'Tis The Season To Be Lazy

Christmas?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we have one of those bastards last year?

I went shopping yesterday to buy presents.
Surrounded by a glittering celebration of selfishness and greed I got all caught up in the atmosphere, shoved my shopping list in my pocket and bought a bunch of books for myself.

I took Phil to see the purple plastic puke-bucket that stands in for a nativity scene down at Mammon Mall (and that Joy has - quite coincidentally - posted about today). He was suitably sickened.
Kids these days don't crawl from their stinking beds before noon, so at that time of the morning the thing was all locked up. Grim and silent. Out front was a booth where festively dressed muggers would soon be fleecing overstressed parents of their last groats.
Disgusting.

Bollocks to it all.
Once again this year I shall have no Christmas tree, no decorations, no cards, no festive crap whatsoever in the house.
I'm determined to work up a good head of rantiness, but this weekend I'm pooped, so I'll take the cheap and lazy way out and - having reminded people that an anagram of "Christmas Day" is "mad, scary shit", simply re-post last year's Christmas Appeal:

Adopts Radio 4 presenter's voice … ahem …

"Around this time of year we are bombarded with Christmas appeals.
There are so many groups who are in need and it's nice to give something so that someone will have a less shitty time of it at the peak of the suicide season.
I like to slip my Big Issue guy a twenty pound note for the Christmas Issue, and my big 'pennies' jar (£170 odd this year) has gone toward Motor Neurone research, which also goes toward making me feel less shitty about myself. And there are lots of others …

This year, when you set aside a moment to consider those less fortunate, I'd like to remind you of a group who get left out year after year; snubbed and ignored, especially around the "party season" when everyone else is so happy.

So Dive's Christmas Appeal for 2006 (and now 2007, too, as I am a lazy bastard) is:
"Spare a thought for the ugly this Christmas".

I admit to a special interest here as I am a longstanding and fully paid up member of this group. Take it from one who knows: Christmas is a fucking awful time to be ugly.
I mean, I'm not hideous (well not very), but when I walk into a party and people turn to see who it is, I can feel a palpable flinch from all the unattached women in the room.
We ugs are the people who put the "N" in "hello" …
We say "Hello" to a woman and her mind forms it automatically into "Hell No".

And even if one of us somehow makes it into a relationship, we get the feeling that we're as sexually attractive as yesterday's washing-up … You know, you see it all piled up and stinky in the sink and you know somebody's got to do it, but … (shudder). No way! Not even with Marigolds on …

And mistletoe. Fuck all round that.

And stupid drunk office girls in Santa hats snogging everything that moves … everything but an ug, of course.

And stupid "feel good" Christmas crap fucking TV. Where are the ugs? Nowhere.
Except for "fake ug", like Ugly Betty … Listen, you TV twats: putting a brace and glasses on a pretty girl does not make her ugly. Ug is Ug. If TV used real ugs, nobody would watch. Just like real life … Bastards!

And "the youth of today", pretty girls binge-drinking 'til they puke, then fucking in their own stink and leaving pools of chlamydia wherever they sit. But even semi-conscious from booze, they won't go near an ug.

And sicky-sicky married couples with their "lovely" kids. Do we ugs get to be attractive married couples? Do we bollocks! So don't invite us over at Christmas; seeing you so happy only makes us more fucking miserable when we get home alone to our dark empty houses.

And girlfriends who are 'friends who happen to be girls'. I've got girlfriends coming out of my fucking ears, but they'd all puke at the thought of dating me. (Ugs make girlfriends as easily as gay guys do; we're "safe" … Hah!).

And Christmas parties? Don't get me started … really … don't.

There's no love in our ugly lives and no prospect of any, so Christmas really sucks huge ass.

We ugs even have our own anthem. The lovely Mister Mozza wrote it for us; How Soon Is Now (sing along):

I am the son
And the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and the heir
Of nothing in particular

You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am Human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

There's a club, if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home
And you cry
And you want to die

When you say it's gonna happen now,
Well, when exactly do you mean?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone

You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am Human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

So, this is Dive's Christmas Appeal:
Embittered, lonely, rejected, heartbroken and self-pityingly miserable as we are, please spare a thought for the ugly this Christmas.

