Back down to earth

It's never easy re-joining the human race. I was never any good at races, especially the ones with hurdles in.

joella

The painters are consulting their colour charts

I was feeling verrry spiky last night. Usual reasons. I had dot to dot spots, churning innards and a sense of impending doom. M kept out of my way, though did furnish me with a big heap of spaghetti in the hope that it might help. And it did. A bit.

It's been a murky, fuzzy, unproductive month, and I want it to be over. It was tempting to head out for something strong enough to blunt my razor sharp edges, but when it gets to be like this, that's the shortest of short term solutions. Safer to retreat inwards and avoid major life decisions. Safer, in fact, to avoid most things.

I went to my CD collection in search of spiky music. I have tons of it, obviously. But then I couldn't find the box for the CD that was already in the player. I looked all over, I swore a lot and then I thought well fuck it, I'll just listen to that instead.

It was Tim Buckley's Happy Sad, which is about as unspiky as things get. I curled up in my big red chair and got myself lost in his big, big voice. It was like being wrapped in a blanket and told that it will all be all right, in the days when you believed 'all right' existed somewhere.

Onwards.

joella

Beware: the Tories are breeding

Tory bollards
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We went for a walk in the Chilterns today. It might be an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but it is also Stuffed Full Of People With Too Much Money. The men wear stripy upmarket polo shirts and always go to the bar. The women are mostly pregnant, in that smug, soft-focus name-down-for-Eton-already (and they *know* it's a boy, because they ordered one) sort of way.

I don't mind the countryside, I said to M, but I have this feeling it's supposed to be bleak. This is not bleak. This is complacent.

The Thames at Henley redefines complacent. You can't say it's not beautiful, but it's also slightly repugnant. We walked down it for a few miles, then veered off to Aston and had beer and sandwiches in the Flower Pot. Both beer and sandwiches were good but on the expensive side, and better that than shit but on the cheap side, I always say. I was bemused, nay, alarmed by the number of stuffed animals mounted round the place, but pleased by the exemplary old-school pub toilets. They don't do pipework like that no more. (Interestingly, one of the recent reviews on beerintheevening, via the link above, is *complaining* about the old-school toilets. Shame on you, that's craftsmanship that is, it will last for decades yet).

I had some more thoughts about gender and toilets as the queue outside the Ladies grew, along the "men in stripy upmarket polo shirts never take their children for a wee, therefore posh country pubs should convert their Gents into more Ladies, and stick a trough in the garden for the men. It will help them reaffirm their masculinity, Iron John style, and the rest of us can piss in good time" lines.

Heck, I've managed to devote more than half a post about walking in the Chilterns to gender, water and sanitation. Go me!

joella

What we used to do on our holidays

What we used to do on our holidays
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

The photos of my years with my Significant Ex are back from the scanners Up North. They seem to have done a reasonable job, though it's hard to be sure as they are all massive files and my laptop is a bit creaky.

I'm not sure what to do with them. I thought I might put a few on Flickr, but just the ones I love.

This one is (l-r) Significant Ex, Mr B and me in the Czech Republic in (I think) 1994. Mr B was living in one of the flats pictured behind, teaching English in Hradec Králové. One of his flatmates was away, so we stayed in his room. The sheets were revolting, so I took them off the bed, and when I opened the wardrobe to put them in I was met by a slithering pile of cheap Czech porn.

We hung out in cavernous beer halls, where they bring you beer until you make them stop. We ate fried cheese. We went to a heavy metal gig. We visited a church which had a crypt with chandeliers made from skulls. And we spent a weekend in Prague seeing more conventional sights and staying on a converted ferry called (if memory serves) the Boatel Neptune. They were happy days.

joella

Lessons in commitment

Here is some plumbing jargon you might find interesting.

'Letting by' -- this is a specific kind of leak. It's a lot smaller than the 'pissing out' kind of leak, but it can really spoil your day. 'Letting by' leaks are usually found on valves which are designed to isolate bits of pipework so you can work on them. You can still work on them, but you get wet. And you can't sweat up (qv).
'Sweating up' -- this means soldering with a blow torch. I don't know why it's called sweating up, but it does make you sweat. First you sweat with naked fear, and then you sweat because you get really, really hot. Usually at this point the smoke alarm goes off.
'Committed' -- this is where there's something you can't move that you have to work around. As in... 'we're committed by that soil stack'.

