September 2004

September 29th, 2004. Taxi

Dad likes the fact that I've got a car now. The Mother doesn't drive because of her sight, so he's always taken her out two or three times a week to various music classes, church meetings, choral groups and so on. Now that it's my car on the drive - and his is safely locked away in the garage - it's me doing all that.

Years ago, of course, I would be going off to the youth orchestra several times a week, and it would be The Mother sitting outside the college in the car, waiting to pick me up.* Now, I'm the one in the college carpark; although, of course, where she would be sat reading the People's Friend, I'm more likely to be listening to The Pixies. Oh, the ironing.

* Well, we normally had lift-sharing arrangements and rotas of parents taking turns; so it wasn't always her.

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September 26th, 2004. Blue car, Blue Mountains

Yes, that's my car on the driveway. We picked it up yesterday, and I still can't quite get my head round the idea that I'm a car driver now. It's a Corsa, blue, and it'll get me to work and back whilst I listen to a CD at the same time. Which is all I'm looking for in a car, frankly.

I sat in it earlier enjoying all the details that presumably are in everyone's cars now, but I've never seen before. Such as: the CD player remembers where it was, as if it was a tape player! When you push the light switch, the light doesn't just flick on; it fades up slowly from nothing over a couple of seconds. And, the windscreen wipers have a programmable interval. I have no idea how car drivers managed in the dark ages before programmable windscreen wipers were invented.

All the car needs now is a name. I thought of "the Blue Meanie", because, well, it's blue, and cars aren't really that nice for the planet and everything. It's not a very good name, though, so feel free to think up something better for me.

Also this weekend: a postcard arrived from an old schoolfriend,* who, just as I arrived back in Grimsby, moved away to Australia. I was, to be honest, rather surprised. So surprised, in fact, that I don't think it's registered with me yet. I'm trying to imagine her taking up surfing, and not doing very well.

* Note for JAL: the person who you did a websearch for...

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September 23rd, 2004. Punctuate

My main co-worker spent most of this morning tidying up the IT store-room, neatly stacking up piles of elderly computers and sorting all the parts into boxes. He decided, for extra ease-of-use, to label all the boxes:

CABLE'S
PLUG'S & SOCKET'S
KEYBOARD'S

It's a shame you can't cross out apostrophes very easily. If I did, it would be very obvious and rather rude. As they're brown cardboard boxes, I can't Tippex them either. The dodgy apostrophes, then, keep lurking on the edge of my sightlines whenever I'm in the room. Grrr. Learn punctuation, please; it's not difficult.

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September 21st, 2004. And now, what you've been waiting for...

More little notes, because I'm too tired to write a proper entry:

a) Was watching Channel 4 tonight, and saw a trailer for Yet Another How To Make Billions From Property show. Immediately recognised the music: Nothing Can Stop Us by Saint Etienne; one of my favourite songs, so hearing it on the telly has to be a good thing. It's the song I put on loudly and dance around to whenever I think I've pulled. I don't listen to it very often.

b) Car definitely on the way. Woohoo! I'd better not be sacked now, or I'll be really broke.

c) Dad has been sitting round doing his Radio Paperwork all night; I'm intrigued. It seems to involve sorting postcards that various people have sent him, to prove that they've had a chat with some other third person, over the radio. From all sorts of random places: Aruba; Finland; Sumner, TX; Waxhaw, NC. I'm not sure I can see the appeal of talking to someone just so you can say you've talked to someone from X. Although, having said that, it does sound rather like IRC.

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September 19th, 2004. Camping

Instead of looking at cars for me, this weekend The Parents wanted to look at caravans for themselves. It wasn't really my idea of fun, but I went along to humour them. "Don't keep making snide comments," said The Mother. "We enjoy spending our holidays in them."

"Snide comments" apparently includes questions like "why are they all white?"* and "why are they all the same shape?"** I have to say, though, that caravan interiors do seem to be slowly changing over time. Any more than a year old seem to be a cheap Melamine pastiche of the 1980s faux-farmhouse Laura Ashley look. Next year's caravans, though, are a cheap melamine pastiche of the 1980s yuppie penthouse look, albeit with the same pine-coloured finish. There was even a model called the Pastiche on display, in fact. All caravans known to man have exactly the same-shape body panels, and exactly the same awful, plasticky interior fittings, whoever makes them. I want to find the company that makes all the horrible caravan window-latches, cupboard-catches, doorknobs and so on, take it over, and suddenly force Good Taste on every caravanner in the world.

