One of Radio 2’s DJs, Jo Whiley, is coming to the end of a gruelling 26 hour challenge running and walking on a treadmill without sleep, breaking for just five minutes each hour.  It’s all for charity.  This will be a commendable achievement, but it’s nothing compared to my walk up to my local railway station last Friday evening.  It’s uphill all the way, on a slanted pavement and as you near your destination, you’re faced with this:

I’m not referring to the impending attack by the mother and pink-clad toddler.

On reaching what seems to be the summit, there are these:

Then a long ramp with a steep incline up to the platform itself.

So, Ms Whiley, if you think your exploding knees and feet are bad, you should try this shit.

I’m listening to the final two hours of her challenge and watching on the internet, she’s something else, looking as fresh as a daisy, if a little deranged.  Gok’s with her, and OH MY FUCKING GOD, Nigella has just turned up.

It’s all in aid of this year’s Sports Relief, so a pretty good cause.

My days of taking part in sporty challenges for charity are far behind me.  In fact, apart from running a mile for Sports Relief ten years ago, my only sporty charity fundraisers were sponsored walks when I was in school.

Oooh! My hair is the same at the moment, not much else is.

I don’t really do physical activity, not since the “skiing incident” wrecked my hip a few years ago.  My left leg is very weak these days and if I tried to run, I’d probably end up going round in circles.  I still have gym membership, but I stopped going because, well, I’m lazy and it really hurt and I found that I couldn’t use the equipment because of the imbalance in strength between my lower limbs.

I wouldn’t even run if I was being chased by an axe-wielding murderer, it’s just not worth the indignity, and next time I catch a train, I’m parking my car at the station.

My charitable work is now restricted to making regular donations to things and living on £1 a day for five days to make a point about people who whinge about not having enough money for food in this country  live in extreme poverty in the developing world.

These aren’t adjectives I’d use to describe myself, not all the time anyway, but my favourite soup that I can’t make in the whole world.

I love it.

I LOVE IT.

Sisterly (as in sibling, not sapphic) duties had me participating in a mock training session on infection control that was delivered by my sister this evening. The little dog and I, Mr Sister and Mrs In-law gathered in her living room and took part in a basic, interactive session that covered all the types of infections, how to prevent them and how to treat them. We were asked to recall a childhood infection and describe it through the medium of coloured felt-tip pens. My picture of me suffering with an ear infection and being treated with banana-flavoured antibiotics was a work of art. There was a section on STIs; she threw in “dental dam” for my benefit, I feel.

Anyway.

There was an evaluation form, which took me back to a previous life in which I delivered training sessions for a living. “How could this session have been improved?” always brought the response “coffee and biscuits”.

Foxtrot romeo oscar.

I eventually changed that question on my evaluations to “with the exception of refreshments, which cannot be provided because of Trust policy, how could this session be improved?”

“More group work”

I’m sure a lot of my participants had different learning types and abilities; some liked to be told what was what so they could get out of there asafp, others could only learn things if I delivered the sessions through the medium of interpretive dance, it being the NHS.

I’d not had the chance to eat before going out and my sister had to nip over to mine anyway, so I asked to bring me hot and sour soup – two portions – while reconfigured an old iPhone that I was giving her. “Get it from the one on the precinct, it’s easier”, although my preference was the takeaway further down the road.

The soup came and I ate the lot. And now I feel a bit sick.

What I love about the stuff is the variety that you get depending on the source. There’s the thick gloopy one that’s basically sweet chilli sauce watered down with vinegar with bits of char siu pork, chicken bits, prawns and whatever they fancy throwing in (this was tonight’s, hence the unwelcome gurgling in my duodenum). “The one down the road” offers a different recipe – less synthetic, less gloopy, much hotter, more garlic, but with the same bits of meat and prawns thrown in. Then there’s the Thai one, tom yum, which is out of this world once you get used to the bits that you aren’t supposed to try to eat. I do have the unfortunate coriander reaction to tom yum though.

I yearn for the day when Heinz start producing tinned hot and sour soup. I can feel a consumer champion letter coming on.

Mindfulness
I’ve started to read Ruby Wax’s Sane something or other… hang on, I’ve forgotten what it’s called… Sane new world: taming the mind book. I say “book” it’s the Kindle version.

It’s all about mindfulness and cognitive… I’ve forgotten again… mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. I haven’t read much of it yet. Because instead of reading it, I’m doing other stuff, obviously.

