The sun is out, the birds are tweeting - usually fairly mundane stuff about what worms they've been eating (haha! I did a joke!); there's a faint smell of cow manure in the air. Next door on a building site a dog frolicks in the long grass and comes out with a half-full bottle of coke in its mouth. It spills, and the dog begins to lap at the puddle. He seems pretty happy, this dog. It really feels like spring is coming, and then summer, but I'm not happy. I found out on Monday that the temp job I'm doing, y'know, the one I wrote about on Sunday, is coming to an end on Friday. This is much sooner than I thought it was going to be, and it threw me into a depressive funk for a couple of days. I don't think it's anything to do with me or my work - Charlotte the manager told me they just don't have the budget for another temp. But it felt like I'd been dumped and was being given the old 'It's not you, it's me' shtick. I'm not sure I want to ask her to be frank though, I'd rather not have it confirmed that I'm a total cunt.
So I'm back looking for work, and my plans have been ever so slightly thrown into disarray. But I'm going to try as best I can not to plunge headlong into despondency, as is my wont. I've taken a pretty decent look at myself over the last few months - I could draw my own navel from memory - and now have a better understanding of the shit I do. I spoke to my parents last night, and they were incredibly sympathetic and nice about it. My dad, with whom I have a warm but fairly distant relationship, even said to me, 'we love you very much' at the end of the call, which I can't remember him saying before. Certainly not in the last ten years anyway. But because it was at the end of the conversation and I was wrapping it up, it took me by surprise and I just said 'thank you' in reply, and hung up. Then I had a small, momentary cry, and went downstairs to watch the football.
I'm incredibly lucky to have the friends and family that I do.
Laaaaaaazy Sunday Afternoon.
Alright world, keeping well are we? I do hope so. Today is a sunny Sunday, and it's put me in a good mood. It's been tempered slightly cos our neighbour's just been round to complain about our drains, but I won't let it bum me out. Basically, whenever we use our washing machine the run off flows out of our pipes and into the clogged drains, and overflows into their yard next door. When it's cold, like at night time, it freezes and becomes a deadly slipping hazard for his tiny son. And it's fair enough: if I had a son I imagine I'd be a bit sad if he died. But we're sorting it out and Glenn the landlord is bringing his rods round next week.
In the last week or so the sun's been out more, and it's great. I've been working, getting home at half five, and generally feeling like a real human being again. It's nice. The other day I also played squash for the first time in about three months, fighting manfully back from 1-0 down to take victory 3-2. One slight problem is that I used a load of thrusty, lunge muscles for the first time in ages, and so now I have a really sore arse and ankle. I think part of the trouble is that I have a fatter arse and ankle than your average man, so there's a lot of it to get sore. I'm playing again next week so we'll see how it goes.
In other news, I have no money. The new job pays monthly so I won't feel the sweet embrace of dosh until around the 30th March. So I've not really been up to anything, and won't be for the next few weeks. It's pretty annoying, and meant that I had to give up a ticket for the England - France game at Twickenham last week, but hey! It's better than dying, cracking your head on frozen washing machine run-off. And for that I should be forever thankful.
In the last week or so the sun's been out more, and it's great. I've been working, getting home at half five, and generally feeling like a real human being again. It's nice. The other day I also played squash for the first time in about three months, fighting manfully back from 1-0 down to take victory 3-2. One slight problem is that I used a load of thrusty, lunge muscles for the first time in ages, and so now I have a really sore arse and ankle. I think part of the trouble is that I have a fatter arse and ankle than your average man, so there's a lot of it to get sore. I'm playing again next week so we'll see how it goes.
In other news, I have no money. The new job pays monthly so I won't feel the sweet embrace of dosh until around the 30th March. So I've not really been up to anything, and won't be for the next few weeks. It's pretty annoying, and meant that I had to give up a ticket for the England - France game at Twickenham last week, but hey! It's better than dying, cracking your head on frozen washing machine run-off. And for that I should be forever thankful.
