Trick or Treat?

Come round my house tonight and you're not going to get a treat. So don't bother! I'm fed up with all this Halloween nonsense, in my childhood days we never used to be sent round to stranger's houses to demand sweets. I had my first trick-or-treaters round last night, at least I assume that's what they were, knocking on my front door rather than ringing the doorbell (too high for little hands to reach?), and as I lurked in the hallway I could hear children's voices outside. So I didn't answer the door. Do I smell children? They were a day early, for heaven's sake! First of all, I've nothing to give them as I don't keep sweets or biscuits in the house, secondly I'm just not into it. So tonight I will mostly be hiding inside with the lights off and ignoring the procession of children that will probably come a-knocking. Last year I was in my kitchen when I saw some ghouls walk past, they knew I'd seen them but I still ignored the doorbell. Bah humbug. Perhaps I should hire someone to dress as the Child Catcher and answer my door for me to try and scare the little beggars off, at Uni one time I remember we put skulls in the window and answered the door wearing lab coats and wielding dental syringes and pliers, and the kids ran away.


Not much else to report, have now ventured back to the gym and got caught leaving after 30 minutes (after I got bored) by my trainer yesterday who shouted down the corridor after me that we must have words... I think he may have noticed that I've been slack recently but I'm sure he won't mind when he finds out it was because of my toe (which is now better).

Oh yeah, I've had to come back to today's entry this evening as I forgot to include today's topical link which you can see here. On that note I've just ignored the first group of children who've rung my doorbell tonight. Hahahahahaha (insert evil laugh here).

One Way

Eeew, filthy dirty dog-on-a-string smelly crusties. Yes, the 6th-form band of choice in 1993 was the Levellers. I think it might have been David Baddiel who, at the time, commented on the irony of a thousand identically-dressed, identically lifestyled students singing along in unison "there's only one way of life, and that's your own", but you can't deny he had a point. The band played at Portsmouth Guildhall in 1993 and practically the whole college was there, making the floor reverborate with the thud of 2000 Doc Marten boots (with various coloured laces, mine were tartan) jumping up and down. In actual fact I still don't think the music was too bad but I don't think I could bear to mosh down with the great unwashed any more.

The chocolate cake thing last night was really nice but as I expected, very rich so there's still half of it left, I'll just have to see if it freezes as there's no way I'll be able to finish it off myself, unless any of you want a bit? Did a really nice chicken dish for the main course which was disgustingly simple but delicious, to serve 2, brown 4 chicken thighs skin down in some olive oil, then after 10 minutes take them out and add 2 chopped leeks (keep them in 4cm-long pieces), soften them for about 5 mins before adding 300ml chicken stock (ie 300ml water with a stock cube in it) and the juice of a lemon, put back the chicken and simmer for 30 mins, add some chopped parsley just before serving with rice and veg. Yum! The lemon gives it a bit of a kick and makes for a really interesting flavour. I recommend it!

When will I be famous?

Yep, my 1988 obsession was Bros. I had shoes a bit like these although without steel toe-caps, and whilst I'm reluctant to admit to being a Brosette, I have vague recollections of a white jacket and red bandana (except I never wore the bandana, I kept it in my violin case to show my commitment to the band during school orchestra rehearsals).

Hmm, enough already. But Bros did pose the question "When Will I be Famous?" so let's move on to dodgy claims to fame. They say that everyone has their 15 minutes of fame, and I've used up a few of these minutes being in the audience of Top of the Pops and some other TV shows. I have also had a couple of celebrity patients and relatives of celebs, but confidentiality prevents me from mentioning them here so I'm more interested in the really tenuous claims to fame. Like "my friend's sister's friend is Marilyn Monroe's niece", or "I've worked with the drummer from Razorlight's dad", or "my gay friend has snogged the annoying blond bloke (H) from Steps". All true, I hasten to add. I would love to hear if any of you have anything even more crap to admit to!

