Monday, February 25, 2008

Oh dear..

i've found a grey hair. perhaps I'm getting old!

Wednesday, February 13, 2008


I'm achieving at work! oh yes. That phrase has become a bit of a running injoke now with me and a lad who is just dossing really until he starts teaching in threee weeks time, especially as its very heard to actually leave work with a feeling of a achievement. unless its the fact that you managed to count a new number on the never-ending quest to count all the tiles in the Great Hall.
(slightly blurry but you can see how many there is, especially when you have the dilemma of whether you count cracked tiles as two or one).
Anyway he's been mocking me lately as in the space of one week, i've been admissions trained, reccommended for "special duties" (as yet unknown) and we've both signed up for this first aid course at work.
Which has been a source of great fun, we've just been ripping the piss out of each other today.
And that brings me onto my point-of-posting.
Oh yes. After my first day of first aid training I came home to eat my dinner, and somehow I reached new levels of spackiness, even for me.
Yes somehow i managed to bite my fork while eating my dinner. Hard. And after having consulting my mirror I've managed to chip a tiny piece off one of my front teeth.
hmmm. Dont think the first aid booklet gives me help on dealing with this one!

Monday, February 11, 2008

so yes.. i arrived in derby and was taken to the eagle centre, visited MHs new house, went for a rather random countryside drive where we talked through some of that girls shit that she's got going down and then i headed out to meet the lads.
It was a bit awkward at first. Like i said its been a long time since i've visited last a long time since i came up last and I was a bit of an outsider at first, all shy like when we first started hanging out but then R appeared!
I've not seen R since, oh forever! See after he finished his degree he moved to rejoin his parents (I'm never quite sure what they do, i think they teach english as a second language abroad, he describes them as travelling missionaries) in the cayman islands (lucky cunt) so for the last two years he's been working out there with the blue iguana conservation program and they have decided to fund his masters in wildlife conservation and in september he moved up to Newcastle!He hasnt changed! He's still the same annoying, drunken tart he always was.
hurrah!
so we went out for many drinks and all was good fun, R tried to teach me how to salsa, N pushed me over and pinned me down in the middle of the road, just like old times!
anyhoo. it got to about quarter to two and MH who was my taxi service for the evening despite not coming out, text me to say she was coming to get me and N got rather irritated at that. I wasnt ready to go home, but obviously i cant take advantage of her kind offer to pick me up and offer me a place to kip!
Anyway he demanded that i stay out and i refused and then he stole my phone and pushed me outside the bar and i followed him, arguing that he gave me back my phone.
Being a tall cunt he strode off and i had to trot after him. he started giving me this speech that i think he'd rehearsed a million times about how I should stop allowing myself to be used by her (which in a way is true. She's said some pretty shitty things to me in the past and messed me about a little) how i should stop worrying so much about what everyone else expected me to do and do what i wanted for a change.
Which I got pretty upset about, I am trying to rebuild my life and sort it out and i dont need pity from anyone else and then he reminded me of some of the things she's said to me, how she expects me to go and move back in with her while she finds me a crummy job just to make her happy, where as I'd quite like to give living with Welshy a go. but he dont figure in her plans at all.
And I got pretty teary and he cuddled me while i fought back a couple of sobs and then walked me to his house. demanded that I not go back to MH and indeed rang her and told her i wasnt coming back (by this time she's arrived in derby, spent 40 minutes looking for me, is pretty pissed off and gone back home, only to come back out again with my bedthings)
He demanded to know when I was coming back to live in Derby again, telling me that he knows i'm not happy, that i've spent too long making other people happy and coming back there would make me happy (I'm not sure it would anymore. i dont think i can live the student lifestyle like they do. yes i miss them all and i miss the social life but i think my lifes starting to take me in another direction to theirs. And really i think all that was part of a ploy to get me to pick sides in the row that is ongoing between him and STF and MH)
Then he started to ask me about Dad, which I've never really actually talked about with anyone in real life except Welshy. About the day that he died and the events leading up to it which made me cry some more.
Then at 3am he decided we should make pancakes. which in hindsight was a bad move when you were as drunk as we were. They were inedible, but we took the scraps up to his room where we settled down to watch crocodile dundee and i must have passed out cos the next thing i remember is that it was half past 7 and his poxy alarm is going off and he's dragging me up and out, so we ate breakfast out, and headed to the pub!
A had gone to the casino and had a mega win 900 quid for putting 80 in! lucky bastard!) so treated us all to breakfast in Our Beloved Friary (there's something so wrong and yet so right about sitting outside a bar ringing them, demanding that they open up and serve us)
I text MH to apologise for the drama last night, and she came and collected me and told me very severely off all the way to the train station and I came home after an epic 4 hour train ride (normally takes only an hour and 45 minutes to get back)
so there we go, an ace night out really minus the girly dramas and i promised i wouldnt leave it so long before i visited again!