Grit your teeth, pucker up and kiss one of us. You can have some chocolate after to take the taste away.
And you can enjoy your Christmas knowing you've done your good deed."

The scary thing is that I've now found someone willing to kiss me and not ask for money or threaten to press charges.
And yesterday, when the coffee shop started playing Christmas muzak, I did not slam my latte down on the table and march out, ne'er to return until January (as happened last year), but - much to Phil's amazement - sat and listened until I'd finished breakfast.
Okay, so it was Nat King Cole's Christmas album … Anything else and I'd have stormed out. You can't hate Nat.
But I'm getting frightened …
I can't seem to work up the rantiness I usually manage at this most sickening season.
Am I weakening in my old age?
Will I one day find myself buying tinsel?
Will I actually watch a "seasonal" television programme?

If I were to do that, the world would end.
Actually, that's pretty tempting …

A Pox On Railways

Graaargh!
It took me five hours and twelve minutes to get to the office this morning, because a fire alarm went off in the main signalling room at London Liverpool Street Station.
I just checked the train website and now (as it's a slightly breezy day) all the power lines have blown down at Ingatestone (yet again) so I'll be lucky if I get home at all tonight.
Arse!

At least when I got in I found that Angela (bless her) has installed a nice, shiny new Mac Pro, pimped to the max for me to play with.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee …

It's got two DVD drives.
Why on earth would I want two DVD drives?
As they're too high off the desk to be of practical use as a cup holder, I'm thinking of putting a pot plant in the one I don't use.

No time to write anything else as I'm desperately trying to make up for all the time lost on the poxy train.

Hey ho.

A Gift For Kate (Half-Nekkid Thursday)

As I don't really have the time to post today, and as Kate has expressed a desire for me to mail my little brother to Australia so she can play with him; here - for your delectation or otherwise, Kate - is a photo of Phil's backside.

Cute, huh?

This is me, cousin Claire and Phil on holiday at Whitstable beach, sometime in the early to mid sixties.
I do have grosser photos of Phil, but there are also grosser ones of me in existence, so I'll stop at this one to prevent an all-out embarrassing-photo-posting war.

Autopilot

I thought I'd start something new.
As I'm an old fart now, instead of simply ranting I will vary things a little by introducing posts that just drone on like a dribbling old lady on a bus.
This comes from Monday's post about getting old and forgetting things. When I was writing it I forgot to put this bit in … so here it is.

I find from Monday's comments box that I'm not alone in forgetting where the hell I am or what I'm doing. So do any of you other guys suffer from "autopilot"?

A couple of examples in case you're unsure what I'm droning on about:
First up: when I used to work in Norwich I would be sat in rush hour traffic for an hour or so every morning. Anyway, this one morning I remember sitting there, listening to music, and the next thing I know I wake up in Dereham, driving through the middle of a town fifteen miles away. It's about an hour later and I have no idea what I'm doing there or how I got there.
I didn't even know where "there" was until I found my way out of the stupid town and saw a sign. I didn't recognise it because there's no reason for anybody ever to want to go to Dereham; it's a shithole.
So I found a main road and made my way to work, where the boss told me I was a dork.

The best one though, happened when I had left that firm and had been working at a new place for eighteen months.
I drove in to Norwich, parked up, bought my paper and walked to the office.
I keyed in the security code, walked up the stairs, said "Hi, Mel" to my secretary, who smiled and said "Hi" back.
I made coffee, walked in to my office and sat at my drawing board, wishing Norman "Good morning."

It wasn't until I had been sitting there for several minutes, chatting to Norm and trying to remember what I had been working on the previous day that good old Norman turned around and said.
"Dive … er … You don't work here any more."

I'd left the place eighteen months beforehand.
Being crap, they hadn't changed the entry codes, and Mel (bless her) was never the sharpest tool in the box (she collected "collector" plates and Star Trek "collectibles" and though she was pretty, she could never seem to get a boyfriend), and Norm was near to retirement, but it took him several minutes of casual chat before he cottoned on to what was wrong.
Mel giggled and said "I thought you looked different." Duh …

So I hung around for a bit until I'd finished my coffee, getting laughed at by my old work colleagues, then went to my new office where my boss told me I was a dork.

Is it just me? Or does "autopilot" happen to you guys, too?

Paperless Office, My Arse!

