Dreadful Nonsense

In fact, I found it a lot easier travelling on my own than when I'm travelling with anyone else. I actually find it incredibly stressful travelling with He Who Only..., and last night I worked out why: I'm an idiot. A crazy, irrational, possibly borderline-actual-insane idiot. Last night on the plane, I walked around, I lay down (the flight was pretty empty and I had all three seats to myself), I looked out the window (London at night is AMAZING during take off. I never knew that. Why has no one ever told me that?). I read my book. I listened to my iPod. I went to the toilet. I didn't cry. I kind of (but not really) almost (but actually really not) enjoyed (but I didn't) the flight.

It was a pretty positive experience for all of us. So now I'm left in a quandary. If we're ever going anywhere ever again, do I need to book us both onto separate flights from now, just so that I don't drive myself, He Who Only... and everyone else in the known universe insane with the crying and the rocking and the impending doom? Or was this just a fluke, a once-off, something that may not be repeated on the flight back? The test will be the flight back on Sunday afternoon. After that there are some tough decisions to be made, like making He Who Only... travel ahead of me, like some kind of advance party.

Actually, that'd be pretty cool. Cos then wherever I go, there would always be someone there at the airport, waiting for me. I'd be like the Queen, or Madonna, or the Pope or someone. I'd make him hold up a sign and everything. Cool.

[In the interests of full disclosure, I took a full 4mg of valium before the flight last night, which is exactly 2 more mgs of valium than I usually take. That might have had a lot to do with it.]

I'm flying today. On my own. It's very frightening for me, and for all the other passengers, when I start screaming and pulling my own hair out and crying and throwing up and praying and rocking.

And that'll just be at the check-in desk.

Ha. That's not even funny. And I've already checked in on-line. Get with the 21st century, daddio.

Anyway. He Who Only... said I needed to put my flight details on line, cos that way the plane won't crash. He also confessed to me this morning that, when he flies, he has one piece of superstitious crazy behaviour which means that on the day that he is flying, he has to act all good and proper and kindly to his fellow man so that if the plane does actually crash and God does a quick background check, he can at least on that one day be mistaken for a Christian and let into heaven.

This morning, I deliberately hit three school children on the shins with my bag as I was getting off the tube, because they were all too young and thin and full of hope.

Anyway. Flight details below. Posts next week about how cute my nephew is to follow.


ITINERARY:
=====================================
AER LINGUS EI 183 Z/ECONOMY CLASS CONFIRMED
DEP LONDON/HEATHROW THU 3APR08 9.10PM
LHR -TERMINAL 1 - TERMINAL 1
ARR DUBLIN THU 3APR08 10.20PM

AER LINGUS EI 168 Z/ECONOMY CLASS CONFIRMED
DEP DUBLIN SUN 6APR08 2.40PM
ARR LONDON/HEATHROW SUN 6APR08 3.55PM
LHR -TERMINAL 1 - TERMINAL 1
=====================================

Whipping through my photo archives, I've taken a lot of photos of pub interiors in my time. They are shadowed only by photos of (a) pints of beer; (b) He Who Only... looking a bit bored; (c) pictures of myself in mirrors in public toilets when I've been drinking that never look good the next morning; and (d) photos of graffiti.


All of the below are various pubs in the locality. I like them all, for a variety of different reasons. But I am not going to talk about them at all. Instead, I am going to tell you the tale of what happened to me almost a week to the day.




The morning started off well, in that I got out of bed in time, managed not to immediately burst into hot, angry tears at the thought of yet another tedious fucking day alive and breathing and having to go to work, think about money, contemplate my future, do some more study, contemplate my own navel and also answer someone else's phone calls for seven and a half hours a day. No, that morning I even managed to sing along to Dusty Springfield in the shower and raise half a smile at poor He Who Only... who has become accustomed to having to hide under the duvet for fear of missiles flying on his head most mornings. He was even brave enough to declare that today would be a good day and that "nothing bad would happen". We've had some bad days recently, you see, and it seemed like we deserved a better day, and why wouldn't it be today? It surely must be today.


