Once I stood a chance with you. It was a small chance, but it was there. It just needed nurturing.
Then I made a silly, drunken, error of judgement - one that wasn't actually so much about judgement, but about the way I expressed a deeply felt, and common, conviction about what was happening - and you cut me dead. It took me a small while to come to terms with that. Fortunately my birthday and Christmas took my mind off it when the hurt was at its most raw, and by mid-January I was, to all intents and purposes, over you. I was doing fine.
I'd been on the odd date, I'd found other victims to obsess about and focus on, and then, when I was considering getting up the nerve to ask one of them for a drink, you suddenly flared up in my consciousness.
I'm trying to move on. I'm still putting myself out there as far as those other people are concerned, following up on suggestions of time together - unlike you, who couldn't commit, but also couldn't just say you couldn't, or wouldn't - and yet you're there, in the back of my mind at the very least, usually in the forefront, and pissing me off while you're at it.
I will not apologise further. You are in part to blame for my outburst. Talk to anyone who really knows me. I'm forceful, but only to protect myself. I have to be pushed a long way before I admit, vocally, what's bothering me.
A very large part of me wants to move on. Of course I see you and tremble. It's been a very long time since anyone inspired the feelings in me you do, even without the odd stony glance and silence I expect when you realise I'm there. Those feelings - I have to choose to act on them. I'm hoping writing this will help clarify my feelings. But I know from experience that itches like this need scratching and I'm not going to get you out of my system that easily.
Get out of my system.
Please.
23 February 2011
22 October 2010
The adventure in 1,500 words or thereabouts
San Francisco
Extremely hot! Was supposed to be a bit cloudy and around 18C, but instead was blinding sun and 27C min the three days I was there. There was a cocktail evening at the Ferry Building the day I arrived, so that kind of set the tone for the pre-Vancouver leg of the trip: lots of alcohol.
Stayed sober Thursday; went wine-tasting in the Sonoma and Napa valleys on Friday. 30C and ten samples of wine before lunch make for a very sleepy person. Spent Saturday morning at the farmers’ market before taking Gromit for a wander around the tourist sites and getting pics of him having adventures for postcards.
San Francisco -> Portland
Spent Saturday night and most of Sunday on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train heading up to the top of Oregon. Slept for about six hours, woke up to the most amazing scenery and couldn't get back to sleep after that. Lovely breakfast of scrambled eggs on a scone, fruit juice and endless tea in proper dining car.
Portland
Fab fab place. Incredibly cycle-friendly and getting more so, brilliant beers on practically every street corner because of all the microbreweries, and very compact so great for wandering around on foot. Again, it was meant to be about 17C max, and the Pacific Northwest has a reputation for dampness, but it was 25C and sunny the whole time I was there. I also discovered a coffee I can drink without getting headachy or funny in the stomach about an hour afterwards – this is what happens when you only roast the beans as much as they need rather than until they’re totally dark like everyone else does and you make your lattes and macchiatos very frothy even with skimmed milk. I love Stumptown for this reason. I will go back to Portland, and spend my whole time on a bike or in various brewpubs I think. But in slightly cooler weather.
Seattle
How I love Seattle.
The only thing against it is that being on the west coast it’s eight hours behind the UK and therefore very difficult to keep in touch with people here without waking them up or being woken up. As I don’t yet live there and therefore don’t yet have friends there, I find this an obstacle cos I like being in contact with people.
Gromit came out with me, to go see Pike Place Market and the Uni of Washington Huskies store. He was very popular among the people clustered around the ‘original’ Starbucks (which isn’t, it’s just the original equipment in a store around the corner from the original premises) when he posed for a photo outside. Sadly because he’s so small, people will have to take it on faith that he’s there, or by checking the buskers behind him and comparing with the photos of them in the Starbucks busking spot in the next photo.
Finessed my wine-tasting skills with a trip to the Washington wineries, taking in Snoqualmie Falls (Twin Peaks country) on the way back.
Then I took the Amtrak thruway coach to
Vancouver
Before getting there we stopped and completely unloaded the bus at Canadian customs, where they asked where I was going and why, and then let me back on the bus. (Compare to getting back into the US later.)
Had realised in Seattle that I’d very cleverly left my anti-depressants at home. Decided to sort myself out while in a Commonwealth country with comparable health system to ours. Lovely doc at walk-in clinic looked at the blister packs I had with me, asked what strength I wanted and how many, and said I could have twice as many just to make sure things went okay. I obviously have an honest face. Consider me next time you need something smuggling. Pharmacists charged me CAN$40 – roughly £25 – for a month’s supply, which is less than I would have paid here ten years ago for the same thing. And these ones are pink.
