ALICE
So, I celebrate my 365th entry today. One-year blogging and what have I achieved? Finally got the official nod that me and Darren are no longer a functioning family unit. Could have told them that years ago. Lizzie is no longer my sweet little girl, but a petulant foul mouthed little madam, although her schoolwork is good. As for Dan, the less said about him the better.

One year on and what have I achieved?

(We pull away from the Earth with incredibly speed, the darkness of space being taken up by huge letters, quickly forming the desk top of a generic blogging tool. The Earth is now in the top right hand corner, spinning round to inform the user they are on line. We can see all that Alice has just said as typed prose. The arrow hovers over the publish icon.

And then more words are added, Alice reading as she types).

In fact, why did I start this blog lark in the first place?

(The arrow hovers back to the publish icon and becomes a little hand which punches down on the icon sending Alice’s thoughts out for the World to read).

2. James and cold gun
It is early-morning across the Atlantic and the camera pans across a city scape of tower blocks as the sun rises behind them. The lights flicker on in one window of an office block and the camera zooms in to show James putting his takeaway coffee onto his desk and then hand his coat and bag on the stand in the corner of the room. He turns on his computer, logs on. While his e-mails load, he starts his internet browser… the cursor flashes in the Google search bar, “Inbox” mimics this in glorious orange from the task bar.

“Fuck that. Just more crap that can wait for later”. James concentrates on the web and navigates to his Yahoo mail account and checks his feeds for updates.

Sixteen new comments from Blogger this or that at [Cold gun]. He opens them in sequence:

Hey James, are you winding us up with this stuff or what? If any of this is true, you’re a sick asshole… but I like you. I wish I had the guts to to that to my fucktard neighbors.

Yeah, I agree, shitheads.

…

…

Hey, great blog, I’m definitely going to bookmark you! You raise some really interesting points and you might want to come and read my blog on Dog hair extensions. It pretty much covers dog hair extensions and related stuff.

“Fucking spam cunts”, he sighs and checks out the new post from Alice in England.

We see the reflection of James’s PC in his spectacles, the pages scroll as he reads and talks to himself:

“Heh, heh, good old Alice. Yeah, come on Alice what have you achieved? Same old crap every day for a year, tell us what’s really going on. You haven’t achieved anything because you really don’t want to. You’re happy to whine on about your crap life, but you’re never going to do anything to change it. You wanna change it? Perhaps James can help you”.

The system clock shows 7.28. James moves the pointer to “E-mail me”. Right click, “copy link location”, paste into a new Yahoo message window. James starts to type.

Dear Alice,

I read your blog most days and I am fascinated by your everyday life. I just thought it would be nice to e-mail you rather than leave a lengthy comment on your blog. I hope you don’t mind.

I had been in my last relationship for a number of years before realizing in a moment of clarity that it was all over and I wanted out, so I fully sympathize with how you’re feeling right now. It is very difficult to take that big step and move out, but you’ll be grateful when you do. Find strength in God and use the help of your friends and you’ll be OK.

If you’d like to get in touch, please do, but I’ll understand if you think it’s weird and don’t want to.

Take care,

J

The cursor moves to the Send button. Click.

7.39 He types into the address bar of the browser http://coldgun.blogspot.com*, the page changes to one displaying a page entitled “You got a friend” above a photo of a burning house: fire appliances and ambulances are in attendance, a crowd of onlookers huddle together.

“Heh, heh. Dumb fuckers never do believe me”.

Hrrrrm, next up in this little venture, I challenge…. Michelle. Will she manage to cheer things up a little bit??? We shall have to wait and see.

*Disclaimer: Any similarities to any persons living or dead or their blogs is purely coincidental and I didn’t mean it or anything. Jesus, it’s only a bloody story, for fuck’s sake. Nobody’s even going to read this because it doesn’t involve a cat in a box or a photo of my injured breast and photo of me in a comedy pose.

Not quite ready for the blog movie just yet. I need a bit of time out from stuff to be able to incubate ideas. God, what sort of a prize tosser does that make me sound like? A big one with a big rosette and bunch of flowers (not dead ones though).

