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September 15th 2009 17:32
WITH the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, I can pinpoint the exact moment today when things went phut.
Due to a looming manuscript deadline and a neighbour with a vast collection of Bob Marley routinely played at Stadium Australia volume, I recently decided to ditch my London existence for a weekend away. In a quest for a geography that would inspire me I headed ''up north''. Specifically to that part of England where the road signs stop listing town names and simply say "the north" and "the south"; where people say hello to you on the streets, and where articles in sentences are optional. This, however, is not the aforementioned moment.
After discovering that my four-star hotel didn't have WiFi, my plans of writing all weekend took a slight detour. However, in an uncharacteristic glass-half-full moment, I decided to use the time fruitfully and so booked in to get my hair done at a local salon.
Upon arrival at said salon a slight young thing, with hair that would not have been out of place on a member of Spandau Ballet, sat me down and started asking me the standard questions.
We agreed on what I wanted. Or so I thought. This, still, is not the moment.
She went off to mix the colours and I settled in to read a five-year-old copy of a magazine providing useful tips on decoupage and baking.
She came back and we began the small talk challenge, where she asked questions to which she had no interest in hearing the answers and I provided answers in the hope of shutting down the conversation.
About half way into the challenge, consequently with my head half covered in aluminium foil, she mentioned that until two weeks ago her hair had been waist long. Given it was now cut in an homage to the New Romantics, this piqued my interest. ''Really?'' I say. ''Did you get it done here?''
She laughed out loud and said ''No!'' with such force that the foil strips tinkled in the breeze.
Faced with the opportunity of asking her to stop half way through, I reasoned that clearly she didn't do her own hair so she was probably the talented one and I would be fine.
And that, dear reader, is the moment when, instead of getting a selection of autumnal low lights and a trim, I ended up looking like David Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth.
There are many things I simply don’t understand about life.
The inverse relationship between people who work in customer service and their desire to serve for example; why Adam Sandler films are classified as "comedy"; when reading porn on the Tube during commuter crush became acceptable and why Southgate in London is so far north it could be in Bedfordshire. But curiosities aside, I have been stopped in my tracks again by one of life’s unanswerable questions.
In our cotton wool wrapped/ no one's responsible/ risk averse world I am overwhelmed with a desire to stop people in the street and ask why?
While I could be talking about ill advised make-up or clothing so tight you can not only see VPL but the gusset seam of said panties, I am in fact talking about people who drink coffee through a straw.
Or, more specifically, people who mistake white plastic stirrers as straws and so drink coffee through a sugar stirrer.
To make myself entirely clear, I mean coffee. Not those weird frothy, coloured fruity drinks that are made in chain store coffee shops and which I suspect contain no more caffeine than those herbal supplement drinks my doctor has unsuccessfully tried to sell me on as a cure to my recurrent insomnia.
As a complete caffeine addict, I am pro coffee. Indeed, my day starts with the obligatory chain store cup clutched mercilessly to my hand until I feel the zingy goodness start to work its magic. To poorly paraphrase TS Eliot, my life will be measured by coffee cups.
But even if I were not completely at the mercy of a 25 year relationship with the real Colombian drug lords, I still wouldn't think to stick a straw in hot liquid and drink it. What kind of a mentallist does that?
For those not completely following me, let me draw you a map. Cup of boiling liquid. Straw channeling boiling liquid into one's mouth. And for those who have mistaken their white plastic sugar stirrer as a straw: small, narrow quasi-straw channeling boiling liquid into one's mouth.
We've all made the mistake before of hot food in the mouth - usually culminating in an overwhelming desire to either spit it out with no attempt at grace or eat with one's mouth open regardless of company. So why deliberately recreate that situation with something so clearly designed not to be used with coffee.
Now, I'm no June Dally-Watkins, so am not about to preach about coffee with a straw etiquette. But I am pragmatist, so would like to suggest the following rule of thumb:
To the straw using coffee drinkers of the world - if you don't do it at home, don't do it in public. You look like an idiot.
I admit, it’s been a while since I was last in a public library.
The advent of eBay and Amazon meant the last time I was in a library looking for a non textbook to borrow Kurt Cobain was still alive; Nelson Mandella has just been elected and OJ had been accused of killing his wife.