Sunday, February 10, 2008

So early on Saturday I caught the train up to Derby, I was horrified to learn that the old Midland Mainline company has been taken over by East Midland trains and they'd taken away the complimentary tea and coffee, not that i drank either but its the principle of the thing!
Going up to St Pancras was an experience too. Since I went to uni, they've slowly been revamping the station. I used to pull into the station and watch the men work on the expansion and then half way through my second year, we got moved into the temporary extension which was very exciting and now its all posh with a pretty glass roof and lots of posh shops.
What I liked best on the way home though was that, before I could look out of one corner and see my Dads cab in the taxi rank, and he'd always be waiting for me in the lobby part either with the cab or he'd come up on the train and we'd talk bollocks all the way home.
Anyway, obviously since he's not around any more to meet me, I always found it hard to go past that window without looking to see if the taxi was there and even Welshy commented once that I walked past all the cabs and had a quick glance in the windows to see if he was there. So to be able to go past and not have that sinking feeling was really nice.

My journey up was pretty uneventful, I befriended some Spurs supporters heading up for the Derby/Spurs match and got chatting to this old man who was carrying a bouquet of roses and I asked if that was for someone special and he started telling me that they were for his best friend'd 60th. A lass that he'd known for fifty years since they were children together and that they only met up twice a year for each others birthdays but had written a letter to each other every fortnight for so long and spoke on the phone once a week for like the last twenty-nine years and stuf like that. Which I thought was incredibly sweet.

I met MH up in Derby and she took me around the new and modern Eagle Centre and i got a very exciting lemon meriangue flavoured milkshake and some stuff that turns your bath water into goo! I cant wait to try that out!
Anyhow I'm really tired so i'll finish this off tomorrow if i remember...

Friday, February 08, 2008

What a match!
Charlton v Palarse games are always something special. thought it was all gonna kick off though at the bottom of Charlton Church Lane, when we got caught in a crowd yelling abuse at the palarse fans and them giving it right back. Anyway the police horses moved in and me and E and her two workmates nipped round the back of them.
Poor things, one of them was getting right spooked by the atmosphere and backed most of the way up, only the skill of the rider and the confidence boost it got from an older, more placid horse, whose rider shoved right in the way of it, stopped it from bolting.
Its so funny to see those guys who just a few minutes ago, had been mouthing off, just scatter away from the waving hooves.
And even more funny to think that me and E just walked past them rather blaise and uncaring. I guess all that time around the horses as kids has left us with perhaps a false sense of secuirity of guessing how the horses'll react. One day we'll get caught out and trampled underfoot!

By the time we'd gotten through all that the game had kicked off and it was a fantastic atmosphere right from the start!
When Varney got the first and then the other (surely it'll go down as an own goal in the end though!?) It just went crazy, right through to the final whistle, where it was another ballache to get out!
Our next game is away to Wednesday. I was hoping to go to this. A had kinda, almost, not really, promised me that i could come and sit in his box for the match but a midweek game is just silly cos i cant afford to take the time away from work, especially when i'm being entrusted with the excitement of a first aid course!

And Tomorrow I'm heading up to Derby! Hurrah! N has been most affronted recently that I've only been up once since coming back from NZ so i'm heading up for a "lads night out"! Ha!
I would have gone up tonight, but obviously, football comes first!
Derby Hurrah!

Saturday, February 02, 2008

On Thursday I had the day off of work so I did some work for the gallery favourite talk that I wanna do for work, so i took a trip to the Imperial War Museum.
Ordinarily i love museums, i can spend all day happily reading and admiring the exhibits (of course it helps if they have interactive parts so i can indulge my inner child!) But there's something so sad and mournful about the war museum. I guess thats to be expected really. I mean its not like war is a happy picnic and kite flying session is it?
Looking at the room full of Victoria Crosses (including one of my talk subject - funnily enough, as I've discovered that the picture they have of him, isnt really him!) and in the main foyer they have an exhibit on the recent TV production of My Boy Jack which starred Daniel Radcliffe and they have loads of parts of guns and tanks and aircraft, and its filled with kids pretending to shoot them and men reliving their childhoods and it made me sad somehow to think about it all, that people were killed and injured and they (visitors not the museum) were making a joke out of it, and not treating them with respect I guess.
I couldnt face looking around the rest of it so I got the info I needed and hurried off to meet Welshy.

My Mother is slowly starting to relent on the Welshy part of my life and curiosity is beginning to get the better of her (only 2 years after I first met him, one year after we started going out and 2 months since I told her about him!) I think soon she'll ask to meet him which alternately scares the hell out of me and is something I want to do.
Anyway we checked into a hotel as we do and hung out for two days, it was nice, I could pretend that we lived together and i was coming home to him from work and gay girly stuff like that.
We went to Pizza Hut together and took supplies from sainsburys to the room and laughed and chatted and caught up.

I like hanging about with him, he's my best friend and one of the very few people I can feel i can be myself about, i dont feel the need to hide my occasional spacky moments where i trip over my own feet and walk into walls, i can tell him about the often random and fantastically illogical thoughts and fantasies that go in and out of my head and i can curl up and lean on his chest and feel safe and comforted in a way that i dont ever feel elsewhere.

Anyway. can you guys believe its a year since NZ? This time last year I'd done my sky tower jump, and spent two days clambering about in a cave. Awesome.