bigmouth strikes again....

As we were driving to work this morning, an innocent conversation about the mist rolling off the river and the number of trees now entirely without leaves suddenly mutated into an argument:

Winter's nearly upon us, I remarked.
Well, said C, actually winter doesn't start until 21st December.
Really? Isn't that the shortest day? Wouldn't you associate that with the depths of winter?
No. It's the winter solstice and it's the official start of winter.

We carried on the debate after we reached the office, with C. sending me something from wikipedia, and me retaliating by sending something back from the met office. As these things tend to do - at least with me - what I thought of as being a trivial, light-hearted discussion seemed to quickly be descending into a surprisingly bitter argument. I'll never learn: just as my dad remains convinced that I used to do a deliberately bad job of mowing the lawn just to piss him off, C seems equally convinced that when we have a discussion like this, I am driven to not only to prove her wrong, but to make her look foolish. Perhaps that's the way it seems, but all I'm trying to do is to understand the basis of the argument. I hope I'm not too grudging when I am proved wrong, but I do like to be swayed by evidence. It's probably my historical training, but even on a subject I know nothing about, I'll never accept anything at face value; I like to be presented with at least some sort of evidence.

I'm the first to admit that this isn't always an attractive trait, and I know that it can have its dark side: I used to maintain that no one is ever more than 80% sure they're right in any particular discussion. With that in mind, I would sometimes chose to make it my position to push at the 20% that wasn't so sure of themselves. All this was originally intended to do was to explore the uncertainty and test the evidence, but in the heat of debate, this probably transformed all too often into a desire to push someone off their point. No matter that the other person may well have been originally more sure of their own argument than I was of my own position, I still found that I could push most people into questioning their own certainty, if not actually making them back down entirely.

I like to think that I've realised that's not actually a very nice way to behave, and it's something to be held back for special occasions. However, in even the most trivial discussion, I have a certain curiosity that compels me to ask questions. It often gets me into trouble at work (in spite of the fact that my analytical brain is the reason I was hired to do this job), and it also gets me into trouble at home.

Why is the shortest day the start of winter?
If it is the start of winter, does that mean that summer doesn't start until 21st June?
If that's the case, why is Midsummer's Day traditionally celebrated on 24th June? Is summer only 6 days long?
When would you say Spring starts? I suppose technically, by this logic, it would be on 21st March - the Spring Equinox. If that's the case, then why is the 1st March called the start of Spring? Is 20th June really still Spring?

....and so on.

These are the questions that I want to know the answers to, and these are the questions that I asked C..... who (perhaps not surprisingly) now thinks that I'm trying to make her look a fool. The thing is, I'm not trying to make her look a fool, and she may well be right.... it's just that I can't stop my brain asking what I see as the unanswered questions, and I then have a need to know the answers. If this is the start of winter, then why? Based on what? Does everyone agree?

Even as C. sent me the wikipedia link, I started searching for more answers.

It seems that winter is traditionally held to start in the UK on 21st December, and has apparently been so for thousands of years, based upon an observation of the stars and the length of the day. Meteorologists don't seem to have much truck with this, and the Met Office for one has the seasons neatly parcelled up: Winter - 1st December; Spring - 1st March; Summer - 1st June; Autumn - 1st September.

But it's all quibbling, isn't it? Aren't the seasons dictated by things other than by dates? The change of the season cannot be marked on a calendar and does not happen at precisely the same moment every year.... there isn't a clock that dictates when birds migrate and animals hibernate; there isn't a calendar that can tell you when the leaves will fall from the trees or when the daffodils will bud. It changes from year to year and is affected by all kinds of things, both natural and manmade...................

And so it goes. More or less every single thing that anyone ever says to me is run through this kind of an internal process, with a succession of questions popping up that can never be fully answered; even if they could be, there are more questions following them up close behind.

I'm not sure why I'm driven to ask these questions, and perhaps more pertinently, I don't know why I haven't yet learned when to stop asking them. I should probably at least be more aware, as I ask all these questions one-by-one, that increasingly the best I can hope for is that I don't lose all my friends by making them feel like they're in front of some kind of ranting inquisition 24/7.

I just can't turn off my brain. Like the scorpion in the fable, I may drown us all simply because it's my nature.

tell me life is beautiful....

When we were in a noodle bar the other day, alongside the bill, we were presented with a pair of fortune cookies. For some reason, C. gets excited about such things, and she eagerly ripped open her cookie and pulled out the message. It said something like, "you will receive some good news next Tuesday". The usual carefully non-specific, quasi-mystical nonsense, I thought. I would have expected nothing less. After all, what's the point of fortune cookies? They're not even especially nice biscuits. Even so, C seemed a touch disappointed and down in the mouth, as if she was somehow expecting more from her fortune. Her disappointment was quickly replaced by an eagerness to see what my fortune had in store for me. She was so keen, in fact, that I had to move fairly quickly to stop her taking my cookie and opening it for herself.

My fortune read: "Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses an appointment".

For some unknown reason, this seemed to enrage C. How could it be fair that her fortune was so mundane and mine was so poetic? Frankly, I couldn't see what her problem was and I was quietly impressed by my fortune. How the cookie could possibly know about my melodic nature...?

Perhaps I've misjudged the whole thing?

and we cry when they all dye blonde....

"Apparently," C. told me this weekend, "if you have your arsehole bleached, you can have real problems getting it waxed afterwards. It's the increased sensitivity."

I'm not sure if there's ever a right moment to be told that kind of thing, to be honest, and it took a little while for the information to process. Had I heard that correctly? Yes, I rather think I had. Did I understand what I was hearing or why I was being told it? Not really.

Let's pause here and consult wikipedia:

Anal bleaching, I learn "is the practice of bleaching the pigmentation of the skin of medium- to light-skinned people around the anus. Some white people have some degree of darker pigmentation of the skin immediately around the anus, which can be mistaken for poor personal hygiene. Discoloration of the anal and vaginal areas can be caused by aging, hormonal changes from pregnancy, diet, and other factors.Bleaching is used mostly for cosmetic purposes to lighten the color of the skin around the anus, making it more uniform with the surrounding area."

Ah, I see. But where on earth does the idea of something like this come from?

"Originally, anal and vaginal lightening was discovered by adult film stars, dancers, models, beauty-forward celebrities and others on the forefront of the waxing trend who were "exposed" and wanted to enhance the appearance of the anal, vaginal and genital areas."

Right. Beauty-forward celebrities. Of course. Am I the only person thinking of Jordan at this point?

