I do like Mondays

... because at the moment, anything could happen. It's not the weekend, so karmically I can't get away with doing nothing at all, yet I don't have to get up and go to work. As yet there's no fixed thing that *should* happen, and what *does* happen is usually worth the energy.

This week I got up pretty early and went into college to commune with my lead welding by myself. Strictly speaking I was far from by myself, as the workshop was full of teenage boys damaging each other in Lord of the Flies type ways, but they were all first years, and haven't got to leadwork yet.

And it was great. Take the pressure off, and the technique comes together. Now where have I heard that before?

I left at lunchtime in driving hail, and went to pick up a few things from Tesco on the way home. While there I decided to buy some food to pad out the box for Asylum Welcome that I started with the food ex-housemate L left behind (plus some of the food ex-housemates S then K left behind before her). I had several 'Tesco Value or not?' dilemmas. I wouldn't buy Tesco Value penne, for example, but it is only 19p for 500g, compared to 35p for Tesco standard penne (which I would happily buy). So that's two people fed rather than one, so yes to Tesco Value. Tesco Value tuna fish though... I just couldn't. Soup: yes. Fruit cake: no. Tinned mandarins: yes. Tinned beans: no. And so it went. Uncomfortable, but strangely addictive.

And so it was that I pushed a much bigger trolley than usual out into the car park, where the hail had given way to sunshine with a knife edge wind. I loaded up into the back of the car, then looked around for the nearest trolley park. 'I'll take that for you my love', said a large middle aged man, appearing from my left with his own trolley to return. 'Oh, thank you, that's very kind', I replied.

Well you're probably busy with a family to feed, he said. I was about to say that I wasn't, but then I looked at my bags and though, hell, maybe today I am.

The Asylum Welcome cupboard, when I later got to see it, was damn near bare. I asked them if giving food was better than giving money. They said that there is never enough money, and if people give food it means they can spend their money on other things, like helping people get to hearings. It was a profoundly depressing experience in some ways, but somehow not one without hope.

Later again we went out to the Zodiac (or the Zod, as M insists on calling it now he is in a proper band) to see John Cale. Most gigs at the Zod are now 14+. I thought this was so teenagers can get in to watch their friends play, but now I realise it's so that 50-somethings can bring their kids along to watch rock legends. It was demographically fascinating - when we got in there was a crocodile of nicely dressed couples forming an orderly but utterly unsustainable queue at the bar, much to the bemusement of the bar staff. To make matters worse, all the men were drinking Guinness.

I think I was the sole 30-something in the place - most of my cohort seem to have shelved their gig-going selves for the duration of early parenthood and those that haven't were probably watching Travis at Brookes instead. How glad I was on Monday night to be bucking those trends. If I could have had Mr B and at least one of the FinnFans there too I would have been the happiest girl in town, for this was an awesome gig and when they happen, there are people I miss. Mr Cale's version of Heartbreak Hotel stormed right into my Desert Island Discs, and his red, black and white hair should be an inspiration to 65 year olds everywhere.

Modern licensing hours meant we were able to find a sofa to have a pint on afterwards, where I rambled at premenstrual length about food and politics and music and connections, and M smiled benignly at me because a) he is always a bit deaf after gigs and b) he'd just spent two hours six feet away from one of his all time art rock heroes.

So. Monday is a whole new day of the week. Wish I'd had this kind of Monday years ago.

joella

Flanning by numbers

If you were a British child in the 1970s, especially if you lived in an ITV rather than a BBC household, then the Phantom Flan Flinger will need no introduction. But for the benefit of others, he (or possibly she) was a masked figure dressed in black who appeared on Tiswas every Saturday morning to shove custard pies in the faces of famous special guests.

A simple concept, but an effective one, and one which the mischievous element at work adopted several years ago when Comic Relief came along. Basically, if you raise a minimum amount (this time, £25) then you can nominate a colleague to be flanned by the Phantom Flan Flinger on Red Nose Day. Those nominated don't (in theory) know who nominated them, and nobody (in theory) knows who the flanner is. If you can't bear the idea of being flanned, there is an opt-out, which is that you can match your nominators' donation.

Flannees, as you might expect, are usually directors, high-profile slightly annoying people, and extroverts. It's never going to be not edgy, given that we are not seven years old, but it's generally good-humoured.

Yet a couple of weeks ago people started sidling up to me and asking if I was going to nominate someone. Not anyone, someone. The first time it happened, my stomach flip-flopped at the thought. 'I couldn't,' I said. I would be doing it for Bad Reasons. Which maybe I could live with, so more importantly, what if they found out it was me?

A few days later someone fell into step alongside me and informed me sotto voce that there was a fund to which I could contribute if I wished. He gave me a name. I went to the cashpoint, and then to a desk in a corner of the building. 'I hear you are taking donations for a good cause', I said. She smiled at me, and lifted her keyboard to reveal a manila envelope, into which she slid my cash.

Friday dawned, and I was a little edgy. Would it come off? And are we *really* allowed to do this kind of thing? Rumour has it the manila envelope was pretty full. Like Murder on the Orient Express, it could have been any of our contributions that tipped the balance.

I didn't join the crowd outside, I didn't know what my face would do. But I did watch from an upstairs window, through my fingers. Then I watched a few more people so I could tell myself I was just, you know, watching. With everyone else. All in a good cause.

joella

Burning issues

Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We went to Luminox last night. Oxford's Broad Street, normally one of the world's most picturesque car parks, was for three nights turned into a part medieval part post-apocalyptic scene featuring fire tubes made of metal stencilled with hieroglyphics, spotlit steam pumps, street lighting made from flaming buckets, and a smell reminiscent of places far, far away in time or space where fire is the only source of heat and light.