However, faced with a need to know more about a country I’m due to land in tomorrow, I found myself scanning the travel section of my local library recently.
Staring at a complete hotpotch of travel guide titles (the Australian guides had been sanctioned to their own shelf, around the corner from the main stack, in possibly a sardonic comment on history) I noted that the titles were neither alphabetically arranged, nor arranged in any kind of pro-Dewey system.
I may not personally be a librarian, but I know people who are and I know that Dewey is their leader.
As I inquired politely of the librarian what system the Brits use for their travel guides, the knowledgeable chap explained travel guides are arranged geographically. “Always have been, always will be,” he said triumphantly, laughing at my suggestion of the universally acknowledged Dewey system.
The geographic organisation, he explained, used a system of continents and geographic boundaries. And so to find my guide, I needed to know about not only my destination but also countries on the border of my destination.
It was like pub trivia meets Indiana Jones! I’d need to know not only information about my destination but I’d also need to know countries on its border, countries in its time zone and countries with a sympathetic cultural history.
Quite frankly if I knew all that I wouldn’t need the guide.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve done massive cram sessions on topics before interviewing people so I could ask relatively informed questions and not appear like a complete dunce, but I’ve never thought to bone up on my geography before going to my local library in anticipation of a pop quiz on the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire.
I recently visited Oxford University with an antipodean librarian mate. As we went through Oxford’s Bodleian library we chuckled to ourselves at a question asked by a tourist from across the pond. Did the Brits use what Americans called the Dewey system, he asked. Our tour guide assured us all that the Dewey system was an international system and well and truly entrenched. Just goes to show how out of touch ivory towered educators are with the social order of today.
From inside the Bodleian Library - Britain's oldest library.
I eventually found my guide; shelved with other Eurasian titles, making me realise that not only do I need to buy a world map but I need to learn a whole new lexicon for continents, regions, systems of economic advantage and all that other stuff that had I done geography at school/university I would probably understand. On the other hand, ask me about the contrapuntal technique typified by the Baroque period.
High on my success of finding my travel guide, I briefly considered borrowing a work of fiction. Fearful that I'd be asked to deconstruct a semiotic analysis of the issue of heroines in the 19th novel to qualify for borrowing anything else, I conceded a trip to WH Smith was probably in order.
So, now all I need to do is pack. And find my passport.
A circus clown gave up his seat for me on the tube this afternoon.
courtesy of http://www.magicalenterprises.com/images/200508020225500.TOBY-CIRCUS-BALLANTINE.jpg
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So, have spent all of today at complete and utter pointless wank fest of training day for "communications professionals". The name alone should have been a heads up to having to spend the day with complete cocks who were going to talk in bellicose metaphors about taking charge of organisational culture and working together to create a better world.
However, because I'm clearly not that bright, and the day meant I didn't have to commute to the suburban hell of my office somewhere slightly south of the hebrides, I signed up. And turned up
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Ok, again apologies for never bothering to update this thing. If any of you have stuck around, good work! I have no defence; I just never bother to think of it.
So, am back in the land of chicken and beer (ok, I may have some defence, I did relocate again
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Email. My first love, and quite possibly the best invention ever, inclusive of when Mr Hershey figured out how to put peanut butter and chocolate together.
Email really kicked off when I first started working, and even though the software we were equipped with was clumsy and unsophisticated, I knew I found my communication tool of choice
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The on-going saga of the Corby family never fails to provide good copy, and the current legal stoush between former friends Mercedes Corby and Jodie Power is certainly providing similar voyeuristic reading.
I admit it. I had a view about Schappelle before her guilty verdict was handed down, although it mostly had to do with wanting her to stop plucking her eye brows. I know she's short of things to do, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD Schappelle - take up Sudoku! The constantly startled expression on her face, as a result of her eyebrows being plucked approximately 5 centimetres too high should be, quite frankly, warning enough to foolhardy drug traffickers. Possibly with a strap line saying "know what you're getting yourself in for
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A 62 year old man from northern NSW was recently arrested for growing a cannabis crop with an estimated street value of $3 million.
It is not the growing of cannabis in this story which caught my eye, but more that our friendly stoner is old enough to be my Dad
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Comment by JaneD
on Send in the clowns
Yellow Brick Road