this is only happening because its friday

October 28, 2005

don’t look down. it’s horrible. like some huge heaving mass from a 50s b-movie starring a young steve mcqueen just wobbling over the edges and taunting you mercilessly with its unrestrained girth. poke it with a stick. go on. see what happens. eeuw, that’s horrible. what on earth did you do?

I couldn’t really help it. last day alone and I’d had the forethought to get some of that pasta that looks like drainpipes and some sad looking garlic bread out of the freezer and its been slowly working out its escape plan from its vantage point on the cooker hood. its can’t go out the cat flap, because we haven’t got one, and anyway, the savage cavies would rip it to shreds. so I guess it just resigned itself to its fate. it did, however, get a sadistic little pleasure from knowing that it was surely too much for one person and well, you just can’t really keep cooked drainpipe pasta very well, especially if you’re a kitchen-challenged dolt with low self esteem who can’t be arsed to scrape it out when it’s cold and put it in one of last years ice cream dishes with a wonky label and wet cling film.

but just that on it’s own wasn’t really enough was it? oh, no, we had to burrow into the vegetable tray and pull out some week-old mushrooms and pop down to the nasty corner shop who keep the stuff from the fridge in cardboard boxes out the back overnight to get ham in a packet that’s just come out of a cardboard box they were going to put round the back and then it really needed cheese sauce and what better than that half pound of cheese that wasn’t finished last time you did this about 3 weeks ago. simple. oh, better get some chocolate while I’m here as well. and more cheese. and those puddings look lovely madam.

have to say that the timing was perfect though. got the roux and the cheese and the ham and the drainpipes and the bread and the bottle of merlot to all peak at the same time (no mean feat in any circumstance) and just slopped it all into a huge bowl the shape of the curvature of the earth and took it through to watch the end of question of sport, natch. sue barker was bearing her teeth and ally mccoist didn’t get ‘stubble’ from jose mourinhio. I defy anyone to tell me how you could possibly better that scenario without including a life.

half an hour later, I’m prodding the leathery pasta pipes that still cling to the side of the caked bowl, like they’re some horrible alien out of starship troopers. bloody things. why’s there so many of them? who’s idea was that? I’m halfway though a repeat of friends that I don’t want to see by now and the chair has shrunk one person size. one herculean effort later and the remainder of the collosal bowlful is necked and I throw the fork with a great clatter into the bowl and sit back in the leather chair, and make that horrible self-satisfied noise that blokes do when they’ve finished a meal that was patently far too big for them but they ate it anyway because they could. aaaaaaaah.

but wait, what’s this, where I should be able to rest at least some of my arm? oh dear, it’s the aforementioned blobby thing that’s belched up from the pit of hell, well, from inside my shirt, and is now just blobbling around like a 38 year old appendage that you just kind of learn to ignore. I mean, it’ll be gone by the morning and I’ll be looking like david hasselhof again, so what’s the worry. no matter that I can’t move. I’m not going anywhere – I brought the chocolate and bottle of merlot with me and arctic monkeys are on in a minute

send in the cleaner

October 28, 2005

that’s too much. there’s only 1 day left but you don’t have to push it quite that far. I mean, there’s just been the one plate circulating round but even then it ended up being a chicken szechuan from wok star and 2 fresh frenchmen from the warehouse. all I need now is a cunning plan to hide the empties, scrape the claret off me levis (he was asking for it) and do a runner with miele and everything will be cushtie. so happens that it’s gonna be minging tomorrow, so I’ve done with poking at people in the street and I’ll get back to prodding at the dead things in the corner and it’ll be all smiles. cheer up son. it might never happen. get me a bucket.

