Engineering works

Preston station was very subdued this morning. Tall young men in long grey coats waved their flags more sombrely than usual while replacement buses ferried people in from the other side of the crash site. It must be awful to work for the railways when the railways fuck up. I blame Thatcher, naturally. Some things will never work right if your priority is shareholder dividends.

But I got home safe, drank some miso soup, hung out a million socks on the line and then headed a few streets over to help D the plumber (employed by J the plumber) install some new radiators in the house of K the sculptor. I wasn't sure I would be any use, or that D would want me around, but in fact I did some nifty bending, fitted a few valves, and nipped back for my lovely drill when his proved insufficiently whoomfy. It was interesting, and there was only one leak, but now I am grubby and smelly and have to be back there in the morning well early. But this is what I wanted to be doing on a Monday. Must remember that.

joella

Advertising and bile

I am up in Lancs watching TV with my mum and sister. I like to think I watch TV - for example I think Skins is the best thing to hit the small screen in many years, and I am taken with Lewis even though I know it's a bit naff, but compared to these guys I am a rank amateur.

A lot of what they're watching this evening seems to be on ITV. I can tell this because every 15 minutes there's a burst of Children of the Revolution, which forms the soundtrack to... a sofa advert.

WTF? If they're not foolable, then how, pray, could the children of the revolution possibly be interested in something that looks like a giant lump of fudge covered in cheap leather? Frankly, you couldn't *pay me* to have that shit in my house, and the only T Rex song I own is Ride a White Swan.

Maybe there's something ironic going on that I don't get. Or maybe they do think we're that stupid. And hell, maybe we are. Check out the death of the bile harvester - it's hard not to be on the bears' side on this one.

I guess advertisers and bile harvesters are just trying to make a living. I say, try harder.

joella

Pipes R Us

Bathroom installation assessment
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

Yay, I finished my bathroom! In a real life situation I wouldn't have left a joint dripping under the floorboards, but I'd already re-done one, and either J the technician didn't notice the second one, or decided not to see it. Either way I'm grateful to him, and slightly dodgy soldering aside it was a pretty tidy job.

By the end I couldn't believe I spent half an hour getting the radiator level and making sure all the pipes under the floorboards were parallel. All that really matters is that you don't break any water regulations and that the finished product holds water. But in the real world appearance matters, so it was good practice. (NB in the real world I also wouldn't use that shitty grey pipe, but the college is low on copper fittings, so...)

joella

Plumbers are gay

This week I am in college every day doing my bathroom installation assessment. I have a bay with a red square on it into which I have to fit the bath, toilet, basin and radiator with red squares on. Plumbing S is in the bay next door with the yellow square. There aren't many clues and it's pretty terrifying.

But more terrifying is the college during the day. By night it is sparsely populated - everyone else may be male but they are all over 21 and I'd happily have a drink with most of them. By day the place is swarming: everyone else is still male, but most of them have yet to discover Clearasil, conversation, or indeed syllables. The most common form of address seems to be 'you gayer',and 'X is gay' gets scrawled on walls, books, pipes, everywhere. We had to check our tools back in with everyone else before lunch, so stood there shiftily at the back as the class got a round (and I believe deserved) bollocking, during which they were derided as the 'flotsam and jetsam of the building trade'.

The afternoon was second years, who were better behaved and more interactive, but it was still a little scary - not least because two of them are in the bays with the green square and the blue square and they are seventeen times faster than me. It's not a competition, but at some level we all know it is.

joella

Fishy goings on

I think I'm a) finally better, and b) recovered from my (mandatory) Valentine's humbuggery. We celebrated on Thursday by heading out to see Space Heroes of the People at the Cellar: robots, dinosaurs and an electric double bass. Ace.

Good vibes continued on Friday with premenstrual-essential seafood and sticky toffee pudding at Fishers. We strolled home stroking our bellies and feeling smug, until we passed Adult World (not work safe, but in a depressing way), newly opened between Futon Central and Baltic Foods.

Is that a new sex shop? I said. Or is that one of the old sex shops re-branded? That's the weird thing about new shops, the moment they open you forget what was there before. Had there been no sex shops on Cowley Road until yesterday, it would be clear that this was new. Had there been just the one, it would probably also be obvious whether this was the same one or different.