I decided against wearing my brand new boots, because I've not quite got the hang of walking in them yet and by the end of the day I'm walking like someone with two ankles on each foot, and a right dose of rickets. I decided instead on my runners that have stars on them, which look like something Avril Lavigne would wear (and secretly that's why I like them). I left in good time to catch the train in, and had plans to pop into the New Look to buy something cheap and made by 6 year olds in sweat shops on the way to work to cheer up my miserable life.


So that's where my mind was at just after 8.15am when I crossed the road across from the train station that I have been crossing for over two years now, and the next thing I knew, I was thinking to myself "Oh, I seem to be falling" and then I fell and kept falling for what felt like about five long, falling minutes.

I cannot tell you in words the pain in my knee. I cannot describe for you the feeling of my knee. I can't explain to you anything at all about my knee, other than the fact that I had really, really hurt my knee and now the world needs to end because dear God, the feeling in my knee is too much. It really hurt, is what I'm saying.

But not as much as the pain in my hand. Oh, the pain in my hand. And there was blood and bleeding and the pain in my hand and my knee, and I can't even stand up. I can't even stand up, so now I'm sitting on the pavement by the edge of the road and I'm laughing because the pain in my knee is so intense that it is actually comical and the pain in my hand and it's bleeding and oh I really should have stayed in bed this morning.

The gloriously nice thing about this experience is what happened next. A man walked past me and towards the train. A second man walked past me in the other direction. And a young, black teenager, all hoody and mobile phone with tinny shitarse music playing out loud, all attitude and chewing gum and inappropriately bulky trainers, he stopped and asked me if I was okay. And I was laughing, still laughing and I said yeah, and he said, are you sure, and I said, yeah, and so he kept walking. And I wanted to hug him so badly, and tell him that I was always sure those little hoodies wanted to stab me in the face and run off with my iPod, but he had changed my mind, but I couldn't tell him that because I was still laughing and the pain in my knee was getting better and worse at the same time.

Another lady came over and knelt down beside me and asked me if I needed some help getting back up and I said I didn't, but I just needed to get my breath back, and she said she'd wait for me, and so she did, and I stopped laughing finally and she helped me back up and then asked me if I was okay, and I said yes, and then she crossed the road behind me and I limped onwards towards my train, sat on the train for 10 minutes examining the bleeding cut on my hand, realised that I was starting to shake and my teeth were chattering, and I turned around and came home again and then burst into tears in He Who Only...'s arms.

The long and short of it all is that my right knee is completely black and blue and fabulously interesting looking, and only today is it able to go up and down stairs in any comfort. My left knee, which was also left cut and bleeding, has been a lot better in comparison to it's brother knee, and is merely blue, green and yellow at this point. My right hand, when it stopped bleeding, has healed up nicely and we'll say no more about it. My left hand, however, only started being trouble the following day and a week later, I am now convinced I may have broken a bone in it.

And this is why I keep complaining about everything. And this is why I haven't been blogging recently. It's all just whining and complaining and broken bones and bruises. But some lovely illustrations, I think you'll agree.

And with this kind of backward thinking comes a tremendous amount of forward planning. I've talked a lot recently about moving away from Hackney. But why, I hear you all screaming so loudly that you're scraping your throats red raw, why in Jebus's sweet, sweet name would you want to move away from Hackney, your home of the last nearly three, long years? Well, dear lovely people, sometimes you've got to think to yourself that enough is enough. This past weekend, we were visiting He Who Only...'s kind parents who were polite enough to put us up for the Easter weekend even if I do insist on being covered in tattoos and don't even eat meat, I mean, what is all that about anyway? And we spent the time building snowmen and sitting drinking tea and reading newspapers and going for walks in the country side, and there on the news spoiling all of our fun was the story of the man stabbed to death in Hackney simply because some people wanted some of his money, and he was too slow to hand it over.

Hackney is fun sometimes. I mean, look at this -

This is more graffiti that I found in the locality. This one stretches underneath a railway arch and goes all the way from here...


right the way round to here -


And since I took that, it's been embellished even more. Giant graffiti punks. I love them. This kind of anti-social behaviour I can really get behind. I love graffiti. If I stay in London much longer, I'll be the next one to publish one of those twee little books about the walking tours you can take around the rough ends of nowhere just to look at some Banksy piece of shit.

