There comes a time in everyone’s lives where something impacts on them badly and they need to take time out to regroup and sort themselves out.

Circumstances chez Trumpsniffer are in terminal decline, dead in fact. A couple of months after moving in, before we’d got started on moving to the next phase of our lives together, Trump decided – with an impeccable sense of timing – that it is over for us.

Sniffy has been left in a state of devastation and confusion that is impossible to describe. Having the world collapse around a person doesn’t leave them in the best state of mind for anything other than alternating between various emotional states, none of which are conducive to any activity resembling what might be normal for a person. The need for self preservation might include the occasional outpouring of hurt, grief, anger in a blog, but I think I need to concentrate on doing things like getting out of bed in the morning, getting a shower, eating, etc, etc.

Pretending things are ok for the timebeing. That’ll be fun. It won’t leave much energy for blogging.

Cheerio for now. I’ll be back soon when things have started to heal a bit.

FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
Fuckety fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

And that just about sums it all up.

I had to interview some candidates for a job in our department yesterday.

Could you imagine being interviewed by me? Those poor, poor people. Most of them were really nice, one was a bit odd, one we just didn’t like, and one, I really threw with a stupid jokey question:

“I’ll run through the job, then ask you a couple of questions before my colleagues ask theirs and then I’ll finish off by going through your criminal record”, meaning, we’ll go through the mandatory questions, one of which asks about convictions, cautions, etc. Having never been to an interview before, she didn’t know about “mandatory questions” and was completely thrown by it.

I’m such a twat. Luckily, she recovered really well and gave a very good account of herself.

The problem with interviews is, there’s no real point to them. You’re not allowed to ask the questions you really want to ask, and you’re certainly not allowed to document the real decision process for picking your preferred candidate for the benefit of the Human Resources department.

We have to tell them our selection criteria and score each candidate against each one. Having the highest score doesn’t get you the job, but it helps. Getting the highest score against the official selection criteria doesn’t automatically get you the job because there are unwritten selection criteria such as:

1. Did we like them?
2. Are they normal, or a bit weird?
3. Do they have good social skills, or do they avoid eye contact and twitch alot?
4. Are their kids likely to keep them at home at short notice?
5. Would they be a pain in the arse?
6. Are they likely to fuck off and do something a lot more challenging?
7. Do they come from Stornoway?

Bloody employment law!

Anyway, Sniffy had to phone the unsuccessful candidates and give them the bad news… and feedback. Not a nice job, but it’s better than letting people hang on and not telling them at all.

In the night garden
Who’d have thought that this would work as an instant anxiolytic for baby throwing a tantrum?

Amazing.

How does it work? Is there a formula for tapping into a toddler’s mind other than a cattleprod to the head?

I think the formula must include things like a brightly coloured asexual “thing” – Iggle Piggle – that dances and sings, but not in any discernible language. Add some other companions that are also brightly coloured, but slightly different in shape; again without a defined sex, but clearly a different sex than the main character – Upsy Daisy. And they jump around, dance, play hide and seek, then sleep in a boat.

Hey presto! All the children calm down. Unless its something to do with all newborns being chipped at birth with a device that can be activated by a specific signal from CBeebies.

CBeebies is a government tool for controlling the minds our children, thus eventually giving the country a generation of numbed zombies who they can control at the push of a button!

I suppose they said the same thing when they introduced the National Lottery.

I’m fed up buying stuff that doesn’t work. Thanks very much Tesco for selling the following pile of shite items:

• Texet cross cut shredder
• Crappy battery powered water pistol

Bollocks, the pair of them.

The cross cut shredder is great so long as you use for no more than 30 seconds in any one time, giving it half an hour’s rest before even thinking of attempting to shred another single piece of paper.

We’ve had two of these now. Both rubbish.

The water pistol was bought to train Rocky to walk on his lead properly. The original super power soaker merely dribbled, so I took it apart, tried to fix it, and then it leaked. That ended up in the bin.

We bought another this evening, it didn’t work at all, not even a dribble of water.

Fucking rubbish.

Don’t Tesco check these things before they sell them? What do they pay their buyers to do? Pick things that they know that are rubbish that people will buy, but won’t bother to return?

I don’t know, I really don’t.

Adios, Fucktards!
One thing I’ve kept quiet about since moving here to Bellend Towers has been our neighbours. Not the fellers next door, not the family next door but one, but the scratbag tenants in the flat around the back.

