Bonus Blog (sort of)

Happy Leap Day, or Leap Year Day, or whatever we’re supposed to call it.

It’s annoying me a bit this year. An extra day in February means an extra day to survive before we can change the clocks to BST, but don’t let my negativity ruin your plans for today. It just shows you my state of mind at the moment that I’m seeing it as a bad thing.

I should be celebrating. It is, after all, an important anniversary.

Philippa proposed to me on February 29^th and, would you believe, that was EIGHT YEARS AGO. That’s scary. I was going to work out exactly what percentage of my lifespan she has been part of, but gave up and decided to cook her breakfast instead. That’s quite good for me, because you may have noticed before that the passing of time, and numbers in general, is a bit of a thing for me. I could have got distracted and lost half the day to calculations, instead of enjoying myself with my wife and son.

All I will say is this:

It seems a cruel trick of the Gods that everything speeds up when you meet someone special. Days used to drag and my life felt bogged down in mud; then I got together with Philippa and everything since seems to have gone by in a heartbeat.

See you in March!

RC 29-2-20

A Rory Recommendation

There are two Norwegian films called “The Wave” (2015) and “The Quake” (2018).

They’re the best disaster movies since ‘The Towering Inferno’ and ‘The Poseidon Adventure’.

Gripping, realistic, full of decent characters, and they cost, combined, about 8% of the effects budget for the first Transformers movie.

Michael Bay, go **** yourself.

RC 28-2-20

Critically Self-Critical

I seem to have become obsessed with writing really strong blog titles, that invoke a sense of impending brilliance that the paragraphs below them probably fail to deliver.

I have become the Radio 4 of blogging – thinking that a clever or witty name is 90% of the work needed to ensure a successful programme.

I shall endeavour to do better (or simplify my titles).

In other news, in the file marked “Better Late Than Never (Pancake Edition)”, is the information that we had our pancakes on Ash Wednesday rather than Shrove Tuesday this year. We did this for a very important reason - we completely forgot them on Tuesday.

I made a bit of a pig of myself, as usual. My undoubted Champion Filling Of 2020 was vanilla ice cream with a honey drizzle. I had three of those bastards, and my teeth still feel coated in the sugar now, so I probably won’t sleep until Sunday.

RC 27-2-20

And The Planet Shall Go On Regardless

I’m being pressured by a relative of Philippas to go vegan. Apparently, the only way to combat climate change is to eat a plant-based diet, and the single most important step any individual can take on the path to saving humanity is to cut out meat and dairy. I would have thought that not driving an automobile that pumps carbon dioxide out by the tonne would be high on the list, and I said so, and my comment was met with that condescending tilt of the head that only modern day vegans seem able to achieve.

I want to make a clear distinction here. I know a lot of vegans, and most of them are caring, conscientious, intelligent people who have a decision to make a change in their lives, and I have nothing but respect for them. But then there are the others – the more recent converts, the ones who wouldn’t understand the truth about climate change if it was written in words of one syllable; the ones who have made the change not out of a sense of planetary emergency, but out of a need for personal attention. They’re the ones that piss me off, and the ones I have no time for. If you’re a vegan – good for you. If you’re a vegan in response to a trend, and/or because you want to shout about it in facebook posts, go and feck yourself.

RC 26-2-20

Goodbye BBC, and I mean it this time

I have now officially given up on the BBC, almost to the point of boycott.

The main headline on their News website last night was “Coronavirus: The World Should Prepare For Pandemic, says WHO.”

Scary stuff, except that if you read the article, the WHO clearly HAD NOT said that at all. They only said that if you took a butcher’s knife to their quotes and moved bits around so they fit your own agenda. The WHO gentleman quoted in the article even gave reasons why it ISN’T a pandemic, and how using words like ‘pandemic’ can cause unnecessary panic. If it was worded slightly differently, and if the paragraphs were presented in a different order, it could actually have been an intelligent, informative, useful, calming read. So why use the headline they did? Because like the rest of the sorry sadsacks of shit that work as ‘journalists’ they’re only interested in fearmongering clickbait bullshit.

This is the BBC for God’s sake. They used to be the world’s most respected news outlet; the standard bearer to which all other broadcasters aspired.

