We had to go to Tesco this afternoon. Needing a paper shredder, we figured it’d be better if we went to a Tesco Extra (wider range of stock) so we headed off to the big one in Portwood.

I don’t know what it is about this particular store, but it just drains me of my will to live; me and Trump always end up getting into a strop there too. This usually happens at the fruit and veg section, but today, tempers started to rise by the time we got to shampoo. By the time I got to fruit and veg, I wanted to kill. I wanted to kill everybody.

The fruit and veg section is never helped by a lot of aisle space being taken up by cages being left all over the place, but the people who dawdle and make passage from one end to the other absolutely impossible. And it’s not even worth thinking about actually trying to pick up any veg because of peoples’ trolleys blocking the shelves.

Today, my progress was blocked by the entire width of the aisle being filled with people, trolleys, children, walking at 0.2 miles per year. Why aren’t you allowed to run at them really quickly and ram a trolley into the backs of their legs?

And then there are the children: pushing trolleys (sideways); walking alongside their parents, taking up space; standing in the way; screaming; breathing.

Fuck.

The only compensation is knowing that I don’t have to go home with the little shits.

Cilantro is what the Americans call the leaf of the coriander plant – it makes sense and saves confusion between the green bit and the seeds.

Coriander leaf is a major component of Asian and Oriental cooking, it adds a pungent, fragrant flavour to dishes that I really enjoy. I love coriander, but coriander doesn’t like me!

Apparently, coriander is an aphrodisiac (weh-hey!), but also a laxative (ah). I must admit that I’ve never experienced its aphrodisiac effects, but I often fall victim to its laxative properties. Yes, I love curries, but I find that within an hour or so of finishing, my guts start churning…

… and then I shit myself.

Without fail.

Annoying eh?

People who understand databases are weird
I’m trying to write a simple database. I can’t do it. I think people who understand databases can also do cryptic crosswords. In fact, the workings of a database must be something akin to Lyra’s alethiometer in the Dark Materials trilogy: lots of different overlapping planes of information all linked by jiggery-pokery and squinting.

Bah!

Bover?
I said I’d mow my parents’ lawn tomorrow. Groan. Of course, Bell-end Towers has a lawn, and this means we’ll have to buy a mower. But the choice! I’m inclined to go for a hover mower, simply because it feels like you’re mowing the lawn with a space ship – how cool is that?

Something like this wouldn’t be any good because it it’d be too big to get into the corners of lawn and it doesn’t have a grass collector.

Rocky’s beard is a bit long.

That’s him with his seatbelt on

When he got shaved the other month, the only things to survive were his eyebrows and beard. The rest of his fur has grown back, and his beard jest kept on growing too.

Him having a long beard wouldn’t normally present a problem, but we’ve gone back to Gravy Bites for his dinners, which he loves. He uses the gravy to condition his beard:

Goo!

It’s like having a little furry leper in the house after he’s had his tea; both of us try to avoid him, prevent him from coming near us and smearing his tripiness on us.

At least he’s not a toddler – they’re always full of snot and slobber and stickiness. Manky little bastards. I’m sure that between the ages of 8 months and 5 years, all children constantly have snot dribbles on their top lips. Disgusting.

I fail to see the attraction in them.

How do I tell my sister??? As much as I love my little niece, it makes me feel a bit queezy to go near her; she’s had a cold and terrible bogies since she started nursery in November.

Children: disease-carrying parasites or bringers of joy and pensions?

Cold

After a couple of weeks of lovely warm weather, it’s gone quite nippy again. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Things are exciting!

Me and Trump signed the contract for Bellend Towers today. Trump’s already bought a house, I’ve never done this before; it feels a bit odd, but great. A little place for us and our menagerie (and menorrhoea) up in Rochdale, away from the ghetto and towards greenery.

We have a canal running outside our front door. It’s the same canal that runs into Manchester, to Canal Street where the queers are. In the other direction, it runs to Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, where there are even more queers – it’s where lesbians go to let their toe hair grow and retire in Camper sandals and camper vans.

I’m considering buying a jet-ski to get to work. Although a scooter might be more economical and less damp.