But anyway, there’s nothing finer than enjoying a nice cup of coffee and a biscuit. Strong, sweet coffee and a ginger biscuit or two, or three.

The advantage of having biscuits with hot drinks is that they afford a mechanism for premature enjoyment of the steaming hot brew by virtue of dunking into the otherwise undrinkably hot liquid. There’s nothing finer than the flavour of ginger biscuit dunked in sweet, strong coffee. Well there is, but you know, this is the start of a dunking discussion.

Here are some good biscuits for dunking:

• Ginger nuts
• Fig rolls
• Digestives
• Hob Nobs
• Kit kat*

*I’ll try to remember this one, promise

I don’t eat crap biscuits, but I can’t imagine that dunking a chocolate digestive would be much fun – a waste of chocolate, you see. Chocolate digestives are best enjoyed by cramming as many into your mouth at once and successfully eating them without choking to death.

*Kit kats (Yay! I remembered the asterisk) are great fun for dunking because you nibble off a small amount from the end of one and then use it as a straw, sucking up as much coffee as you can before the wafer centre collapses and creates a disgusting mess in your mug and all over your fingers. Try it in your next meeting – the Chief Exec will be highly impressed.

Is it wrong to go to bed at 7.30? Depends on who with I suppose. Ho ho ho.

Travel
As a seasoned traveller, I am clued up about things such as visas and travel insurance and stuff. Oh yes, I shall be the most well-prepared traveller on earth by the time I step onto that plane to jet off to BC in the summer. My bank provides travel insurance, but I’m going to make sure that it covers me against waterskiing and helicopter accidents, as well as personal injury resulting from horse play with horses and mugging by 3 year old terrorists.

I think I’m OK if I get hijacked though.

Waaaaaay too tired today.

I want to prepare people for something that might be quite good fun.

Herge over at the FANTASTIC Angry Chimp has had the great idea to write a blog movie to which any blogger can contribute.

He has written the introductio and I’m going to try to put scene two together sometime over the next couple of days. Check it out and see what you think.

I feel a little inadequate though. Still, it’s all good fun – a bit like those games you played when you were children.

Booze
I had some alcohol-free wine tonight. I thought it was one of those poncy adult soft drinks “with herbs” and I almost choked when I took a sip. Far too similar to the real thing and it threw me a little bit. Not sure I liked it (the feeling).

Weird.

I think I’ll stick to cough mixture for my sneaky alcohol intake; it’s safer that way.

Anyway, I followed Tesco’s customer care instructions for the situation when you receive dead flowers: let them stand in water for 24hr.

But look! C’est un miracle!!! Little Max has indeed risen from the dead.

Separated at birth
There was a wonderfully vile woman in the Lidl (cheap, nasty, foreign supermarket that doesn’t really sell many well-known brands) near work this lunchtime. Me and a colleague were on the look out for dolphin-friendly tuna (in Lidl???), tinned sweetcorn (maybe, but not) and Heinz baked beans (no chance) and we kept hearing this woman shouting, “I said I’d just be a minute, I’m not queue jumping!”.

As we got nearer the only open till, at which there had amassed a sizeable crowd of people waiting to pay, she ran to the front of the queue, shouting “Who’s moved my stuff off the conveyor? I only went to get something that I’d forgotten, I’m not queue jumping!”

In fact, what she’d done was grab one item, stick it on the conveyor belt of the till, then gone round the store to do the rest of her shopping.

Definitely separated from her brain at birth, but not her downright cheek. Twat.

I wonder if Lidl and Aldi were separated at birth, they only differ by one letter.

Well, after all my slagging off of retail giant Tesco (did you know that £1 in every £8 spent in the UK goes to Tesco?), I thought there’d been some action on their part to rectify their shocking failings in customer care.

Look what was waiting for me on my bed when I got in from work tonight:

After declining replacement flowers for the ones that were killed in transit, it seemed that they’d decided to send me some afterall. Aawww, how sweet of them.

Imagine my horror when I opened the box to find this:

Poor little Max! Murdered by the Mob.