I’m angry, and I’m done.

On another note (written after calming down a bit) – I’m really enjoying coronavirus. After a year or so of playing Plague, Inc, seeing it act out in real time is a dream come true!!

RC 25-2-20

Lookahead

This time next week we’ll be in March!

It has been, historically, my favourite month; a time when the glorious onset of Spring fills our gardens with blooming flowers, and fills our ears with returning birdsong, and fills our hearts with light-eveninged joy.

In recent years though, let’s be honest, it’s become a month firmly rooted in mid-Winter. So I’m expecting snowfall, bitter winds and more flooding, but at least we get to change the clocks on the 28^th.

I feel I need a blog-based challenge to get me through the 31 days of March. I’ve always wanted – and still failed to achieve – a calendar month in which I post a blog every day. No way I can see that happening this year, so instead I might expand my old friend ‘Initialoetry.’

How about this?:

The first letter of each blog title I post in March will form an acronym.

That feel like something I can achieve, even while fighting the Winter Blues.

RC 24-2-20

The Sunday Dread of an Imminent Workday

Blood like fire; mind like ice

Did the crime, now pay the price

Muscles aching, stomach tight

Restless, rolling in the night

Throat disabled; liver tired

Eyes unfocused, ears unwired

Empty bottles; empty bowels

Burning forehead; cooling towels

Drank too quickly, lost control

Torrid Sunday; turgid soul

Early night, restoring health

Wasted weekend; wasted wealth

RC 23-2-20

God, I need Spring

I am so grateful to have made it to a weekend off that I could cry, explode and collapse, all at the same time. My God, this has been a tough week. The weather, let’s be honest, has been shit, and my mood has sunk lower than a weighted-down sack of kittens in a river. Everyone seems to be pissed off about everything, and they’re all looking to me to sort things out for them. I get it – it’s Winter, we’re all sick of dark nights, we’re all finding everything a struggle; piling your shit onto my desk isn’t going to cheer you up, it’s just going to drag me down with you.

Anyway, who am I to complain? I can spread a bad mood around quicker than a Chinese exchange student spreads corona.

One finds oneself contemplating ones future, and onedering – sorry, wondering – whether or not it’s time to move on. I know this happens to me cyclically, but when it happens at the end of February, it seems more heightened and more urgent.

Anyway – I don’t want to waste my Friday evening thinking about work issues, and those drums aren’t going to play themselves…..

RC 21-2-20

So far, so safe

I’m sick of the wind and desperate for Spring to reach Suffolk.

I’ve had enough of staring out of windows and seeing bare branches, I want flowers and buds and birdsong.

We have Dennis battering the Hell out of us. It’s dark, wet and gusty and I’m wishing I was somewhere else in the world. Somewhere bright, dry and still.

What can I do about it, though?

Write haiku…..

Welcome Storm Dennis

I hope you leave our garden

Just as you found it

RC 16-2-20

Hiding from Dennis

We’re locked indoors and prepared for the onslaught of weather.

Storm Dennis, it is claimed, will be worse than Storm Ciara, who tore through our garden last week like a hungry dog tearing through a Twix wrapper. The strongest wind, and heaviest rain, should be tomorrow, but we’re keeping out of harms way today anyway.

Imagine if Dennis and the coronavirus teamed up? One of them a supposedly deadly virus, the other an unstoppable means of transport? Mankind would be wiped out in one weekend, and maybe that would be a good thing.

Anyway, on a less speculative and more positive note, this evening we are having our postponed-from-yesterday Valentines Day time together. A homemade Chinese meal, a bottle of fizzy pop (Philippa still isn’t drinking while breastfeeding, and I want to be supportive for a change) and a Philippa-selected movie.

That’s the plan, anyway. Being a negative soul, I am anticipating a Dennis-caused power cut that ruins the food, and then Philippa falling asleep early through son-induced tiredness. How romantic.

RC 15-2-20

1540 GMT

The Suicide Tour, Day 3

NB - I wrote this last night, and thought I'd posted it, but obviously I didn't, so you'll have to read it now, and pretend it's last night... RC 15-2-20 

I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m sorry, but I simply don’t want to talk about it. It was painful, pathetic and ultimately pointless.