I think Vancouver suffered from my being slightly less medicated than normal, but it was also actually finally damp and less sunny, which is bound to put a slight downer on a place after more than a week of blazing summer. I can see why people say it’s gorgeous, cos it’s set in the middle of some amazing scenery, but the downtown part of the city itself is much of a muchness with other places, and not that big. I think if I was there to do outdoors stuff I’d really enjoy it. Loved my hotel – they were quiet and so upgraded me to a ‘suite’, basically a flat.
Favourite bits of the week were going to Capilano Suspension Bridge and realising I was nowhere near as scared as my brain knew it should be going over a 200ft-high rope bridge, and the afternoon I spent at the University of BC’s museum of Anthropology. Turns out my GCSE textiles project owes a lot to an artist from the area.
Train back to Seattle before flight to Boston.
Oh yes – the US re-entry.
Had to arrive an hour and half before train left to fill in forms, get checked in and assigned a seat and answer usual questions. Dragged bag through to x-ray machine. The woman in front of me had a couple of Canadian apples studied carefully and confiscated by security because she couldn’t guarantee she’d eat them before we crossed the border. I came into Canada with a couple of bottles of fruit juice and an openly-held banana (I was hungry by that point). Then, when we reached the border, we’re boarded by scary-looking border guards with big boots and guns and the loos and restaurant car are locked down so no one can hide, and at *this* point our tickets are checked, as well as our passports. How to make sure no one tries to sneak up a class.
The flight:
Stuck on plane next to woman with extremely strong perfume for five hours. My nose started itching and hasn’t really stopped since. It turned into quite a mild cold, but as I haven’t had one since I was last on the east coast of the States, Ben and Pete are now really convinced I’m allergic to the whole seaboard.
Boston
The problem with living with the Tube is that I’m confident using other cities’ underground rail and I don’t necessarily learn about the streets above by getting lost walking around. It took me till about four days in Boston to realise how close everything is to each other and that it was just my slightly screwy navigation (I think my sense of direction is in my nose) preventing me from getting about on foot.
Did the trolley tour to get an idea of the history, went to Fenway Park because you can’t discover you actually quite like baseball without going to the home of the most famous team in the States, ate a lot of take-out in my room while fighting off the snotty nose. Only conked out completely one day, when I decided to stay in my room and watch House from 10-5 with a box of tissues and a lot of tea. By the next morning I was out taking ferry rides (and using my slight temperature to protect me from the worst of the wind whipping the city) and going up to Salem for the afternoon without too much tiredness or goop.
The Boston Book Festival was on when I was in town, so when I went to gaze in awe at the Public Library, I also got to be all literary – and discovered Nobel Laureate economist Joe Stiglitz was taking part in a debate as part of the day. Went off to watch. I reckon the American economy is doomed. They’re so anti-anything that could help get more people into work because it could impact on the money available to everyone else that they’re just never going to break even. Stiglitz said as much – he pointed out that the average wage has actually decreased in the past 20 years because most people are being paid less to allow the top bosses to have their fortunes added to – but no one wants to risk being the one who loses out even more to help balance things back up again.
Final day spent wandering Boston Common, Beacon Hill and Newbury Street.
Got an upgrade on the flight home – Premium Economy gets you a drink before takeoff, real cutlery, comp wine and spirits throughout the flight, and even well behaved babies. And importantly, bigger seats and space to sleep reasonably, although the bloke in front of me insisted on putting his seat right back so my legs were *still* a bit squashed, but nowhere near as badly as they would have been normally.
Now I just have to finish paying for it all.
Extremely hot! Was supposed to be a bit cloudy and around 18C, but instead was blinding sun and 27C min the three days I was there. There was a cocktail evening at the Ferry Building the day I arrived, so that kind of set the tone for the pre-Vancouver leg of the trip: lots of alcohol.
Stayed sober Thursday; went wine-tasting in the Sonoma and Napa valleys on Friday. 30C and ten samples of wine before lunch make for a very sleepy person. Spent Saturday morning at the farmers’ market before taking Gromit for a wander around the tourist sites and getting pics of him having adventures for postcards.
San Francisco -> Portland
Spent Saturday night and most of Sunday on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train heading up to the top of Oregon. Slept for about six hours, woke up to the most amazing scenery and couldn't get back to sleep after that. Lovely breakfast of scrambled eggs on a scone, fruit juice and endless tea in proper dining car.
Portland
Fab fab place. Incredibly cycle-friendly and getting more so, brilliant beers on practically every street corner because of all the microbreweries, and very compact so great for wandering around on foot. Again, it was meant to be about 17C max, and the Pacific Northwest has a reputation for dampness, but it was 25C and sunny the whole time I was there. I also discovered a coffee I can drink without getting headachy or funny in the stomach about an hour afterwards – this is what happens when you only roast the beans as much as they need rather than until they’re totally dark like everyone else does and you make your lattes and macchiatos very frothy even with skimmed milk. I love Stumptown for this reason. I will go back to Portland, and spend my whole time on a bike or in various brewpubs I think. But in slightly cooler weather.
