whycycle my bicycle.....12

Cycling to work...it's something that lightens my mood, enhances my day and gives me pretty much the only form of (blogable) exercise I seem to be able to find the time for.
So - imagine my heartache this morning when, upon arriving at work in the manner to which I'd become accustomed over the past two years, I discover the "flaps are closed" and my "entry refused"! I couldn't believe it!
Thankfully I'd left home in good time, so such a fuckup wasn't necessarily going to result in me being scalded (yet again) by my timekeeper extraordinaire boss.
But the crux is that instead of leaving my beloved horse tucked away nice and safe in the stables below our offices, I have to chain him up to a bar in what can only be described as a cycle graveyard in the carpark of the building around the corner!!

I've just been out and checked the sitch...my bike's still there...but there are three and a half hours of the working day left - and in an hour and a half the little bastards, or school children as they're also called, will be out and roaming the streets - looking for bikes to steal, old ladies to stab and concrete to eat...jesus...I might need to get a babysitter...

deathbug rampant 49er

My weekend has proved more troublesome than it was really worth.

I'm suffering frequent liquid exits ever since enjoying the barf-bee-queue at a communal fireworks display on Sunday. I pushed a burger past my lips, a potato, some cheese and onions, a sausage and then some chicken - where I believe the blame lies.
Being a fireworks party it was dark, dark enough to enjoy the warm glow from the bonfire and the sparkle and flash of the fireworks as they took their turns to dazzle and crackle off up in the night sky. It was also a perfect opportunity for me to unwittingly pick out the most gloopey uncooked piece of poultry I could've...and then to stuff it down into me belly where it would fester, battling with the alcohol already in residence. The war seemed to rage on through the night - booze obviously holding it back for some time, until I'd absorbed all the sugar. Then the chicken took flight and darted off into my system, kicking my guts firmly in the metaphorics.

Monday was tricky...sporadic bouts of chucky and anal fling. By the evening I thought I'd sorted myself out, but then came slumber...and with it the chance for my body defenses to once again become the target for a most horrendous attack!
Up half the night with a gurgling gut, reminiscent of the Wampa ice monster in Empire.
Trekking to and fro between my pit (now stinking rancid from parps born of the most evil and putrid of gasses) and the bathroom (stinking pretty much the same...apologies owed to flatmates for days to come...joy), finding what little temporary entertainment I can throughout the early hours before finally settling down to some snooze.

No work again today - this week is proving expensive...

So I guess I'll go and try to make myself something to eat. Dry toast was what people who knew best always told me to eat when suffering so. Dry toast sucks though! I want some nice food!
More tea vicar? Yeah, yeah sure - let's have another cup, why not?!

Jesus.

There isn't even any snooker on.

threehundredandfortyLUNCHthirteenTIMEseventytwo

I'm knackered. My body's suffering from something I'm not entirely sure I know the cause of. I feel run down; tired and hungry - but I'm sleeping...and eating...

My girlfriend's away...

...I'm empty

677731567.04andsleep

...the midnight hour is close at hand...and grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom...

Mr Jackson may have taken a moment to reflect on some of his lyrics of late, and rightly so. He told us in 1987 that he's bad, he's bad, shamowwwwwn! - but we didn't listen.
After four months of 'trial' we now know that, according to the jury at least, he is a completely innocent sideshow-bob freak-fest kiddy-fiddler of a pedder ass-pest who embedded doubt and uncertainty into the minds of all who laid eyes upon him, and we know that he's toast in the States.
So what now?
He's leaving the U(nder) S(tatement) of A(ll time) to 're-launch' his career in Europe and the Far East.

Hmmmmmmmm...

Is he?

Me think not.