I've got some friends coming over for dinner and have made a lovely cake from the Green and Blacks chocolate cookbook, it's basically chocolate, butter, sugar and eggs and it smells divine. I think it's the sort of cake that you can only have a tiny bit of though as it looks pretty rich. It's a miserable day again, rainy and overcast and this afternoon whilst I was making the cake I put some relaxing choral music on, which unfortunately combined with the smell of baking and poor light made the atmosphere rather Christmassy. So I had to turn it off as I'm not allowed to mention it for another 5 or so weeks. Tomorrow's musical influence is going to be the sixth-form years...

Back in the day...

I ache so much today! I've been wandering round like an old woman, think it's due to spending all of yesterday in soaked jeans. Going to go and have another nice relaxing bath in a bit, but thought I'd do today's blog entry first. I've got Steve to thank for the inspiration for this, we were having a bit of a YouTube nostalgia-fest last night and as I know he thinks I have an appalling taste in 80s music, I thought I'd play up to it for a while. I sent him a Patrick Swayze clip from Dirty Dancing and one of the tunes listed below, but on being threatened with a "3 strikes and you're out" policy, I moved onto the 6th-form era stuff, which met with rather more approval, and inspired a musical theme for this week - I will take you through a brief journey through some of the bands which have influenced me (and, more dubiously, my fashion sense).

Makes sense, I think, to start at the beginning, so rewind back to 1984 when I was eight.

WHAM!

The first great band of my youth. We were all mad about them at school, probably after seeing this video on Top of the Pops. Everyone coveted one of those "Choose Life" T-shirts (don't worry, I never had one), and from the amount of jealous evils given to Pepsie and Shirlie, I think lots of 8-year-old gaydars were a bit under-developed. In 1985 I bought my first single (Wham's "I'm Your Man") which had a silver sleeve with a multi-coloured stripe on it, not sure what happened to it but I treasured it for ages!

Then, moving on to 1986, we reach the phenomenon that is Five Star. I think I still have the cassette of their album somewhere, and I probably should apologise to my parents for the amount of times I made them play it in the car on long journeys. Looking back at some of their videos though, I'm not convinced that identical red sequinned jumpsuits were altogether a good look? Apparently some of them are still in a pared-down version of the group, although I saw a picture of Stedman (the elder boy) a while back and he looked really creepy, I never trust a man who has thinner, tidier eyebrows than me. In fact, one of the blokes off of the groups on X-factor is going that way, but I digress. Will save my views on male grooming for some other time.

Tomorrow I will move up to senior school and 1988, any guesses who I was mad about at that time?

Trench foot

Here is a picture of trench foot. My feet are not yet this bad, but after spending 10 hours out in the pouring rain directing traffic and closing roads at the carnival in my parents village today, I fear I may be at risk of it. It poured virtually all day, which was a real shame for all the people who had put loads of effort into organising the thing, but those who turned up enjoyed it. I could barely get my jeans off though as they had shrunk to fit very tightly, but I managed to prise them off and have just had a hot bath to try and relax my aching limbs. So going to bed now as I have work in the morning, will try and do some more gubbins tomorrow evening.

Although just seen I'm now in quadruple figures hits-wise, how exciting! 1001 to be precise when I just checked. Who on earth is reading this thing?! Probably less people now that I've put today's awful picture up...