It was great. Everyone was hyper and happy, and although the only thing standing between the public and red hot metal was rings of sand and volunteer stewards in fluorescent tabards, all the St John's Ambulance teams had to deal with was a few cases of over excitement. As we left I wanted to have a big button to press which said 'More Public Art Like This Please'.

They are saying, however, that the money pit of the Olympics will drain the provincial left-field art installation pool bone dry. There will be Less Public Art Like This if we are to provide the world's athletes with cutting-edge table tennis facilities for two weeks in 2012. If this is indeed the case, it will be a great shame, and even if it isn't I am beginning to suspect that the whole thing is going to turn out to be a colossal waste of our hard-earned cash.

Spend more on large-scale ephemera, I say. It might not make the world a better place, but it will sure make it feel like it, and isn't that a good enough reason?

But before you do that, oh once brave new government of mine, spend it on food for the destitute. Asylum Welcome, our local organisation supporting asylum seekers and refugees emailed out an appeal this week for food donations* for asylum seekers who have had government support withdrawn and yet are not allowed to work.

I know budgeting is complicated, but it is morally incomprehensible to me that in modern Britain we can have a situation where all that stands between human beings and starvation is the goodwill of small charities and private individuals.

I am reminded of Princess Diana's famous comment when someone said to her that she needed to be aware of all the complicated political issues surrounding landmine laying and clearance. She apparently replied 'I don't see what's so complicated about children getting their limbs blown off'. I wasn't a huge fan of hers, but that was a genius statement. SORT IT OUT. That's what we pay you for.

joella

*For those local enough to do something about it, they are asking for tea and coffee, tinned fruit, tinned vegetables, pasta, rice, couscous, tinned fish, tinned meat, UHT milk, tinned soups, lentils and fruit cake. They can't take fresh food as they have no storage facilities, but working tin openers that you don't need would be very welcome.

A tale of two postcodes

Fitting a torpedo hot water cylinder in a mean part of town
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

This morning, I got up early to drive into deepest darkest Oxfordshire to hand tools to J the plumber while he changed a hot water cylinder for a housing association. I was proper work experience girl.

The plumbing side of it was interesting, and I learnt a lot. I cut some pipe and did some soldering and melted something I shouldn't've (which fazed J not one iota, and he patched it up beautifully).

But the human side of it was even more interesting. The sun was shining when we arrived, and the houses, set round a grassy common area, seemed cheerful and full of life.

Then J took a call from his wife while he was hacking away at the thin-walled copper in the airing cupboard (there was a copper shortage in the 80s and this was all local authorities could get) and said 'yeah, I'm out in Drugland'.

I thought it looked quite nice round here, I said, and he took me into the back bedroom and pointed out the window to where the neighbourhood changes. Two streets over, he said, and I wouldn't be taking you into those houses. He then told me some stories (he's not a big guy, but you really, really wouldn't mess with him) that I don't feel that comfortable repeating.

The teenage daughter of the house was sitting on Bebo downstairs, wrapped in a Playboy pink fleece blanket (wrong on so many levels) because the front door was open while we drained down the hot water and the central heating. She told us that they'd just been allocated another house, as they'd wanted to move ever since her mum got beaten up by one of the neighbours. They'll be moving in four weeks or so, but they've already packed.

It's shit round here, she said, it's all smackheads and single mothers. J asked her if she was doing her GCSEs, and she laughed and said she left school ages ago, she works in childcare.

I liked her, she seemed smart and together and focused. I wish someone would send girls like her off for a shit hot sixth form education. She'd go miles, I'm sure, given the chance.

J did a pretty tidy and thoroughly kosher job, though it's hard to know who would have cared if he hadn't (which gives me pause for thought given my previous rant about social housing which passes into private ownership). I helped tidy up, then headed back to a land where people separate their recyclables and add essential oils to their biodegradable washing liquid.

About an hour later, as I was eating sunflower seeds and drinking green tea, my mobile chirped. Did I want to come and check out a float valve replacement on a close-coupled cistern that was pissing water everywhere? Sure I did, and headed over to a privately rented flat in a part of town where they brought in residents parking so the nannies and the cleaners wouldn't have to compete with commuters for parking spaces.

We're talking Montessori Ashtanga wine cellar central. This is not just ladies who lunch, this is ladies who lunch and then go to the M&S food hall on their way home.

Having said all that, the plumbing in this flat was just as shit as the plumbing in the previous house, in an absentee-landlord-letting-agent-managed sort of way. It was functioning, and its worst excesses were largely hidden by the upmarket his-and-hers toiletries, but you really wouldn't need to be an expert to spot the bodges -- the best one was the basin in the bathroom, which had a hot tap on the right, not connected to anything, and a mixer tap on the left where the cold tap used to be, which was plumbed in but which was so badly fitted you could twist it round 180 degrees.

I am left, overall, with a philosophical question: if nobody actually cares whether you do a good job, and you will get paid the same amount whether you do one or not, is there any point in doing one?

Maybe I should listen to Adam Curtis and get busy, game-theory-stylee, focusing entirely on my own self-interest of making as much money as possible. But hang on, isn't having pride in one's work essential for self-esteem? Doesn't it pay long term societal dividends to make things look good and work properly? Or am I just hopelessly out of date?

joella

OX4D

The sun is in the sky oh why oh why would I want to be listening to a smug bint in a yellow dress?

Well no reason, of course, so instead, though feeling sad at bidding farewell to housemate L, now on her way back Up North, we spent a happy afternoon gardening to Supergrass while the sun hit the sky. The dogwoods are now pruned, the pittospermum (sp?) is now planted, the veg bed is now dug over and the laundry is now stiff with fresh air and the smell of sap rising.

