I’m sure months didn’t fly by this quickly when I was in my twenties. It feels like I’ve barely finished getting used to the passing of August and now I’m having to say Hello to October. I suppose this is what happens when life is busy and you’re distracted by work woes and marriage plans - you’re concentrating on occurrences in your own little existence while the World goes on turning regardless; continuing it’s merry slog through the Heavens oblivious to my ‘important’ cares and worries.
Jesus, where did that just come from?
I explained that about as well as a blind man would describe a sunset that is going on behind him. Not exactly Prof. Brian Cox, am I? Never mind - I bet he wouldn’t be able to pre-plan the petrol needs of a North Suffolk town with the panache and ability that I can, so stuff him. I’m happy with who I am.
30-9-15
One of the managers at work has got in trouble for refusing to connect with her superiors on social media. She looked genuinely lost and confused when they were explaining why they were disappointed, and she insisted that she had been unable to sign up for LinkedIn despite all her best efforts to locate it online.
After a long and protracted conversation, it turned out she had spent countless hours looking for a website called “Link Tin”
The mind boggles.
Well - hers doesn’t, obviously, it just stumbles along like it’s weighed down with boots full of custard, but you see what I mean…
RC 28-9-15
The sea was bloody freezing today. If I don’t get a wetsuit soon I’m going to throw a big tantrum or steal one. I don’t see how I can justify spending a lot of money on something to play with when we have a wedding to pay for, so I haven’t even bothered looking them up. But if I have a spare moment of boredom at work this week (which, let’s be honest, is pretty much a given) then I may take a look at ‘secondhand wetsuits dot com’ and see if I can find something cheap. Hopefully someone of equal size to myself recently got hit by a stray speedboat and suffered massive, fatal head injuries. Then his suit will be undamaged but unwanted and I can scoop it up for a tenner or so. Unless his wife wants to keep it as some bizarre, morbid memento of their awful time together. I bet she will. Bloody women are always out to spoil my fun.
Anyway, I digress.
The sea was a bit calm so the surfing was a bit disappointing. Plus my fingers felt like they were freezing solid within five minutes of my body hitting the water. Thankfully we had a takeaway tea on the beach and I had the best haddock and chips I’ve had in my life, so that made up for everything. Now I’m going to see if Philippa fancies using her body heat to warm me out of my sea-induced chilliness. My suspicion is I’ll end up having a hot bath instead, but there‘s no harm in asking…..
RC 27-9-15
I may have overdone the exercise today. It was soooooooo gorgeous that I went for a bike ride that just got longer and longer. Then, after lunch, I mowed the lawns and weeded the garden and got rid of all the nettles. Then Philippa suggested we go for a long walk. By the time we got home my shoulders were seizing up and my legs felt like sacks of stones. Maybe I should have stretched before and after cycling, eh?
Determined not to learn any lessons, I’ve agreed to meet chums at the beach tomorrow for some surfing fun. I may have to take a day off sick on Monday if my body needs time to recover.
I don’t know why we call Indian Summers Indian Summers, but I love them.
RC 26-9-15
Late Summer evening
Sat in the garden with wine
and my fiancee
A beautiful moon
A beautiful Philippa
A beautiful night
I love this house now
I also love Philippa
Life is kinda good
RC 25-9-15
It’s scary to think that my wedding is only three months away…..
I keep trying to distract myself with things like work, and cheese, but however much I try to ignore it my thoughts keep drifting back to it.
It doesn’t help that Philippa seems to think every waking moment should be spent fretting about it and planning it.
In truth, we’ve done just about everything we can do at this stage. We’ve even booked the entertainment for the evening do. Have you heard of a band called ‘Nettle Rash’? No, neither have I, and I’m a bit worried their name makes them sound like a thrash metal combo of some sort. But apparently they do acoustic versions of popular stuff from the 1950s right up to today, and the guitarist is also a DJ so once they’ve finished their set he ‘spins a few discs’ in a disco sty-lee and people can dance if they choose to while I try to get Philippa back to the hotel room well before midnight.
I know I occasionally moan about the marriage thing, but the truth is I can’t wait to be Philippa’s husband and I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life.
I just wish we could have the marriage without the wedding.
