Things lost this week

Money: Spent Monday at home despairing and drinking. A plumber had come over to fix the cistern of my loo, and I'd anticipated the cost would be around £100. Steep, but worth it for a loo that flushes properly, I'm sure you'll agree. He estimated the job would take two hours. OK, so that's £150, expensive but I can afford it (just). When, after two hours, he announced that he had to go and drive to Shepherd's Bush to get a part, I cracked open the vodka. He was gone another two hours (traffic accident in Holland Park, don't you know), then took another hour to install the part. Total bill? £478.10. Happy Christmas! Thinking of having a party and making everyone drink loads of beer, then charging 50p to wee in the most expensive toilet in South London.

Pride: At the Actionettes Christmas club, I
a) approached a guy I thought I knew, only to have him back away with a look of fear in his eyes.
b) Played music for 45 minutes, and on my way out of the DJ booth accidentally jogged a turntable and made the record skip and then stop... It was the DJs first track and she glared at me with hatred. I hid backstage for ten minutes, and drank more.

From these experiences I can deduce two things: 1) It'd be easy for me to be an alcoholic and 2) I'd probably enjoy it a lot.

Feeling impish. Am entering corrections on-screen, and some of the sentences I have in mind would be better than what the author came up with… ‘Recent signs of affluence’ could, with a slip on the keys, become ‘recent signs of flatulence’ and a colleague suggested that a soldier ‘toasting the Queen with a tot of port’ might be more interesting if he were ‘toasting the Queen over the fire with a fork’.

Work is demoralizing and boring, even if in the fortnight before Christmas it is practically compulsory to drink every day while at my desk. Certain people are pissing me off and making me feel sad. BUT tonight the Kennington Chameleon is DJing, and on Saturday the Actionettes (weatherbeaten old hags, if you believe the Guardian Guide) are having a Christmas shindig.

Today I am very crabby, and it’s not helped by the fact that the phones are down, and the central heating is on the blink. I went for a late lunch today, at about 2.15, as I was suddenly hungry and all I wanted was soup. So I donned my coat, scarf and beret. The hat covers my ears, and I only realized my muttering was quite loud when I expressed annoyance at the chicken soup being sold out at EAT. ‘Flippin’ bollocks,’ I sighed – and the guy in front of me turned around and gave me a funny look. As EAT had nothing I wanted to EAT (£3.75 for a pie? Who do they think they are kidding?), I moseyed on over to Kastner & Ovens. I have a love-hate relationship with K&O. I love the food but I hate the bastard place. What sort of evil people take your order, spoon lots of hot cottage pie into a container, and then go ‘Oh wait, you’re having the small, aren’t you?’ and then, when you admit that yes you are having the small*, they TAKE LOADS OF THE COTTAGE PIE OUT and put it back in the serving dish. Bastards. And they never give you cutlery, napkins, or anything. As I walked out I mumbled ‘Fucking rip-off’, and they may have heard. Oopsie.

The boy is at home resting. He looks very forlorn and very cute with his paw all bound up in a cast. Aawww.



*Cos the large costs £1.45 more and it’s ten days til you get paid

Big news of the weekend is this: Steve’s broken his arm. He did this by running down the street, tripping, sailing gracefully through the air (so I am told) and landing on his elbow. Crunch. Ouch. But he then got the bus home, called NHS Direct, waited for them to call back, then went to bed when they didn’t. Sunday morning his arm still hurt, so he called them again. They deigned to ring back this time, and advised him to visit A&E just to get it checked out. Somehow the boy had managed to dress himself, eat, play golf on his Xbox/playstation/whatever, walk for 45 minutes to the hospital, ALL WITH A BROKEN ARM. If I get pregnant, he’s having the baby for me, as he appears to have a freakishly high tolerance for pain.

I think it’s the rubber ankles what did it. Steve has ankles that occasionally give while he’s walking, and I’ll see him fall over and straighten up really quickly out of the corner of my eye. So tonight I am at the hospital (St. George’s, my most hated hospital. Really, I hate it. I have a lot of memories of St. George’s, all of them bad). He had surgery this afternoon and gets out tomorrow, at which point we’ll have to come up with a plan for assisted living. Cross your fingers.

Today I am crabby. Co-worker is annoying me with much throat-clearing and harrumphing. Also I am sneezing and no one is saying ‘Bless you’, which for some reason is making me want to go home and sulk.

Other annoying things (today)
People who give their newborn sons old-man names. Alfred, Archibald, Wilfred. It’s probably done with the intention – conscious or not – of doing everything to prevent the kid growing up to be one of those hood-up, tracksuit bottoms, urban thugs who kick people to death and film the whole thing on their mobile phone.

I cry very easily. At songs, films, TV advertising jingles, newspaper stories about premature babies pulling through against all odds. But why in God’s name does any version of ‘Winter Wonderland’ make my eyes leak?

Speaking of leeks (sorry), I am scoffing a leek tart from my fave bakery in the world, Paul. Still crabby, though.

Star spotting: Bianca Jagger looking anxious/bored in the back of a parked Mercedes.

Weird: Last night I got off the bus and headed for Sparrows to pick up my regular fix of property porn, the Evening Standard Wednesday supplement. A woman was leaving and she stopped me with the words: ‘I recognize that face’. She looked familiar too. We exchanged a few words and established we were both from Wimbledon. Only as I was walking back to my flat did her name come to me, and I remembered that we’d gone to school together… until we were 11. Now, you’d think that a person would change a little in eighteen years, but obviously I look the same. Even wearing a hat, aged 29, in a winter coat, high heels, in the dark, I look the same. Admittedly I am now sporting the exact hairdo I had when I was 11, but whatever. Part of me is pleasantly amazed that she recognized me: it gives me an odd feeling of safety: here I am living in a city of 8 million people, and I bump into a woman I went to primary school with, in the cornershop. But it also really annoys me: like most people, I spent much of my teenage years trying to become the person I wanted to be, trying to shed my adolescent nerdiness. And nearly two decades later, an ex-schoolfriend glimpses me and knows straight away that I’m that 11-year-old she shared a tent with on a trip to the Isle of Wight.