…If you feel:

• Pain
• Dizzy
• Faint
• Shortness of breath

Bloody hell, I feel all those things the second I wake up in the morning. Little chance of coming out on top in a 10 minute battle with a cross trainer then.

Cross trainer. This could invoke images of an angry coach, as in fitness coach rather than big bus or horse-drawn vehicle.

Ain’t the English language super? It’s just a shame that I’m crap at it.

Fit, fit, fit
The friggin’ gym was packed out this evening. All those poor bastards who have made New Year resolutions to get fit, punishing themselves for their self-indulgent lifestyles. I, on the other hand, only need to go to maintain my athletic figure. As if! I’m a fucking fat bloater too.

It’s a strange routine that you build up (if you go often enough to remember what you do week-in, week-out): if your usual locker isn’t free, it doesn’t feel right; you have to use the same pieces of equipment in the same order. I’m sure the slight muscle-pull in my calf is the result of using the wrong treadmill this evening.

Fuckers.

The current mood at work surely reflects that of the country: one of guilt, regret and willingness to change, that results in people on near starvation diets, or at least “being good”. No doubt there are plenty who are starting to suffer the effects of nicotine patches: disturbed sleep; strange bowel movements; itchy patches of skin and localised dermatitis. My recommendation is to keep at it, go the course, perhaps try gum if patches are making you go off your tits.

Life coach
Of course, having experienced two major incidents of withdrawal from my chemical dependencies, people sometimes come to me with their own stories of giving up this or that. Having been almost mocked for being tee-total by my current stand-in line manager – this obviously meaning that I’m sad and boring (which is true) – she announced proudly to me today that she’s staying off the booze for a month in order to try and shed a few extra pounds. Good for her.

“Well, if you find it’s getting difficult, feel free to come to me and I’ll give you all the support you deserve. Remember: one day at a time.”

It’s odd though, the questioning about why people stop drinking and I think I’ve mentioned this before. There are two main reasons: religion and alcoholism, plus a few others that include morals, certain health issues, that kind of shit. So when I’m questioned as to why it is that I stopped drinking and I answer, “Oh well, I’d had enough of it”, it’s not strictly true, but it’s easier for people to deal with than if I said the “A” word.

And how about a quick:

1. Working really hard to get fit then putting on loads of weight over the autumn and winter?
2. Flirting with your stand-in line manager (again!)
3. Offering advice to hopeless drunks and fag addicts (not you, Piggy)
4. Stalking your readers by checking their ISPs on sitemeter – Bovis Lend Lease is the company that’s doing the PFI construction at the Trust where I work, btw.
5. Traditional school dinners
6. Having more than two excellent bowel movements per day
7. Porridge
8. Porridge vomit
9. Winter
10. Going on holiday to Vancouver Island and staying with a fed-up, foul-fucking-mouthed, donkey-fucking Canuck squaw?

During my ten minutes of torture in Asda the other day, a couple of things struck me (other than the obvious like the dimwitted patrons, equally dimwitted staff and the ever-so-delicately-named “BOOZE” section [fucking scumbags]):

“Landing level approaching, please take care”*
How fucking annoying is this announcement, repeated every 30 bastard seconds as yet another shopper approaches the upper or ground level while stuck to the escalator behind their trolley? Of course, in the situation where there are two people approaching the upper level (on the two ascending escalators) while another nears the ground level on the descending one, there’s a weird triple echo effect: Land..and..ing..anding… leve…evel…evel… app..app…roach…approaching… please…please…ease… take…ake…. care…are…care. It’s enough to make a person completely demented.

In the decades that escalators have been in use, there have been numerous public information films about not standing too close to edge or messing about on them for fear of a little rag doll being chewed up in the teeth-like steps. We’ve got the message, thank you very much. We don’t need some automated bint telling us to take care because the landing level is approaching. Besides which: a) with the potential for three of the fuckers going on at the same time, if you’re blind, how do you know which one is addressing you? and b) the escalators in these sodding shops aren’t even the variety with steps, the worst that can happen is you slide off when you reach your landing level.

Tossers.