RC 23-9-15
Hannah is going to appear in a school production of Hamlet! It’s with the High School that is attached to her Primary School. The GCSE Drama students are putting it on but needed extra cast members so some of the teachers have had to step in and help out. They knew of Hannah’s performing background so asked her if she’d get involved and she leapt at the chance. I’ve been calling her ‘Ophelia’ all day but it turns out she’s playing Gertrude, the elderly Queen of Denmark! I’ve thrown lots of jokes at her about ‘not needing make-up’ and all that obvious shite, but it’s not bothering her in the slightest. Either I’ve lost my wittical touch or she’s so confident in herself nowadays that what I say doesn’t affect her.
RC 20-9-15
2105
A Midnight despair
Insomniac wanderings
Eaten too much cheese
RC 20-9-15
It’s been raining.
Heavily.
All day.
The skies are as glum as a Lottery winner who has just gone to cash in their ticket,
only to be told it expired last week.
I am sinking.
Quickly.
Into SAD.
Or maybe I’m just miserable because it’s too wet to walk, and too cold to cycle,
and I can’t get the sun I seek.
It is boiling.
The water.
In the kettle.
(Not the temperature outside) So I plan to warm myself with a mug of soup
made of potato and leek.
RC 16-9-15
Yeah, all right, I admit it, my enthusiasm for the cheese/dream investigations has wavered somewhat. To be honest, my favourites cheeses have all been done now and I’ve started dreading the nightly intake and what it’s doing to my digestive system.
Now I understand why most scientists find volunteers to use in their experiments, rather than carrying them out on themselves.
Next time I’ll try and persuade Hannah to get involved and leave all the eating work to her. Or I’ll advertise on a jobs website and get someone destitute and desperate to accept minimum wage to gorge themselves nightly on dairy products. But for now, I’m pausing the whole think pending some kind of funding from somewhere.
Now I have an unfinished report on my computer, and three shelves full of cheese in my fridge.
RC 14-9-15
We went out for lunch today. For dessert I selected ‘Belgian waffle with Neapolitan ice-cream.’ What was delivered must have had enough calories in it to keep a herd of elephants energetic enough to run a marathon. It was an inch-thick, eight-inch square waffle, with a large (and I mean LAAARRRGGGEEE) scoop of chocolate, a large scoop of vanilla and a large scoop of strawberry ice-cream, all covered in hot chocolate sauce, and then (because that wasn’t indulgent enough, obviously) it had a crumbled Flake drizzled over the top of it as well. I think I’ll be on a sugar rush for a decade.
No wonder they keep saying people are getting fatter and tooth decay is getting worse. Why is all this necessary????? Why aren’t these places being shut down, or forced to limit the amount of chocolate products that can be used in one helping? I mean, at least cut it down to ONE mega-sugary ingredient per bowl rather than the 12 or so I had plonked down in front of me at lunchtime.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I ate it all, but really………….
RC 13-9-15
Autumnal onset
Acorns take their final fall
Leaves go green to brown
Indian Summer
Would set me up for Winter
By delaying it
The greedy sparrows
Have eaten all my bird food
Fat little bastards
RC 12-9-15
According to the website CHEESE.COM (look it up - I’m not kidding) there are over 1750 varieties of cheese produced around the world. So if I set myself the challenge of trying them all, one per day, I should finish my experiment sometime in June 2020.
Have I mentioned before how much I love science?
In other news (that isn’t really other news) Philippa listened to my cheese-related plans with her usual sneering indifference. She accused me of ‘going off alone down one of my weird, dark streets’ and said she wished I could be so obsessive about our wedding.
She’ll change her opinion when I’m holding the Nobel Prize.
RC 11-9-15
I didn’t have a dream last night but I did wake up with terrible indigestion and heartburn. I’ve decided to modify things slightly and eat my chosen cheese earlier in the evening, to give my innards time to absorb and digest it. That way I hope to have it’s dream-activating goodness floating through my system without the physical bulk of the cheese itself resting inside my stomach when I lay down.
God I love science.
RC 10-9-15
I’ve decided to re-discover my Scientific bent by conducting a little experiment.
I’m going to prove or disprove once and for all whether eating cheese before bedtime makes you dream. And if it does, does the variety of cheese you choose determine which type of dream you have and what you dream about?
I’ve always believed you should dive in headfirst when inspiration strikes your pool, so after work I popped to the supermarket deli counter and stocked up on samples and I’m kicking it off tonight.
