REALLY useless trivia

It’s October tomorrow, so I thought I’d leave you with my three favourite pieces of info that I’ve discovered during September:

Bryan Adams has only three vowels in his name, and they’re all ‘A’
98% of Algeria’s exports are oil or natural gas.
Horses don’t get jet lag.

RC 30-9-10

Dream on (again)

I had another one of my bizarre dreams last night.
I was doing a bungee jump in the Arctic. I was naked, standing on a platform about a thousand feet above the clouds. I was worried that I couldn’t see the ground but the supervisor guy kept saying “don’t worry about that. You won’t go down that far.” Jo Brand was waiting in the queue behind me. She was wearing a bikini and she said “If you do it like a brave boy this will be your reward.” and she slapped her own arse.
As I leapt off the platform I heard the supervisor guy say “Shit, we forgot to inflate the bouncy castle” and all I could think was “.. I don’t even like Jo Brand..”
If Dr Freud is reading this, I’d love to hear from you.

RC 30-9-10

CDIII

I reached a milestone at the weekend without realising it. No, it wasn’t a year since my last kiss, although I can understand why you might think that. I’ve actually now posted more than 400 blog entries. I don’t know if that should be celebrated, or whether I should apologise for still putting you through this trot on a regular basis, but I noticed, so I thought I’d mention it. I was tempted to read back through them all and see what my journey has been like, but thankfully I changed my mind. I try to be honest when I’m writing these posts and I’m worried that if I re-read them now I’ll think they make me seem like someone I don’t like, and then I might try to change the way I write from now on. Jeez, does that make any sense what-so-ever?
I also think that if I re-read them, I’ll find that I’ve written something like ‘does that make any sense what-so-ever?’ quite often, as I’m so lacking in confidence about most things I do that I feel most of my posts are worthless as soon as I’ve committed them to paper.
Anyway - ignoring the fact that there’s no ‘paper’ involved so my last line was complete nonsense - if you’ll have me, I hope to be around for another 400 at least……..
　
RC 28-9-10

Too much food, not enough action

I spent most of the hours between 1 and 3 this morning throwing up.
I think it was over-eating.
Beryl made some rather lovely broccoli and stilton soup and I made a bit of a pig of myself. Then last night Hannah and I ate our way through a box of chocolates while talking about Christmas and Sophie. And then I went to bed. And then I woke up feeling like someone had put my stomach in a washing machine and set it on spin.

Beryl gave me hassle about Philippa yesterday as well. She said “Oh, that girl was so nice, and it was so obvious you liked each other, why haven’t we seen her since the World Cup?” I found myself being honest and saying “Because I’m an idiot. I ended up being nasty to her because I was jealous and confused and things haven’t been the same since.” Beryl shook her head and walked off saying ‘shame, shame’ Ted just called me a bloody kid, and an amateur, and told me I should ‘man up’ and ‘get it on’ before it’s too late and I end up lonely, gay or married to someone I’ve never loved.
I asked him which one applied to him and he said this: “All is well in my world. I have no regrets, and do you know why? When I met the woman of my dreams, I told her so and I set out to win her. I didn’t hide behind fear and jealousy and miss my chance of happiness. You think about that next time you’re looking at that girl across the office in silence.”
Sometimes he’s so right I hate him.

RC 27-9-10

Sunday night haiku

The dartboard that Simon claimed he ‘got for Christmas a few years ago and then left in the cupboard’ actually had The White Horse Public House stamped on the back of it. I have a feeling it reached him not via Santa’s sack but at the end of a drunken night out. Beryl was disgusted. Apparently she did not ‘bring him up to steal ,and to lie.’
Something monumental happened in the course of our afternoon, so like all great historians, I shall report it in the style of poetry:

I beat Ted at darts!
After months of painful loss
Finally I win!!!!

RC 26-9-10

One sport for another

Looks like my bike might be condemned to life in the garage for another Winter. It’s been raining solid for three days and the Met Office website tells me it should rain for another three days, so I think I’ll pencil in my next bike ride for March.
This afternoon, Ted and I are playing darts. We’ve been trying to learn these weird Japanese card games that I’ve found on the internet, but they’re complicated, and boring, and take six months to play, so we’re gonna go for a good old English pub game instead. His son Simon had an old dartboard laying around so he’s let us borrow it and hang it up in the kitchen, much to Beryl’s discomfort. She’s worried about damage from mis-thrown arrows, so I expect she’ll have the walls and carpet covered in bubble wrap.

RC 26-9-10

200 words about something..

I’ve been feeling uninspired about blog writing recently. Mind you, I’ve been feeling uninspired about pretty much everything. The weather is changing, work unfortunately isn’t; my love-life is poo, and I don’t see much of my sister Hannah anymore as she seems to think if she goes more than an hour without seeing Nathan she’ll die.
Today, however, I received some very happy, very welcome news.. Sophie, my other sister who lives in Edinburgh, is going to come and see us for Christmas!! I hate to start planning yuletide stuff this far ahead, but she called today and asked to discuss it. She’s had to work right through each of the last four Christmases, and this year they’ve made sure she’s not on the schedules, so she asked if she could spend it with us! I’m so excited I’m starting to wish it was December already. I know Hannah will be thrilled too, but I haven’t had a chance to tell her yet. I thought of texting her the news but I’d like to see her reaction, so I’ll have to wait until she’s not with Nathan, or not distracted by thinking about Nathan.
That’ll probably be sometime in January.

