I like fruit. I’m a big fruit fan. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like puddings and chocolates too (more), but fruit is good.

There are loads of sweets (“candy” to you lot) out there that purportedly have fruit flavours. Excuse me, but I beg to differ. Have you ever eaten an orange-flavoured boiled sweet? Does it taste anything like an orange? No.

Could you imagine if you peeled a lovely juicy orange (washed your hands quickly to prevent the juice from causing the skin between your fingers to sting and burn) and tasted one of the segments to find that it had the flavour of a boiled sweet or wine gum? That’d be fucking horrible beyond belief. Eeeeeuuuuuwwwww. No, that would be plain WRONG.

Boiled sweets are pretty crap anyway. Whenever people go on holiday to Spain or Greece, they return to work with HUGE bags of fruit-flavoured boiled sweets to inflict extra punishment onto their colleagues who can’t afford foreign holidays. I wish they’d just go to Tesco and get a bumper pack of Miniature Heros – something worth removing the wrapper for, i.e. Cadbury’s chocolate-based sweets, none of your boiled sugar crap.

Bored
It’s weird how I can discuss things in meetings; tell people about stuff; explain policies, procedures. But when I’m asked to do a small bit of work that means that I have to write a document about exactly the same things, I can’t bring myself to do it. I find it so tedious that I have to really force myself to hit each individual key to get the letters down. I think in the back of my mind, I’m wondering what on earth people want to know about this stuff for, it’s hardly of earth-shattering interest to anybody.

It must be part of some mechanism for population thought control; like torturous hypnosis where you’re made to repeat the same thing over, and over, and over again. With so many people employed in the public sector, and with most of these people living in key political seats, it’s hardly surprising that the Government sees the imposition of endless directives and tick-box exercises as an ideal method for brainwashing a huge section of electorate. Intelligent people become unable to think for themselves because, day after day, they are made to reiterate policies that rain down on them from Government departments. They are never able to ask “Why?”, or feed back up to the top with their own ideas.

Patricia Hewitt is a highly intelligent woman, the cream of the crop. The Department of Health and NHS are safe in her capable hands. She’s doing such a fantastic job.

The cheek on it!
Gosh, somebody who is attending a course here in the centre has just nipped in to our staff loo. Hope she’s not passing a solid in there. Cheeky thing.

Do you think somebody should tell him?
Look at this dick:

This is a chap called Rio Ferdinand. He’s an arrogant big-head, who thinks he can play football. For some reason, he’s allowed to represent England on the international stage.

Now, look at this:

I rest my case.

On just about every day that I work, I have roughly the same thing for my lunch (dinner, as we call it up here):

• Minestrone cup-a-soup
• 2 oranges
• 2 apples

The variety of fruit changes with the season and I can’t wait for nectarine and plum time; I’m getting a bit fed up of Russian Roulette Braeburns and labour-intensive oranges. I don’t know where Tesco are sourcing their braeburns at the moment, but that last few batches have been bloody horrible – sour and powdery at the same time.

People tell me that I don’t have enough to eat at lunchtime, especially since I never have a breakfast and I’m up from about 5.30am. The thing is, you can have a sandwich, pot of yoghurt and some fruit and you still end up starving hungry by 4pm for triple the calorific intake.

But today I’ve had my cup-a-soup – it was OK. I’ve endured two apples; they weren’t particularly bad, but they didn’t do much to satisfy me and I managed to chew a couple of pips too (apple pips contain cyanide you know). I’m looking at the remains of my lunch as it threatens me from inside a carrier bag on my desk: three orange things waiting to make a mess and cause my eyes to water. I don’t think I can cope with them today. I need a king size Twix…

…and chips and gravy.

A bit about avian flu
Having walked past the pond on my way back from my constitutional wander to the shops, it dawned on me that it’s hardly any wonder that there’s a concern about bird flu. Those ducks are stupid: they were all there, wandering around barefoot with snow up to their knees; jumping in to the freezing water, even diving right below the surface.

Catch their deaths, so they will. They need to be wrapped up warm with their feet up in front of Trisha, not messing about outside in the cold weather.