At ten-thirty I shall eat a large chunk of edam, then have a shower before settling into bed with a novel. I shall have a notepad and pen beside my bed, and we shall see what transpires overnight.
Tomorrow it’s gorgonzola, and there’s a lovely wheel of camembert to get through at the weekend.
I love science.
RC 9-9-15
I had a bizarre dream last night where I was a scientific advisor on the sequel to ‘Jurassic World.’ It was being directed by that bloke with the beard (not Spielberg, or Lucas, but the skinny one with the face like a stretched skeleton)
He kept having a go at me because every shot was costing at least a million dollars, and I couldn’t tell him the difference between a Velociraptor and a Utahraptor.
I just kept saying “I’m a physicist mate, not a paleontologist, I’ve been telling you that since the day we started filming.”
In the end he threw me off the boat we were filming on and I was left bobbing about in the open sea while the boat disappeared into the distance. All I could think to myself was “Philippa is going to be so angry I lost my surfboard.”
Madness.
RC 8-9-15
I had backache today. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t exercise very often and then you indulge in a couple of hours of Sunday surfing. Maybe I should start stretching before and afterwards to stop myself getting horrendous muscle pain. Or maybe I should give it all up and go back to being a fat sofa-bound slob whose only activity is going to the kitchen to get a drink and more Wotsits.
Work dragged by as a result. Everything seems to move in slow-motion when you’re racked with pain and uncomfortable. Whenever I sat down, I felt like standing up, and when I was standing up, I kept stooping. It felt like someone had my Adam’s apple on a piece of string and kept pulling it down-and-forwards towards my chest.
I spent my lunch break online looking at chiropractors, osteopaths and physiotherapists to see if one of those might be able to relieve me. Then I saw what they charged for an initial consultation and thought to myself “Stuff it. I’ll take a couple of Anadin and struggle through til it‘s better.”
I know - I’m a hero.
RC 7-9-15
It was a bit warmer today, so shame on all of you who wrote grumpy blog postings yesterday about Summer being well and truly over.
We took advantage of the upturn and hit the coast for a walk and a bit of surfing. The water is bloody chilly and the sooner Philippa buys me a wetsuit as an early Wedding present the better.
When I say ‘surfing’ what I really mean is ‘floating about on a cheap polystyrene body board’ but it’s the best I can do for now. Until Philippa buys me a surfboard…….
RC 6-9-15
Autumn seems to have come crashing down around our ears like a badly made hat. I thought it might be nice to have a morning ride today, but by the time I’d pumped my tyres up and checked my brakes I was bloody freezing. I’d got myself through the perpetual winds of May and June by thinking ‘August might be really hot’, then August was full of rain so I told myself ‘we might yet have an Indian Summer with September temperatures in the twenties’ but it don’t look like that’s gonna happen either. So now I don’t know what to think. I’m too intelligent to convince myself that Winter might be gorgeous so I may just give up and sink into one of my depressions.
Or maybe I’ll just go for a bike ride anyway and see if the resultant release of endorphins cheers me up a bit.
I’m aware that my grammar and comprehension in this posting has been a bit awry - I blame the weather.
RC 5-9-15
So much for my grown-up ‘maturing like wine’ spell.
Today I spent three hours building a replica of the filling station using printer paper and out-of-date milkshake. It’s amazing how pliable A4 becomes once you’ve soaked it in strawberry Frijj.
I’ve suggested to my superiors that we branch out a bit and sell more food in the garage. It’s not the usual plan because they like us to direct people into the supermarket if they’re hungry, so they can spend money in the café or possibly be persuaded to impulse-buy while they’re looking for snacks and a sandwich.
But so many of our regulars come in on-the-hoof with little time to spare, and I’m sure we could get them to spend more if we churned out bacon sarnies and coffee.
My line manager asked me to write the suggestion up as a report, so that gave me an excuse for an afternoon in the office, where I ignored the job at hand and amused myself with crafts and graffiti. You might call it time wasting; I would call it training my brain to think in alternative ways and thereby improving my chances of making sensible, profitable decisions and generating innovative, profitable ideas.
I’ve always hated ‘Management Wankspeak’ but it’s so easy to pick up I’m almost fluent in it….
RC 4-9-15