On Monday, I was battling a complicated bit of pipework in a cupboard. The isolation valve was letting by, but on the outside rather than the inside. I was thinking I'd worry about that later. My immediate problem was that I couldn't see how I was going to sweat up the new joints, as I couldn't reach them. I'd done some nifty bending, but there was one corner that had to be jointed, and another bit where there was a T for a new feed to the WC.

I rang J the plumber, who was doing something filthy and industrial. Help! I said, I can't sweat up, there's no room! Use compression fittings, he said. Well I could, I said, but I wouldn't be able to get onto them. Take it out, do the joints and put it back, he said, it's all on isolators isn't it? Yes, I said, but I won't get it back in if it's jointed. I'm committed by this cupboard.

Jo darling, he said, that's not committed. If the cupboard's in the way, get rid of it.

Oh, I said. Right.

He's never called me darling before. But I think he meant it benignly.

joella

Here in Diverse Facilities

I don't have a team anymore, I am a lone operator, I manage information under a wandering star. As a result, NGO X didn't quite know where to put me, but there was a space available in between Diversity and Facilities, so they squeezed me in there.

I quite like it really. I get to share the excitement when there is a genuine fire alarm (someone left a lentil burger unattended in the microwave) and offer the occasional second opinion on the appropriateness of various communications. I probably don't make my fair share of tea, but I do offer informal technical support. And generally, I'm pretty good at screening out conversations that don't involve me, so I'm easy not to disturb.

But yesterday I was restless, and listening in. The telephone engineer was attacking the PC of the Diversity Adviser, which has been playing up no end. She couldn't do any work, so she was sorting through papers. 'Did you know', she said, 'that British black and minority ethnic women spend more on clothes than white women?'.

No one said anything for a while. I was thinking that it's not hard to spend more on clothes than I do, wondering if that had anything to do with my ethnicity, and deciding it probably did a bit, but I wasn't sure what. Then the telephone engineer said 'well, that's because they feel the cold more, isn't it?'.

It was distinctly chilly after that.

joella

Oh yeah, *and*...

The leak from the shower onto the stairs was Not Fixed by my optimistic efforts with the silicone sealant gun. So it's probably leaking from the waste pipework rather than the shower tray (as my efforts with the silicone sealant gun were fairly robust). So we might as well move house. It's that or take a claw hammer to the ceiling above the stairs. Either way, it's going to be grievous. Arse.

joella

Bad Customer Service Saved Me From Myself

I soooo nearly bought a pair of skinny jeans today.

'Hang on!' comes the chorus. 'But jo, you're short! You're not skinny! And you're 37! What the fuck were you thinking?'

I know. I know. I KNOW, all right? Last time I had a pair of skinny jeans, I was 13. My dad said I looked like Max Wall in them *then*. And I fear he was probably right.

But clothes shopping is so difficult. I thought I'd do some today as a) it's not Saturday, b) the sales are on and c) quite a lot of my clothes have recently developed holes in them.

Now, I've seen What Not to Wear. Trinny and Susannah would put me in a V-neck wraparound top over something floaty and/or bias cut, with heels, blusher and lip gloss. I'd look curvy and elegant, at least till I fell over.

What I Want to Wear is a bit different. What I Want to Wear is a big jumper (ideally featuring a hood and thumb-holes), skinny jeans and trainers. With eyeliner for special occasions.

What I Actually Wear is something between the two, mostly bought in sales or second-hand, occasionally quirky, very occasionally cool, but mostly, sadly, a little dull. And I really don't like to be dull.

Which is what had me grappling with the skinny jeans today. I've tried them on before, then laughed hollowly and made swiftly for the nearest exit. These ones were better... stiffer and less stretchy than most, making them more forgiving round the lower thigh, and giving a bit more room below the knee. They were the right length, so they crumpled appealingly round the ankle. Up top was still not a good look, but it never will be, and I yanked my top down and thought 'actually, with the right T-shirt on, I could look quite cute'.

So I went to buy them, and joined the one-deep queue. Ten minutes later I was still standing behind the same woman, who was buying everything on £1 sale in the whole shop (destined for a quick profit on Ebay, I suspect). There was no one behind me, so no one came to open another till, even though there were plenty of other staff around. I got that 'I might die here and no one would notice' feeling.

But I had plenty of time to think. I thought about the only good piece of shopping advice I have ever read, which was, I believe, uttered by Anna Wintour. She (or someone equally fashionistic) said "Even if it's in the sale, don't buy it unless it's perfect for you".