(I say that now, but when my bus went past the latest Banksy, which is the one with the kids pledging allegiance to the Tesco carrier bag, I nearly got off the bus to take a photo and lick the wall in appreciation.)

But it's the stabbing, the spitting, the traffic noise, the lack of social cohesion, the sense that, if I carry on living around here for much longer, my luck's going to run out and I'll be stabbed through the chops by some little tike who wants my iPod (and then this blog will be found, and that last sentence will be reprinted in The Fucking Daily Mail along with my MySpaz photo and the word "Tragic" printed in bold beside my name in the photo caption).

But we can't decide where to move to. We're trapped in London, we really have to stay within an hour of the centre, we need good transport links, and I want a dog more than most women want children, so we need a garden and an understanding landlord, and every time I contemplate leaving my comfortable little mouse-infested Nest'O'Love I get more panic attacks than I know what to do with. But then again, I felt the same way moving from Dublin, and I'm ever so glad I did that too.

Hey ho. Nothing ventured, and all that.

No, in answer to Lorraine's comment on the post below: this is not my way of weaning y'all off my blog, but my way of explaining the lack of posts, both to you good people and to myself. It's not that it's been a rough few months, or that I've had nothing to tell you. I've got tons to tell you all, absolute belters of stories, many, many photographs that need to come off my phone and into your computer screens, but the thing of it all is that I find myself constantly with neither the time nor the inclination to blog it all up.

For example, there was an astonishing sunset about a month ago that I dashed to a window to take photos of. I wanted to blog it immediately. I didn't. So here now are some photos of the view from my work building of a sunset over London Town, about a month ago. I will use these to illustrate a long whinge about why it's so difficult to blog these days.

For a start, I'm spending more of my time studying at the moment for a course that I'm rapidly losing interest in, but having told so many people of my life-changing career decision, I feel kind of trapped into following it through, even though I no longer feel capable of doing it. Or even willing to do it at all. I'm loving the theory, I'm loving the regular and fresh insights into my own actions and decisions, and being able to look back at other things I've done in the past and seeing the long line that flows from decision to decision that extends all the way back to THAT ONE TIME MY MOTHER DIDN'T COME RUNNING QUICK ENOUGH WHEN I FELL OVER IN THE SUPERMARKET, YEAH THAT'S RIGHT, SHE MESSED ME UP GOOD. So I'm reading, and I'm learning, and every day I'm thinking, I can't do this. There's no way I can do this. I don't even want to do this.

But every time I see someone who I've already told that I'm going to do this, this is the thing that I'm going to do with the rest of my life, they ask me how it's all going, and I don't want to burst into tears and sob "I can't do this..." into their jumpers, so I tell them it's going really well, I've applied for 6 places in 6 different universities and have already saved up one year's fees for the three year course, and I'm still thinking in my head I CAN'T DO THIS, I CAN'T DO THIS but smiling and telling them how, really, it's the course in this one university that I want the most, but if that one doesn't happen, then I'll settle for either of these two ones, because they're the most prestigious, and yes, I'll probably work in the NHS when I qualify, and it'll be a blast but I CAN'T DO THIS is still rattling around in my head so loudly that it must be leaking out of my ears, can't you hear that? The sound of someone shrieking with fear? That's me.

So I haven't really found a way to tell people that, actually, I CAN'T DO THIS and so I won't be doing it, because when I do tell people that, you know, I've been thinking that perhaps this might not be the way for me after all, you know, maybe I need to reconsider what I've been planning to do up until now, they tell me that of course I should still give it a go, though, no point in going this far and giving up and you'll only regret it in a few years time if you don't, and it's best to regret the things that you do do, rather than the things that you don't do, and then the I CAN'T DO THIS monster starts running around behind my eyes and I feel really tired and like I can't stand up any more, and so I tell them that, yeah, the studies are going well, and really let's just keep plodding down the same road because I CAN ALWAYS JUMP OFF A BRIDGE IF IT ALL GETS TOO MUCH.