I finished my last post with the well-worn phrase "Fuck, fuck, fuckity fucking fuck!" and it seems apt to start this one with it.

I get up at 4:40AM this morning, same as usual; shower, hair-wash, dress, grab my stuff and head off on the three and a half hour commute to Westminster.

So far, so hoopy …

Getting to work I find I cannot log in to my computer.
As more people trail in, we discover that the whole office has the same problem.

That's okay. Occasionally we get a server glitch that locks us out and all we need to do is wait until IT start arriving (usually after nine) and get someone to put it right.
So the atmosphere in the office is jolly. Lattes are drunk, croissants are consumed and bitchy gossip is exchanged.

Angela arrives and finds me waiting outside the IT department with the news.
"Hokay." She smiles. "No problem."

A few minutes later and she is running from IT offices to server rooms, to my office, to the other departments and more of her lazy-assed cohorts are drafted in as they arrive.

As time drags and nerds run around shrieking and flapping like someone set fire to a battery chicken farm, it is becoming apparent that this is going to be one of those days.
After a longish while it turns out that this is not the sort of problem that will go away if you simply throw nerds at it (fun though nerd-throwing can be).

Bugger all round that. Angela lets slip it could be all day at least before things are up and running, so those of us who can work from home skedaddle pronto.

Which is why you find me just arrived home and ranty at one in the afternoon, having been up for almost eight and a half hours and having achieved precisely zip.

Paperless office? My fat, hairy arse!

Depleted 'C'ranium

Maria's post yesterday on being old and forgetful struck an all too painful chord with this saggy old bastard.

For example, this happens with alarming frequency:
I'm sitting downstairs and I get a sudden urge for a book that's upstairs in the bedroom, or I decide to go for a spin on the exercise bike that's up there, or maybe record something in the studio …
A few seconds later and I stand there at the top of the stairs and wonder, "What the heck did I come all the way up HERE for?"
Then I look down at my socks and think, "Ah! Slippers!" and head on down the landing to the main bedroom, dig out my slippers from their hiding place under the dresser, put 'em on and amble back downstairs again, only to reach the bottom step and remember just what I went up there for in the first place.
It wasn't slippers.
It never is.
I don't even WEAR slippers.
I've only got some because somebody bought me a pipe, slippers and flat cap and scarf for Christmas once as a joke about getting old (thanks, Steve) and I never got round to throwing them out.

Maybe it's something to do with atmospheric pressure.
The decrease in pressure due to the rise in altitude of climbing the stairs affects the addled and cobwebby remains of my brain and tilts the pointer to the word "slippers".
Maybe it's something buried deep in my past that I've suppressed, that involves a need to … er … wear slippers.

And it's not just the slippers … words go missing, too.
I spend an increasing amount of my time waving my hands about and whining "Hang on … It's on the tip of my tongue".
The worst missing word episode happened while I was on site at one of my buildings, shouting at the contractors about something and a word slipped quietly out the back door and wasn't there when I needed it.
I was left doing frantic "charades"-style hand gestures while the building contractors and the quantity surveyor and the structural engineers all tried to figure out what complicated concept I was trying to get across.
I walked over to the nearest stack, picked one off the top and waved it at them, yelling, "This! I can't remember the word. What the fuck is it?"
The missing word was "brick".
I am an Architect.
I've never lived that one down.

Worst of all, however, is the entire decade of my life that got wiped from my memory.
And I didn't even know until I was in a music shop a few years back and someone was hassling me.

I was getting pretty pissed off with him and did my best to ignore his attentions until I heard him tell the guy behind the counter he used to be in a band with me.
I'd never seen this guy before in my entire life, so I snapped and told him that and a whole lot more in front of shop staff and customers in no uncertain fashion, leaving him to trail out the door looking decidedly embarrassed.

It wasn't until a couple of weeks later when Chris was chuntering on in the studio about some guy who we used to play with who had been given a bizarre ranty, fuck off by me in a music shop that I started to get concerned.
Chris then trawled through his files and came up with photos, tapes, even videos of me happily playing alongside this guy.
Apparently we were in a band together for several months in the early nineties. Almost successfully.
We laugh about it now and are good friends (yes, Dave; I know … ha, bloody ha … Just wait 'til you get this old), but try as he might to remind me I simply cannot remember a thing about it. Or indeed ever meeting him before the music shop debacle. The photos and stuff are proof, but my memory is completely fucked.
Scary.
And now I'm getting old, too, so I can expect a whole lot more of that crap.
Whoopee …

I've also reached the stage when, every time I get up out of a chair or the sofa I make a noise like Grandpa Simpson.