The day out made me want to go camping again, though; not in a caravan, but in a little two-man tent on the ground. Just the smell of the crushed grass reminded me of it; how nice it is to snuggle up in a sleeping bag whilst rain patters on the roof of the tent. I've dug out a book I used to read when I was younger, for holiday inspiration: Camping, by Nigel Hunt, published 1969 (Withdrawn from Stock, Humberside Libraries, 25p). A lot of it seems rather gung-ho in a quaint 1950s way: it concentrates on the idea of just camping in a random field you like the look of, and contains lines like "cook sausages, steak or chops well-wrapped in silver paper tied to the manifold of [your car's] engine. After 60 miles (turning them over at 30 miles) sausages will be nicely done giving a hot meal before pitching camp. It takes longer for steak - over 100 miles, you will find." I like the idea of a camping holiday, but not the idea of digging my own latrines. Some parts of the book, of course, just seem quaint in an out-dated way:

Not all [petrol cooking stoves] can borrow from your car or motor-bike fuel tank. They may not use the same petrol. Some petrol stoves use ordinary leaded petrol as used in cars, yes. But others use unleaded petrol. If you use car petrol in a stove not suited for it the solder in the fuel tank suffers. Consequence: explosion. Unleaded petrol can be ordered from petrol stations in two-gallon cans.

A typical petrol stove was about £2.15.0 in 1960s Old Money, apparently.*** I wouldn't really fancy one myself - surely the fumes give your food a horrible tang? Leave me, nice and cosy in my tiny tent, rehydrating my dinner on a roaring gas burner. I need to find out when I can get some holiday time.

* "So that they blend into the landscape, I suppose" said The Mother. She didn't know why, in that case, they weren't all green or blue.

** "They're not. Stop it."

*** For young people and foreigners: £2.15.0 = two pounds, fifteen shillings, no pence = £2.75 in modern, decimal money.

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September 18th, 2004. Regression

The cat's trip to the vet seems to have left him in his second kittenhood, now the wounds have healed and his hormones drained away. He spends his evenings chasing balls of paper round the living room floor, and playing with his toys, just like he did when small. He still goes outside just as much as he did, but he has a lot more energy left when he returns.

Unfortunately, there's another side-effect. He's started doing something else that he hasn't done for a few years: pissing indoors. Specifically, pissing on newspapers on the floor, or on piles of laundry in the bathroom. The Mother has become paranoid, and stalks him everywhere inside ready to spot him squatting to pee. If it happens, he gets picked up and roughly thrown outside. He's banned from the living room unaccompanied, now, and she's wary of leaving him indoors on his own at all. I'm feeling rather sorry for him.

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September 15th, 2004. Tally-ho

Today was a historical day. After the Gordon Riots, the Toxteth Riots and the Poll Tax Riots, we now have the Let's Kill Animals Brutally Riots. Hundreds of people gathered in London to protest at their democratic right to let their dogs tear foxes into small pieces, and a few broke into the House of Commons. These people, though, are calm, pleasant and peaceful when they're not ripping small mammals apart. Yes, there was a little violence in the demonstration, people tried to break through the police cordon, and the riot police had to be called out. Nothing to do with the hunters, though: it was all caused by some football supporters who had sneaked their way into the crowd.*

All of the anti-hunt campaigners will tell you it's about animal welfare, not class warfare. For some of them - Ann Widdecombe, for example, it's probably true. Hunting, though, is the original Class Warfare. I'm always saying that when people go on about traditions going back a thousand years they're talking bollocks; but, a thousand years ago** William I was depopulating huge swathes of the countryside, taking the use of it from the poor and giving it to the rich - his aristocratic hunting friends and family. Ever since, it's been a potent symbol of the upper classes' "right" to trample all over the peasantry. Hunting has always been used in conservative, anti-modernisation arguments ever since - when the railway network was being built, "it will disturb the local hunt" was constantly used as an anti-trains debating point.

Banning hunting is, its supporters say, anti-democratic. They like to ignore the polls which constantly state that most of the country is against it. And, it might cause unemployment; but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the end of the mining industry. I didn't see any field-sports people complaining about that.

* I know this sounds like something I made up, but it was genuinely what their spokesman claimed on Channel Four News earlier tonight.

** A pedant writes: well, 937 years ago at most.

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September 14th, 2004. Cameo scene

At 8 in the morning, when I'm walking round the fringes of town, children are starting to wander towards school, or waiting for the bus. They wander all over the path and force everyone else into the street to get past.

