Diary of an up and coming sociopath

On Saturday I woke up at a really ungodly hour. Something like 10am. I remember not having much sleep the prior night, but thankfully I was in a state where I could actually do things like walk and drive, so when I picked Rachel up from outside Oriel, I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to kill anyone. I had to give the car a brief wash before I left, because the trees chose the last day or two as the point where they start dripping all inds of sap and leaves across my vehicle, and when your hand sticks to the door handles and you can’t see out the window properly for the goo, it’s probably a good idea to wipe a bit off, so I filled up the largest jug we had with warmish water and gave the windows and door handles a quick clean. The to Oriel, then to Warwick.

By the time we arrived in Warwick, the weather had become much brighter. The trend continued over the weekend unfortunately, which led to a particularly exhausting and hot drive home. After a brief stay at Nikki’s, we went into Leamington and showed Rach what Fopps are like, then they visited possibly every clothes shop in the town, so in return I took them to Woolworths to look for Transformers and Pokemon toys. We visited Nikki’s mum in the hospital and then I got a McDonalds, since the claim is that chicken Nuggets have been improved. They’re kind of right, since they’re now back to how they were a few years ago, when they were unimproved. I consider this more a return to the status quo, though it’ll probably get me into McDonalds’ with a minutely higher frequency than now. We spent the evening taking in the 6 best friends episodes, 3 of which were thanksgiving episodes. Pretty good, considering we don’t even have that strange excuse for a holiday here. By that time it was about 1am, so we pulled out the Sofa bed for Rachel to sleep in, and laid on it to watch some…Big Brother… I just can’t even stand it this year. I’ve just had enough of the whole thing. I’m actively avoiding it as of now. Anyway, the problem with being in bed is that it sends people to sleep, and everyone had already had a pretty long day. Nikki was the first to actually go to sleep, whether she’s aware of it or not, so soon after that we called it quits and hit the sack. God know I didn’t feel like I was missing any decent TV.

In the morning, I took Jo to choir practise and listened to my new tape, which is filled with the Pixies. I’ve been trying to make a new one solely to make Orpheus available for in-car listening, so I combined that with NME.com’s “Top 20 Pixies songs” list and filled the remainder with some good driving rock. I’ll probably stick it on the mix-tape site thingy at some point. In the afternoon, I went to see Mum and Terry, then to Nan’s for dinner. Rob was ill and Dad was off walking somewhere, so after I’d spent some time at the grandparents’, I got a chunk of meat out of the deal which is going to feed me for a couple of days now. When I got back to Nikki’s, they were all watching Buffy S4 on DVD, and being upset that Oz was leaving, again, as he does every time I watch that episode (Wild At Heart). I was much more impressed with the episode immediately afterwards, “The Initiative”, which I consider a much greater triumph in structure and content, though it does have the really awful line, “It’s like it hurts too much to form words.” Ouch.

Once those episodes were up, I said my goodbyes to my woman and brough Rachel back to Oxford, leaving her at the Angel and Greyhound. I got home and rehydrated myself by drinking my recently bought Vimto, and then spnt the remainder of the evening catching up with the Internet. A pretty crammed weekend, to be honest, so I’m glad I have a bank holiday to recover from it.

So far, today, it’s been quite non-stop. Probably since I woke up yesterday, actually. Ian and I started, at 2, by going to Tescos, after which we continued with our coursework. We had this vague plan to complete it before dinner. As we spent the day working through these seemingly randomly generated numbers, recalculating them and filling spreadsheets with the reverse engineered equations, and converting these numbers into diagrams. We finally finished at around 2am, after around 24 man-hours of work on this crappy software project management. Even more hilariously, we had originally planned to do one copy each, rather than work in a pair as was allowed, but there was so much work we realised about halfway through that there was no way we could possibly both do a full project, so we just compiled it all together. I spent 2 hours watching my Zim DVDs after that, because I realised I’d spent an entire day working and I felt like I should allocate some time for winding down.

This morning we conferred with George over the work, came to the conclusion we were al on roughly the same page, and then made a brief expedition to Wheatley to hand it in. After that was out of the way, we walked up to the comic shop where I purchased Joss Whedon’s new X-Men comic, which is great. Oh, I forgot to mention that Buffy S7 arrived this morning. A several years long chapter of my life can be closed on that subject. Much like how, in theory, I’ll never have to buy another Futurama DVD, the same can now be said of Buffy. That damn guy has taken so much of money over the years.