Bloody call centres

Going to have a bit of a rant this evening I'm afraid, having spent much of the afternoon on the phone to overseas call centres whose staff have an inability to understand what I was trying to find out!
It's all to do with a nice digital radio that I was given as my birthday present 18 months or so ago. I'd asked for one specifically to put in my (then) new kitchen, so that I could listen to it whilst cooking, but after receiving said radio from my parents, I found that the reception in the kitchen was rubbish and I couldn't get any channels. I was rather annoyed, but thought that after I'd done the decorating upstairs I'd be able to find a suitable home for it, so it has been sitting on my sideboard ever since. Last week I decided to finally move it into my bedroom to replace an old clock-radio, and it seemed to be ok (apart from the digital reception still being temperamental, but I assumed that was just due to my house maybe being in a blackspot).
Anyway, there was a power cut yesterday and ever since, the radio appears to have died. Although the screen comes on with the power, it won't display anything, it won't switch off, and if I turn it on and off I can sometimes get it to make a weird wailing noise as if it's trying to tune in to something like an ET-phone-home situation (or should that be BT phone home?) I was rather narked, as these radios aren't cheap, and it's only been used for about 10 days so even though it's out of warranty time-wise, I think it needs mending.
So I called the helpline who in fact couldn't help, and told me to call BT which is where the foreign call centre fiasco began. None of the automated options sounded appropriate, so initially I tried the faults department and explained the situation. Bloke had no idea probably what a digital radio was and asked me several times for the phone number of the problem line, so I have up and tried the trick of calling again and not pressing any buttons to see if I could get through to general customer services. Which kind of worked, apart from I got a woman who also did not have any understanding of the problem (ie where can I get an authorised repairer), so I gave up. I know they are only trying to do their job but I have a real problem with companies sticking their call centres where they can exploit the cheaper labour, it's not fair on the foreigners or the customers as all I wanted was some advice. So I'm going to try emailing them. Reason for making a fuss is that when the sound on my TV (2.5 years old at the time and also out of warranty) broke a couple of years back, I complained and quoted the sale of goods act that says that goods have to be fit for purpose for a reasonable length of time, and that I didn't believe that 2.5 years was reasonable given that the TV was quite expensive. So Philips arranged for it to be taken to one of their repairers, and after the dodgy part had been found, they replaced the part for free (saving me 80 quid) and I only had to pay for the labour. Result!
I'll let you know if I can manage the same thing again...

"Sinister and scary"

Couldn't resist another quick update, after playing around a bit on the doctors.net website this evening I happened upon a thread with the following title in the general chat forum. It poses the question "What is it about clowns that make them so f*cking sinister and scary?"
Then followed a string of comments from my esteemed professional colleagues agreeing with the above sentiment, and a few pictures too, like Stephen King's "It" and other sinister-looking clowns. Then this picture was posted with the comment that "this happy-go-lucky clown wouldn't hurt anybody".

Really?

So I posted the following: "See that picture of the "happy go lucky" clown? Look behind him, there is an empty child's buggy. Look again at the straining fabric over the clown's belly. THE CLOWN HAS EATEN THE CHILD AND IS ESCAPING ON ITS YELLOW MOPED! This evil must be stopped!"

Ha. I think I proved the point.

Goodbye Paul Robinson

Time for an update on Gubbins Athletic, I think. The boys haven't been doing too well I'm afraid, and I have fallen to around 85,000th on the leader board. Nothing to do with my lack of management skills and zero knowledge of football, of course. Several of the team have been letting the side down so I've been ruthless and booted out a couple of them. First to go was S Reid, whoever he is, as he's scored no points and is injured, so not much chance of getting me up the ladder. And I've also said goobye to Paul Robinson, my fit goalie, who made a bit of a schoolboy error during the England game earlier this week, I am told. I suppose I might have him back if he improves, but for now I've got someone else in (can't remember who though). Anyway, it's a good excuse for a laughable 80s photo, albeit of a different Paul Robinson (second from right, bottom row)...

More of the usual this weekend, ie clearing out the spare room and slowly getting rid of all my junk. One way of recycling some of the things like notebooks and cards, and trinkety things that you don't need any more but are still in excellent condition is to box them up and send them to needy children in Africa and Eastern Europe. You can find out about this here. I've decided to do a couple of boxes, one for a boy and one for a girl, and have bought some things to put in them. Got the usual notebooks and hair clips for the girl, and some of those great long whistling balloons for the boy one. My mum got me into this as they are doing them at her work, so let's hope they like what I can find. I'm also putting in one of my hand-knitted scarves as I've got tons of wool still and it's something to do in front of the TV to avoid the temptation to snack!