Accompanying his stiffened little body was a note:

I must say that, despite the obvious disappointment of receiving a bunch of dead flowers 2 days too late and having my complaints met with the most appalling customer service imaginable, I can see why Tesco is such a HUGE retail success and I think everybody should buy their mums flowers from Tesco online for Mother’s Day.

I wish Tesco every luck with their venture into the US market.

No cats were harmed in the making of this blog post. Even Tesco aren’t evil enough to murder a family pet… give them time though, give them time.

Can anybody see this?

Back from my convalescence in Norfolk. I was very relaxed until Sonny the ADHD cat started mithering me as soon as I walked in the door. I’m sure we’d get loads of welfare benefits if he was a child – and probably an extenstion put on the house for free too.

So, despite it still being icy cold in the UK, spring is springing across the land and it was quite noticeable down there, where there’s lots of countryside and stuff. There were new lambs in the fields, baby rabbits leaping about, baby birds twittering, the ducks were going mental after a bit of action. And then there were the pheasants.

The pheasants. Oh deary me. My friends are lucky enough to have pheasants roaming through their garden, in and out of the hedges in that headless chicken panicky style of theirs. Of course they run in and out of the hedges that line the roadsides too, generally into the paths of oncoming vehicles – BLAM! I’ve never seen so many squished birds in all my life. Stupid friggin’ animals.

Songs of the week
I don’t know why, but the embedded music thing in the sidebar seems to disappear after a while and, since it’s such a fart pissing about with the templates, I decided to put the tracks in a post instead.

So anyway, here are this week’s specials.

Rocky
Never heard of it myself, but Jo requested something by The Pixies, so here is Gigantic.

Gay disco
This week’s disco hit comes from Seamus Haji and his mate thingy Emanuel. That’s right, it’s Take me away! I love this one and I play it REALLY loud, well as loud as my mum will let me.

Nice
Who can’t like the lovely Natalie Imbruglia? She sings effortlessly and she’s dead fit too. The thought of her certainly makes me shiver!

Like I said, I’m more than happy to take requests and you can see them here every Sunday.

Nippy
Tell you what, you don’t half notice a nipple injury when it’s cold and you get all shivery. It’s like being stabbed in my bosom. Can you imagine that?

After I’d woken up from my anaesthetic yesterday, I was given the opportunity to have a bit of a snooze before being given a cup of coffee and some toast. I started to feel more human with every minute, but couldn’t see (no specs) and I was curious to see whether I’d had any text messages. A neighbour of mine works in the hospital and is ALWAYS present, whenever I happen to be there – no matter what area or circumstance. He was there yesterday, so I called him over and asked if he wouldn’t mind reaching into my pocket for my glasses and my mobile; he passed them to me.

One text message from mother: “Are you sleepy? Some flowers have come from Trillion.”

Eh, flowers? For ME? I was thrilled. You see, Trillion is lovely; she has the most enormous heart and I love her to absolute bits. She’d phoned on Saturday to ask if there hadn’t been delivery for me, so I realised that this must’ve been it. What a lovely gesture.

Anyway… in the car on the way home, I asked Mum about the flowers. “Well, there’s a problem you see. It says on the box that they should’ve been delivered on Saturday. And they aren’t packed in water. And they only came today. And, well, they’re all dead.”

Indeed they were.

Despite being groggy and tired and sore, I decided to kick some serious arse with the people the flowers had come from. Yes, that’s right, good old TESCO.

I phoned them up. Their customer services centre seems to be in Scotland, so this automatically got my back up as I realised I probably wouldn’t be able to understand who I was speaking to. Great. If anybody wants to hear what sort of accent you have to deal with, then phone this number and use the automated menus to navigate to “Tesco Extra” before hanging up: 08457 225533.

Me: “Hello, I’ve had some flowers sent to me by a friend as wonderful gesture because I’ve been in hospital for an operation and I’ve just got out. They should have been delivered on Saturday, but they came today and they’re all dead.”

Tesco: “Can I have the order number please?” I gave it to him. “Well, it only says Saturday delivery as a guide, it could mean any time… can’t be guaranteed.”

Me: “No, it says quite clearly on the box, with a yellow sticker: “DELIVERY SATURDAY”. That means deliver Saturday to me.”