Later I joined C&G for a late afternoon pint in the Marsh, which was extremely pleasant in itself *and* came with the added bonus of allotment-fresh leeks, which are this minute baking in the oven in time for Adam Curtis's latest documentary about the bleakness of the modern world. I believe every word he says, as a rule, but that doesn't change the fact that in the gaps, in the cracks, in the little spaces where there's no money to be made, I reckon modern (western?) Europeans are among the luckiest people who ever lived.

joella

I am woman, hear me... roar?

Happy International Women's Day! I've spent too much of this week in the pub already, and tomorrow I will be there again with a man I met on the internet, so instead I have celebrated as follows:

7 hours information management
3 hours oxy-acetylene welding
1 packet Koka Tom Yam noodles with tuna fish and Lebanese pickled cucumbers
1 large red snapper (like a Bloody Mary, but with gin)
1 episode of Skins

So it's more like hear me sigh gently, really, but I trust someone's roaring out there somewhere on my behalf.

joella

PS 6Music's Shaun Keaveny has just wondered whether it is ok to play Grinderman's No Pussy Blues on International Women's Day. Absolutely it is ok, this is Nick Cave respecting the fact that No Means No. Play it again!

Adult in need

I wrote this last night after too much sherry. Consequently it's at least half bollocks, but it's such a splendid rant I thought I would publish it after all.

There are no words to express how much I hate the annual do-gooder car crash sick bucket that is Children in Need. Contrary to popular belief, I do not hate children - I experience mild to moderate misanthropy some to most of the time, but I don't believe this extends to children any more than to people in general.

But nor do I think children are that special, wonderful or likable simply because they are children. They are vulnerable and relatively powerless, and both government and society should do their best to look after them and help them grow up safe and unexploited, but I get angry when damaged children grow into damaged adults and suddenly become part of the problem. There are at least as many adults in need as there are children, but they don't make such good television.

So every year gak-snorting, minion-abusing, eating-disordered adulterous fuck-ups (among others) get to take the stage and do low-rent cabaret for the great British television-watching public, who in return dig themselves a little deeper into debt. But it's all for the kids, as the people round here say when they advocate speed bumps, SUVs, armed response units, prep schools and other forms of middle class isolationism. And today (which is what catalysed this rant) we discover that Terry Wogan, cauliflower-eared Blarneyist extraordinaire, gets paid hard cash from our licence fees to curate this lowest common denominator bollocks. OK, not that much, in his scheme of things, but surely there's a law against getting paid for this kind of mawkish cack.

I feel for everyone who hits 20 feeling as lost as they did when they were 10. Which is most of us, but if you are unlucky (or lucky) enough to get classed as a child in need it's surely going to be worse coming of age to find that you're on your own now. Build me a path from cradle to... oh.

joella

Don't you bring me down today

It's Friday afternoon and I'm mapping business processes. Luckily, there's music. Here's my process mapping playlist -- not too fast, not too slow, not too uplifting, not too downbeat.

All Night Disco Party - The Brakes
Beautiful - Clem Snide
Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen
Boys Wanna Fight - Garbage
Breathless - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Waltzing's for Dreamers - Richard Thompson
This Mess We're In - PJ Harvey feat Thom Yorke
Oh What a World - Rufus Wainwright
There is a Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths
No Surprises - Lee, Shawn
Animal - Ani DiFranco

Actually it is a bit downbeat. But in a visceral sort of way, which helps. And when it's finished I'm off for a pint of Discovery with a nice lady from Finland. Hooray!

joella

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

The Blue Peter blues

Another week, another two days off. I really must get my arse in gear. This week though I drew the joella mela to a close by managing to go out for dinner with three ex-schoolmates simultaneously. Which was quite good going as one of them was supposed to be in Australia and one of them was supposed to be giving birth.

We reminisced about being teenagers in Blackpool for about 30 seconds, before remembering that it didn't have a whole heap to recommend it beyond the fact that you could buy single Cocktail Sobranies from Smoky Joes in town to coordinate with your outfit. We pre-dated alcopops, so to drink it was Blue Bols, Campari, Pernod and black or Midori, depending. I feel a bit ill just thinking about it.

We are altogether more sensible these days of course, *and* have better hair. It perhaps wasn't the best idea to squelch back through South Park, but the view was nice and the mud will come out eventually.

It was all a bit anticlimactic yesterday though (well possibly not for ex-housemate S, but haven't heard anything yet). I waved Australia R off, put the laundry on, ate posh chocolates, sprayed WD40 round the place to loosen things up, but still felt edgy and weird. M settled me under a blanket before I could cut through any live wires, and turned on CBBC.

On came Blue Peter, which I can't have watched in the last 20 years. They have a presenter from Northern Ireland now, who'd have thought. They showed us some footage from Andy's trip to Malawi, where he has been visiting children living with HIV. Apparently 300 pairs of shoes make a bicycle. I remembered lying under another blanket in another place when I had been visiting people who were, largely, failing to live with HIV. Big fat tears rolled out of the corners of my eyes and splotched onto the cushions.

I guess I've just been too bouncy recently. It's going to catch up with you sometime. Now I'm going to send all my shoes off to save the world.

joella

The stopping train to Hangover Central

I don't have a good record with Burns Night. The first one I went to was in my first year at university. I was just getting it together with my Significant Ex and I got so pissed that he had to a) stop me lying down and going to sleep in the middle of Whewell's Court b) take my contact lenses out for me and c) hold my hair back while I chucked up in the sink. I saw him down the end of a long tunnel and said 'I love you'. It must have been a terrifying experience for him.

