Happy Birthday to Me

'K, well, its not really my Birthday yet. But I did realise today that its been exactly a year since I gave up smoking, and bar a few 'herbal' cigarettes, I've been completely nicotine free. Well done me, I say.
Unfortunately the heat has adddled my brain to the extent that I can barely manage to write coherent sentences, so I'm just going to go back to my mojito in the garden. Still, I'm off to bingo for the first time in my life tomorrow (long story), so it'll be just like playing micro limits poker again.

Well, dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians

So we're sat around at work, with the usual dearth of work, and because we are so stimulated, the conversation turns to vampire-guy's love life. Blown out by accounts girl, and despite appearance to the contrary an apparently healthy young man, he is looking for a laydeeee. Or, some casual with a fairly easy bit of skirt. He no longer pretends to be fussy about it. Peep-show guy and I toss out some suggestions:
'What about Laura in pricing..?'
'She's got a boyfriend'
'Kelly in admin?'
'Too old'
'Nicola?'
Silence. 'Nah' (fussier than we thought, obviously)
'What about' says peep-show guy like he has just invented penicillin 'Tash'
Vampire Guy and I look at eachother. Tash is a lesbian. Everyone knows that, right?
'Um no, peep-show guy, I have more chance with her than Vampire Guy does'.
Silence.
He looks at us like he suspects us of playing nasty joke.
'Why?'
And then we spend the next 5 minutes trying to explain to the incredulous and disbeliving Peep-show guy that this is a girl that doesn't do boys. And then, (and this is really what I'm trying to tell you when I say he's just awful) he stands up, walks over to Tash and says something to her. Something really smooth, along the lines of Tash, are you a lezzer?
Like Queen Victoria, it appears there are some people that really don't believe that girls do that sort of thing - and rather unlike Queen Victoria one suspects, imagine they are purely products of a porn producer's imagination. Poor old Peep-Show guy.

Not much planned for this weekend. May sneak out to watch Bruno but feel a bit luke warm about it. I just fancy going to the cinema, more than anything else and I don;t think theres very much else for me. The only films I am generally all that keen to watch seem to come out in the four weeks surrounding the oscars. I'd like to say how unfair this is, but then, the sort of films for lovers of the 'Dude, wheres my car?' genre, only tend to appear in June, July and August. When the rest of us normals are supposed to be out enjoying the sunshine.
I do, on the other hand, have the first three episodes of Season 3 of The Wire to catch up. I am sorely tempted to stay in, brew tea and hide on the sofa. Good idea? Most def. A'ight.

Rest in peace.

Heat

Ahh, everyone has gone to Glastonbury. Theres no one lying in my park smoking weed and drinking cider. Theres noone trying to poison themselves on those imbecile individual barbecues, theres no queues 20 deep of students all individually buying packets of crisps and rolling papers with their credit cards in my local supermarket. My only regret is that isn't pissing down with rain (sorry, Cheesies, I hope you have a lovely weekend :0)). Its not that I dislike students especially, I think I dislike the ones that live around me. Life around here is just a bit nicer when its not term time.

And things are fairly quiet otherwise. No news is usually good news in my part of the world. I have a glass of wine, I have 'celebrity' masterchef, I have grilled plaice and jersey royals and I have an early night.

Happy Father's Day

Ah, its been a lovely weekend, although (and I realise this might be a bit of a chink in my personality), I can't not think about the strangely rapid descent into darkness and cold that happens after the longest day. Next time I blink its going to be November. Still its been beautiful weather and I'e only just recently had to come in from the garden for feeling a bit chilly. Can you imagine that in 4 months time?

I've been looking after my mum's dog this weekend. I worry about that dog, really. Shes a working breed and my mum gives her a twenty minute walk every day. Twenty Minutes! I think it was a bit of a shock for her when she came here because she was suddenly on a diet of two hour long walks a day. My mum keeps saying shes concerned that the dog doesn't eat a lot - well, mother, neither would you need to if you only left the house for twenty minutes every 24 hours... Shes also fairly naughty, really, which is because my mother hasn't made much of an attempt to train her. I can tell she understands 'sit' because her tail touches the floor for about a nanosecond, but thats as far as shes ever got, it looks like. I was really worried when I took her to the park the first time that she wouldn;t come back if I let her off the lead but I should have had no worries on that score. My mum gave me one of those kind of curved sticks that you put the ball of the end of and throw it, which was great, but despite this, techniques still no good and I think I've pulled a muscle in my .. (please hold while I google).. deltoid. Anyway, I'll miss her, the boy will miss her - he actually cried when my mum came to pick her up tonight (can we have her on another sleepover, soon Nanna?).

I have started to think about getting a dog - but I'm only really interested in getting a big dog like a boxer or a german shepherd. Or maybe a retired greyhound. Or a doberman, I would LOVE one of those. And I can't really afford the extra mouth to feed. And I'm not sure that I have the time for proper walks every day.So probably not this year.

Otherwise, my other houseguest has been my little one's dad. He and I haven't always had the easiest of relationships - its not that we don;t get on very well on a personality level, we always have, but there have been times I have had to work harder than I have felt I should to encourage him to maintain a relationship with his son. Still, he moved back to Bristol in the winter and since then their relationship has really blossomed. He was very supportive of me during what were an extremely difficult few months at the end of last year and beginning of this and its been a real pleasure having him back in the family again. Sadly, any romantic spark there has ever been between us has gone, for me, certainly. But we do talk about raising another child together often, which I've been considering more and more seriously lately- especially since my current lover feels he is allergic to kids. So, hes been here, having breakfast made for him in bed, we took him out for lunch today and everyone had a great time. He's had all my beer though. Nobody's perfect.
And thats really it. I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow to discuss a reduction in my anti depressant medication and I feel like I'm going to go for a run,. Hopefully the sun will keep shining.