Day one – Awww how lovely! The day we moved in, I saw “Sam”, the female, leaving the flat with a very cute puppy. Strange… I’d seen the advert for the lease and it said no smokers, no DSS, no pets. Hrrrm.

Day three – What the fuck? Got home from work and found one of their visitors had parked in my parking space in front of my garage. Cocks. I blocked them in. They wouldn’t do that again, but it didn’t stop their visitors parking in the residents only parking area or in other residents’ parking spaces. Grassed them in to Carol, the marketing woman, who informed us that Simon, their landlord, lives just round the corner “I’ll tell him!” I happened to mention the dog too, and the cig butts all over the parking spaces that they dropped from their window “I saw the advert for the lease and they’re not supposed to have a dog or smoke.”

Week one – Eezer Good. It was obvious in our first week of being here that the young occupants of the flat were dealing drugs. And endless stream of vehicles would come each evening, visit the flat clutching bundles of cash, leave no more than a couple of minutes later stuffing things in their pockets.

Trump mentioned it to our neighbours, who may well have told the coppers. Whether this resulted in anything or not, I don’t know, but the activities stopped after a couple of weeks when they must’ve cottoned on that they were very conspciuous now that other residents had moved in.

Week three – “Gizmooooooo!”. Did I mention that their puppy is a St Bernard? In a small flat? Gizmo was left to roam the parking lot and crap all over the place, including on our parking space. Gizmo was left out at all times of day and night and frequently our sleep would be disturbed in the early hours by Sam shouting him, “Gizmooooooooooo!”. Fucking cunt.

Week four – The sound of music. Not only was our sleep disturbed by “Gizmooooooo!”. Sam and Jason (for that is his name) had a delightful habit of playing their music ever so loudly at all times of day, but especially in the early hours.

Week four and half – A knock on the door. One evening I saw their landlord trying to get them to answer the door. They had a habit of not bothering to answer it and he ended up having a conversation from the doorway up through the open lounge window. He’d return the next day. He did.

Week five – Thank you for the music. Gizmo was getting bigger, his poos bigger, the music was getting louder. I was on the verge of putting a note through the landlord’s door, telling him to get rid of his scumbag tenants, but I held off. The blokes from next door joined us for an evening of merriment and we found the experience therapeutic, airing our displeasures and plotting ways of getting rid of them.

Week six – Gone. They’ve gone. They moved out last night.

Can’t wait to see what we get next.

Fucking buy to let bastards, allowing any fucking scumbag into a place without worrying about their neighbours. I suppose we’re lucky in that we know who the landlord is and where he lives, but bugger me, you shouldn’t have to be plotting to burn somebody’s house down within days of moving into a place!

Isn’t the weather shit?

At least that’s how I hope it’s going to pan out – I’ve had a busy week or so and I could do with putting my feet up.

It all started with looking after Casa Cakesniffer and the Mousesniffer family of moggies while the venerable ones were away on holiday.

Those bloody cats are such hard work. Only Max does his toilets outside so this means twice daily litter changes. Then there are constant demands for food and biscuits, although I couldn’t find the cat biscuits in the disaster zone that is my dad’s shed, so the cats followed me round whinging for four days until I finally discovered the bag of biscuits behind a chemical toilet.

Then there’s Max. Dear, lovely Max with his seemingly ever-growing ears. He has a habit of demanding to go out at 10pm, but he always likes to sleep inside overnight, so he has to be called back in at bed time. Only he doesn’t come in unless you play the “come and get me” game. This involves me going out onto the main road an calling him (generally after midnight) until he appears from his hiding place to follow me back home.

And my long term back problems were exacerbated by all four cats insisting on sleeping on my bed overnight.

But they’re lovely and it’s nice to be able to look after them.

TUESDAY brought the fabulous B52s to Manchester. They were wonderful. Approaching their sixties, I’m quite certain that there’s a fair bit of botox been injected into those faces (esp Fred and Keith) and I think Fred even left the stage for an emergency top up while the girls were singing Roam.

However, this was probably my last chance to see my favourite band live and I’m so glad I did. They played a good selection of tracks from their latest album Funplex, but a good few of their classics too, including:

Mesopotamia (I think this was a bit political, Mesopotamia being today’s Iraq)
Give me back my man
Private Idaho
Strobe light
Party out of bounds
Roam
Love shack

Finishing with
Channel Z
and the fabulous Rock Lobster

Apparently they did Planet Claire as a second encore. What were they thinking of?

