Friends and phones

It is said by many that the mark and measure of a true friend is being able to go for months without talking then picking up as if nothing has happened when you do see them. I half buy in to this theory, surely in these days of mass communication it’s not that hard to stay in touch – but at the same time I have many of these friendships myself. Mainly by virtue of having lived in some far flung places and having friends that still live there and also because I really, really, deeply loathe speaking on the phone. My phone is always on silent and nowhere near me. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you. I just don’t want to talk to you on the phone. Let’s get a coffee, let’s DO something. And if that’s not practical due to geography then send me an email. I’m better in email.

You can edit what you say in email. You can embellish events to make them sound interesting, because here’s the thing – when you haven’t spoken to one of your true friends in six months how do you make it sound like you have achieved something in half year? I spoke to a friend of mine the other night. He has a very exciting job. I don’t know exactly what he does but involves a great deal of dashing and daring and living in numerous foreign countries. He also has a love life and is very happy. I have no love life which immediately cuts my conversational material in half and whilst my job is fun and I enjoy it a lot it mainly involves being in an office rather than wrestling tigers whilst holding a bayonet between my teeth.

Now it’s not that you have to hype your life up to gargantuan proportions and I’m sure he didn’t ring up to hang on my every word as I recounted tales of dashing and daring – I’m pretty sure it was more of a catch up. But when your life is reduced to six months of ‘you know, going out and stuff’, it does being to sound like you are sitting home night after night rocking and talking to a special teddy bear friend called Mr Trousers.

Of course the second I got off the phone I remembered I had been away, I had done quite a few things and was actually ticking along quite nicely and there was no need to plunge head first in to the existential crisis I was heading for. However it would have been beyond weird to ring him up and suddenly start listing what I had been doing and doing so would have doubled my allotted phone time for the month (about twenty minutes). Therefore yes there are friendships where you can pick up and carry on and I love those kind of friendships and am grateful for them but you really do need to pick up and carry on and not try and summarise your life so far. Either that or you have to overcome a hatred about talking on the phone.

Dog Suicide

I was very relieved this week not to have participated in the suicide of a dog. I was at a meeting at a friends house and their dog was wandering around. At one point during the meeting someone leant over to me and said "the dog just got something out of your bag, I don't know what it was though".

There followed a rather frantic game of 'Kim's game' where I desperately tried to remember what I had had in my bag and what the dog could have eaten. My phone, my purse, my keys and my make up were all still there so I was fairly confident the dog wasn't in the kitchen tarting himself up and making long distance calls before driving my car away to do some shopping. I assumed the dog had just eaten a reciept or something but then I suddenly remembered that I had a pack of neurofen and a load of anti-hystamines in my bag that were now no longer there. The visions of a transvestite dog now turned in to visions of a dog in serious danger.

I pretty much reassured myself that I would have heard the dog crunching his way through a load of tablets and their plastic packaging but I still had niggling doubts that I had inadvertantly provided this innocent creature with the tools to end it all. The rest of the meeting wasn't a relaxed affair. I eventually confessed all to the host who laughed and suggested I take a wander to the kitchen to check on the dog. Who was fine. And seemed to me to have a smug look on his face.

Technology

Technologically speaking it’s not been a been a good couple of weeks. Admittedly some of it has been my fault. A great deal of it has not. I was not built for this age. I should be in the 1920s marvelling at a picture lantern. Not losing the will to live in the Car Phone Warehouse. Which by the way is the most ridiculously out dated name for a shop. Who has a car phone? It’s like popping to the Betamax Warehouse to buy a dvd.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the cinema one Sunday afternoon. I saw the Time Travellers Wife, which is alright, not sure I entirely understood it – just as I got my head round one concept (oh he can go forward and backwards) another one would spring up which would fox me – how could he write a list of the exact dates he would visit her? Anyway the sight of Eric Bana dancing around in the nip meant that I was fairly cheerful when I left the cinema, I checked my phone for messages, I had none, so I put my phone back in my bag. Or so I thought. I actually put it through both handles of my bag and it landed face down on some tiles and shattered the screen. Which isn’t handy when it’s a touch screen.