But it’s done now. I can forget about it. Until Monday, when I’ll be expected to write a 1000-word appraisal of it and highlight new techniques I might have learnt that will somehow revolutionise my style of management and somehow justify the job of whoever forced this shit upon us.

Anyway – onto happier topics. I have a bottle of red wine open, I am alone in the house, and I am about to watch ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ for at least the 14^th time. If Philippa and Mathew aren’t home when it finishes, I shall bash the Hell out of my drums in a drunken Mick Shrimpton style (but hopefully without exploding).

The Suicide Tour, Day 2

What started yesterday as a pointless exercise in top-tier over-management descended today into farcical ineptitude.  I hope that makes sense because my mind has been numbed beyond the point of coherent thought. Basically, seven of us made our way to a small town in Lincolnshire, only to reach a store where the manager wasn’t expecting us.

What an unbelievable, and yet almost expected, snafu. We had to hang around for a couple of hours while someone in Head Office contacted someone else in Head Office, and between them they decided we should probably not hang around. Brilliant.

We made the best of the situation by all going out for a huge lunch, which will of course be charged to our company. Turns out we’re all very similar and we got on really well. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that our improvised interaction in the eatery (a nice countryside pub called ‘The Hearted Lion’) has probably saved the week from being a complete waste of time. Anyway, we’ll find out for sure tomorrow, when our last Forced Day Of Corporate Wandering takes us to the northernmost point in Essex, where apparently the filling station manager is some kind of marketing genius who has revolutionised profit margins and is the current flavour-of-the-month with Head Office. Be nice to meet him, I suppose, he’ll probably be running the company by Christmas.

RC 13-2-20

The Suicide Tour, Day 1

So today I took part in our first ‘sub-site socio-economic staff-shifting shitefest’ or whatever they’re calling it. What a numbing experience. Seven people who already have too much work to do, taken away from their places of work to see how other people in the same position do their jobs, meaning they’ll be even busier when they get back to their own locations. Today we were visiting a store and garage on the North Norfolk coast, where Storm Ciara was continuing to batter the landscape like a Californian copper batters a lonely black driver. (Sorry that reference is nearly 30 years old, but I watched a very good film about the LA riots called ‘Kings’ recently, so it’s stuck in my head. Plus – after what I’ve been through today, I’m amazed I have the mental capacity to type four letters in a row without making a mistake, much less come up with a witty or intelligent simile.)

It was freezing cold, so windy you could hardly hear anything, and the ‘outside catering’ mentioned in the e-mailed itinerary turned out to be leftover sandwiches in the staff canteen. All in all, a sad waste of time. That’s not just my opinion, either, all seven of us (eight if you include Nicole, the poor manager who had to babysit us all day) were struggling to find one positive aspect to the whole affair.

Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow, when we’re traipsing almost to the far side of Lincolnshire.  Thanks for the (very) early start, employers.

RC 12-2-20

Hohner-ing my skills

I’ve started to get a bit of a tune out of my harmonica! By which I mean – I can string three notes together without it sounding like they’re being played by three different people (two of whom have no musical ability).

I think Philippa is regretting buying it for me, but it’s too late now. I’m determined to get better, and that takes practice. I can tell her patience is wearing thin when she walks into the kitchen, sees me about to put it into my mouth and says, ‘Can’t you take it to work and play it in the office?’

But as I said – “I’m determined to get better.” By which I mean – I will go at it hell-for-leather for a couple of weeks, then get bored with it, decide it’s hopeless even trying, and throw it in a drawer somewhere beside my magic tricks and my partly-designed board game. And then move onto something else….

RC 11-2-20

Willem Dafoe - an appreciation

I went to see the movie “The Lighthouse” on Friday night. It’s taken me this long to be able to write about it because it is, to use the vernacular, “chuffing mental.”

At times, I would love to be a film critic. Imagine being paid to watch three or four films a week and then write out an appraisal of them. You can’t get it wrong, either – it’s always just a matter of opinion.