Yesterday
Yesterday was our local Pride event that Trump helps to organise. It’s OK these big cities having their Pride Parades and using the whole thing as an excuse to milk the queers for all their commercial worth, but smaller towns really need to get the message out that gay people exist there too.

So well done Trump and her colleagues.

We went out to the town’s only gay pub last night, Trump’s mum came too. It was full of people who would never be allowed into any of the bars on Canal Street, with the exception of Paddy’s Goose perhaps.

Today
Don’t know, but sun is shining and it’s warm. Enjoying this rare event is what’s on the cards today.

I was draining my boiled rice for my tea earlier. What should fall into the sieve-full of nutty white grains but a big fuck-off moth! It was like a scene from Silence of the Lambs.

Hideous bloody creatures, flapping around with no real purpose.

What do moths do?

They go on my Judgement Day Z list, and there ain’t no way ANYTHING on the Z list makes it into the Sniffy eternity.

I’m sure the washing machine’s been running for two hours! It’s like an aeroplane flight deck with all its computerised lights. I’ve no idea what cycle it’s on. I hope it finishes before it goes dark.

As much as the automatic washing machine has to be one of the top ten inventions of the 20th century, I’d be tempted not to have them in paradise with me. I always have such traumas with washing and washing machines, I’d rather my eternal life wasn’t bothered by their presence.

So anyway, back to my Z list. Most other creepy crawlies would join the moths, along with snails and slugs. Reptiles would be on their too, weird creatures. As much as I love animals, I don’t have much time for anything without feathers or fur, so land-dwelling scaly things would be left behind, although fish and sea mammals would be made welcome, perhaps even octopuses (because they taste nice). Are you allowed to eat things that you invite into paradise? You can do what you want if you’re in charge I suppose.

The Z list includes certain types of people, microwaves, toasters and caravans. I have an eternity to decide whether things on the Z list have to stay there. Take caravans for example. Without a doubt, those caravans that you pull along at the back of your car (Vauxhall Omega) at 38mph will stay parked in Z list hell to burn there forever, but I think I’d love a Winnebago.

I’ve been looking at them and new, they cost £175,000 – that’s the price of a mid-range house on the Bellend estate. Who can afford that? And if you can afford that, why can’t you afford to stay in a hotel?

But a Winnebago is the ultimate mobile luxury. Just look at these photos:

Amazing.

And imagine how many motorists you could piss off driving one of those buggers!

We finally got connected to our broadband yesterday. It wasn’t as simple as it was supposed to be, i.e. we couldn’t just plug in and go, we had to phone Sky’s technical support. After a bit of faffing with a very patient technician’s help, we were “connected”.

I say “connected” because the speed was no better than dial up. Absolute rubbish. I know ADSL was rubbish, but not that rubbish.

We were connected on Sky’s basic package – up to 2Mbps, allegedly. I decided to see what would happen if I upgraded to their mid-range package, which should allow up to 8meg, but for a fee of £5 a month.

Having gone through the upgrade process online, the instructions said that the modem would have to be turned off. Within seconds, we lost our internet connection. Multiple attempts to reconnect by rebooting the modem were unsuccesful. Bollocks.

So, we left it overnight and turned it back on again this morning. Still no internet. I was then inspired to use a filter provided with the modem to connect the phone to the socket. Hey presto, the internet came back on.

What sort of fucking hocus pocus shit is this? You can’t connect to the internet unless your phone is connected via a filter device? And if you don’t use a filter device, you get such interference on the line that the phone is unusable?

PLEASE VIRGIN, COME AND CABLE FOR US!!!!

Anyway, we were reconnected to the internet and, surprisingly, it’s much faster than with the basic package. I did another speed test:

Basic (free) package Maximum: up to 2meg Actual: 150kbps
Mid (£5) pacakge Maximum: up to 8meg Actual: 3.8meg (which is the maximum allowed by our BT line)

Aint that weird? You get 1/25th of the potential connection speed on the free package, yet paying a fiver allows you to get the maximum for your line.

Twats.

So we’re both back online and it feels like our severed limbs have been restored to full functionality.

Aaaahhhhhh.

Sniffy was invited to lunch with a colleague yesterday. Faced with the prospect of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder avec fromage, she jumped at the chance.

I approached the counter: “Quarter pounder with cheese and regular fries please”, I beamed with anticipation.

“Sorry, we only have a limited menu, this is all we have”, the assistant gestured to the sad-looking display and empty menu, “but we have our special of the month on.”

Limited menu???? Have they started rationing since I left home this morning?