Anyway, I’m going to practise mindfulness when I’m stuck in the car on the way to work tomorrow. Instead of getting to the point of wanting to leave the 40 minute traffic queue by simply getting out of my car, locking it and walking to the nearest bus stop so I can get home, I shall be mindful of my sense of being.

I am being killed by this.

How do I feel? Let me start with my head, I hear loud screaming in there and my brain is pounding. My eyes are being destroyed by the low sun. My nose is dripping a-fucking-gain. My mouth is dry. My teeth are clenched to the point that I can feel my jaw breaking.

Moving down, my shoulders are hunched and tense and aching so much, my heart is pounding, my hands are gripping the steering wheel so tightly that they might leave marks in it. I am hungry. I need the loo. My back hurts. I forgot to adjust my seat after wearing pumps yesterday and I am too close to my peddles.

I’m not breathing. I’m NOT BREATHING!

And Chris Evans has spent the last 20 minutes complaining about the sound of the new Formula 1 cars. AGAIN!

But back to the book, I don’t know what to expect from it. If I managed to read it to the end, but my track record over recent years isn’t encouraging. This statement has no bearing on the books that I choose, just my ability to concentrate or maintain interest in anything for the past few years.

I regret buying the electronic version now. This is the sort of book that should be read as a book, something to sit down with, or go to bed with and read by turning proper pages, breaking the spine, escaping from screen time before trying to get to sleep.

Tonight though, I don’t think it’s my late use of this electronic device that will result in poor sleep, rather the sugary, vinegary, fishy, meaty gloop that is sloshing around my poor abused insides.

I am clenching my teeth still. I’m not sure I’ll be needing a dental dam, but maybe a gum shield might come in handy.

I was laughed at today, several times. I was laughed in a nice way though and I don’t mind that one bit.

After spending the morning trying to force out aldehydes from my bloodstream by pumping in pints of Ribena, I became almost recognisable as a human by 2pm.

This was one of those days where’d have been tempted to laze around and do nothing, but I had a date at the restaurant with my family. The company was fun; we were accompanied by my sister’s sort of in-laws and I managed to sit near them and away from my folks.

I adore my parents, but they irritate the fuck out of me, especially in restaurant situations. They’re both hard of hearing, as are their two friends who were also with us this afternoon. My fragile being could not cope with the usual confusion that stems from four partially deaf people (one Italian) talking over each other and having to repeat things ad infinitum because, unlike a lot of a lot of people who’s hearing isn’t what it was, they don’t seem to make any attempt to listen.

So I took a gamble and sandwiched myself between my niece and the in-laws. Little Con got scared by a langoustine, but once her mother had removed the flesh, the alien-like head thing provided much entertainment. Oh, we teach good table manners in our family.

At one point, I turned to my sister and asked if she might cut my hair for me. Mr in-law looked at me in horror, “You’ve just asked her to cut your hair??”

“Yes”, I replied

“But why don’t you just go to a hairdresser?”

“I don’t trust them”, I said. “They get on my nerves with all that faffing around they do, and then they don’t do it how I like it, so I might as well have twenty minutes of pain letting Anna do it. My hair still won’t be how I want it, but at least I won’t have to pay, and it always grows back anyway”.

I must learn where punctuation goes relative to speech marks.

I didn’t say that, but I’ll throw that in next time it goes quiet in the snug.

Anyway, I’ve been hacked at tonight. I think I look like something out of Les Mis. She uses the dissection scissors from the rat brain experiment when I was at university. Not quite sure how she got hold of them. I mean, stole them from me, rather than how she picked them up and used them.

My hair will grow, all too quickly, and maybe I’ll pluck up the courage to let a proper stylist loose on it at some point this year. They’ll throw in the snide remark, “So, who cut your hair last time?”. They all say this irrespective of whether you’ve had it cut by a professional or some maniac wielding a sharp object that was used to snip open a rat’s skull in a former life. I’ll probably entertain them and say it was the rival salon over the road… or “You!”.

I discovered Morcheeba in… 1998… ish. Their song, Let me see, featured in that TV programme, Cold Feet, a major hit at the time.

Here’s a digression. That particular series was very “in” at the time with people my age group – late 20s – who were sort of professionals. It was particularly nice because it was set in Manchester and it made Manchester look good. And then came the property asylum seekers from London, but that’s another story.

Anyway the telly programme featured lots and lots of contemporary music. There were even Cold Feet compilations that you could buy on CD, compilations that featured all the music that appeared in the programme.