But Cowley Road is long and dodgy, and it already has three. At least. If that's a new one we have to move. I can't live on a road with four sex shops and no fishmonger.

joella

Love is...

Bear, drying
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

... restoring Christopher the bear to his original pinkness in the washing machine (40 degree gentle wash, Ecover liquid, inside a pillow case) then drying him in a range of positions on the radiator before sewing up the hole in his back created by the spin cycle.

Christopher is about 35 years old, and was made out of fake fur and old tights by a spinster neighbour called Ruth who had a soft spot for my toddler self. His ears are odd because my sister tore one of them off and my mum never got them to match again, and his eyes were originally bigger and further apart (and, I believe, blue) before they got smashed against a radiator in another childhood fight and were replaced by these little orange ones.

He did have two babygros, one pink (not sure whose that was originally) and one blue, which belonged to a premature baby called Tarun who lived next door to us in the 1970s. But I washed the pink one and it disintegrated, so now he's down to one.

With a bear like Christopher, you never sleep alone.

joella

As you might expect...

I *hate* Valentines Day. Thanks to Meg at meish.org for another year of fab anti-Valentine's. I don't think I'll send them to anyone, but just knowing they exist always makes me feel better.

Also - watch what you're saying with flowers.

Am I a Grumpy Old Woman yet?

joella

Busy being born

We were stomping across Shotover Hill in the rain this afternoon when ex-housemate S's text message - "12 hour labour, very tired" - arrived. What's the protocol? Can you just turn up?

We asked Plumbing S when we stopped in for tea and hot cross buns. She knows about these things. If she's still in hospital, she said, she'll be bored sideways, definitely go. If she's at home, ring first and take food.

We thought she was probably still in. We did ip dip dog shit to choose between the three maternity wards, and got the right one first time. Ex-housemate S looked great, lying in bed with a packet of Walker's salt and vinegar on one side of her and an expressing machine on the other. Her Young Man looked exhausted, but he's got the sort of cold that would keep most young men in bed, and he hasn't been near his for days.

And in the middle was a tiny little thing with a squashed head. I've never seen a baby that new before. I know where he came from, but I still can't quite make sense of it. Possibly I have a bit missing. I think babies are fascinating, but as alien as the surface of Mars.

About four years ago my friend K gave me her new daughter to hold while she went to get something. I didn't have time to say 'actually, I don't know how to hold babies'. This time, S said 'I'm not sure Jo's allowed to hold him', but M (who is allowed, because he's had three of his own) grinned at her and handed him over anyway.

I found him surprisingly dense, as if all his humanity is already there and will spread out over time as he grows, and surprisingly warm. I think he and ex-housemate S will get along just fine.

joella

Fear hangs a plane of gunsmoke

Today my new manager asked me how my current stress levels were, alluding (obliquely yet to my mind unmistakably) to the my Dark Days. 'Oh, I'm fine', I said. 'I've walked out into the sun.'

Only someone from the same place and time as me (which she is not) could possibly recognise this as a line from Duran Duran's Careless Memories, but that doesn't matter. It wasn't a line that needed an appreciative audience, though it meant a lot that she asked.

But it got me thinking. I don't really get poetry. I want to, but the words just move round the page and make me feel clumsy. But now and again there's a line that sears into me and hangs around for days. I was more searable (maybe we all are) when I was an adolescent or even younger, and I have a whole bunch of lines, from songs, from poems, from books, still there, waiting for the right moment. (I don't know if lyrics count as poetry, but I think they probably stimulate the same nerve centre).

Sometimes I don't even remember the words, just the idea. One of the earliest is from an Enid Blyton book I must have read when I was about eight. There were some kids, there was a castle, there was somerthing bad happening. They were investigating in the middle of the night, as you do, and there was a window giving out a light which was a colour they had never seen before.

I was fascinated by this colour. How could it exist? Could I imagine a colour myself that I'd never seen?

Many years later, I saw a February city sky at 4am, the colour of streetlights reflected off snow onto heavy clouds. That was a colour I'd never seen before. I saw it again this week, an ethereal orange-grey glow. Here be magic.

joella

Muffled snuffles

The doctor gave me a pot to poo in but said I probably had a virus that would go away on its own eventually. I said I thought she was probably right.

But it hasn't gone away yet. Yesterday my temperature started rising while I was driving across Oxford to attend a three hour meeting to develop a shared vision for our open source content management system. Try saying *that* when the thermometer reads 100. (Actually, it reads 38, but I am strictly old money when it comes to fevers).