The I CAN'T DO THIS monster has been joined, you'll have noticed, by the creeping slug called I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS which is making the I CAN'T DO THIS monster jumpy and hyperactive. It was okay when I could think to myself that it was just cold feet, just jitters or nerves, because it's right to have doubts about big decisions, it proves that you're giving it some real thought, that you're not blindly leaping down alleyways because it seems like a good idea at the time and damn the consequences, because, really, it's right to think that you're not always supernaturally capable of everything, and over confidence killed the cat - well, okay, not the cat, but I'm sure over confidence has killed a lot of things. So, when I get the right training, with some experience, with my own client base and supervisor, with three more years of training under my belt, of course the I CAN'T DO THIS monster will have gone away, to be replaced by the LOOK AT ME, I'M DOING THIS! fairy.

But the I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS slug has arrived and has slimed all over my brains, leaving me a mess who arrives home from work and sits sobbing on the sofa more times in the last couple of weeks than is right or even hormonally justifiable.

I'm running out of sunset photos.

A trillion years ago, I made some kind of ridiculous promise to myself, and thankfully not to you people, that I would start updating my blog on a regular basis again. This obviously hasn't happened. My problems are many and varied, but a short selection of them include:

1. I don't have time.
2. I don't have interesting stories.
3. My nails are too long to type.
4. I've been too drunk.

I will try. I do worry about what you all do without my interesting stories to brighten up your lives. Really, I do. Honestly. I wonder what you think about on the bus on the way to or from your pointless jobs, when you don't have my latest opinions to ponder or pass off as your own to the poor idiots that are sitting beside you.

This post is illustrated by some of the things that I saw in Tate Britain that I liked. Some of them are just bits of pictures. I don't know which ones, I'm afraid. I wasn't taking notes.


Please take this, therefore, as a long and boring, but well illustrated, apology for the silence that you've been listening to on this website for so long. I can't honestly tell you if it's ever going to come back to the way it was. I doubt it. I've kind of fallen out of love with the internet, and all of its big promises that come to nothing. I've started cancelling my accounts with all of the social networking sites. The only one now left for me is F*c*book, and I've even started trimming down on my "friends" on that site, which has led to some difficult situations at work where I've had to explain to people I don't know very well why I don't want to be virtual friends with them. Jesus, that's awkward.

A slight interlude to talk about the above photo because I loved these sculptures SO MUCH I took about six photos of them. I love these ladies. These ladies are very crudely made, quite scrappy around the edges, wonderfully illdefined, standing on massively chunky and clunky feet and bit of behind and hair. Their facial features are almost non-existant, I love that their chests are not at all the focus of attention or even have any attention particularly paid to them. I love these ladies. I love that they are striking and strong, and recognisably women and female and feminine, but with the lines being blurred. I loved them.

My dinner has just arrived. I'm going to eat it now. I might post more later.

My two favourite things about being Irish today:

1. The Sublime -



(Honestly, I just watched this again, this and the acceptance speech, and actually started crying a little. I freaking love this song, this film and these people. There, I've said it.)

2. The Ridiculous -

I love a good telephone-photograph-self-portrait picture. Nothing makes my chin look longer and pointier than when I hold a telephone up above my head and force a smile. It's great.

Myself and Little Sister Edel (that one, up there, on the right) now have the same F*c*book profile photo, which is making the thread in which me and other members of my extended family shout insults at each other very difficult to follow, because some sections of it now look like I'm shouting at myself and calling myself retarded.

But that's beside the point. It also struck me that many other people on F*c*book have these same style of self-portrait photos as their ID photos and this is of course because nobody likes photos of themselves as taken by anyone else.

Either that, or the F*c*book ID photos fall roughly into two other categories:
1. Pictures of you and your boy/girlfriend, both of you grinning like morons; or
2. Pictures of you in fancy dress and/or pulling a face.

And that's it. I think in the summer there may be a spate of ID photos where people are standing in front of somewhere identifiably foreign, but these will fade away just as quickly as their disgusting flakey tanned skin.

I'm interested in why people choose particular photos for their F*c*book pages. What are they trying to say?

With the self-portrait, I think that just happens because you're simply not happy with any other photo posted by anyone else of you on the site, and so you have to take matters into your own hands, and keep snapping away until you get something which makes you look at least bareably human, if not at all like the person you imagine yourself to be. I never look like what I think I look like in photos. I have yet to take a picture in which my face isn't (in my opinion) contorted into the same kind of grimace race horses pull just after falling over a fence and giving themselves a break in the leg that they know in their heart spells the end for them.