I LOVED this programme and was so thrilled when the DVD box set was released that I didn’t mind spending quite a lot of money to buy it. I remember receiving it and settling down to watch all those wonderful moments again. Within a few minutes I noticed that something strange had happened, the music had been stripped out and replaced by some generic studio crap that bore no reflection that which had appeared in the transmitted programme. I couldn’t watch beyond the first episode of that DVD collection and was pretty annoyed. How could they market a whole load of CD compilation albums of music “based on the TV series” then take all those tracks out of the DVD?

Because they’re a bunch of fucking arseholes, that’s why.

The same happened with Titty Bang Bang.

Anyway, back to Morcheeba. Their music was wonderful company for me when I was living alone in my flat in Sheffield from 1999 to 2001. It was a time when I was still actually enthusiastic about music; I sought out new stuff, knew what was what, talked about the intricacies of particular tracks and the flow of albums. I had a tape in my car: Big Calm on one side, Becoming X on the other. It played on loop for 18 months.

Then things happened and music became too associated with life events; I had to let it go.

One thing that I’ve never let go is my inability to get dressed unless a particular pattern is followed. I just tried to put on bed t-shirt right arm first and my head ended up coming out through the arm hole. I can’t put trousers on unless I have my socks on and then, I have to put my left sock on first – same goes for shoes. If I start with my right sock, I find myself pausing to analyse what has happened and deliberate whether I need to remove the sock and start again. It takes superhuman effort to tie my laces. It often takes two or three attempts to button up a shirt or cardigan and doing up the buttons on the cuffs of sleeves just doesn’t happen without the help of a third party.

I do remember my childhood, all of it, but I must’ve been off from school the day they had the “getting dressed” lesson. Maybe the cosmos is just trying to tell me to wear pull on-trousers, a vest and slippers.

The children’s TV character Worzel Gummage was a scarecrow who could swap his head to match any particular occasion.  “I gots me thinkin’ ‘ead on.”  “I gots me singin’ ‘ead on.”  “I gots me ‘andsome ‘ead on.”

Most of Worzel’s transformations were quite scary, but the visible signs that he’d changed from one character attribute to another were nice and obvious.  Everybody could see which Worzel they were dealing with and limited their expectations to each particular one.

When we encounter people, unless they’re displaying extremes of emotion, we can’t tell which head they happen to be wearing at that moment, well I find it difficult sometimes.  I’m not one to externalise my emotions, not generally, but I think everyone could pick up that I had my “I’m in a foul mood, don’t talk to me” head on.  Because of what that particular head made me do yesterday, I’ve been wearing my “thumping head” today.  This is the one where, inside, I am punching myself in the head continuously; like those machines at Ikea that used to kick bits of furniture years on end.  Mobelfakta, that was it.

I’ll be wearing my thumping head for quite some time I think.  But at least it’s me who’s doing the punching and not somebody else.

Silly games

I’ve been playing an online Scrabble game for a few weeks.  I’m shit at Scrabble, but this is good because I can’t have arguments with people about the validity of their words – the game decides for you.  It’s a bit odd because words like “OK” and “jew” aren’t seen as valid, yet those such as “xi”, “qi” and “ae” are.  Even my spellchecker doesn’t recognise them.

I’d been enjoying a high-scoring game with another cheat opponent for a couple of days and today, they messaged me: “Before I start flirting, are you male of female?”

Another instance that would normally elicit a roll of the eyeballs had me dealing another crashing blow to my temple

“Err, I’m female and I’m gay,” I responded, thinking that my opponent was a bloke.

“Ha! So am I!” came the response.

“ADRIENNNNNNE!!!!” the blood was oozing from multiple lacerations on my head at this point.

“Lol, you top or bottom? I top”

KNOCKOUT!

Deary, deary me.  Anyway, she thrashed my 60 points and we’re having a rematch.

I’ve been threatened with a rematch at Lego Lord of the Rings on some games console thing next weekend.  I played this last week, didn’t have a clue what was going on, so kept turning myself into Gandalf and killing my teammates.  Much more fun than hunting for clues and solving riddles.

Vietato fumare

I think that’s Italian for something.  I don’t think it’s Italian for “can I have a go on your tits” because they have signs with that written on them up all over the place over there.  Then again, who can tell with the Italians?

I’ve been smoking myself stupid, drinking too much, not eating and not sleeping for a few weeks.  All this has got to stop. Starting now.  The thing is, the great thing about smoking is that it gives you the opportunity to go outside and look at the night sky, which has been beautiful recently.

