Quite Random

Plans

Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
John Lennon

My recent slump in mood is not down to moving, work pressure, friends with relationship troubles or cocking up my last assignment. It was good to blame these for a little while, but that’s a cop-out. I’ve been cheesed off because I allowed all that stuff to distract me from my plans, as nebulous as they are. I’m not the must goal-oriented person in the world, but I need goals. In 2003/4 I had two – to pay off a stack of personal debt, and travel the world. I can remember looking for the first element of the big trip – it turned out to be a voluntary project in India with Aidcamps. With that booked, everything else crystallised around it. If I don’t have a plan, I coast, I get bored, I watch too much TV, and my brain dribbles out of my ears.

Talking of crystallising, there was little more satisfying when I was younger than growing copper sulphate crystals on bits of string, so, in the spirit of hanging my little bit of string in the blue liquid and hoping something clings to it, plans are back on for the next project, and a date. Dates are good. Plans are good.

The old ‘uns are the good ‘uns

Smoothies and doughnuts

There’s comfort eating in the office this afternoon – fruit smoothies for the body and doughnuts for the soul. Everyone is ill. One person sat at his keyboard two days ago and coughed and spluttered violently until he was instructed to go home – before he barfed up a lung and before everyone else got what he had.

He may have kept his lung but it looks like we all got what he had.

They say schools are unhealthy environments to be in, all those germs and viruses floating around the hallways and classrooms, but this office feels just as bad. The time is punctuated by various sniffs, coughs, moans and, well, ‘mucusy’ noises. At least we don’t have air conditioning in here. You can almost see the bugs surfing the recycled, convecting air, looks of glee on their faces as they find the next healthy person to take out.

So what to do tonight? Sensible answer – go home, wrap up warm, watch the telly and eat some soup. Silly answer – go to Covent Garden and belatedely celebrate my birthday in a smoky bar with lots of beer and a South African playing cover versions. Oops. Colour me silly.

Foxy

She visits us in the back garden. She’s after food.

Curiouser

There be strange things happening in London Town. Walking to work from Victoria this morning I saw a girl with a marking on her forehead almost like Harry Potter’s scar, except blue in colour. I thought maybe she’d had a violent accident with a biro, or that it was some kind of exotic birthmark, so I felt bad for staring.

Then behind her another with a mark on their forehead, and another, and another, older women, men in suits. Some people’s marks were smudged, some bold and bright. Either a priest somewhere in Westminster has put ink in the Holy Water or there’s something even stranger afoot.

Idle

Ah, Friday.

So, the Random Kitten Generator is providing some amusement this afternoon, almost as much as one of my colleagues wrestling with a flatbed scanner, and I’m thinking of everything I need to do with my life and putting it on Remember The Milk. I can’t feel too bad about being unproductive on company time, after all I have achieved just about everything I was supposed to, I’m moderately cheap, and I have saved you the taxpayers vast sums of money recently by designing promotional mugs for a lot cheaper than you’d get from a creative agency headed by a man with a cord jacket and a polo neck who goes ‘yaaa’.

Should I put skills in mug design on my CV, or is that just going to make it even more like I’ve never made my mind up what to do for a living?

No man no van

The Australian never showed. Two and a half hours of waiting with all of my possessions in boxes, no phone call, messages left of the voicemails of three separate chirpy Antipodeans, where is my man with a van? I gave up waiting and went to the pub.

I seem to have been in the pub every day since (partly because all I had left to eat was teabags and flour and all my stuff was in boxes). I have beer fatigue (characterised by enlarged stomach, flinching at the sight of fried food, and mystery bruises). The last week has been a combination of excessive alcohol consumption, packing, unpacking, hugging miserable friends, cooking for miserable friends, and making lots of sympathetic noises. I have a soggy shoulder, a bent ear, a furry liver and almost no sense of humour left to speak of.