I looked at my skinny jeans, and I knew they weren't perfect for me. So I flung them on the counter and left the shop.

The only jeans I've ever had that *were* perfect for me were a pair of vintage men's 501s that I bought in Afflecks Palace in Manchester when I was 19. So now what do I do?

joella

Possibly not quite as underachieving as previously thought

Back in February, I wrote a To-Do list, hoping it would help. A mere six months later, here's the status update:

1. Sew button back onto orange pyjama top
   Done! Did almost straight away in fact.
   
2. Tighten button hole on third button down on other pyjama top (so it doesn't come undone in the night)
   Done! As above.
   
3. Put Christmas decorations back in the mini loft space
   Done! Took till April.
   
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)
   Done! Serious teamwork and a whole Sunday required. Local Freecycle day failed to get rid of electric blanket and duvet, so took them to the tip.
   
5. Change the other bust spotlight bulb in the kitchen
   Done! Have done it several times since, beginning to think that Tesco Value spotlight bulbs aren't up to much.
   
6. Flatten ground for compost bin #2 and get it started
   Done! Actually, M did this one.
   
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
   Done! Took till June. And they wrote back! Straight away! We are compliant!
   
8. Order the tools that I didn't order before my birthday, didn't get for my birthday, and still need
   Done! Did almost straight away before money ran out. The backnut spanner is a life-saver. The basin wrench likewise. The baby pump pliers are gorgeous. The multi-head electric screwdriver was perhaps surplus to requirements. I haven't used the circlip pliers but I will have them when I need them. I'm still not quite sure how to use the multimeter but I will work it out one day. The tape measure with built in laser level was a stupid waste of money.
   
9. Drill holes in the wall for the clip frames full of gig tickets currently gathering dust
   Done! Took seconds, cheered me up for days.
   
10. Fit the Ikea toilet roll holder that mocks me from its box every time I get caught short
    Rethought. Decided a free-standing toilet roll holder is required. But haven't got one yet. Anyone need an Ikea toilet roll holder?
    
11. Find out which bit of the shower tray is leaking through onto the stairs and sort that out somehow
    Might have done! Resealed it today, won't know if it leaks until tomorrow. Should probably wait till tomorrow to write this but too excited!
    
12. Put the Zambian beer bottle top chairs on Ebay
    Freecycled them instead, but they are gone, so it's Done!
    
13. Research new fridge options (current fridge is 25 years old so this is environmentally advisable rather than rampantly consumerist)
    Researched! My mother (from whom I inherited current fridge) told me how to dismantle the back and clean out the drainage tube, which was full of mould. Current fridge therefore no longer leaks, and popular opinion has it that it's environmentally better to hold on to perfectly good built-to-last fridge which also has a certain degree of retro chic. Have chosen to believe popular opinion.
    
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
    Done! Took till August. They were hard to find, but not *that* hard.
    
15. Develop tiling skills or find tiler who can genuinely say 'no job too small'.
    Done! Also required serious teamwork, and at least one of us has bleeding feet from walking on tile shards. Can report that grouting is harder than it looks.
    

I have of course done other things in the last six months, this is not the sum total of my activity... nontheless I did find that having the list gave the things on it a certain status, a certain priority, a certain je ne sais quoi. So I ought to make a new list really.

I'll do that tomorrow.

joella

Honey, I burnt the heuchera

(I'm blogging by firelight in the garden. I've just singed half the perennials)

Twenty years ago, I went out with a man called Colin. I was 17 and he was 22; I lived in Lancashire and he lived in the New Forest. It was an enormously unlikely and ultimately unsustainable arrangement, but for a good few months it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

We didn't see each other very often, what with the 300 miles and my A-levels to contend with, but we wrote to each other in between what used to be called Nooky Runs.

There was so much I blatantly didn't know and couldn't pretend to, in those days, that when there was something I didn't know but felt that possibly I should know, I tended to keep quiet about it and try and work it out. I still do that sometimes. I'm still not sure what the Westland Affair was, for example, but I nod knowledgeably whenever it comes up.

Colin wrote me a letter which contained two song quotes. He didn't attribute either of them, presumably assuming I'd recognise them, and I was too proud to ask where they were from. I thought to myself, 'I'll hear those songs one day, and then I'll know'. There were no lyrics servers in 1987.