Now, I might be metrosexual enough to use moisturiser, but that grey hair is all my own, and I'm about as likely to have a back, crack and sack wax as I am to tap-dance to San Francisco singing "Holding Back the Years" by Simply Red. Anal bleaching? I'm not sure I know which is the more bizarre: the idea of someone applying bleach to their fundament, or the idea that anyone might actually want to bleach it in the first place. How does that come up in conversation? Who tries that out for the first time? And once you've started, would you ever really be happy with the colour you've achieved, or would you want more? Would you spend every spare moment over a mirror with a colour chart? And as for the news that it renders many people too sensitive to be waxed.... well.

I put it to you: if the biggest problems in your life are the colour of your arsehole and the subsequent increased sensitivity - post-bleaching - that makes waxing something of an ordeal, then I'd suggest you're lucky not to have more serious problems.

Or is that just me? Is everyone else doing this but me?

I'm clearly reading the wrong magazines.

A problem, I would suggest, that our forebears never had. This, my friends, is evolution. Can our species advance any further?

And, yes...... I am still a little baffled as to how this can come up, apropos nothing, in casual conversation with my wife. Wouldn't you be?

our castle and our keep...

The world is in recession; banks are being dragged under by bad debt and are being bailed out with Government money; shares are plummeting; people are being laid off in their thousands; the property market has collapsed.... Meanwhile, in my middle class world, we're having a loft conversion done.

People tend to raise their eyebrows when I tell them this, and they then leer at me suggestively and ask if we're feathering the nest. Nudge, nudge. Wink wink. Say no more. At this point, I generally feign confusion and ask them to spell out whatever it is that they're insinuating. It's a jovial way of asking if we're planning a family, apparently.

No. Not at the moment.

We actually talked about getting the loft converted from the very first moment that we looked around the house with a view to putting in an offer, but for various reasons, we never got around to doing anything about it. We actually considered moving somewhere bigger about 18 months ago, but in the end settled on getting our little garden sorted - last year's project - and getting the loft done. So why now? Well, the reason for the building work is that we've finally managed to entice our Austrian friends and their two kids over from Vienna for a week in the summer. We're going to try to repay the kindness they showed us when we got married (and every other time we've been to Vienna) by taking some time off work and showing them around the country. We've arranged to borrow my dad's big car so that we can shuttle everyone around in go. No, please don't ask why my dad used to ferry my two brothers, my mother and me around in a Fiat Strada and then bought a massive people carrier as soon as we all moved out. So, an extra room and an extra bathroom are going to be really handy.

Anyway. That's what C told me was the reason for getting the work done, anyway.

Hmmm.

The work has been going on for a few weeks now, but it's only since Monday that the builders have been working in the main body of the house (and not just in the roof), so things have moved on pretty quickly since then. I've got new stairs and things.

I'm hardly Kirstie Allsopp, but here are a few photos of what's suddenly appeared over the last couple of days.



This is the view from our bedroom. You can see the door there on the right hand side of the picture, and you can see how we've lost a chunk out of the corner of the room where the stairs turn and head up into the attic. Apparently our ceiling is in a terrible state, and bows towards the middle of the room, so the builders are actually going to completely replace it. Free. It makes their lift a lot easier, apparently. It will come down a couple of inches to accommodate that new landing you can see hanging down, but will still be tall enough that I will only just be able to touch it with my arms above my head. Plenty of headroom. They're also cutting down one of our tall wardrobes so that it will fit underneath the new stairs.



Apart from the photos that C. took though the hole in the floor last week, it was only on Wednesday evening, when I came home to find the stairs had been put in, that I was able to see what the builders had been up to for the last few weeks. It's somehow much bigger and more airy than I was expecting. I was also a touch worried about how much headroom I would have under the slant of the roof, but it's plenty high enough. The velux windows are absolutely huge too, and when the rain started to hammer down onto them, I was thrown back to my old bedroom in the house where I grew up, where the partially flat roof used to make a hell of a noise when it rained. I found the sound very soothing at the time, and apparently I still do.



Look at the size of that window! And there's our missing stepladder (on the left).



The room was looking quite a lot less spacious when I got home this evening, but only because the builders had started to box in the bathroom. There's another velux window to go in yet, and obviously none of the bathroom fittings have gone in yet, but things are taking shape really quickly.



It seems that C. isn't the only member of the family who is intrigued by the new room. Minou is staring into one of the cupboards that will provide us with storage space underneath the eaves, and it's surely only a matter of time before she explores these new and interesting places more thoroughly. Luckily, she is currently finding the remains of the builder's lunches more interesting..... She's in the habit of rolling around on her back, displaying her fou-fou to the world, and as a result has been filthy dirty since the moment the builders first arrived.... the little tart. Like everyone else she meets, Minou appears to have the builders wrapped well and truly around her little paws. Trollop.

More exciting middle-class building expansion news as it happens!

I see a salty message written in the eaves....

For the last few weeks, we've had builders round working on converting our loft into something considerably more usable. Although we've had a bit of scaffolding up, from the inside you'd hardly notice that they were here at all: instead of dragging all of their stuff in and out through the house, they made themselves a little hole in the roof and have been carting everything through that. Simple. Given that one builder we had round to quote for the job told us that we might as well move out for six weeks because it was such a dirty job, this has been quite gratifying, and it's been no surprise that these guys came so highly recommended. Apart from the mysterious disappearance from the house of our stepladder, we've otherwise been able to watch in undisturbed comfort as our roof is transformed above us. Apart from the scaffolding and the piles and piles of stuff appearing in the skip outside the house, the only visible change initially was the arrival of two huge Velux windows. Not only did they give the outside of the house a new look, but thanks to a small hole that the builders made in the ceiling where they're going to put in the new stairs, we have been able to see brilliant sunshine streaming down from what had previously been an extremely dark and inaccessible loft.

All good things come to an end though, and as of the back end of last week, when a plumber made a few last adjustments, the builders were ready to break through into the house proper. C. was quite excited by this: one of the drawbacks of having the builders coming and going using the scaffolding has been that we haven't actually been able to see any of what they've been doing up there, and this is - for some people, anyway - a bit frustrating. All those changes happening and you don't get a chance to have a good nosey around and to watch what's happening for weeks. It didn't bother me at all, but I get the feeling that curious homeowners have caused these builders trouble in the past, and so they've always been very careful at the end of each day to make sure that they seal up the roof properly and take away their ladders so that all temptation to clamber up and have a peek is removed and, with it, all danger of having a clumsy homeowner put their big feet through their own bedroom ceiling.

C's been climbing the walls - metaphorically, at least - in her eagerness to have a look at what's going on up there. When the Velux windows were first put in, she kept wandering down the street to see what she could see of the new attic room through them. Not much, as I discovered when she dragged me down the street to see for myself. It probably goes without saying that she was very much looking forward to a hole being made in the ceiling, as it might give her a chance to see what was going on up there.

