Quite Random

Feel small?

Bring on the beards!

Woo hoo, I’m fashionable! It turns out that I have been being fashionable for a short while now, ever since I decided that I could no longer be bothered shaving on a regular basis, and I felt happier with my appearance with a hairy face, not a bald shiny face. Beards are back.

I opted for a full-face beard-like thing, which I cultivated while travelling last year and haven’t been able to say goodbye to ever since. I feel more comfortable and confident with it, partly because it conceals a chunky neck and an underwhelming chin. I tried goatee beards for a while, but suffered too many comparisons with Ricky Gervais, and saw too many examples of men with goatees who were conspicuously tossers. They’re usually gurning down their noses from under baseball caps on the Crimestoppers website, or displaying ‘Craig David’ beards that are so tidily trimmed I wonder why they bother when they could just draw it on with a magic marker.

Doughboy does his goatee right, it fits him, not too fussy, but I know he is but an inch away from cultivating it into a gigantic metal-band monstrosity that scares small children and doubles as a food storage facility. Only then will he have fulfilled his true potential. I’m going to keep working on mine as well.

Patientline

Mum went into hospital Wednesday night in a hurry, well, actually in an ambulance. My aunt, her best friend and I wanted to get hold of her to see how she was. The nurse looking after her was able to describe how she was doing, but only you can describe how you’re feeling. That’s why I wanted to talk to her directly. The nurse can’t put you through. There was a time no so long ago when a payphone on a trolley was rolled across the ward, or a cordless phone taken to the bedside, so you could have a conversation – even if it’s just about feeding the dog, fetching fresh pants, and when you can come and visit.

Now hospitals have Patientline. The shower of bastards.

You can’t talk to anyone, or receive calls, until you buy a pre-pay card, worth £3.50, £5 or £10. When you do get one of these cards, you can enjoy all of the facilities that Patientline offers – TV, crappy Internet access, and a phone, all on a convenient wipe-clean monitor unit that hovers over your bed on a long arm like you’re in the first row of beds on a long-haul flight.

When you phone the patient at their bed, before being connected you are first given a chirpy message telling you that your call costs 49p a minute, 39p a minute off peak. This message takes one minute. When you get through, your conversation is given maybe the slightest sense of extra urgency for the fact that you are practically paying as much as you would to enter a TV holiday competition or listen to porn. Making calls outwards is the same – a few phone calls, and a £5 pre-pay card is spent. But it’s OK because Patientline make it easy to top up with your debit card. How very helpful.

I’m not sure how Patientline can justify charging these prices to offer these facilities, but I’m sure they can try. What I am sure of is that charging these prices, and offering a service which is so conspicuously not about patient care, and so conspicuously about making money hand over fist, is truly contemptible. They are screwing people over for money at a time when people have no choice, and their sense of urgency and concern force them to comply. And that makes them the lowest of the low.

Mum’s OK, and will be coming home soon.

Time

Just recently, the dishes are glaring reproachfully at me from beneath thick layers of dessicated stir-in pasta sauce, the bathroom floor is harbouring new and interesting forms of life, the telly is feeling unloved because I don’t even look at it for days on end, threatening paperwork is ganging up on my kitchen table, and I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow. It feels like there isn’t a second in the day that isn’t accounted for, and just watching TV or cooking a proper meal feels like a luxury. This from nine months ago where an entire day dedicated to reading a book or analysing navel fluff was perfectly acceptable.

Even if I wanted to cook a proper meal, the contents of my fridge have been reduced to the level of ‘condiments and sorry looking vegetables only’. A ketchup and pickle-topped tomato with a side order of pesto just won’t do it.

My mate Lou describes this as a good time for a pum pum. Boo hoo you may say. Well, balls to you. This is my blog and I’ll pum pum if I want to.

They say you’re supposed to live every day as if it was your last, but if it was my last day, I certainly wouldn’t spend it running around like a blue-arsed fly. Analysing navel fluff would be just fine – even someone else’s.

London is supposedly all about living life to the full, 24/7, a hectic social life, and saying things to your friends like “I think I can pencil you in for a coffee next August”. As I said to Iain a short while ago, I remember the time when we were seven years old, and if a friend asked you out to play, you didn’t consult your calendar before blowing them off, you just asked yourself, “have I had my tea?”. If the answer was yes, you went out and played. If the answer was no, you still went out and played, you just had tea at their place.

…there is a strong tendency for us to over-commit the future, so that when the future becomes present, we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acute scarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves to about thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four. In addition to the mere fact that time has competitive uses and high marginal utility in an affluent society, this overcommitment creates a sense of pressure and harriedness.
Ivan Illich – Tools for Conviviality

I am overcommitted and knackered. Studies are suffering, work is unrelenting, friends are being put off until next August. All my time seems to be getting spent on all the things I’m least enthusiastic about.

Stress levels rise even further when confronted with the monstrously tacky, hackneyed orgy of crap that is Christmas. I can’t even be bothered dignifying the comments of lunatics like John Sentamu, suggesting that Secularists are de-Christianising Christmas. Actually, I can. When plump-breasted Kerry Katona hovers over plump-breasted turkeys in Iceland adverts and John Sentamu complains about Christians feeling offended (again) by moves for a more inclusive midwinter celebration, while people across the world are suffering and dying, and we are expected to give thanks to an omnipotent deity that hasn’t done a thing about any of it, I’d like someone to tell me what use Christmas is to anyone. This all sounds like I’m going to start singing “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?”.

Kerry can shove her turkey up her arse. John can do the same with his offence. No-one’s getting presents. I’m giving to charity and getting some sleep, and if anyone plays “So here it is, Merry Christmas” to me, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.

Don’t.

Lessons learnt from the last week or so:

• Don’t marinade your laptop in red wine. Not only does it do nothing to improve the flavour, it causes irritating stickyness of the keyboard, and imparts the laptop with a completely random ability to click on things for you when you least expect it. A lot.
• Don’t tell a workmate she looks like a ninja seductress from a Bruce Lee movie. She is liable to start looking at you ‘a bit funny’, and may consider a harassment action, even if you thought you were paying a compliment.
• Don’t accidentally forward on the flippant,  sarcastic comments of colleagues to other colleagues when passing on an enquiry as the other colleagues may get the impression that that first colleague is unprofessional. Even when, no, especially when they are a Director.
• Don’t blog about it. Ahem.
• Don’t scream abuse at the TV whenever Kerry Katona is in an Iceland advert. She can’t hear and she doesn’t care.
• Don’t allow yourself to get wound up by the fact that the US is always at the top of lists of countries in those little drop-down boxes you get on forms on the Internet. It isn’t worth it. Even though it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
• Don’t start writing a philosophical diatribe about life, the universe and everything when it’s already very late. You’ll just end up getting nowhere and writing a list of things not to do.