Feedback Friday :: Oops! Where Did the Weekend Go?

bulk :: 15st 8 (oh God. Reserves of discipline being dredged as we speak, I swear. Or actually, I’m currently thinking of starting up again on January 31st. That’s my favourite date. Classic date for fresh starts. I won’t be going to Fitness First though. No, Sir. I popped into one round my way for a looksee, and it reminded me of stories I’ve heard about some offices in China, just rows and rows and rows of people all doing exactly the same thing, cramped and unsmiling. They had some excellent facilities, I’ll give them that, but there was just something creepy about it. I didn’t like the amount of information I had to give either. I am not a Number! I am a Free Man!)
booze units :: quite a few to be honest. I’ve discovered whisky. It’s nice.
leaves left on the poinsettia :: 67
word count :: 137,627 (next step is to get rid of half of those words, rearrange those remaining and then find some more new ones to add to the mix)
silly accents in my head as I read :: 7
films watched :: 3

Good morning to you. How are you feeling this morning? I know, I know, there’s another cold snap coming, you can feel it in your wrists. But what can you do? Into every Summer a little Winter must fall.

So, I do hope you’re well, I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages. Did you have a good weekend? Merely OK? Come, come, what did you get up to?

I usually see you on a Friday, of course, but I’ve been busy as a bee, writing away like a bonnie wee rascal, writing away like a wordy fuck. And after a shaky start I’ve really got into it. I’ve located the balls of the thing and I’m giving them a good old squeeze. Time though, eh? There really aren’t enough hours in the day.

So, let me tell you a thing or two of what I’ve been up to since last we chatted.

I went to the optician for a free eye test. Cost me a bloody fortune. And while I was in there - SpecSavers it was - an old lady came to the counter after me and said to the young woman behind it, she said: ‘Will you clean my glasses, please?’ Then she took her glasses off and handed them to the young woman.

The young woman was twenty-one, twenty-two maybe, blonde and pleasant and ordinary. The old lady was in her sixties, and seemed quite mad. She had no care, no sense of convention, she did not conform.

The young woman examined the glasses, and said, ‘These are not SpecSavers glasses.’

The old lady, moving slowly from side to side and blinking, said. ‘Yeh, will you clean them, please?’ She spoke quickly and with nasal clarity.

The young woman was in a corner. She didn’t want to be rude, but there were other people waiting, with requests she was paid to consider more important. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Will you take a seat, please.’

The old lady shuffled to a nearby seat and sat waiting patiently.

The young woman dealt with a couple more customers and when the rush died down, she cleaned the old lady’s glasses and returned them to her.

The old lady took them from her, stood up and shuffled quickly and silently out of the shop.

Not so much as a by your leave. Milady.

The young woman shook her head in disbelief. If they have Candid Camera in her country, she was probably very briefly entertaining the idea that she was being set up for the hilarity of the feeble-minded and housebound.

I asked her if that had ever happened before. She said it had not. We agreed it was strange.

When I got home I loaded up the car with dirty dishes and high-tailed it to IKEA.

And ehhh… So what else?

Well, I went into London on the tube this week and I was using prepay. I made a bit of an arse of things and lost some money doing a stupid thing with my card. A tube station employee saw me standing there like a disappointed moron and asked if everything was OK. Then, when I explained, he proceeded to help me get a refund from the guy at the window with such an extraordinarily friendly manner that I was quite taken aback. He did his job perfectly. It really stood out in this city where good service is becoming a forgotten art. I know I’m sounding like a frightful reactionary, but dash it all, you know it’s true. But this guy was great. I would have tipped this guy if he’d worked in an industry that was deemed tippable. As it was, I merely thanked him repeatedly and made it quite clear that he’d made my day.

We’re meeting for dinner on Wednesday.

And ehhh… So, Morag bought me many wonderful things for Christmas. We had a great time by the way, both here and in Scotland. One day I think I’d like to talk about it all. There was fun and there were feelings. It was really quite something. Anyway, one of the things she got me was a voucher for a man-pampering centre. This is because I’ve always said, one day, when I can afford it, I’d love to have sit-down with a chiropodist. So just as soon as I can grab an afternoon, I’m going to get my feet scraped. And maybe a nice facial.

And ehhh... Ooh, also this week I’ve got another round of medical things coming up, including eyes, ears and balls check. Wish me luck, you old devil, you.

Oh.

leaves left on the poinsettia :: 65

So tell me, how’s your Monday shaping up? Tell me everything.

I'm off to bed.