Seattle
How I love Seattle.
The only thing against it is that being on the west coast it’s eight hours behind the UK and therefore very difficult to keep in touch with people here without waking them up or being woken up. As I don’t yet live there and therefore don’t yet have friends there, I find this an obstacle cos I like being in contact with people.
Gromit came out with me, to go see Pike Place Market and the Uni of Washington Huskies store. He was very popular among the people clustered around the ‘original’ Starbucks (which isn’t, it’s just the original equipment in a store around the corner from the original premises) when he posed for a photo outside. Sadly because he’s so small, people will have to take it on faith that he’s there, or by checking the buskers behind him and comparing with the photos of them in the Starbucks busking spot in the next photo.
Finessed my wine-tasting skills with a trip to the Washington wineries, taking in Snoqualmie Falls (Twin Peaks country) on the way back.
Then I took the Amtrak thruway coach to
Vancouver
Before getting there we stopped and completely unloaded the bus at Canadian customs, where they asked where I was going and why, and then let me back on the bus. (Compare to getting back into the US later.)
Had realised in Seattle that I’d very cleverly left my anti-depressants at home. Decided to sort myself out while in a Commonwealth country with comparable health system to ours. Lovely doc at walk-in clinic looked at the blister packs I had with me, asked what strength I wanted and how many, and said I could have twice as many just to make sure things went okay. I obviously have an honest face. Consider me next time you need something smuggling. Pharmacists charged me CAN$40 – roughly £25 – for a month’s supply, which is less than I would have paid here ten years ago for the same thing. And these ones are pink.
I think Vancouver suffered from my being slightly less medicated than normal, but it was also actually finally damp and less sunny, which is bound to put a slight downer on a place after more than a week of blazing summer. I can see why people say it’s gorgeous, cos it’s set in the middle of some amazing scenery, but the downtown part of the city itself is much of a muchness with other places, and not that big. I think if I was there to do outdoors stuff I’d really enjoy it. Loved my hotel – they were quiet and so upgraded me to a ‘suite’, basically a flat.
Favourite bits of the week were going to Capilano Suspension Bridge and realising I was nowhere near as scared as my brain knew it should be going over a 200ft-high rope bridge, and the afternoon I spent at the University of BC’s museum of Anthropology. Turns out my GCSE textiles project owes a lot to an artist from the area.
Train back to Seattle before flight to Boston.
Oh yes – the US re-entry.
Had to arrive an hour and half before train left to fill in forms, get checked in and assigned a seat and answer usual questions. Dragged bag through to x-ray machine. The woman in front of me had a couple of Canadian apples studied carefully and confiscated by security because she couldn’t guarantee she’d eat them before we crossed the border. I came into Canada with a couple of bottles of fruit juice and an openly-held banana (I was hungry by that point). Then, when we reached the border, we’re boarded by scary-looking border guards with big boots and guns and the loos and restaurant car are locked down so no one can hide, and at *this* point our tickets are checked, as well as our passports. How to make sure no one tries to sneak up a class.
The flight:
Stuck on plane next to woman with extremely strong perfume for five hours. My nose started itching and hasn’t really stopped since. It turned into quite a mild cold, but as I haven’t had one since I was last on the east coast of the States, Ben and Pete are now really convinced I’m allergic to the whole seaboard.
Boston
The problem with living with the Tube is that I’m confident using other cities’ underground rail and I don’t necessarily learn about the streets above by getting lost walking around. It took me till about four days in Boston to realise how close everything is to each other and that it was just my slightly screwy navigation (I think my sense of direction is in my nose) preventing me from getting about on foot.
Did the trolley tour to get an idea of the history, went to Fenway Park because you can’t discover you actually quite like baseball without going to the home of the most famous team in the States, ate a lot of take-out in my room while fighting off the snotty nose. Only conked out completely one day, when I decided to stay in my room and watch House from 10-5 with a box of tissues and a lot of tea. By the next morning I was out taking ferry rides (and using my slight temperature to protect me from the worst of the wind whipping the city) and going up to Salem for the afternoon without too much tiredness or goop.
The Boston Book Festival was on when I was in town, so when I went to gaze in awe at the Public Library, I also got to be all literary – and discovered Nobel Laureate economist Joe Stiglitz was taking part in a debate as part of the day. Went off to watch. I reckon the American economy is doomed. They’re so anti-anything that could help get more people into work because it could impact on the money available to everyone else that they’re just never going to break even. Stiglitz said as much – he pointed out that the average wage has actually decreased in the past 20 years because most people are being paid less to allow the top bosses to have their fortunes added to – but no one wants to risk being the one who loses out even more to help balance things back up again.
Final day spent wandering Boston Common, Beacon Hill and Newbury Street.