So I took it to the Car Phone Warehouse to make use of the insurance that I fork out for every month. Apparently they had to assess my claim as I have claimed on my insurance before. Yes, I have, when I hurled my phone in to a pint of water when I was asleep. This is why I have insurance, because I am clumsy, even when asleep. This is why I now wish to set the insurance wheels in motion. But no, I had to wait 72 hours to be assessed. So I thought I’d spend my time usefully backing up my phone. Or in my case, merrily deleting all the photos off both my phone and my computer. Did it properly too, can’t get any of them back. Great. I was mature about it. I cried.

I awoke on Monday ready to start the week afresh. Got to work and discovered that the central locking in my car had failed and I was locked in my car. I sat there for a while trying to decide whether to crawl out the boot or fling myself out the window. I wasn’t entirely sure if there was a release catch in the boot and I didn’t really fancy then being trapped in there. I also wasn’t too sure of my ability to Dukes of Hazard it out the window. However after a lot of pulling at handles and kicking the door (technical) I could get out the passenger side. Which is how I spent the three days before I could get it to the garage and have it fixed. So glamorous.

It was the strangest thing to break in a car. Almost as odd as the time that the wind caught my car door and knocked it off the hinges and I had to have the whole door realigned and glued back on.

Just so you know I drive a ford not a clown car where the doors fall off at random.

But now I have a car that opens and shuts and a temporary phone until mine is returned, still no photos though. Two out of three isn’t bad.

Facial Mutation

I still haven’t renewed my passport. Although my MP has replied to my ranty email and has said he’ll write to the home secretary about my assertion that renewing your passport shouldn’t cost the same as a new one. I picked up the forms for my passport on Saturday and then went to get photos taken. I was relishing the chance to get rid of my old passport photo as I look like a junkie on a come down. I’m really not sure what happened but I have had to put up with it for 10 years. So I paid 4 quid, followed the bizarre rules (hair tucked behind ears, face in the oval – it didn’t fit) and then got a set of photos which show I have progressed from a junkie on a come down to …a junkie who will mug you in the street with a dirty needle. I looked at them for ages (mainly in disgust) and then convinced myself they weren’t that bad. Then met my friends for lunch and they were all reduced to speechless hysteria and then one of them said “take anything you want just don’t hurt my face” so I have decided they were unusable.

So I thought I’d lard on the make up, tie my hair back rather than have it stuffed behind my ears and have the photos retaken. I was planning to do it on Monday. Then on Sunday a small lump appeared on my forehead. I thought it was a spot so attacked it, it wouldn’t die. By Sunday evening I looked like I had been hit on the head and had one of those amusing cartoon style head bumps. Monday I came to work and my whole forehead was swollen and my lump was enormous. I went to the chemist and he said it looked like a bite so gave me some stuff to put on it. When I woke up Tuesday I was looking a bit puffy so I thought I’d slap a lot of make up on. Sadly I couldn’t locate my eyelids as they were so swollen. On closer inspection the bridge of my nose had blended in to my massively swollen forehead and I looked horrific. I cried. The mature option. And then realised that I was only crying from one eye. Which amused me for a bit and then I went to the doctors. Was put on penicillin. Spent the day hiding from the world. Woke up Wednesday to discover even bigger face, one eye swollen shut and two massive eye bags. Cried again. Went back to doctor. Now on steroids. Hid from the world.

Today is Thursday and I have some semblance of a face, I still don’t have the most defined features so I am wearing my glasses so people are able to guess where my eyes should be. Sadly I am having to wear them half way down my nose in a librarian style as the top of my nose is still quite swollen. Such is life.

Of course this is the week when the person I like asks me out for a drink. I have refused on the grounds that I would have to wear a balaclava. I may be being overly vain but I am not that attractive at the best of times, I’d rather not ruin my chances totally by having Krakatoa on my forehead. Which is so swollen it’s now a fivehead. I really hope this goes down soon. It is deeply unpleasant. I hate it.

So still no passport photos. I shall have to put it on the back burner and do it next week when I have some shape to my face. If you see me tottering around looking like Bette Davis in What Happened to Baby Jane then I am off to have the snaps taken.

