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.

There was a news article this week about certain restaurants wanting to ban customers from taking photographs of their meals. My initial thoughts were “pretentious nobs”, but thinking about things a little more objectively, I now think, “pretentious nobs”.

You go to a Michelin starred restaurant to experience something utterly wonderful. You take the time to select dishes that have been created and executed by the best culinary minds, in an atmosphere that I’d assume to be welcoming and helpful. This is something special to you and you want to share your experience, excitement, love of and amazement at the creativity of the chef with those who you know will also appreciate the work of those who are the absolute pinnacle of their profession. Plus, you’re paying for it, so it’s yours. So why do these stuck-up twats take such an affront to people wanting to share their experiences and, at the same time, advertising their food?

Because they are arseholes. They are “artists” and taking photographs of their creations is no different to somebody taking a photo of a concert. Yeah? And their point is?

…

I digress to point out that I am still in love with my electric blanket
…

I’d be really flattered if somebody took a photo or screenshot of one of my most impressive spreadsheets, avec table des pivots, and shared them amongst the wider public. I spend hours creating these things and analysing bits of data so that it’s presentable to colleagues. They give me a great sense of pride.

But I’m a scientist at heart. I am objective and pragmatic. Chefs, artists, performers, they lie amongst a merry band of creative people who would otherwise be known as sociopaths if they hadn’t found a calling in life. Or, in other words, “twats”.

I’ve heard rumour that Instagram automatically deletes any images that its software algorithms recognise as “food”. I’m going to Instagram a variety of images of the stuff that’s served up at the snack bar at work. I have every confidence that none will be deleted, especially the dire sandwiches of mayo and compost.

Le sandwich
What is it with the obsession that catering companies have with mayonnaise? My existence had been very happily mayo-free until I was introduced to the vile greasy muck at university. My flatmates had cupboards full of the stuff and I was like Harry Potter when he first entered Hogwarts; it was like entering an entirely new world: I had become exposed to Middle Class. Of course when I was young, I knew that people ate salad cream and I’d even tried it, it was disgusting, but mayonnaise was like a posh version of salad cream, yet equally awful. I just didn’t see the point of it and still can’t to this day.

The snack bar at work stocks all sorts of sandwiches and just about every one is plastered with greasy mayonnaise. Why do they do this? Why can’t they just make a chicken salad sandwich? What is so difficult to conceptualise about this? It’s easy: a bit of chicken breast, some salad leaves. But no, they have to smother the bread with butter, then layer it with mayo, which then turns the green stuff into nothing better than compost and the bread into a millimetre thick, soggy disaster.

There are some things that will change when I’m in charge, one of them being licensing of mayonnaise and banning all exposure to minors. People will need to fill out a 43 page application form that makes them justify why they need it. They’ll then be interviewed and assessed for further processing. Following a week of counselling, they might be allowed to purchase the eggy/oily crap if they sign up to an intensive course of therapy to help them kick the habit and identify much nicer things to use, such as nothing, on their bread-based lunchtime snacks.

The hunger games
Now I’m hungry and could murder a bedtime snack, however because I know that I’d eat them, I don’t buy snacks so I have nothing in the house to satiate me. The little dog seems to really like his chewy sticks, maybe I should give one a go.

Like Battle Royale, The Hunger Games pitted youngsters against each other in a fight to the death. It was a bit like the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme with killings. I really enjoyed it. I can feel a letter to Prince Philip coming on.

Caveat emptor infuckingdeed
An update on the new-old car: it needed a new exhaust fitting today: £200. There goes any chance of me buying an Hermes scarf to hide my post-op neck wound. I’d wear a polo neck, but my ears are in the wrong place.

At least I haven’t broken my “no booze after midnight” rule.

The stresses of the week in combination with my own weakness compelled me to open my Friday Merlot (£4.79 a bottle at Sainsbury’s) at 6.48pm today. I’d finished the first by 9.30 and, for the first time in a while, opened a second. My sensible side took over for once and I restricted myself to just one glass from bottle 2 of 3.