A complaint
I had another altercation with smokers in the entrance to my local hospital yesterday, so I e-mailed the hospital to ask if nothing could be done about these antosocial, fucktard scumbags. I got a nice reply today – very prompt of them – saying they were really tired of the problem, but are trying other initiatives to ensure that smokers use the shelters provided. The woman who e-mailed me then went on to say: “… however the culture of the catchment area is containing a high percentage of smokers who do not take kindly to being asked to move elsewhere.” In other words, they’e a bunch of fucking scumbags who give abuse whenever they’re told to do anything.

We’ll see.

It’s not as if I’m even that bothered about it; I can tolerate cigarette smoke, having enjoyed up 50 a day myself in my life. It’s just the principle of the thing (I would never smoke where it was prohibited) and the fact that the fuckers act like “Am ah bovvered??” abusive teenage shits whenever you challenge them. They’re like a different species, they are definitely sub-human in their ability to communicate and process simple logic – or rather, inability to do so in anything other than the manner of a juvenile. Perhaps lighting up in that particular spot could trigger something to seal off the area and pump a load of toxic gas in there?

Snow
I was really surprised when I got off the motorway to find the ground thick with a covering of snow. Then again, it had been forecast and everywhere else has been getting it over the past couple of days.

It was freezing when I left home this morning: -3°C and the car was thick with ice, but it was lovely and bright. Of course the motorways had been gritted and as soon as I picked up speed, my windscreen got covered in salt spray. The temperature gauge told me it was still below zero outside. Why then did I try to use my screenwash, knowing that it’d be frozen? The result of this was a couple of sweeps of the wipers over the windscreen that the smeared salt over the entire glass. Couldn’t see a fucking thing for the next ten miles of my journey.

Use the force, Luke.

Sometimes you think about the decisions you’ve made during your life and there are some that you wish you’d thought about a little bit more before taking the plunge. These seem like minor decisions at the time, but they turn out to have quite an impact on your later life.

It’d be nice to have a time machine so you could revisit certain points in your past, not to interfere with things too much, but just to give you the opportunity to leave yourself a note…

• 1982: MOVE AWAY FROM THAT PASTY! Your mum is cooking a big tea and you don’t need pasty, chips and gravy on top of it at lunchtime. A sandwich will tide you over just fine. Oh, and make a bit of an effort in PE, you lazy slob.
• 1986: Don’t agree to go out with Glenn, you’re only doing it because Mark asked you as a favour to him. You know you don’t fancy him and you’re being unfair to both of you. You know that you’re just waiting to see who you meet at 6th form… and you know damn well you’re not thinking about the lads you might meet there.
• 1987: Put that application in to go to Cambridge. It may seem too far from your family, but you’ll get used to it. It’ll be a great opportunity and those posh birds are well up for it.
• 1987: You might like biology, but you should think about chemical engineering – or how about biting the bullet and going for medicine? It might not be as bad as you think.
• 1991: Stay here in Leeds, you’re happy here. Don’t listen to those idiots who are telling you to move away. Where the fuck is Warwick anyway?
• 1991: Oh, and you need to get to the gym a bit more and cut back on the booze.
• 1991: Do NOT, NOT, NOT go into that shop and buy any fags! Stay in the fucking car.
• 1991: Go knock on Ela’s bedroom door and see if she’s got any fags, but take your time to leave – strike up a conversation! Get in there…
• 1992: You know this isn’t for you. You should’ve stayed in Leeds, but that can’t be helped now. Quit while you’re ahead and a PGCE.
• 1993: Go on… see about doing a PGCE.
• 1994: When was the last time you went to a gym? Look at you, you fat git!
• 1994: Don’t leave that note calling the security guard a spastic, just don’t do it.
• 1994: Do you really need to go to the pub every night in the week?
• 1995: You need to cut back on the booze and stop eating so much.
• 1996: You really need to watch what you’re drinking – and you’re eating too much.
• 1997: You’ll be a size 24 soon, do you really need chips and gravy on top of 10 pints of Strongbow and a full dinner?
• 1997: Don’t get any closer to the boss. You’re drunk, he’s drunk, you’re both pissed off at each other. Get the Jacob Marley image right out of your head this second!
• 1998: You need to cut down on the booze and get some exercise.
• …..
• …..
• ……

You see the pattern?

Blimey, what a nagging bastard I am. You see, what I really needed was somebody to look after me.

Crazy
A time machine would be really useful for me to go back and kill Patsy Kline before she sang Crazy. I’d also snuff Jennifer Rush and Andrew Lloyd Webber. These bastards are responsible for providing my neighbour’s repertoire of songs that she belts out at all times of day and night. Stupid, useless, parasitic, fucking wench and stain on society that she is.