Got an upgrade on the flight home – Premium Economy gets you a drink before takeoff, real cutlery, comp wine and spirits throughout the flight, and even well behaved babies. And importantly, bigger seats and space to sleep reasonably, although the bloke in front of me insisted on putting his seat right back so my legs were *still* a bit squashed, but nowhere near as badly as they would have been normally.
Now I just have to finish paying for it all.
22 September 2010
Sam goes on the road again
...or rather, on a couple of planes and several trains.
Updates coming as and when I remember to log on and write up my notes. If you're really interested you should just borrow my journal, it'd save electricity and stuff.
Updates coming as and when I remember to log on and write up my notes. If you're really interested you should just borrow my journal, it'd save electricity and stuff.
11 September 2010
Fifteen disks
Ben tagged me on Facebook with this one, and I like thinking about what my choices meant to me so much I decided to repost the results here.
The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
1) Troublegum - Therapy?
2) Absolution - Muse
3) The Holy Bible - Manic Street Preachers
4) The Bends - Radiohead
5) All About Chemistry - Semisonic
6) The Colour and The Shape - Foo Fighters
7) Hifi Serious - A
8) Gold Against The Soul - Manic Street Preachers
9) Echo Park - Feeder
10) Hot! - Squirrel Nut Zippers
11) Leftism - Leftfield
12) No Angel - Dido
13) Take That and Party - Take That
14) The Best of - James
15) Garbage - Garbage
Chronologically, it was Take That first. I did my homework in the kitchen, which only had a radio casette player, and fast-forwarding the tape copy I'd made of TTAP automatically switched the radio back on. Thus I was exposed to Mark Goodier's Evening Session, and a lifelong love of noisy bouncy indie rock was born.
Therapy? and the Manics pretty much saved this unhappy 16-year-old's life. Instead of taking out my misery on myself, I screamed along with James Dean Bradfield and Andy Cairns, put my parents through hell and emerged relatively healthy and normal on the other side.
I still tell people that if I can get through listening to The Bends without wanting to hurl myself in front of a bus, I'm *really* doing okay.
Garbage arrived all moody and sexy and redheaded and scary when I was trying to work out what sort of grown-up female I wanted to be. I ended up looking more like Justine Frischmann, but I think Shirley Manson's attitude was the more influential.
Dido... As JD says in an episode of Scrubs, "if my heart could write songs they would sound like these". I think it's a girl thing.
James, Leftism and The Colour and the Shape were huge parts of my university life. I could only study for psychology exams if Leftism was playing. (Fatboy Slim wrote my dissertation a couple of years later). James was the inevitable band to start and end any student party.
I remember bombing around Cumbria on various little projects the summer before I moved to London with Hifi Serious and Echo Park blasting out of the car stereo. The bass used to rumble her suspension something chronic.
Hysteria is one of my favourite tunes EVER. Absolution's a pretty stellar album, and who couldn't love Chris Wolstenholme's botto- I mean, Matt Bellamy's over-theatrical performances?
All About Chemistry, a smashing album all about sex and love and how the two don't always have to be compatible, delivered with a cheeky grin and sheer exuberance for being alive. And then El Matador, a total turnaround, deep and solemn and wistful and yet still secretly joyful.
You kind of have to experience the Squirrel Nut Zippers to get their appeal.
The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
1) Troublegum - Therapy?
2) Absolution - Muse
3) The Holy Bible - Manic Street Preachers
4) The Bends - Radiohead
5) All About Chemistry - Semisonic
6) The Colour and The Shape - Foo Fighters
7) Hifi Serious - A
8) Gold Against The Soul - Manic Street Preachers
9) Echo Park - Feeder
10) Hot! - Squirrel Nut Zippers
11) Leftism - Leftfield
12) No Angel - Dido
13) Take That and Party - Take That
14) The Best of - James
15) Garbage - Garbage
Chronologically, it was Take That first. I did my homework in the kitchen, which only had a radio casette player, and fast-forwarding the tape copy I'd made of TTAP automatically switched the radio back on. Thus I was exposed to Mark Goodier's Evening Session, and a lifelong love of noisy bouncy indie rock was born.
Therapy? and the Manics pretty much saved this unhappy 16-year-old's life. Instead of taking out my misery on myself, I screamed along with James Dean Bradfield and Andy Cairns, put my parents through hell and emerged relatively healthy and normal on the other side.
I still tell people that if I can get through listening to The Bends without wanting to hurl myself in front of a bus, I'm *really* doing okay.
Garbage arrived all moody and sexy and redheaded and scary when I was trying to work out what sort of grown-up female I wanted to be. I ended up looking more like Justine Frischmann, but I think Shirley Manson's attitude was the more influential.
Dido... As JD says in an episode of Scrubs, "if my heart could write songs they would sound like these". I think it's a girl thing.
James, Leftism and The Colour and the Shape were huge parts of my university life. I could only study for psychology exams if Leftism was playing. (Fatboy Slim wrote my dissertation a couple of years later). James was the inevitable band to start and end any student party.