Confused, and unable to figure out what the hell the special thing was supposed to be, I went for the safe option of a Big Mac and fries. Plenty of people seem to like Big Macs, Trump likes them, Bomb likes them, so why not give it a go?

I think I’d had one of these things once before. Just the once. There’s obviously a reason why I’d only ever had one Big Mac prior to yesterday’s:

Big Macs are fucking rubbish.

Two crappy beef burgers, shredded iceberg lettuce (!), some dodgy slimy stuff – is it mayonnaise, one slice of cheese, one slice of gherkin, shredded processed onions. And then the thing falls apart as you try to eat it.

Why do people go for a Big Mac over a quarter pounder? And why the fuck does the McDonald’s on Oxford Road in Manchester have such a shit menu?*

RUBBISH, RUBBISH, RUBBISH!

*As if any McDonald’s menu is the height of culinary achievement!

Snail’s pace
Where have all these snails come from? We never used to see snails in these parts. Slugs? Millions, but snails? Never.

Over the past couple of years, we have been overrun with the little bastards.

Have the slugs finally saved up enough for a mortgage? There are MILLIONS of them.

I never really studied slugs or snails that much when I did biology at school; I don’t like them, therefore I don’t want to know about them or their weird ways – they make me feel a bit ill.

How do snails grow their shells?

What do they do all day?

Do they look down on slugs?

Do they communicate? I bet they get really dirty with those slimy antennae of theirs. Dirty little things.

Bugger only knows.

Le weekend
Yep, it’s nearly the weekend. What’s in store? Praying for a couple of dry days for a start. We’re having another one of those summers: cold and wet.

I have a hover mower to test drive, you know.

Le Dog Whisperer
Rocky had an altercation with the neighbour’s dog this evening. Apparently, the other pooch went straight for Rocky’s beard.

At least it gave Trump the chance to meet one of the blokes next door. How we’ll laugh about it at dinner parties over the coming years!

An edit from the bedroom
It’s now 23.37, I should’ve been asleep an hour ago, but I never get enough sleep, so I’m used to it.

Here I am in the bed that I slept in for so many years. It’s a comfortable bed and I’ve always liked it. Big Con has done the motherly thing of putting my favourite bed linen on, the pillows are plumped up. radio is on quiet (Country night on Radio 2). All set for dreamland.

I should be comfortable, I should be tucked up, dozing off. But I am bent like a paperclip, surrounded by all four of the cats, Otto is in his usual place under the quilt alongside me. Such odd creatures. And the dirty looks they give you if you dare to move to get into a position where your back isn’t creasing you in pain.

Yes, I am online, courtesy of house and cat-sitting at my folks’ place while they’re on holiday. Broadband won’t be coming to Bellend Towers until the end of the week. Why? Because BT and Sky are a bunch of fucking jokers.

I ordered my BT (telephone to those not in the know) connection the week before we moved – that was the 20th of June. We moved in on the 27th of June, our telephone was connected on the 8th of July.

I ordered Sky satellite TV and broadband on the 20th of June. We couldn’t get connected without a live BT phoneline, so the telly couldn’t be installed until the 9th of July. Sky then have to tell BT that one of their customers wants broadband access, then BT twiddle their thumbs for a bit before deciding to activate it. Our estimated activation date is 17th July; about a month after ordering the service… if we’re lucky.

And then the maximum speed we can get through our oh-so speedy BT phoneline is about 3.5mbps.

Fucking useless.

Why they get the monopoly on providing the broadband infrastructure is beyond me. And why don’t Virgin lay some fucking cables? Tossers.

So, how is Bellend Towers? It’s OK. Rocky has eaten the bottom of the kitchen door and half a door mat. Loosh the cat has started pulling the carpet on the upstairs landing and depositing her hair all over the place. We’ve settled in really well.

There are four of five boxes still to be unpacked, but we’re getting there. We bought a lawnmower yesterday and our SECOND shower tidy (we can’t seem to get them to hang properly).

So what’s so good about where we are? Check this out…

Good eh?

I’ve kind of got used to living with Trump; it’s nice, it makes me feel complete – I guess that’s the idea. Despite being apart from her for a few days, there are a few advantages, mainly checking out all the weird shit that my parents buy in from all the dodgy shops they go to. I’ve just tried a tiny tin of squid in ink sauce. It was surprisingly nice.

I’ve just noticed a disturbing note from Connie – she wants me to tape something. Bollocks. I have no idea how to work a video recorder anymore.