If you’re that fucking worried about not being careful enough on reaching the landing level, use the bloody lift!

*This was pointed out to me in a comment: Despite hearing it thousands of times in the space of ten minutes, the actual phrase is “Approaching landing level, please take care”. See, all their efforts are completely wasted because nobody takes any notice anyway – people are just so fucking irritated by it all that they turn off!

And I’m a spaz with a poor grasp of English.

“Always happy to helpdesk”
Asda’s staff are proud to wear uniforms emblazoned with the motto “Always happy to help”. Yes, of course they are. About as much of any of us would be given that mind-numbing job and having to deal with lowest of the low in supermarket clientele on a daily basis.

If your average pleb on the shopfloor can’t assist you, you can always avail yourself of the specialist help services at their “Always happy to helpdesk”. As if you would. By the time you’ve exhausted all attempts for help from the frontline staff, you’re worn to a frazzle and a dribbling wreck of a person. It takes all your efforts to find the exit. You’re not going to waste your last bit of energy repeating yourself for the FIFTH time to Customer Services “Pam”, who despite looking like a burns victim, just happens to be a little over enthusiastic with the latest range of “Mediterranean glow” foundations and blushers that are new in store that week. Pam is also a huge fan of complementary and herbal remedies for alleviating the symptoms of the menopause. On top of Mediterranean glow, the hot flushes and anxiety attacks provide enough energy to run the filter coffee machine and the burger griddle of the McDonald’s outlet in the entrance.

Clone me
But yes, Asda are always happy to help. They even have “Always happy to help” printed on the till receipt. Also printed on the till receipt are all but 5 digits of your credit card number, the start and expiry date for the card and the name of the card holder. Nice to see them doing their bit to prevent identity theft and credit card fraud.

Are they fucking thick or what? Why on earth do they need to print that information on a till receipt?

Dicks.

It really pisses me off, having to rip receipts into tiny little bits in an attempt to destroy all evidence of card numbers and the like. Credit card bills and bank statements contain a ridiculous amount of information too. Surely they can code things so they don’t include the entire card number with your address and cardholder name? It can’t be that difficult.

And if you’re fairly with it and like to use online banking, why do they need to send paper statements out at all? There should be the option to request a paper copy when you need one, otherwise, you should just be able to rely on the online facilities.

It’s a right pain in the arse, having to shred all evidence before disposal because, as we’re led to believe, all our rubbish is being closely picked at by identity thieves and if we don’t take care, somebody else will become us in a weird Invasion of the bodysnatching bin-dippers scenario and it’ll be OUR FAULT!

Fuck ’em. If some stupid twat really wants to be me, I’m happy for them to take over for a while and give me a friggin’ break from it.

A final thought for the day
You have to be a complete nobhead to open a bank statement two weeks after Christmas and three weeks before pay day.

Eeeeek!

Itches are a pain. Worse still, there are some itches where it is almost forbidden to scratch when in polite company, or among colleagues. Such parts of the anatomy are:

• Tits (nipples)
• Foo
• Bum
• Scrote

There’s nothing worse than an itchy nipple, apart from when you get the compulsion to stick a bottle brush up your anus to get at something that’s causing a kind of pleasant discomfort up your arse. Instead, you have do that “dog with worms” thing and suffle about on your seat, hoping that nobody notices, or they do, hoping they don’t think you’ve got worms.

What is the cause of anal/rectal itching? You’d like to think that you’ve got quite good bum hygiene after having a poo, so it shouldn’t be shitty remnants. And sometimes it feels like the irritation is right in your rectum. The answer has to be sweetcorn.

It’s always fucking sweetcorn. Along with cockroaches, sweetcorn nibblets are bound to survive any nuclear blast, maybe even mutating to form a super species of bright yellow insects that taste nice when warmed through and served with a knob of butter. What if rectal itching was caused by cockroaches? Or just plain old cock?