I remember bombing around Cumbria on various little projects the summer before I moved to London with Hifi Serious and Echo Park blasting out of the car stereo. The bass used to rumble her suspension something chronic.
Hysteria is one of my favourite tunes EVER. Absolution's a pretty stellar album, and who couldn't love Chris Wolstenholme's botto- I mean, Matt Bellamy's over-theatrical performances?
All About Chemistry, a smashing album all about sex and love and how the two don't always have to be compatible, delivered with a cheeky grin and sheer exuberance for being alive. And then El Matador, a total turnaround, deep and solemn and wistful and yet still secretly joyful.
You kind of have to experience the Squirrel Nut Zippers to get their appeal.
26 August 2010
So here's the deal, overnight boy.
I am totally smitten with this other boy.
Although there have been recent developments in his noticing I'm actually quite funny, he otherwise thinks I'm boring old nice.
So I have a massive favour to ask.
It would really advance my cause if he heard about how cool and groovy and downright lovely I can be, and often am, from someone he trusts and holds in high regard, and it's almost frightening the way he lights up when you're around. He thinks you're cool. It's the greatest bromance the office has ever seen.
I can only offer regular baking and my deep deep gratitude, but could you - would you - find a way to drop me in it, so to speak?
I am totally smitten with this other boy.
Although there have been recent developments in his noticing I'm actually quite funny, he otherwise thinks I'm boring old nice.
So I have a massive favour to ask.
It would really advance my cause if he heard about how cool and groovy and downright lovely I can be, and often am, from someone he trusts and holds in high regard, and it's almost frightening the way he lights up when you're around. He thinks you're cool. It's the greatest bromance the office has ever seen.
I can only offer regular baking and my deep deep gratitude, but could you - would you - find a way to drop me in it, so to speak?
24 August 2010
Blessed relief, a change of subject
Thoroughly lovely, if also damp, late weekend with Janey.
It's been a long time since I've had as lazy and girly a morning as we did yesterday, throwing rude comments at Breakfast telly over pain au chocolat and obscene amounts of tea - even for me - and managing to do our hair and make-up in the same mirror at the same time. The irony isn't lost on me that I have to take far more time over my hair when it's going to get wet or sweaty in the hope of ending up looking only as unkempt as usual. By then end of the day I had actually quite stylish twenties Marcel waves going on.
Lunch was great. It may have been the result of a glass of champagne on a light breakfast and a light lunch (smoked salmon with seasonal salad, pork terrine and chilli chutney, followed by two Scottish cheeses on crackers), but it was remarkably sedate - the rain stopped while we were 100 feet in the air, under a large perspex canopy, and there was no breeze either. Combined with being strapped in via more seatbelts than a school bus and tighter than my control pants can manage, the only moment of worry for either of us was that we couldn't reach our food or champers easily.
There's no other way to finish off dinner with your feet dangling over Prince's Street Gardens than with a mint cornetto once you're back on the ground, so that's what we did before meeting Kathryn to plan our evening, then taking our second jaunt of the day down the Royal Mile to get throughly flyered and find a show to keep us out of trouble and the rain. Took up the Free Fringe comedy show at the White Horse because of the fetching purple flyer. The first chap wasn't that good - but won us back with his encore poem - while the second chap was brilliant, if only because of his ability to edit his whole show as he was going along because of the presence of two 14-yr-olds in the front row.
Almost everywhere in Edinburgh is a venue these days, but when you're looking for one in particular that doesn't help much. It was worth persevering in the hunt for GRV, for the well-needed tea they provided me with, and the Sanderson Jones show, Taking Liberties. He uses graphs, badly-drawn cartoons on flipcharts and the odd photo to illustrate his ramble about freedom speech and opinion, and is throughly disgusted with his dependence on his iPhone. There's a lot of comedy designed to make you feel uncomfortable around these days, but very little of it is because it makes you think.
I really should eat more Thai food. It's very creamy and often has fish hiding in it, but Thai Basil thoroughly reignited my love of my love of red curry. Tons of sticky rice and Tiger beer and four very happy diners.
Then we gathered a couple more people to go to Just The Tonic at The Caves (a big disused railway arch just under South Bridge) to see the German Comedy Ambassador to the UK, Henning Wehn. Apart from his views on After Eights and KFC, I don't think I can remember anything specific from his show, but I spent most of it trying not to cry with laughter.
Home before midnight and a chocolate brownie each on the sofa before crashing out for the night; we're not the young things we once were.
This morning we decided to have a second breakfast at Brown's - eggs florentine, and elderflower fizz and rich mocha torte for Janey, and the creamiest scrambled eggs, a pot of tea and banoffee cheesecake for me. All wet mornings waiting for a train should be spent in such a civilised way. It was so reviving the sun even came out as we headed back to Edinburgh Waverly.