And I was right. The first one was
"I see you now and you are so very young, and I've seen battles lost, and I've seen battles won. And I've got this intuition that it's all for your fun."

This is from The Queen and the Soldier by Suzanne Vega, which I heard barely a couple of months later, when my friend N pressed a tape into my hands one Saturday and said 'you need to hear this album'. I already knew Marlene on the Wall, as I practically lost my virginity to it, and the rest of the album had me completely spellbound. The Queen and the Soldier is still one of my favourite songs in the world, though not specifically for that reason.

The second one took a couple of years, but come 1990 I was lying on a beanbag in the bedroom of my Significant Ex, a few spliffs worse for wear, listening to Pink Floyd's The Final Cut for the first time.

"I was just a child then," he sang (Roger Waters, not my Significant Ex). I sat bolt upright and said "Now I'm only a man". Then I said 'wow' a lot.

Patience is a virtue, I have always believed, even if I haven't always practised it. And if you've got this far through this post you clearly have it in spades, so I'll get to the point.

There's a book I've been waiting to find for years and years and years. I read it before I was 10 -- I think one of my primary school teachers lent it to me, I was a fairly precocious reader -- and little bits of it were seared into my mind, but I had no idea what it was called or who the author was. I remembered a lonely girl, Lilliput, bloaters and lots of weirdness. I had one phrase to go on, which was that she had 'eyes the colour of Marmite'.

I've been Googling that phrase since before there was Google, I remember searching Alta Vista for it, full of hopes (dashed), and Asking Jeeves (likewise). I've been waiting for the full text of all books ever to be there for the searching.

I'm still waiting. But I've kept trying (it's been my default search phrase in any new search engine, but it's never taken me anywhere).

Until today. Today I found the book. By pure chance my phrase is part of the first paragraph, and I found it quoted twice: once as part of a first sentence guessing competition, and once by a secondhand bookseller selling an early edition of it.

The book opens:

"Maria was ten years old. She had dark hair in two pigtails, and brown eyes the colour of marmite, but more shiny. She wore spectacles for the time being, though she would not have to wear them always, and her nature was a loving one. ...Unfortunately she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more complicated than they were with other people."

I always knew I'd find that book eventually. It's called Mistress Masham's Repose, and it's by T H White, who coincidentally (or is it?) wrote one of M's favourite childhood books, The Once and Future King. Tomorrow I'm off to get it out of the library.

The internet is a beautiful thing.

joella

Thrills, spills and bellyaches

I do so want to be clean living, and I am so bad at it. On Wednesday night we cycled up to Plumbing S's for dinner. She has a big terrace with epic views and the kind of table that looks like it should have a whole roast pig on a platter in the middle of it. Knowing Plumbing S, half the time it probably does, but on this night she was pulling out the vegetarian stops, though she did do a chicken 'on the side', she can't help herself.

She's also forgotten more about wine than most of us will ever know, and she hauls dusty bottles out of dark places and foists then upon you. You get something different with each course. I forget how many courses there were. Around midnight we hauled the last chunk of tree trunk out of the wood-burner (or it would still be burning now) and called it a night.

Then we had to get home. It's downhill all the way, with a couple of bits of really scary, badly lit bits. The kind of downhill you normally do with the brakes on. Not holding hands, Thelma and Louise style, and whooping.

The morning of my first ever hangover I had trampolining at school. I wanted to die. Yesterday I had the dentist at 9 am. I felt much the same.

joella

Summer girls will

My favourite episode of Black Books is the one where Bernard gets a summer girlfriend.

As Wikiquote reminds me:

"I've got to get a girlfriend, just for the summer, until this wears off. She'll be a summery girl. She'll have hair. She'll have summery friends who know how to be outside. She'll play tennis and wear dresses and have bare feet, and in the autumn, I'll ditch her, because she's my summer girl!"

I am not that girl. And I never have been. But I've always envied them slightly.

I was lying in bed this morning, grateful for the lack of plumbing work (who wants to put on kneepad trousers and safety boots in this weather?). I had the French windows open and next door have got builders in big time, so I was involuntarily listening to Builders Radio. Builders Radio is usually shit (being either Radio 1 or some MOR FM shite, depending on the age of the builder) but occasionally reveals a gem. This morning it was Boys of Summer, by Don Henley. Some tossers did a truly dreadful dance remix of this a few years ago, but the original is a great song -- if you are fourteen, anyway.