Foo itches are just as bad because it is absolutely forbidden to touch yourself “down there” when you’re in the workplace; I don’t think you’re allowed to touch anybody else there while at work either. Perhaps employers should show more understanding. In fact, amongst women, there is an expectation for male colleagues to be constantly readjusting and scratching themselves around their bollocks. Perhaps we’re all just resigned to fact the that some blokes can’t keep their hands off their knackers and no reinforcement of acceptable practices of behaviour will ever change that. Maybe they just need to check that they’re still there periodically, who knows?

Here in the UK, a very eminent professor of reproductive medicine, Lord Robert Winston, has made a name for himself as a celebrity scientist. Whenever there’s a need for the lay person’s interpretation of something scientific or medical, Robert Winston’s the man. He’s very good at explaining all sorts of medical phenomena in a down to earth and entertaining manner. I’d love for him to explain why you can’t use your fingernails to scratch an itchy foot, especially a bare foot.

Ne touch pas

Foot itches are the absolute WORST type of itch (and I realise that I’ve contradicted myself). They generally occur when you’ve got your shoes and socks on, so there’s the immediate problem of access. This can cause all sorts of problems when you’re driving, you just have to pray that the sensation will get bored of itself and fuck off. But if removing footwear isn’t an issue, then what? You rub the offending area against the other foot, or against a piece of furniture. But it always comes back.

Maybe it’s just me…

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | The great firewall of China
This is an interesting article on today’s BBC News Website.

Wherever I am in the world, I like to keep up with events by checking out the BBC on the internet. Although not as impartial as I’d like, what with the Beeb being firmly in the stranglehold of Tony Blair’s paranoia, it’s pretty OK, with decent up-to-date content.

Imagine being in a place where access to the BBC News website was blocked. Completely blocked. Without question.

That’s China, apparently. With a desire to protect its citizens from the evils that lie on the Web (like information and news), the Chinese IT Police have the ability to block access to any internet site. Banned sites also include Wikipedia. People can get round this by being nifty with proxy servers and the like, but it’s all a bit of a faff to get the latest footie scores.

And we thought our employers’ IT Nazi Bastard Police were bad?

But one thing that the Chinese can do that some of us can’t (from work), is blog. Imagine it, millions of people, striving for free speech and information; they find the world open to them in the Blogosphere. Well, they need to get their acts together because, on my “Next Blog” blog cruises, I’m sure I’ve come across some Chinese blogs and they’re all really dull: no donkey fucking; no Daleks; no challenges to huge retail institutions; no political satire; no taking the piss.

It’s quite good living in the West (sometimes). Given all this freedom and all we use it for is to take the piss.

There’s a Sneaker Pimps song called Tesko suicide on their album Becoming X (which is still one of my favourites after many years). I’m not one for delving deep into the meaning of song lyrics; I just tend to enjoy the music and the way the words fit into it, but during a trip to the Tesco store in Dereham, Norfolk on Monday, “Tesco suicide” seemed a relatively painless option for getting me out of there.

The UK had a bank holiday on Monday because New Years Day had fallen on the Sunday. This meant that Monday was the first day the supermarkets had been open since Saturday evening. A whole day of not being able to stock up on provisions and the people of Dereham and its environs had gone into panic – entire families of Norfolk folk were out in force.

Now, I’ve not had much contact with real Norfolk people, but if those present in that store on Monday are representative cross-section, I don’t think I’ll bother much in future. I was actually quite scared. There I was, minding my own business, when a 6 foot woman and her two unruly kids literally ran at me with a trolley. What the fuck?, I thought as I picked myself up and dusted myself off.

Blimey, they were a bit odd. Turning the corner to find Cath – we’d become separated – I bumped into a huge man who was wearing sunglasses. Eeeek! My heart raced, I listened intently for the excited squeals of Beanie, but she’d become occupied with chewing a label.

On finding my companion, I calmed down a touch. There was another family where the two children were dressed in dressing up clothes (like ballerinas, or fairy princesses). The children were following their parents down the aisles: pirouetting, bowing, leaping along.

Why do people have to make shopping trips an entire family outing? Can’t one parent stay at home with the frenzied offspring while the other does some shopping? Nobheads.