Gromit's extremely bouncy after two days with one of his girlfriends, and while I'm tired I had a fab time. We mustn't leave it so long before doing something similar again.
It's been a long time since I've had as lazy and girly a morning as we did yesterday, throwing rude comments at Breakfast telly over pain au chocolat and obscene amounts of tea - even for me - and managing to do our hair and make-up in the same mirror at the same time. The irony isn't lost on me that I have to take far more time over my hair when it's going to get wet or sweaty in the hope of ending up looking only as unkempt as usual. By then end of the day I had actually quite stylish twenties Marcel waves going on.
Lunch was great. It may have been the result of a glass of champagne on a light breakfast and a light lunch (smoked salmon with seasonal salad, pork terrine and chilli chutney, followed by two Scottish cheeses on crackers), but it was remarkably sedate - the rain stopped while we were 100 feet in the air, under a large perspex canopy, and there was no breeze either. Combined with being strapped in via more seatbelts than a school bus and tighter than my control pants can manage, the only moment of worry for either of us was that we couldn't reach our food or champers easily.
There's no other way to finish off dinner with your feet dangling over Prince's Street Gardens than with a mint cornetto once you're back on the ground, so that's what we did before meeting Kathryn to plan our evening, then taking our second jaunt of the day down the Royal Mile to get throughly flyered and find a show to keep us out of trouble and the rain. Took up the Free Fringe comedy show at the White Horse because of the fetching purple flyer. The first chap wasn't that good - but won us back with his encore poem - while the second chap was brilliant, if only because of his ability to edit his whole show as he was going along because of the presence of two 14-yr-olds in the front row.
Almost everywhere in Edinburgh is a venue these days, but when you're looking for one in particular that doesn't help much. It was worth persevering in the hunt for GRV, for the well-needed tea they provided me with, and the Sanderson Jones show, Taking Liberties. He uses graphs, badly-drawn cartoons on flipcharts and the odd photo to illustrate his ramble about freedom speech and opinion, and is throughly disgusted with his dependence on his iPhone. There's a lot of comedy designed to make you feel uncomfortable around these days, but very little of it is because it makes you think.
I really should eat more Thai food. It's very creamy and often has fish hiding in it, but Thai Basil thoroughly reignited my love of my love of red curry. Tons of sticky rice and Tiger beer and four very happy diners.
Then we gathered a couple more people to go to Just The Tonic at The Caves (a big disused railway arch just under South Bridge) to see the German Comedy Ambassador to the UK, Henning Wehn. Apart from his views on After Eights and KFC, I don't think I can remember anything specific from his show, but I spent most of it trying not to cry with laughter.
Home before midnight and a chocolate brownie each on the sofa before crashing out for the night; we're not the young things we once were.
This morning we decided to have a second breakfast at Brown's - eggs florentine, and elderflower fizz and rich mocha torte for Janey, and the creamiest scrambled eggs, a pot of tea and banoffee cheesecake for me. All wet mornings waiting for a train should be spent in such a civilised way. It was so reviving the sun even came out as we headed back to Edinburgh Waverly.
Gromit's extremely bouncy after two days with one of his girlfriends, and while I'm tired I had a fab time. We mustn't leave it so long before doing something similar again.
22 July 2010
Totally crushing out.
I don't recall being this silly about someone since I was about 14.
He's got a lovely voice, hair on his arms like John Cusack (you have to have seen the impact High Fidelity had on me to understand this one), deep eyes, a certain scruffiness, smells of coffee, a shy grin and probably a more than healthy fear of me should he ever find out I'm wittering like this.
It's really nice to be happily dizzy and messed up about someone rather than fraught and confused like I usually am.
Of course, this means it's doomed and nothing will ever happen, but it's fun.
I'm not sleeping either, and so far the psychosis this is inducing isn't a problem either.
I don't recall being this silly about someone since I was about 14.
He's got a lovely voice, hair on his arms like John Cusack (you have to have seen the impact High Fidelity had on me to understand this one), deep eyes, a certain scruffiness, smells of coffee, a shy grin and probably a more than healthy fear of me should he ever find out I'm wittering like this.
It's really nice to be happily dizzy and messed up about someone rather than fraught and confused like I usually am.
Of course, this means it's doomed and nothing will ever happen, but it's fun.
I'm not sleeping either, and so far the psychosis this is inducing isn't a problem either.
15 July 2010
I've forgotten how to flirt.
Well, no, I haven't, quite, but I've forgotten how to act around people I like and want to make a slow and steady impression upon.
It's only a recent loss of ability; I remember doing it before Christmas.
But now it sort of matters, because a rather interesting couple of people have appeared on the horizon, and I can't for the life of me manage anything more than Willow Rosenberg did before Buffy Summers came to Sunnydale:
"Well, when I'm with a boy I like, it's hard for me to say anything cool, or, or witty, or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away."