From the comic shop, we continued to walk into town, where I returned Nikki’s library books a whole day early. Ian and George wanted a Starbucks, which entailed us standing in the strangest queue I’ve experienced for a while. It never actually seemed to get shorter, except for when people got fed up and left. George accidently filled his coffee with cinnamon instead of chocolate dust, and I was unable to steal any coffee beans for my collection, because there weren’t any on display. Whiel they drank their coffees, I flicked through my comics, and then we spent a while figuring out if Friends was solely to blame for the horrible compulsion people feel to go and sit in coffee shops. Then we went and got another Ice Cream, and walked back home down the Cowley road, attempting to figure out where the cyclist was killed, but having our game cut short when we practically fell over a pile of flowers.

Anyway, in all this work, I’ve barely had time to play Pokémon, and I really need to complete it, else it’ll be hanging over me for the rest of my life. Then maybe some website work, which has taken a back seat of late. Ah, yes, such plans do I have.

I’m inclined to say that “Gigantic” is my favourite song on the subject of interracial relationships. I recently procured for myself the single version of said song, which is one of the few Pixies recordings I don’t have on CD. The completism is all motivated, of course, by a gig. The gig. It’s now in under a week. I may, on occasion, have mentioned it. I generally try and stay any excitement about things until they’re actually happenning and all chance they won’t is removed, but god damn, it’s so close I can taste it.

Anticipation aside, it’s been a long day. I woke up with an incredibly powerful headache brought on by a combination of lack of sleep and various other factors that made me feel incredibly disorientated for the first few minutes of being awake. Ian came and banged ont he door to check I was awake and I may have shouted the confirmation that I was rather overzelously. I eventually pulled myself together and got the hell to Wheatley, though quite why we still bother going to the software project management practicals is a mystery, since no-one, least of all the lecturer seems to want to be there. Most classes are given to Ian, George, me, and 3 japanese people who haven’t spoken at all in 6 weeks. The lecturer comes out with many statements that echo how we all feel, such as “Wow, this just keep going.” and this week’s astonishingly insightful: “This is getting tedious.” I can only assume he doesn’t care, because he keeps on pressing forward. It’s probably because he’s getting paid. Meanwhile, a cyclist was killed on the Cowley road, and I’m still not sure which of us had the worse morning.

I spent the afternoon trying to keep my thought processes relatively linear, though at Ian’s insistance we watched an episode of Pokémon in the original japanese to see how it compared with the translation, and that can’t have helped. Before that, we did some coursework, though, which got easier as it progressed and we figured out just how to order the given set of random numbers into something resembling a logical progression. I think we’re headed for an easy pass here. Seems like ages since we did any work that got marked, actually. We plan to finish it off tomorrow, which gives us way more time than we need to hand it in on Friday. Medals of valour all round.

Well, as will probably be customary for the next few weeks, I went to see Nikki this weekend. I took her and Jo to the hospital in Cov, hung around the waiting room for a while, and then Jo left with Sue, so Nikki and I went to the carvery in Binley for a hearty meal, then came home and watched the first half of “picture perfect,” a Jennifer Aniston vehicle wherein she played the one character she’s capable of playing, in a horribly contrived plot so irredeemable that we went to watch Angel on Nikki’s laptop instead.

On Sunday I did the usual rounds of people who get to see me when I come back home, and then went back to Nikki’s fixed her wayward internet connection and came back here where I continued the pokemon game which I have become addicted to. I became addicted to pokemon once in my life already, and I have a distinct memory of playing either Pokemon Blue or Red over and over and over. I decided to skip playing Pokemon gold and silver, because of how badly the predecessors had crippled my life, and by the time pokemon ruby and sapphire were out I was totally cured. I thought. Ian, like some kind of metaphysical demon of temptation, downloaded the new game and started playing it. I assume the desire to get an emulator and games was related to lack of cheap GBA’s materialising the other day. Anyway, the more he asked questions about pokemon games, the more my lust to play them again was stirred, and I’ve since clocked in a good 20 hours of gameplay since around Wednesday in the damn thing, doing exactly the same crap over and over again as I did several years before. The fact that I consider myself a relatively strong-willed adult should show how utterly overwhelming the addiction is. Quite why it’s legal for children to play this game is beyond me. As we discussed pokemon further, it turned out both ian and I used to watch it in a haze every mornings during A-Levels, when Pokemon was shown on Sky One. In a fit of nostalgia, we watched a couple of the cartoon episodes too, and now Ian’s systematically downloading them. I’ve stopped short of actually paying for anything pokemon related, though I did fish out the Pokeball keyring Josh bought me from America a few years back, so let’s hope that quells the lust for merchandise in advance.

Speaking of being strong-willed (ahem) I just bought Buffy S7 from Play.com. I was going to wait until I had more money, but they just listed it for a promotional price of £30. At that amount, I can’t afford not to buy it. I’ll just get an overdraft extension or something… Once this arrives, I can officially stop worrying about buying Buffy DVD sets. It will be complete. I’ve only got two more Angel ones to buy and presumably, by the time those are out I’ll actually have some money. As ever, part of me looks at my pixies ticket in one hand, eBay in the other (less literal) hand, and finds it hard to jusitfy the net losses made in attendng the gig rather than selling the ticket, but then you can’t BUY memories like going to the first UK pixies gig in a decade, right?