Today, outside the newsagents' in Cartergate, some kids were standing with their bikes dropped flat on the ground. All boys, only about 12 or 13. As I stepped into the gutter to get past them, a middle-aged man in a suit came out of the shop. "You arrogant twat!" he said to one of the boys; small, with glasses. He was forceful, but wasn't shouting.

"What?" said the boy.

"You arrogant twat!" he repeated. And that was all I heard, before I was out of earshot.

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September 13th, 2004. Premium Rate

The parents keep trying to remind me how awful life will be when I get a car. "It'll cost you £20 a week just to keep it without going anywhere, you know. And the mileage soon mounts up. You'll have to spend a third of your salary on it."

Boring things I've had to do: phone round for insurance quotes. The neon sign over my head has switched to saying "I am a grown-up." Whilst I did it, the cat was sat on top of me, doing his best to get attention:

"1.2 litre, five doors oohyes you are a furry cat No. ooh, is that nice strokings? You do like that, don't No, I've never had any convictions. Who's a lovely happy puss On the driveway is that happy purrings?"

I was sat happily with the cat, working my way through the 0800 numbers in the yellow pages, when my dad decided I Wasn't Doing It Right and decided to take over. He spread all the phone books he could find around the place and barked out numbers for me to dial as soon as I put each call down. Of course, Knowing Better Than Me, he picked out lots of local offices for me to call; and as it was the weekend, none of them were open. "RIGHT, NEXT ONE!" he'd shout, after I'd reached yet another answering machine, and shout out another number faster than I could dial it, getting more and more annoyed the more useless numbers he picked out.

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September 11th, 2004. Vroom vroom

Following up the previous entry: today, we went car shopping! I stood around and tried to look as if I knew what I was talking about, whilst the sales talk washed over me. I'm clueless when it comes to cars.

"So, this car has twin airbags, CD player, air con, blah blah thingy, height adjust whatsit, wibble wibble. And if you pull this lever, the steering wheel goes up and down!"

Me: "Um ... and it'll get me to work every morning?"

Afterwards, I took one out for a test-drive (without telling them that I hadn't driven anything, anywhere, for about five years).* Surprisingly, I didn't crash into anything. You might say "it's like riding a bike" - but that wouldn't really encourage me, because when I tried to ride a bike for the first time in five years I got half-way down our street before realising I'd completely forgotten how to go round corners. Driving, though, I haven't forgotten, which is good: I was worried that when I finally do get a car, I would be too scared of driving to actually go to work in it.

In other news, I should definitely get this tshirt - although black isn't really my colour.

* saying that, they didn't even ask to see my licence first. They didn't even ask if I have a licence.

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September 8th, 2004. Tiredness can kill, take a break

Tired. Sleepy. Sore legs, from walking about five miles a day. Alarm set to 6.30am. Note to self: must buy a car. Affordable option: must steal a car.

A mysterious text-message came today. I'm fairly sure it wasn't meant for me, but you never know:

hey doll, how are things? Would love to meet up but busy that night. Around at the weekend? xx

I definitely don't remember inviting anyone to meet up with me, at least not in the past month or so, or on any specific days. Damn wrong numbers.

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September 6th, 2004. Wardrobe

Went shopping at the weekend, to buy lots of Smart Business Clothes.

Years and years ago, I remember, if my gran wanted to go somewhere special to shop, she'd go for a day out to Doncaster. They had a C&A in Doncaster, you see, and they didn't have one in Grimsby. Nowadays, of course, neither has a C&A - the nearest branch is probably Rotterdam or somewhere - but Doncaster does have something else Grimsby doesn't: one of those factory-outlet shopping parks. So, we had a shopping trip to Doncaster, in order to save some cash. And, I have a new Smart Wardrobe to go alongside my usual tatty one.

On the way, we passed the remains of the A18(M) - Britain's only abandoned motorway. I was impressed, because I'd only just read about it on the Pathetic Motorways website.* I have to admit, I have driven past it many, many times before without being impressed, because I didn't even know it was there. After all, all you can see from the road is an empty field.

* link via Simon's Skip.

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September 4th, 2004. On the other hand, I do like goths

Some of you, I imagine, are reading this site because of its appearance in the current issue of Web User magazine. Because of that, I thought I'd write some more about my idiot next-door neighbour, who - as it said in the magazine - we don't really get along with.