It's difficult, and not particularly attractive, for a 30-something woman to try to hide behind jaw-length hair rather than acknowledge someone's presence, never mind channel the mojo which she used to have in spades, albeit kept in a cupboard for special occasions.
I think I might need to take a leaf out of the German football team's book.
They practice penalty shoot-outs all the time, even if the chances of them being involved in one are very slim. Like Jonny Wilkinson's obsessive goal-kicking practice, it instils in them an almost zenlike ability to block out the distractions of the moment when it matters and slot the ball where they want it to go. I need to flirt with loads of people at times when it really doesn't matter so it's second nature again when it does.
The only problem I can see with this plan is that, much like weight loss, it's one of those things where I could really do with seeing results now (Don't get me started on my actual weight watching antics).
So if you have the misfortune to be accosted by me, and I seem more flighty / nervous / insane than normal, or for some reason I can't look in anything like your direction, don't worry. I'm just practicing.
Well, no, I haven't, quite, but I've forgotten how to act around people I like and want to make a slow and steady impression upon.
It's only a recent loss of ability; I remember doing it before Christmas.
But now it sort of matters, because a rather interesting couple of people have appeared on the horizon, and I can't for the life of me manage anything more than Willow Rosenberg did before Buffy Summers came to Sunnydale:
"Well, when I'm with a boy I like, it's hard for me to say anything cool, or, or witty, or at all. I can usually make a few vowel sounds, and then I have to go away."
It's difficult, and not particularly attractive, for a 30-something woman to try to hide behind jaw-length hair rather than acknowledge someone's presence, never mind channel the mojo which she used to have in spades, albeit kept in a cupboard for special occasions.
I think I might need to take a leaf out of the German football team's book.
They practice penalty shoot-outs all the time, even if the chances of them being involved in one are very slim. Like Jonny Wilkinson's obsessive goal-kicking practice, it instils in them an almost zenlike ability to block out the distractions of the moment when it matters and slot the ball where they want it to go. I need to flirt with loads of people at times when it really doesn't matter so it's second nature again when it does.
The only problem I can see with this plan is that, much like weight loss, it's one of those things where I could really do with seeing results now (Don't get me started on my actual weight watching antics).
So if you have the misfortune to be accosted by me, and I seem more flighty / nervous / insane than normal, or for some reason I can't look in anything like your direction, don't worry. I'm just practicing.
13 July 2010
When you finish a holiday, you're never really keen to go back to work. I could say the same about the end of my jury service. Two weeks of not having to be in "work" until 10 and only staying till 4.30pm at the latest, of getting food and drink free (as long as you consume less than £5.71's worth a day, which is only five large cups of tea or six small cups, or 11 packets of crisps, or a decent lunch and maybe one cuppa), of a lot of sitting around reading and relaxing while waiting to be called onto a panel.
But it was really nice to come back into the office yesterday morning. I had to take on the Central Line at peak hour, but the office was fairly quiet and cool, and there were various friendly faces about. I was back somewhere I actually belong.
Jury service is a strange thing.
You're basically there to make the random process of jury selection as random as possible - there are more people in the pool than can be called up for all of a court's juries (just), so if there's a full house, every last name is called by chance, not because they were the last kids to be picked for the team. This means there is an awful lot of sitting around waiting. It took until Thursday of my first week for me to survive all the selections and actually hear a case. By then I'd read two whole books.
Even when you're on a jury, there's a lot of waiting about. The court has to be assembled before you troop in, so you're called, taken to your retiring room - where you have all your discussions - and then wait... sometimes for only a minute, other times for half an hour or more. In the case of legal argument, you're sent out - and a barrister's 10 minutes is a normal person's half an hour. If you're lucky, you'll be sent back to the assembly room to grab a drink and relax somewhere with access to fresh air. If not, you'll be taken to the retiring room - some of which at Isleworth have a small garden attached so you can get some fresh air / sneak a cigarette while you're waiting - or to a room with windows which technically open but that are alarmed, and where anyone who wants a cigarette has to send a note to the judge asking for permission before everyone is taken outside to stand with them while they puff.
I liked that if the jury wanted something, the whole court had to reconvene for us, which could make one feel quite important were it not for the fact that it usually means one decides to ask the question, then has to wait for the clerk to come for your note and reassemble the court - which means dragging the judge and the barristers away from whatever they decided to do while you were elsewhere. And I did meet lots of people I would never normally be exposed to, which is a good thing.
I also remembered something from my year of therapy. At first I much prefered to read rather than talking to my fellow jurors while waiting for a case, partly because everyone seemed to know each other already. But after only a day or so I realised the people sitting in little groups nattering away were people serving on juries together, or who clearly belonged to the same social cliques outside court - like the skate kids who sat in the corner being hairy and showing off more leg than you generally expect to see on a man in a government building.
