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I know we’ve been away for some of the build-up, but do we really have to open our advent calendars tomorrow? Where the Hell did November go? Amazing how quickly time can pass when you’re busy getting ready for a house-move and then having a week on holiday.
To avoid the countless pensioners who are already panic-buying peanuts I decided to sit in the office for some haiku:
Tunisian beach
I still have your sand on me
Maybe I should wash
December arrives
Time for crazy behaviour
In supermarkets
Advent tomorrow
A daily chocolate treat
And Christmas build-up
RC 30-11-13
Back to work today.
All my enthusiasm and determination that I’d cultivated in the country of Tunisia disappeared within the first two hours.
My recharged batteries feel flattened again.
The best part of my day was laughing at the staff members who are taking part in Movember. Two of them look like camp cowboys, and most of the others have so little growth it barely constitutes a moustache at all. I made several disparaging comments and dropped 50p in the collection tin. I was then brought crashing down to Earth when one of them said “Say what you like. We’ll get our own back when you’re running on a treadmill in the foyer.” I had, in the course of my indulgent seven days in North Africa, completely forgotten about the sponsored run.
RC 29-11-13
It’s been so long since I used this blogsite I had almost forgotten my own password!
We had our time in a Travelodge; we had our time in Tunisia. Now we are living in a small spare room at the house of Philippa’s cousin Sally while awaiting our next landing spot to be vacated.
We are Professional Nomads.
It’s nice that Sally’s letting us use her internet connection, but she doesn’t have Wi-Fi so I’m reduced to having to plug my laptop into a modem! What is this - The Dark Days Of 2007?
Tunisia was absolutely wonderful. Even the fact that we had to share our dinner table each night with an alcoholic Scotsman and his unpleasant German fiancee couldn’t diminish the joy of the week we’ve just had.
And my God, can’t a good holiday do you the world of good! Ten days ago I was ready to quit and jump off a bridge, now I feel refreshed and ready to face whatever the world of supermarket employment can throw at me. Don’t get me wrong - I still want to leave. But for now I’m going to concentrate on maximising the productivity of my department between now and Christmas so I can earn my nice end-of-year bonus.
Then I can leave in the New Year.
RC 28-11-13
Well, we moved.
What a strange feeling.
The place we had called ‘home’ and looked after as if it was our own has now been handed safely back to it’s owners.
As an extra ‘thank you’ from David and Becky they gave us a £500 cash bonus. FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS!!
That’s the holiday spending money sorted then!
There’s something very sexy about staying in a Travelodge.
I think it’s the feeling of being secreted away in a hidey-hole that could be absolutely anywhere. It might also be the fact that we’re in such close proximity to each other all the time. Up until Saturday, we had the equivalent of four rooms each and now we’re stuck together in an area the size of David and Becky’s shower cubicle.
Life feels unsettled, but good.
I am so satisfied with where I am and what we’re doing that it’s less than 24 hours until I have to get on a plane and I’m NOT shit-scared! Maybe Philippa’s been spiking my coffee with tranquilisers.
This time tomorrow we’ll be in Tunisia!
Please don’t expect me to blog much. I really need to switch off and re-charge so I’m planning a week of nothing but sleep, alcohol, sex, good food, sleep and sightseeing.
I promise to bring you back a pressie!
RC 19-11-13
We leave this house soon
I have enjoyed staying here
But not cleaning it
“Wind in the Willows”
Sounds like someone farting
Amongst cricket bats
Winter upon us
Time to go somewhere warmer
Like Tunisia
Bottle of red wine
Should never be drunk alone
Or spilt on carpets
A doner kebab:
God’s antidote to lager
That tastes of scrotum
RC 15-11-13
I’m not sure how this happened, but Philippa and I are ready to move!
We’ve just kept a bag each with the things we need for the next three days, and everything else is locked away in Tom’s warehouse. Amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it, and work together. Obviously this has Philippa believing that organising our wedding will be a doddle.
Everything has to come back to the wedding with her.
I swear if I told her I’d just killed every member of her family she’d say “oh, we’d better have a look at the guest list again, then”
Bloody women.
We’ve got a very busy few weeks ahead, but I’m really calm about it. I can’t wait for our holiday because we haven’t been away together for ages, so I’m trying to concentrate on that and forget about all the other stuff that’s going on. Most of it is organised anyway, so there’s no need to fret, but when has that ever stopped me before?
If anything, I’m really excited about all the changes, and I just wish I had the courage to change the one thing I really do want to change, which is my job. Still - you’ve heard enough of my work-related whinges, and I’ve sworn to stick it out until the New Year anyway, so I’ll shut up now and go and play on the Wii.
Oh shit - I can’t. We’ve already packed it away in storage…
RC 14-11-13
Management are trying to hijack my fundraising efforts. Rather than have me do a fun run in the New Year, they want to set up a treadmill in the supermarket and have me run on it in front of the customers.
I was hoping the whole thing had been forgotten, but apparently not. Shame really, as I haven’t done any training for a fortnight. Unless you count spending a few hours playing Olympics on the Wii??