It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It should matter. And it does.

But anyway (:@) I need to be up in the morning because I need to pay a visit to Kwik Fit so they can look at the exhaust on my new/old car. It was a bit blowy on the way to work this morning and on my way home it decided to go full throttle “I’ve got a fucking huge hole in me. No, this isn’t a Subaru you can hear from 400 yards, it’s a Nissan, and no, it’s not a Skyline”.

Sheesh. In all fairness, I did know that the exhaust needed some attention when I bought the thing, but I’d have hoped it would have lasted more than three weeks. Still, at least I’ll get it over and done with… until the next thing. I’m betting shock absorbers.

Caveat fucking emptor indeed.

The desperation of life
Sometimes I just sit here and shake my head, an expression of pure exasperation on my face as I think about stuff. Stuff like knowing I was going to go into the freezer and take out sausages to thaw overnight while I was downstairs, but forgot. As usual. And now I have get out of my comfortable bed, disturb the little dog of perpetual licking and venture into the cold dark depths of my kitchen. It’s no big deal, it really isn’t, but the daily realisations of my ability to get sidetracked make me want to punch myself in my head.

At least that’s sorted, I just need to remember to buy fresh basil tomorrow and then I’ll be fully prepared for one of my absolute favourite meals: Italian sausage pasta. Fuckindelish.

Comfort food
I find a lot of comfort in cooking. Not one for following recipes, I just stick what’s tried and tested and that brings me plenty of satisfaction. The whole process brings relief from my worries and the transformation of aromas from the raw, freshly prepared ingredient through the stages of cooking is something quite wonderful.

For this particular dish, I start with finely chopping an onion and slicing some fresh red chillis. Onions are onions, but the less obvious the better. The hot stuff commences with part-cooking the sausages in olive oil. This is a process that requires constant attention as the surfaces of the bags of mystery must brown evenly. Much splattering ensues as they release the essence of their ingredients into the atmosphere – garlic, fennel, rosemary. It’s usually at this point that I recall that I’ve changed the bedding and I have washing drying, so I run upstairs to close the doors.

With the sausages evenly browned, it’s time to remove them from the pan and start cooking the onions and chilli. To this, the handful of fresh basil leaves transforms the atmosphere of caramelising onion and sweetness of the basil fill the air.

I want it NOW! But this is only a fraction of this culinary journey. The sausages go back into the pan, along with tomatoes and water, salt and pepper. Over the next forty minutes, magic happens. I put aside science, this is magic.

The final scene is the cooking of the pasta itself. I wait until the water comes to the boil, add salt – the water fizzes in excitement – and oil – the water settles back down and I add the tubular pasta with its beautifully formed ridges. And wait. And wait. And wait. It’s always worth waiting until that moment when the pasta is cooked to perfection.

Condensation obscures my glasses as the whole kitchen becomes filled with steam as the pasta is drained and returned to the pan. It is mixed with just the correct amount of sauce and plated out into white porcelain; a little more sauce added to the top of the dish.

And there it is: happiness in a bowl.

Happiness in my tummy.

There are those who see cooking as something to be endured, and I’m inclined to agree with them on a work night when I’m tired and hungry and I just need food. But there’s something special about having that close relationship with your ingredients and your hob and your pan; knowing that what you start out with will not just bring you sustenance, but true happiness.

Cooking is a pretty good metaphor for life itself. We can look around us and see that we have just disparate things and bits of stuff and this will never bring satisfaction or joy. We need to look at we have available to us and see how they can be used together as simple ingredients that can transform into something pretty special. But it does take a little bit of thought, effort and patience.

I’ve always maintained that the months from November to March are my nadir. Most winters, my mood dips drastically, lethargy consumes me, I retreat to the safety and comfort provided by the confines of my home and my bed. My relationship with the little dog suffers because he is generally confined to on-lead walks, which he hates, which makes me resent him; we both miss the hour-long explorations of the local woods.