The Couples Photo sends out another signal entirely. That one screams WE ARE SO HAPPY LOOK AT US WE ARE SO HAPPY, which of course makes me suspect that they are not. I have been guilty of this photo ID before, which happened coincidentally shortly after He Who Only... because F*c*book friends with one of his ex-girlfriends. I sobered up a few days later and removed it, of course, but then it made a reappearence when I in turn became friends with one of my ex-boyfriends (who is now married) and I needed stress HOW VERY HAPPY AND IN LOVE I AM, LOOK AT US, WE'RE SO GOOD TOGETHER.

The Kooky Photo is, of course, the last resort - you can't find a good photo of yourself, you either don't have a significant other (not that there's anything wrong with that) or your significant other is too ugly to photograph, you're balding and you don't want your school friends to find out, or you just want everyone to know that you're still as fun and fun loving and fun fun fun as you were 10 years ago when you were the life and soul of uni, and having a job, mortgage, kid and wife has done nothing to dampen your party spirit. And wearing an Elvis wig in a photo while winking and curling your lip will hide the pain of your haemorrhaging soul.

Or, you know, it's the only picture you have on your computer, and it's better than one of those stupid silhouettes with a question mark in it.

It's pretty, innit?

We went to see Cloverfield for Valentines Day.


I'm not sure if it was the power of suggestion, but even walking towards the cinema had me feeling a little wobbly of stomach. Picking up the tickets, there are more of the same signs, and then these lovely notices stuck to the door of the cinema. Equipped with the smallest size popcorn and the biggest sized diet cola, I thought I could probably power through it. I don't get sea sick, I reasoned, and it's not like being on a boat - at least this way, when you start feeling a bit ill, you can just look away for a moment, centre yourself back in the room and you're good to go once more.

How very, very wrong I was.

The first 20 minutes are no problem. This will not spoil a darned thing, plot-wise, and don't worry, I'm not going to give away any secrets or even explain the title of the film, but the first 20 minutes are just some slightly unlikeable but very pretty to look at 20-somethings (kind of like Hollyoaks, but with acting and without the sheen of Primark) talking into a video camera about someone you don't care about called Rob. When the first explosion happened, me and He Who Only... turned to each other and whispered "thank fuck for that" because the tedium of 20-something relationship politics was starting to exhaust us. Quite soon after that, the actual travel sickness set in.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE the film. It's tremendous. It would be wrong to say that it's the Best Film Ever, simply because I've not seen every other film. However, it would be right to say that it's one of the best films I've ever seen, even allowing for the fact that I had to leave the cinema for three minutes to stand in the coridoor outside shaking and trying not to puke before heading back inside.

I didn't even know about all the websites connected to it, all the back-stories and side-characters and sub-plots. I've been looking at all the sites since seeing it, starting with the Wiki entry and moving on from there, and it's needlessly and additionally entertaining, but even without all that crap, I would wholeheartedly recommend this film to everyone, even those not particularly interested in big monsters or screaming teenagers or buildings falling down. It's simply great.

I will however never again see it in the cinema. The day it's released on DVD, it'll be mine, but until then I'm going to have to console myself with the viral marketing videos and nonsense conspiracy theory websites and the fake MySpaz pages for the characters. But holy hell, I was sick as a parrot in the cinema and I shan't be doing that again.

Totally worth it, though.

Tonight: a massive update. Photos and everything.

In the meantime, this is one of the best articles about dieting I've ever read. If you're a boy, and you don't understand why girls announce that they're fat and miserable and want to cry (which I do about twice a month, on average), then read this. It very eloquently explains it all. I'm really looking forward to reading her columns.

It's difficult to find things to do at the weekend. Having spent all week being incredibly time efficient: doing my shopping on-line while at work; studying in my lunch breaks; reading improving literature on the bus to and from work; helping the poor and needy orphans in the evenings... By the time it comes to Sunday afternoon, I've done everything I'm required to do, and I find myself increasingly lost for options. I've been to the gym, I've tidied the Nest'O'Love, I've found the cure for AIDS, I've watched two hours of House, it's 2.00pm and I've got nothing left to do. I could, of course, get the hoover out again and give it a quick twice-over, but He Who Only... says that OCD isn't sexy, and I've had to restrict the hand washing and light switch flicking to when he's not in the room.

