Electric Quaker II

Le-gen- … wait for it…

Hooray! I’m going to be a Librarian again! It’s all coming up Millhouse! [Incidentally, if someone can tell me precisely what Simpsons episode that quote is from, I’d be grateful, because otherwise not knowing is going to send me mental]

OK, well technically I don’t start until the 1st of August, but I reckon I can subsist until then.

I almost feel like I ought to be talking more about it, and how ace it is, but I don’t know that there’s especially much to say… Although I am planning to see if I can get my second ever hangover tomorrow morning (Yes, I have indeed bought champagne. Win!)

Other than that, well, not much, really. I’m stupidly tired, but that’s entirely my own fault for not going to sleep until the World Service was merrily entering it’s “Closedown for Radio 4” phase on Longwave, so I’m not going to be so ungracious as to complain.

And, hey, why complain? Life is rockin’!

I wasn’t actually until I left the Bodleian that I realised I really want to be a librarian. I mean, you’d think I’d have got the hint after spending all of my lower school career in the library (partly because I had not friends, and mostly because I did that Library Assistant Traning Scheme Level 2 – still got the certificate, thank-you Mrs. K), and then work exeprience there, too… But I’m notoriously bad at reading the signs of subtle things like that, as I’m sure Ruth and Claire will tell you, with strong moderations of frustration every time…

Huzzah! All is shiny, and I am feeling cheerful! And, inexplicably, looking forward to the rugby on Saturday (I still have no idea what that’s about, but never mind. Anyway, Wales vs Italy was just funny.

So, yeah. I’m a librarian again! Awesome!

… -dary!

Troma, as I believe these things tend to get called, Announce.

So, yeah. Dan and Claire have eloped to Bulgaria and left us in Aber to organise our own Troma Night.

So it’s taking place at Rory’s house, 8pm as per usual.

Probable theme is something akin to “Films what are good, but which Dan or Paul would sulk about, if they weren’t abroad or at work.” Rory was inclined towards the Usual Suspects, which he hasn’t seen, so if we go with that, we can all sit there and resist the urge to go “Ohhh….” at him.

Leave us a comment ahead of, say, 18-00 tomorrow if you divunt know where Rory lives.

PS:

Yeah, I’ve not updated for a month. Not sure what I’ve been doing; will do a proper update presently, I hope. Cheers!

Boxing Day

Well, Christmas is going well so far. I like Aber.

I’d just like to get onto Abnib the link to the latest-looking Flash thingy from JibJab (They did, if you recall, the ‘This Land‘ animation about the last US presidential elections).

Anyhoo, this one is based on Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ & is fairly good. Slightly more America-centric than the original, to be fair, so there were a few things I didn’t get at all, but hey, ‘s fairly amusing.

O, and, being American, it misses the “and” from the phrase “two thousand and seven” (2007), which is a bit weird, but it’d spoil the rhythm to say it ‘properly’ anyway.

Here it is, anyway.

Merry Christmastide!

So, yeah, delayed post, again…

I should probably blog more often, although what exactly I’d write, I have no idea. Mostly, not been doing much of late, beyond applying for such jobs as turn up. Interviews for two most recent aren’t due ’till January anyway, though, so I’ve nothing to report on that, either. Insofar as I’ve got much to report it falls into the following three lumps:

Telephone upgrades, with networks various:

O, I attempted to leave Orange for Vodaphone, who wanted to give me a free N95 in exchange for a cheaper contract than my current one, which I figured was a great deal. But that didn’t pan out properly, so I’m still with Orange who were, at least, mostly keen to keep hold of me, and gave me a 10% discount on my bills, and a 12-month contract renewal with an N73 which is still relatively nice (or, at least, better than my current 6680).

Am more or less pleased with it. Orange helpfully chucked me a free 2 Gb micro SD card to go with it, and Nokia seem to have beefed up the built-in web browser, although I’m still finding myself using Opera Mini because I find it better for bookmarking purposes…

Dream, through the medium of LiveJournal:

Crazy dream about two nights ago. Ruth & I were in a Generic American City, all Romanic grid-pattern streets, and lumpy cars and tower blocks. I’m not sure why; I think we were there for some talk or other.

Anyway, we wandered into a grimy yard surrounded by little blocks of flats; 1940s brick things, all external fire escapes and soot, but with a central house fenced off and in a nice little garden with a lawn and one of those swinging benches (the sort which Dr. Pepper adverts always put the “what if I don’t like it?” teenagers on) so we wandered in. Not for any particular reason, as far as I know; the dream just felt like going that way.

Once we were inside, it transpired, it was Ferrett’s house, which I have, of course, never seen (although I get the impression it’s not bang in the middle of some random tenaments). Everyone seemed to know who we were, and didn’t mind us being there, so that was fine, and I kept wandering round and spotting things which, on waking, I realised I’ve read about on Ferrett’s journal. For example, I went to the bathroom, at some point, and saw the sex parties book he left lying about as per this entry.

I have no idea what any of that is supposed to mean. It just struck me as more than usually bizzarre [do those words actually sit together without having a fight?] so, being pretty low on anything else to talk about, I thought I may as well mention it.

Christmas:

I’m in Aber for Christmas. This is fun. The flat is bloody cold, mind you, which is a bit irksome. I’ve decided I dislike storage heaters. (Sure, re-heat on cheap electric, if you like, but d’you not spot the link between “Cheap electric at night” and “the world is cold now the sun has left”? Bastard machine.)

The Christmas farmer’s market was nice. Proper brass band playing Christmas carols, and things, which contrived to make me feel festive, hooray.

Knees are giving my gyp again, though. If we have a white Christmas here I shall sulk.

On the plus side, though, I’ve got a proper Advent Calendar, with pictures and everything. It’s great; you get a new picture every day. I seem to be getting more Traditionalist, lately.

—
That’s it, I dinnae have owt else to mention.

(Man, it’s been ages since I blogged…)

Edited Sunday August 23^rd 2009: Please see Comment 4 for clarification on inquest findings & accidental death. (I can’t readily adjust the post this far on, but please be aware of Comment 4, from Charlie Stroud, before reading the post, & bear in mind my memory has played me false. Thanks.)

I woke up this morning.

I appreciate that’s not really the sort of incisive opening line that normally draws you in*, but I start with it regardless because I think, all things considered, it’s something of an achievement in itself, since, in spite of everything, up to & including me, I’m still here, ten years further down the line.

(and, yes, slightly coming to bits. Never used to be this weak, dunno what’s going on with that.)

But, hey, I’m still here.

Naomi, a Quaker from Telford Meeting once changed her surname to Stillhere as an affirmation; “I am still here, in spite of everything the world throws at me.” I quote that as it appeared on the order of service from her funeral; in the latter week of May 2000 she was finally overwhelmed and threw herself from a bridge in London.

I wished at the time that had the guts to do the same. As it was, however, I repeatedly chickened out of anything of the sort, and thus, by and by, I came to waking up this morning, which I do think is something of an acheivement since, if I’d had just a wee bit more backbone, I’d never have come close.

Congratulations, past JTA; you are indeed a useless gutless spinless shit, and I owe you one for it. I know it isn’t much help but cheers! nevertheless, and remember that if you’re stubborn enough life seems to get bored of shoveling shit in your face.

Time I got to bed; I’ve got a whole another lot of waking up to do tomorrow. G’night.

* The best opening line I ever read ran ‘If you were a pigeon, you could fuck forty times a day.’ I can’t for the life of me remember the rest of the book, but it started fantastically.

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again…

There wasn’t a locked gate, mind. Just the sudden shock of waking up in the dark, at four in the morning, with the rain desperately lashing against the window, and the same thought running madly through my head: “I didn’t just dream that again, did I?!”

I had. A clear five or six years since I last did, I had the same recurring dream. Or, rather, I had a very similar dream, because the precise details, location and causes and things, always seem to change, I guess depending on what unsorted backdrops my subconscious can find waiting to be filed away neatly in my memory. But the precise content; Deus ex machina meetings, and revelations and forgiveness and tentative friendship was just the same as ever it was. The only real differences I could work out was the anachronistic use of a Thames Travel double-decker bus (rather than a creaking Midland Red one), a major role for Ruth, and a definite fuzziness in people’s faces, where the synapses my brain used to polish daily have got worn down and overgrown as I’ve slowly given them less and less attention.

It’s the kind of dream I used to have more or less regularly, and it once buoyed me up during some of my darker moments with the pathetic hope “but it could happen!” It hung round for a while after it was strictly relevant, resurrected, I imagine, by my thoughts straying vaguely as I was drifting off to sleep, but it’s not been back since, until last night.

Which is why I woke and was shocked. Or – more specifically – I woke and my first thought was “O, God, no, it was only a dream!” just as ever it did, closely followed by “No, wait… What was that?”

Evidently some part of me still wants answers, explanations, acceptance. In this day and age, presumably, I could even endeavour to accrue them, with a little help from the All-Seeing Eye of Google, and perhaps a couple of speech marks. On the other hand, Google cuts both ways, which is why I’m being sparse on names and details, here. I have no idea if I ever caused damage or upset to anyone beyond myself, but if I did I’d rather not compound it out of the blue.

The whole thing was a big mess, and the best analogy I’ve ever found to describe it is the experience of being adrift in a shark-infested ocean on a life-raft lashed together from the debris of your sunken ship, bound loosely together with incomprehensible knots you can’t see, let alone begin to fathom, and which randomly flips itself over, desperately trying to throw you into the sea, baring jagged edges that slice at your fingers every time you’re forced to cling on, spilling fresh blood in the water, whilst the lead shark dances round in a spitefully oblivious frenzy screeching the phrase “the precious meanwhile!” like a sadistic parrot on acid and deriding your feeble skill at swimming at every chance it spots…

A big and horrible mess, like I said. Given the alternative, though… well, I was never a very strong swimmer, and I doubt I could train a shark to give me a lift to a happy island paradise full of rum cocktails with little umbrellas in the glass, so I guess I had to make the best of what I got, huh?