The hole, when it finally came, was initially only a small, trapdoor sized, incision in the ceiling of the hallway just outside our bedroom. Still wary of inquisitive homeowners, the builders made sure that they covered it each evening with a bit of wood..... that they screwed on. C. was away in Paris all week, but I wasn't really bothered and just left them to it. What was the big hurry to see the progress I knew what happening up there? I was more than happy to wait until the stairs went in. Others, it turns out, were less patient, and I got home from a swim that Friday night to find C. bouncing around the house with glee. Apparently she'd been initially frustrated by the screwed down cover to the hole, but had discovered that her hand was small enough to creep up past the cover and into the space beyond. Naturally, once she had realised that, sticking her hand up holding a camera was only moments away, and now she was hugely excited about showing me the resultant pictures.

Mildly curious, I had a look.... and I can tell you that, unsurprisingly, our new attic room currently looks like an unfinished room. Given that it used to be a horrible, dark, dirty attic, this is definitely progress.... but there's still some way to go yet. C. however was excited enough to point out to me where the new storage cupboards were, how light it was, how spacious it looked and, and this was her favourite bit, the solution to the mystery of where our stepladder had got to. There it was, leaning against the wall at the back of the new attic room.

"I reckon they must have put that there to stop us using it to try and get into the roof though the access hatch". C. had obviously been giving this some thought.

I glanced over at the new hole in the ceiling and at the gap where she had pushed her hand through to take the photos. It was at least 3 meters up in the air.

"So how did you take those photos then? How did you get your hand all the way up there?" I asked.

C. looked over and saw the other, much bigger, stepladder that the builders had left leaning against the wall underneath the opening and which she must have climbed up in order to get her hand up into the roofspace. Her face fell.

"Oh" she said, somewhat crestfallen.

She's a clever girl, that one, but sometimes.......honestly.

The stairs go in tomorrow, so who knows how excited she'll be when she gets back home this Friday.......

a room is still a room....

My wife informed me the other day that I would be on my own this weekend because she is going home. It's an odd turn of phrase, isn't it? We've lived together for something like eight years, and we've been in the same house together for a little over six of those years... and yet when she goes to visit her mum and dad in France, she says she's going home. She hasn't lived there for fifteen years or so, and it's not really the house that she grew up in, but it's still home; it was the place her parents were living when she moved out.

Home. I'm not really sure what that means. I was born in Northampton and my parents lived in the same house a few miles outside that town for something like thirty-four years before they moved last year. Does that mean I should consider Northampton my home town? Did I think of that old house as my home? Was I sorry when my parents moved down the road? Not really.

Someone once told me that they thought I had a Northampton accent. If that's true, then I have absolutely no idea how I picked it up. My dad is from Plymouth and my mum is from Essex and I was born in Northampton General for the simple reason that both my parents were working there and living just by the hospital. The worked in the hospital itself, actually. Neither has an accent of any description, as far as I can tell, and anyway, I don't even know what a Northampton accent sounds like. I hardly picked one up by osmosis from the locals either - I was sent away to boarding school when I was seven years old. Although I suppose I technically didn't leave home for another eighteen years, when I finally finished University, to all intents and purposes, from the age of seven, I was spending more than thirty weeks of every year living somewhere completely different: at school until I was eighteen, then as an undergraduate at University for three years, and finally as a postgraduate for another twelve months. In that time, home was probably still near Northampton with my parents, but you were far more likely to find me in, successively, Brackley, Rugby, Coventry, Leamington Spa, Venice or York*

Northampton has never felt like my home town, it was just where I was born. Even the house that I called home wasn't where I spent the majority of my time or near where my friends were; it was just where my parents lived and where I spent my holidays.

I moved to Nottingham on the day that Princess Diana died in 1997, and I've lived here ever since. That's more than a decade now, and certainly the longest I have ever solidly lived in one town in my whole life. Since January 2003, I've even lived in the same house (I can remember painting the skirting board of the dining room on the day that Hans Blix revealed to the world that he had not been able to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq).

Does that make Nottingham home? I suppose the fact that my parents have moved out of the house I grew up in helps clear things up a bit, but is Nottingham now my home town?

Home. It's just a word, isn't it?

* One of the great advantages of buying a house has been finally being able to fill in a form without needing to try and remember about twelve different addresses: I've now lived in one place for long enough that I only need to remember a couple.

we'll have the life we knew we would....

So, anyway. Where was I?

Ah yes, Bath.


The Angels climb Jacob's Ladder on the front of Bath Abbey

We spent Friday night at the wedding venue. The place itself was nice enough, nestled alongside a pretty river and basking in the autumnal sunshine, but the room was little more than something you might find at a university hall of residence, with a posh sink built on. For £90, I was expecting something a little nicer, to be honest. Still, I tried to make up some of our losses for the night by making damn sure that we took both packets of rolos, all of the shortbread biscuits, the mini packet of fruit pastilles and all of the teabags and sachets of coffee. That little haul probably recouped - what - a couple of quid back? Way to stick it to The Man, eh?

We said our farewells to the wedding party (with an unusually warm hug from my dad, showing that that rioja the night before had been an excellent investment) and headed off into Bath and the rather more luxurious accommodation that would be lying in wait for us there. First things first, though, and we made a small detour to Shepton Mallet to pay our respects to the Mulberry Factory Outlet. Now, I can generally take or leave these things. I had an idle hope that I might finally find the decent leather belt that I have been seeking for the best part of two years, but I wasn't expecting to come out with hundred of pounds worth of leather goods..... and we didn't. C. already has a rather nice Mulberry bag, and she supplemented this with nice cardigan for the office, but otherwise I wasn't that impressed. The menswear in particular looked like an Italian designers interpretation of "Classic English Design", but had unwisely decided to add little extras like a real fur lined hood. Not good. I picked up a basic wallet, but otherwise spent the rest of our time there marvelling at the people shopping there. Now, as I was soon to discover, Bath is posh. In fact, I've rarely been to a town more full of toffs... many of them a little bit dirty and disheveled and driving the kind of antique Volvos that only the truly wealthy own. If the area is posh, imagine the kind of people that find their way to the Mulberry factory outlet. If Bath is posh, then the clientele at Mulberry are quintessence of posh. From the awful, floppy-haired public schoolboys with their Paris Hilton-alike girlfriends, to the more mature ladies with headscarves and their outsized designer sunglasses. Awful, and actually fairly rude. As I'm sure you know, posh people have no understanding of body space rules and will think nothing of pretty much walking through you on their way to a bargain handbag.

We stowed our meagre bag of purchases in the car, tickled the friendly cat in the car park, and then made our merry way to our hotel just outside the town centre in Bath. Now, this was more like it. My initial search for a room had revealed that Bath was busy that weekend and that most of the mid-range, reasonable hotels were completely full. Essentially, we used this as a shameless excuse to book ourselves into a 5 star spa hotel just outside the town centre. It was a little more than I would usually pay for a room, but what the hell, C can afford it.....