Today I hit on another brilliant scheme in which to occupy myself and He Who Only...'s wandering eye: baking. I decided today was the day in which to start learning how to make scones.

The first batch turned out like this:


The second batch turned out like this:



One batch involved me working on my own, without interruption. The other batch included the special assistance of He Who Only... hurling flour everywhere, knocking sultanas to the floor, giving me lectures on the best way to sieve and spending longer than is decent squishing butter between his fingers.

If it helps, there they are side by side:



The difference, I think you'll agree, is striking. Them on the left there, those ones are scones as I understood scones to be. The second lot (on the right as you face them)... Well, there's something wrong with them. Something to do with... um... the general flatness.

It might help to see them side-on:



You see what I mean? They're like scones, but flat. They're like scones, but scones that have gone terribly wrong. They're also like biscuits, but biscuits that have gone terribly wrong. They're like someone tried baking, but it all went terribly wrong.

Those ones, you'll have already guessed, were mine.

He Who Only's baking extravaganza looked more like this:



Easier to cut in half and get the cream and jam on. We've named the other ones "Stink Biscuits". Hey, he might be able to cook, but I'm the one that invented a new form of food. Not bad for an idle Sunday afternoon's work.

Yesterday, we went out for a walk around the local wildlife preservation in order to achieve two things. These two things were to:

(a) Get some fresh air (no easy task in Hackney); and
(b) Get out of the city, in whatever sense possible.

When we're looking for something a little less urban than the actual area in which we live which is more urban than I can occasionally bear, and also currently the holder of the Teenage Stabbing/Shooting Centre of Britian 2007, we wander up to Hackney Marshes. Hackney Marshes, despite the fact that it has the word "Hackney" in it, is in fact a wildlife reservation.

[I have just been informed that, strictly speaking, the area in which we go for our walks is in fact Walthamstow Marshes. Hackney Marshes refers to the football ground, and the area where the fucking Olympics is going to be in 2012. I swear in reference to the fucking 2012 Olympics only because I am currently heamorrhaging taxes towards these flipping Olympics, but chances are I'll be well dead before they actually come around. Anyway. Two things: 1. I don't care about the Olympics or the correct name for the area in which we go walking; and 2. Shut up, He Who Only..., and go back to watching the football.]

I brought my camera out with me to take some photos of the vast wildlife that's out there. In our walks over the past three years, we've seen hawks, voles*, stoats*, otters*, swans, ducks, geese, a heron, cows and many different dogs. Mainly rats, though. Everything with an asterix beside it above was probably a rat. There are massive rats down there. Fucking huge rats. Seriously. Rats with their own post codes. Massive crazy rats.

Instead, I took photos of the graffiti. It's brilliant round there.

Two new additions since the last time we've been there. This one is currently my phone's wallpaper:


I really like it, and I think the fact that someone's tried to pull most of it off the wall only adds to it.

The other really brilliant one was this:


What might not be clear from this photo is that the barrells are all holding up the fence guarding the building site behind. It's make shift at the very best, but I adore the fact that someone has seen them, gone home, made a template, come back out with their yellow paint and walked along the line marking each and every barrell. About 20 of them in total.

This one looks fantastic:


I love it.

Unless they were all actually radioactive.

In which case, I've got about 48 hours left to live.

Because they don't do a banner small enough not to destroy my margins, here instead is the banner embedded in a post. It's the best I can do.

Seriously, though, this is a brilliant campaign and one I'm happy to put my name to (although I'm not sure I can watch the programme itself because I don't want to have to live with the knowledge of how precisely they slaughter chickens. Me and He Who Only... had a two minute conversation in which we discussed the possibility of a machine created solely to break the necks of chickens and/or pull their heads off, and I was left horrified for the rest of the evening).

[The banner has been removed since it constantly made an incredibly loud and irritating noise. You should still sign up though. Sign up here, you mothers]