She’s this horrible, cackling bitch who thinks she can sing a couple of songs and so lets rip every now and again. I was trying to sleep the other night when she started her rendition of Crazy (for loving you) and The Power of Love at 10.45pm – in the room of their house that adjoins my bedroom. Not that I’m awake at 5.30am for work or anything. Of course, they don’t quite get the concept of “work” since they don’t have to bother with it, what with us paying for their luxury lifestyle with our taxes and everything.

Why? Who is she trying to impress? She won’t be fucking impressed if she does it again and get a fucking ASBO slapped on her sorry fat arse.

Twat.

*So there’s this chain of shops that are present in and near most NHS hospitals in the UK – or in England at least, since the UK doesn’t really exist any more thank you very much Tony Blair you fucking wanker. This chain of shops is called McColl’s and they’re a general store that functions as a newsagents, grocers, off-licence, that type of affair. Because they have the monopoly for being THE retail outlet of the NHS, this means that they can get away with hugely inflated prices for the shit they peddle.

Frexample, take Cup a soup: Tesco price 89p per pack (or 2 packs for £1.40), McColl’s price £1.40 per pack; packet of crisps: Tesco (Express) price, 30p; McColl’s price, 50p. Get the idea? My snot sandwich the other day cost me something like £2.50 and others were over £3.

It’s the type of place that has a wall of fridges that stock solely Coca Cola products and still mineral water – no fizzy mineral water. I challenged the assistant in the McColl’s in my local hospital the other week: “Haven’t you got any chilled fizzy water? You seem to have LOADS of varieties of still mineral water.”

“We don’t put sparkling mineral water in the chillers.”

“Why is that?”

“We just don’t”

“Perhaps you should. Then people might actually buy it.”

Not

Good

Enough

Wankers

Don’t fuck with me today
There’s nothing worse than an ex-smoker.

This might be true, but I’m pretty easy-going when it comes to people smoking. I oppose the ban on smoking in pubs and clubs where food isn’t sold. I think smoking in these establishments is part of the culture and the atmosphere. The country is now in danger of all its pubs become sterile clones and Whacky Warehouses full of families with young children. A large chunk of the British tradition has been lost.

However, there are places where smoking is wholely inappropriate and this includes hospitals. Most hospitals now provide smoking shelters in the vicinity of their main entrances where people can go for a fag without becoming too exposed to the elements. It’s pretty undignified and I’d favour the provision of dedicated smoking lounges within the buildings (with proper extraction and the like) – there’s something not quite right about seeing people wheeled outside in their pyjamas, IV in situ, while they hurry to smoke a cigarette. Nevertheless, the situation is that smoking isn’t allowed in the hospitals and is restricted to designated areas.

I was so very, very fucked off at having to negotiate a wall of smoke in the vestibule of the main entrance to the hospital when I went to visit Mother this evening – going in and coming out – esepcially since the smoking shelter was literally a 5 second walk around the corner. I challenged the culprits: “There’s a smoking shelter there, you’re not supposed to smoke here.”

“But it’s cold out there”

I was stunned

“I don’t care, that’s not my problem, you’re not supposed to smoke here.”

“Everybody smokes here.”

“What if everybody else shat themselves here, would you?”

They looked at me indignantly and carried on. I left before I got angry.

Ignorant cunts.

I’m going to write to the hospital Chief Executive and propose that a sprinkler system is installed that is triggered by people smoking in the entrance. Either that, or I’m going to set the fire hose on the next set of fuckers I see there.

On returning to my car, still annoyed at the altercation at the hospital entrance, I noticed that some lazy twat minicab driver had parked right behind me in a position that restricted the turning angle for my exit from my parking bay. He’d (I’m assuming “he”) obviously left his car there because he was too lazy to drive a bit further and find a proper parking space – there were plenty of parking spaces.

Did I take extra special care when manoeuvring out of my parking space? Did I perform mutliple turns of the wheel and repeated forward and reverse steps to get out without hitting the offending vehicle? Did I bollocks.

If you’d been parked legally, I’d have gladly avoided hitting you pal. Leave your car where it was because you’re too lazy to walk from a proper parking space and I’ll twat your fucking wheel arch. That, my friend, is what bumpers are for.