It looked promising as we pulled through the gates and into the wooded driveway, and I wasn't at all surprised to see a concierge and several porters, all suited and booted and desperate to try and prise my bags from my hand. We were served by the Reception Manager at the check-in desk, and were looking forward to checking out our room.

"Oh, this seems to be a twin room."
The Reception Manager bit his lip for a moment before continuing. "No problem."
He continued tapping away on his computer for a moment and then rather apologetically informed us that he had found us another room, but it wouldn't be ready for us to use until 3pm. Not a problem for us, as we were popping into town anyway.
"I've put you in the Imperial Suites".

Whatever. I didn't think anything more of it until we returned to the hotel later on in the afternoon to make use of the spa facilities before dinner. We were shown to our rooms by one of the porters. Yes, rooms. The suite we had been put in was probably bigger than the entire ground floor plan of my house. We had two huge flatscreen tvs, a lounge, a massive bathroom and a comfortably spacious bedroom with an enormous bed.
"Would you like champagne and canapes?"
Er... yes?
"I'll have your butler bring them through for you."

Our butler?

Yes, that's right: we had a butler.

Now this is living.

Did I mention the butler?

To be honest, I had absolutely no idea of the etiquette involved here. Does one tip, or is that vulgar? What does he do, exactly? If it rains, would he walk beside me, holding an umbrella over my head?

As it turns out, what he mostly does is be available at our beck and call for the duration of our stay. If we should so desire to beck and call him... which as it turns out, we didn't really, although he did book us a cab.

I had a private education, but even that proved inadequate training for what to expect. That afternoon, I was sat in the jacuzzi at the hotel spa, just relaxing, when the butler came in with another member of staff, he was clearly a man on a mission, and he knocked at a closed door and patiently waited for it to open. He stood there for a while, and it suddenly dawned on me that he was trying to catch my eye. I looked up, and he sort of nodded/half-bowed to me. From my position, wearing only a pair of trunks and sitting up to my neck in warm, bubbling water, I could only really nod back. This seemed to satisfy him, and he went about his business.

What a job. He must spend almost every day of his working life trying to explain to idiots like me what a butler actually does and what we can ask him to do to make our stay more comfortable.

Bath itself is a beautiful town, in fact, it's a UNESCO world heritage site, and is stuffed to the gills with interesting things to look at: there's beautiful Georgian architecture everywhere, a beautiful airy Abbey, lovely parks, a couple of nice bridges, a top class rugby team and lots and lots of shops. You know you're in posh town when you see that almost all of the sports shops in the town centre sell things like hockey sticks, squash rackets and rugby shirts, and there's a distinct absence of those awful pile it high, sell it cheap polyester leisureware shops that have slowly taken over the rest of the country. Only to be expected in a town like this where the rugby club is very much the modern heartbeat of the city, with the ground right next to the river in the town centre. I celebrated this by buying myself a pair of proper cotton rugby shorts. The pair I have are now some ten years old and rather the worse for wear, but I hadn't been able to replace them. Proper town. Proper sport shops.

As you might expect from a town this splendid, the city centre thronged with tourists. Unlike other towns like this - York, for one - Bath has managed to stay just the right side of twee. They're clearly proud of all of their heritage, but not so much that they feel the need to sell lots of tea towels and doilies displaying it. Instead, alongside your normal high street shops, there's a pleasing selection of smaller boutiques and street stands. I didn't really buy anything (I'm not sure the new Kings of Leon album counts), but C. bought herself a nice basque style t-shirt (curses. it's a man's t-shirt and I was rather hoping it would fit me...) and also a rather natty Luis Trenker Gatsby cap. Actually, I was quite struck by how much of a Swiss / Austrian alpine connection Bath seemed to have: as well as a Luis Trenker boutique (with a very boozy and cheerfully over-familiar lady behind the counter), there was a strudel cafe and a shop where you could buy lederhosen and cuckoo clocks and things like that. Weird, and not the first thing that springs to mind when I think of Bath.



I know that my love of monumental architecture probably renders this a redundant statement, but I was quite taken with the Abbey. It's not the most beautiful building to look at on the outside, but it has the most enormous windows that mean that the interior is extremely airy. Perhaps it needed to be: in the middle ages, the Abbey was famous for not having enough burial space for all of the dead, and graves that should have been left sealed for longer were frequently opened to squeeze more bodies in. The result? A distinct and lingering smell of decaying flesh. Nice, eh? One legacy of this is that almost every available surface in the Abbey interior is covered by a memorial plaque of one kind or another. Well, I find this kind of thing interesting anyway.



Beautiful vaulting too.

The one thing that will stay with me above all the others about the Abbey is the sculpture of Jacob's ladder that adorns the facade on the West End. As you can see from the pictures above, this consists of a ladder (one on either side of the main door), with angels climbing up and down. The thing that absolutely makes this for me is the fact that the angels descending are coming down head first, and they look incredibly sinister, bringing to mind Bram Stoker's description of Dracula scuttling head first down the walls of his castle.... not the image that the sculptor had in mind, I shouldn't wonder. I marvelled at it all the way through the delicious bagel that I had for my lunch on sunday. I've never had a better bagel, actually, and it was perhaps even a little tiny bit better than the delicious traditional pasty I had for my lunch in more or less the same spot on Saturday. I do like my food, you know. I never quite got round to a Sally Lunn though, although the fudge isn't much to write home about.... and I could also have comfortably done without those tone-deaf posh idiots with the out-of-tune guitars whining along to "Hey There Delilah" and "Scar Tissue" as I tried to enjoy a coffee in the beautiful sunshine. Pah! (actually, they were so dreadful that they were almost entertaining... every note they missed brought those of us sat outside Ben's Cookies closer together as we winced at each other).

There seemed to be lots of nice looking restaurants, but a spot of internet searching a couple of weeks before had led us to try an Italian place called Aqua. Mmm. Simple and delicious. I started with a beef carpaccio, moved onto some linguine with clams, mussels and chili, and finished with some ice cream and a fragrant dessert wine. All very reasonably priced and expertly served... although I do think that perhaps I should have tipped the girl on the table just next to ours, as she provided such good entertainment value throughout the meal.

"Did you have a scallop in that starter?"
"No?"
"Neither did I. That's not a prawn either, it's a langoustine."
"So what?"
"Get me a menu. The menu says it's prawn with scallops. That was definitely white fish, and white fish is cheaper than scallops."
"Right"
"We should say something, except we've undermined our position by eating the whole lot. Maybe we should still let them know that we're onto them... Order another bottle of wine will you, and get me a menu..."

....and so on, for the entire meal. She was absolutely determined to complain, or at least to not enjoy herself on her meal out with her poor, poor boyfriend. I thought she was hysterical.