Fuck, fuck, fuckity fucking fuck.

Monday Melee

It must be several weeks since I've done a Fracas Monday Melee: so I'd better atone.
Here goes nothing:

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).

"I and all the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return"

W.H. Auden: "September 1st. 1939"


2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).

Bystanders. Fuck 'em.

"Washing ones hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful.

Paulo Freire. Brazilian educator and Christian Socialist


3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).

"It's very different from living in academia in Oxford.
We called someone vicious in the Times Literary Supplement.
We didn't know what vicious was."

Aung San Suu Kyi: on returning to Burma from England, 25th. September, 1988


4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).

Hugh Kingsmill: Writer, for:

"Friends: God's apology for relations."
Christmas is coming. People are already starting to wince in anticipation of family get-togethers.


5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).

I've remembered to do a Monday Melee for the first time in ages.


6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).

Spring.

That's your lot. I'm out of practice. I'll need a couple of weeks to build up a good head of steam before the bile starts flying again.

Sunday Bathtime Stupid Question

I do love a nice long soak in a hot bath of a weekend.

I don't have the time during the week; it's strictly showers only, so when the weekend rolls around I find myself called by the deep, primæval urge to soak; to luxuriate in the sensual yumminess of my bathtub and to let my mind wander whither it will.
A big mug of coffee and maybe a few squares of Green and Black's chocolate and I drift off into realms of weirdness unplumbed outside of that steamy haven.

Last week I lay in the bath thinking about Jesus - and you know what that led to.
Next up, it was quantum mechanics … Hey, I happen to like quantum mechanics! And I am fortunate enough to possess the arithmetical chops required to ponder the subject in the bath. It is not boring!

Today it was - somewhat more prosaically - "How the fuck did all the fish get to the Lake District?"
Hokay, so it's rather more mundane than Jesus or quantum mechanics, but my mind has many and varied dusty corners and that's what came creeping out this morning.
So: freshwater fish …
We have river fish and we have lake and pond fish. And a lot of these lakes and ponds are ultimately connected into river systems that reach the sea. So I can see how fish got into those.
But …

The Lake District.
Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the glaciers retreated to leave a series of valleys with pretty melt-water lakes in the bottom. All very picturesque and great fun for old Wordsworth and his chums, but not in any way connected to a river system (okay, Phil; I know that technically only one of them is a "lake" and the others are "waters", but semantics aside, the point I am trying to get across here is that they are a just bunch of overambitious ponds with no aqueous link to any possible piscine parental source).

So somebody tell me please, how the fuck did they get to be so full of fish?

Don't try to tell me Og and Ug decided to catch loads of river fish in their stone nets, put them in their stone buckets and haul the buggers up to the inhospitable heights of the Lake District and tip 'em in there.

And don't tell me God did it. There's not a HA! in the whole wide world big enough to pour scorn on THAT one!

Just please, for my Sunday sanity's sake, give me a plausible explanation.

Three-Way Blog Collision

Yesterday morning, Waterstone's bookshop coffee-bar hosted a three-way, breakfast-time blog collision between Norwich Daily Photo, The Monkey God and Old Dive.

Phil (latte), you know, and you met Joy (fruit juice) last week, but today - kicked out of bed at an unearthly hour - we are joined by the unfeasibly young and handsome Thom (Earl Grey).

Poor old homebody Dive had to endure the three of them swapping tales of tropical paradise holidays (yes, Jules; you came up, too), and the fact that Joy and Thom are soon off to the Philippines for Christmas, and Joy had to endure Phil and Dive pointing at America and laughing. All jolly good fun.

Joy and Thom are splendid company and after breakfast we hit the Christmas Market to take hordes of blog photos and to heap abuse on the French.

Geese Is The Word

(Go on … sing it … You know you want to).

Norwich has a better class of street litter than most cities. Someone appears to have discarded a large, marble brain in the plaza beside St.Peter Mancroft.
We took loads more photos but those will leak out when we are short of blogging material.