I sat at the far end of the big boardroom table drinking coffee and shivering while we talked about 'strategic collaboration' and drew lots of circles on flip charts. I remember waving my arms and saying 'poor and intermittent connectivity!' a lot.

I drove home hunched over the steering wheel with the heater blasting, feeling small and vulnerable and having the little anxious 'what if I was homeless?' moments that come out at such times. But I am not, thank heavens, and instead I was soon pyjame-ed under a duvet with Lemsip, which is where I have been ever since.

So I am watching the snow rather than battling it, which is possibly the only sane thing to do if you are not a bus driver, road-gritter or member of the emergency services. I am gutted to be missing plumbing tonight (I am struggling with lead welding and need all the help I can get) and I'd still rather have something short and sharp than this will-it-won't-it business, but sometimes you need to accept that you have to slow down for a while.

joella

When we're open we sell jewellery for babies!

Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.
I have cheered up a bit and have uploaded some of the photos from our India trip, for those as is interested...

joella

Ribena and echinacea

... is what I'm currently drinking, in a rather pathetic childhood-meets-New-Age attempt to sort myself out. Basically, I'm not right, but in a very unspecific way. My guts have been weird ever since we got back from India, moving randomly up and down the Bristol Stool Scale, and I seem to be running a temperature some of the time but not all of the time. When I am not, I feel fine, but if I get drunk, my hangovers feel disproportionately life-threatening.

Today I went for a long walk with round-the-corner S and Sheba the dog, then flaked out under a blanket on the sofa like a fleece-wrapped caterpillar. About half past three I got up to hoover like a mad woman (only mad women hoover, really), sew on buttons, leap around to the Cure a bit, change the bed, attack the cupboard under the sink, demand help (declined on grounds of lack of notice) in emptying the loft, and then coming over a bit funny again. I feel kind of misanthropic, kind of mutinous, kind of morbid. I don't think I can say that to the doctor though. But I think I should probably go and say *something*.

In other news, how the fuck can they call a factory with 159,000 turkeys in it a *farm*? Bootiful my arse. (Yes, I know Ribena is made by GSK, but somehow that doesn't do me in as much as intensive poultry farming.) I wondered towards the end of last year if it wouldn't be better to start eating free range meat and stop eating processed vegetarian alternatives, but no, I don't think so. If I started eating free range meat then sooner or later something from a factory farm like that would find its way into my mouth. I'll stick to the Quorn sausage rolls till the world's a better place.

joella

On the to do list

I have a kind of rolling unwritten to do list of niggly little things. It seems to have about the same number of things on it at any one time... when I do one, like change the bust spotlight bulb in the kitchen, it is automatically and immediately replaced by something else. If I write it down, my current thought goes, then I might look back later and feel better. Worth a go: it is February after all.

In no particular order

1. Sew button back onto orange pyjama top
2. Tighten button hole on third button down on other pyjama top (so it doesn't come undone in the night)
3. Put Christmas decorations back in the mini loft space
4. Ideally, take everything else out of the mini loft space first and tip / freecycle things that have not been used for the last five years (eg electric blanket, third spare duvet)
5. Change the other bust spotlight bulb in the kitchen
6. Flatten ground for compost bin #2 and get it started
7. Write to the council about the retrospective planning permission we haven't got yet for the hole we knocked in the wall four years ago
8. Order the tools that I didn't order before my birthday, didn't get for my birthday, and still need
9. Drill holes in the wall for the clip frames full of gig tickets currently gathering dust
10. Fit the Ikea toilet roll holder that mocks me from its box every time I get caught short
    
11. Find out which bit of the shower tray is leaking through onto the stairs and sort that out somehow
12. Put the Zambian beer bottle top chairs on Ebay
13. Research new fridge options (current fridge is 25 years old so this is environmentally advisable rather than rampantly consumerist)
    
14. Buy four (four!) tiles for the shower cubicle so I can take off the plastic bag that has been taped over the shower unit for the last six months
15. Develop tiling skills or find tiler who can genuinely say 'no job too small'.
    

I think 15 is enough to be going on with, though this is a list I could continue making all night. I haven't, for example, said anything about improving my relationship with iTunes. I am not sure my self esteem could stand it right now, frankly.

joella