The one on Friday wasn't quite that bad - I got myself home, kept the tatties and neeps down just fine, took my own contact lenses out and (probably) did nothing too much worse than waking everyone up by singing happy birthday to myself in the early hours - but on the whole I think I should not be allowed more than one whisky at a time. It's a fine and noble drink, but too much of it and it hollows out your soul while you sleep and leaves you in no fit state to cope with your birthday leg wax appointment.

So that part of the day was quite unpleasant, but I pulled it together valiantly for a lovely birthday walk, hair-of-the-dog at the King's Arms (sitting outside! In January!) and brief art interlude at MOA, where guest of honour was an enormously pregnant ex-housemate S. She was an installation in her own right.

Brief interlude for a bit of whimpering under the duvet (no, that's not a euphemism) and then we were off for dinner at the lovely R's with other guests of honour including Ms Y and plumbing S. Home late for merlot nightcaps and the Ballad of Lucy Jordan. Yes, I am that old, and today I felt it. However, I have Aveda body products and Benefit lip products to go with my MAC eye products, so at least I am sparkly and smell nice. I also have a Gerber multitool with auto-recoil needlenose pliers and a milk bottle full of worm urine, so don't mess with me.

joella

Kicking off the joella mela

Carbon and Coquette
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

It's my birthday on Saturday. As usual, I reject the entire concept of the January blues, preferring instead to embark on a week long celebration of existence, particularly that of Aquarians and extra particularly mine. Most people come out to play in summer, I do it in the middle of winter. Frankly, and I don't know why this should be, it's when I'm gladdest to be alive.

Now, most of the things I want for my birthday (or indeed want full stop) can be purchased from the Screwfix catalogue. After some challenging from nearest and dearest, I conceded that this was a bit one-dimensional. So my mum is getting me some French safety boots (practical yet glamorous -- they come in green and in proper girl sizes!) and I asked M for some new make-up, as most of my limited supply dates back to the 20th century, and some right back to the 1980s.

And so it was that in pre-birthday spirit we went for a long frosty walk on Tuesday, followed by posh lunch at the Ashmolean, followed by a trip to the new MAC concession in Debenhams. It was mildly terrifying, but I dabbled around in the eyeshadows until the uber-glam assistant came to help me. I liked her look, kind of goth with extra pink, and she had a fabulous leather apron full of make-up brushes.

Last time I owned make up brushes I was 18 (I know, I am not a proper woman). But I now have two for eyeshadow alone, on the strength of what she did to me with matt jet black and murky brown.

I'm going back next week to find out what to do with the rest of my face.

In other joella mela plans: Burns night, winter walk, curry spectacular, Sunday lunch, tea and cakes, whisky macs, open fires, duvet day. February can wait.

joella

All that glisters is not gold

I haven't started my plumbing sunlighting yet, so I have Mondays and Tuesdays to myself. People keep asking me what I am doing with all this extra time.

Trying hard not to spend any money, obviously, as annoyingly if you only work three days a week they only pay you for three days a week. I haven't been this skint for years. But, you know, potatoes don't cost much.

And I've been thinking a lot. Not getting up on Monday morning is *great*, you can listen to all of Start the Week without having to start the week. I could have done without Hanif Kureishi, obviously, a man's man if ever there was one, but it was interesting to hear Ed Zwick about talking about Blood Diamond.

A week or so ago we sat in a little shop in Mamallapuram while a young Kashmiri guy offered us rubies and sapphires. I rolled my eyes at M. 'One of the things I like best about you,' he said with the air of a man who has not always been so blessed, 'is that you don't want me to buy you expensive jewellery'.

It's true. I have a gold ring, which was made by melting down an identity bracelet; a gold bracelet, which used to be half my great-grandfather's watch chain; and a pair of diamond earrings, whose stones were originally set in an engagement ring (not mine). But not much else.

Partly, this is for all the right reasons. There's the issue of dirty gold and blood diamonds, but there's also just the miserable, miserable, miserable conditions that many mineworkers live and work in. I read some stuff about gold mining when I was in South Africa that will never leave me.

But you can get ethically sourced / environmentally friendly precious metals and gemstones if you really want to, like you can get Fairtrade cut flowers and organic tiger prawns. Thing is, I don't. Because my genuinely favourite ever piece of jewellery cost £45. It turns my neck green, but that just reminds me not to wear it every day. Essentially, I'm a cheap date. Everyone's a winner.

joella

Unisex Chipshop

All right, all right, I'm getting the point of YouTube. It means you don't even have to go to Glasto anymore...

joella

Must try harder

I didn't see a single British news story in the Indian newspapers the whole time we were there. The only international story that made any impact at all was the hanging of Saddam Hussein, which caused buses, ferries and rickshaws to go on strike in the city we were staying in, and various political factions to march through the streets shouting and burning effigies. We wandered through it all unsure if they were celebrating or protesting (the effigies didn't resemble anyone in particular), and waving at them when they shouted at us. We realised when we got back to our hotel and discovered that it had put up the riot shutters that this was possibly not the safest thing to do, but I'm guessing it must have been fairly clear that we were not warmongering Americans.

Less than a month later, chav munter queen Jade Goody has singlehandedly changed all that. I didn't watch any of the footage in question, but I vicariously followed the 'is this racist bullying or just cat fighting' debate online, and couldn't manage not to tune in to Jade's silent eviction this evening, though I felt slightly ashamed of myself for doing so.

FWIW, yes, I think Shilpa was subjected to bullying behaviour, and that this had a racist element as well as a class and a beauty envy one. As Ani DiFranco once said, everyone harbours a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room, and it seems that if she's a different colour as well it's going to be worse for her. But I also think that if you'd stuck Keira Knightley in a house with a bunch of rough-as-knackers Indians, she'd have had a grim old time as well.

