I’ve noticed more drivers creeping through traffic lights as they turn to red. Twats. But not as bad as the utter tosspot who drove past a line of stationary traffic that was stopped at a pelican crossing on red, yes, narrowly missing the folk who were crossing. Nobrot.

Oh the joys of motoring, and the hazards of being a pedestrian. UK pedestrians can’t help but notice the changes to pavements on the approach to crossings. In their wisdom, councils have done away with the nice, smooth slope down to the kerb in favour of tactile paving slabs with raised bumps. These are intended to warn blind people that they’re approaching the road. That’s what they’re intended for; what they actually do is cause agony for older people with arthritis and anybody with sore feet or joints. They also break up and cause a trip hazard.

Look at the shadow of the person in the picture. They’re scratching their in puzzlement at the crazy paving before them. “How do I traverse this dangerous footway unharmed?”. That’s what they’re saying to themselves.

So all this for the benefit of, oh I have no idea of the proportion of population that is 100% absolutely, can’t see a fucking thing BLIND, but I know a much greater proportion suffer from arthritis, sore feet and joints, and tripping up over broken paving slabs. I hate them, they REALLY hurt my feet.

I think making things easier for people with disabilities is absolutely necessary, but there must be a better way of doing this. Imagine if you’re totally blind with arthritic knees and ankles? At least people who can see can avoid these bumpy pavements, and they do. Next time you’re out and about, have a look at the people walking in front of you and watch how they skirt round the bumpy approaches to the crossings. Most will, believe me.

Ups and downs
Trying to upload 75MB worth of photos to Costco for printing while downloading Windows updates. Network and Trump not happy.

Slippers
They’re here, they are wonderful. I bet I could run really fast in them.

In the year or so since I’ve been using Trump’s fridge, I’ve always been most puzzled by the door. There’s this bit where nothing really fits; you can slot in a bottle of salad dressing, or a salami, or a bag of mozzarella… until it goes off and explodes.

As the rest of the fridge was becoming short on space – mainly because of the huge ice monster that was encroaching from the useless icebox – I searched for an alternative location for my cans of pop. And then I had an epiphany:

Well, you’d have thought she’d have told me, wouldn’t you?

I don’t really like fridges; they tend to be hiding places for long-forgotten groceries. Are they fit to eat? Will they taste nasty? Will they taste OK, but be toxic? You end up playing a game of Russian roulette with a jar of pesto.

Who’d have thought a fridge could cause such excitement? The whole experience had me scouring the internet for fridges. They’re not cheap, and you don’t pay much less for one that doesn’t have an icebox. Why pay for something that doesn’t freeze anything, that wastes electricity and takes up valuable space that could otherwise be occupied by good things like gala pie or scotch eggs.

The L Word
I love The L Word and I can’t wait until series 4 is available here in the UK. But until then, I am forced to watch the previous series on DVD , over and over. After the first couple of viewings, you get over the excitement of watching some of the hottest women play out some fairly steamy sex scenes and you start to notice some pretty terrible acting.

Now, only those who have ever seen the show will understand this, but how crap is Tina? Bette (the gorgeous Jennifer Beals) loses grant money, she informs Tina who, with a look of a seven year old in a school play being told to “act like you don’t believe what you’ve just been told”, mouths a “wha?” and says “That’s totally fucked up!” Awful.

And I, along with the entire lesbian population, would love it if Jenny would just fuck off.

But the one thing that pisses me off about this is the patronising way the owner and manager of the show’s social centre refer to “these people”, “our community”. For example, “Many of our community like to use wireless internet, so let’s hook up a network”. Or “Many of our community are vegetarians”. Or “These people deserve a place where they can come and be themselves and enjoy themselves.” And of course, nobody else likes any of these things.

That’s totally fucked up.

Slippers
I’m getting new slippers. I am very excited.

There are some things that make you ask the simple question, Why? The answer is probably not that easy to find though.

Frexample, why does Whoopi Goldberg have no eyebrows? I’ve never quite understood that. But why do we have eyebrows anyway? What purpose could they have served in humans as they evolved from walking fish? Just looking at some silverback gorillas on the telly, they have the furrowed brow, but they don’t look they’re hairy in the way that humans’ are.

So eyebrows are weird things. I’m particularly disturbed by:

• Monobrows (Noel Gallagher, me circa 1986-2000). Ugly, ugly boys.

• Black eyebrows, white hair (government minister Alistair Darling). Fucking ridiculous.

• Shocking over-plucking. This is where the eyebrow is plucked to within a hair of its life, result in a constant look of surprise (me in about 2004).