Still, it looks like I’ve still got a level of concern that I might’ve worried people who had nothing to do with me. Hell, people who would never have had anything to do with me as long as I lived. I don’t know if that made things better or worse. Probably worse, I think, because if I’d had any chance of being friends with them in any way, I don’t think I’d’ve been in that crazy situation of… Well, I still don’t really know. But I think it was the crazy situation of relying on the sight of them to drag myself from one day to the next without needing to think of the

[sweet Jesus Christ. This is a sentence that doesn’t want an ending putting on it. Uh. Bear with me, I’ll try again.] …relying on the sight of them to take my mind off the fact that I’d never be able to see [look, guys, I don’t want to burst into tears in my office, OK? If ye can’t work out where that sentence is going, ask me at some point when I’m very drunk.]*

Crap. See, this is why I never tell people things. My brain digs its heels in and says things like “I’m not going back there! It’s scary and sad, and I haven’t got a torch!”

[O, hey, a feeble joke to distract everyone from the issue at hand. Nice going, brain! Unsubtle useless bastard.]

I guess everyone needs a floatation device, anyway. And, probably, I’d’ve had to find one from somewhere. It was just bad luck – and fucking awful timing, like there was ever going to be any other sort – that meant a burgeoning teenage crush heading in one direction met an out of control juggernaut of pain and sorrow and loss heading the other way, with nobody sufficiently in control to sort out the pieces properly.

And so, just shy of a decade since the whole thing started, just over six years since I last did anything of the sort, I find I’m still waking up in the middle of the night, thinking “God, it was only a dream,” like a seven-year-old thinking it was Christmas and then waking up in October, and still, apparently, flailing around in the desperate hope that “Hey! We could put all this behind us, explain it, forgive! We could be really great friends!”

…The difference is that now, I can see that it won’t happen. And I think that’s probably for the best.

No real point beyond that, but this is one of those things that I’m pathologically incapable of thinking through and setting out if I think I’m the only person who’ll read it. I explain much better to an audience than to myself, I guess. Anyway, the coin says post.

* I was going to edit out this whole section, to make everything look neat and smooth, but I don’t really like doing that with blog posts anyway, and, besides, I went to a lot of fucking effort even to get those two half-sentences down; I’m not just digging ’em up and throwing them on the compost after that.

(I actually wrote this on Saturday)

Well since my choices, just at the moment, appear to be “further bloody packing” or “draft blogpost” I thought I’d go with the latter. And, yes, I know I’m kinda running three months ahead of the curve, here, but I thought I’d lash up a quick retrospective on the last twelve months or so, which is more or less the time since I moved down to Wallingford.

Wallingford is a really nice town; it’s got a lot of the “proper” English town feel to it, which I’d previously assumed still existed everywhere, and which got me really depressed when I realised that, actually, no, everywhere’s either conglomerated and horrible, like every town in Telford, and their soulless repetitions of Woolies, Aldi and First International MegaBankCo (formerly Local Market Friendly Society, LTD) .

Wallingford’s a bit better than that. It’s got a Waitrose (and dear God I am going to miss Waitrose when I’m back in Aber. (Quite apart from selling absolutely everything, at a moderately viable selection of prices, they contrive to have the largest collection of ‘Female till staff qualifying for the adjectives ‘young’ and ‘nubile’ that I’ve ever seen in any shop, ever, which really takes the aggravation out of queuing for twenty minutes while the old lady in front of you buys a bottle of gin with pennies…)

But, in addition to Waitrose, we’ve got a really strong local choir, which kept Ruth busy, a bunch of bell-ringers who were all very cool and friendly, a Pizza Express that Dan and Claire got us more or less kicked out of (In that we were in the back bit, and they started saying, in loud and pointed tones, “Should we shut the back now?”), a brilliant dude in Threshers, who never seemed to mind when we went in and asked for help picking white wine (“What are you looking for?” “Well, crisp, dry and refreshing, really…”) and my favourite bus company in the world, ever, Thames Travel.

Thames Travel, alone out of every bus company I have ever travelled with, have, to my knowledge, never been more than three minutes behind schedule. Except once. And, on that occasion, Ruth and I spent the entire delay saying how amazed we were that the bus hadn’t come yet, and wasn’t that weird, perhaps there’d been an accident and they’d had to shut a road?

(This is in incredibly stark contrast to Stagecoach in Oxford, who are the only bus company I have ever used where, when you stick your hand out to flag down the bus, the driver stops, opens the doors and then, as soon as you are on the bus, says [and I’m not making this up] says, in sarcastic tones, “O, thank you very much for making me stop. I’m really going to get into town on time now. I’m running late already, you know!” – Which, of course, held us up even longer, because I was so preoccupied trying to work out if he could have really just had a go at someone for using his company’s shoddy late service that I didn’t bother to tell him where I wanted to go, and asked him to repeat himself instead. But I’m going off on a tangent again. Sorry.)

Wallingford also possesses the Corn Exchange, a great little theatre-cum-cinema, owned by the local Am Drams, the Sinodun Players (Who also mostly comprise the local Choir, and every extra in the background of a Midsommer Murders ever), with whom I did Panto for the most exhausting January my life has ever compassed.

The only problem I have with Wallingford, really, is it’s terminal shortage of anyone I care about, beyond the people in the house. Caro and Jerry are great people, and frequently very fun to be with, and I’m very fond of them, and, of course, Ruth, when she was here (as opposed to hiding in Norfolk) has an amazing talent for making everything seem better… Beyond that, though, I don’t really know anyone. I know that my amazingly well paid boss (in contrast to me, at least) lives round here somewhere, because she’s caught the bus with me a few times, and I’ve always assumed that if she wanted to have anything to do with me outside work, she’d make the approach, and have thus treated her more or less like everyone else on the bus, ie, I’ll smile if we happen to meet each other’s eyes, but otherwise I’ll not attempt contact.

I know a few people vaguely from Panto, but not very well; I’ve had a few proper conversations with them, as well, but I don’t really have any actual friends down here. I think that’s party why I started to hate my job back in November (The main reason, however, was that I kept making really stupid errors – due, as it eventually turned out, to the fact my glasses were actually working against my eyes, which probably only I could manage – and Gail, who was supervising me, got increasing impatient and voluble in her criticism of me, which made me incredibly reluctant to interact with anyone in the office, ever. [If, as seems amazingly unlikely, Debbie Hazel is reading this from somewhere in Canada, I’m sorry I didn’t have the guts to go to your leaving party; I didn’t realise it was happening until everyone else was already there, and I didn’t have the courage to walk into a room full of people who spent about five hours a week listening to me getting called thick and incompetent. It wasn’t personal, and I’m sorry if you thought it was]).

Anyway, back in November, when all the bad stuff was going on, Gail (fairly reasonably, as assumptions go) decided that the reason I was making errors was because I’d periodically tab into IRC, and see what the Aber people were saying. She promptly forbade me to go anywhere near the thing, which had two effects: firstly, my productivity went absolutely down the tubes, because work ceased to feature anything remotely approximating to light relief, and secondly my alertness fell to nothing, as well, because I stopped drinking coffee in my coffee breaks, and instead used them to catch up on scrollback and say hello to anyone about at the time. That was unfortunate, but I got over it in the end, and sacrificed large bundles of flexitime to take two-hour IRC-laden lunches instead.

It’s only now, thinking back, that I realise I was actually really lonely. How weird. I don’t really remember being lonely ever before, although I must have been because when, years ago, people who didn’t like me at school demanded to know who my friends were, I listed names of people I’d been at primary school with, and hadn’t, in fact, spoken to for ages [which I did, of course, because I didn’t have any friends. I used to sit in the Library and read Jennings and Molesworth]. Also, a memory has just surfaced of me faking a couple of signatures on the cast I got when Tom Perry broke my wrist, which is literally pathetic… Well, anyway, it doesn’t matter now, because I’ll be coming back to Aber – brilliantly described by Ruth’s smarmy kid brother Robin as “Ah, Aber! Land of plenty!” – in a few days, and everything will be better.

I think, on balance, I like my job, even if it’s ruined my eyesight [I used to loathe the idea of glasses. It is probably very fortunate that I happened to first need them at the same time as we were all watching Evangelion, and I suddenly realised glasses could look cool (providing you can get the light to bounce off them so nobody ever sees your eyes…). The only real quibble I have with them is the way they seem to get laden with smears even when I’m really careful not to touch the lenses. And I do like the people in the office, and I’ll miss the crazy politics, and the almost stereotypically mental decisions of upper management (my favourite ever was the one that said “Will all staff please not that being unable to attend work as a result of the recent heavy snow is unacceptable…”) I think I could grow to like working in an office…

So, really, it will be strange, I think, to be leaving. It will, however, be brilliant to have the Uberflat, and some actual space to ourselves, where we can loll on the sofa and eat TV dinners if the mood takes us, without displacing Caro and Jerry’s desire to watch the West Wing (I still think I could really grow to like that show, but I’ve no desire to start watching it from the middle of series five, I’d be horribly confused!)

And it will be good to be living with Paul, I think (our last attempt to do anything of the sort got kyboshed by the Porters, and then Elaine Watkin forbade him to live at Hafan, with the words “I know Paul very well, and I’m very fond of him, but he never listens to a word I say, so I’m telling you: if you have this accommodation, Paul is not allowed to sleep there, understood?”).

I’m looking forward to Troma and Geek Nights, as well, and, well… everything. Except for the bit where I cease to have a) a job, and b) a thousand pounds paid into the bank every month. That’s going to take some adjustment, I think. Also, faintly tragically, looking forward to buying furnishings and things for said Uberflat and generally making it “ours,” rather than “random cool-looking flat I looked round once, for ten minutes.”

Of course, first I have to finish packing, and I can’t properly do that until Friday morning (Once everything else is loaded into the van, I can pack up the computer and stow that, as well). Current plan is to leave Wallingford by 10:00 at the latest, swing, incredibly briefly by Newport, to load up whatever the Hell it is from Hafan that’s left in the entry (and the proper speakers for the computer, and possibly the SVGA monitor for the DOS box, which, I guess, the Rev will take to Aber in November, if not before) and then be away from Shropshire by 15:00. So I should be back by the evening on the 28th, barring accidents (yes, I have used my last remaining day of holiday to go home a lone day earlier than previously planned. Shut up.)