So, a nice comfortable night's sleep, a run alongside the canal through the rolling mist, and then back home... although not before C. insisted that we wait at the main reception desk after checking out so that she could have a word with the Reception Manager. As we'd been checking out, we'd seen a couple of people complaining. Both had the demeanor or people who were moaning without much cause, and one appeared to be agitated because he had made a mistake over his ability to pay the bill with -- oh the shame! -- Tescos Clubcard Vouchers. This man rudely insisted that the reception manager, who had done absolutely nothing wrong, write him a letter so that he could try and claim his money back. We waited until this letter had been produced, before C. was able to tell this man how much she had enjoyed her stay and how the hotel staff had done absolutely everything they could to make our stay as comfortable as possible. Apparently she's stayed in three other hotels in this chain, one in Moscow and one somewhere else glamorous sounding (tough life, eh? This was my first), but in her opinion, this one had been by far the best. I think she made the poor man's day. That's my girl. Lovely hotel though. You'd need £600 to stay in our suite (apparently! I know!), but if luxury is what you're after.... A good weekend.

Enough about Bath already. What is this? Some kind of personal journal?

un mosquito....

"....to which genus of mosquito?"

Paxman was already more than halfway through the question by the time we had changed channels.

"Anopheles," I said triumphantly.

The students were bemused and were only able to come up with "erm, Yellow Mosquito?".

"Nooooo," said Paxman, "Anopheles".

I was quite chuffed at that. We'd caught less than half of the question - and it was a difficult question too - and yet I'd come up with the correct answer. None of those clever minds from Southampton University had known the answer to that, and they'd had the advantage of hearing all of the question.

C. was less impressed.

"How many other genus of mosquito can you name?"

And thus was the bubble of my own self-satisfaction punctured before it had really had a chance to inflate. I ask you, there can't be all that many people who can name a single genus of mosquito... hell, C herself couldn't name a single genus of mosquito.... and yet she knew me well enough to know that I might not know more than one.

The fact that it was the right one was neither here nor there.

Pub quiz tonight. Well, you have to use your brain for something during the working week, don't you?

sk8er boi....

After a long day at the office today, I managed to get home with just enough of the evening sunshine left to go out rollerblading with my wife.

Yes, I am aware of the ridiculous, giraffe-on-skates, bambi-on-ice images that the very thought of this no doubt conjures up in your mind, because the same thought occurred to me for every one of the two thousand one hundred or so seconds that I was on those skates. I can skate a bit, I suppose, but I just haven't done so for about five years. C. loves to rollerblade and, for some reason, she especially loves to rollerblade with me. She was in the country, the sun was shining and we were both in the same house at the same time. So why not?

I think it made her happy, and that makes me happy. That's reason enough, I think.

Yeah.... alright then.... I quite liked it too.

After all, who amongst us doesn't secretly covet a pair of Heelys?

I know I do.

(like the deserts miss the rain)

If you'll forgive me, I'm going to indulge in a little moan now.

As I lay wide awake my bed at a quarter to five this morning, I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier. I had initially been awoken by C's alarm, but was increasingly disturbed from my slumbers by the tiny little noises she made as she got ready to leave to catch the early flight to Paris from East Midlands Airport: the shower, the last minute packing, the phone call to the taxi company to make sure the car was on its way. The final straw was when she put the hall light on and came in to ask me where my wallet was so that she could borrow £20 for the taxi.

"It's where it always is"
"Where's that?"
"In the kitchen drawer"
thump-thump-thump down the stairs. pause. thump-thump-thump back up the stairs
"It's not there"
...and then silence when she saw it sat in the doorway to the study, where I had tossed it when emptying out my football bag from last night.
thump-thump-thump down the stairs, bang of the front door, clank of the lock and the realisation that she's left the hall light on.

We go through more or less the same routine every week, and usually it barely bothers me and I'm able to drift off back to sleep fairly easily. Today though, I got angry, and once I was angry, I found it took me ages to get back to sleep, and barely managed it before my alarm dragged me out of bed a little after seven.

I have no wish to make C. feel guilty about this, but I found myself wondering about my life. My wife is away from home for between two and four nights every single week, as well as the odd weekend. I know it's not easy working away for that amount of time, and I understand that hotel rooms and business dinners rapidly become very tedious, but this has an impact on me too. I spend most weeknights rattling around the house on my own, with my Sky+ box filling up with programmes that I can't watch until my wife gets back. I cook meals for one and I stay in and I talk to the cat. I've got friends in Nottingham, so undoubtedly much of this I do by choice, but even if I was out every night, that's still no substitute for spending that precious downtime with the person you love. And anyway, half the time that there's something on in town that we could do together, we either can't plan the time that far in advance, or she's already committed to being away so we can't go. I actually quite like spending time on my own, and I think a little bit of time apart is good for us, as I often need time to decompress from work without needing to talk to anyone about it. I'm not great at smalltalk and I like being able to potter about and do my own thing. Well, it turns out that I require that space for approximately one, maybe two days per week. Much more than that is too much alone time, and for the other nights I'd quite like to have my wife around, thank you very much.

I think all of that time apart affects our relationship a little when she's back in the country too. Not surprisingly, when she gets back, C. will be keen to spend some time with me and some time at home with her husband. I've been at home all week already though, and I find that I've adjusted to being on my own and that it consequently takes me a little while to adjust to having someone else back in the house. This means that, as she gets closer to me, I seem to unconsciously want to keep my distance a bit as I need time to readjust. I also find myself feeling irrationally resentful of this person appearing back into my life according to their own timetable and seemingly, in my head anyway, expecting me to drop everything and to spend all of my time with them. It doesn't work like that. Not for me, anyway. My life goes on during the week and sometimes at the weekend I like to catch up with the things that I might not have been been able to do during the week. I might want to go and see my friends or to go to a gig, and yes, that might mean that I leave my wife at home and go out on my own. My life is not governed entirely according to my wife's schedule.

Except that it is.

The day before she goes away, she spends the evening in a mood as she contemplates being away. She goes to bed early and has often been asleep for a couple of hours by the time I get to bed. She then gets up early and inevitably disrupts my sleep, leaving me tired and grumpy the next day. She often returns late too, missing dinner and sometimes not coming back until after I've gone to bed. This means that even if she's only away for three nights in a week, two of the remaining evenings in the week are essentially gone too. That leaves two nights a week that we spend together properly.

Is that enough?

I hope so, and the last thing I would want her to do is to compromise on a job that she has worked very hard to get and is doing very well in. I love her and we just get on with it, but it's hard sometimes and just occasionally, on days like today, I feel a bit grouchy about it.

End of moan.

and always the right way round...