so that’s why its wrong

October 25, 2005

only 2 days and already that’s 3 bottles and 17 hours a day hunched over 2 screens in a small box in the east of England lurching over adobe cs and imagining that something might happen one day but actually nothing will happen it you just sit there watching people in a different timezone sign off from IM and get the SUV out of the car park and back to the ranch where there’s probably another SUV with the tail lights still warm that’s come straight from the after school clubs where everyone was playing soccer and the sun was still out and they were still sprinkling stuff like they do. I’ve just finished updating m3u files from 2001 and I guess I’ll be synchronizing everything back up but probably doing the synchronize the wrong way round like I always do so that I delete the source and then ftp an empty directory over 10 years of web detrius that is largely meaningless but satisfyingly distracting for 10 minutes when you’re looking for something to do just before you head off to the after school club in the SUV but you can’t be bothered to start another email about application testing in Norway that you should have done last week but you pretended you didn’t know where Norway was so you needed a week to look it up and, oh, that’s a funny looking country.

I should never be left on my own for extended periods of time. like it says in that song, all she wants is to be like anyone. I could never get the guitar break right in that one when I tried to do it again.

warning 201

October 21, 2005

connect dammit. I know that that particular subsystem is unavailable right now, but I don’t know if I’ve got a 10:00 or a 15:00 or 15:45 which is 8:45 but might overlap my 17:00 which will be 9:00 which actually runs over my 18:00 which doesn’t really exist because its a placeholder I have to cover me for other one at 18:30 which is full of stuff that crawls out of my sideboard and claws at my ankles like a weekend dashboard mangle dropped by the east anglian ambulance service, so now look, they’ve got their umbrellas up and its so dark I can’t see far enough to work out whether that man is the one I used to make lego spectrums with and cycle to wroxham on saturday morning because it was there even though there was nothing there when you got there except roys of wroxham which we didn’t go in because we didn’t have bike locks because it was the 70s and of course we just used leave each others doors open and lie in the street because of course you could in those days because nobody committed any crime and everything was splendid notwithstanding 3 day weeks and stumbling around in the dark because we weren’t allowed to put any lights on because we’d run out of coal or something and look at that, a man with a hat like dad’s and there, his vauxhall astra, I thought he was supposed to be somewhere in france but no, hang on, that’s in january even though its feels like it now but actually its only autumn although I’ve put my clock back already because I always forget to do it at the time so you see, being able to look at my calendar is very important because I’d like to know which meetings I’ve got in a hours time so I can arrange to be late.

ooh, I’m in. better just keep an eye out for the FBI, just in case. I’ve seen that spooks thing on the telly, so I know what they could do if they knew I was subverting the national interest with my plans for the globalization of the unified product information architecture.

yeah, like those plums, right?

October 20, 2005

I didn’t think anybody still did that anymore. I mean, thrusting your Adidas into your socks, it’s not making a comeback is it? it won’t be long before I’ll be able to dig out my 3/4 length black jeans and couple them with a pair of nice white fluffy terry socks three for a pahnd snetterton sunday market and be socially acceptable while I’m queuing for goth night at the waterfront with a cabbage on a stick and cradle of filth in my pocket. it’s a long while since I caught up with the shenanigans at the underground market on the kings road, but perhaps white jags and polyester footwear are in again. strike a light, I never had the chance to get andy back to keele, and now it’s blown a gaff on the A47 with kerry and chalky proflagating in the hatchback while radio luxembourg is fading in and out of view. if ever there was a time for ganking the suzuki and rattling the horse chestnuts over the black horse, then surely this is isn’t it might will ever be.

objectionful

October 14, 2005

there’s nothing like a bit of quiet middle class uproar to get you acquainted with your neighbours. we’re friendly with them next door and she keep bringing us plums, but there’s five houses in acuba terrace and I never speak to the occupants of three of them even though we pass each other on the pavement as we dodge the pavement cyclists and dog presents and we smile weakly like we know we should invite each other round for a gin and tonic and a wedge of brie but really, life is so impossible with the children at their clubs and us seeming to always be down at waitrose, flicking through the salads and maris piper, trying to fill out our weekly meal planner for less than a tun, but oh, those tarts looks lovely and blimey, I’ve got to get that ganache. so, I watch them pile into their multiplas and their golfs and they probably see us tumbling out of the scenic after swimming on friday or trampolining on saturday or skipping on thursday or yarmouth on sunday or dorset at half term or burnham market at easter or the video shop when its raining and they probably think they should probably invite us round or something but best wait until we’ve finished the kitchen because it looks a bit of a mess at the moment and anyway, we’ve not done with the utility room yet so really, its just bad timing and maybe when we’ve got the living room straightened out we could invite the whole terrace round. for christmas. in 2007.