It’s been a great year, it has. It’s just some of the really best bits (the Real Ale Ramble, the narrowboat holiday, Cropredy, Edinburgh, and so on, have all been bits that didn’t happen actually here. Mostly what’s happened here is that I’ve commuted, learned to sleep on buses without fearing for my actual physical safety like I used to, and counted down the days until I get paid again. It’s not been unpleasant, but it’s been very tiring and the payoff hasn’t always been grand. I think as long as I can get something to keep the money coming in, I’ll be happier in Aber.

Bring it on, then, y’buggers. Bring it on…

Huzzah! (Broadly)

Computer appears to have come back up and fixed itself of its own accord. All seems well, bar two minor snags; first, the BIOS seems to have forgotten to support USB keyboards, so I’ve had to plug my spare, via an ATX to PS2 converter, into the PS2 and try not to let it fall down the back of the tower. Secondly, when I ctrl+alt+del, it gives me the Windows security type box in nasty spazzy tellytubby mode, but everything else seems fine.

Indeed, so fine was it, that I played Nethack for a full half hour yesterday, without it rebooting itself once!

Bollocks.

Farvel Janet the Valkyrie.

You died in Gehennom on Dungeon Level 33 with 749109 points and 19241 pieces of gold, after 28552 moves. You were level 14, with a maximum of 138 hit points when you died.

Final Attributes:

You were piously aligned.
You were fire resistant.
You were cold resistant.
You were shock resistant.
You were magic-protected.
You saw invisible.
You were warned.
You were invisible to others.
You were stealthy.
You were protected.
You were polymorphing.
You had polymorph control.
You were very fast.
You had reflection.
You were extremely lucky.
You had extra luck.
Good luck did not time out for you.
You are dead.

Vanquished creatures:

Juiblex
a mastodon
Medusa
an iron golem
a master lich
3 gray dragons
a silver dragon
2 red dragons
a white dragon
a black dragon
2 blue dragons
2 green dragons
9 minotaurs
a jabberwock
Lord Surtur
a baluchitherium
3 demiliches
a stone golem
4 Olog-hai
a pit fiend
2 sandestins
3 titanotheres
2 trappers
a baby black dragon
a baby green dragon
a disenchanter
4 vampire lords
2 shopkeepers
an aligned priest
2 captains
4 liches
8 water trolls
a clay golem
4 nurses
4 ice devils
a lurker above
a frost giant
an ettin
9 black puddings
13 vampires
5 lieutenants
a watch captain
22 ghosts
2 mind flayers
7 giant mimics
3 zruties
28 fire giants
5 ogre kings
6 ice trolls
18 rock trolls
4 umber hulks
4 flesh golems
2 Elvenkings
4 doppelgangers
5 hezrous
5 bone devils
6 large mimics
2 long worms
a couatl
8 stalkers
an air elemental
4 fire elementals
3 earth elementals
4 water elementals
7 hill giants
3 giant mummies
a black naga
4 xorns
6 giant zombies
an elf-lord
8 sergeants
a water demon
5 barbed devils
6 vrocks
6 wargs
a winter wolf
7 small mimics
2 warhorses
8 xans
5 ettin mummies
3 ogre lords
5 quantum mechanics
17 trolls
2 wood golems
2 erinyes
a marilith
4 sharks
6 gelatinous cubes
a pyrolisk
a large dog
3 freezing spheres
2 flaming spheres
5 shocking spheres
2 large cats
3 tigers
4 gargoyles
a dwarf king
a tengu
7 ochre jellies
4 leocrottas
3 energy vortices
3 mountain centaurs
4 stone giants
8 elf mummies
6 human mummies
2 red nagas
2 green slimes
2 pit vipers
a python
a cobra
24 wraiths
2 carnivorous apes
6 ettin zombies
a leather golem
7 Grey-elves
44 soldiers
4 watchmen
4 horned devils
a succubus
2 incubi
3 chameleons
4 crocodiles
7 giant beetles
5 quivering blobs
6 cockatrices
8 wolves
2 winter wolf cubs
2 lynxes
a panther
4 gremlins
a spotted jelly
8 leprechauns
3 orc-captains
3 mumakil
6 giant spiders
2 scorpions
8 horses
4 black lights
11 vampire bats
5 forest centaurs
a gnome king
3 orc mummies
4 dwarf mummies
4 ogres
6 brown puddings
5 rust monsters
2 owlbears
4 yetis
3 gold golems
3 werewolves
13 Green-elves
7 giant eels
8 lizards
7 chickatrices
2 dogs
3 dingos
a housecat
4 jaguars
2 dwarf lords
4 blue jellies
3 white unicorns
2 gray unicorns
a black unicorn
a dust vortex
2 ravens
2 plains centaurs
a gnome mummy
4 snakes
2 water moccasins
7 apes
7 human zombies
3 rope golems
5 Woodland-elves
27 soldier ants
62 fire ants
22 bugbears
an imp
7 lemures
4 quasits
6 wood nymphs
6 water nymphs
5 mountain nymphs
10 Mordor orcs
8 Uruk-hai
3 orc shamans
5 rock piercers
6 rock moles
3 ponies
3 fog clouds
6 yellow lights
2 shriekers
7 violet fungi
20 gnome lords
14 gnomish wizards
2 kobold mummies
a red naga hatchling
a black naga hatchling
2 guardian naga hatchlings
7 gray oozes
3 barrow wights
15 elf zombies
10 ghouls
5 straw golems
3 paper golems
5 jellyfish
6 giant ants
2 little dogs
7 floating eyes
2 kittens
8 dwarves
2 homunculi
a kobold lord
a kobold shaman
3 hill orcs
8 rothes
3 rabid rats
4 centipedes
3 giant bats
a monkey
11 orc zombies
5 dwarf zombies
2 werejackals
8 iguanas
30 killer bees
an acid blob
4 hobbits
10 manes
4 large kobolds
18 hobgoblins
2 giant rats
12 cave spiders
4 brown molds
a yellow mold
a red mold
71 gnomes
9 gnome zombies
3 geckos
7 jackals
a kobold
5 goblins
7 sewer rats
2 grid bugs
4 bats
7 lichens
5 kobold zombies
8 newts

1318 creatures vanquished.

[Select] items:

An uncursed amulet of reflection(being worn)
the rustproof +2 Sunsword
The rustproof +3 Mjollnir (weapon in hand)
a blessed +1 silver Sabre

A blessed +2 grey dragon scale mail (being worn)
a blessed fireproof +2 pair of speed boots (being worn)
an uncursed rustproof +4 pair of gauntlets of power (being worn)
A blessed rustproof +2 helm of brilliance (being worn)
a cursed thoroughly burnt +0 cloak of invisibility (being worn)
a cursed +0 shield of reflection (being worn)

an uncursed ring of Slow Digestion (on right hand)
an uncursed ring of polymorph control (on left hand)

The Bell of Opening
the blessed Orb of Fate (0:5)
a blessed magic marker
an uncursed blindfold
a +0 unicorn horn
a can of grease (0:11)
a +0 pick-axe

Contents of the bag of holding:

an uncursed ring of free action
an uncursed potion of object detection
an uncursed ring of see invisible
a wand of create monster (0:11)
5 uncursed scrolls of blank paper
an uncursed scroll of light
an uncursed scroll of fire
a cursed amulet of restful sleep
a cursed -1 pair of levitation boots
an uncursed +1 ring of increase damage
6 uncursed food rations
a blessed +1 ring of increase accuracy
a wand of create monster (0:12)
an uncursed leash
an uncursed ruby
a can of grease (0:1)
a wand of striking (0:4)
an uncursed +0 oilskin cloak
a wand of digging (0:3)
an uncursed ring of sustain ability
an uncursed potion of levitation
a wand of digging (0:5)
a wand of digging (0:6)
a wand of striking (0:6)
a wand of create monster (0:12)
an uncursed scroll of create monster
a wand of digging (0:6)
an uncursed amethyst stone
a cursed ring of aggravate monster
7 uncursed wax candles
a blessed tallow candle
a cursed tallow candle
6 uncursed tallow candles
a cursed potion of object detection
4 uncursed worthless pieces of violet glass
an uncursed +0 pair of gauntlets of power
3 uncursed jasper stones
19241 gold pieces
2 uncursed luckstones
an uncursed scroll of destroy armor
a wand of digging (0:4)
a wand of digging (0:5)
a wand of magic missile (0:4)
2 uncursed fortune cookies
a wand of striking (0:7)
6 cursed food rations
a cursed potion of object detection
an uncursed ring of regeneration
a cursed wand of cold (0:3)
a cursed potion of full healing
an uncursed amulet versus poison
2 cursed diamonds
2 cursed partly used tallow candles
an uncursed tin whistle
a wand of digging (0:4)
an uncursed luckstone
a cursed +1 ring of protection

[Sorry, I know that’s long and probably Abnib-unfriendly, I just wanted to keep tabs on how I was doing in terms of Blog-worthy scores…

Although, actually, I think most of my old scores are LJ or in the Missing EQ Archive, but still.]

Anyway: work.

God damn lazy bastard machine!

OK, so my tower fell over on its arse last night. I am less than happy. Mostly, I am less than happy because I don’t really know what’s wrong with it; it isn’t connected to the Internet, or anything that isn’t itself, and yet it’s behaving awfully “Look at me with a virus!” like…

(Can you get a virus through a USB key?)