Black pepper, madam?
Why don’t they leave you a black pepper grinder on the table in Italian restaurants? I think the waiting staff enjoy the power of making diners wait for them to sidle along with a huge grinder – “Pepper, ladies?”. They then proceed to give you two twists of their knob, which approximates to about a nanogram of ground pepper, most of which misses the plate. They give you salt, they give you white pepper (which in many cases I prefer to black anyway), they give you flavoured olive oil, but not black pepper.

And while you’re at it, leave the grated parmesan.

Prego!

Little Con
I’m not one for plastering photos of babies on the interweb, but I couldn’t resist with this one:

My dear, dear virtual friend and blogging muse is back.

Today is filled with joy.

I’m hot. I think some people have positioned a load of mirrors so they reflect the sun’s light into my office. Fuckers.

The north of England is no longer a safe haven for its indigenous population. For a number of years, southern asylum seekers have been migrating here to escape the ludicrous house prices and general nastiness of their origins. As a result, pockets of Manchester are now infiltrated with nasty southerners who have forced house prices up and infiltrated the populace with their Guardian-reading, lefty attitudes.

Me and Trump sometimes frequent a cafe on the high-street that offers a corking full English or Irish breakfast, along with other stuff that’s a lot healthier, but doesn’t prepare you for a trip to B&Q and Ikea. We went there yesterday to find that we could hardly get in for a number of huge baby buggies parked in the doorway: a group of young mothers had colonised one of the tables and were enjoying a breakfast morning. Nobody else was enjoying their breakfast morning through the random squeals of their infants and the droning rubbish coming from the mouths of the southern earth mothers. “Oh, it’s so wonderful up here; I love Chorlton, but THIS part of Manchester is great. There’s such a wonderful mix of social class and ethnic background – it’s so rich! And the housing is wonderfully cheap. We’re thinking of buying a third to let out to students.” How they found the time to eat their veggie breakfasts while talking so much is beyond me.

A man in his fifties ate his lunch in solitude at the table next to the brood. Most of the group had drifted off and as the final two forced their massive buggies through the chair and table legs and people’s feet, the man stopped them. “Would you ever consider going to one of those baby screamer sessions at the cinema?”

Her: “Oh yah, I used to go to one at the Ritzy in London with my first, it was fantastic. We could all relax and watch a film while the little ones just screamed – and nobody cared.”

Him: “Is there anything like that in Manchester?”

Her: “I think there’s something way out in Salford, but I wouldn’t go THERE!”

The conversation continued and it turned out that the bloke was thinking of trying to set something up where women (and I assume men too) could take their babies to the cinema and watch the film with screaming toddler without worrying about disturbing other people.

What a load of fucking crap. If you want to watch a film, you’re going to be so annoyed if somebody else’s kids are screaming away and they’re getting up and down to change nappies. It’s just another excuse for parents to take over places where normal people could once escape from them. You can imagine them taking over cinema foyers with their stupid three wheeler buggies and then taking over the cafe afterwards.

Why can’t they just stay at home and look after their kids without inflicting them on everybody else? For fuck’s sake. NOBODY WANTS TO BE AROUND YOU AND YOUR OFFSPRING! If they did, they’d go to visit you, or you’d be invited around to their house. You get in everyone’s way, expect special treatment and you piss people off when your baby doesn’t stop screaming. Just organise a coffee morning like parents used to do, you selfish twats.

A richness in social class
These are the sort of people who live in areas that are sheltered from the realities that the rest of us endure. The “richness in social class” that they refer to are what we call “fucking scumbags” who make peoples’ lives a misery. I’m sure they’d welcome the richness in social class tearing up and down the streets around their houses on mini scooters for hours on end during the summer. They’d love to meet the richness in social class in their local kebab shop and strike up a conversation with them about the latest trends for wearing sports pants just below the buttocks with the legs tucked into socks.

And they allow these people to vote.

And breed.

All hope is gone, bring on the revolution.

Light the corners of my mind…

Only they don’t. I’m becoming increasingly furious with my inability to remember things. My short term memory is reliant on notes and electronic gadgets. Remember… Sammy Jenkiss was it? You know, that film about that bloke who had no short term memory so he had to take polaroid photos of things and people so he knew he’d seen or met them. Memorabilia… (good tunah) or something.

Anyway, as I sat watching reruns of Frasier earlier, something came to mind that I was going to have a look for on the internet. Was is something to buy, some information I was looking for? I can’t remember. I’d forgotten by the time I’d found a piece of paper to write it down on.

Am I going bonkers? Is it CJD, or is it laziness, as I don’t need to use my brain that much anymore.

Or is it just that it wasn’t important enough to remember?

Flatpack fiasco
Check out Trump’s account of the huge flatpack set of tumbling dominoes that came from Habitat.

One lump or two?
I understand that eco warrior Sheryl Crowe has suggested that we should only be allowed to use one sheet of toilet paper to wipe up after a wee and maybe two after a poo.

