober note I'm off to finish On the Beach, then spend the weekend partying like it's 1963.

joella

No heroines

Spine asked me to blog from the annual conference of the IPHE's Women in Plumbing group, which he imagined as lots of tiny women standing inside steel pipes banging tools on the walls. His description reminded me of a Reclaim the Night march I went on once in Cambridge: we stomped through the covered shopping centre ululating and banging shop windows, and the winos fled into the shadows like silverfish under a spotlight.

They didn't provide blogging facilities, but I'm safe home now, and the right side of a lavender oil bath and my second-best pair of fleecy pyjamas. And this is what I might have blogged.

I listened to Ani DiFranco on the train to London this morning, to get myself in the mood for Women in Plumbing. I hadn't been on a rush hour tube since 7/7, and I hoped that if I got blown up someone would think to play 32 Flavors at my funeral (original studio version please).

I got to Waterloo by 9.15 and sat and ate a Mushroom Feuillette (so wrong yet somehow so right) remembering the time I went shaking to the Transport Police here to report the man who wanked himself off at me on a Sunday afternoon train from Canterbury. Hoped there was no subliminal link between this memory and the filling of the Mushroom Feuillette. [They never got him, of course, but that was partly down to me not pulling the communication cord on the spot (you are allowed to do this, by the way), and I did have the small consolation of a large policeman escorting me to the door, putting his hand on my shoulder and saying 'mind how you go now'.]

I digress, but I was definitely having gendered thoughts by the time I parked my bike helmet in the cloakroom at the mildly terrifying pillar of the establishment Union Jack Club, went to the ladies and became one of many, many people to come out of the cubicle and remark to the queue 'that flush could use a little attention'.

I got my coffee and my bag of marketing literature and freebies, and I took my seat. Excuse me, said the quiet woman next to me, are those safety boots? No, I said, I wish they were, my safety boots are a size too big and I have to wear extra socks with them. There were nods all round.

Later, she and I were talking about how hard it is to get work experience, and how lucky we were to have found someone to take us on. Does he ever touch you? she said. Well yes, I said, he's showing me how to do stuff, and he helps me across narrow beams, and it's a bit of a squidge if there's two of you up a stepladder. But does he ever... touch you, she said. Oh, I said. No. Well, we hug each other occasionally, but no. He doesn't touch me. Oh shit. Really?

Yes, she said. I don't know what to do. I really need my NVQ.

I told her about my driving instructor, and how I really needed my driving licence. But I was 17 then. We talked about what she could do, whether her college tutors might be able to intervene, whether she could write a letter to the IPHE.

Later, some glossy blondes talked about how much money you can earn in this business by beating men at their own game.

Let me be clear. I like plumbing, and I like a lot of the men I have met who are involved with it. Men are not there to be beaten at their own game. It's not a fucking competition. There should be a place for women in all construction trades, and it should be an equal and fair place. You take yourself seriously, you deserve to get taken seriously. Ray O'Rourke and his like should be hounded out of town, you should be able to get shoes that fit, and nobody should 'touch you'.

When I was on the train home I looked in my bag of marketing literature and freebies, and discovered a tube of strawberry flavoured British Gas lip gloss. Tell me this isn't the future.

joella

Lost weekend in a household in Lancashire

... single insomnia in a double room.

Nah, I'm exaggerating slightly. I was definitely in Lancashire, that horizontal hail to the left of you and rainbow to the right is a dead giveaway. Parts of the weekend were a bit lost, it's true, but they were also the most fun, as they were spent in the company of A Free Man in Preston and Girl on a Train, drinking Blonde Witch beer for many, many hours and talking life, art, blogging, music, and, I fear (at least on my part), bollocks. It was splendid.

I did do a fair bit of waking up in the night, but mainly to drink more water and go to the loo and then again to repeat the same. My rule of thumb is drink half a pint of water for every pint consumed over the evening, but to manage that in one go on Saturday would have required some sort of intravenous contraption. I was in reasonably good shape on Sunday, considering (in a 'managed Sudoku over breakfast while defending self against so what time did you call that and where have all the gherkins gone' accusations style).

Sunday night I argued politics with my uncle J over red wine and Chinese food. It's one of those comforting traditions. He shouts more but I win and he knows I win even though he shouts more. I'm dead fond of my uncle J *and* he works for a fairy light company so I return south laden with sparkly ex-samples that I can use to make friends and influence people of the kitsch-appreciating classes.