Whether my winter depression is real, whether it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy (akin to the attestations of those who claim to hate Christmas for the sake of it), or maybe a combination of the two, the fact of the matter is that I detest the dark months.

This winter, here in the UK, we’ve experienced greyness, hurricane-force winds and constant rain. Whereas most years, we are at least granted some merciful sunshine and crisp, frosty days, the winter of 2013-14 will go down in history as the biggest pile of shit in recorded history – and we’ve not even been flooded up here. Even the penguins are on anti-depressants.

But today is the 20th of February and March is just around the corner. The move into the third month of the year will hopefully bring more favourable weather, but if not that, light and flowers and pancakes.

Bring. It. On.

I shall welcome the spring by finally painting my bedroom. For the past few months I’ve been taunted by the paint splodges on the walls. I’ve no idea what came over me, but I thought some shade of blue would be the way forward, but the more I’ve been looking this mess, the more my love of neutrals has been confirmed. It won’t be magnolia, but it won’t be far off. Can’t go wrong with Natural Hessian.

Forward thinking
Many things about the forthcoming months are uncertain, but one thing that is almost certain to happen before the end of the summer is the surgery to remove the troublesome growth in my parathyroid gland. I have many troublesome growths – my entire body is a troublesome growth, but this particular one has been causing grief for over a year now.

The surgery is dependent on genetics testing to determine whether I’m a mutant, but irrespective of that, it’s probably going to be quite brutal. I’m having visions of near decapitation, arterial spurts and severing of vital nerves. I tend to get these visions when I’m plotting revenge against those who have wronged me, but it’s different when the scalpel cutting a six inch incision on your own neck.

Still, I get a fortnight off work afterwards and then there’s the fun of buying accessories to cover the wound as it heals. I’m undecided between an Elizabethan ruff and an Hermes scarf and I need to check out eBay in order to help this process.

Tina has got a Cortina
I haven’t, and I know it was Gina. I wonder what it’d be like to drive one of those 1970s beauties. No power steering, no ABS, no air-con, no electric windows, a shit stereo that’s not even a stereo. God, how did people even live back then?

So yes, cars. I bit the bullet and changed my trusty old Nissan Almera recently… for a slightly less old Almera that needs to earn my trust. I liked the colour and the fact that it has five doors and a seatbelt that doesn’t garrotte me… ooh, and leather, and alloys AND A SPOILER! I mean, why would you need any additions to spoil an Almera when the basic design does it pretty much anyway? Still, it’s nice and it’s comfortable and it should last me a few years.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, unless money is no object, you’re really better off paying no more than £500 a year for the purchase of a car – the last one cost me £300 a year (actually, it cost me about £90 a year), the one before that cost me £2,000 a year. They all got me to and from work and the places that I needed to be in pretty decent comfort (apart from the seatbelt thing) with wonderful reliability.

Caveat emptor, they say, whoever they are. Never a truer word is spoken than in relation to buying a car (or a dog). Plus there’s that thing of, if it looks too good to be true, then there’s probably something wrong with it – as I found out when an HPI check saved me from buying an almost perfect, beautiful, low mileage… insurance write off.

Shame you can’t do HPI checks on mini schnauzer puppies.

Ghosts
After previous experiences with significant others, in particular the last one, I always promised myself that I would not allow anybody to ride roughshod over my emotions and that any hint of suspicion would have me running for the hills. This is all well and good, but it’s probably a better idea to deal with the issues of one’s past completely so that they can’t continue to have a detrimental effect as you move on through life. I need a bloody good kick up the arse.

I went for a meal to celebrate my dad’s birthday today. The whole family was there: loud brother and his girlfriend (*waves*); my sister, her feller and my niece; Mum and Dad, and family friends, Ivan and Sue. We gathered at the local Italian restaurant where we’ve conducted such celebrations for nearly thirty years. It’s a great place with good food and a friendly atmosphere. I once dined with David Beckham there, don’t you know – well, he came in for a meal while I was in there once, so it was as good as.