And to add to the agony was the layout of the store itself: no space for queueing because the aisles were within 2 metres of the tills. To cap it all, none of the tills had conveyor belts. So there I was, trying to pack up and none of the shopping items were reaching me. The checkout girl had to remember to push stuff down to me. I had to reach forward and overstretch my back to get to stuff. And you couldn’t stand alongside the till to do the packing because there wasn’t enough room between the two tills.

I was incandescent with rage. I almost stopped packing to get her to call for a manager, but I didn’t want to make a scene in front of the baby – she’ll no doubt suffer enough embarrassment at the hands of her parents. I so wanted to say “Stop! I’m not doing any more packing until you get a manager here to explain why these tills have no conveyor belts. How am I suppose to pack my shopping? I want it delivered to me one or two items at a time in a nice steady flow, not be sent piles of stuff sporadically!”

So, Tesco, I am very disappointed that I AGAIN have to have a whinge about one of your stores. What the fuck were they thinking ofwhen they designed the layout of that fucking place? And no conveyor belts on your tills? Are you fucking mad? The patrons of that store looked like they had enough difficulty getting dressed! You don’t expect them to be able to multitask by both reaching forward AND picking stuff up simultaneously, do you?

The catalogue of evidence against Tesco being my favourite supermarket is building. Let’s review it:

1. Not making sure that lazy bastard customers return their trolleys at the Prestwich store; the lazy twats just leave trolleys in parking spaces instead.
2. Not selling items that I like all year round.
3. Only selling chilled drinks from the Coca Cola company and providing shit customer service when challenged about this.
4. Hiding the pickles.
5. Not limiting the number of care in the community shoppers to two at a time.
6. Crap store layouts.
7. No conveyor belts????? Nobheads.
8. Tesco Express

Tesco Express
Deserves its own whinge and this has been done most eloquently and very recently by Funny Thing. These stores crop up in town centres, often where there’s a high student population, and they’re also associated with Esso petrol stations.

The first thing you notice is the markup in prices compared to the standard stores. And then there’s the queuing: if you time it wrong, you can be in a queue of about 30 people waiting to get served.

But the absolute worst thing about these stupid stores is when they’re part of a petrol station. The forecourt is given over to parking, rather than petrol, so there are only 2 pumps. But the parking spaces are too close to the pumps so it’s difficult to manoeuvre in either case. You go into the store to pay for your petrol, but although it’s a Tesco, they don’t give out Clubcard (loyalty) points on petrol sales.

Fuck that, their petrol’s shit anyway and it’s cheaper at the Shell near work.

From the numbers of newspaper columns, TV programmes, weblogs and books that complain about various aspects of modern day living, I think it’s pretty obvious that no, it’s not just me and yes, everything is shit.

Today’s shit household item that serves no purpose is: The electric toaster. Unless you don’t have a cooker of some description, these things are redundant. So why do people have them? Why, after NEVER having one in our home, did I get home yesterday to be confronted by one in our kitchen? Here are some things that I despise about domestic toasters:

1. They take up space. In a kitchen that is already crammed full of utter shit and where isn’t a square millimetre of free worksurface, somebody decides to squish up some of the existing crap and shove a toaster in.
2. The setting is always wrong. Toasters never toast bread properly; it either comes out as warm bread or something that’s seen the wrong end of a flamethrower. Toast from toasters is disgusting.
3. They can’t do cheese or sardines on toast, they can’t do toast toppers.
4. They drop crumbs all over the already shitty worksurface.
5. They attract that greasy, fluffy shit that ends up covering everything else in the kitchen.
6. They are for lazy fuckers who can’t be arsed to watch a grill and turn over a bit of bread.

They are for lazy fuckers called Anna, who can’t be arsed to watch a grill and turn over a bit of bread. After questioning “Why the fuck have we got a toaster? Whose stupid idea was that?”, Mother informed my that Anna brought it from Sainsbury’s the other day.

“But there’s no room for it and they’re shit, why can’t she use the grill?”

“Because she wanted a toaster. Anyway, we’ve made room.”

“My arse, you’ve made room, all you’ve done is shove all the shit further into the corner of doom. There IS no room for a toaster. She can have a toaster in her own fucking house, why does she have to inflict one on us?”