Our beautiful cat gave us a bit of a fright the other day. On a normal day when we're at home, Minou pops in and out of the cat flap all the time. She likes to be outside, but she never wanders far, and she likes to know what we're up to. On Good Friday -- it had to be a bank holiday -- she popped out in the early evening and popped back in about 30 minutes later. I didn't think anything of it, but when I went upstairs, she followed me... but was practically dragging herself up the stairs. There was something wrong. She was crying and couldn't walk properly. Of course we took her straight to the vet. It being an evening and a bank holiday, we had to go to the emergency vet... that's the best part of £100 before you've even started, but what else are you going to do when your pet is in pain? (and anyway, she's insured..of course she's insured)

The vet examined her and decided that she hadn't been hit by a car - apparently cats instinctively put their claws out when they are hit by a car and as a result often have claws that have been worn down on asphalt. It looked as though our silly cat had fallen off something and landed awkwardly. Given that she's a tiny bit clumsy and overly enthusiastic, this wouldn't really be all that much of a turn up for the books. She was knocked out and X-rayed, and the vet was able to tell us the excellent news that she hadn't broken anything, but had strained some ligaments in the knee of one of her back legs. Strict bed-rest, apparently.

And drugs.

It's not easy to confine a cat to quarters, but Minou clearly had other things on her mind and was content to just curl up on a beanbag.

The drugs help. They really help. Within a couple of days, she was almost back to her normal self and clamouring to get outside.

I was very pleased to hear that I wasn't going to have to try and feed the cat pills (have you ever tried that?), but I was sceptical when the vet gave me the little bottle of Metacam solution and told me I was supposed to give this liquid to the cat. Apparently cats love it. Hm. Do you know what though? After a bit of initial suspicion about the syringe-like device you use to administer the dose, Minou really did like the stuff. In fact, she couldn't get enough of it.

I think she might be a junkie.

Metacam is an anti-inflammatory, and is supposed to help Minou's knee get better. I'm sure it does this, but what it also does is to knock the cat out. Minou does like a good cuddle, but she's not really a lap cat, preferring a short stop before finding a warm pipe or something to sit on. When this stuff kicks in though, she just zonks out and wants to do nothing else but curl up on someone's lap.

Well, I say someone's lap, but actually all she really wants to do -- much to C's irritation and in spite of her best efforts -- is to curl up on my lap. The other night she climbed up onto my lap no fewer than four times, to my wife's increasing outrage.... especially when on the fourth occasion, the cat had to climb across C's lap to get to mine.

What can I say? She likes me....



Besides, she always goes to C for a cuddle in the morning when we first wake up - I think because she's a lot less sharp and angular than me and offers a much more comfortable chest to sit on than my hollow pigeon chest. And do you hear me complaining? I look across when I wake up in the morning to see my wife cuddling my cat and not knowing which one of the pair of them is the more contented.

Anyway. She's a lot better now, but she's still wanting a nice cuddle in the evening, and as my wife has gone off to Russia on business until the middle of next week, I'll take all of the affection that I can get.

So yeah. I love my cat. What of it?

just the same old rules for the same old game....

C is in Paris this evening.

Much though I love the odd evening to myself - a curry, a couple of beers, a rant about some stupid band, watching Johnny Marr perform "Panic" with the Cribs and Billy Bragg perform "New England" (with Kate Nash, of all people) on the telly, some cuddles from my (other) poesia.... well, I miss her.

So there it is.

It's not big and it's not especially clever, but there it is.

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien....

Well, how would you feel if you woke up on a Monday morning to discover that your arch rival from drama school, a terrible, talentless cow with a nasty cocaine habit (in those days, at least), had just won an Oscar?

C's not in the best of moods today. What with France losing in the rugby and then this slap in the face, I think it's fair to say that this hasn't been C's favourite weekend in the world ever.

Whatever their quarrels in the past, nothing settles an argument quite like an Academy Award though, eh? Whilst it might be true that the Oscars are not quite what they used to be, they're still considered to be pretty much the gold standard when it comes to judging an actor's worth. Game, set and match to Cotillard, surely? It would take someone pretty special to come back from that kind of a set back.....although if I was Cotillard, I wouldn't write C. off just yet.

To be fair, I probably didn't do too much to improve her mood when I pointed out that Cotillard had looked fantastic on the red carpet too....

Yes, she's got an Oscar.... but is she happy?

Eh?

Oh.

counting all the ripples on the sea...

In his first post of 2008, Andrew Collins had an idea.
"It's a new year. Time to solve the problems of the world - and there are one or two - before it's too late. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and it's dawned on me that the only way we're going to make the world a better place without having to plough through all that due process and red tape and so-called democracy is to start being better ourselves."

Fair enough. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.

But how?

He put forward the following and called it The Manners Manifesto

1. Smile
2. Say please and thank you
3. Let that car in
4. Be friendly to strangers
5. Help old people off or on the bus
6. Buy the Big Issue and give some change to the homeless
7. Be polite to Jehovah's Witnesses
8. Never swear at people on the other end of helplines
9. Never, ever drop litter
10. Leaving bags of stuff outside charity shops when they're closed? Come on!
11. Talk to people at the check-out
12. Don't swear when there are kids about

The thinking behind each one is detailed in the post itself, and it worth having a look at the follow-up discussion that this stimulated on Metafilter (if only to marvel at the idiot who thinks it's his right to litter the world with his butt ends if the world insists on banishing him outside into the cold to smoke).

I'm sure you don't agree with it all, and none of this stuff should need to be said at all, but the sad truth is that we could probably all do with a bit of a brush-up on a few of the points. Here's my own self-assessment:

good: 2, 8, 9, 11
could do more: 1, 3, 4, 6 (but at least I always make eye contact), 12
not really relevant, but yes in principle: 5, 7, 10

Actually, I reckon I could still do more of the things I think I'm alright at.

The point is, I think, is that we are all human beings and we're all in this together. We can either try to make the journey as pleasant as possible for each other, or we can decide not to bother. You don't have to be a pushover, but you just have to try to remember that it's easy to make somebody's day, and it's easy to ruin someone's day... sometimes you have the choice. Which one would you prefer someone chose for you?

Christ, I sound like a hippy.

I'm not the most outgoing of people in the main, but I do enjoy being as polite and friendly as I can manage with the people I run into in the course of my normal day... not the people I know, of course - I'm a bastard to them. I mean the people I don't know: the checkout girl, the bus driver, the taxi driver, a waitress. A smile here, a little comment there, making absolutely sure that all my Ps and Qs are in the right places... it doesn't take much. Some people will always be miserable bastards, of course, but actually surprisingly few, and when someone responds positively with a smile or whatever, I find that little spark of human interaction really gives me a kick and puts a spring in my step.