so, when the friendly neighbourhood pubs thought they should really apply for extended hours under the new legislation so that the local vehicle remoulding squads and extreme wall repointers could get a few more swift pints of stella in before pissing into our gardens and barking at the moon, we all naturally got terribly upset at the prospect and miraculously we all found ourselves suddenly gathered around the kitchen table at number blah blah blah for a hastily convened residents meeting with our local councillor and the area police community catchment coordinator with water on the table and a chairperson and everything. being the kind of residents we are, we naturally had in our terrace a solicitor, a writer, a project officer, a pensioner, an expert committee leader, a teacher and about 17 IT consultants. well, 2. to say the meeting was organised was something of an understatement. I thought about doing it remotely at first so I didn’t have to walk 2 doors down, but in the end, that would have probably made it into the meeting minutes which would have ended up being published on a residents committee website somewhere and I would never live it down. we had a chair, we took our turns to cover our agenda items. we had a lively and informative discourse with the police and local council representative and we ran to time and captured all our action items and of course, agreed on some next steps and a broad outline of our plan of action going forward into the next millennium. it was like being at work. but with my neighbours. who I didn’t even really know, at least, nowhere near as well as I know the people I work with who are all the other side of the atlantic and live in mountains and stuff.

but at least I got to meet everyone I normally just catch a glimpse of out of my office window as they unload the farm goods and swimming bags, and actually they’re quite, well, nice. when we’ve got the kitchen and bathroom sorted out and got the pictures up and decided what we’re going to do about the hall and the back garden and then spent endless days and about ten thousand pounds putting everything in its right place, we might just invite them round for tapas and a vegetarian cocktail with bits in.

verily plucking out mine eyes

September 19, 2005

hardware is throttling my membranes and the jagged sawtooth blade of the cutter in my skull is jarring my eyeballs at 2000 rpm. that shouldn’t do that when I quit. reboot, quick. ooh. dammit. that didn’t work. I thought I might get away with just swapping out the ATI X800 for something new, and be done with it, but it’s something else. its my precious precious diamond pro 2070SB. its buzzing like a demented asbo on a saturday night in norwich, outstaring me in a frenzied, worrying kind of way, which suggests its about to fall in the river, mashed up on diamond white and draw. all over the screen is a fusion of distorted scan lines and broken wires and I can barely read the hotline number in the feverish haze.

trouble is, that number is useless. the warranty is about as current as Tony Bennett, so I’m going to have to make the horrible choice I’ve been trying not to make for years. CRT or LCD. I’m feeling flat, but granular.

the uncanny parallel of funky monkeys

September 15, 2005

while I’m banging my head against some bright red foam cladding on an upright scaffold pole and throwing up the fishy stars and ice cream I had 2 minutes ago, I’m noticing that the parallel worlds of soft play areas and program management are inextricably linked. I’m in both of them at some point in most days. no, I mean, I’m actually in either a warehouse by the airport converted to a roller skating/rope netting and dayglo platform hell, or in the office trying to work out whether a PPD comes before a PRD or whether I’ve used the wrong paradigm or something, while I’m looking out the window at a 17 year old on the way to Top Shop to meet her mates with similarly inconsequential vests. In either case, I usually end up sat in the corner dribbling while children run around me in insane circles, flailing me with Tamagotchis hung with Scoobie string and doing that horrible squawking noise with means I’ve told them its either time to go home or time to go to the bathroom, depending on which reality I’m in at the time.