RIGHT?!

It’s making me feel a little more stupid about that Ash ticket, though…

I often suspected that the neighbours here were quite clearly in the bracket of humanity I’d consider “dispensible”. A mixture of utterly incorrect personal and social priorities and no respect for people and property. A will to neglect everything. Often, these families are poor and disadvantaged, but I tend to feel that’s a symptom rather than the cause. Plenty of other poor and disadvantaged families manage fine without raising criminals and having shouting matches on the doorstep with half the local community. To be fair, these are hardly neighbours from hell - if nothing else, they generally keep out of our way. However, even soon after we’d moved in, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to bring myself to like them - they’re the epitome of everything my personal philosophies aren’t, and no matter how liberal I might want to be there are some ideologies that are just incompatable. It wasn’t just the fact that they consider Tobacco and Sky TV a basic need - despite being poor, that the kids never seem to be at school, or that the husband is unemployed, (besides being an immigrant of suspect legality). It wasn’t even just the fact that the mother of the family, who works at the local Tescos, can’t press her till keys proplerly because her fingernails are too long, or that she has a voice that sounds like it’s been through a cheesegrater due to what can only be charitably described as “heavy smoking”. No, what really clinches the deal for me, the thing that really make me realise that this family is clearly representative of my most disliked social group, was the fact that yesterday, I was forced to negotiate one of them off our fucking roof.

Picture, if you will, the scene. Ian and I were sitting here, watching the final episode of Angel. As the action reached a climatic point, Ian asked me to pause it, and ran upstairs. I was unsure of just what could cause such a reaction, right in the middle of this epic battle, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a shadow move past the skylight. Not just a small shadow, oh no, it was definitely human shaped. It now occurred to me that Ian had heard the footsteps of these suspected race of roof people, and gone upstairs to check they weren’t trying to steal his DVDs again. I follwed him up, and he informed me that through his curtains he had seen a local youth strolling casually about MY OWN ROOF. We could see them on the house next door, climbing in and out of their window. Unwilling to leave them to it, yet unable to prove anything, we decided to sit and just wait for them to try it again. My understanding of the unwanted nuisance was good, and soon enough a young boy again walked out over our roof. But this time, I was ready for him. Immediately, he saw us. I recognised him as one of the utterly disgusting little shits from next door. In retrospect, I wish I’d had a camera waiting, to have captured the look on his face. A look of fear mixed with the reluctant acceptance of his fate. He froze in his tracks, a reaction you’d you’d expect from someone caught gallavanting about on another person’s roof.

I assumed my most adult pose, threw open the window, and inquired of him: “What the fuck are you doing on our roof?!” He just kind of mumbled back at me, so increasing slightly in volume, I expressed, (almost disturbingly…) channelling my own father to do so, what he should’ve inferred from the previous tone. “Get off now, else I’ll be having a brief word with your parents about this.” Presumably, when your parents are the utter dregs of society, this is either the kind of threat which would lead to him getting a severe beating, or be utterly meaningless, since the parents don’t care enough to discipline him. Either way, it seemed to work and he clambered hastily back into the window, never to return. I admit, I was hoping he fell to his death just to teach him a lesson, but I’ll settle for having imposed some order on his orderless life. For god’s sake, it wasn’t just trespassing, it wasn’t just bordering on property damage, it was decidedly dangerous too. Had he fallen off, or worse, through the roof, he’d have been pretty bady injured, and we’d have been there to pay the fucking compensation and repairs, I’m sure. This child is decidedly out of my favour.

As ever, wednesday comes, and with it comes the promise of lectures. I managed to be awake well before Ian came to knock on my door to check if I was awake, which was retty amazing in itself, and we were early for the bus. Early in a “short conversation at the bus stop” way rather than a “reaching the bus stop before the bus has turned the corner” way. It seemed, as the morning sun beat down upon the bleary Wheatley campus, that there might be some hope left in the day yet. There’s nothing so convincing as 2 hours of being talked at about a subject as incomprehensible as the mathematics of software project management. It sure as hell convinced me that I had better things to be doing today. I mnea, technically, it was only an hour an a half, but the man himself said - “My, this just keep on going.” Understatement of the century, methinks. Software project management keeps on going like the energiser bunny on viagra. I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t ease the pain if we were actually called upon to do anything in these practicals, but we didn’t even have a question asked of us today. When the practicals contain no practicing, I start to question why we even go. I could’ve read the lecture slides myself, to be honest. I don’t need a bunch of qualifications and the title of “lecturer” to do that.