But that doesn't mean I think it's okay, and it's not enough to do it and then say, as she did, 'well yes, it looks awful doesn't it, I can't defend my behaviour and I apologise'.

When I worked for the little publishing company in the house on the hill I vividly remember being steamrollered in a meeting by the marketing director. Later, we passed in the corridor and she said 'sorry if I was a bit aggressive in there'. I said 'actually, you can't behave aggressively in public, where decisions are made, and then apologise later, when nobody's watching. It might make you feel better, but it doesn't make it all right'.

In fact, several people *were* watching, and they flattened themselves against the wall in anticipation of a row that didn't materialise, and I like to think that I gave her pause for thought. But I have been bullied since, and no amount of candid feedback worked there. Some people take responsibility for their character failings and consequent bad behaviour, and use what they learn from others to help them be generally less of a dickshit over their lifetime. I like to think I generally fall into this category, though I do have a tendency to hold a grudge for longer than is healthy, including (at times) against entire genders and nationalities.

But others have bad intentions and skins of leather, and if you're thick as a brick with it, as I fear Ms Goody must be, well it's going to be ugly.

Essentially, I'm, making like Chumbawamba and saying our apologies count for nothing. You need to own your own mouthful of shit and do something about it. At the end of the day, you can't help the hand you're dealt, but you can help how you play it. End of.

joella

Rediscovering...

1. Cheese
2. Wine
3. Dylan
4. Radio 4
5. Ribena
6. Loo roll
7. Olive oil
8. Duvet
9. Shameless
10. Blundstones

Also discovered that we left the turntable going round for a month.

joella

Hello bathroom my old friend

Our journey home was as straightforward as any journey involving a long haul flight taking off at 0400 could be. We had checked in online the day before, sitting in a seaside internet cafe, choosing our plane seats and still not really believing this kind of thing really works. But it does.

At the airport the very beautiful woman at the bag drop desk told us that the flight was overbooked and tried very hard, using all her beauty, to get us to bounce ourselves onto a later flight (via Delhi) in exchange for £250. Each. We looked at each other. My look said 'I haven't had a solid bowel movement for the last five days. This flight is already eleven hours long. It's already one in the morning. I have a special meal booked. I have an aisle seat near the toilet booked. Mad as it may sound, I do not want this £250 as much as I want my own bathroom'.

We smiled at the very beautiful woman and said no thanks. She smiled back and said 'well, as we are so full, I have moved you into the next cabin. Have a nice flight.'

I have never been upgraded on a flight in my life before! OK, it was only to World Traveller Plus, so it wasn't like getting a sleeper suit and smoked salmon on silver plates or anything, but we got big seats and preferential toilet access. I like to think this was my karmic reward for turning down the cash.

But the best reward of all was getting in the bath. India has much to love and much to miss, but a hot bath gets to the places that a jug and bucket just can't reach.

So now I just have to try and work out what time it is in my body, and get my head round how quiet it is in this country. I feel like I'm waiting for my brain to descramble and my ears to pop.

joella

India: never knowingly understaffed

I am a tiny bit ashamed to admit this, but we just hired a car and a driver for three days. He drove us from Madurai to Thanjavur on the first day (about six hours driving), on a couple of desultory trips round Thanjavur on the second, and to Mamallapuram on the third (about eight hours driving). Nights, I think he slept in the car. That's what drivers do here. That was one of the reasons I chose a big Ambassador rather than a little Maruti.

This entire exercise cost about the same as one standard class open return from Oxford to Preston. We did it a) because there were no direct trains between point A and point B, and no trains at all between point B and point C, so we'd have been on long distance buses with (ever increasing) luggage, which is an utterly miserable way to travel, and b) because we both had stomach upsets which made any form of transport over which we had no control a bit of a scary prospect. And we felt pretty knackered out generally. But mainly because it was so damn cheap.

It's so damn cheap because there are so many people here. In every hotel there is a staff of hundreds - the person who takes the laundry is not the person who cleans the room (or indeed the person who *does* the laundry), the room service boy will call someone else to call the lift for you, while a third boy will carry the bag you have given up any attempt to carry yourself. You pay the man on reception, and he hands your receipt to someone else to put into an envelope and hand to you. Restaurant service is similarly finely gradated. The lowliest person you see is the one who clears the crumbs off the table after the plates have been removed by someone else, but there are many more levels after hours, I'm sure.

And most of these people rely on tips to supplement a tiny wage, so driving is a relatively good job, I suspect, especially if everyone feels as guilty as we did and tips so well.

I wish his English had been better though. His manners were impeccable and his driving excellent, but he was otherwise totally inscrutable. We wanted to explain. He may of course not have given a toss. Oh, it's a complicated business.

Anyway, home soon. One thing I won't miss is the Indian media. Today's Deccan Times headline was better constructed than most, but utterly depressing: TSUNAMI-HIT SELL KIDNEYS. Ack. Sleeping in the car has to be a better way to earn a living than that.

joella

Shower power

Yesterday was a long old day. We finally, and sadly, bade farewell to Haritha Farms (not to be missed, should you find yourself in Kerala), and set off in a taxi at 8 am for a day on the backwaters. We were navigated through narrow waterways by wizened men in orange lunghis with excellent punting skills. They pointed out the water snakes, the kingfishers and the wild pineapples as we went. It was like the River Cherwell on acid.

