so here we are...

...sitting in the window of starbucks in islington like an amsterdam whore. i decided to try a sprinkling of cinnamon on my mocha - let's just say it seemed like a good idea at the time. not really written anything of any substance recently, and have been copping out with easy youtube tastic video posts. Which is very 2.0 but also a bit lazy. this post doesn't look like being am increase of standards. my people watching antics aren't being helped by it being dark out there and very bright in here, meaning that the main person i'm able to watch is myself. which isn't terribly interesting for anyone else let alone myself. tomorrow looks like it's going to be xmas tree collecting day. there's a slightly mad seeing lady who's claimed the table next to me. it'd take too long to explain exactly why she's a bit peculiar so you'll have to take my word for it. i'm sure there was loads i was going to write about but i can't remember any of it now. maybe next time...

i'm being cut to shreds

deck the halls with disney products

i know my last post was whining about how awful it is having xmas stuff everywhere in the middle of october, well i suppose with the drop of temperature, my cynicism has thawed a little. i was up at oxford circus last night trying to do a bit of xmas shopping (the majority of which will be done online, therefore totally avoiding the bastard high street) and i was a little disappointed to see that the xmas lights have been hijacked by disney's new modern fairy tale, enchanted. it might be 20:20 hindsight of course but i'm sure when i was little the lights were a big deal, with santa and his elves beavering away in their workshop or something without having to relentlessly whore some kind of nonsense. i may not be the most christmassy person but mickey mouse shouldn't be allowed to steal the limelight from poor little baby jesus.

aaaah!

now it's fucking slade courtesy of argos! time to throw the remote away and write a book or something

don't forget santa

it's the middle of october and i've just had to listen to mariah bleeding carey chirping on about what she wants for christmas thanks to those pikey sofa peddlers dfs. it's bad enough having to tolerate the hideous shrieking banshee for a couple of weeks in december but putting xmas songs in your adverts 2 months early is just not on. i suppose it's an omen of things to come as everyone works themselves up into a lather over JC's birthday. happy days.

downs dogging disaster

i'm sat on epsom downs at the moment, looking out of london on a beautiful evening, eating a bit of sushi before i have to head to sams in a while. it reminds me of the last time i was up here on my own. it was many years ago now and a lot later and darker than it is at the moment. i had been round my boyfriend's house but had made an early exit to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of a row with his folks. i had my laptop with me so decided to head up here and do a bit of work before going home. because i was working and reading from notes and things i had to put the inside light on a couple of times to see what i was doing. after a while a girl in her twenties i suppose emerges from the dark and frightens the bejesus out of me by tapping on the window. apparently someone had pulled up next to her car (where she was having a nice chat with her boyfriend) and proceeded to have a bit of a wank and she just wondered what i thought she should do. i said maybe if it was upsetting her and he was still about, call the cops or something. I was so blissfully naive. it turns out that sitting in your car and turning the light on and off is some kind of code to help doggers identify each other and people who are up for it. it really wouldn't have taken a genius to work out that what she was really after was a bit of audience participation from me, but i'm afraid to say that that went right over my head, so i missed my chance there. so far this evening though i've not been propositioned although there is a very suspect transit van with curtains in the back which has been doing the rounds, so maybe i'm just not his type. or maybe i've just let myself go a bit since my close encounter a couple of years ago?

watch out for the yellow t-shirt

this is the news!

the other night, the beeb had some exclusive report on baby trafficing from albania or some such eastern european place. i wasn't really paying too much attention but it all seemed very outrageous and generally not so good. poor little albania kiddie-winks being ferried over here for a few thousand euros, really outrageous, a bit of a coup for the bbc uncovering it really. poor old itv news, they really are the netto of tv news. they obviously didn't want to be outdone so the following day they had an exclusive of their own. Not on child smuggling, but disabler chinese kid smuggling. it all seemed a touch desperate really, with a certain part of the day today about it. like they'd seen the bbc report and thought, we'll see you your child smuggling and raise you one batch of disabilities. i'm sure it was just as newsworthy as the albania thing, but itv should stick with standing in puddles and letting the beeb do the news stuff. Rant over.

spikey spikey!

queer as four

so, channel four are having a bit of a thing at the moment about the 40th(?) anniversary of the decriminalisation of those dirty gays. i agree this is something forth getting excited about, but i'm not convinced that their program on sunday, clapham junction, does the cause a great amount of good. they managed to roll out all the standard stereotypes: cruising for sex in public toilets, check! trying to bed straight men left right and centre, check! cocaine habits galore, check! cheating on your boyfriend at the reception of your civil partnership, check! the cherry on the cake was the paedophile trying to seduce a schoolboy. granted they had a vaguely different take on it, but it seemed a bit off that following an extended arguement on big brother beforehand about gay men being equated with paedos, c4 then went and perpetuated that myth. no wonder there seems to be a preconception that all gay guys are drug addicted paedophiles with a sideline in shagging straight men. it'd be really nice if for once there was a gay character on tv that bore even the slightest resemblance to me or any of my gay mates. Failing that though, i guess we'll have to make do with paul nichols knob...