Stupid cunt. She may not mind going about stinking of piss and poo because of her inadequately-wiped nether regions, but I’d rather stay as clean as possible between bum washes, thankyouverymuch.

So here’s a question for you all, half of it probably won’t apply to blokes:

How many sheets of toilet paper do you use to clean up after:

A) A wee, or
B) A poo, or
C) Both?

And do you fold or scrunch?

Where in the world could you be subjected to aural torture, incompetence and frustration for over an hour, when you’re actually wanting to spend about £700?

Where in the world?

PC FUCKING WORLD, that’s where. Bunch of shits.

Trump has been after a new laptop and had spotted a rather nifty model when we’d nipped in to PC World a couple of weeks ago. On that occasion, we’d been hounded by the spotty staff more than once as we browsed. “No, we’re just looking thanks”.

“Nice laptop, we’ll look online and see if it’s cheaper anywhere.”

We did, and it was. But you couldn’t actually buy it online, you had to reserve it, then go and pick it up. The logic of this defies all reason, but hey ho, there you go.

So on Saturday, we went to PC World, Pin Hill, Manchester, clutching the piece of paper that said we’d reserved the laptop for pickup online.

As we entered the store, we were met with the most horrendous noise as the super wide screen TV and surround sound system that was playing Shrek at full blast – a gang of monged-out toddlers staring hypnotically at the screen. Walking through the store, it became apparent that everything that made a noise was turned on full blast. Very pleasant.

We looked for somebody to help out, there wasn’t anybody. A PC World store on a Saturday afternoon and no spotty geeks to help? What the hell was going on? We were told by somebody wearing a jacket (duty manager?) that he’d get somebody to help. Nobody came, the noise from the TVs, PCs, tannoys were all unbearable. Tempers were getting frayed as more people queued up for help.

An angry mob was gathering… in my head.

Where the fuck was everyone?

After an hour, the jacketed man finished dealing with the bloke who he’d helped pay for something after trying four credit cards and a finance deal. “Has nobody come to help?”

“Err, no” Actually, we like standing here getting increasingly annoyed while being offended by all the fucking noise in here, so we’re just hanging out.

“I’ll go and get somebody”.

He arrived, as did a number of other youths who must’ve been in the staff room, surfing porn.

“We’ve reserved one of these and would like to buy one please” Trump showed him the paper.

“Errm, there’s no reference number on here, we need a reference number. Have you already paid for it online?”

“No, it won’t let you pay for it or order it online, you can only reserve it and come and collect it.”

“Well, we can’t give you the online price without the reference number. This banner advert has printed over it.”

“So you’re telling us that the advert from your site has printed over the reference number?”

“It appears to have done that yes.”

“Well, let us on the internet here and we’ll get another reference number.”

“We can’t do that.”

“But you must have a PC with internet access here?”

“We can’t do that, you’ll have to go and print it out to get the reference number and come back.”

“I don’t think so”

I turned on my heel and walked out.

Here are some suggestions for PC World:

• Don’t have exclusive online offers unless you’re going to let people actually BUY things online
• Don’t have banners ads that cover the oh-so-important reference number when you print the bloody page
• Turn off all the sodding TVs in your shops. In fact, you’re a PC shop, sell PCs not tellies, arseholes
• Train your staff to come and help people when they need it, and not hassle them when they’re just browsing

Makes my blood boil.

Tossers.

Tomorrow: Flatpack fun and frolics with Habitat.

I’m not sure how you spell ladle ; that doesn’t look right some how.

Ok, so it’s a hockey stick and not a ladle, but the image sums up the out of control cat from the Bear comics. I have an out of control cat on my lap right now. Otto does a very good impression of a pyjama case…

…as does my arse. But soon enough I shall be back into my fit, fit, FIT ways as I start exercising again. I have no excuse either since I’ve just discovered that I can transfer my gym membership to the one near Chez Trump. Oh lordy, the accounts of pain I shall be recounting here.

Little Con
She is five weeks old today. She doesn’t half whinge alot. I think my sister’s breast milk is poisonous and they are cries for help. “Please give me a bottle, my Mum’s boob is toxic!!!”

I’m sure she must be ready to try her first Pot Noodle.

Off
I’m off work for a week from tomorrow. Yay! Activities will include:

• Waiting in for a delivery
• Going up to Barrow
• Coming back from Barrow
• Stripping Trump’s bathroom
• Getting some repairs done on the car
• Watching somebody do some decorating at Trump’s
• Eating vast amounts of chick pea curry at the Nawab Indian buffet
• Moving stuff into Trump’s so I can officially become a kept woman

I’m not sure she knows about me being a kept woman, but she’ll get used to it.