But it was also bakingly, steamingly, meltingly hot, and we were dropped with our bags at about 5pm at Ernakulam Junction wanting nothing more or less than a cold shower followed by a cold beer. There was no prospect whatever of the former, however, so we made the best of it by visiting one of South India's gloriously dingy air-con bars, full of men drinking vodka on ice and doing deals, and followed that with a fortifying masala dosa at one of the incomparable Indian Coffee Houses. Where else in the world would a worker's cooperative run a restaurant with turbanned waiters?

Then we settled on Platform 1 in the warm clammy night to read our books, slap mosquitoes and wait for the night train to Madurai.

Twelve hours later we emerged blinking onto another Platform 1, after a decent 8 hours sleep and several wake-up cups of Indian Railways' super-sweet coffee. Deflecting the most persistent auto-rickshaw drivers to date, we hoisted our ever-expanding rucksacks and walked to the Hotel Supreme, which I have been looking forward to visiting ever since I found its website about six months ago.

It hasn't disappointed yet. Our room has cool marble floors, the ceiling fan is whirring, I've scrubbed 30 hours of grime off me, and there's a thali out there somewhere with my name on it.

I love this place.

joella

Slickedy doo dah

Ayurvedic massage tables look a bit like wooden pool tables, I have discovered. They are rock hard, dead flat, and have holes at the corners. These are for drainage purposes.

You clamber aboard in a paper loin cloth (basically a bit of string and a length of loo roll) which has no discernible function and last about three seconds, lie on your back quivering slightly, and then two nice ladies (or gents, if you are of the gent persuasion) pour a gallon of toffee-smelling oil over you and make vigorous synchronised circular and up-and-down movements designed, I believe, to loosen deep seated toxins.

They certainly loosen something. Your job is to slither around bashing into the edges and trying not to think about what this must look like. Your last shred of dignity departs when they've finished your front and want you to turn over. There is no purchase to be had anywhere, so you flail helplessly while farty oil sounds emanate from the small of your back.

When they're done with you (and not all of it is vigorous pumelling, some is delicate circumnavigation of the navel which is strange but very pleasant, like being tickled with many small rubbery funnels) they help you up and then leave you with a bucket of hot water, some twigs ("scrubbing!"), a bag of brown powder ("also scrubbing!"), a tiny pot of brown goo ("hair!), a mini bar of soap and a large-ish tea towel. You therefore come out of the bathroom covered in nearly as much oil as when you went in.

Never again, you think, and then two days later you have another one.

joella

Coconut oil and ayurveda to the rescue

Happy New Year! We managed to stay up until all of 10.30 on New Year's Eve, and that was only thanks to a bottle of Indian Cava and a lively game of Corx with our fellow guests. When daylight fades on Haritha Farms, you tend to fade with it.

I did, however, wake up the next day feeling decidedly peaky in the ear, nose and throat department, something which had been brewing for the previous couple of days and which has annoyingly kept me from the first two cooking sessions on our seven day course. M has had to do double shifts at Coconut Central. The food's helped though. Pepper and ginger can cut through most things, in my experience.

I also had to miss my first Ayurvedic massage, due yesterday at the Dhanwanthari Vaidyasala, which M said made him feel like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed at both ends. Instead I sat with a nice lady doctor who prescribed me some Anjal, something unpronounceable and some Septilin. The first two are tablets and therefore easy enough to deal with, the last is a black viscous liquid which tastes pretty alarming.

I don't half feel better, mind. So much better, in fact, that I got up at 6.30 this morning and rode on an elephant before breakfast. And tonight I get my apron on and get to work on those coconuts.

joella

Not very bleak midwinter

It will be hard to leave the Nilgiris, though leave them we must (tomorrow in fact). I can't imagine anywhere else where you could head up into the hills on Christmas night to an old wooden colonial house with braziers burning in the garden, a local music teacher singing Silent Night, a Father Christmas who wobbles his head sideways, and young men in light-up Santa hats providing tandoori cauliflower and 'handkerchief rotis' (so called because they are as thin as handkerchiefs). We drank local red wine with our hosts (a passable substitute for sloe gin) and went back for seconds and thirds (wontons, beetroot salad, fried rice, tandoori paneer...).

I am also now the proud owner of my first sari, a Christmas gift from our hosts. First of all I thought the top was too tight, but then it turned out I had it on back to front. The rest of it I couldn't hope to get on by myself, but help was at hand. I still don't think I would be able to go to the loo in it, but I will confess I did feel rather splendid, though it's a long time since I had my midriff on display... M got a kurta which also looks pretty amazing. The question is, where to wear them?

joella

The night before Christmas, Nilgiris-style

I came to the Nilgiri Hills a long time ago, when my Significant Ex and I were backpacking round India on a shoestring. I remember it rained, and everything felt grey, chilly and overpriced. I didn't really see the point of hill stations anyway (all those *hills*), and was happy to move on.

This time, I feel like I could live here. This is in no small part down to the wonderful hospitality of our host family, who have fed us royally, given us a cosy cottage to stay in with views of endless green hills, and taken us places we would never have found by ourselves. But it's also down to the sheer beauty of the place, the sparkly clean air, and the relaxed pace of lives lived largely in harmony, rather than competition, with the suroundings.

We've been walking through Shola forests and tea fields, and down winding roads past blue and pink villages with technicolour temples. There are little tea shops (and government liquor shops) and snack stalls, like everywhere, but there is also broadband and fully computerised banking. The cows are milked by hand, and the roads are mended (or not) by barefoot men and women balanced precariously on hillsides, but these same men and women have better mobile phone services and more TV channels than we do. It's a lot to get your head round.

Most everyone's a Hindu round here, but Christmas is celebrated too, in a slightly surreal kind of way. I'm looking forward to it.

joella

Chilling

This morning, I had to check my packet of malaria pills to find out what day of the week it was. Now that's what I call Being On Holiday.