But then I see a film like this one and think ‘how the Hell am I supposed to review it? I can’t even tell you what was going on, much less what it was about.’

I have to say, though, that I absolutely loved it. It’s mad, but it’s brilliant. For a start, it looks like a movie that was made in the 1930s – black and white, great use of shadows, not a great deal of camera movement – and I’m guessing that was a deliberate choice, as the picture itself is set in the late 1800s, so the grainy look gives it an angle of accuracy. It’s a weird combination of supernatural thriller, romantic comedy and a psychological battle of wills. Imagine that ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ had a baby with ‘Nosferatu’, then that baby grew up and married ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, and then they in turn had a child that grew up to marry a film whose parents had been ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ and ‘Carrie’. This film might be the result of that weird family tree.

The acting is terrific. A surprisingly watchable Robert Pattinson does a good impression of someone trying to do a good impression of Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘There Will Be Blood’, but is still impressively unique. Willem Defoe, however, is uniquely impressive. He is simply excellent. Mad As A Box Of Frogs, without being caricature or panto. Delivering complicated speeches (a lot of research was spent on providing authentic, historic dialogue) that are almost Shakespearean with a believable, modern-day feel to them, he owns the whole screen in a way I’ve not seen for years. The one-take shot where he drunkenly invokes a curse on Pattinson may be my favourite close-up in the entire history of cinema.

If you’re a fan of superhero, blockbuster, CGI, games-based, action fare then you’d best stay away. But if you love film and filmmaking then I suggest you see it soon; and see it in the dark on a big screen, don’t wait for it to turn up on Film4 or Netflix, where the ratio will make it seem too small and where they’ll intercut it with adverts.

Hard to get your head around, but too good to miss.

RC 10-2-20

Off the wagon; off a cliff

Well, that didn’t take long. 24 hours after praising myself for acting healthily, I have gorged on shit food and made myself feel sick and ashamed. Yet again, it’s down to my oldest, worstest enemy. I am sad to confess that my nemesis – the British weather – has caused my comeuppance. Sitting indoors while yet another day of wet, windy, grey shitness pounds the world outside has driven me quickly into self-pity, depression and gluttony. It’s weird, and disappointing, that I still always turn back to eating shit when I feel the need to change my mood, but old habits die hard, I guess. You can’t change the habits of a lifetime just because the weather was sunny for two days. Indulgence is my heritage, or something…

Maybe I’m just weak.

Or maybe I’m just overreacting. I exercised yesterday for the first time in months and didn’t change my intake of calories accordingly. I also did too much at once, making too many changes too close to each other. I cut out sugary stuff, cut down caffeine, altered my meal sizes and reduced my amount of carbs, all in the time between Wednesday and Friday. And that was even before I put in 8 miles on my bike. (without having breakfast, I might add.)

So – I was a bit of a twat, really. My body couldn’t cope with so many adjustments, so today it took me back to what it had been happy with before, craving the sort of foods I’d been stuffing myself with throughout January, and I wasn’t strong enough mentally to oppose it.

So my new leaf that I turned over has now turned back again, or turned over again in a different direction into a different kind of leaf, that’s even worse than the one I had before.

Being me is so taxing…

RC 9-2-20

From one extreme to... etc,

I took my bike out for its first cycle of 2020 this morning.

The first one of the year is always a struggle, but it’s good to get it out of the way early in February, rather than waiting until the onset of BST or the first sign of swallows. The inspiration has been the gorgeous (dare I say it? – almost Springlike) weather we’ve had for the past few days. Still, bright, clear skies. Not warm enough to be removing layers of clothing, but pleasant enough to be comfortable in the open air without wearing nine layers of thermals and a Russian Army hat. How could one not get the urge to be perambling through the countryside on a Velociped? Storm Ciara is expected to ravage Britain for the next 36 hours or so, so it seemed pertinent to get outside this morning and exercise while I could.