RC 23-9-10

Rory's On The Road Again

I’m having a few ‘refresher’ driving lessons. I’ve got the urge to open up my life a little work-wise and socially, and having a car is probably the best way to do that. I haven’t driven since passing my test however, so I thought I’d spend a few quid and get myself up to scratch. Ted thinks I’m wasting my money. He said “Once you learn, you never forget. It’s like riding a bike.” Cars, of course, have four wheels, so I suppose he’s half right.
This evening I sat beside a nice BSM instructor named Amanda and drove from my house up towards Wells, on the North Norfolk coast. We spent most of the journey there stuck behind an old couple in a Volvo doing 26mph, then spent most of the way back stuck behind a tractor and trailer loaded full of steaming, stinking animal shit on it’s way to be ploughed into a field somewhere. Amanda said “Get used to this. It’s the truth of Norfolk driving.” According to her BSM ID card, she moved here last year after learning her trade in Essex. I’m guessing she’d like to go back.

RC 22-9-10

Angry, of Norfolk

There’s been ‘an outcry’ about last weekend’s edition of the TV programme “The X Factor”
Apparently, one of the acts on the show has a history as a call girl.
People are outraged that producers let a ‘whore’ appear among the contestants.
I’m not sure why - they normally have one among the judges.

RC 21-9-10

Haiku on the Orient Express

I sat up last night watching ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ which is one of my all-time favourite films. I then had one of my bouts of insomnia, so I decided to write some haiku about the people that were in it.
These are my favourite three:

Anthony Perkins
was a nutcase in ‘Psycho’
and in real life too

Vanessa Redgrave
may be old and wrinkly now
but she was DAMN HOT!!

Suchet is ok
But no-one can play Poirot
like Albert Finney

RC 20-9-10

Bad dad

I met someone today who is even crueller with kids names than Tom is. He’s an ex-professional drummer from Oxford, currently on holiday in North Norfolk, and he has three children. They’re called Austin, Dustin and Justin.

Here’s a resulting haiku:

Names you give to kids
Should not be embarrassing
Or ‘Adolf Hitler’

RC 17-9-10

recurring theme

I found some of the unpublished blogs that I was talking about yesterday. I thought I’d share bits of them with you, just to show you the sort of places my head has been in the past fortnight or so…

“Sorry I’ve been absent.
I was in a strange little world of insular consultation.
That conversation in the pub with ‘Thommo’ really affected me. I couldn’t get the idea of Philippa lowering herself to the likes of him out of my head, and I’ve been in a foul mood as a result. She could tell something was wrong at work and kept asking me what was going on, and I was just horrible to her. I treated her as if we’d been married for fifteen years and I’d just found out she’d been unfaithful. I knew it was just my insecurities, confusions and jealousies making me behave that way but I couldn’t help it.”
　
“I had a lovely evening last night. Nathan came over to be with Hannah and I cooked us all a meal. He was telling me about his family’s attitude towards Hannah. Some of them call her The Fallen Woman, just because she’d had sex a few times before they met. Unbelievable. His parents are ok and like her a lot, but he has an uncle who sounds like he should be an evangelist on American TV or something.
It all made me re-evaluate my ‘relationship’ with Philippa. I’d been quite nasty to her at work this week, just because she may or may not have had sex with that guy I met in the pub on Monday. I know it’s just jealousy, but I couldn’t help myself. Laying awake in bed last night though, I realised a few things.. Firstly, it’s no business of mine what Philippa has been getting up to, or is getting up to, especially as we’re not even an item, and anything she’s done in the past doesn’t make her any less of a person. After all, my sister spent her early twenties having more sex than a sheep has tics, and she’s proving herself capable of love .. Secondly, I’m not the most experienced sexual animal on Earth, but I’m no blushing virgin, and I can’t expect any potential girlfriend to be one either. And thirdly, and it pains me to admit it, but Thommo is a good-looking hunky guy, and if I was a girl in my early twenties with more sex drive than sense, I may have been tempted by him myself.
So I’m going to cut the girl some slack, and start being nice to her again.
Or I might continue to hide my feelings behind a veil of indifference and then stare at her longingly across the office…”

I promise you tomorrow’s blog will have NO MENTIONS WHAT-SO-EVER of the young lady that I currently work with, whose name begins with P.

RC 16-9-10

Let's play catch-up..

I’m back after my late-Summer break.
I haven’t been anywhere, just wallowing in a world of despair and desperation and depression, which happens to me occasionally. I felt tired and pitiful and even writing a blog seemed like too much effort.

I was really affected by the thought of Philippa being with that bloke I met in the pub on Bank Holiday Monday. I reacted by being horrible to her and trying to convince myself I didn’t like her. I wrote several thousand words about it as blog entries but thankfully never published any of them. Then I finally got my head straight about it all at the weekend, so I’m trying to be nice again now, and I just hope I haven’t put her off me completely.

I’m thinking of doing an evening class in something. Helping out in The Weary World of Wallpaper isn’t exactly a riveting career choice, and there aren’t many spare jobs around, so I may try re-training as a chef or learning French or something.
The supermarket have asked if I’d be interested in doing some shifts in the build-up to Christmas, and I’m actually considering it. Extra money without having to go somewhere new is always worth thinking about, even though I’d rather nail my own feet to a leopard than ever be a stock replenishment operative again.

Apologies now:
I apologise for my absence over the past two weeks.
I apologise for the incoherent, nonsensical nature of this rambling blog entry today.
And she won’t be reading this, but I apologise to Philippa for being such an emotionally-retarded f**kwit that I can’t deal with my feelings for her, and consequently in her presence I act like either a sulking 6-year-old brat or a misogynistic bastard who is completely impervious to her charms, which I can assure you I am not.

RC 15-9-10