We arrived at Misty Heights the day before yesterday, via an overnight train to Mettupalaiyam. Thank Krishna it was the last stop, as I couldn't undo the combination padlock with which I had chained our bags to the luggage rack. We could have ended up anywhere. But thankfully our hosts were waiting and sorted it out (how, I don't know), and we were off into the glorious Nilgiri Hills.

We're now at somewhere around 6600 feet. The air is thin, the stars are huge, and we are ourselves getting bigger by the hour thanks to three home cooked Indian meals a day. We've done a little walking through the tea buses and eucalyptus stands, a lot of sleeping, and M had purchased some shiny new Indian specs, having stomped on his two days before we left...

Our to do list is getting smaller, which was the plan, and I feel we are, you know, acclimatising. I even have an Indian mobile, which could text in Hindi if I wanted it to, and which reminds me when it's Kingfisher time (about now).

You don't need as much beer up here. I am sure there are myriad reasons for this.

joella

Rushed thoughts from Chennai Central

Whoah. It's different here. And largely great, though very very hectic. Good stuff: food (masala dosa!), drink (salty lime soda!), sense of humour, endless things to look at and think about. Bad stuff: traffic, squalour, and getting groped in the breast while walking down the street by a man who then apologised to M when I yelled at him. I was *incandescent*.

However, it appears the Indian male is beleaguered (sp?). I read in the newspaper yesterday about a story, which a, about how Indian men are, on the whole, too small in the trouser department for 'international' size condoms, which is having a detrimental effect on efforts to get more of them to use them. I can see why. The columnist writing about it added wryly that it was further galling to have as a related link on the page a story about how South African men have the opposite problem, as in they just can't get them big enough. It's bad enough losing to them at cricket, apparently.

There are also multiple posters pasted onto bus stops, hoardings etc advertising cures for 'sex problems', which are expressed in glorious euphemisms such as 'sleeping time sperms release' (actually there's nothing euphemistic about that, is there?)

So next time it happens I will shout 'Hey! Small Penis! Shortly sperms come out!' at him down the street. Even if he doesn't get it, I will feel better. And a very nice man gave up his seat on the rammed 17M bus for me, so it's swings and roundabouts.

We are about to get a sleeper train to Mettupalaiyam. There it will be calm and cool. Or that's the plan...

joella

Stress head

I thought I'd be packed and have my roots done in time to go see Tim & Jeremy's band tonight (sorry Jeremy). Instead I am STILL PACKING despite needing to get the airport bus in six hours, and the last thing to squeeze into the rucksack is the hair dye, as I will be doing it subcontinentally.

Check out the latest bizarre hand luggage arrangements. Who gets to make these things up?

Thankfully, housemate L is hanging around so we don't need to remove all perishables etc, but it's still been a hideous day. Next time I go away I will plan it for the middle of my menstrual cycle so I am not weeping and dropping things and swearing at myself. However I believe we are now packed.

So, in parting, here is my parsnip soup recipe (specially for C, who could use a little comfort...)

2 finely chopped onions
6-8 parsnips, whizzed in food processor or chopped v small
3-4 handfuls red lentils
garam masala
ginger
chilli powder
vegetable stock
olive oil
butter

Heat a knob of butter and 2-3 tablespons of olive oil in a heavy bottomed pan, add about a teaspoon of ground garam masala and half a teaspoon each of ground ginger and hot chilli powder, and sweat the onions until they're soft. Add stock (about a litre), parsnips and lentils and cook for 40 mins or so. Serve with sardines on toast.

Mmmm.

Right, next update, with luck, will be from Chennai. If I can't be arsed, merry Christmas!

joella

Reluctantly...two festive things

Sound is required for both of these...

1. Oxfam Unwrapped meets Mastercard on YouTube. I laughed at this despite myself.

2. Away - the Christmas single from Nonstop Tango on MySpace. Mawkish it ain't.

joella

In the gravy

(click image for a bigger version)

I've blogged before about the parallel universe of online grocery shopping, but until now those woah! moments have all been when they actually turn up on the doorstep with something almost, but not entirely, unlike the stuff you ordered.

Tonight, having reviewed the to do list for the next week, I thought the Tesco delivery charge would be justified and the random grocery risk worth taking. I also like the fact that, evil multinational though they may be, they take away all your carrier bags for recycling. (I feel oppressed by carrier bags - can't throw them away, can't burn them. I do have string bags, and a bike pannier, but still the plastic accumulates. I don't know where it comes from. But anyway.)

Now last time I went to India you couldn't buy tampons for love nor money, and while things may have changed in the last three years (can you *be* a superpower in waiting while still requiring women to use Big Pads?) I thought I should stock up. Hence search for Tampax, as I am fairly brand-loyal on this front, though I should point out that I would never buy a san-pro product with a name including the word 'Fresh', as that is clearly a euphemism for 'Includes chemicals that irritated the eyes of rabbits', and why would you stick those up yourself?

But also squarely on the list of things I would not stick up myself is 'Antony Worral Thompson Onion Gravy'. Some Tesco techie smoked too much weed before his algorithm class, maybe. Or maybe the Revolutionary Communists, who I seem to remember had an ideological objection to tampons back in the late 80s, are subverting the capitalist system from the inside.

Or maybe... what? M came down to top up his Shiraz, looked at the screen for a while, and said 'well, it's an easy mistake to make'.

It'll be interesting to see what they actually deliver.

joella

A drill of one's own

This lunchtime I was swaying gently to Moondance in front of the parsnip mountain in Tesco when I felt my mobile vibrating.

'What voltage is your DeWalt?' said Plumbing S. 'Er, 14.4', I replied. Why do you ask?