Of course, when she sees me doing this, C. generally accuses me of being a flirt and of having a magic touch with ladies of a certain age.... well, that's not it at all. I'm not denying that I find it easier to make a connection with ladies, but it's definitely not flirting - not consciously, anyway. Jesus - I wish I could be so relaxed about flirting, but I've always been absolutely hopeless at it. Terrible. I've never knowingly chatted up or flirted with anyone in my life, I don't think. The very thought of it makes me start to sweat. If, as C. alleges, my behaviour is tantamount to flirting, then perhaps I have the slightly unfortunate ability only to flirt with people I'm not really seriously interested in flirting with.

Whatever. It's not flirting. I'm just doing my bit to make the world a better place, one person at a time (two at a time, if you count me).

Anyway. Enough about me. How do you score?

good looking, so refined....

C. got up early this morning and was picked up for another drive down to Heathrow and another trip overseas with her new job. Now, I know that all this international travel sounds tremendously glamorous, but I've done enough of it myself to know that the reality of it is often rather different: it's extremely tiring and stressful, and most of the time you would far rather be at home in your tracky-bums watching a bit of telly and not eating room service in another soulless hotel.

It wasn't all that surprising, therefore, that C. spent quite a lot of time huffing and puffing about her trip as she packed her bag last night. This time though, my sympathy is limited.

She's going to Monte Carlo.
She's staying in the Fairmont Hotel in Monaco.
She has no specific role at the conference and no duties other than to attend.

Ah yes, she said, but it's going to be tremendously boring.
Yes. But boring in Monaco is not at all the same thing as bored in Nottingham, is it? You're in bloody Monaco, for starters.
But I haven't been given any guidelines about what the dress-code is, she said, so I'm having to pack loads of stuff, including a ballgown, just in case. After all, I don't yet know if I'm going to be invited to the party on the yacht....
....Oh, you poor thing, I said.

She rang me at work this afternoon. Twice. The first time was to tell me that she had been met at the airport by a chauffeur holding up a card with her name on it and driven from Nice to the hotel. The second call was to tell me how, when she had gone to check in at the hotel, the receptionist had seen her name and told her that she just needed to speak to the Duty Manager. She then heard the receptionist telling the duty manager that there was a V.I.P. checking into the hotel, and so the duty manager came over to welcome her personally and to show her to a room with a balcony overlooking the harbour. I'm very much looking forward to her next call: perhaps she'll have won big on the roulette wheel with a chip given to her with the compliments of the management, or maybe she'll have just had dinner with George Clooney. Who knows?

There are business trips and there are business trips. This is the kind of business trip where you are pushing it if you are expecting much sympathy.....

Do I sound at all bitter as I sit listening to the football on radio and sipping from my cup of sour grapes?

Still, someone has to stay at home and keep the home fires burning, eh?

Pah!

to reach the unreachable star

In spite of the fact that her mum is from Halifax and her dad is from Stoke, growing up in France has always meant that C's sporting allegiances have generally been pretty clear to her: allez les bleus.

In the old days, when England used to hammer France in the rugby with glorious regularity, I would occasionally receive a phone call at half time asking if she could change sides, but the answer was always no. I think the last time this happened was in the semi-final of the last World Cup in Australia in 2003. We were in a bar in Amsterdam surrounded by enthusiastic Frenchmen, whose excitement at the early Betsen try soon tailed off as their side got hammered in the pouring rain. My philosophy is that if you nail your colours to the mast (and C. tends to wears a France shirt on these occasions), then you have to take the rough with the smooth. Since that morning in Holland though, the French have beaten England more often than not, and it's not an issue that has ever come up.

This has been a rollercoaster World Cup for both England and France, so the semi-final on Saturday night was always going to be an emotional affair. Perhaps it was just as well for our marriage that I was away in Oxford for the weekend, so we weren't able to watch the game together.... a narrow win for England that dumped the hosts out of the tournament and saw the defending champions march on to a final next weekend against South Africa that seemed like a pipe dream only 4 weeks ago.

C's dad may have lived in France for 30 years, but he's definitely an England fan. His son has no interest in sport at all, so I think he quite enjoys having a son-in-law to talk sport with and quite often rings up after a game (cricket, football, rugby.... anything will do) to have a chat with me about it.

Picture the scene in our house after the England v France game when the phone rings:

C: "Hello daddy. He's not here. If you were thinking about gloating, don't bother".
C's dad: Oh. Right. I'll talk to you another time then.

[hangs up]

Tee hee.

---

I heard on the radio this morning that one of the key reasons why Barack Obama is so far behind Hilary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination is his colour. Now, sadly that doesn't really come as any great surprise to me, but what did make me pause for thought was how some people are rationalising this racism -- and this was backed up by a vox pop from a bar somewhere -- apparently "Obama" sounds a bit like "Osama". Coincidence? Many American voters apparently think not. That's like saying that you wouldn't dream of voting Labour at the next General Election in the UK because "Gordon Brown" sounds a bit like "Incompetent Clown".

Eh? Oh....

photograph....

You remember I was telling you all about C's creepy new boss? Well, it turns out that she's actually an ace talent spotter.... C has just been promoted and her new job title features the word "Director".

Hurray!

The details of the new job are not yet entirely clear, but it looks as though my beautiful,clever wife is going to be spending a lot more time in places like Paris, Russia and Italy. Sadly, she wasn't really offered much choice in the matter, and although it's clearly a great compliment that she has been cherry-picked for this opportunity, they've managed to make it so that she feels a bit railroaded by the whole affair.... they tried to announce the job before she'd had any of her questions about salary, location and the basic details of the job answered. Ridiculous.

Still, as someone wise told her (not me, obviously...), it's surely better to be looking for a new job with a higher salary and the job title "Director" than not.

Of course, the move now means that her salary more than doubles mine. For some people, this might be an issue, but I genuinely don't mind. For starters, she's very generous and besides, we're now married, so legally it's half mine anyway, isn't it? Nah. I earn more than I can spend already (albeit not as much as I'm worth) and it's never been a problem for me. There has only been one brief period since I've known her when I've actually earned more than her anyway, and that only lasted for a couple of months, so I'm kind of used to it. Mind you, it was certainly a problem for her. For that couple of months, it really, really annoyed her that I was bringing home more cash..... (and it was only a couple of hundred quid too). Make of that what you will. Perhaps it's that kind of drive and ambition that gets you to director level, eh?

Anyway. It's a well-deserved promotion.

It presented me with one dilemma immediately though: I was working at home on Wednesday when I got an urgent email from C's secretary. Would I be able to find a high resolution picture of my wife that she could send to the communications people at her new job so that they could add it to the news story about her?

Hmmm. That's an impossible ask. C. was in Oslo, but this was clearly a delicate decision, and I was pretty sure that whatever photo I picked would be the wrong one.

I ummed and ahhed and then picked this one:



She looks gorgeous, no?

They rejected it and asked if I had anything else.