On the offchance it helps, the order of events was roughly:

1. JTA boots computer. All is well.
2. JTA launches C&C Generals. Plays about five minutes.
3. Generals terminates, shuts self down, accompanied by warning box from Windows to say it’s encountered a critical error.
4. Click ‘OK’. Computer restarts.
5. Windows returns. “Recovered from serious error” dialogue box. Click OK, don’t tell anyone (because how the Hell can it? It’s not wired to anything).
6. Computer restarts.
7. Windows loads. Waits five minutes. Restarts.
8. Ditto.
9. Windows starts to load, is displaying desktop. Explorer presumably loading (no toolbar or start menu yet). Computer restarts.
10. Attempt to start in safemode. Computer BSODs.
11. Worry.
12. Attempt to start in safemode. Computer tells me that “txtsetup.ini” is corrupt, startup cannot continue.
13. Manually restart machine.
14. Wait, whilst computer whirs and clicks and does nothing. Don’t even get a “no signal” message to monitor, it’s just firing black at me.
15. Repeat five times. Switch tower off at wall. Switch on again.
16. BIOS starts in “fail-safe mode.” Never seen that before. Getting worried now.
17. Discover BIOS fail-safe mode appears not to include support for USB keyboards. Can’t F8 into safemode.
18. Plug in proper keyboard via ATX – PS2 converter. Start safemode. Roll back to System Restore from Friday 14th September.
19. Computer restarts mid roll-back.
20. Repeat step 18. Computer crashes during restore, sits there half an hour. Manual restart, repeat step 16.
21. Turn on power at wall. Contrive roll-back to System Restore from Sunday 16th September.
22. Computer completes system restore, looks fine and happy.
23. JTA gets suspicious, waits ten minutes.
24. Computer restarts at random.
25. JTA leaves house to get bus to work.

…Seriously, I’m kinda stuck here. (All my live CDs and boot disks are in Norfolk, with Ruth (apart from some old ones, which are in Suffolk, which is just as useless.)

Not sure what can’ve happened to it; all I can think is that there’s a virus come in on my USB key, but I’ve just run that though Sophos here at work (because I dinnae want to infect the office PC, of course) and that’s come out clean… The only other thing I can think is that, when I cleaned up the Rev’s PC a while back, and got all her My Documents files off it (because that had a nasty virus) one of those files contained a virus itself. Word documents, a couple of spreadsheets and .jpgs of dead people from memorial service booklets, any of them likely to harbour a virus that waits two months and then goes off without you opening the files? Or is there just a mechanical failure in there?

…I was kinda relying on that PC to, pathetically, take my mind off how weird it is to be in the house whilst Ruth’s away (seriously, it’s not something that’s ever happened before in the year and a bit I’ve been here), so I’m vaguely strapped now.

No internet at home, either, because Ruth has the laptop.

Any ideas? (Just wondered, don’t really expect much… Might need someone to help me resurrect the damn thing once I get back to Aber, though. Any volunteers for that, either?)

*sigh*

Qparty: Afterword.

OK, so I didn’t post about Cropredy. I know I should’ve, I just failed to get round to it, somehow.

And, yeah, I didn’t post about Edinburgh, either, and I really should’ve said something, even if it was only “Hoorah!” (although we didn’t see Brian and Krystal this year), but by the time I got back I owed about eight hours of flexitime, so I never got round to it.

Still, I might yet manage it; I’ve got pages and pages of very cramped diary entries for both of ’em, so in the event that I find free time, and nothing else to distract me, I’ll bung something up, and post-date it to annoy and confuse people.

Meanwhile, got back from Preston this afternoon, dropped the suit back at Moss (very aggravated that they didn’t check it was all there; I could’ve filched that waistcoat which, though not the fanciest I’ve known, was still pretty damn nice!)

I’m really glad we didn’t leave ’till this morning, it gave me some time to wind down after the whole thing – for those of you who didn’t see Roper Hall as it was at the time we got there, I’ve got a few “before” shots as well as later ones from the party, and Dan‘s given me sufficient access to the Qparty gallery that I’ll be able to upload some (also, I guess, since he and Claire are off on Qmoon, at the moment, he won’t object if other people send me their photos, too, and I can chuck some of them up as well.

But, yeah, once I’m home and have uploaded those you’ll be able to see why I swung merrily out of retirement (for the few of you who don’t know, I used to cleaner at the Union building in Aber, and then the County Hall on the seafront, and some crazy offices in Portland street) and grabbed a broom and started scrubbing things up, along with pretty much everyone else who was there (except the staff, who spent some time standing round and offering to hire me, and not knowing where stuff was – at one point I asked for a few J-cloths, or something, with which to clean the bar, and the poked ’round in the storeroom for about ten minutes, before I got bored and started opening up their boxes of supplies and found some).

It was, in a crazy slightly worrying way, really good fun to be desperately trying to get things ready against a fixed deadline, especially with all the usual suspects equally rushed and efficient. It must be a September thing…

And, as everyone’s been saying already, the party was fantastic (and, yeah, some of the speeches made me cry, as did some of the clip-frame contributions. Happy tears, though, so it’s all OK!)

Glad I left when I did, though, I don’t really like nightclubs full of random crazies. Also, a big cheer to the huge number of people who turned up for LASER Quest bowling; that was great fun, so many thanks for coming and contributing, even if you weren’t bowling yourselves.

Great to see everyone again, even though travel is exhausting, and even though I think I’ve done something horrible to my back (because moving or staying still hurts) it’s been a great weekend, and thank-you all for being there and being ace.

And, of course, extra thanks and congratulations to Dan and Claire, who are both wonderful people, and to whom I’m not ashamed to say I felt really, honestly, proud of the pair of you, and thank-you for an amazing party, and the chance to see everyone again.

Anyway, some of us have got Green Dragons to catch up with, so I guess I’ll see you around.

Have fun!

Cropredy: Foreword.

Afternoon.

Ruth & I are off to Cropredy 2007 tomorrow.

By and large, I’m looking forwards to it, barring the logistical challenge of getting there (which is mostly to do with carrying things, since public transport in the south is (mostly) OK.

I’m a little concerned that the temporary crown I had rammed onto my snapped tooth might crack itself, but I’m fairly sure it won’t. (it’s experimental, apparently, & I’m guinea-pigging it, and being given £20 in exchange – I still have to fork out £370 myself, mind. Bloody criminal, but if I’d’ve stayed NHS with Lala I’d probably not have the tooth at all, so never mind).

I’ve bought actual not-for-avoiding-PE-in shorts for the first time in forever, because it’s suddenly got awfully hot round here.

I’ve not been to Cropredy for a decade, having last been there in the long hot summer of ’97, just before the Eternal Winter that ran from that October through to, er… Well three years back, I’d’ve said “through to May 2000,” and even this January I’d’ve said “Through to Summer 2005″…

…These days I’m not so sure. I’m starting to realise that there’s some emotional gouges that you can’t just decide are sorted out, although even my lazy brain thinks ten years is a Hell of a time to decide to wait. The recent funeral, etc. seems to have shaken me up rather more than I’d expected it would, and I think that’s the main reason for the trepidation I woke in the middle of last night and suddenly realised I felt.

With the exception of Boulogne and Eyam, either of which I could avoid if I felt like it, I don’t think there’s a single place on Earth which I went to before October ’97 that I haven’t been to since, except Cropredy.

I’d be more specific about the circumstances of Cropredy ’97 & who was there and things, but I am still technically at work, and I’m fairly sure it’s wise to let my brain just skitter merrily away from the point rather than sitting it down and telling it to dig up old memories. Well, for now anyway.

Shan’t be around in the Land of Internet after this evening, until Monday. I’ll endeavour to contrive an ‘Afterword’ post around then. (And now I’ll hit the post button before I start re-reading and cutting bits out. Sorry for such typos as have crept in…)

Have fun!

“…And JOIN me! In a public BURNING!”*

Well as you’ve no doubt noticed, it’s been just a bit wet lately.

And I wondered if I’m the only person to have seen the link between that and the rather amusing Simpsons movie advert from last week?

Note the humourless pagan lady in the sixth and seventh paragraphs:

“We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind. “We’ll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away.”

…

Worked, then…

So who wants to grab the faggots, matches and kindling and round up some Pagans and wander back up Broad Street? (We don’t actually have to set light to ’em, but we could see if they could do some sort of “We admit we’re silly cretins” dance, which would, at least, cheer people up.

*Usual vague offer of pint for citing source applies.

Well I suppose you’re due an update.

Ruth’s grandmother died on Sunday morning. The week, therefore, has not ranked in the “most happy fun weeks of 2007,” and, with the funeral tomorrow, it’s not likely to.

It’s been nine years since I went to a funeral. This is something of a new personal best. I’ve had to buy a black tie & everything. (Previously I used to borrow one of my father’s black ties, but I think I like this one better.) Everything else this week has really been the usual mix of people bursting into tears and worrying about everyone else. I don’t mean to sound callous, I’m just surprised by how I seem to have settled into the “bereaved” mentality again after so long a gap. Mind you, I have the dubious advantage of having been through it all four times before so I’m not so shaken by it and, of course, I hadn’t known her as long as Ruth, or Caroline and Jerry, so of course I’m going to take it less hard. It still bloody stings though. It’s very strange, I always think, how the human brain can be perfectly well aware that someone’s died & yet shove all the pain out of the way in little bursts. Given that it always seems to come back worse one wonders why it bothers.

I’m at home again today (I’ve been working crazily short days in order to not leave Ruth on her own too much and make sure there’s someone she can talk to) and Ruth has gone off to the doctors, so I’m killing time playing Nethack (again.)

On top of the usual one that comes free with every bereavement, I’ve just been given a valuable lesson in not taking things for granted in Nethack, as well as in real life:

My valkyrie enters the Dungeons of Doom. My kitten kills a newt as I snatch a bag of gold and try the door. It’s locked, so I kick it open.

Enter the next room, speculative quaff from a fountain, because I’ve not got too much to lose at this point, no dice. Not going to chance it so I move down the corridor, kill the jackal and open the next door.

This rooms got some gold in it, some steps down & a wand. I snatch the gold, and move over to the wand.

> “A trapdoor opens in the ceiling and a rock falls on your head!” Bastards.

I take the wand, and wonder what it is. So I attempt to engrave something.

> “What do you want to write in the dust here?”
Elbereth
> “Sorry no such thing exists in this world. For what do you wish?”

Uhm. I read the scrollback.
” > “You write in the dust with a wand of wishing. For what do you wish?”
Elbereth”

Crazy. So I’m now on level one with a whole bundle of goodies.

It’s not even a millionth of what I’d need to make the week less tragic, but I guess it could be a start.