Lyme Regis
To a haunting three-and-a-half minute instrumental guitar track, it shows all that can be done in Lyme Regis. Lyme Regis, incidentally, is the Latin for 'King Lemon'. No one knows how a small seaside town on the Devon coast came to be named in such a way. If you're unwilling to sit through the whole video, that's fair enough - after the first minute the fun tails off a bit really. Lyme Regis, it would seem, is a place where old people go to walk along grey seafronts, and where pale families sit on stony, wind-swept beaches. There's a lot of grey in Lyme Regis. And a lighthouse. And some old men sitting on deckchairs. To be honest it looks pretty niche, maybe even boring if I'm being harsh, but oddly it's the first Youtube result when you search for 'UK tourism video', which I found odd. Come on Foreign Office, sort it out!
Anyway, I don't really have anything else to say about this video. Like an observational comedian, I've 'noticed' something and drawn it to your attention. I've said "what's that all about, ey?!" and moved on. But I feel hollow and disappointed; I'm no Michael Mcintyre, that's for sure.
I've got a job, right, and the sudden onset of actually working and getting up early has meant I've been too busy and tired to write one of these. A mistake I think, that, to use this platform to moan and simper when unemployed, only to sack it off when things are better. Soooo seeing as I'm here, how about a little update. Well, I've been working at the Sheffield University admissions department, on the road up from the West End pub. That pub, incidentally, is where I spent my first night in Sheffield when I came up in 2004. Depressingly, and I have to admit mainly through my insistence, we went there and did a quiz and played pool. We didn't even sodding win, and all the while the cool kids of Halifax Hall were partying as if t'were 1999 in their tiny, characterless student bar.
The job involves processing paperwork and dealing with uni applicants, and it looks like it's going to be absolutely fine. The pay's quite good for temp work, and I think it should last for a good few months, which is exactly what I need having been so skint for so long. I'm sitting next to my friend Amy. Me being there at all is entirely down to her word, so more than anything I owe it to her to try hard and do well. I'll let you know how it goes.
Aside from that, I've done what I usually do when I have no money: stay indoors watching downloaded TV series. In the last couple of weeks I've ploughed my way through the first series of Treme, the latest offering from dishevelled Mark Lawson lookalike David Simon, creator of The Wire and Generation Kill. It's fairly slow to get going, but is awesome, and rewards patient viewing with a fantastic array of characters. And music. Loads and loads of music. I've also watched the first series of Louie, a sitcom written and directed by Louis CK. It's a bit like Seinfeld and a bit like Curb Your Enthusiasm, in that it concerns the life of a stand up comedian and intersperses moments from it with clips of him performing. There's no laugh-track. It deals heavily with pretty bleak themes, like loneliness, depression and the crushing inevitability of death, but does so in an often hilarious way. There are some really touching moments, bits that made me well-up, but most of all there are lots of things in it which are piss-yourself funny. It's brilliant, and you should watch the arse off it.
The job involves processing paperwork and dealing with uni applicants, and it looks like it's going to be absolutely fine. The pay's quite good for temp work, and I think it should last for a good few months, which is exactly what I need having been so skint for so long. I'm sitting next to my friend Amy. Me being there at all is entirely down to her word, so more than anything I owe it to her to try hard and do well. I'll let you know how it goes.
Aside from that, I've done what I usually do when I have no money: stay indoors watching downloaded TV series. In the last couple of weeks I've ploughed my way through the first series of Treme, the latest offering from dishevelled Mark Lawson lookalike David Simon, creator of The Wire and Generation Kill. It's fairly slow to get going, but is awesome, and rewards patient viewing with a fantastic array of characters. And music. Loads and loads of music. I've also watched the first series of Louie, a sitcom written and directed by Louis CK. It's a bit like Seinfeld and a bit like Curb Your Enthusiasm, in that it concerns the life of a stand up comedian and intersperses moments from it with clips of him performing. There's no laugh-track. It deals heavily with pretty bleak themes, like loneliness, depression and the crushing inevitability of death, but does so in an often hilarious way. There are some really touching moments, bits that made me well-up, but most of all there are lots of things in it which are piss-yourself funny. It's brilliant, and you should watch the arse off it.