I didn’t take in much of the view, I must admit. It was more a case of ignoring the rapidly-onsetting burning in my thigh muscles, complaining about the stiffness of the brakes and gear cables after months in storage, and putting up with the tingling numbness that spread through my buttocks and pelvis. But the point is – I did it. I have a starting point for my (hopefully) increasing fitness that I shall work on in the coming weeks and months. And the fact that I am exercising again has provoked me to start changing my eating habits too. (I refer you to my blog of this Tuesday, entitled “Eating like a student”.) Even the fact that I was planning to exercise a couple of days ago stimulated change. I have eaten no chocolate since Thursday, ate nothing after 7pm last night, and have swapped most of my coffee breaks for water breaks.

It’s early days yet, but I do feel that psychologically speaking I have turned a corner, turned over a new leaf, and turned things around all at the same time.  

Quick self-edit point: It should have been ‘perambulating’, but never mind.

RC 8-2-20

Delayed reaction

I’ve felt absolutely exhausted today. I think the Late Night SuperBowl Stay-Up has caught up with me. I wouldn’t care if we’d won the pissing thing, but as I may have mentioned briefly on Monday, we didn’t.

Sorry to bore non-Gridiron fans, but here’s a couple of other random observations from Sunday night’s extravaganza:

A few times, they cut to the crowd to show Jay-Z and Beyonce sitting together in one of the posh boxes. Every time they did, Jay-Z was ploughing his way through a huge pile of chips. (BRITISH chips, I mean, not American ones). I thought, at first, they were just re-using the same clip, but Beyonce changed her glasses at one point, so it was definitely live each time. I only point this out because he was probably the only man on Earth who ate more than I did during the game.

I found the half-time show a bit disappointing. Different people have different tastes, but to me it was too glitzy and not musical enough. All that dancing and sparkling costumes. It was like watching EuroVision.

J-Lo and Shakira looked great, and moved well, but I’m not convinced that Shakira was singing live, and I wish they’d picked two or three songs each and done them well, rather than churning out 20-second chunks of 20-or-so songs. It was like watching a commercial for their Greatest Hits Collections.

I flitted between the BBC coverage, and Sky Sports. Sky is my go-to channel of choice, but obviously there are ad breaks, so I found myself steering towards BBC1 more and more often as the match progressed. I understand that Sky is a commercial channel and needs to fund itself, but I’d much rather watch Jason Bell explaining the play-action fake, than watch yet another advert for Jet2 Holidays.

One complaint – the BBC obsession with ‘real people involvement’ does detract from the analysis. Why EVERY show they broadcast has to hit a certain number of ‘viewer comments’ is beyond me. I’d rather hear Josh Thomas talk about the emotions you get when you run onto the field at a SuperBowl, than hear what Phil the Cabbie from Wigan thinks about Osi Umenyiora’s jacket.

But to end on a positive note – Mark Chapman, the BBC host, is absolutely excellent.

RC 5-2-20

Eating like a student

My diet seems to have gone incredibly haywire recently. I always let myself go a bit at Christmas, and it nearly always carries on until my birthday, but it’s normally just a bit of overindulgence, rather than being particularly unhealthy.

At the moment, though, I seem to be hoovering calories like a Dyson hoovers dust. It’s mostly shit stuff too. Crisps, cakes, chocolate, pastries. I’m starting every day with a bacon roll in the staff canteen and ending it with cheese and biscuits at home. In between, I’m snacking on anything salty that isn’t glued down to a shelf, and I’m having lunches that are larger than most people’s wedding meal.  I keep finding excuses to go over to the main store and every time I do, I’m bringing back something edible.

I think it’s one of those self-feeding (no pun intended) loop things. I don’t cycle much during Winter coz I find it buggers my chest up inhaling all the cold air, so I feel a bit unfit anyway, so it doesn’t bother me if I eat something shitty. If I was exercising, I’d feel better about myself, and it would provoke me to eat more healthily. I know that’s a fact, but I’m still giving in to the urges.

It needs to stop really.

I don’t weigh myself often, but I wear a belt round my work trousers, and I have to confess that I’m using a part of the belt hitherto unfastened, so I can’t deny that I’m getting fatter.

Once I finish that large bag of peanuts in my office drawer, and once I’ve finished the large wheel of stilton at home, and once they stop selling cheap Reese’s Peanut Cups in the supermarket, I’m turning over a new leaf, for sure.