the youth is out there

maybe it's the influence of big brother and stuff like that, but for the last couple of month i seem to have started turning more and more to dvd box sets for entertainment. with the selection consisting mostly of this life and x-files, it's like being right back in the 90s. we finished with this life a couple of weeks ago and i'd forgotten how fab it was. my memories of it turned out the the fairly vague so in a way in was like watching it for the first time. shame that the +10 reunion a couple of months ago wasn't much good. x-files was virtually something of an obsession in my formative years and with each series only £15 on play i've been starting that one from the beginning. i know it really tailed off in the last few series (though i never actually watched them to be honest, i suspect the curiosity might get the better of me on dvd) but for the first few years it was actually a pretty ace tv show and for the most part stands the test of time. we'll see how i get as we get further into it when it all starts getting silly. this life's place i think is going to be taken by six feet under from the beginning, which i suppose is probably the last show that i was hooked on. that won't have quite the same degree if reminiscence about it, but should still keep me out of trouble for a while.

these are the days of our lives

i've added about 50 entries to this today. i found the blog that was here for a year from may 2004 archived so have added everything from that onto here. i've resisted the urge to tweak anything , so the entries that are added to here are the same as were originally posted. i can't remember whether i was blogging anything between may 05 and july last year but i'm not sure i was. the blogs from before may 04 i think have been lost forever in the mists of time. but now is better than the whole of the past, so we shouldn't worry too much about that. hopefully i'll get around to posting something a bit more current soon!!

things that go bump in the night

you should all go see zodiac, it's great. it's not so great to see when you've got to drive home on your own in the middle of the night. i forgot to check the backseat before getting in which was a fatal error. well, potentially fatal i suppose seeing as i'm sat here writing this. but anyways, there's something unavoidably creepy about driving back at night after watching a film about a serial killer who shoots people to bits on the roads. once you're done with the driving home wondering about all the lights in the rear view mirror, you have to drive into a spooky underground car park full of nasty dark corners perfect for bad people to hide in. i made it in intact though, with a quick trip round the flat to switch on all lights and check all potential hiding places. maybe mr bean's holiday wouldn't have been such a bad alternative after all.

get me out of here

it's started... big bloody brother. is there any avoiding it? not living with alex there doesn't seem to be. but i'm damn well gonna try. the plan is that every time i find myself sat in front of it, i'm going to do something productive instead. like writing this blog entry. potentially things even more productive than blogging but that remains to be seen. if nothing else, with any luck there might be an increase in posts on here.

a-maze-in mitcham

an occupational habit of searching for jobs on reed using the word 'design' is that you'll usually get bucket loads of urban design/traffic planning type nonsense jobs coming up. one of these days i think i'll try my luck and apply for one anyway, because to be honest i couldn't do a worse job than whoever it was who's responsible for the rabbit warren of mitcham. it's worse than my anti-climatic ant farm as far as dead ends go. it all seems to have been lovingly build, planned and mapped out, only for them to realise they ordered a few too many barriers from the tescos online store so had to find places to stick them, and the criteria for that seems to have been based on causing the most inconvenience possible and wasting time at either traffic lights that only let 3 cars through at a time or a level crossing which someone how intuitively knows when i'm going to be passing through and has a train waiting on stand-by just because i manage to get across the bastard. regardless if i set off 5 minutes earlier or 5 minutes later, those bastard little gates still have to come crashing down right in front of me.

sleeping is giving in

why is it that at the weekend, no matter how much i drink and what time i drop into bed, i'll be up wide awake at the crack of dawn with a complete and total inability to get back to sleep. but when monday morning comes round i could happily sleep til lunchtime. i'm sure i'd do better in the med, somewhere i can be justified in having a couple of hours kip in the middle of the afternoon. it also wouldn't if it was nice and hot so i could spend half my time sat on the beach soaking up the sun.

unlucky in love

i don't know whether it's anything to do with the big black cat which jumped out at my in the dark the other night, scaring the bejesus outta me, but i seem to be having a bit of a run of back luck at the moment. the other night we went to bingo with a couple of mates (don't laugh). alex and me have both been a few times before with his work-mates, though never managed to convert our enthusiasm and optimism into hard cash. surely our luck would be in this time. apparently not. the two newcomers to the delights of bingo we took along with us, managed to win not once, but twice. each. although once, by the time he'd realised that he'd won, it was too late and he's missed out. it wasn't particularly big money bingo, but a small token win wouldn't have hurt anyone. it's not that i'm a bad loser, and i'm happy for those that won - you'd have just thought it was about time it was my turn! that's not the end of it though. the next night we were meant to be in the audience of fame academy (again, don't laugh!). we trekked up to where they do the filming, and met the people from the audience company and got ourselves our little numbered pink ticket. incidentally, the guy behind the desk, while perfectly nice enough and with great taste (constantly referring to lex as sexy boy!), was about as much of a walking, talking stereotype of a gay guy that works in the media that you can get. anyways, back to fame academy. our camp little pink tickets were number 174 and 175. first up anyone under 150 are called up to swap their ticket for a coveted wristband giving access to the hallowed halls of the academy. then numbers 150-160 get their turn. it stops at 162. arse. that lot are eventually led off to the studio with the rest of us being told there's probably be more space, and that last night there were only 18 people they couldn't fit in. a quick count up round the room shows that their are a lot more than 18 people waiting and the majority of them came later than as so, it's not looking too bad. the graham norton wannabe behind the desk then calls everyone under 180 over to grab standby wristbands, so that we're poised, ready to burst into action at a moments notice. which, as it turns out we needn't be. with just 4 people in front of us they announce the studio's full and we're all outta luck. if only we'd not stopped to get cash at waterloo, we'd be front and centre on primetime bbc one cheering on a load of minor celebrities murdering the karaoke classics. as it turns out we had quite a nice night anyway, thanks very much so we don't need you and your silly tv show. fingers crossed that the luck's swinging back in opposite direction, cos in two weeks time we're meant to be in our new flat, which will be a whole new exciting adventure of its own.