One of the same, my gay friend A, was the ONLY PERSON to notice I've had my hair cut. 'Well', he said, it does look like it was cut in Lancashire'. Fuck off, I said, but I was still pleased he noticed. M said 'has something happened to your eyes?'. They should teach boys this stuff in school, they really should.

joella

Blood on the tracks

Buoyed by winning small 'greater good' pavement battle against 'I'm all right Jack' overprivileged dullards (no Clio in evidence for last 24 hours), this morning I asked two young men on the train to turn off the R'n'B videos they were watching (and listening to) on a laptop in the Quiet Zone.

'There's nowhere else to sit'.
'So... can you turn it off?'
'No'
'Do you want to borrow my earphones? You can use one each!'
'We'll turn it down'
'Mmmm, I can still hear it. It's the Quiet Zone. Please turn it off'.
'No, sorry.'
'Well, you're clearly not sorry are you? You can't be sorry about something that you know is wrong but you refuse to stop doing. Sorry doesn't cover it.'

'You're not going to turn it off are you?'
'No, sorry'.
'Spare me the sorry'.

I gave up at this point, being a) alone, b) small and c) unable to think of anything else to say that wasn't aggressive. As I sat down again my neighbours made little supportive grunting noises, and one of them said 'someone else asked them earlier'.

What is it with people that they think they can inflict their tinny sexist MOR shite on people who have deliberately chosen to sit somewhere they won't be subjected to tinny sexist MOR shite? I should point out that they were at the lumpen, inarticulate, scurfy end of humanity, but even so, I don't get it. I'd be embarrassed, myself.

joella

Underintelligent, overindulged, over here

I fucking hate posh thick students, especially when they're my neighbours. To be fair, the majority of students living on my street are no trouble at all, bar occasional late night noise (worse in summer, when they bray more), ostentatious underwear parading and kebab box litter. They have shit landlords, earning my sympathy, and they are burglar magnets (too many Sony VAIOs and video iPods in one house for their own good), earning my gratitude. On the whole, we rub along, and I think we've had as many noise complaints in the last five years as we've made, so the feeling's probably mutual.

But every year there's one little brat who got a souped up hatchback for his/her 18th without the parking lessons to go with it. These kids, I want to annihilate. It is murder parking round here in term time, and the least you can do is park considerately. By which I mean not in the middle of two parking spaces, so you can drive in forwards and you've got plenty of room to get out, and not on the fucking pavement.

There's a house down the road which has that rarest of things in East Oxford, an off-road parking space. You could use it perpendicularly, by parking under the archway between it and the house next door, or you could use it parallel-style, by parking in front of the front window and across the archway. I have seen it used both ways.

This year, however, the bint with the Clio thinks she can use it by parking perpendicular to the front window. This means that the back half of her car is on the pavement. Quite often one of her friends parks on the street blocking her in, which means that there's about a foot of pavement left to squeeze past in. Meanwhile, their driveway lies unobstructed.

If you ask them why they don't park there, they tell you that it's because that's because they'd block access to their front door.

Right, I said tonight (on the third attempt), but it's all right to block the pavement for everyone else? How am I supposed to get my pushchair past?

OK, so I lied about the pushchair, but they lied more, with their inconsistent flick-and-drawl 'we don't actually live here', 'the letting agent said this was our parking space' and 'the owner of the car has just today gone away for 2 months' shite. If that's the case it shouldn't be a huge inconvenience for her if I put her little runaround on bricks and burn the tyres in a righteous pyre.

I think I may be premenstrual*.

joella

* I was.

One language, many worlds

I am trying to book a room at the Hotel New Woodlands in Chennai (The City Formerly Known as Madras). I first of all tried to do it by email. They sent me the room tariff and the following information:

EARLY MORNING 6AM WE DO NOT CONFIRM BOOKING,SINCE OURS IS A 12 NOON CHECKOUT, OUR CHECKOUTS START ONLY AT 10 AM.ON ARRIVAL AT 6.00AM YOU CAN TAKE WHICH EVER IS AVAILABLE TEMPORARILY, LATER YOU CAN SHIFT TO YOUR CATEGORY ROOM.

Charges are very eloborate and finer details involved, hence we request you to
contact our travel assistant.

Hmm, I thought. I don't understand a word of that, I better contact their travel assistant. So I rang them up.

How many rooms? he said. One, I said. Four? he said. Just the one, I said. When are you arriving? he said. 16 December, I said. At what time? he said. Late at night, I said. We do not have any rooms at midnight, he said. Only in the afternoon.

I'm sorry, I said, could you say that again?

He did. Several times. They have rooms available on the afternoon of the 16th, and if I was arriving then I could book one of those for two nights, but I can't have one if I'm arriving at night. How does that work?