It was lovely, if a little lengthy. I get bored in those situations, well not in the situations as such, but the prolonged sitting at the table after finishing my meal induces tedium and irritation, not to mention a numb backside. I’d much rather be able to move from the table to the less formal bar area and have a coffee and a chat there. Or just go home so I can have a lie down.

The thing with eating at restaurants that I find just a tad annoying is the: “Is everything alright with your meal [insert: guys, sir, madam, depending on establishment]” that without fail comes just as everybody has their mouth full with food. We all muffle our approval and carry on with our meal. Then somebody else comes and asks the same thing. Yes, it’s lovely, thank you.

I’m not sure why they do this. The waiting staff at this particular restaurant are the most attentive I’ve ever known: the owner beats it into them. You can’t even reach for the bottle of wine to pour a glass without a ninja waiter appearing from nowhere to swiftly take the bottle from your hand and pour for you. They are always on hand to make sure that your meal is as you would expect, so I’m assuming that it’s purely out of curtesy that they ensure that all is well, repeatedly. I’m sure they use the same ninja skills to detect when their customers’ mouths are at their fullest to check though.

Even if you’re in a place where the food isn’t quite living up to expectations, it’s difficult to say something, well for me at least. I run through a checklist:

If the food fulfils these criteria, then I’m not one to complain, especially if I’m hungry.

I get so uncomfortable when people I’m with make a scene in a restaurant. I get incredibly uncomfortable when people I am with are unfriendly to the waiting staff. On too many occasions, my ex behaved exactly like this. On one occasion, she pursued a head waiter into the kitchen in a city centre restaurant so she could remonstrate with him. She even asked if I found it embarrassing. Of course I found it fucking embarrassing. It’s bloody rude and it’s unnecessary.

When I go to the supermarket, I actually enjoy going to a till with a real cashier and having a chat to that person. It makes the whole experience so much nicer, rather than enduring the frustrations of pleading with the self checkout, trying to convince it that the unexpected item in the bagging area is a bag. I especially like it when there’s a woman on the till who’s approaching retirement – you can have a wonderful gossip with them and it doesn’t add anything to the time it takes to conduct the transaction. Others find such conversations a terrible inconvenience and an insult to their intelligence. Well stuff them, miserable bastards.

People who work in restaurants, shops, bars, they don’t earn a huge amount of money and they work very long hours. It’s hard work and I wouldn’t like to do it. So long as they are polite and friendly, they deserve to be treated with respect – it’s a two way thing. I have learned that if somebody I am with can’t summon up the manners to be polite to the person who is serving them coffee, then I really don’t think I want to be associated with them.

Thirteen or so years ago, I stopped drinking. Things had got to a stage where I realised that I was being controlled by an impulsion to drink every evening; I woke up to myself and stopped. What followed were eleven blissful, hangover-free years in which I knew I could rely on myself. When my life fell apart a couple of years ago, I hit the bottle hard and, for a few months, I found myself drinking every day again. It started with having a house full of booze that was left by the one whose actions had caused me to lose myself. There was no way I was giving away £10 bottles of wine, not when I needed the self-indulgence of inebriation to ensure that I was experiencing the absolute worst time of my life.

Once things calmed down, though, I got it back under control and became a proud weekend binge drinker. This was something that I’d never achieved as an adult. The compulsion to drink midweek was gone and I now consider my relationship with booze almost normal. Normal, that is, except for the fact that it makes me so ill. It’s as if alcohol is seeking some sort of vicious revenge for all those years that I forsake it… forsook it… didn’t allow a drop to pass my lips… whatever.

People don’t understand me when I tell them how much I enjoyed abstinence. They give up for a month or so and do nothing but whinge and moan all the time instead of looking for the positives and enjoying the numerous benefits that come from staying sober.

So I’m facing a bit of a dilemma. Do I continue as I am doing and play Russian roulette every weekend, never knowing whether the bottle of wine that I drink on a Friday night will render me utterly useless the following day? Or do I just pack it in all together, knowing that I’ll just feel so much better? Taking the latter option will be so much easier this time round. I’d no longer feel uncomfortable when faced with the questions of those who find it incredulous that somebody doesn’t drink. Instead of having to come up with some cock and bull story, I’d have the confidence to tell them that booze and I just don’t get along.