Friday 11th
I have a job. I may have a job. I'm 98% certain I have a job. OK, technically at the moment I don't have a job, but I'm told I probably will. My friend Amy, a lady of great beauty and poise, thinks she may have wangled me some employment in her team at Sheffield Uni. Apparently, I'm told, only the manager having a complete change of heart will stop me getting it. And that's ace, because I could feel myself slipping steadily into the pessimistic, miserable mindset that prompted the beginning of this blog. Tonight I will get drunk.
It was nice telling my mum on the phone, hearing the relief in her voice - she too, I suspect will get drunk tonight. My mum is a huge worrier, about every conceivable thing. Sometimes things that are completely out of her control. She once admitted to laying awake all night, concerned that her niece's rabbit was stuck outside in an uncomfortable hutch in the freezing cold. She comes down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, worried that she's locked the cat [below] out, when in fact she hasn't. But mostly, she worries about me, and I'd like one day to put an end to that.
The cat's called Oscar, and I think he's about 13. We got him when I was only just a teenager and for every minute since he's been a thoroughly outstanding cat. He doesn't squeak and miaow all the time, sits on your knee a lot, kills tiny creatures with aplomb, and has a permanently wet nose. As you can see, he's a massive ponce, and is thoroughly indulged, but I think that's one of the main reasons for having a pet: deep down, it's just nice to give another animal the best life it can possibly have. He even chases ping-pong balls and torch-beams around the carpet in an insane fashion. What more could you ask for? Yes, we'd all like a pet monkey, but it's just not feasible.
It was nice telling my mum on the phone, hearing the relief in her voice - she too, I suspect will get drunk tonight. My mum is a huge worrier, about every conceivable thing. Sometimes things that are completely out of her control. She once admitted to laying awake all night, concerned that her niece's rabbit was stuck outside in an uncomfortable hutch in the freezing cold. She comes down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, worried that she's locked the cat [below] out, when in fact she hasn't. But mostly, she worries about me, and I'd like one day to put an end to that.
Brekkin the law! Brekkin the law!
About an hour ago, 234 elected MPs voted to break the law. They were opposed by just 22. The vote concerned prisoner voting. For a bit of context: The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that there cannot be a blanket ban on giving votes to prisoners. As it currently stands, all prisoners in British prisons do not have the right, which places us in contravention of the law. The ruling handed down does not say that all prisoners should be able to vote, just that there should not be a total ban, and that each case should be taken on it's merits. Ace legal blogger David Allen Green, who knows infinitely more about this than I do, which may make it a bad idea to link to him, writes that there is a similarity between this and bail. He says, 'There is no general ban on an arrested or convicted person applying for bail. It may well be refused, and it usually is in respect of serious offences, but there is no blanket prohibition'. And the same should apply here. The lib dems, who I bloody voted for, had prisoner voting in their manifesto but I suppose that doesn't really count for much these days.
What riles me most is the sheer arrogance of the idea that the government, if it doesn't like one of the rulings to which they are legally bound, can just vote against it in the Commons and hope it will go away. It won't. If they continue to impose a blanket ban, each prisoner will be able to sue the government for infringing upon their human rights. Would they prefer that? It's easy to imagine what the press would make of rapists and paedophiles getting compensation because the loony European Court says so. But it wouldn't be Strasbourg's fault, it would be the fault of the MPs from all parties who, in trying to prevent lawbreakers from voting, have broken the law themselves..
Anyway, enough of that. In other news, I still have no job, which I imagine is becoming less newsworthy with each blog. But hey ho, never mind, I'll get one eventually. It's the waiting that blows.
In my copious spare moments I've been reading Bill Bryson's new book - At Home. It's really really good, like the Brief History of Nearly Everything he did, but based around domesticity and the home. He'll start talking about hallways, then branch off into a huge tract of history and biography. Capability Brown seems like a really cool dude, and I'd only vaguely heard of him before reading this. It's a trivia-addict's dream.
What riles me most is the sheer arrogance of the idea that the government, if it doesn't like one of the rulings to which they are legally bound, can just vote against it in the Commons and hope it will go away. It won't. If they continue to impose a blanket ban, each prisoner will be able to sue the government for infringing upon their human rights. Would they prefer that? It's easy to imagine what the press would make of rapists and paedophiles getting compensation because the loony European Court says so. But it wouldn't be Strasbourg's fault, it would be the fault of the MPs from all parties who, in trying to prevent lawbreakers from voting, have broken the law themselves..