Pah. If that's not good enough for them, then bollocks to them.

loneliness is a cloak you wear....

When C is away, as she has been for the last two days, I tend to fall into a reflective mood. It's not that I sit around the house and mope, it's more that her absence tends to see me break from my normal evening and morning routine. Because I'm on my own, for some reason I spend a lot less time watching TV and a lot more time just reading and listening to music. I've been meaning to use the time as a way of catching up on some DVDs that I never seem to find the time to watch, and when yesterday's post brought a couple of packages from Play, I finally had a bit of motivation.

I watched Scott Walker: 30 Century Man.

Regular readers will know that Scott Walker is a real hero of mine, and I've written about him here many, many times in the past (but 'W' is an awfully long way off in the alphabeticon yet, so indulge me). The film is excellent: there are lots of interesting interviews with people like Brian Eno, David Bowie and Jarvis Cocker, but best of all we get an interview with the man himself and we get to see loads and loads of archive footage of him at work, in the Walker Brothers, performing some of his peerless 1960s solo material and of him in the studio recording last year's "The Drift". Amongst other things, I learned that Walker first discovered the music of Jacques Brel, the artist who changed him forever, when he picked up a German Bunny on the opening night of the London Playboy Club and she took him back to her house and played him some records. Most pop stars would presumably be more interested in the Bunny than the music, but Walker sat up all night with her listening to Brel. Well, so he says anyway.

I loved it.

Perhaps it was my reflective and slightly melancholy mood, but as soon as the film was finished, I went and dug out those four brilliant solo albums (Scott I, II, II & IV) and retreated to the bedroom for a listen in a darkened room.

It was magical and I'd recommend it. As if that wasn't enough, it also came with a free t-shirt, so now I am probably the only person in the world with not one, but two Scott Walker t-shirts.

What more could a wife ask for when she's away than that her husband stays indoors in darkened rooms and listens to beautiful, heart-rending classics of existentialism and death, all sung in the greatest male baritone ever committed to record?

...well, apart from the washing up.

And the hoovering.

And some ironing.

And some laundry.

....etc.

of recklessness and water....

I know there are probably worse things going on in the world and everything, but in my comfortable middle-class world, the clearest demonstration of man's continuing inhumanity to man is to be found in the swimming pool.....

There are only so many lanes in a swimming pool, and there are often lots of people wanting to go for a swim at the same time. If we all want to swim - and we do - then we are forced to share. If we want to swim, we must coexist with our fellow swimmers, sometimes crammed many to a lane.

In a harmonious world, a world where people gave a damn about their fellow man, this would not present any issues. Every swimmer would have an instinctive understanding of the space that their fellow swimmers required and would show some simple consideration: faster swimmers would be allowed to pass at each end, and slower swimmers would pause to let the quicker swimmers through. Nobody would have to feel rushed, or frustrated or angry.

Everything would be just peachy.

But we don't live in a world like that. We live in a world where, if they think of anyone or anything at all, people think of themselves. We live in a world where a swimmer will think nothing of pausing for breath at the end of a length, putting their arms behind them and generally taking it easy as the person behind them swims towards them. Their only concern at this time will be that they kick off for their next length at the last possible moment before the other swimmer arrives. It doesn't matter to them that they swim considerably slower than their fellow in the lane; it doesn't matter to them that they also did this at the other end of the pool too, that the other swimmer was forced to wait for half a length to give them enough room to kick off, and will now be forced to wait another half a length before kicking off. Hell no, the important thing here is that this person has the best possible swim that they can. To hell with anyone else.

If we can't coexist in a swimming pool, what damn chance do we have anywhere else?

---

Creepy boss update: C. had a meeting with the new boss and a number of other people today. C's current director was sitting between them, but new boss kept leaning behind his back to wink at C. during the meeting.... about 8 times in all.

I think the new boss likes C, but it's kind of hard to know for sure, isn't it?

you're not the boss of me now....

In stark comparison to my so-called career, C's doing quite nicely for herself at the moment. After a frustrating few years when she always seemed to be highly regarded but constantly passed over for jobs in favour of less able candidates, she's finally been getting a bit of recognition recently. The company has just been merged with another large retailer/wholesaler and has been taken off the stock market and is now in private ownership. As you might imagine, this has caused a certain amount of upheaval. The changes don't really affect me much, and actually I've been roped in to work on a large project related to the integration itself. C's position has been rather more fundamentally changed, with lines of management being completely redrawn and it looks like there's going to be further significant restructuring ahead. C's job is changing, but in spite of all of the uncertainty that brings, I get the sense that her stock has never been higher. After all, what's not to like? She's a very unusual beast in what is essentially a UK retailer because she speaks several languages fluently and is very good at everything she turns her hand to. As such, I think the new owners prize her, even if they have a rather funny way of showing it.

Last night, C. and the executive team of her part of the business were taken out to dinner by their new boss. Not only does their new boss head up the sizeable international wholesale business of the company, but she also happens to be the long-term partner of the new owner and has a hefty personal stake in the company. I've never met the woman, but I've heard lots of whispers that she's not really much cop, that her part of the business is run terribly, but no one dares to say anything to her because of her relationship with the boss. If that's true, then it's a rubbish state of affairs.

Anyway.

At dinner last night, apparently everyone was unsurprisingly falling over themselves to try and butter up their new boss and to make an impression... everyone, that is, apart from C, who didn't have the energy or the inclination because she's tired of being messed around and she's tired of the politics. At one point during the evening, in the middle of a conversation, the new boss lady stood up, walked across the room to the sofa where C. was sitting and began to stroke her hair. Not surprisingly, conversation dried up and people stopped to stare in slack-jawed amazement. C's response to this was to keep her composure and to say (in French - new boss is Italian and not very comfortable conversing in English) that she was going to stand up now as conversation was awkward between them with her sitting on such a low sofa.

Nicely done, but there's no escaping from the fact that this was a very clear gesture by the new boss to everyone else present in the room, people who had been busy trying to impress her all night, that C. is the one she has picked out. Later on in the evening she was busy telling C. (perhaps a little wistfully) that she had done so well, considering she was "just a baby".

Hmm.

Whilst I'm convinced that this woman was very much trying to make a point to everyone there, I'm also pretty sure that the way she chose to go about it was simply a reflection of a cultural difference between a hot-blooded Italian and a bunch of stiff-upper-lipped brits. I'm sure she didn't mean to offend anyone.....(except perhaps C's current boss, who is presumably very much threatened by this development). Of course, my rather less mature response to this story when a slightly ruffled C. relayed it to me later that evening was to insinuate that she was being "groomed" by the new boss for an entirely different reason....

For some reason, I also now can't shake the image of the White Witch from "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" feeding Edmund Turkish Delight, as if he were some kind of pet.