Bellend Towers has three places to wee (not including the canal or kitchen sink), two to poo (we’re not allowing solids in the downstairs lav). This is a little excessive I feel, especially since there are only two of us and we never allow visitors, but hey, that’s modern homes for you.

Everything is beige. I can live with this, although it is rather like living in a tub of margarine. We didn’t choose the light fittings (then again, we don’t have to pay for them either) and we have a huge fuck-off, twelve-lamp, chandelier in the main bedroom. That’ll be nice, having our retinas blown out by having that put on first thing in the morning.

How did we come about acquiring this property? Well here’s how to do it:

1. Put your house on the market, but get fed up of not being able to sell it because you’re trying to sell in an area where only total idiots seem to want to buy;
2. Happen up new developments in the same area where you were looking to buy, decide to check out Persimmon’s coach houses;
3. Drive to Rochdale;
4. Find development, drive in, wander into sales office and look bemused at the house types: “Don’t you have two types of coach house?”
5. Encounter Carole, the shortest, yet most powerful saleswoman on the planet, “No, just the one, well, the foundation’s only just gone down, but it’s a belting property”
6. “Oh, we thought you had two types…. Oh hang on, we were looking at Persimmon, this is Bellway! But oh, right, you do part exchanges do you?”
7. Find out that we can’t a part ex for a coach house, “But go and have a look at a Hamilton, it’ll show you the build quality and kind of finishes we do. Check out Plot 9”
8. “…Hrrrm, this is actually quite nice, and with the part ex and discounts….”

Two months later and we’re almost moved in. I think I’ve signed all that I need to, I might go on holiday and leave Trump to do the packing and moving.

I started my new job today. It’s nice. My new boss had a jiddy fit. It was OK.

Spring is with us and there’s no doubt about it. Just a few weeks ago, we were suffering very cold spells and overnight frosts; just three weeks ago, I had to rid my car’s windscreen of ice before I could drive it to work.

Now, we’re basking in sunshine and temperatures of 19°C, rising to 23°C by the end of the week (a good temperature for July over here). This has brought out the daisies and dandelion wet the beds (more later) on the field at the back of Tumpsniffer Towers. The fine weather has also brought out the children and families who play there.

Kids playing football, kids playing cricket. No bother, just enjoying themselves and getting hot and sticky before teatime. There’s no better way of enjoying your evening meal other than red in the face, head pounding, sweaty and covered in dirt and grass stains. Good for them.

On closer inspection, one thing becomes apparent: cricket is played exclusively by the Asian kids; football by the white ones. No black children are there; they’re probably doing their homework under threat of death from their mums.

I wonder why Asian folk don’t seem to play football. Cricket is such a shit sport: five days to play a game; you stop for tea; stop if it goes a bit dark or wet; five days to play a game and you can still get a draw! What sort of nonsense is that? Make them play in the rain, that’d make it a bit interesting at least.

Ongoing sagas
Since starting this blog, I have on numerous occasions, made mention of my long term battle with contact lenses. I got some new ones through the post this weekend. Firstly, I couldn’t tell which one went in which eye because the only information about this was on a label on the box that had been thrown in the bin. When I finally got them the right way round, the prescription on one of them is out and I can’t see too well through it.

My right eye aches like a total bastard because I’ve been squinting all day and now I’m getting a headache.

When the moon hits your eye
This filled me with glee. I always give those face on speed cameras the two fingers, but I wish I could persuade Trump to do this.

Newness
Orange phoned me up today and told me they were changing my tariff and sending me a new phone. Good old Orange.

Dandelion wet the bed
Dandelions make you wet the bed if you touch them.

Down in Norfolkland last week, we had a lovely pudding; something made with rhubarb and polenta and yoghurt (blame Nigella). It was delish. Trump decided she’d make it for our Sunday tea (no main course – straight to the pud), so I was sent on an errand to buy provisions from the supermarket. “Get custard and bio yoghurt”. Those were the instructions.

I was in an unfamiliar supermarket (Morrison’s in Rochdale) and, not knowing where anything was, or whether the natives were hostile, I felt a little flustered. I finally found the custard, or what I thought was custard – the shelf edge label said “creme anglaise”, but the main product logo was obscured by a sticker, but in the trolley it went, along with the other provisions.