I'm in Toolmaster, she said, and they've got a Makita special offer on. The 18v is £20 more, do you think it's worth it?

Yeah why not, I said, specially if you get one of those special side handles. Don't forget your bits. What on earth, I wondered, is Plumbing S doing buying power tools on a Friday lunchtime?

The answer is, she's getting divorced. She appeared half an hour later with a large turquoise case, and spent the rest of the afternoon brandishing her new Makita round the office, making grown men cry. (Plumbing S has been described as NGO X's 'cross between Liz Hurley and Nigella Lawson'. She confounds expectations like nobody I have ever met.)

Last time I was this angry, she said, I put on an Alanis Morrisette tape. This time I decided to spend two hundred quid on a fucking hammer drill.

I salute her.

joella

From festive bus ticket to the whole five feet

Festive bus ticket
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

I was tempted to come over all bah humbug this year and only give house room to decorations made from used bus tickets and / or parsnip peelings. But then housemate L asked in a small voice if we had any tinsel or if she should go and buy her own and I caved pretty quickly and hauled the box of shiny things out of the loft.

Then she asked if I knew of anywhere within walking distance selling Christmas trees. Tell you what, I said, I'll pick one up when I go to buy some firewood.

And so it was that yesterday, being a lady of leisure on Tuesdays at the moment, I tootled off to Bagley Wood Sawmill.

I adore Bagley Wood Sawmill. It smells fresh and damp and woody, and rugged men in padded shirts and fingerless gloves appear to tip barrowfuls of logs into the back of your car and advise on axe wielding techniques. You glimpse a parallel universe where you live in a cabin with one of them, wearing padded shirts and fingerless gloves too, spending your days making tea over a roaring fire in a big cast iron kettle before striding with a wolfhound through ancient woodlands. Well I do, anyway.

Do you have any small-ish trees, I said. Well, that depends on what you call small, said the rugged woodsman. They're two pounds a foot.

We walked over to an enormous heap of trees and he pulled two out that were about five feet. Um, I'll have that one, I said, pointing. That was an easy decision, he said, most people take ages. Well, I said, to be fair, it's not for me. I'm going away for Christmas. Wish I was, he said. But the wife wouldn't hear of it.

I suddenly realised that he probably didn't live in a cabin in the woods. He probably lives in a semi in Abingdon. But never mind. We chatted a while longer about rampant consumerism.

Where do these trees come from? I asked him as I was writing out the cheque. Oh, we grow them just over there, he said.

I never knew that. Genuine Oxfordshire Christmas trees from sustainably managed woodland. That makes me feel a lot better.

joella

Making do and mending

My uncle J, who works for a fairy light company and recently presented me with some trade-show leftovers resembling a pair of giant sparkly bollocks, has never been that great at remembering birthdays. These days I don't give a stuff (I'm not that great at remembering them myself) but there was a time when this mattered. My mother therefore made sure he got me a proper 18th birthday present, which was my first rucksack.

It's hard to express how much I loved that rucksack. It lived in the same part of my heart as my 2cv, which arrived around the same time. They were symbols of my independence, and I made the most of them both. My rucksack accompanied me up and down the country and round the world, a little piece of home that I could lean on in strange places. It had a special smell, a combination of sweat and mosquito coils, special stains from damp railway station platforms, and a special pocket that I kept £20 in in case of emergencies, which was pilfered several times from cheap hotel rooms.

The bottom pocket was once ripped open somewhere between Perth and Bandar Seri Begawan -- probably an accident, as all that disappeared was a box of condoms -- but I managed to get the zip replaced in Kowloon. A few years later a bus driver in Oxford slammed the door on the belt buckle, and I managed to get that replaced too.

But eventually it was time to say goodbye -- it was a great rucksack in its day (a royal blue and red women's Berghaus), but it was a real bugger to pack, especially once the fabric between the upper and lower pockets went, and its straps had started to dig in. So I filled it with unwanted clothes and carried it on its last journey, down to my local Oxfam shop. I hope someone somewhere found a use for it.

This was about three years ago, just as I came into possession of my second rucksack, a Karrimor Global 50-70L. This rucksack, you can open all the way round and pack like a suitcase. Its straps are adjustable to fit your back exactly. It comes with a little daypack which you can zip onto the back or clip onto the straps and wear across your front. It has an extension so you can take it away full and come home with it fuller. And it has a special flap to zip away the big padded belt for going on planes, plus a shoulder strap so it can be carried holdall-style. I have hoiked it all over the place, from Amsterdam to the Zambezi. It's the business.

Or it was till, at barely three years old, the strap-zipping away zip went. I have been giving it hard stares ever since, wondering what to do with it. You can't really take it on a plane with the straps out, as they are the kind of straps which are designed to be zipped away. You'd have to get it wrapped up in one of those giant cling film machines they have at airports in countries where luggage is generally held together with string.

I know planes themselves are bad these days, so maybe this was a sign that I should just stop getting on them. Well, fair point, but wild horses wouldn't keep me in the country for Christmas this year with Glum McGlum and the Absentee Stepchildren. I'll plant some trees when I get back or something. And think of the methane I won't be emitting after eating all those sprouts.

So I had to get the rucksack situation sorted out. I don't have the cash for a new one, and chucking a whole expensive rucksack away for want of a zip feels badder than flying, even if it isn't.

Enter Lancashire Sports Repairs. What a lovely bunch of people. Cost me £36 (it's a big job, that, she said, and I am sure she was right) but it was done in a week and I had the pleasure of receiving a giant parcel in the post, which was very exciting even though I knew what was in it. I look forward to packing up my troubles in my old kitbag and smile, smile, smiling.

joella

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