RC 4-2-20

Gutted

It’s a bit of a shitter when you sit up until gone 3am and your team end up losing.

For those of you who can’t stand American Football – I advise you to skip this blog posting and come back tomorrow, coz this is all gonna be about the SuperBowl.

First of all, I’m pleased for Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. He is, by all accounts, one of the nicest people in the world of sports and this Big Win has been a long time coming. But I have to say that the 49ers kind of handed it to them, rather than lost it to them. I’m not even sure what happened in the 4^th Quarter, but 90% of the San Francisco personnel seemed to forget how to play as a team, and the other 10% seemed to think the match was already won, and stopped concentrating. The MVP voters say that Patrick Mahomes woke up and took the game on; I would say the 49ers went to sleep and gave him countless chances.

Penalties killed us; a couple of them dubious. Did George Kittle really do anything wrong when pulling in that monster throw from Garoppolo just before half-time? That catch had set us up for a chance to score before the interval, and in the end it was ruled out because he hit the defender with a straight arm. A simple bending of the elbow could have won us the game!

If that one was a bit questionable, the Pass Interference by Tarvarius Moore on Kelse towards the end of the game was just unfathomable. I’ve never played the game and I don’t understand all the intricacies of the rules, but even I know that YOU CAN’T JUMP INTO A RECEIVER WHEN HE’S ABOUT TO CATCH THE BALL! All Moore had to do was turn around, face the ball, jump up to block Kelse’s view and let the ball hit the floor. But he didn’t. He locked his eyes on Travis Kelse and then clumsily bundled into him.

Everyone was starting to panic, and I think that was generated from the sidelines, as much as anywhere else. If your management are looking edgy and making unexpected decisions, surely it’s going to throw you off your own game as a player, and lead you to make strange on-field choices yourself?

I don’t know, I’m just speculating. My greatest sporting achievement is a 25-metre swimming certificate, so who am I to pass judgement on professional athletes?

It just seemed to me that the wheels well and truly came off the machine. We stopped doing the things that had got us to the SuperBowl and then panicked when the Chiefs got into gear. THEY played EXACTLY the way they played all post-season, we had a complete brainfart and started trying to be clever, or different. I guess strange things happen under enormous pressure, and people start to break down and make mistakes. Sadly, this has happened to Kyle Shanahan (our head coach) before (see SuperBowl LI) and it highlights what I think was the deciding factor in the whole game – the Coaches. Down 20-10 with not long left, Andy Reid looked calm and confident and zoned into his tactics. Leading with less than a quarter to go, and having been pretty dominant for most of the half, Kyle Shanahan looked rushed and unready and seemed to shit himself and lose his rag.

Maybe I’m writing this at the wrong time. It’s still very raw and I’m still very bitter, and later on I might look back with more pride and more happiness, but I only got 2 hours sleep and right now I feel very, very flat and very, very disappointed.

At least I predicted the winning team correctly. I’ve never been less happy to get something right, but at least I have a slight positive from the evening.

RC 3-2-20

Annual Prediction Thang

I have gone all around the houses with this. It seems much harder to pick a Super Bowl outcome when you have a vested interest in one of the teams. On Monday, I was confident we could beat them all ends up; on Wednesday I had convinced myself we’d be on the wrong end of a blowout. Since Friday I’ve been expecting a very close game, but keep flip-flopping on who I think will win.

But Sod It – fortune favours the brave, so here goes:

San Francisco 21 Kansas City 24

I love the phrase ‘flip-flopping’, by the way, and I need to use it more often.

RC 2-2-20

FEB!!

So I guess we’re out of Europe now, huh? Can’t say I feel any different today…

I must be honest – I’d completely forgotten the Brexit date was approaching. I think there’s been so many delays and postponements over the past year or so that I’ve just become blasé about the whole thing and assumed the date would change again.

Now it’s done.

I’m surprised there wasn’t more of a hoo-hah made in the Press. I guess they were too busy reporting on Harry & Meghan, the Coronavirus, Liverpool’s unbeaten run, and whatever shit show Ant & Dec are selling themselves to front at the moment.  I shouldn’t complain though, I was moaning like Hell when it was dominating the News during 2019.

RC 1-2-20