When The Mother wants to tell people about the idiot next-door neighbour, there's one conversation with him that she always goes back to. It must have happened fifteen or twenty years ago, but she always goes back to it, probably because it's bound to set everybody against him. It also must have happened not long after he'd moved here from rural South Africa. He started off, so the story goes, explaining how he could really do with some black slaves to do his housework, like they did back on the family farm.

"Um, well, we haven't had slaves for a few hundred years, have we?" said The Mother.

"Well, we call them servants," he replied, "but they're slaves really. We give them a kick if they don't work hard enough."

"But you can't do that!" said The Mother, slightly shocked. "You wouldn't kick your dog, would you?"

"Well, they're not as good as my dog," he answered.

He is, apparently, planning to move soon; but he's been saying that for ten years at least. At the moment he's planning to move out and then leave the house empty for a while, because it needs a lot of work before it will be saleable for anything approaching the neighbourhood average. The window-frames are peeling and rotting. He keeps all his curtains firmly shut, but as far as we can tell the house is decorated in all the colours you're advised not to use if you want to sell - deep green, scarlet and black.

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September 2nd, 2004. Embedded

There are adverts everywhere at the moment for the new Spielberg film, The Terminal. Cheerful, heart-warming romantic comedy, of course. It's got Tom Hanks in it, so it must be cuddly family fare which will squeeze the flintiest heart. I think there's a law or something.

Am I the only person, though, who sees the whole thing as being just a little, well, racist? WARNING: I've not actually seen it, so you might say I shouldn't be criticising. I have seen the trailer far too many times, and I know that it's loosely based on a true story. A true story about an Iranian man living in a Paris airport, which (by the power of film) is magically turned into an Eastern European travelling to America. Now, I can understand them wanting to shift the film from France to the USA. You can see, too, how your stereotypical film executive might be iffy about a hero who looks a bit Arab.* It's going a bit far, though, to cast one of the most motherhood-and-apple-pie actors around for the role. Especially when he then has to speak in the corniest fake-Slavic accent you can think of, just in case the audience might forget that he's playing a foreigner.

The whole thing reminds me of all those 1970s British sitcoms like It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, where white actors would slap on the makeup and play Asian characters, usually with the standard "sounds a bit Welsh" Comedy Indian accent. Oddly enough, none of those series are shown any more, because the TV companies realised that they might be slightly racist. Nowadays, if there's an Asian character on British telly, they actually get an Asian actor to play the part. It's a shocking concept, I know.

Ever since the Macpherson Report was published, the phrase "institutional racism" has been in the news an awful lot. It makes Daily Mail readers** upset; they think it's all Political Correctness Gone Mad. They think institutional racism is a big myth. It's not, though. Because it doesn't mean Chief Constable Roger Rolledup-Trouserleg actually telling all his new recruits: "Right, lads, let's go out and bang up some darkies. They're all guilty of something." That, hopefully, never did happen.*** Institutional racism is the general background feeling that makes a movie studio feel it has to cast a friendly, white American face to play a character who was originally middle-eastern. They're not deliberately being racist; they're just assuming that the rest of their audience is.

* although - before anyone outpedants me - Iranians aren't Arabs. You can't expect most Americans to realise that, though.

** and Michael Howard when he's leapt on board their bandwagon

*** although I wouldn't bet on it either way.

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September 1st, 2004. Marsh

One thing I meant to write - rather than just whinging about my mother - was a guide to this area. I've started plenty of entries and never finished them properly, but this is something that I've never even started properly.

I was thinking about it today, because I spent this afternoon walking around the West Marsh. It's the part of town that I lived in when I was a baby, and I can still vaguely remember being taken to the local playground to go on the swings, and to look at the ducks on The Haven.

I walked along The Haven today. It's the drainage canal that runs through the West Marsh, dug 400 years ago to try to stop the port silting up. It's flat, mirror-smooth, and barely moves. You couldn't row a boat along it, because of bridges crossing it with a few inches' clearance. You couldn't swim along it, because you'd get covered and tangled in weeds and algae. The roads alongside it have been pedestrianised and neatened up with brick paving; but the streets are still lined with Edwardian four-room terraces opening straight on to the pavement.

Round the corner, the houses are a bit posher: they have a few feet of garden between the house and the street. Nearly all have their 'garden' paved over. Many houses seem to be empty, or maybe the windows are just boarded up with chipboard. Kids hang around outside the corner-shops, or lean on their garden-walls. The side-streets lead to factory-sides, or towards the docks; occasionally, you can see ships' bridges, several stories above the streets and houses.

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