Anyway, enough of that. In other news, I still have no job, which I imagine is becoming less newsworthy with each blog. But hey ho, never mind, I'll get one eventually. It's the waiting that blows.
In my copious spare moments I've been reading Bill Bryson's new book - At Home. It's really really good, like the Brief History of Nearly Everything he did, but based around domesticity and the home. He'll start talking about hallways, then branch off into a huge tract of history and biography. Capability Brown seems like a really cool dude, and I'd only vaguely heard of him before reading this. It's a trivia-addict's dream.
Revolution!
So I'm still unemployed, and haven't yet heard anything back about the reporter job in Congleton. It's too early to get disheartened. The editor, when replying to my application, said that the job was going to be advertised for another week, which I think brings it up to about now. So hopefully in the next few days I'll at least hear something back. He said that most applications are rejected first because of spelling mistakes. I've also applied for a fairly promising-looking postgraduate coordinator job at Sheffield Uni, along with probably 500 other people. That closed today, so fingers crossed. One of the most depressing things about being out of work is not hearing anything back at all from employers. Some applications take HOURS to do, taking into consideration the allotted amount of procrastination, and when you don't even get a reply back, whether you've been successful or not, is a massive kick in my balls. My two, unemployed balls.
I read this very informative '20 reasons why it's kicking off everywhere' piece by Newsnight reporter Paul Mason, and you should too. He writes about the why and how of the recent unrest in North Africa, France and Britain, the catalyst for this tumult being a new demographic: the unemployed graduate with no future. In Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia there are now a sizable number of educated young people with more access to information at the touch of a button than at any time in history. The same applies for France and Britain, where people are able to call 'Bullshit!' quicker than ever before, and distribute information to thousands of people in seconds. The difference between here and North Africa though is the middle-class elites - doctors, teachers, lawyers - who here are placated but there are fucking pissed off. When they begin to take to the streets in protest, the government is in trouble.
In other news, I went to Bakewell the other day. Home of the magnificent egg-based pudding and lots of shops that sell hiking equipment, it's a lovely place to spend a day walking around. And walk around we did. We walked to the church, which was founded in the 12th Century, and had a look at the graves. As you do. Then we walked to a little British Legion memorial garden set away in a quiet spot near a primary school. Then we walked along the river, scaring ducks, to the cricket and football pitches. We played on the kids' playground, which was a bit too fun, then retired to a pub for a bit. It was really nice, and only about £4 on the bus, which is one of the ace things about living in Sheffield. It's a big city, with a Mcdonalds and everything, but is within 20 minutes drive of some absolutely amazing countryside.
Right, must dash, got some stuff to do innit.
I read this very informative '20 reasons why it's kicking off everywhere' piece by Newsnight reporter Paul Mason, and you should too. He writes about the why and how of the recent unrest in North Africa, France and Britain, the catalyst for this tumult being a new demographic: the unemployed graduate with no future. In Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia there are now a sizable number of educated young people with more access to information at the touch of a button than at any time in history. The same applies for France and Britain, where people are able to call 'Bullshit!' quicker than ever before, and distribute information to thousands of people in seconds. The difference between here and North Africa though is the middle-class elites - doctors, teachers, lawyers - who here are placated but there are fucking pissed off. When they begin to take to the streets in protest, the government is in trouble.
In other news, I went to Bakewell the other day. Home of the magnificent egg-based pudding and lots of shops that sell hiking equipment, it's a lovely place to spend a day walking around. And walk around we did. We walked to the church, which was founded in the 12th Century, and had a look at the graves. As you do. Then we walked to a little British Legion memorial garden set away in a quiet spot near a primary school. Then we walked along the river, scaring ducks, to the cricket and football pitches. We played on the kids' playground, which was a bit too fun, then retired to a pub for a bit. It was really nice, and only about £4 on the bus, which is one of the ace things about living in Sheffield. It's a big city, with a Mcdonalds and everything, but is within 20 minutes drive of some absolutely amazing countryside.
Right, must dash, got some stuff to do innit.
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