Anyone know where I can get one of those in real life?

OW! I’b nebber eating quiche aden! I habe id!

Fuck. That really stings.
The side of one of my route canalled teeth just fell off. Or, rather, sid free of the filling and jammed down into my gum when I bit. I thought it felt a bit funny the other day, but I assumed I’d bitten a carrot funny.

‘kin Hell that stings.

Generic Update ; no. 257

Lately I have been…

Wondering why the Hell my busted knuckle has chosen today to hurt like Hell and make typing painful.

Playing about with our shiny new low-end laptop (because it’s replacing a Toshiba from the late 90’s, and about time too.) So far it’s coping very well with DOS box, which is nice. It can probably play newer things as well, I haven’t found out yet.

Fixing the bed, which collapsed yesterday when I knelt on it. It’s a sofabed, and very comfy as a sofa, much less so as a bed, and it isn’t (because it’s a sofa bed) designed to be slept on on a regular basis, and started sulking. Bloody thing)

Sleeping lots when on buses, which I still think is a dangerous thing to do, but I haven’t been stabbed yet, so that’s OK.

Playing LoTGD.

Wandering round on Facebook,

and,

Wondering why weekdays have started to drag so much.

And that’s about it. Or, there would be more, but this knuckle-aching nonsense is making it surprisingly hard to type, because I keep having to use fingers other than my third, which is a really tricky thing do without thinking about it an awful lot.

Enjoy.

“JTA attempts Willsave Vs. Sleep (3) (+1, CON) -3 penalty=1. CRITICAL FAIL”

I’ve just realised that if I don’t get lots of sleep I actually become ill.

I’ve realised this because we went to London yesterday (note to self: apologise at this point for bad typing), and had a great time and went to bed at about 02-45.

The alarm went off at 05-30 and we were out of Owen’s flat by 05-40 and in search of an overland to get us onto nhte tube and thence to, er, Victoria to get the Oxford Tube (bby which they mean bus) bus back to Oxofrd.

I slept a bit on the bus, as well – I can, as various people have noticed, sleep anywhere; my two most random were, “on a coach, on the isla seat, bent over the armrest at the waist with my torso handing down and my head swinging into the floor when the bus accellerated” and “Sitting cross-legged on the grass in a field, tipped forwards onto my head” – but I don’t sleep very well in that situation.

I’ve pulled a fair few all-nighters in my time, for one reason or another, and on one horrible occasion I spent about forty-eight hours running on five hours sleep, which was very hard, but I’ve never done a full days work on three-and-a-bit hours sleep before.

Frankly, I’ve spent today getting paid to stay awake, so I’d just like to share with you my patent 4-AM special.

Normally it keeps me going like a dream, but not so much today, I think there is only so far the bounteous gift of God’s great coffeetreebush can take you, but what the hey.

You will need:
1) A big mug.
2) Some freeze-dried coffee.
3) About 40 pee in silver coins.
4) A Coffee Machine that gives out little plastic cups of coffee.
5) Some hot water.
6) A spoon.

Method:
1) Fill bottom of mug with freeze-dried coffee, at about 1 and a half the strength you’d normally use.
2) Put sufficient money into coffee machine to cover purchase
3) Order an “ExpressoChoc” with sugar. That is to say, get the machine to make you an expresso, with some hot chocolate in it.
4) Collect mug of ExpressoChoc. If money inserted into machine exceeded purchase, push retrive change button and retrive change. Otherwise, skip to 5.
5) Pour ExpressoChoc into mug of instant coffee grains.
6) Dispose of instant coffee cup.
7) Add hot water to mug of ExpressoChoc-with-strong-instant-coffee-in-it.
8) Stir freshly crafted beverage.
9) Drink 4AM Special, allowing to cool if necessary.

Those things normally fire me up so much I have trouble sitting especially still. Today… nothing. Except I occasionally feel a bit more tired. I’ve had about four so far. This is alwarminhg.

More allarming is the fact I feel drunk, when I’m not, and ill when I don’t think I am.

I’m having to put most of my energy into not falling flat onto the keyboard and waking up tomorrow, but I don’t think I can do it much longer, so I’ll shove off and go to bed once I get home, assuming I can wake up enough to get onto the bus, off the bus at the other end and then make it back to the houes.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d share the 4AM special recipie, just in case it will do anyione else any good. Wishi it still worked on ,me…

Readers? O, yeah, there were readers, I guess.

[Actually, they’re all really quiet at the moment. Joys of everyone else reading for exams, huh?]

So, yeah, I did the thing. I swear people post these on Abnib just to sucker me in. Crazy USA-centric, though.

(someone tell me how to fix the code on that, please; it looks a right shambles)

In other news, Facebook changed my name for me, so it had JTA in it (couldn’t do it automatically: John ‘JTA’ Trevor-Allen is invalid because it “contains too many capitals,” so I’m seeing if I can’t get into the swing of that, now…

“In the name of God — go!”*

Seriously, shove off out of it, you swines.

No, I’m not talking about Israel having another pop at the Lebanese. I’m not even supporting the dismissal of the Long Parliament – I’m sat here twiddling my thumbs and waiting for the Act of Union to be over and done with, so we can have an English parliament without a bunch of Scottish MPs cluttering it up and making a bloody nuisance of themselves.

It would appear that the bulk of Scotland is in favour of going off and being “Scotland” again, and I think Wales would rather like to do the same, given an Assembly with slightly more teeth and some members who might be capable of actually forming a coalition, rather than just talking about it (Although I think if they go, they’d better go good and hard, because it’ll be a logistical nightmare to just give them the old Principality back and try to re-militarise Ludlow – can you imagine trying to corner a tank at the traffic lights above the Feathers?)

I personally would like to see the whole thing come to bits because I’m not a fan of, eg, Top-up fees, the legislation for which only came through because the Scottish MPs – who knew damn well it wouldn’t affect them – voted in favour of it. If they’d not been there then the whole thing would’ve got defeated by the English MPs – who it would affect – and who knew damn well it was a daft idea. I’d like a break-up that left a Welsh and Scottish representation in Westiminster on a purely national level (which is to say something that leads to Trevor McDonald saying “Mr. Ben Jones, MP for Wales today joined forces with his Scottish counterpart Mr. Jock McTavish to protest against the under-representation of their two vast constituencies in British politics.”) I think that would balance things out a bit. And England can put an representative for England into the Scottish Parliament and another into the Welsh Assembly.

After all, in the whole run-up to the local elections we’re told that there’s going to be huge moves for devolution, and now it seems to have gone a bit quiet. I’m probably missing something, but I can’t find much in the news to say, eg, “Her Majesty has today called for the re-appointment of the Prince Bishops to the seats of Durham and Chester in what has been seen as the first move towards defending England from the secessionist Celtic republics of Scotland and Wales…”

Which is a shame. Because, apart from anything else, (including the fact that nobody much wants to be in the Union anymore) I don’t think it would do much harm. I can’t imagine we’re going to revert to border raids if we say “actually the UK was a nice idea at one point, but it’s now looking a bit feeble, let’s put an end to it,” and I’m fairly sick of living in the only bit of the Union that’s left without representation at what we might call the National level. Sure, I can vote for a MP who can go off and be with lots of other MPs, but where’s my AM, hmm?

And, quite apart from anything else, ‘God Save the Queen,’ as the national anthem of the UK is frankly pants when you compare it to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (or, even, to be fair, ‘I vow to thee, my country’).

I’m assuming, mind you, that a break-up would be nice and amicable, and without closed borders and checkpoints and things. I’m imagining, here, more of a “separate beds” thing than an “acrimonious divorce with obscenities scratched into the bonnets of the ex’s car at midnight,” but I’m fairly confident we can manage that. I admit Wales might be a bit shakey (If we see Scotland as the wife in the break-up I’m fairly sure Wales is the child that always suffers, if only because after 700-odd years it’d be a damn big shock to suddenly get put outside with a suitcase full of toys and told to get on with it) but I reckon it’s worth a go. Anyone who really hates the idea can move to one of the other places and we can see if we can all still be friends. It’s got to be worth a go.

It’s just a thought, but I’m all for it. I’m not, really, in favour of the Regicide, but I will grant that he was good at stirring up trouble. (So, of course, was Leo Amery, so I can probably claim to be quoting him). Speaking as a pro-devolutionist, therefore, and working on the assumption that we can still meet up for coffee and things without sniping about who used to steal all the metaphorical duvet each time we bump into one another at a party, let’s have some of that dissolving, shall we?

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing lately…. Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God,—go!

Well, that’s enough making a nuisance of myself; I should go do an afternoon’s work…

*Or “Don’t stuff your head up with things you don’t understand“

Dudes! I finally posted about my holiday!

The Avon Ring Narroboat Holiday Page:
The full write-up of the holiday now exits. It’s huge. At 18, 695 words, it is, I think, the longest thing I’ve ever written, and it’s probably taken me close on 24 hours of actual writing time. I blame this entirely on my starting to write it and then thinking “Heh, I wonder if I can try and do a Jerome K. Jerome style of writing?” That, and my thinking “I really want to try to get down everything that happened so I don’t forget it.”

You don’t have to read it all, I realise that’s pretty damn vast. But it’s there if you want it; go click the link.

Have fun!

Public transport…

#1: Trains: The syphillitic drippings from the Devil’s wart-ridden cock.
That is all. Thank-you.

Why aye, Abnib. Let me barge in, there…

Intro.
..And add a wee bit to the ongoing “Religion” thing. I’m not out to get drawn into the wider debate, mind (not yet, leastways) but I’m dropping in a quick reply to Andy’s question, and from here so I can lob a photo in more easily. [Well, I say that, what I mean is “from here I have more hope of getting a photo to work”…]

Handily flagged-up disclaimer:
This is rather, I’m afraid, by recounting a religious experience, with all the gubbins of “unverifiable thing what happens to one person” that entails. If you can’t deal with that in a sensible and adult manner, than shove off to the American Bible Belt and make a nuisance of yourself over there, because you’ll not be welcome here, my friend. Fair warning.