More Grumpy Letters

More I am thinking about writing another grumpy letter. This time the victim is living tv. Living tv is home to great programmes such as America’s Next Top Model and the brilliant Four Weddings, where brides attend each others weddings and then slag them off. I love living tv, so I probably won’t write to them as it would be heartbreaking for both of us. However I am very upset with them, so maybe when Four Weddings has finished and before the new series of America’s Next Top Model I will perform a brief boycott. A week or so, but not when there is anything I actually want to watch on.

The strop is prompted by an advert that I saw the other day. It’s for a programme called Dating in the Dark which is due to start soon (and looks appalling). Three girls and three boys go on blind dates together, but here’s the twist, all the dates take place in the pitch black. They see how they get on and then the lights are turned on. In the advert one girl is seen snogging a bloke in the darkened room. Then cut back to her chatting to the other girls where she is flushed with embarrassment and says in the tones normally reserved for telling someone you’ve run over their cat “and then the lights went on….and Sean was ginger”. Cue raucous laughing and gasps of horror from the other girls. How charming. I have a feeling if she’d come out and said in horror “then the lights went on and Sean was Chinese” it would be met with embarrassed silence at her racism and discrimination. But ginger – that’s fine. Let’s tell the world how ugly gingers are, let’s be embarrassed to find them attractive.

It’s just rude. But presumably if this poor Sean guy turned round and said “well you have a massive nose, so big it’s repulsive, what’s that about Schnozzy?”, he’d be told off for bullying and being rude as it’s a feature about herself that she can’t change. Unlike hair colour which presumably should be dyed on emergence from the womb.

I am only slightly ginger but it still gets commented on regularly. Perhaps people envy my ability to grow interestingly coloured hair. Perhaps they are just bored. Maybe I shall start a bizarre streak of prejudice against people with brown hair. Everytime someone with brown hair walks past I shall collapse in to paroxysms of mirth whilst pointing and going “oh my god you’ve got brown hair”. “poo head!”. I don’t really think anyone would take that as the brown haired person having the problem. I however would look very special indeed.

That was quite a rant but I do find it irritating. In my mind I should be celebrated (and not just for my hair colour). I have never had to dye my hair. Surely we should be mocking the people born with such non descript mousy hair who have to pay to get theirs dyed? People who have curly hair? People whose hair is too straight? Or perhaps we should all just get on with it.

Gosh that was a bit of a rant. Perhaps I won’t send it to living tv. Perhaps I should send it to the UN as a call for peace. Just call me Kofi Anan

Carte Dor

Am I the only one slightly disturbed by the Carte Dor advert? A tub of ice cream being dipped in to whilst someone sings in the background about how “you have to follow through”. Now personally prefer not to think about ice cream in the context of following through and I would have thought advertisers would have steered clear of any links between their products and crapping yourself. Then again I’ve just seen one for Canisten and their tag line is “feel yourself again”. It beggars relief really.

My real venom is saved for the utterly revolting one about the poor, badly dubbed child who “wants to do a poo at Paul’s house”. Lucky old Paul. I can’t even remember what the advert is for so it’s not even a very effective, vile advert. Just stomach churning. Thinking about it, maybe it’s for an air freshener. If so they should take the buttock clenching boy round to the family who find it necessary to have an air freshener that goes off every 30 minutes in a variety of scents. Where on earth are these people living? Next to a sewage treatment plant? What kind of smells are they producing (in their living room) which can’t be covered by opening the window or just waiting for it to go away? Perhaps the advert doesn’t show the whole picture, perhaps if the camera pulled back a bit you’d see Granny sitting on an over flowing commode or the entire cast from “All Creatures Great and Small” filming in the corner.

I used to live near a sewage treatment plant and occasionally in the garden you’d get a slight whiff from the poo-ery but never enough to have motion sensitive air fresheners set to detonate at our every step. Weirdly you used to have to pay to take a short cut through it. Slowing down to put your money in the toll was always risky. Once when driving through it, it was particularly pungent and my mum felt moved to shout “Grief Barney, is that you?” he pointed out it was more likely to be the 50,000 tonnes of excretement outside the window.