It hasn’t fallen in, not quite, there will be others.

I’ve decided that relationships aren’t for me.  Well, I’ve had it decided for me, but I should’ve always known this.  Nobody actually deserves me anyway.  That can be taken in a number of ways.

From now on, I shall be avoiding all romantic encounters and the advances of women unless there is no pretence about what they want from me.  It’s all very good being witty, intelligent, caring and a decent cook, but that novelty wears off for people after a while.  Clearly.

I’m going to get a t-shirt printed with: “I just want a go on your tits”.  I shall wear it in Chorlton and risk arrest for being offensive.  It’s a great way to meet new people anyway.

People, the bane of my life.  I’m sure they just exist to irritate and disappoint.  Best avoided.

I have no positive thoughts.  None whatsoever.

Current status = big, massive PFFFFFFFT

I had a phonecall from my surgeon’s secretary today, enquiring as to whether I’d been to see the genetics consultant. Yeah, yeah, whatever. She’d been prompted to contact me by the surgeon herself. Should I be concerned that the surgeon is actually being proactive; wanting to find out my test results so she can plan my surgery.

Maybe I should be flattered with the attention.

But it’s got me thinking that maybe I should be taking some actions to prepare myself for going under the knife. Things like, getting healthy, losing some weight, cutting out the ciggies, stopping the booze. Well, my thoughts on surgery are, if there are complications, please let me go. I can’t think of a nicer way to die: drift off to sleep under anaesthetic; surrounded by people and not alone; painless; totally unaware. I’ll be having words with my anaesthetist to the effect of, please if something goes wrong, don’t make any effort to save me. Given the choice between an easy exit over a long-term brain injury, I know which I’d prefer.

In terms of preparing for my surgery, I’ve no idea what to do other than prepare for what’s going to come after it:

How to deal with the pain
How will I shower?
Will I bleed
Did I mention the pain?
Who will look after me and, more importantly, the little dog?
Can we do this when the weather is nice so that there’s some prospect of me convalescing in sunshine?
What about the scarring?

I think I’ve sorted thing in terms of the scarring issue. Once the wound has healed, I’m going to be sporting one of these for a few months until the scarring is less obvious:

I can’t think of anything finer. And to distract people’s attention, I also plan to wear a set of badly fitting wooden dentures. I’ll be the talk of the town.

Le pub quiz
I’m almost a regular at a pub quiz. Well, I’ve been twice, so it’s as good as. The competitiveness of people is quite astonishing; some even cheat by sharing answers across two teams. They have proper quiz team names and everything.

But I like the quiz that I go to in the sleepy Lancashire village of Dobcross. We have a meal, lots of wine, and then it starts. Maybe our merry band of three would do better if the quiz started before the third bottle of wine, but we do OK and could’ve been the top scorers last night, but for an error on my part.

I will never mistake Sophie Dahl for Sienna Miller again.

So I spent most of the day, hanging out in the Lancashire/Yorkshire hinterland. It’s an odd part of the world where, despite it DEFINITELY being in Lancashire, many people consider themselves Yorkshire. Fucking weirdos – why would you even do that? People think that Crimea is a hotbed of separatism, they need to get themselves to Saddleworth.

I love the beauty of the hills, the away from all the crap feeling that the area gives me, but I really don’t understand the awful broadband and lack of 3G mobile signal there. It’s as if the mobile companies and broadband providers have the area marked as “potential war zone” and so are limiting investment.

Could I get used to this? Well, the places are pretty, the pubs are great and the company is always very welcoming. But no, actually, I couldn’t.

None shall sleep
I snoozed from 6pm to 10.30pm this evening. It’s now 2am. Tempted as I am to take one of the white tablets, I shall restrain myself and let my natural state of slumber consume me. I think my genetics tests will show that I am part sloth.

I am incredibly envious of those lucky people who do not have to work. Three days out of the office and I am relaxed; the prospect of the morning drive to work still far enough in the distance that I can shrug my shoulders and not worry about it.

I’ve come to realise that the drive into and out from the city adds so much stress to my day that it’s actually the major thing that makes me resent going to work. The job itself is nice. When I work from home, I’m refreshed, productive, and I can easily put in at least three more hours than I might consider while sitting at my desk in the office, so that makes four hours.

The little dog is happy, I’m happy, we’re all happy.

But this week, what have I been up to with this precious time off?