Main bit.
Some years ago now – I think I’ll have been in the region of eight or nine – we ended up, in the course of a family holiday, on Lindisfarne. There, as yon Wikipedia doesn’t, at first skim point out, they’ve got a statue to Saint Aidan the man who re-Christianised the North (as the Wikipedia entry does say).

And here we have a photo of said statue:

Note the lowness of the thing. We’re talking something basically life-size here, not a hulking great thing that rears up to the skies. We’ve got a wee copper staff, but it’s not likely to act as much of a lightning conductor, or owt, especially not on warm, cloudless, summer days.

We were there on a warm, cloudless, summer day. And my parents thought “That’s a nice statue, let’s get a photo of it,” and promptly sent me over to pose with it, as parents do when on holiday. So I went and stood on the raised bit on the left side of the statue, the one closest to the camera in that shot there, and leant against it, propping the bulk of my weight on my left arm, in turn leaning on the stone of the statue, somewhere in the region of the elbow-fold in the cloak, and a a good foot or so away from yonder staff thingy.

Which was the point at which the bastard thing sent a shock right through my arm. It quite and electric shock, such as you get from a fence, or something, it was just a definite thump right down my arm.

That scared me witless, and we ended up not with the photo, because I refused to touch the thing again, and kept bursting into tears when I was asked to.

All very disconcerting. I genuinely don’t think I got an electric shock, or anything; I didn’t get any sudden convulsions of muscles, or hairs sticking up or pain, or owt. I just got a thumping great pulse off it.

Those of you who’ve paid over-much attention to the backs of my hands may, at some point, have noticed my broken knuckle, on the ring finger of my right hand. The finger ends, and then, a quarter of an inch later, I’ve got a knuckle, which makes that finger look like it’s a lot shorter than it should be, only slightly longer than my little finger. I get the same thing with the corresponding toes on both feet, so I look like I’ve got a big toe, two toes of equal length, then a sudden drop and another two toes of equal length. It’s very weird.

The only equivalent knuckle I’ve got that isn’t busted, as you should, by this point, have been able to divine, is the knuckle of my ring finger on my left hand. That’s fine, and contrives to look very much like it’s supposed to. I’m bloody sure the damn thing never bloody used to; they were all weird and busted up even before.

And that’s why I thought I’d slug in an answer to Andy’s question. I reckon it’s as close to proof of owt as I’m ever likely to get, and, since most people dinnae even get that, I reckon it’ll be good enough for me.

That is all.

Have fun!

“Neither use nor ornament”…

…and other bad ways for an optician to describe the glasses you’re wearing.

I have just discovered the most disturbing thing in the world. And it isn’t even on the Internet.

Instead, it’s the moment when you go for an eye test, and sit down, and they turn the light off, point out where the mirror is, turn on the typical letters-whose-size-decreases chart, and give you some fake glasses to cover up your left eye and ask you, with the right eye, to read the chart, and you sit there and say, “Er… God Almighty, that’s awful. Is the top letter A?”

Before you ask, it doesn’t help very much if the left eye fares better and gets you through the second line of “E, O” before descending into abject fuzz and rubbishness.

Apparently, though, I’m still pretty well off, with a ‘-1.50 sph’ in my right eye and a ‘-1.25 sph’ in my left, down from ‘-0.5 sph’ right, ‘+0.25 cyl left’ last time round, but I still need new glasses. Evidently these headaches I’ve been getting have more to them than I’d thought, but I’ll get onto that in a minute. For now, I’ve got no glasses.

This is because, having decided they were rubbish, they’ve taken them off me, so they can re-use the frame and save me money, because whilst the University will pay for my eye test, it won’t pay for my glasses because I need them for things other than work and work alone (like, eg, driving. I’m must “Never, ever, ever start the engine [of a car] unless I’ve got my glasses on,” says my new and really cool optician. Well, maybe not cool. Really very friendly, though).

So until they “give me a ring when they’re finished” I don’t have any glasses. Since I got sent, by work, for the eye test in case my current glasses weren’t good enough and were dragging me into mistakes, taking them off me altogether seems a bit random, but never mind.

On, as I say, to the headaches.

I have a problem with pain. Or, rather*, I tend to disregard aches. If, on the rare occasions when I’m cycling, I try to go really fast and all the muscles in my thighs start to hurt really badly and cramp up, slowing me down, I respond by trying harder, which, Ruth tells me, is the precise opposite of what I’m meant to do. Likewise, if sitting in front of a computer is giving me a splitting headache, I’ll stay where I am and maybe drink an extra bit of water and knock back a pill. I’ve thrown my back before now trying to carry really heavy things on the grounds that even if it’s hurting really badly, I probably just need to try harder.

I blame this entirely on my knees. My knees, as far back as I can remember, have given me trouble. Back when I was six, and couldn’t sleep some nights because they were so bloody agonising (I know it was six, because I got told off after it turned out I’d been dosing myself up on [the appropriate amount] of purple Calpol just to make the pain go away) it got dismissed as growing pains. Since then I’ve been told I have patella tendonosis, or, to put it another way, my lower leg is on a slight twist, thus screwing up the joints in my knees.

This got promptly ignored by everyone – I only got sent to the consultant who said “yes, it’s not just growing pains” at the age of seventeen, and then I saw the note my doctor had sent and it contained several heavy hints of “he’s just making this up, isn’t he?” Indeed, bar giving me lots and lots of ibruprofen for six years (which I stopped taking after it got to the point where I could take 800 mgs at a go and still not feel any change except getting more queasy), and, recently, agreeing to give me tasty co-cadamol instead, nobody’s ever really done anything. I had a physio, in Aber, but he said there wasn’t really anything that could be done, and I should use exercise bikes and things.

The upshot of all this is if I draw an exponential scale of “background pain” from one to ten, with zero being nothing at all, I have about one day a fortnight where I am, for the whole day, at less than one. Normally I’m on two, three or four. Today I’m on four, which, really, is like having a fairly nasty headache in my knees. Just the left knee today, I don’t know why the change round like that. Ruth’s told me off before, for not saying when it hurts, but I’m long since past the point where that does me any good…

…The downside of all this, of course, is that I tend to regard pain as “one of those things,” to be put up with, like “often it is cold in winter,” or “sprouts don’t taste very nice.” So when I get, eg, lots of headaches, I don’t think “Man, this is rubbish, maybe my eyes are having trouble and I need glasses,” but “Damn that hurts. I’ll take a pill,” or, “God, I wish this headache would leave over for a minute.” It’s the same problem with a bike. “Maybe I’m trying to go too fast” never occurred to me; I just thought “Sodding legs! Stop hurting!” and pushed even harder, with the result that when I stopped and got off the bike, the damn things gave way under me because I’d buggered up the muscles.

I don’t mean to whinge, of course, I’ve got it far less than some people, and in many ways I’m very lucky. I just find it really strange to imagine that there’s people out there where they get up and don’t think “Crap, this is going to be a bad day, my knees are stiff already.” Since that’s probably most of you, you’d all better enjoy it. And, then, when you’re old and having a hard time getting used to it, I’ll hobble up like a mean-spirited old git and tell you not to be such a wuss.

Hey ho. Back to the fuzzy-looking grindstone.

*and before Aber people start making snide or sarky remarks, thank-you very much.

My future brother-in-law is the Son of God! Gimme a new knife…

…And other things not to say on an areoplane.

So on Thursday I finished at work, dragged a 70-litre rucksack onto my back, caught hold of my black briefcase/shoulderbag thing that always weighs like it’s made of lead, hefted a large wicker basket wrapped in cellophane in my other hand and staggered out of the office feeling thoroughly encumbered. Once Ruth had arrived and ditched her bike in the rack we set forth for the railway, where I paid a frankly criminal hundred and forty pounds for two returns to Durham – with, look you, a 33% Young Persons Railcard discout; I dread to think what it would’ve been otherwise – and off we went for another one of those weekends where we draw different coloured lines all over the map for a few days before winding up right where we started.

Bizarrely, the train was on time, although we did spend a fun minute pretending to be Germans* and sulking about the train beforehand which was a disgraceful fifty seconds behind time. Thus we left Oxford by the 1735. Three hours later, somewhere between Leeds and York, Ruth has an epiphany, and discovers that it’s actually “A really long way” from Oxford to Darlington. Aye, it is that.

An hour and a half after that, we actually made it to Darlington, where the Rev. collected us and took us back to Colburn, where Ruth’s room was annoyingly full of moths. In consequence we spent most of Friday swatting the little bastards and bagging up things to be put through the wash.

Anyway, after that we went off to Robin’s school to see him playing Jesus in ‘Jesus Christ: Superstar’.

I’ve always – guiltily – liked Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat; liked because I actually enjoy it, guiltily because, unmusical though I am, I’ve been told Webber isn’t actually that good at music. What I’d never seen, however, was him trying to do something else. I remain deeply confused as to how one can take the greatest story ever told ™, and certainly the all-time bestseller, and, by adding music make it so enormously dull and confusing.

Don’t get me wrong on this; Robin was really good, as was Mac, the guy playing Caiaphas, an ultra-cool [read: wearing a very long coat and hat and therefore ultra-cool] Jewish priest, and I’d pay good money to see the guy who was Herod playing Emcee in ‘Cabaret’… But, actually, it was really poor as a show, which I think is mostly the fault of the show itself, rather than the production. (Although, that said, tech did a really bad job on it; the sound balance was wrong for the room, the lighting rig was too much over the stage and the less said about the follow-spot operators and their wobbly over-application of fade-to-pinpoint and bring-up-to-full approach to making a mess of things, the better).

I think, by and large, I’m slightly above the average level of awareness of the Jesus story as told in the Gospel. I’ve not done any scientific tests or surveys to confirm this, but I think if someone did do a thing with a clipboard in the street I’d come off ahead of people who could only supply “Born in stable; died on cross, and I think there was something about a loaf** of fishes.”

And boy did I have a hard time working out what was going on. And this certainly is the fault of the show, because it really, really assumes a whole fatass pile of prior knowledge, and then makes no attempt to explain anything. Without lighting the fires to summon the Nomad Trolls, I’d just like to re-iterate my long-standing opposition to doing things that leave the audience feeling stupid or confused. You’re relying on those guys to enjoy themselves so they either come back or tell their friends to go. Making ’em miserable is just dumb.