I've still got a real excess of chillis, have frozen some of them but will probably have to harvest the rest soon as the weather's getting a bit crap. Having some of them with dinner tonight, and might go to the next farmer's market and get some nice pork steaks as a really nice way of cooking them is to marinade in maple syrup and chopped chillis, if you slow roast it it goes ito a nice sticky mess. Making me hungry so going to eat now!

Sweeties, darling!

Mmmmm, sweets. I feel a Haribo binge coming on, in celebration of going to the dentist today and not needing any work doing. Got a bit nervous before going in again, but the actual examination was quite relaxing! My dentist is very nice and he showed me the x-rays I had last time, my mutant baby tooth appears pretty stable and the socket isn't eroding, and although a couple of my wisdom teeth are a bit wonky, they're not so bad as to cause problems so I'm more than happy with his recommendation to leave well alone. I'm still not a fan of the scratchy hook he uses to poke around the gum margins, but it didn't hurt so I get another 9 months reprieve and told to keep doing whatever I'm doing as it's working!

Been clearing out some old magazines this afternoon, and also browsing through the new Exodus brochure which I've just been sent (they are the company I went to Peru with in July). So many tempting holidays, and I'm getting some ideas of what to save up for for next year. As I really enjoyed the high altitude landscapes when we were in the Andes, I'm especially interested in something in the Himalayas, even more so after watching the Michael Palin series on the region last year. I have visions of doing the trek to Everest base camp ("you're NOT climbing Mount Everest" said my mum when I mentioned it to her), but I think that may be a little extreme. This trip to Tibet sounds fun though, you do a bit of walking to the North face camp, but it seems more like sightseeing rather than hard-core trekking. Anyway, I shall wait and see what happens work-wise as I'll need to do some serious saving up. If anyone fancies coming along then I'm looking at early next summer!

Denied!

Would you jump in a car with this man? I wouldn't, but then again, I'm not German and apparently the man is a demi-God over there. Must ask my German friends if that is true or the suff of urban legend... Anyway, despite Scott Mills' (off of Radio 1) campaign to get the Hoff to number 1 in the charts, he only managed number 3. I didn't go so far as to buy the single, although my friend Russ did and even managed to get himself mentioned on the radio after texting in on friday to say that he'd "just bought the single but was a bit embarassed so had to buy another cd at the same time to hide it under". Not sure he'll appreciate me naming and shaming him on here, but less people read this than listen to Scott Mills so I don't think I've done anything wrong. Congratulations to Razorlight however, for taking the top spot this week with a cracking tune.

What have I been up to since my last entry? Just the usual really, work and continuing the sorting out in my spare room - managed this weekend though to get rid of a pile of old clothes and will take a load of stuff down to Oxfam this week. On friday evening I went to see the film "The Queen", which was really good - although rather a sombre subject matter, there were some great performances and subtle humour, and I'd definitely recommend it as one to see. There's quite a few other films out at the moment that look good but I never seem to get round to seeing them and usually end up having to rent the DVD. Off to have dinner now, it's still bloody freezing and although my heating is supposed to be on, the radiator I'm sitting next too feels cold so I think I'll have to go and check that out!

Nip in the air!

Brrr, it's a bit nippy tonight. I've turned my central heating on this evening as I was cold. Last night I was sitting on my sofa under a blanket, but figured that since it's now October, I was allowed to check that the radiators still work. So today's picture is of the ski holiday earlier this year, taken at one of our favourite umbrella bars in Saalbach, it was rather cold then too, but at least there was Gluhwein on tap to warm us up. Perhaps a future picture will be the one of me after "warming myself up" a little too much... Anyway, if it gets colder here then I'm getting the ski clothes out.

Been at work today as this month I'm doing regular hours. Although having to drive around a bit this week as working in different places morning and afternoon. Nice to have some weekends free to sort out the house and stuff, and I'll have to get back down the gym as otherwise I'll lose all motivation to go, running's still out because of the bad toe but I can sit around in the sauna or have a swim or something.