V
E
R
Y

L
I
T
T
L
E

Oh, those extra hard returns have worn me out and I could do with a snooze, but I have stuff to do in the kitchen soon. Following on from the fun of pancake day yesterday, I figured it would be a good idea to put the remaining eggs and milk to good use and make some batter for toady hole. No rush though, I can take things at my o w n p a c e because I am enjoying my freedom from the constraints of time. Unfortunately, there’s an ominous rumbling in my stomach that won’t let me leave things too long.

Still, I have some time to ponder stuff, such as, why does the little dog smell worse after I’ve bathed him? He’s sitting next to me, licking his nether regions and smelling of, I can’t even describe it. I’m going to contact Molton Brown and ask them to start a hypoallergenic pet range.

STOP. LICKING. ME!

Are your passive aggressive tweets intended for me?
Twitter is a funny thing. Actually, it’s a pretty dumb thing and I use it mainly for looking at posts about poor driving and parking, and swearing travel updates. I pretend to be bothered about politics so I follow some boring politico hacks who fill up my feed with “1 of 400” tweets instead of just writing an article and linking to it. Then there are the luvvies who use Twitter to tweet @theirmates and to show the rest of us how amazing they are with their 500,000 followers while they only follow people who’ve been on the telly.

And then there are those who you don’t follow, and they don’t follow you, but you have history, so you check them out on occasion to see if they’re still unbearable twats. This makes you an unbearable twat for doing it in the first place, but there’s such a sense of satisfaction in reading confirmation that they are, and will always be, the biggest cunt on the planet. They post little snippets that you suspect are to dig at you and sometimes, when life is a little wearisome, they get the bile rising. Most of the time though, all they elicit is an audible roll of the eyes.

Anyway, time to get the oven on and those bags o’ mystery cooking.

I do hope there are no avalanches or terrible accidents in the French Alps next week.

There’s a cruel irony to being a smartarse. Your instincts drive you to find out the truth about things you supsect, but would rather not know.

I’ve always said that thick people must be a lot more happy than those with a degree of intelligence. I am cursed by this.

I’ve been channelling my inner Poirot recently and this has led to much distress. Aside from this, my inner Poirot has externalised and my moustache has developed into something that would do the Belgian sleuth very proud indeed.

I exaggerate of course. But a few facial hairs can cause such embarrassment if not dealt with swiftly. They are too numerous and my eyesight is too poor to deal with them by plucking, so I go for the sledgehammer effect of wax strips. This is a process of last resort, anybody who uses these things will know where I’m coming from. They come in little boxes of about 20 strips, accompanied by two “conditioning” wipes. My first bone of contention is this: why so few wipes compared to the wax strips themselves? Is the idea that the initial experience of waxing your top lip is so horrific that you’ll never use all of them anyway? Some of us have more perseverance than that.

The process is thus: remove strip from box (box has an image of a beautiful woman who gets her facial hair removed professionally on the front of it); rub strip between the palms of your hands; separate one strip from the other and place on hairy bit, smoothing down in the direction of hair growth. And then it stops. You know that the next bit will bring so much pain, but you’ve reached the point of no return. Jesus. Oh sweet baby Jesus and the orphans. Take a deep breath. No, hold on. You need to pace up and down the bathroom for a while to contemplate your next actions. OK, here you go. No, hang on. OK, here you go. You take hold of the non-sticky part of the strip. Take a deeeeeep breath. Hang on. JUST DO IT! You are Braveheart, you are all your heroines! Pull the fucking thing as fast as you can. So you do. And the result is a mass of sticky hair still firmly embedded in your upper lip, lots of redness and stinging. But on the wax strip itself, there they are: the four or five little bastard bits of fuse wire that you know everybody has been staring at for the past few days. You are VICTORIOUS! Until you realise that you have to go through the whole process again on the other side and that you haven’t even started the eyebrow tweezer sneezefest yet.

Why do I do this? What difference does it make? Well I do it because I started to do it when I looked decent and I don’t want to let myself go, irrespective of the fact that I’ve put on five stone since then and lost all ability to dress like a human being. I still have some standards.

They’re back
The geese, the ducks, the blackbirds. They’re all back now, welcoming the spring after the winter that never really was; we’ve just had October in varying degrees of darkness for the past four months.

The little dog is very excited by the blackbirds, especially the beautiful chap who sits atop the ivy taunting him with his bright yellow beak and eyes. I wonder if blackbirds would make good pets. I shall add them to my imaginary menagerie, along with the hares and the bats.