Feedback Friday :: Working From Home

bulk :: 15st 8 (damn you, Christmas chocolate!)
exercise :: 0 (joining new gym next week though, I swear)
glasses of wine :: 6
cases of wine :: 0
cohabitation disputes :: 3
kittens :: 0
senses working overtime :: one, two, three, four…. Four.
Twitter updates :: 111

So here we are, one week down, hopefully at least a couple of thousand to go. And I’m happy to report that it’s gone tremendously well, especially once I’d moved down from the icebox of the study-cum-second bedroom to the relative hospitality of the kitchen. As well as being at least 10 degrees warmer than the spare room, the kitchen has the concomitant allure of a fridge full of fish, a kettle full of water and the inexorable poignancy of a poor poinsettia, for whom it seems, it is forever Autumn. It does feel a little odd masturbating at the kitchen table of course, but that’s something I’ll get used to, I’m sure.

I mention masturbation not merely to shock you, gentle reader, but rather to neatly segue, like a fractured infinitive, into the subject of Distraction. In my previous incarnation as a website editorialist and junk-puking killer of trees, deadlines tended to impend. I’d generally have just a few days or a week or two at most to get something done. This meant I was usually up against it and if I wanted to get paid, I couldn’t afford to piddle around on Facebook or Twitter or – eek! – YouPorn. With this book thing however, I’ve got till some time in March to complete, and although there are countless mini-deadlines along the way, I don’t think I’m going to get dropped if I miss them, so you know… ooh, look, a penguin!

It has to be said however, my main distraction this week hasn’t been pornography, and it hasn’t been abused penguins. My main distraction this week has been Twitter.

I must admit, until the beginning of this week, rather like the ghastly Bryony Gordon, I didn’t really get Twitter. I just thought it was a place where a bunch of people – the vast majority of whom you didn’t know and would never want to – mouthed off about the wholly insignificant minutiae of their often very mundane lives. And I was absolutely spot on. That’s exactly what it is. What I didn’t realise however, was that although that sounds like the height of tedium, it can in fact be excellent fun and a source of constantly sporadic fascination.

Two things make it particularly enjoyable. One is the arrival in the Twitterverse (shudder) of Jonathan Ross.

Wossy, to give him his Twitter name, is a fantastic fellow to follow. And if you’re a fan, Twitter is a great place to get close to him. Obviously he gets a lot of people yammering on to him all day and night (a Twitter search for to:Wossy gives you some idea), but that doesn’t mean he won’t get back to you. Most of his Tweets now are responses to some of the hundreds of messages he receives daily. Indeed, for a man who occasionally abuses one-time national treasures, Jonathan Ross is extremely personable. He’s also perfectly wiling to speak his mind. For example, in one Tweet he describes Piers Morgan as ‘a grotesque talent-vacuum’, which made me feel all warm inside. And in another he writes: ‘Just broke wind with such force that my wife is on the verge of tears’, which I must admit made me laugh out loud.

Of course it’s not just would-be starfucking that’s endeared me to Twitter – it’s more that I just happen to have started following the likes of Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Graham Linehan, Henry Rollins and Darth Vader in the same week that it finally clicked for me. The other thing which made it all make sense is TweetDeck, which, thanks to Patroclus, I downloaded yesterday.

TweetDeck is an application which sits behind your browser and aggregates all of your Twitter twaddle. What this means is that I can have the document I’m working on here in front of me, and then, just to the side I can have TweetDeck feeding me Tweets as and when they are twittered. So I don’t even have to stop typing! I can just glance to the right and see that Stephen Fry is cuddling a narwhal or whatever and the delightful Veronica Belmont is going on and on and on and on about tech stuff. Please stop, Veronica. Tell me more about your cats!

In short, Twitter, via TweetDeck, takes all the lonesomeness out of working from home, but without the annoyingness of actually having to share a room with real people.

Do you see now?

Come on. Let’s live together!

...

In other news, I got virtual chatting to one Alex B, who was diagnosed with Clinical Depression in 1996, has now given himself 45 days ‘to defeat a lifetime’s worth of negative thinking’ and is chronicling his efforts here. Good luck, Alex. Look! Sunshine!

And speaking of depression, I’m finally owning up to the fact that my eyes are not what they once were. I’m going blind. Or – exaggeration aside – I think I might need glasses. I’m going to seek out an optician this afternoon. Oh, and because of a piece of tooth that broke off while I was in Scotland, I’ve also made an appointment with a dentist.

Oh, God.

I AM FALLING APART!

More wine!

See you next week. If I’m still here.

Oh, and have a nice weekend. Are you up to anything nice by the way? Let me know in the comments. (Twitter will never take the place of comments by the way. Comments are for real friends. Mwah.)