But what really made it for me was being told at least once a day that what I was doing was really important, a vital civic duty. I knew reading was good for you, but it now has a whole new significance.
But it was really nice to come back into the office yesterday morning. I had to take on the Central Line at peak hour, but the office was fairly quiet and cool, and there were various friendly faces about. I was back somewhere I actually belong.
Jury service is a strange thing.
You're basically there to make the random process of jury selection as random as possible - there are more people in the pool than can be called up for all of a court's juries (just), so if there's a full house, every last name is called by chance, not because they were the last kids to be picked for the team. This means there is an awful lot of sitting around waiting. It took until Thursday of my first week for me to survive all the selections and actually hear a case. By then I'd read two whole books.
Even when you're on a jury, there's a lot of waiting about. The court has to be assembled before you troop in, so you're called, taken to your retiring room - where you have all your discussions - and then wait... sometimes for only a minute, other times for half an hour or more. In the case of legal argument, you're sent out - and a barrister's 10 minutes is a normal person's half an hour. If you're lucky, you'll be sent back to the assembly room to grab a drink and relax somewhere with access to fresh air. If not, you'll be taken to the retiring room - some of which at Isleworth have a small garden attached so you can get some fresh air / sneak a cigarette while you're waiting - or to a room with windows which technically open but that are alarmed, and where anyone who wants a cigarette has to send a note to the judge asking for permission before everyone is taken outside to stand with them while they puff.
I liked that if the jury wanted something, the whole court had to reconvene for us, which could make one feel quite important were it not for the fact that it usually means one decides to ask the question, then has to wait for the clerk to come for your note and reassemble the court - which means dragging the judge and the barristers away from whatever they decided to do while you were elsewhere. And I did meet lots of people I would never normally be exposed to, which is a good thing.
I also remembered something from my year of therapy. At first I much prefered to read rather than talking to my fellow jurors while waiting for a case, partly because everyone seemed to know each other already. But after only a day or so I realised the people sitting in little groups nattering away were people serving on juries together, or who clearly belonged to the same social cliques outside court - like the skate kids who sat in the corner being hairy and showing off more leg than you generally expect to see on a man in a government building.
But what really made it for me was being told at least once a day that what I was doing was really important, a vital civic duty. I knew reading was good for you, but it now has a whole new significance.
28 May 2010
In recent years I've been called a tomboy, and told I'm "not very girly, are you?" despite my love of most things indigo and cerise.
But there must be some baseline level of femininity within me, because I have to ride a stepthrough bike and I can't for the life of me work out why so many men I see cycling ride with their knees out to *here*, like they've been stung in the groin.
Why?
It's bad enough, when you're on public transport, that there'll be a carriage full of people keeping to their own seat's width of space that some bloke'll sit down and force his legs so far apart yours end up on those of the person on your other side. But on a *bike*? It's not because these men are worried about the effects on their genitalia, is it? For one thing, bikers, even big hairy ones ("...full of sperm" - 10 Things...), ride with all their anatomy firmly against the saddle / shanks of their machines, and for another there are saddles designed to relieve any pressure on your chaps if you're really concerned about squishing etc.
Is it that there are hundreds of men unfortunate enough to be attacked by bees whenever they get on their bicycles? Or are they so lacking in upper body strength (apparently a problem with many cyclists) that they can't tighten the bolts holding the saddle in place enough to stop it worming its way down while they ride? Or are they having trouble with their underwear (I saw, and overtook, one lad the other night for whom this was evidently the problem, cos he kept lifting himself up slightly and tugging at the other leg of his baggies)?
Is it really that difficult to ride with your knees, if not together, then not at right angles to the rest of your body?
But there must be some baseline level of femininity within me, because I have to ride a stepthrough bike and I can't for the life of me work out why so many men I see cycling ride with their knees out to *here*, like they've been stung in the groin.
Why?
It's bad enough, when you're on public transport, that there'll be a carriage full of people keeping to their own seat's width of space that some bloke'll sit down and force his legs so far apart yours end up on those of the person on your other side. But on a *bike*? It's not because these men are worried about the effects on their genitalia, is it? For one thing, bikers, even big hairy ones ("...full of sperm" - 10 Things...), ride with all their anatomy firmly against the saddle / shanks of their machines, and for another there are saddles designed to relieve any pressure on your chaps if you're really concerned about squishing etc.
Is it that there are hundreds of men unfortunate enough to be attacked by bees whenever they get on their bicycles? Or are they so lacking in upper body strength (apparently a problem with many cyclists) that they can't tighten the bolts holding the saddle in place enough to stop it worming its way down while they ride? Or are they having trouble with their underwear (I saw, and overtook, one lad the other night for whom this was evidently the problem, cos he kept lifting himself up slightly and tugging at the other leg of his baggies)?
Is it really that difficult to ride with your knees, if not together, then not at right angles to the rest of your body?
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