Tesco: “Well, what we suggest is that you put them in water for 24hr and then phone back”

Me: “And what is that going to achieve, apart from a mess in the kitchen? These flowers are dead, there’s no going back, they ain’t gonna do a Lazarus on us. Dead, do you understand? Have you seen the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch? Well, substitute the parrot for these flowers. THEY ARE DEAD and they will still be dead in 24 hr.”

Tesco: “But the policy set by our suppliers says they need to be left for 24 hr before we can do anything.”

Me: “Who is your supplier?”

Tesco: “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Me: “What is this, the KGB? Can I speak to your supervisor please?”

Tesco: “I’m the manager here.”

Me: “Right, well I know all about the training they make you go on, how you’re told to think about the motivations of and the perspectives of the people who phone you up. Most people don’t phone to congratulate you, they phone because there is a problem that needs resolving. Telling them to wait 24hr on dead flowers is not helping people, it is winding them up.

And then I did it, shame on me, but I did it…

“Could you imagine if your mum, sister, girlfriend had been in hospital to have a breast lump removed and they came home to find that somebody had sent them dead flowers? How do you think that would make them feel?

Tesco: “I understand and it’s not acceptable.”

Me: “Why are these things not packed in water like you get from Marks and Spencer or Interflora?”

Tesco: “The ones that are sent by courier are packed in water, those sent by Royal Mail are sent frozen.”

Me: “I don’t understand why there’s a difference, they should be packed exactly the same, no matter what the method of delivery is. This gets more ridiculous by the second.”

Tesco: “All I can do is suggest that you give them 24hr, I can’t do anything until then.”

Me: Well there’s leadership for you. Where were you when they bombed Plymouth? “Well, they’ve already been given 48 hours and they are dead, and they will be dead tomorrow.

“I will call back tomorrow, as will the person who ordered these for me. She is going to be very upset about this and if you think that dealing with me had been bad, just wait till she phones you up.

“And what you need to do is take the transcript from this telephone call and pass it on to your mysterious supplier and tell them that they are inept.”

Tesco: “Ok, well I’m sorry that I couldn’t be any more help.”

You fucking will be.

Round two
So now that 24 hours have passed, I’ve just phoned them up to tell them what to do with their flowers.

Me: “I phoned yesterday to complain that I’d been delivered some dead flowers that should’ve arrived on Saturday. I was told that, despite the fact that they’re dead, I have to leave them 24hr.”

Tesco: “That’s correct.”

Me: “But it isn’t correct though, is it? What’s the point of leaving dead flowers for 24hrs to see if they perk up?”

Tesco: “I meant, that’s our procedure.”

Me: “Well your procedure is wrong. Anyway, surprisingly enough, they’re still dead and I want some action taking.

“First of all, you’ve got to pass this message onto your supplier to tell them that they are rubbish and that they have no idea how to pack flowers. Better still, change your supplier to one who knows what they’re doing.

“This “give them 24hr in water” thing is ludicrous. Who on earth wants flowers delivering that look half dead? They’re supposed to arrive in tip top condition. Mother’s day is coming up in a couple of weeks, can you imagine all the mums in the land being delivered half-dead flowers and having to wait until the Monday before they can appreciate them? It’s not on.”

Tesco: “So what did the flowers look like?”

Me: “Well, you know what dead roses look like? They look like that: shrivelled up petals, wilted leaves and stems. Like something that’s been at a graveside for a couple of weeks.”

Tesco: “I’ll certainly pass that on. How would you like to proceed?”

Me: “Well, I certainly don’t want any Tesco flowers, but I want you to give a full refund to the person who sent them to me and I want you to give her some compensation too.”

Tesco: “Ok then, we’ll certainly do that: a full refund and a good will gesture.”

So long as they don’t think a good will gesture is a bunch of flowers.

Fucking morons.

The thing is, I love Tesco, it’s one of my favourite shops in the (my) entire world. Tesco is one of Britain’s best ever retail success stories and it deserves to be – the stores are great. I hate having to knock them, but things like this really get on my scarred and painful tits.