Anyway - I don't want to write about the Neverland Perv. I was intent on trying to lay down some waffle about sleep (again). Previously I wrote about insomnia, something that doesn't seek me out quite so much these days. It's almost as if the deprivation-demons of doze have found someone else to pester; like when a gent suddenly finds himself without the baton (the mysterious bringer and taker away of success, mainly in the realm of romance and rascality) the spell, it would appear, has been broken.
Thing is, no sooner does the sun take leave of its sentry post for the day, my mind slowly begins to wurr into life. At this time of day (er, night) I want to take my time relaxing and leaving the drudgery of the day behind me. But I can't. I can't because my flatmate can hear my music through the wall in her room. She's trying to sleep - it's not even half eleven! No matter how low I turn the volume on my anti-social behaviour making equipment, she can still bloody hear it!
There's a reason for this, and it's nothing I can work around. At night, your house gets 'turned up'. A force is at work here which amplifies every sound that would normally slip past unnoticed, transforming them all into the kind of din normally associated with small children and brightly coloured plastic trumpets. Infact, if you smoke enough, you can sometimes see the very creatures responsible for these changes...sneaking about the skirting boards, carrying little backpacks full to the brim with tools, making adjustments to the entire acoustic set-up of your house. It's staggering just how many rotating thumb switches there are throughout the average four-bedroomer. Each one controls a different aspect of the soundstage in each room, which of course has to be tuned to an omnidirectional state of perfection, so as not to confuse and disorientate the occupier as they travel from room to room - for instance you don't want to hear the fridge buzzing when you're scratching about in the loft looking for your old football boots do you?

Oh. I think I've lost my thread.

fullup5tart

I've had a very boozy weekend. It's been a journey...traversing the peaks of drunkenness and hangoverdry...and I think I'm still out there...a'wandering...it's lunchtime on Monday and I'm still up to my eyes in blur and fuzzle...my skin's a mess from too many late nights and an extremely poor diet of late (I say poor, but I could swap that for liquid), my poomaker's forgotten how to produce solids and everytime I take a stroll to another office I find the walls in the corridoor seemingly determined to leap out at me, as if they're all trying to GET ME!!!

Somehow I managed to ride to work this morning - on a very empty stomach, and a pair of rather overly flat tires too. That added to the misery of my pounding head; the way I might as well have been cycling through the mature stages of a great river, a river of soup, or rice pudding, or Tennants Super, or mushroom stroganoff, or gloopey guey (man) sauce you get on your salad in dodgy overpriced Italian restaurants along James Street W1...

I can no longer put words together to make, um, sentences, yeah, sentences...screen...wash...my...apricot...bungee...

Badgers - will someone please make me a nice cup of tea?? Anyone? Hellooooo??

8Cheesecake?

The weather's been a bit iffy lately here in ver saaf. It's gone from a sweaty t-shirt dreching (well almost) sun-fest last weekend, to grey skies, hail, snow (and now rain) and knacker-numbing cold. It's depressing and degrading and that's why...

...I couldn't have pudding today.

Our staff canteen is frequently slapped about the chops by its visitors because of one thing or another, someone once claimed to have found a wood chip (floodgates to pun-city are now officially open) in amongst his pie and chips. He complained to the resident health & safety team and had the canteen's chops slapped. Now had he not been poking about in his lunch, blatantly looking for something to whine about, he would have enjoyed his nosh along with the rest of us...and anyway at what age exactly is it no longer rude to "play with your food"?

Anyway - every Friday it's Funtime Friday, and in the true spirit of lowering one's barnet and really letting go, our superior chefs throw on a feast of fish and chips, with a choice of mushy peas, beans and fried onion rings. You can have lemon on your cod piece and tartar sauce dollopped neatly on your rim should you so desire, or just take the soft option and "go veggie" with a lasagne or something equally ladylike. Basically, they cater for all, pop on a fab spread on a daily basis and even go as far as to include a rather homely and practical sponge cake-based pudding, drowned in a sea of sweet lump-free custard (made with man's milk and none of yer bloody light weight diet nonsense skimmed malarky neither). These puddings are baked by angels, delivered by the ghosts of dead popes and smack of good old fashioned home crafted baking by the ultimate master baker...