I mean, soft play is something of a misnomer. 1cm of bin-end foam wrapped round a girder and covered with stretched latex doesn’t cushion the blow of the equal and opposite reaction of my head crashing into it as I plunge through a pair of giant sponge rollers at the end of some labyrinthine world of rope tunnels, things covered in rubber bats and plastic vortexes at 70 degree angles, after I’ve heard the unmistakable cry of a poleaxed child who I think is mine at the very top of the evil construction although I can’t really hear because in these places, well, you just can’t really hear. its like some kind of infant cacophony torture aimed at displacing you through sensory overload until every child in the place sounds like yours and they’re all crying like hyenas in a high pitched screeching kind of way that makes your ears bleed. I just have no idea idea where I am at that point, as I pick the shreds of moulded plastic from my receding head and the blood trickles onto the padded floor. which I have to pay to get cleaned probably.

similarly, I follow some equally mindnumbing paths through the chaos that is my flimsy grip on the world of something approaching adequate program management, which will almost certainly see me teetering on the edge of a 100 foot platform, covered with grease and nails, labelled ‘life cycle’ or something just as terrifying and just as I think I’ve selected the path that bears the unbearable lightness of delivery, an enormous foam hammer crashes onto my cranium and somebody in the darkness flicks on the devil’s PA and cackles something about business requirements so loud that my ears bleed and so I’m flapping about wildly in the hope of catching hold of at least 1 document that has something on it I wrote in 2002 but is still relevant and its at that point that I crash into the cliffside of scope creep and am dumped unceremoniously onto the rocks of dependency, which are made of sharp, pointy dayglo plastic by the way, and I end up on the padded floor, picking the shreds of moulded plastic from my receding head and wiping off the spittle before anyone notices.

there’s some kind of magical doorway that links these two anti-Narnias somehow, but I’ve not come across it yet. its probably only visible from the outside and it has ‘staff only’ on it. and it probably revolves. forever.

birth and death

September 12, 2005

we have some good friends that we first got together with at our pre-natal classes in Guildford, when a small group of slightly anxious 20-something couples met up in the living room of a slightly insipid 40-something facilitator, all of us wondering what on earth was going to happen to our lives. most of us fell neatly into the middle class and comfortable category, who are looking to do the right thing in a responsible and earnest way for our soon-to-be children. typical NCT cases. throughout those classes and following the births and for the 8 or so years after, we’ve all remained close and shared those life changing experiences. our family and our friends family follow pretty similar paths – we both now have 3 children 8 and under, we’re finally getting our home and schooling just how we like it, we’ve worked hard to get our houses in order and we struggle with those logistics of childcare, full-time employment and long school holidays. the dads work in IT. the mums work in the public sector. our 30-something lives are happy and warm.

at least, they were

on saturday, I had the kids while my wife was working on a special opening of one of the museums she works for. I took them into town and we met up with mum in the castle gardens, had our lunch in the sunshine and we wondered around doing saturday things until it was time to head home and think about tea.

on saturday, my friend got up, got ready, waved goodbye to his wife and 3 lovely children, went off to his beloved football, where he had a heart attack and died

its a simply tragic tale of the shortness of life. it should compel me to question my own mortality and change everything, so that I actually live every day. I probably will. but right now I’m just comprehending the awfulness of a mother who can barely speak, but will have to explain to the children why daddy is not coming home again. ever.

back to the city with a spanner

September 8, 2005

that’s broken. I’ll fix that. that’s broken too. ah, that really is broken. I’ll need a big spanner for that. I’ll tell you what, pick me up on the corner by that old hangar and we’ll head out to the clear zone. I’ll jump out at the last minute and crawl through some 2D bushes until I hit the edge of town. then I’ll get my big spanner and start spannering. it’s better than the big horse I brought last time. that was useless.

Things what I writ