And happy father's day to all you lovely Dads.

Love Hurts

My first proper kiss... left me with physical scars.
I was about 14 and I had gone on some god awful holiday with my mother and my siblings to one of those caravan/leisure parks, in Dorset. I met this lad from... I'm ashamed to say I can't really remember, somewhere up north, and we started knocking about together. Anyway, on his last day, we went for this walk and we ended up at the end of the park. No one about, or so I thought, and he took his chance and went in for a kiss. Unhappily my older brother had followed us down there, ostensibly, he still insists, to tell me I had been called back by mein fuhrer, to spend some pointless time doing boring stuff with my hateful family . The perimeter of this field was surrounded by some hedges and a metal fence that was falling down a bit in places. Spotting a chance to get away from the enemy we tried to climb over the fence to continue in more privacy but I lost my footing and caught my forearm on this rusty, jagged edged fence. I didn't even feel it at first, just noticed a load of blood dripping from my wrist. After this kid and I looking at eachother for what felt hours, I did the inevitable and started screaming.
Later on, my mother is cleaning out the wound with some of those antiseptic wipes that sting like fucking hell (perhaps deliberately) and she looks at me, thoroughly disappointed and asks:
'Was he worth it?'
Cringing, I shook my head and my eyes welled up with tears, and she looked at me, sighed and said in a low sad, tone: 'They never are. Never'

Tonight, almost 16 years later, I take my son out for tea at a restaurant we are both fond of. Most of the staff here are foreign nationals, as is the case for most poorly paid work in Bristol now. The customer toilets are down stairs and as I take the boy down to the bathroom, I realise that we have walked into an argument between a waiter and his probable girlfriend. She is a young woman, 20 at most, clearly very distressed and although she has been shouting her demeanour is cowed. He is mid to late twenties, fairly attractive and he has also been shouting but he looks bored and detached. Who can say what the argument could have been about, when people are talking in an eastern european tongue you have no knowledge of? Its impossible to speculate. What i do know, is that I wanted to sit her down and say, 'He's just not worth it dear, they never are.'
Oh well. I've finally turned into my mother.

I've played a fair bit of poker and watched a fair bit of telly this week. I haven't really felt motivated to do anything else. To say I have been running bad is a bad bad understatement. I wouldn;t mind if I was just losing my flips, I'm losing to the two and three outers almost every time I get my money in with a big hand. I'm tempted to post hand histories to try and make you share my misery, but lucky for you I'm just not that kind of blogger. Telly has been just as bad. I just wish I could be bothered to do anything else. I could use a bath, so instead of wasting any more time on some Daily Mailesque rubbish on the spanish property crash, I will do just that.
Thanks for reading, hope you're running better than me!

Recently, at work, my colleagues and I were given a new job. It would be difficult to define it in an official job description except perhaps to describe it as probation officer/care assistant/cannon -fodder/dogsbody. Can you guess? No, I suppose you can't. The company that I work for has a very strict policy on callcentre staff not having to accept rudeness from customers, especially those customers that we pay commission to for selling our products. Which is a great policy. Especially given that the 'professionals' that phone us are often quite rude when they don't think we are moving their cases along fast enough and they’re not getting their commission as quickly as they want. All a member of staff has to do, is pass the call details along to someone like me and if the caller has been unecessarily unpleasant, we give them a call and gently remind them that the people they talk to here are, in fact, human. And that as a business, we would like to have an ongoing relationship with them but we will understand if they don't want to play nice,and they can just stop calling. If this gentle prompting doesn't work (and for all but the hardcore, it usually does), or they are particularly nasty they go straight on a list of names that people can refuse to talk to.

So who do these people talk to if not call centre staff? Well, now, they talk to me. I don't mind this really, the calls are relatively few and I don't mind the trash talk in the slightest bit. Even from Joy. Not since Drop the Dead Donkey have I known of a less Joyful Joy. Joy never says hello, goodbye, please or thank you. She doesn't listen to a word you say. She will frequently and freely accuse you of being 'sloppy' and 'unprofessional' and 'stupid'. She will bark out an order and put the phone down. Joy phoned this morning to demand something unusually unreasonable.I begin to explain that I will not be complying with her request and she calls me a 'fucking lazy bitch' and slams down the phone. The brilliant thing is she doesn;t have a wireless phone, she has a phone that you can slam down with a satisfying crash. I wish I still had one of those sometimes.
Irony, thy name is surely Joy.

Not much happening for me at the moment. Suffering a mahoosive hangover today due to my first bottle of wine since the kidney infection took hold. Had a barbecue yesterday, which is nice, and the only way I can stop my Sunday crowd expecting me to cook a roast dinner on a Sunday, but I do find that I drink a lot more than I usually would. There is definitely something about sitting outside in the heat that makes a cold glass of wine go down faster. I need to give up alcohol. Mornings like this just make me feel too bad. So bad, infact that today, recalling my frequent bad hangover days of my early twenties I was craving a pint of cold Coca Cola and a cigarette. As I no longer consume either of these evils, and could stomach nothing else, I just suffered.

As physical suffering whilst the likes of Joy are in my life is not a tenable option I'm clearly going to have to do something else.