Stupid twat.

It’s going to meet with an accident. Along with the “Microwave cooker” (something made of plastic that you use to cook things in in the microwave) and hopefully the microwave itself.

What is so difficult about:

1. Adjusting shelves in top oven/grill to suitable height for toasting.
2. Turning on grill to high and leaving to get hot for 5-10 minutes.
3. Placing bread/crumpets/potato cakes on grill pan and positioning under the hot grill.
4. Watching till bakery item has attained satisfactory toasting on one side.
5. Turning over (adding cheese, sardines, toast toppers) and returning to grill to toast for the required time on the other side.
6. Enjoying a delicious toasted snack?????????

It’s difficult for lazy fucktards who can’t be arsed to wait and watch. For people who can’t be off their mobile fucking phones for more than thirty seconds at a time to concentrate on watching something under a grill.

Kitchen crusade
When I’m in charge, I shall do away with the following items from all UK domestic kitchens:

• Toasters
• Microwaves
• Bread bins
• Coffee makers that just take up space and only produce brown, flavourless water
• All other shit that just takes up space and never gets used

Happy anniversary
Today is the first anniversary of Cakesniffers Beware. I started the blog while sat in my office at work (naughty) and while listening to people in other offices going on about everyday things. It struck me how people (in general) could become so consumed with the banal. I often use examples of things that I hear or experience while at work, but these occurrences happen in workplaces all over the country, all over the world.

People are people and they provide companionship, amusement, annoyance, without which our lives would be very dull indeed.

Being off work the week after New Year has its advantages, but mainly it’s nice to prolong, or even avoid, the agony of the incessant volleys of “Happy New Year”, “Did you have a nice Christmas?”, “Did you get anything nice?” that usually fly around the workplace in those few days back in work after the break.

I hate New Year, fucking loathe it. At best, it’s just another day. At worst it heralds the beginning of two of the most depressing months in the calendar. You think you can start to look forward to spring, to longer days, to warmer weather, new beginnings even. Instead, it’s still dark all the time and freezing with it. You’re still in the same shitty job that has put you on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. Spring is still at least three months away, the next long weekend is, let’s see… the 14th of April. Three bloody months away.

So there’s nothing to look forward to for ages and you’re faced with the now. The now consists of clothes that are too tight and bank balances that are terminally ill. Perhaps if I was terminally ill, my clothes would fit me and my bank balance might be healthier.

I have a headache.

I have a headache and a job that I hate, that I really can’t face going in to on Monday. With my day off tomorrow and the weekend ahead, I have two options:

1. Make the most of it: go to the gym a couple of times; think of some nice (healthy) things to eat; do some cooking of nice things.
2. Mope around: take as much codeine as possible; lounge around the gloomy house in a confused haze (I’m sure there used to be a tiwnkly tree over in that corner); get pissed; plan suicide; eat own body weight in remaining salty snacks and chocolate.

I’m edging towards Option 2 at the moment.

Even my little cat Max couldn’t be bothered to come and see me on my return from Norfolkland; he’s upstairs asleep, curled up in a corner. If I was paranoid, I’d say he was trying to avoid me.

Oower Eewer
So Norfolkland. What was on offer this time? I arrived in snow, which was very picturesque and in stark contrast to the hot sunny day that I left behind back at the beginning of September. My friends had been struck down with a vomiting bug that was using their eight month old as a vector to transmit itself across the country, and they weren’t really up for much.

Having assumed that the diseased bag of snot couldn’t possibly be shedding any more virus particles, I thought I’d be in the clear when she sicked up on me on Thursday. I had porridge coming back up through my nose by midday on Friday. Laid low by sickness, headache and systemic achiness, I lost Friday, but found that sicking up porridge (yummy sweetness) is much nicer than sicking up wholemeal bread. Sicking up bile at 4am while your head is pounding and joints are aching is not nice at all.