We’ve just had our tea and I was a little disappointed with my expensive, creamy, vanilla custard. Investigating, I removed the “Try me free” sticker that had been obscuring the name on the pot and I read it. It dawned on me that we’d been hoodwinked into buying “Nomoo“, a dairy-free alternative to custard. Try me free, I wouldn’t have tried you at all had I known.

FUCKERS!

How dare they call it “Nice vanilla custard” advertise it as creme anglaise, cover up its real name with a fucking sticker and pretend to be high quality custard when it is in fact, crank food for flip flop-wearing Guardianistas, with the information relating to its crankiness being in the tiniest of shitty writing.

Bastards, ruining my tea. I can feel an e-mail coming on. Morrison’s and NoMoo watch out.

Leave it on the table
I love eating out. We went into Manchester yesterday afternoon. It was quite late when we went in and, since it was approaching teatime and since I’d been starving after finishing my lunch, we decided to eat at Croma in the City Centre.

Croma is lovely; with a simple menu of unassuming appetisers, salads, pizzas and pastas. You know what you’re getting when you go to a Croma, and it’s always great quality and a nice environment.

Yesterday was no different, but when my starter arrived, my hunt around the table for the salt pot led me to realise that none of the tables had either salt or pepper. What? Why the hell not? Just put a salt pot and a black pepper grinder on each table, then you don’t have to yell at the busy waiters to get their attention so they can bring them over.

Just put salt and pepper on the bloody table, for fuck’s sake.

And when he brought it over it was a salt mill, not a salt pot. A salt mill with one setting: coarse. Coarse to the point where they might as well have brought the packet of rock salt to the table.

So, to repeat: table salt in a salt shaker; white pepper in a pepper pot; black pepper in a mill.

And dairy products in my fucking custard!

Neighbours are cocks.

All the parking spaces near here were taken up by the usual hoards of visitors to them over the road last night. I ended up parking outside the house of bling with the intention of moving my car, should a space nearer here come available.

One didn’t, and it wasn’t as if the wind chime obsessed bint couldn’t park relatively near to her property when she got back from wherever she’d been, so I started doing bedtime things at 10.30.

At 10.45pm, there was a knock at the door, trump answered.

“Hello, is that your car [reciting some numbers from my registration]? It’s just that it’s parked outside my house. Can you get him to move it?”

“She. She only parked there because people have parked outside our house. And she’s in bed. But there’s nowhere else to park, look”, Trump indicated at the full road outside the house.

“Well, OK, but don’t let it happen again.”

Stupid fucking cunt. Did she really think that I’d parked there for the sake of it? Did she really expect me, or anyone else, to move a car at 11pm? Was it really such a hardship for her to park behind my car?

I hate people round here; they’re all total fucking retards with either no pride in their homes, or so much that they think we all want to appreciate their awful taste in wind chimes and other ridiculous house jewellery.

This is only a fraction of the shite that she hangs from her house, but you get the picture.

When we finally get out of here, those wind chimes are coming down.

And then I’ll burn her house down.

Lesbosians
I see that people from Lesbos are objecting to the word Lesbian being used to describe gay women rather than people emanating from there. They first want its “gay” use to banned in Greece, and then they’ll take on the rest of the world.

Why don’t they just use their common sense and refer to themselves as “Lesbosians”, or even “Fucktards”?

We’re here…

For now at least.

We’re off home again in the morning after spending the past few days here in Norfolk. It’s been nice. Look, the beach at Wells in sunshine!

These things are brilliant for washing the dishes with:

Perhaps not those particular ones, those look a bit rubbish, but the proper ones are ace for doing the pots with. With nice hot water and good washing up liquid, they’re the best things for getting all the mush off your dishes, leaving them squeaky clean. You can use the abrasive edge to take off any dried on food, while the sponge helps the washing detergent foam up, making it go so much further.

On the other hand, these things are totally shit:

Unless they’re absolutely desperate, do people actually use these things to do the washing up? They’re useless! We’ve run out of washing up sponges and we’ve had to resort to dishcloths instead.

Dishcloths have two purposes:

• Cleaning the carpet after one of Rocky’s dirty protests
• Stopping water dripping over the end of the bath

RUBBISH!