Still, as I said, the production did amazingly well to be decent under the circumstances, and (bar periodic oversinging, and the aforementioned rubbish lighting techs) it was all pretty fun. And, as I say, Robin, Mac and the guy who was Herod did very well. And then we went to the pub, which was fairly fun, and then Ruth & I went to Maulds Meaburn with Tom and Judith, and spent a couple of days there.

Yesterday we left Maulds Meaburn at 1330, arrived in Durham at 1455 and got on a train at 1315, which was when it was supposed to go. That was an express, which meant we were lumbered with being in London by 1825, and slogged round the Hammersmith and City line to Paddington and got onto a train to Didcot, where we arrived at 1900 and waited half and hour for a taxi to turn up and get us back to Wallingford. [Seriously, I really need to sort out my driving test, it’d make life far easier***].

When we got back, I found I’d been sent a letter from Burton McCall, the guys who do the UK customer service for Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knives people (or, at least, the half of them that aren’t Wenger). On Wednesday I’d posted off my Swiss Champ to see if they could fix it – I’ve had it since something like the fifth day after my first student loan payment, when I was in Penbryn and, since the heady days of 2003 it’s opened a Hell of a lot of bottles. Time was when it’d pop the cap of a bottle in one neat movement, but it’s been increasingly bad at that, of late, frequently taking two, three or even four goes to gain the purchase and lever the lid off. I had a look at this, and the cause seemed to be that the steel had got worn from a neat angle to a smooth curve.

That struck me as a bit of a downer but I didn’t figure it was too bad, since all the Victorinox stuff comes with a nice lifetime guarantee that I’ve previously used for things like “I’ve lost the pen out of it, please post me a new one.” So I duly got myself a jiffy bag, spent half an hour in a queue at the Post Office and dispatched it to Burton McCall to get it re-set, or something

What alarmed me about the letter was that it plainly contained no Swiss Champ. Perhaps they were about to explain that they were going to need to keep it for a month? Or that they couldn’t fix it because opening several hundred beer bottles didn’t constitute “normal use”?

To make a hollow laughing. What they said was:

“Dear Sir,
Thank you for returning your knife for repair. Unfortunately we are unable to repair it in our UK workshop and as such are offering you two options:

1) We will replace the knife free of charge under the lifetime warranty. This will mean that we do not return your original knife, but issue you with a brand new one, the same or as close to your original as is currently available.

2) We will return the knife to Switzerland for repair. This takes approximately 8-10 weeks during which time the knife is stripped down and rebuilt to a good condition.

Please call out [ie, Burton McCall’s] Customer Services Department on 0116 2344646 with your preferred option.”

This, for some reason, struck me as thoroughly fantastic. Not only did they say “Yes! You have indeed broke your bottle opener, you mentalist dipso, you! Would you like another?” but they also recognised that if you’ve been carrying one knife around for a long time (and, to be fair, they didn’t know if it was three years or thirty) there was a damn good chance you’d be really attached to it and not want to have to lose it if you could help it.

Normally, in fact, I’d go with the latter, because I do have an enormous capacity to form deep and powerful empathic bonds with inanimate objects and things****, but we’re going away in three weeks, and I want a knife.

But I thought I’d just say how much those guys rock, because it seems fairly rare, these days, to find a lifetime warranty that really seems to mean something like it. Also, brand new replacement. Winnage.

So, yeah. That’s what’s been going on at this end, except for today, which I’ve mostly spent in a thankless trawl of Google for various things, before I go back to work tomorrow.

Have fun!

* Because they have an actual railway network on the continent, rather than a network that got broken up on the laughable pretext that companies that make money from people try to serve people really well (As opposed, say, to cutting as many corners as possible in order to make more money. Hence, tangents aside, pretending to be Germans.

** That was a typo, but it amused me, so it stayed in.

*** Also, I need to do it before my Driving Theory Test runs out and I have to go and spend thirty minutes watching clips of erratic cyclists and blind bends being insultingly obvious at me.

**** I used to “rescue” rubber bands from the floor, carrying them about on my wrist because I felt really sad that after doing such a good job before they’d been heartlessly cast aside without anyone to love them. I never said I wasn’t screwed up.

…Because it fills the time.

Your Brain is Green

Of all the brain types, yours has the most balance. You are able to see all sides to most problems and are a good problem solver. You need time to work out your thoughts, but you don’t get stuck in bad thinking patterns. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, philosophy, and relationships (both personal and intellectual).

Which is kinda nice, but blue is a far nicer colour…

Meme! That’s the way to kickstart going to bed on a Sunday

The impression I get of this one (from Paul is that you’re only allowed one word answers to the questions. Which strikes me as a bit contrary to the spirit of these memes, which I’ve always taken as encouragement to rattle on as per, but, given that it’s a change, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s harder ‘n it looks.

1. Where is your cell phone? Here.
2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend? Ruth
3. Your hair? Unruly.
4. Your mother? Tired.
5. Your father? Dead.
6. Your favorite thing? Lie-ins*
7. Your dream last night? Poirot.
8. Your favorite drink? Tea.
9. Your dream car? Gadget-y.
10. The room you’re in? Bedroom.
11. Your ex? Which?
12. Your fears? Loss.
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Happy.
14. Who did you hang out with last night? Didn’t.
15. What are you’re not good at? Sleeping.
16. Muffins? Crumpets!
17. One of your wishlist items? Superfluous.
18. Where you grew up? Shropshire.
19. The last thing you did? Typed.
20. What are you wearing? Clothes.
21. What aren’t you wearing? Nothing.
22. Your pet? Tortoise.
23. Your computer? Beefyish.
24. Your life? Decent.
25. Your mood? Indifferent.
26. Missing? Presumed.
27. What are you thinking about right now? Words.
28. Your car? Austin.**
29. Your work? Weekend!
30. Your summer? Varied.
31. Your relationship status? Engaged***
32. Your favorite color? Blue.
33. When is the last time you laughed? 8 pm.
34. Last time you cried? Sunday.

* I reckon that’s one word. And, anyway, it makes nae sense otherwise.
** Austin A40, to be precise. Model II, I think we worked out. It dun’t go; hasn’t since the 70s.
*** Or, to put it another way, “Blimey, I ain’t writ that afore!”

That is surprisingly tricky. Hence some of the footnotes. Ah well. Soon the bedsheet will be dry and we can get some sleep. Have fun!

Just something…

…to while away the lunch hour (because I’ve finished today’s turns on Green Dragon) – some people over at yon BBC web magazine department have got two guys to discuss War & Peace with one of them who has read it and is a proper expert, and one who’s not read it, and is just bluffing.

They’ve hidden the names of who’s who, so you can go read it and then vote on which out of “A” or “B” is being the sneaky bluffing guy. Now I rather liked that; it reminded me of some seminars I’ve been in where you’ve had people who really didn’t do the reading and still tried to look good, and they generally came a cropper over some little mistake.

I’ll not say who I reckon was doing it, but head on over there yourselves and vote, and let me know what you thought, and then once I’m past the “spoiler threshold” of a few people having done it, I’ll fess up and say who I plumped for.

Many of you Aber-types, of course, the lucky student devils that you are, don’t really have lunch-hours, but I guess you’ve got exam results coming out today, so good luck with that, and congrats to Claire and Paul who I’ve heard from already.

(Also, Claire, how long’ve you had that blog to only get to 47 posts? How the Hell d’you do that?!)

Have fun!

Hey! I’ve been here before…

I’ve just finished reading the Judas Pair (again), and there’s something bugging me.

Every time I read something I try to map the locations onto places I’ve previously been. I’m not quite sure why. If it were, for example, a book about Bishop’s Castle (God help us), I’d try to dump my recollections of the place on top, which is fine. I’ve no trouble with the Malcom Pryce books, because Aber fits fairly neatly on top of ’em, most of the time, and that sort of thing doesn’t really bother me – after all, if something is set in a real-life location, it’s only natural to think of it as set there.

What’s more weird is the way I take other places and bend them round fictional settings. Lovejoy’s cottage, for example, is firmly mapped onto the ground floor of the house my grandmother used to have in Pleck Road, Walsall, somewhere about as un-wattle-and-daub-Norfolk-y as it’s possible to get, but it’s been mapped onto that ever since I started reading the book, although it took me ages to realise that this was the case. But at least it’s the only place I map things onto.

My infants school, on the other hand, shows no such self-control; in it’s time it’s been made to fit – with astonishing neatness and no overlapping bits, in every case – Linbury Court, the place Billy Bunter lives, the floorplan of Hogwarts (which, despite its having been thrown up in the 60’s out of concrete and pebbledashing, it still manages to do far better than the full-blown film version) and, on those occasions when Ruth’s talked about her school, St. Elphin’s as well.

Now some of this makes sense. Using my infants school as the layout for Jennings books works because I started reading those when I was in year 5, at the junior school over the road, and painfully aware that the two styles of school couldn’t be reconciled. Thieving the floorplan of somewhere sufficiently distant for me to feel some level of nostalgia, therefore, made perfect sense. However, by the time I read Harry Potter (note lack of present tense, please), I’d got plenty of other places to work with, and yet I still used Hadley Infants. The “other places to work with” had doubled by the time Ruth was talking to me about her place, and I’d even seen photos of it, but, time and again, the old hall from Hadley raises itself up a couple of floors and does the office of a common room. It’s like my brain is too lazy to store more than one set of backdrops, and it’s hoping the stuff in the foreground will make up for it.

This might be something everyone does – I know my father used to think of Green Knowe as being his grandmother’s house in Kineton, and, obviously, I know I used to think of it as being (as it then was) my grandmother’s house in Newport, and that’s probably because it’s not a story you can map onto a place sorely lacking in a big evergreen tree, even if it isn’t a yew…

To an extent, it all makes some sense. But the flexibility of the places amazes me. Seriously, the infants school hall is a perfect match for the dorms in Jennings, or, indeed, what Ruth has told me about, and the hall at Hogwarts, although I tend to ignore the silly ceiling, and everything bends itself around whatever place I’m reading about, to make sure it all fits brilliantly, which is always does.