I've got a dental appointment next week which you might not think is worth writing about, but going to the dentist was a huge deal for me as I'd managed to avoid it for rather a long time! I went regularly as a child but due to not really liking fizzy drinks and being rationed on sweets, I never had anything done apart from check-ups until the age of about 15. Then the dentist went private so I missed a couple, and then went off to university and never got round to registering with one there. My view was that some of my friends were trainee dentists so I could ask them if I had any problems, and as I never did, I kind of let it slip. Then last year I managed to chip the back of a tooth whilst flossing, leaving a rough edge (later realised it was scale rather than tooth that had come off). So I had to bite the bullet and get it sorted. I managed to find an NHS one next to one of the places I work, and after getting all anxious before going in, found the actual appointment to be rather relaxing. The dentist asked me when I'd last gone, and I said "quite a while ago" (didn't think he'd be impressed if I told the truth which was 14 years ago), did a couple of x-rays, poked around a bit, scaled and polished and that was it! I did have to point out that I am a freak as I still have a baby tooth, so he x-rayed to see if the adult one was there or not, but since I never heard back I assume all was ok. But at the surgery you get struck off the list if you don't have regular check ups and a year has gone by so figured it was about time I went again. I'm still very proud of having got to the age of 30 without a single filling though!

Bargain 2-for-1

What's this? A second helping of gubbins? Yes, whilst I'm waiting for my bath to run, thought I'd make up for missing out all of last week due to being away. Not that I'm going to say a lot, of course. Just stick in a few random thoughts.

One site I've come across recently is Holy Moly, where there is a list of what they term "Rules of Modern Life". My favourite true statement from the list is that "the more common you are, the more people will be waiting for you outside your X-Factor audition". Got me wondering if I could think up some of my own. The only one I've come up with so far is "everyone who went to school in the UK in the 80s was in a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and can still remember some of the words". Maybe readers could let me know via the comments if I am correct on this one?

Bath is ready now, so I'll leave you with some nostalgia off YouTube, in my opinion the best Eurovision crowd entertainment ever. Makes me want to re-start dancing lessons again, just have to find an appropriate class... Click here for the Riverdance
Quite like the music too, although the harmonising bit at the beginning sounds a bit too Chr*stmassy for me. Not that that's stopped the supermarkets decking the aisles with family packs of nuts, it's way too early! I promise not to mention it until December!

Ouch!

I'm back again, have had a nice break in Wolverhampton and will be starting work again tomorrow. Marie's baby is very cute and we did all sorts of fun things like going on a tour of the canal tunnels, a nice day out in Ludlow visiting tea rooms and the castle, and also a night out in town at Walkabout's indie night which was great fun. Except we felt really old, there were all these 20-year-olds there larging it up to old-school 90s indie stuff, and they probably were only just born when some of it was out, unlike us who remember it from the first time round... Anyway, bloody good fun although I can't handle my vodka like I used to be able to.

My next project at home is going to be redecorating my room and I've started by getting rid of my bed which was too big (in terms of height). It's going in my parents house so will still be put to good use, and at the moment I'm on a mattress on the floor whilst I sort out the decorating. Room looks bigger already!

The reason for having an x-ray as today's picture is that some of you may remember me saying I'd signed up to do the Great South Run which is due to take place on the 22nd October. Anyway, training had been going well until around ten days ago when I got up at night to use the bathroom and not having my glasses or contacts on, walked straight into the door in the dark and injured ?broke my right 4th toe. It hurt loads and went all red and black and swollen, and although it's a bit better now, walking on it for long periods and certainly running hurts so I haven't been able to train. So that's put paid to that idea, and whilst I'm kinda sad not to be doing it, since the person who was going to do it with me didn't even get round to signing up, it wouldn't have been much fun on my own. Maybe next year.

So instead I guess I'll be spending the 22nd October at the Titchfield Carnival as my dad's on the committee and they always need helpers to do things like count money and line the route. It's on a sunday this year in an attempt to get more people to go - and it needs all the support it can get as people don't seem to be as bothered about it these days which is a shame. Last time I was in it, I was about 14 and some friends and I made a giant pink Nellie the Elephant (I was the back end). Seem to remember we won our section.