Do not fuck with Wendy Testaburger!

Everybody enjoy their pancakes?

Or have I finally found something worth living for?

I was looking for some action, but all I found were screaming pets and parasols…

Ahem, finding myself on Sesame Street again there for a minute.

Today is pancake day in the Sniffy household. I was very restrained and had just the two with sugar and lemon for my pudding. We were supposed to be having them tomorrow, it being Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day) and all, but Mother (awwww) is back in hospital having here pacemaker leads moved about so she won’t be in any fit state to be making pancakes for my tea. Having found a book on “Influencing people”, I persuaded her that it’d be a shame if she had to miss out on pancakes and that having them a day early would mean that she could enjoy (making) them (for me).

What’s the story?

Is it wrong to like Oasis songs from ten years ago? Pootling through my music collection the other day, it dawned on me that I didn’t have any of their stuff and that I actually quite liked some of it. Strange that I never really was into them back then because “Cigarettes and alcohol” just about summed me up when it was released back in the mid-nineties.

PEGged back
During a conversation with my ever-cheery friend David last night, I told him that I’ll be having a general anaesthetic when I have my op in a couple of weeks’ time. “Have you, you know, got anything written down? Just in case?”

“Well,” I replied, “Mum gets everything and my debts should be sorted with the loan insurance and stuff.”

“No,” he continued, “I mean like, if, you know, you have a reaction to the anaesthetic and end up in a permanent vegetative state.”

“Oh right, I hadn’t thought of that.” I hadn’t. “I don’t want a PEG feed, no way!”

PEG feeds (or percutaneous endoscopic gastronomy) are feeding tubes that are inserted surgically and they are all but permanent – their removal can only be performed surgically. Of course, once they’re in situ the medical team aren’t allowed to remove them without the consent of the patient or their next of kin. There have been high court battles over these things where one side of the family wants them removed so the patient can die with some dignity, yet other family members insist on them remaining in place – hoping against hope for some recovery. Famous cases include Tony Bland in the UK and Terri Schiavo in the States.

Should anybody in their right mind want one of these? Hell no! I’d recommend that anybody of a similar opinion carries a signed bit of paper with a “DO NOT PEG FEED” statement written on it. You never know when you might suffer a neurological trauma that renders you in a condition where there’s no chance of recovery, but where somebody might be tempted to put one of these things into you because it’s easier than reinserting an NG-feed that keeps popping out.

Besides, what’s the point of having a feeding tube if you can’t get pizza, curry or Pot Noodle through it – or even taste the stuff? Bah! To that.

Of course, other people have different attitudes to this and you have to respect that.

I ain’t havin’ no feedin’ toob, FOOL! Then again, knowing me, I might be the first person ever to recover from that state when I got hungry. I’m always being woken up through being starving hungry.

Cheery
No, I’m not, but I’m sleep-deprived because of my pathetically-needy and neurotic miniature tiger. Little bastard was scratching and crying at my bedroom door for ages throughout the night because I decided that I wanted my bed to myself for a change. Shithead.

Nu Shooz
I put that reference in for people Googling the one-hit-wonders who brought us “I can’t wait” in 1986. But I did buy new shoes last week – really borin’ black school shoes. Schuh was a nightmare: the thing I admire about Asian people is their sense of family and how they all stick together and look after each other, but surely the entire extended family isn’t required when one person needs to buy shoes? Hence the shop was a little crowded with hubby, wife, sister, aunt, kids, toddler (screaming, incessantly), mother, etc, etc, etc. I browsed the shelves and found that I only liked the trainers and the boots, which I have plenty of already, so I ended up buying sensible black Kickers for work. I guess I’ve always worn trainers and Docs for playing out and I don’t think anything’s going to change now. I did try a few pairs of playing out shoes, but they all looked really spazzy in my size, so I didn’t bother.

I’ve noticed that shoe sizes are changing and that my feet appear to have shrunk down to a size 3 (36 in Europe, something daft like 4½ in America) . It’s all a bit of a disaster because of my diamante anatomy: I really can’t be doing with tapering down any further at my foot end.

Enjoy your pancakes tomorrow.

Question of the week:

Phheeeeewwwhheeeeee! My Saturdays are starting to get VERY hectic now that we’re finally exiting winter and spring is round the corner. I think I’ve been quite depressed since October, but look at me now, the model of happiness and joy, almost leaping out of bed on Saturday mornings.