Bile is a strange colour, produced in the liver from bilirubin and biliverdin (brown and green) and stored in the gall bladder (other words like cholesystokinin and pancreozyminsomethingorother also drip back into my mind – something to do with the pancreas – but I can’t be arsed to remember any of that shit anymore). It’s nice the way bile makes its way into your stomach to be the icing on the cake of your general shit feeling when you’re ill.

Before Friday, I hadn’t been sick since very early on in 2000, so I suppose that’s not too bad.

Other things from my time in Norfolk: avoiding thinking about having to come home (go back to work); playing with the baby (who, despite her snot, dribble and penchant for rubbing chewed up biscuits in my hair and clothes, was extremely lovely); ate nice things. It was good.

Maddie/Beanie/Snotbag has started making vocal sounds, well, she calls everything “Dada”, or DAHDAH!!!!! (followed by excited squealing, bottom-bouncing and arm-waving)when she sees Lucy the cat. I was feeding her (the baby) yesterday and I swear she called me “shithead”.

On my journey home today, I discovered that overtaking when perhaps you shouldn’t (or wouldn’t normally) is quite good fun, exhilerating even. I saw this big Audi do and realised that the vehicles you’re overtaking and oncoming traffic sort of move out of the way for you so you can drive right up the middle of the carriageway. And chevrons are only made of paint, so they don’t hurt if you drive over them.

Coming up…
No, not my porridge again. Of all the wonderful gifts I got for Christmas, two of the most brilliant were books:

“Is it just me or is everything shit?”
This is essentially this blog in book form and I recommend it.

“You are what you shite”
This is essentially this blog in book form and I recommend it.

And back to New Year. I hate New Year because it’s one of those times of year when we’re supposed to reflect on what we’ve done and to look forward to what we’d like to achieve in the next twelve months. Each year for the past 12 or so years, I’ve got to January, reflected on how things have gone, tried to look forward and realised that I really hate my life.

Still alive, still in Norfolk with my friends and their baby, Typhoid Beanie.

Having spread her sickie tummy poo-bug around Derbyshire and South Yorkshire on Christmas Day, I thought I’d escaped, but I spent all of yesterday and last night throwing up.

I feel very weak.

I really wish I had the fists and the reach of a boxer. I’d then be able to punch my fucking sister’s lights out. Cunt.

She is really getting on my tits. Having been here since Christmas Eve, cabin fever seems to be setting in and she is doing my head in. But of course, it’s all my fault because I’m always picking on people. Too fucking right if they’re being twats.

Never mind, I suppose the stress levels are only set to increase further on today, Boxing Day; the day of the running buffet, the day when my cousins descend onto the Sniffy household and eat all the food and drink all the booze that Mum and Dad have paid for, but never bring any contribution themselves. Except their company, which I suppose is more than adequate payment. It’d be a terribly boring day without them.

So Mum is getting stuff ready for the running buffet (I can’t wait to dig in), while Anna is eating stuff as soon as it comes out of the oven. Greedy fucker.

I like today, but today I’m going to be a bit tired. In a while, I’m off to Liverpool (about 30 miles away) to pick up my auntie, and my cousin, who is over from Holland with her two kids. I’ll be taking them back later on too, and ferrying other folk around. Do I mind? Not at all, it’s much better to know that people can enjoy themselves, have a drink and get home safely (as safe as my driving allows).

Tomorrow, I face the frozen wasteland that is NORFOLK, where I’ll be staying for a week (blizzards and multiple pile-ups allowing). I may be able to check in while I’m there, unless I’m dead or in intensive care or something hideous that involves bed baths and people seeing me naked. Jesus. I’ll make sure I drive carefully.

I’m such a slack bastard that, what with food (excellent Christmas dinner), pressies, Daleks, and other festive shite (what about Dr WHO???), I’ve only just turned on my PC.

Hmmmm, sprouts…. I am doing horrendous farts.

“YOU WILL OBEY THE DALEKS!”

Just a quickie to say Merry Christmas to all who drop by. I hope that everyone is having a good day and that the festivities contine to bring much happiness to everyone.

Take a little time to think of those not as fortunate as us too; people in Wales, for example.

All the best everyone. Hopefully, I’ll post something properly tomorrow.

Take care,

T