The summeriest girl I ever knew was called (something similar to) Sarah Stuart. We were at primary school together. She was lithe and tanned and her hair was perfect and she could toss it just so while glancing over her shoulder at you. Her lips glistened, she never sweated and everything she wore looked amazing on her.

The last time I saw her was probably the summer of the Boys of Summer. She came into the bread shop where I was working... she was lithe, tanned etc, and I was pasty and frizzy and damp. I hated her, standing there in her little fluorescent mesh playsuit, with half of Clifton Street still rooted to the spot they'd been standing in when she flounced past.

Hi, I said, what are you up to at the moment?

She told me she was working at the Pleasure Beach. That was the place that summer girls worked, that's where you got to hang out with the Boys of Summer. We all wanted a job at the Pleasure Beach. I asked her what she was doing there.

She told me she had a job sitting on a swing in a bikini, over a pool of water. Punters would throw balls at a target, and if they hit it, her swing would give way and she would fall in the water. It was then I learnt that there's a dark side to being a summer girl.

Later that summer, someone told me she got badly injured when she swam into the heating element and burnt her leg. It was then I learnt that there were very real advantages to not being a summer girl.

August's still a struggle though.

joella

Pipework and Potter

Nestling in my wallet is a cheque for £700 from J the plumber. It's my first proper plumbing money. I don't want to cash it, I want to frame it.

I am of course still running at a massive net loss, if you count the cost of the course, the cost of the tools, the money I haven't been earning at NGO X since I went part time at the end of last year, the massive mobile phone bills I have run up ("no, it's still leaking, what do I do now?"). And if you knew how many hours I worked to earn that £700 you might think I was bonkers. I know some people do. Hell, quite often *I* do. So I wouldn't blame you.

But I did it my way. So I look at that cheque, and I smile.

And the £700 doesn't cover whatever it is I may have earnt this week plumbing in a giant vegetable steamer in a pub kitchen in Abingdon (the job that was flooded out last week). I was doing the pipework, J was doing the drainage, and S was doing the electrics. We were working alongside the staff, who were preparing lunch. It could have been awful, but it wasn't: everyone working in the kitchen was Eastern European, and they were considerate to a fault. There was a moment when I was perched on top of a large, temporarily relocated fridge with an SDS drill -- the drill was vibrating, the fridge was shaking underneath me, sweat was dripping into my eyes and waitresses were squeezing past like nothing untoward was happening. One of the chefs did squeeze me on the leg at one point, but it was a fairly pointless exercise, as I had my kneepads on.

Later, I was curled up behind the fridge fitting the non-return valve and the appliance isolator, swearing gently and melting slowly (it's a long time since I worked in a pub kitchen... they are really fucking hot) when J appeared above me. Leave that, he said, it's lunchtime. And we sat outside for half an hour with a platter of sandwiches and our flasks of coffee. I love it when someone tells me to take lunch. I love going through doors marked Private. I love it when my pipework comes together. And I love knocking off at 3 because the job's done.

So there was plenty of time to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows . Unlike Beth, I was wrong about Snape (well, not wrong, but far from right). But I was right about Dumbledore, if not quite for the right reasons. I found its style as bloated and heavy-handed as most of its predecessors' -- especially the last chapter, which is almost unforgivably trite -- but it remains (sorry Charlie) a fantastic story on many levels and in many ways. Here's to the Free Elf (he was always my favourite).

joella

All hail fourth wave feminism

Said M this evening... "My discovery of the fact that you can microwave a raw poppadom in 30 seconds is possibly my greatest gift to mankind.

[beat]

Or humankind, I should say.

[beat]

Oh, and you have to give them 30 more seconds to stiffen."

He's bang on.

joella

(illustration courtesy of Vibe2k. Concept courtesy of AMcV. Original fury courtesy of Spitting Mad Woman.)

You have to think like a fish to catch a fish

The first rule of Sushi Night is, you do not talk about Sushi Night. The second rule of Sushi Night is, you DO NOT talk about Sushi Night.

So instead, I'll tell you that they've got some lovely beer on at the Turf at the moment. *And* they're selling Spitfire Ale at Cafe Baba... with big clunky glasses to drink it from. Saved me from mojitos on a schoolnight, that did.

joella

Blanket, feet, wellies

Blanket, feet, wellies
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

There are some great Womad mudshots out there. My other ones are here and here, but I think my favourite is this one.