I deflected a decision by telling them I can’t possibly consider it until we’ve sorted out our house move….
4 days to go, by the way…
RC 12-11-13
God, the last 24 hours have been fun!
We went to an absolutely awesome fireworks display last night! It was at a small village, but you would have thought we were at a big town event because it was SO GOOD! It was a free event, but the fireworks must have cost thousands, so God knows where the money came from. It was supposed to happen last week but they had to cancel it due to the weather, so maybe they’d made an extra effort to make up for the delay. They had the best home-made leek and potato soup I’ve ever tasted. Yum, yum and yum.
Then today I got to have a real go at a couple of stoners because they talked during the two-minutes silence at work. I really went to town on them and got a round of applause from the other shoppers around us!
Then this evening Philippa and I sat together and watched the tennis. It’s so rare for us to find something we both want to watch that we cuddled up with wine and made a night of it. Philippa calls tennis “badminton for poofs” but she seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. She was backing Nadal to win, while I had a feeling for Djokovic, so we added some spice to the occasion by making a bet. I won (well - Novak did) so now Philippa has to cook me a big breakfast tomorrow before work. Result!
A rhyming couplet:
Fireworks are my favourite thing
They warm my heart and make me sing
RC 11-11-13
We had such a good time at the fireworks this week that we’re going to another display tomorrow.
It was my idea. I’m pretending it’s because bonfires make me feel romantic, but It’s mostly to get Philippa out of the house before she starts cleaning it yet again. She seems determined to scrub the pattern off the carpets before David and Becky come back next week. Seriously - I’m starting to think this is a real problem. She’s started watching dust specks fall from the sky and is determined to stop them before they hit the furniture. I think I’m engaged to Howard Hughes.
My only hope of a nearly-sane week is to distract her. She won’t let us have sex in case the mattress gets dirty, so it has to be outside activities or alcohol. So tomorrow is all about a funfair and fireworks; tonight is all about red wine and “Rocky”
RC 9-11-13
What is it about drinking a mug of tea with whiskey in while watching the end of a bonfire that is SO perfect????
RC 6-11-13
Every so often Philippa and I have an argument that is so ferocious it could lift the roof off a building. Today’s was about Bonfire Night. She wants to go to the annual seaside charity event that we went to last year. I looked at the weather forecast and said “I think we should miss it this time and have a quiet evening in.” I then had to be called a selfish, lazy bastard, and be told that she NEVER gets to do what she’d like to do. I pointed out that she recently spent a whole weekend away getting drunk and playing games with her sports chums, and then I had to be called a lazy, selfish bastard because I hadn’t gone along to support her. We went round and round for a bit before I shouted “It’s going to be pouring with rain. I could easily re-start my chest infection” which I thought was very important.
She said (loudly) “You haven’t had a chest infection you stupid arsehole, you made that up to have time off work”
I realised she had a point, so we’re off to the fireworks shortly.
Sunday’s blog, by the way, was exactly 500 words. I know - I’m a genius.
RC 5-11-13
Well, well, well, where do we start?
I’ve been laid low by a chest infection which has left me tired and breathless and unable to work or even walk properly. I barely had the energy to lift my head off the pillow on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I’ve been having lots of vitamins and hot drinks, and done lots of steam inhalations, and hopefully I’ll be back to full fitness by the middle of the week.
Right, hopefully anyone from the supermarket will have stopped reading this by now so I can switch back to ’Truth Mode’:
The ‘chest infection’ was really just a bit of a cold, but we desperately needed to get ready for the house move and we were running out of time and we were getting stressed with a capital S so I decided to be a bit naughty. So I took a walk down Sickie Street.
It did the trick too, because we’re bang on schedule now for everything coming up in the next few weeks. Most of our stuff is packed away already. We’d kind of forgotten that most of the things we’ve been using here belong to David and Becky so once we got into it there wasn’t really that much to do. One van will be enough to move us out, and Wallpaper Tom is kindly lending us one of his. He’s also lending us a small bit of his warehouse to lock our stuff away in while we’re ‘between houses’. He really is very kind. But then, Philippa works incredibly hard for him and she hasn’t had a pay rise since she started so it’s the least he can do really.
I can’t believe we move out in less than two weeks! Now we’re sorted it’s becoming a bit exciting, but up until last weekend it was terrifying. But we sat down together and wrote a list of exactly what needed doing, and there wasn’t as much as we thought, and we were able to tick them off as we did them and see that we were making progress! We’ve booked ourselves a few days in a Travelodge (which we got pretty cheap by booking nice and early) so we’ll have a few days there after we move out. Then we’re off to Tunisia for a week! Then we’re going to stay with Philippa’s cousin Sally for a bit (they have a nice spare room that they have offered us free of charge) Then we move into a house called “The Willows” on December 8th! It’s our first appointment with the house-sitting agency! The couple that own it run a fish and chip shop during the summer, then bugger off to Portugal for three months to avoid the Winter weather. Can’t say I blame them. They get to bask in the sun for a while, and we get to live rent-free in a very nice detached cottage on the outskirts of Norwich!
Bargain.
RC 3-11-13