Today’s leap took me to the car wash. Those automated things scare the shit out of me, especially since my wing mirror cover is only held on with dirt. Consequently, I tend to wash my car myself and I’ve never taken this one through a carwash. It was very exciting, almost like being on a rollercoaster: you’re sat there, waiting for something to happen; the motor whirs into life and the rollers start spinning; the adrenaline levels start to rise and your heart races; you vision is obscured by foam and fear; contact! after their threatening whirling dance, the spinning rollers finally get to work on your car; you watch in trepidation as one hits the fragile wing mirror… Anyway, it was OK and it didn’t do too bad a job.

How interesting.

As I was waiting for the final spin cycle to finish, I recalled my annoyance at not being able to have Shreddies for breakfast because there was insufficient milk. Onto Tesco then. Did all that and, after admonishing myself for forgetting to get cashback when paying for my stuff, I went to the cashpoint outside the supermarket. Fiddling with my wallet to retrieve my card, I half heard “There’s a queue here, love” coming from the crowd of people near the drop-off point. I ignored it. Again, I heard a woman’s voice in typical Salford squawking, “We’re queuing here!!!”, so I looked up and there they were, at least 20 paces from the cashpoint was a queue of folk waiting to use it. “You’re a bit far away, I thought you were waiting for taxis”, I uttered in my defence. The same fishwife bawled out sanctimoniously “You’re supposed to give people space when they’re using the machine”. “I agree, but I think a mile is a bit over the top.”

Fucking stupid Salford retards. In fact, Walkden has the worst of all worlds because there’s a nasty mix of Salford and Bolton going on there. Tossers.

Sniffy University Degree Programme 2006
You can do all sorts of noddy degrees these days, including a BA in Noddy and Big Ears from the University of Farnworth. It seems that there is such a demand for a university qualification, academic centres of mediocrity are popping up all over the place so that thickos can get a “degree”. Of course, the courses have to match the abilities of the students so as you keep raking in the cash from them for the entire three or four years without risking them dropping out because things are proving too difficult… Things like getting out of bed before midday and managing more than 4 lectures a week.

To match sky-rocketting demand for a degree from a UK university, I’m going to set up my own university in the garden shed. My initial degree programme, starting in September 2006, will include subjects such as:

• The history of de/rehydrated foodstuff in the UK
• Pooing science
• Salford history: centuries of scum
• Medium studies: Doris Stokes from beyond the grave
• Shoe design for spaz-footed cretins (a modular course that can be mixed and matched with elements from the Hooded top and leisurewear BA)
• Charlie’s Angels and the Dukes of Hazzard – When telly was good
• Salty snacking
• Staying in
• Takeaway evolution studies

I reckon I could get about £2000 per student each year with that lot. Let’s face it, every other so called university is at it, so why not me?

“You should’ve been a gay man”
That’s what my sister said to me last night when I was playing my latest playlist. What does the public think of this lot, just a bit queer?

1. Lola’s theme – Shapeshifters
2. Take me away – Haji & Emanuel
3. Feel good inc. – Gorillaz
4. What you waiting for – Gwen Stefani
5. Back to basics – Shapeshifters
6. Sexy mother fucker – Prince & New Power Generation
7. Move that body – Technotronic
8. Dare – Gorillaz
9. Incredible – Shapeshifters
10. So good – Rachel Stevens
11. Gonna make you sweat (everybody dance now) – C&C Music Factory
12. I bet you look good on the dancefloor – Sugababes
13. Let me show you – K Klass
14. Oops up – Snap

If water could be solidified at room temperature and solid water had the texture of airy bread with slimy stuff when eaten, then eating solid water would give you the exact same experience as I had lunchtime today. Being unable to avail myself of my usual minestrone cup-a-soup, I nipped to the shop where I spent a good while browsing the overpriced* lunch snacks that were on sale there. The choice was: Ginsters high fat, super-filled sandwich with bacon and mayonnaise; huge, overflavoured and expensive wrap; Weight Watchers varieties; chilled savoury pastry products.

I went for Weight Watchers prawn mayonnaise; I just fancied a prawn mayo sarny. It tasted of exactly nothing. I’ve never known anybody with the ability to remove every single molecule of flavour from anything, but Weight Watchers managed it with this particular sandwich.