Late nights and brain toxins
I’ve never experimented with my sleep so I don’t know what my optimum sleepy time really is. All I do know is that I need far more then six hours on a worknight. There was a study published in Science this week, which of course I haven’t read. I think, because I couldn’t actually even be bothered to read the noddy version that was on the BBC news website, that the study showed that sleep gets rid of all the toxic chemicals from your brain that accumulate during the day. Something like that anyway.

Assuming that the more toxic your thoughts during the day, the more toxic the chemicals that need removing from the brain, I’m in deep trouble from the insufficient amount of sleep that I get each night. If I calculate that on an average work day there are about seven hours of me thinking negatively about things and about twenty minutes of positive thoughts, and added to this there are the journeys to and from work during which I want to launch a rocket into the boot of most cars that I’m following, that’s about nine hours of ill-feeling that needs to be excreted from my head. Then there’s walking Rocky on his lead, emptying the dishwasher, despairing at all the fluff in the house and catching the news headlines. Adding it all up, I should really be in bed by 5.30pm and asleep by 6. Getting to sleep at about midnight on a school night means that there are six hours worth of bad thoughts already carried over into the next working day.

I think I need to work this fact into my work e-mail signature. It’s already perfectly evident from the way I answer the phone.

As a celebrated turn coat and hypocrite, my collection of those products that have been designed in California by Apple is ample. I have an iPhone (4s), an iPad (3), an iMac (2011), Apple TV and Airport Express. The phone and tablet are my go to devices for day to day web browsing, pissing about on social media, accessing music, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I use an electronic diary at work, where our IT system is still firmly embedded in 2003; clinging on to Windows XP. But what with exchange servers and clever shenanigans, my work and home diaries merge across all platforms. I’ll stick something into my diary on my phone and it pops up in my work calendar, on my iPad and in the diary on my computer at home. I’ll arrange a meeting with colleagues and tell them, “OK, that’s in my diary” and then they have to do it, they can’t help themselves… they send me a calendar invitation, which results in this:

The red notification dot of doom.

Why do they have to do this when I’ve already told them that I’ve put it in my diary? Don’t they realise that, no matter how many times I accept their fucking invitation, the red dot of doom is almost impossible to get rid of? Worse still, I get these invititions from people when they know I’m on annual leave. It’s like being hunted by an overzealous pack of rabid administrators.

They’ve obviously been on the “Making the most of Outlook” course, aka “How to really piss people off with the click of a mouse button”. What’s evident from one particular culprit is that the “Making most of Outlook” course clearly doesn’t contain is a section entitled “Turning up to the meetings that you’ve invited loads of people to”. It’s no good adding a note to the invitation that asks attendees to “please come and get me if I don’t show up”, it’s kind of a given that when you arrange a meeting, you turn up.

Minor irritations
Anyway, life must be pretty good when your worst gripe is a red dot on one of your mobile phone application icons.

What is quite annoying is the realisation that your little iPad keyboard doesn’t work properly with a number of applications that have been upgraded recently. I have left-right cursor movement, but not up-down. The only way to resolve this will be to get another Apple product, probably a MacBook Air or something. Or maybe I should just shrug my shoulders and move on.

In reference to “moving on”, my tendency towards flying into road rage is now being affected by the increase in traffic congestion that’s usual for this time of year. All motorists are guilty of contributing to traffic congestion just by being out on the road, but some seem hell bent on making the situation worse by their sheer fuckwittedness. Here are just a few pointers to help keep the traffic moving:

Of course, none of these thing really matter that much in the grand scheme of things and they all stem from self-annoyance because I fail to leave the house before the traffic starts to build up in the morning. There’s not much I can do about dimwitted drivers, but I can try to be on the road when there are fewer of them around. That just leaves the minor problem of what to do about the calendar invite obsessives. I might have to arrange for their fingers to be broken.