...until today. Nope - today something went wrong. Today, on the day the country was wrapped in an April freeze, the day I'm staring a bleak cycle ride home in the cold, the day Dave Steele found he couldn't upload the latest chapter in his genius work "ICON" because of unknown technical issues with Blogspot.com, our dinner ladies thought "stuff it", the result of which was realised in the form of fecking cheesecake. CHEESECAKE!?!?!

Tonight some of our elderly and frail are going to perish because it's so damn cold, and we're offered cheesecake.

I love my staff canteen, dearly, but when things like this happen I have to take a moment to weigh up what's really going on...is it a glitch in the matrix? Is it a wormhole? Is Sam Beckett going to come crashing through the serving hatch (sending splinters of wood flying in all directions....woah....think about it) with that carefully crafted gaze of despair and confusion planted firmly on the space between his rosy cheeks???

I'm not sure, but one thing that's certain is that without a pudding to warm the soul, especially on such a grey and miserable afternoon, there's only one substitute worth considering...I think it's time I made some tea.

17easy riser

It's that time of year...

I'm notorious at the best of times when it comes to getting out of bed in the morning, especially if it's for something I'm not immediately excited about. My bosses, over the years, have so far failed to understand the difficulty I face each day with this exercise - some of them have even suggested I seek employment elsewhere because of this very reason - but I try not to let that get me down, afterall it's them at fault isn't it? I can't prevent them for thinking they should stir at the first hint of daybreak, I can't go around telling everyone that that's simply to let us know that the world's completed another turn, I can't reach everybody...just to explain that getting up early isn't really that clever either.

As the prospect of getting up on time perplexes me everyday, perhaps I should consider night shift work? Maybe then I'd finally be relaxed in my 'daily' routine, albeit at night, in the dark, when most people are snoozing...
But then I could legitimately watch all that late night telly...the Korean Snooker Open and the world championship radio controlled helicopter finals amongst other favourites.

Late sleeping is a disease that affects not only myself but many others. Indeed those of you who laugh in the face of early morning lethargy should take heed, at least, from (some of) the points laid out on Drue Miller's pages for the snooze-needy. Here lie the pleas and cries of some of the bravest 'easy risers' on the planet. Well, those with internet access and a desire to go looking for excerpts concerning the inability of some of us to clamber out of bed, only to be told we're late by someone who, not just at the end of the day, doesn't get it.

Some jobs require personel to be punctual, 'landlord' forinstance. If a publican is late opening, punters are likely to wander off, head held in hands, (and more importantly in a monetary sense, 'heads held in hand') seeking somewhere else to drown their wavering strands of emotion (I know, I used to arrive late at my local, and I was acting licensee!!). It's not something to be taken lightly - very much like sleep itself.

As I browsed the wonderweb for something else to bore you (yes YOU, you're the only one reading this!) with, I stumbled across the professed genius of Sue Cunningham, certified senior advisor.


Sue states quite clearly that, "In a survey of 1,200 allergy sufferers, 25% said nasal congestion kept them up at least five nights a week." Imagine that! A quarter of all gloopy faced sniff-suffering individuals, questioned on what prevents them snoozing, said they thought it was their blocked honkers! Well I'm not sure about you, but that's certainly hydrolic nail-gunned the tail firmly on farthest end of a mule for me...astonishing Sue, astonishing.

Seriously though, Sue's no fool. She's written (but forgotten to translate from her preferred professional lingo) a rather useful article on how to combat snoring, which as I can only imagine (having never slept with a bison) must be traumatic for many a'sleeper world-wide. Actually, come to think of it, I did share my bed with a mate once...his girlfriend has had gromits fitted...after one night, post pub session, they were both asleep in bed. He rolled over to face her mid-snooze and proceeded to spend the following 4 hours snoring into her ear. Point-blank range was in use at the time.

I'm still searching for a god to thank for saving me the same ordeal. Although that doesn't seem possible within the remit of
Christi(e Ins)anity...

Anyway, I'm parched...better head off and make some tea, and properly this time.

7a

Woah

I can't post...it's too late...I'm tired.


...oh so close...