Thank god for the high-salt, high-fat, extreeeeeemely high-flavour, bacon Frazzles that I’d bought to accompany it. Did you know that Frazzles have been on the market for 30 years now? No, neither did I.

Other corn-based crisp-type snacks that have been going for a while are good old Monster Munch. I love em, particularly the pickled onion variety. Love the snack, but the smell is pretty rank. Imagine my delight at being in two meetings in part of the hospital that smells exactly the same as pickled onion Monster Munch! DIZGUSSTING.

“TUUUUUNE….EHHR!”
My sister has a habit of ending every exclamation with “..EHR!”. So we’ll regularly hear protests of “NOOOOOEHR!” and even things like “Don’t be so STEEEUUUUPID….EEEHHHR!”. It’s quite irritating. One of her worst crimes is crying out “TUUUUUUUUUUUUNE..EEHHHR!” whenever there’s a song that she likes playing.

Jesus.

Pimp my nanny
Christ, whatever next?

On my way, to where the air is sweet
So today I thought about what you see when you first wake up in the morning, the first thing you see when you look out onto the world. The first thing I usually see is Otto’s face, very close, and when I stumble downstairs to open the curtains, I’m met with hazy street lights through the condensation on the window; not much else being visible in the pitch blackness except perhaps the moon or the odd axe murderer’s shadow as it scurries by beyond the garden hedge.

But when you open your curtains/blinds in the morning and look out onto your world, wouldn’t it be brilliant if you were met with this:

Won’t you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street? (clicky)

It’d be top notch if you looked through the window to see Big Bird delivering your morning newspaper. Actually it wouldn’t, it’d be a complete head-fuck, besides which, Big Bird was a pathetic, annoying twat and I hated him… her… it.

But just imagine the rest of it: the bin men coming on Friday, to be verbally assaulted by Oscar the Grouch;

People talking Spanish and using sign language for no apparent reason; a weird obsessive-compulsive vampire who can’t stop themselves from counting things;

Bert and Ernie’s totally acceptable (yet not really talked about) same sex relationship; a furry monster with Prader Willi syndrome and a totally BIZARRE woolly mammoth…

Come and play, everything’s A OK.
Yeah right, sure it is.

You rub your eyes and Chorlton and the Wheelies roll on by while Finella the Kettle Witch pops up on the lawn. “‘Ello, little old lady!”

Beg pard?

Friendly neighbours there

I don’t think so, not around here. My neighbour would come charging out of his house to complain that the mammoth was blocking his drive “I’ve got disabled kids you know!”. It’s not just the kids that have special educational needs, is it, you thick bastard?

What on earth is going on? You need to catch your breath, so you sit down and turn the telly on:

Maisie wanders in to check why her breakfast isn’t ready,

Something’s not right, you take another look:

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHH!!!

And with thought processes like these, is it any wonder that I got Pancake Day wrong?

Good news today! Great British crisp brand Golden Wonder has been saved from extinction by Irish salty snack favourite Tayto. There’s something pleasing about learning this; it’s like the little boy with his finger in the dike, holding back the oppressive force of water.

I suppose we run the danger of always gunning for the underdog, irrespective how their quality compares with their bigger competitors. Big is seen to bad, but if the quality is good, or better than the alternative, then so what. But Golden Wonder ARE nicer, I’m convinced of this.

All this fuss over something that we shouldn’t be having anyway.

The great travel to work triathalon
The new multistorey car park has finally opened at work, ending 18 months of park and ride misery as most of us were chucked off site during its construction.

It’s a lovely car park – HUGE, with fabulous sweeping slopes and generous parking bays. No tight corners to catch your car on, oh no, this place is a beauty. There’s just a slight problem. It has been built to provide parking for a massive hospital site and it is on the furthest possible part of the site from where most people work, so there’s a ten to fifteen minute walk to or from your desk. The car park is so far away from any of the clinical areas that there’s even a shuttle bus service to take patients and visitors around the site.

Walk? Yes, Tina, it’s that thing you do when you go to the bar.

That’s progress for you.

Lovely car park though.

A series of unfortunate typos
The standard typewriter keyboard is a weird thing, all the letters being jumbled up so as to prevent proficient early typists become too fast and mashing up the typewriter keys. A consequence of this is the positioning of the letter ‘U’ next to the letter ‘I’. With a name like “Tina”, this can result in the unfortunate typo of me signing off e-mails as:

Best wishes,

Tuna

A series of unfortunate skin complaints
I am in my mid thirties and I am still suffering from terrible pustulous boils on my face, and now neck. My latest spot is right on the margin of my top lip and it hurts like a complete bastard.