Except, if I’m doing all the work of bending things around so the fit so well, why don’t I just imagine things from scratch?

Because, I suspect, they’re never as good.

Moria, for example, is waaaay better in my head than it is in the films, and that’s great, and, by and large, a standard requirement for any film adaptation. But compared to the floorplan of – I’m using it because I think it counts as a more mainstream example than Jennings – of Hogwarts, even when that floorplan consists largely of walls painted in magnolia, lino floortiles and low ceilings with the occasional pot-plant on the windowsill – it sucks. Even though I have, somewhere along the way, gone to the effort of dreaming up neatly carved steps and things.

Which, I suppose, is why people like telly more than books; it tries to do all the hard work for you…

Afternoon all.

My sister has broken the computer back home. That’s “broken” from the point of view of her & my mother, mind, since what she’s actually done is bugger up the mouse and the PS/2 port, not the actual machine. From where they are, though, in the land of not-knowing-the-keyboard-shortcuts, it’s effectively screwed.

I only found this out because my mother had to ring me to find out how to shut it down without damaging it, which, in some ways, puts her a level up from the average users who’d just pull the plug out – she was, once, quite good with computers, before the advent of “start” buttons which, er, don’t, in fact, start anything, and her main worry was that, without a mouse to click the shutdown button, it wouldn’t be able to park the hard disk properly, and it’d all get bust. (To be fair, she didn’t say that, but I extrapolated from the fact the computer we used to have did demand the feels-like-we’-re-computing rigmarole of returning to the c:> prompt and asking it if it’d like to get parked. It used to bring back a message that said something like “HD PARK OK. NOW TURN POWER OFF!” …)

Anyway, that call took some time, because I first had to explain the “ctrl+alt+delete, and now navigate to “shutdown” with the cursor keys” bit, and then ask why the mouse wasn’t plugged in. It wasn’t, it seems, because my sister decided it was broke last night, and tried to swap it for another mouse which “had a connector like a spaceship” in that it was “wedge-shaped, and full of little holes.” I didn’t even know we still had a mouse to plug into the com port back home, but apparently we do. Predictably, that didn’t work (Hell, even I don’t know where the serial port is on that computer, and I built the damn thing) and so (I’m guessing) she got really cross and – somehow – ripped the PS/2 mouse either in or out, so what they now have at home is a PC with a PS/2 mouse port full of the pins from the connector on the mouse, and a mouse that can never connect to anything again.

Given that the mouse plugs in at the back of the machine, down and to the left of the desk, I’m assuming she took up the mouse in two hands and ripped up and towards her. Can’t imagine why, mind. Ordinarily I’d say I’ll go home and fix it, but it’s nae really that simple, for I’m not due home until October as it is.

I’d not advise buying a whole new PS/2 mouse in the hopes that the port will be OK if you cut the power and pull the shredded pins out with tweezers, because it doesn’t sound like the balance of probability is in favour of it being in a good way, given what’s happened to it, and the box back there only has two USB ports, one of which is taken up with giving them an internet connection. Two, ordinarily, would be plenty for them, as it’s one for the Internet thing and one for the printer / USB stick, neither of which get used at the same time on enough of a regular basis to ever matter.

If, however, they’re going to have to give one over to the mouse, that suggests lots of disconnecting the Internet fun-ness whenever they want to save to a USB key, or print something, or similar.

But, even I – prone as I have always been to sudden flashes of mentalist rage in the vicinity of computers (once, after I got my top character killed in Hillsfar, because of a stupid fight in the arena because of Wak bloody Rather, after I’d spent weeks getting up at 06:00 before heading off to junior school to play it, I caught hold of the monitor, dragged it towards me and then rammed it back so it made an inch-deep dent in the wall behind it – damn thing survived, amazingly, we’ve still got it somewhere) – even I find it hard to imagine destroying a mouse just by pulling. Or, at least, destroying a mouse so the pins stay in the port; dragging it free and lobbing it against the wall I can see could happen more easily, and picking it up and slamming it into the desk so hard the button spring break I’ve done once or twice. But ripping the pins out and leaving ’em in the socket? Man, that is excessive violence against peripherals.

Also, as I say, it rather sinks the use of the PC, which always strikes me as a bit dim… Ah well. It does, at least, save me telling you about the daft dream from this morning (there was a bus, in Bath, which ended up by Morrisons in Aber, and a guy stood in the road with a crash trolley, and revived a guy in the bus next to the one I was in, who’d been having a heart attack). That dream was rubbish.

Must be something in the lack of beer…

Well it’s been a while since I had two mental dreams just before I woke up…

This one, mind, wasn’t as fantastically funny as the last one, but, in the manner of someone with nowt better to do, I’m going to tell you all about it anyway (cue mass exodus from desks as people scramble to avoid hearing someone else’s dream…)

There’s this abandoned cottage, small, and run down, and with an upstairs room quite like the front bedroom at Mauld’s Meaburn, except the floor’s on two levels, and made out of planks of rotten-looking wood. There’s two big bookcases at each end, and I’m looking through their contents – entirely old penguin paperbacks, entirely made up of the General Fiction range, with a couple of Crime ones thrown in. They’re all really tatty, and I’m poking about without any definite aim…

…and Statto suddenly rushes in, and tells me about this really important meeting I’ve got to be at. So the scene dissolves to, for some reason, a cross between the big reading room in the Northwest corner of the NLW, which has been crossed with the Jekyll and Hyde, and at which there are loads and loads of people.

The meeting appears to be ready to start, and seems to be an old Guild GM, with Bethan about to chair it, and it’s running late because I haven’t turned up. And then my mobile goes, and I end up having some sort of conversation with someone on the other end, possibly about the books I’d been looking at. That takes ages, and Bethan gets really cross, and tells me to get off the phone so she can get on with the meeting (although why it can’t happen without me, I don’t know).

I tell her to get stuffed, because it’s really important that I take this call, and that I have to talk to this person (although I don’t know who the person is). Bethan reacts really badly to that, in the sense that she turns into Bec Corn, the meeting vanishes, and me and Statto are in a faceless indoor shopping centre, like the Bull Ring, or Telford, or somewhere, trying to get onto a travellator. It’s really hard, because it’s steep, and so we crouch down. It’s lucky we did, because I nearly get my head taken off by the transparent pale-blue plastic roof that’s over the thing about four foot from the floor.

Then it levels out, and turns into a pneumatic tube, which gets dark and less blue, and which is really bumpy and uncomfortable, and spits us out by the kiosk in Waitrose in Wallingford, where a burly guy in orange dungarees demands to know what we were doing in the corpse tube. I ask “what corpse tube,” and he explains that’s how they move coffins about the place, and it isn’t an escalator at all.

So we go and look for beer. (I dunno why, because Statto doesn’t drink the stuff) I can’t find any bottles, all I can see is tins, such as plum tomatoes come in, with orange labels, and pull-rings. Then Statto turns up really angry holding a bottle of Newky Brown, full of beer, but with a hole in it, and wants to know why I smashed it, and I say I didn’t, and he says that yes I have, look, it’s right in front of me, which it is, on a pallet loaded up with bags of sugar. So we have an argument, Mansbridge arrives, and the alarm goes off and wakes me up.

I’m starting to wonder if these might be stress-type dreams, of the sort I’ve not had for some time, and which I never remember to keep tabs on, so I’m trying with the tabs thing now. Of course, it could just be that I’m going mental… Certainly bloody sounds like it.

Edit: 18-52, 21/02/07
Put in links to Bethan’s blog. And, er, wikipedia page, the presence of which took me rather aback. In the interests of fairness, therefore, I’ve linked to a BBC page for Bec, since it was a choice between that, or the bit on the Guild website from when she resigned, and I dinnae trust the Guild to keep the site going with all the links where they are at the moment [or, you may rightly surmise, very much at all]. In t’unlikely event Bec’s wandering about over here and wants me to plug a proper blog instead, she’s more’n welcome to drop me a comment.

And now I’m going to get a shift on out of the Reserve, because in three minutes they stop paying me to be here.

Somnrisusing. Or something like that.

I had the weirdest experience, this morning. At 06:00 I laughed myself awake. I’ve never done that before. It was… odd.

See, what happened was, I was having this dream, which featured a land-rover and some really muddy hills, and me, Norman, Nick Frost and a third guy whose fact I don’t even slightly remember, were slogging over them.

At which point, the whole scene faded to the dining room at Manse Road, where I lived until about 2001, with the old leather sofa that used to be in there, and the little brown sofa from Hafan and the little table we got and then gave to Dan and Claire.

And on the table were shots, I think of Vodka, or something equally foul, and… Nick Frost was knocking back these shots and trying to sing the song that Lister, Petersen, Selby & Chen sing in a Red Dwarf flashback scene in something like series one (“I’ve been to Titan / I’ve been to Polanski / I can name ninety men / Who’ve slept with Kochanski”) …except he was really drunk, and kept getting it wrong, and had to keep drinking shots as forfeits, and then he’d get it wrong again…

At this point, in my dream, I was in a laugh-out-loud giggle loop, and I kept thinking “I need to stop laughing, or I’ll wake up!” After what seemed to be half an hour of this, I did wake up, sniggering madly away with, as Jeff says, my shoulders going like I’m drilling the road…

…except, it turned out, I wasn’t actually laughing. I know this, because I was finding this dream so funny, and shaking with laughter so much, that Ruth woke up, under the impression I’d finally cracked and was sobbing hysterically and trying to keep quiet about it so I didn’t wake her. Presently, therefore, she asked me what was wrong, and I said something like “It’s… so… funnnnny!!” and then I thought “Er, no it isn’t. Why in the name of God am I giggling so much?!”

I still can’t work out what was funny about it now. Or why Norman was there, or anything else about it.

But laughing yourself awake at 6am is kinda new to me, so I thought I’d foist the concept on the Internet and save myself the trouble of thinking about it anymore. Anyone who’s had that happen to them, mind, is more’n welcome to tell me about it…