But check this out. A whole site devoted to dishcloths; industrial ones! Those stupid, stiff ones that are half sponge, half cloth, wholly crap. You know, those blue and white stripy ones – I think they’re called J Cloths.

They could clear a whole aisle of this shite at Tesco and give it over to things like pickles, gadgets or hair products. I might write them an e-mail.

Cute sushi lunches
Talking of which, I need to contact Tesco about their sushi packaging. They’ve changed the packaging on their large sushi packs so now the plastic tray that the fishiness comes in contains a special little well to mix the wasabe and soy sauce in. Not a bad idea, you’d have thought, except for the fact that you can’t fit any of the bits of sushi into the well to dip into the wasabe.

What’s all that about then? That’s about people meddling unnecessarily, that’s what that is.

Cheeses strings?
What the hell are cheese strings? Are they supposed to be edible? Are they part of some government plot to stunt the development of our youth to prevent them from achieving, thus consigning them to a life on incapacity benefits, a new generation of Labour party voters?

They look awful… and so do the cheese strings.

Why can kids just eat cheese?

Says I, polishing off a packet of Fox’s Viennese Melts. Fuckin’ delish!

You know what it’s like when you’re so tired that it’s a real struggle to even lift your head from the pillow, but you know you have to drag your arse out of bed to go to work because you can’t phone in sick because you have to give a presentation and then when you’re there you desperately want to cancel the contact lens follow-up appointment you’ve made for that evening because you might as well wait until your new specs are ready to pick up so you phone them up to tell them but they tell you that your specs are ready so you might as well go that evening afterall even though you feel like you’re dying and the prospect of sticking contact lenses back in your pisshole eyes makes you feel physically sick?

Well, that’s how I feel.

The combination of lack of sleep, a slight cold, hormones, stresses (good and bad) means that Sniffy is very very tired at the moment.

But why so stressed?

Well, Sniffy has finally, after about five years of trying, FINALLY got a new job, starting in May. This means that I have to do shitty things like handovers to the morons I work with at the moment as well as start picking up new bits of information about the new job. So that’s good stress.

Another good/bad stress is… buying a house. We’re doing a part exchange on Trump’s place for a new build (Bellway). I think we’re getting a good deal. I have no idea about these things. It’s in the hands of solicitors and a financial adviser. I’m keeping my head down until I’m asked to sign a cheque or a contract and once all the savings have gone and the contract is signed, the bad stress will turn into good stress. I am naturally pessimistic and wary of things, especially things involving housing developers and solicitors, but we’ll see how things go.

The return of the neighbourly squeaky chicken
I hope Rocky will be happy in Bellend Towers. He’ll have to encounter something that he’s never had to face before in his short life: doors. HA!

He’s very happy at the moment; having chewed up all his squeaky soft toys so the stuffing has fallen out, I have resurrected his squeaky rubber chicken. I’d forgotten how much he likes it. It is VERY loud and I do hope our neighbours don’t get disturbed by its constant squeaking during the day while we’re out of the house. It would be such a shame if he did anything to piss them off.

On one side, we have the Asian couple with the small children. They’re OK in the main, but it can be a bit annoying being woken up at 4am by the man’s screaming down the phone to somebody in Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad (see, I do know the names of some foreign places outside Europe and North America!). And I’m sure the sofa propped up against their window hasn’t put off any potential purchasers of Trump Towers… no, not at all. Not that we haven’t printed off the information for the FREE PICK UP service from the council and given it to them twice or anything. No, we wouldn’t think of doing anything like that.

On the other side we have Mr and Mrs Fagash and their extraordinarily loud telly. I like the way I can hear what they’re watching in their living room from our bedroom upstairs. I like the way they have a visitor for a couple of hours, but continue to have a ten minute conversation in their open doorway while blowing cig smoke into our house. I love the bloke’s impression of a pig at an abattoir whenever he has an asthma attack in the bedroom adjacent to ours at 1am.

People eh?

15th April 2008
That’s today’s date. On this day last year, it was sunny with a temperature of about 23°C. Today, exactly a year later, it’s about 8°C max, with heavy showers. I had to scrape ice from my car’s windscreen this morning. It’s fucking freezing.