You’d think that I’d have learned by now that my spots are never really that good for squeezing, but I still always give them a go. They’re just agonisingly painful for a few days before disappearing, so I suffer the idnignity of disfigurement as well as the pain, but rarely get to experience the pleasure of splattering one out against a clean mirror.

Life is a constant let down.

Pancake day
Tomorrow is Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday (or Mardi Gras if you’re poncy). It’s something to symbolise Jesus’s 40 days and nights in the wilderness while he found himself. It was just as well he’d nipped into that Little Chef before he went. It was there that he enjoyed a plate of delicious pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream before he wandered off. The calorific value of 15,000 was just about enough to see him through his ordeal. A few of the facts may be a bit hazy there, but that’s something like how it was.

I love pancakes, but I only tend to have them on Pancake Day. Like they say, everything in moderation. But since I like virtually everything, there has to be a trade off whereby I can only have certain things once a year (McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, pancakes, sex, etc).

I was surprised to learn that my Muslim colleague would also be enjoying pancakes and that she wouldn’t turn her nose up to a hot cross bun. The cheek on it! I don’t know, Muslims complain about westerners’ lack of understanding, but they constantly confuse us and shift the goal posts: it’s OK for them to do Easter and Christmas things, but ask them get you a sausage barm when they’re at the canteen, or offer them a pork pie and they’re up in arms, burning your duffle coat!

I don’t know, you just can’t win with some people.

Anyway, back to pancakes. In terms of fillings, despite generally going for the savoury alternative for most things (nuts, popcorn, etc), I prefer sweet fillings for my pancakes. The absolute BEST way to enjoy them is with a sprinkling of sugar and drizzled with lemon juice – simplicity and perfection. Of course, I wouldn’t turn down maple syrup and ice cream, or oranges in Cointreau syrup, but lemon and sugar does it for me just fine.

So today’s burning question is:

At 19 February, 2006 16:43, Anonymous said…

“Why must young people always use the F word in their Bio. Free speech and all that I know. I used to be that way when I was young too. Now I am middle aged and have teenagers that insist on using the F word. Now I find it disgusting.”

This was a comment that was left today on one of my posts from a few weeks back. In all fairness, I agree that I swear too much, both in real life and in my blog. It was something that started out as a bit of a joke then became a bad habit. One that is hard to kick. I don’t like hearing swearing much either, but it all depends on the context I suppose. I think here, I write the things I wish I could say to people and that includes all the expletives that I wish on the world on a daily basis.

However, I’d like to point something out to this commenter. Firstly, I ain’t that young. Secondly, I can’t take credit for the profile text that they are referring to:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

This is actually Philip Larkin’s This be the verse, which I’d never heard of because I’m an uncultured yob, but Garfer kindly posted into a comment he left somewhere. I absolutely love it; it sums up my attitude to life and, since many of my gripes relate to my parents and other people’s kids, it seems apt for this blog.

For the rest of my blog? Yes, I am foul-fucking-mouthed, but so what? Nearly 2,000 died in a mudslide at the tail end of last week, the muslims are still going potty and wanting us all wiped off the face of the earth, the fundamentalist Christians have got a stranglehold of the American government, we’re living in a dictatorship, we pay too much tax and get nothing back for it, and half the world is starving. My use of colourful language seems rather insignificant in comparison.

Shoo!
Well, my heart has been well and truly warmed by the overwhelming response to my plea for help in my epic quest for a pair of shoes that I like. Here are the suggestions from the wonderful Land of Blog.

Bearing in mind I said that I only ever wear “comfortable” shoes or trainers and I never wear anything “girly”, I was really pleased with people’s suggestions.

First up was that wonderful Irish man, SID

Thanks, SID. I really appreciate the effort you went to in identifying these as something that I might wear.

Jesus help me.

Then we had Indiana Jones’s suggestion:

Not bad, but I might have trouble finding my size in some of That Merrill’s styles.

Inexplicable Device chose these:

Interesting

And here are some that I quite the look of:

Stuff it, I’ll just stick with my trainers I think. It’s far too difficult.