I honestly didn’t mean to theme this entire article around poo. Apologies for anyone enjoying a snack or a meal. It was meant to be about advertising. Unfortunately all the adverts that annoy me seem to be lavatorial in tone. I don’t really see the point of adverts for toilet paper- it’s not a luxury item. I’ve never seen an advert for andrex or whatever and then rushed out and bought a load.

The weirdest advert at the moment is for a special cream that stops you chafing when you walk. What?!?!?! Surely clothes solve this problem, or I don’t know, not being so fat your skin ruptures when you walk. Or perhaps go out for lunch with women who like to discuss their bowel movements over lunch and keep a handy packet of laxatives in their handbags to recommend to their friends. Lunch with the bulimic brigade. It’s not just astonishing that they are talking about this over lunch it’s that one of the non-speaking one doesn’t look up and go “do you mind? I’m eating here”.

Oh dear, I’m back to poo again.

Office Pet

I have for a long time been waging a campaign to get an office pet. My suggestion of an office dog was immediately vetoed even though I promised to leave a tap running and the teabags in easy reach to keep him going at weekends. An office cat was disallowed too. As was a rabbit, a hamster and a gerbil. I then proposed an office panda which we could call Mahatma. Mahatma Panda could live in the archive room, I thought. It would be very roomy and he could serve the dual purpose of stopping people from taking old episodes and not bringing them back. But again I was over-ruled. Where would we get the bamboo?

Even so, however much I wanted a pet I am absolutely certain I do not want an office mouse. Which strangely could be the one I am most likely to get.

I had a packet of extra strong mints the other day. I had one and then offered them around. Ayesha wanted one so I threw them across, she helped herself and threw them back and I forgot how to catch. I got the putting your hand up part but completely forgot about closing your fingers down around the object thus securing it to your palm. So when I was gently lobbed the mints I decided to use my hand as a bat and slam dunk the mints down on to my desk with such force that they all shattered on impact. However as they were all in the tube I simply put them in my drawer and forgot about it until the next time I wanted a mint when I tore some of the paper off and covered myself, my desk and the carpet in fragmented mint.

So far so irritating and a couple of days of trampling over it and running my chair over it didn’t improve matters. It started to look slightly suspect having a white powder scattered everywhere so I got a bunch of paper towels, ran them under the tap and tried to clear up. Which didn’t make it look any better. If anything adding water to the mix merely formed a paste which I then smeared about. It looked horrible. In fact it looked revolting. In fact it looked like someone had come over to my desk and been so delighted by what they had seen there that they lavishly ejaculated all over the surrounding area. Thankfully that night the cleaners came and restored the carpet to it’s former glory.

So I have no pet at all. Which is a slight relief in a way as I am awful when pets die. I simply don’t get over it. I didn’t have many pets when I was growing up as my brother had a fur allergy so we had fish – which tended to be won at fairs – most didn’t last for long except for one, the splendidly named Dazzle, which lived for years. He staged his death many times over his ridiculously long life span but just as he was about to take the swim that needs to no towel down the toilet bowl he would suddenly spring back to life and live for another decade. I also had stick insects that the school gave us. One Saturday I decided to clear their tank out. I chose to do this in the garden shortly before we were due to go out. As I was carefully fishing them out of the plastic sweet jar they called home, my mum came round the corner. Said “for heavens sake Laura get a move on”, then snatched the jar out of my hands ran it under the tap and shook it and then held it out as evidence as to how quickly you could get the job done. She was very upset and very repentant when I told her that I hadn’t actually got the insects out when she did this. She thought they were safe and sound. I wasn’t actually that bothered. Stick insects are insanely boring, you can’t even see them, and I could pretend to be absolutely devastated about their passing in order to milk my mum’s guilt trip. Nothing like calling your mum a murderer in order to stay up late (“but I can’t sleep, it’s at night that I hear the screams”).

A much loved and ancient rabbit was killed by a fox and the thought of any other pets seemed to be to the ultimate betrayal. So my pet owning ended there. I just couldn’t take the slaughter. Reminded me too much of when I was in ‘Nam.

Cheltenham.