I can feel a roadtrip coming on, it might involve black pudding from that place where the wicker effigy awaits me. There are pine martens and wild cats up there. More to add to my family of beasties.

He’s done something to his right front paw, the little beast. I first noticed it on Tuesday morning as I watched him from the dining room window. He was stood there, pathetic, his right paw held aloft, looking at me through the blinds. I let him into the kitchen and he was limping badly.

Two trips to the vet, £120 lighter in pocket and him provided with drugs that I can only dream of, four days later and still he limps.

It’s quite nice to have him subdued medicated, but I’d rather he was pain-free and back to himself. I think.

We have a week off together and it’s not going to be much fun if he can’t walk. I feel sad for my ball of smelly fur.

Grand designs
I need to decorate my bedroom, but I’ve been putting this task off for months because of lethargy combined with the prospect of moving furniture. There’s not much of it, but it is bulky, it’s difficult for just one person to move, and there’s nowhere to put it while I perform the simple task of merely painting the walls. I still haven’t chosen a colour scheme, but after an insane dalliance with blues, I know that I’m going to go neutrals.

The more attractive option is to put the house on the market and let the new owners deal with the problem. I’ve done the rest of the house, so two rooms shouldn’t be a problem for them.

More and more though, my house is just a place to be, a place to exist and to sleep. I feel less attached to it and its contents each day. There’s always been something special missing from this place and that will be true for anywhere that I reside.

I just spend my life rattling around in boxes that are full of things, full of stuff, but that miss those vital components that transform a house into a home.

Conversation, companionship, love.

The rest of it, it’s all just stuff.

The curious incident of the non-scannable chicken
The last few years has seen a transformation in the way we pay for goods at supermarkets. This transformation has been, quite frankly, rubbish. I’m referring to the self checkouts, which are just the most dreadful so-called innovation in the history of retail.

Firstly, they make it impossible to be “green” in that using your own bags causes so much hassle that it’s just not worth it. The unrecognised item in the bagging area is a bag.

Then there’s the default volume of the woman who shouts at you while you scan, bag, get told to call for assistance, pay, reminds you to swipe your Nectar card, asks you how you’re going to pay – again, then thanks you for shopping there as you’re already fifty metres away and out of the door. Stop. Shouting. At. Me!!! So I mute the volume and this makes it so that I can’t hear her as she’s telling me to take my £30 cashback and I leave the store without it. Fucking bitch.

Today’s experience at the worst Asda on the planet ripped whatever was left of my soul from me. Having waited patiently while three women took an eternity to scan, bag and pay for four items, my poor, tired, hungover body started to scan. No, I don’t want to bag these items. Seriously, no, I don’t, they don’t fit into a fucking bag. Then came the rotisserie chicken. It had a barcode, which didn’t scan. I tried and tried, but it wouldn’t scan. I tried to enter the code manually instead – nothing. The man behind me was encroaching impatiently, “It won’t scan”, I mouthed at him apologetically. Having summonsed the energy to raise my head and look around, I spotted the self-checkout assistant and looked at her, pleadingly. She was too busy having a conversation with somebody. Like a schoolgirl asking permission to speak, I raised my hand. I had to raise my hand… in Asda. Why don’t they provide a button that gives the assistant an electric shock to waken them from their gossiping? Oh the humiliation. She noticed me eventually. “Oh, it’s a rotisserie chicken, you can’t scan these.” Why the fuck not? If they can’t be arsed to put on enough proper tills, surely they should make it so you can scan everthing? Clearly not.

It didn’t end there. I made the mistake of buying screenwash for my car. The self checkout didn’t like this either and I had to call her back.

By the time I was allowed to pay, the man behind me was almost giving me a piggy-back, he was so close. It was an utterly dreadful experience.

The thing is, if you have to scan your own items, why don’t you get a discount? There’s no novelty, or convenience added by having to do this, it’s a ball ache and it’s so much slower than going through a normal till. And at least at a normal till, you have the chance of having a conversation with somebody, you know, human interaction that’s actually quite nice when you haven’t spoken to a soul all day.

Down
I’m down on the world at the moment. The usual and predictable disappointments of life have reared their ugly head again and I’m so tired of hearing the same old excuses from others for their behaviour.

This coming week will give me some much needed rest and the chance to regroup, dust myself off and recharge the batteries as spring finally breathes new life into my weary bones. And hopefully, the little dog will be up for a bit of fun and mud-filled frolicking in our favourite place.