What I want to know (see the last photo) is how Joy can wear open-toed sandals in sub-zero temeperatures?
Brrr …

Have a great holiday, you two.

I'm Right; It's The World That's Wrong

Fuck!
It's December!
Who left the door open and let that bastard in here?
Brrr …

Anyway; bollocks to December, let's talk crap instead.

You know I'm a BBC Radio 3 man; I loathe television. I've spent most of my life without one and am going to bin the bloody thing again when they switch off the analogue signal in a year or two.
Television has now dumbed down to the extent that my brain actually seizes if I sit in front of it for more than a few minutes.
It's only once or twice every decade or so that the idiot box throws up something that's worth the effort of switching it on and pointing my eyes at it.
To date we've had The Simpsons, Frasier and the sublime Buffy from the States, and Black Books, Green Wing and Q.I. from Brit TV; all of which I have on DVD and can watch on my Mac, so I don't really need a telly any more, as there's fuck-all else on.

Anyhoo, loath as I am to quote from a TV programme, Q.I. last night made me forget that it is December and that Christmas misery looms, when quizmaster and world's sexiest man Stephen Fry asked what the middle initial stood for in Ulysses S. Grant and Dara O'Briain suggested that it might be "Sugar-tits". I'm still suffering the giggly aftershocks of that one.

Ah, if only the world worked like that … sigh …
It would certainly explain why the old curmudgeon looks so grumpy on all those civil war photographs.
Annoyingly - as any fule kno - he was born Hiram Ulysses Grant and the S. stood for absolutely nothing; he changed his name to stop children pointing out that his initials spelled "hug" - a huge embarrassment for a curmudgeon; although it had the further effect of forcing Robert E. Lee to retaliate with a middle initial of his own (which stood for Emily, though this was later covered up by revisionist historians).

All of which nonsense leads - somewhat confusingly - to the tiny alternate reality that is the Small Glass Planet.
Inside my head, deep in the world of Dive, Ulysses Sugar-tits Grant is now a real historical character and this goes a long way toward explaining the result of the civil war. What soldier wouldn't fight like a devil and happily lay down his life for a man named Sugar-tits? I know I would.

And it also leads - even more circuitously - to the list of other delightful things that I consider are real and the rest of the world is wrong about.

Way back in the swirling mists of time, when the Small Glass Planet was still a primordial soup of rants and strangeness I used to append a "Today's Fact" to the end of each post.
Robyn - who had been rather unwisely delving into the murky and fœtid pismire of my archives - reminded me of these and suggested I start doing it again.

Being a lazy-arsed git and not really wanting the bother of having to think up new ones, here are some of those old "facts".
These can safely be used to enhance your dinner party conversations or to tell to small children. They are the way the world should work.
Some of these are true in your world; all of them are true in mine:

Up until 1919, every fifth US President was left-handed.

Wood only floats when people are looking.

The Portuguese have no word for gravy.

If a pregnant woman strokes a pig, there is a thirty-seven percent chance her child will be born short-sighted (Statistical Bureau of the USA).

In the northern hemisphere, a freewheeling bicycle will naturally veer slightly to the left; in the southern hemisphere, to the right.

Photocopiers are intrinsically evil.

All cats are born with an innate sense of rhythm.

Every biscuit has an immortal soul.

The number "four" cannot be added to, subtracted from, multiplied by or divided by any other number.

The Bedouin have only one word for sand.

Shoes are an invention of the devil.

The rennet used in the manufacture of Limburger cheese is distilled from the tears of little orphans.

Washing a German can cure hiccups.

Walking backwards actually reverses time (try it)!

Gold is actually a vegetable.

Blancmange is the suckle of Beelzebub.

Puffins cannot sneeze.

Shredded Wheat is not made from wheat, but is actually the cocoon of a large, crunchy moth.

As men get older, their dancing becomes more sexually alluring. To what, however, is still a mystery.

Krakatoa is, in fact, quite a long way west of Java.

Before crossing the road in Norway, you must rub yourself against the nearest building.

Beetroot juice can be used to remove minor stains from upholstery.

Never, EVER, look up!

All goldfish are called Bob (just ask 'em).

So now you know. I hope that has been of some use to you. At least it may make my world a little less baffling to you.
Your world certainly baffles me …