I guess I need to stop applying my Judaeo-Christian logic to Hindu reality, and call somewhere else.

joella

I have been released

The alarm didn't go off this morning. I woke up in a mild flailing panic to the eight o'clock pips, thinking shit, what am I playing at, what time do I need to be at...

... and oh how sweet it was to have that little jolt of nasty adrenaline replaced by the realisation that not only do I not have to brave the forces of darkness in the New Building this morning, I Never Have To Do It Again. I didn't set the alarm ON PURPOSE. I was so excited I went straight back to sleep.

This won't be the case every Monday, mind. The plan is that I will be hanging out with J the plumber on Mondays and Tuesdays, handing him spanners and learning how to use blowtorches and power tools, and this will necessitate being halfway across Oxfordshire long before I would normally be out of bed. Wednesday to Friday I will be a regular office worker, but on a new floor, with a new grade, a new remit, a new PC and a new manager.

But all this starts next week. This week I am free.

And getting stuff done. In between a trip to Kwik Fit (you really *can't* get better than a Kwik Fit fitter) and a yummy lunch at Yummy, I bought my first pair of knee pad trousers. They are cut for men, and consequently they are tight round the arse, loose round the waist and the knee pads don't quite line up with my knees. It's like buying clothes in Communist Russia.

Next week I'm going to the Women in Plumbing annual conference in the Smoke. I'll be demanding trousers that bloody well fit.

joella

Top quality friends

M has a friend whose last name is Faultless. Neat.

joella

Galloping down the home straight only a little bit pissed

Tomorrow is my last day as a full time employee, and, I hope, the last of my Dark Days. I. Can't. Wait.

It's a momentous day, and maybe one day I will be glad I had a job that made me so miserable I couldn't face doing it five days a week, or even doing it at all. Had I loved this job as I have loved previous ones, I can't see I would be making the leap into relative skintness and absolute strangeness with anything like this degree of enthusiasm.

Meanwhile I have eight working hours to implement modifications to our monitoring database, finish my handover notes, send comments on the Malawi HIV knowledge map content to the researcher in Lilongwe, write induction objectives for two new starters, attempt to conclude job offer conversations with the same, authorise everyone's leave for the rest of the financial year, clear my desk, wash up my mug, write an announcement for my new boss to send out, negotiate an acceptable level of storage space for the archivists (who are being asked to move areas), give two people interview feedback, feed into a communications review, finish migrating our content from one area of the network to another, and eat the cake that will surely appear at some point (and which will hopefully be an improvement on our current coffee-table offering of date-filled cookies from Saudi Arabia that look like the breasts of teenage girls).

I have asked one of my team to make sure I am in the pub by 6.15 (which equates to leaving the office at 6). The pints of Discovery will be on me.

joella

We are a godmother

I stood in a Catholic church in Manchester today and said 'I do' to a fair number of things that I actually don't. It was more uncomfortable than I expected and there's probably, this being 2006, video evidence of me mumbling and crossing my fingers and generally looking a bit shifty. However I am technically qualified for the job as I am lapsed from the right religion, and I was assured by A's parents that they won't hold me to any of the God-related vows.

The other ones I'm fine with, especially the unwritten gin-related ones that will come into play in about sixteen years' time. Meantime I think I just have to pay her lots of attention. Which won't be hard, as she is a very cool baby. And I don't say that very often.

joella

Gritty woman

A side effect of a conference by the sea in the bleak mid-autumn is sand everywhere. I've been home two days and I'm still finding it: in my boots, up my nose, in my ears.

I'm not complaining though. If you grow up by the sea there's always something missing if it's not there. At some stage I will need it back in my life, but meantime I take where I find. The Africans and the Asians thought we were bonkers to be fighting into the wind on the way out and staggering helplessly back with tangled hair and sand-blasted faces, but I am sure they have similar rituals, and it went some way to compensating for losing half of Sunday to Heathrow Terminal 4.

And back to crystal clear frosty Novemberness. Could be worse, though I have yet to find my under-the-bike-helmet hat, since I haven't needed it since February. And there's suddenly a whole lot more stuff to carry around... bike lights, scarves, high-vis jacket... plus today add plumbing paraphernalia and the exhaustion that comes with a disrupted week and three hours of wrestling with hacksaws and stilsons.

I hate being a girl at plumbing, but tonight I caved in and asked J the technician if I could leave my steel toecap boots in the workshop till next week, because I just couldn't face hauling the bloody things home.

He laughed and said 'as a fellow cyclist, I understand'. He is a kind person. It was still a long way back, but I could smile through my gritted teeth.

I don't mind the cold and the dark, but you have to make time to adjust. It's the time of year where you need to aim lower, and spend more time eating comfort food while wrapped in fleece.

joella