It was perhaps an incredibly irony of fate, then, that following a particularly embittering morning of tutoring, we were seized upon to fill out a questionnaire for the University’s latest audit. It asked some incredibly relevant questions, and certainly clarified a few things in my mind. For instance, question 32: Do I get a chance to give my opinion about my course? Strongly Agree! We do one of those crappy module assessment forms for most of them. Question 33: Do you feel like your opinion leads to any changes? Strongly Disagree. I can honestly say out of all the times I’ve handed in a module form, not once has any tangible difference been evident. I took the opportunity for the first 2 years of Uni, all the times I could, to complain about being unable to access the U: from home, only to discover midway through the second term of year 2, that the feature was already available, it’s just that no-one currently employed knew it was possible. It wasn’t in the intranet documentation, it wasn’t in the computing handbook, in fact, I’m still not certain how I even came by the knowledge. After that, I made a point of putting down that a bigger deal should be made of the fact that you don’t have to come into Uni to get your work off the intranet, but still, no sign of anyone caring. I remember taking ample opportunity to explain just why their new overpriced and unreliable bus service was failing to meet the needs of students like me and my friends, and that’s because it was previously free and unreliable. They thought that by buying shiny new buses and charging us all a practically compulsory (literally, next year) hundred quid or so to use them, without actually improving the reliability of the service or disposition of the drivers, we’d somehow be more inclined to hop on the damn things. Never received a reply from that, and their response was to just band car parking at Wheatley, which didn’t work. So they got yellow lines painted outside the campus. So now students are pratically parking in people’s gardens and everyone involved is getting mighty annoyed. I just can’t imagine who thinks up these beauraucratic nightmares.

Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. We spent the afternoon watching cartoons. On Tuesday I went into town with Ian, to buy the new Ash album, and to put a cheque in the bank. I totally forgot abot the latter, though I got the album fine. Ian was still primed from the console rumours of recently to go and buy himself some console, so he was looking and second hand stuff, which is how we somehow ended up meeting Rachel. I wouldn’t have placed her in a computer game store, especially, but she was there looking for Seb, who walked past us just as we parted ways with her. I felt an incredibly urge to cry out “Hey, I recognise him from the internet!” but that would’ve just been…awkward. I was planning to walk into town, since I don’t have anything better to do with my time while Nikki’s not around, but Ian was still crippled from laser quest the other day so we just got the bus. Still, the godd intentions were there. Carve that on my gravestone, or something.

The other day Ian found a well-sourced (confirmed in multiple towns) rumour that certain WH Smiths stores across the country were having clearouts of consoles at ridiculous prices, so today when Nikki was at the bank, I made a point of having a look in Leamington’s branch, and later in Stratford’s. Alas, there was nothing, and dreams of reselling £30 GBA SPs for thrice the price vanished as quickly as they had been formed. I did get my comics and some Vimto though, which means the day wasn’t a total loss.

On Sunday, Nikki and Jo came over to have dinner at nan’s. I’d reqested beef, because I hardly ever get to eat it and because I knew Nikki liked it. That left the room quite full, since it’s only a small house, but I think everyone involved was happy enough with the results. After that, they went to visit their mum in hospital, and I went ’round dad’s for a while. Then I stayed over at Nikki’s, which led to the aforementioned comics-buying console-hunting evening jaunting around the local cluster of counties. After the recent hi-jinks stuck in roadworks on the Longbridge roundabout, we went the scenic route to Stratford, which cuts out the motorway. It’s not much longer, and you get to drive past a load of incredibly expensive houses and a masonic lodge. While Nikki was in H&M, I sat on a bench outside Lush, and just opposite where we had parked, because it was way too hot to sit in the car, and the bench was in the shade, and read my comic. After a few minutes, Nikki phoned me to say Ian wanted to copy of Ultima: Ascension, which I’d recently found in one of WH Smith’s warehouse clearout sales, so I ran off to get that and met Nikki at the car, and we went back the direct route. Turned out Longbridge is fine this time of day. Ah well.

Technically, the weather’s looking up now. In practise, that means incredibly hot. hadn’t really considered this when I made my plans to go to a couple of gigs in a few week’s time, but hopefully, the heat will mostly stay outdoors. Right. I eventually found an Ash ticket for Oxford on eBay, which is good because it means I can just walk up to the gig. I was entertaining some seriously daunting ideas about going to London twice in two days to see a band, but I’ve avoided that, so long as the ticket arrives, and I’ll be posting it tomorrow. So, gig wise, i’ve got the Pixies on the 2nd of June, Ash on the 3rd, and 3CR in July. We saw Cox’s Yard where 3CR are playing in Stratford when we were there today, actually. It looks incredibly up-market, not the kind of place I’d expect any band to be playing, let alone 3CR. Still, it’s practically on the doorstep, which means I’ll probably go, now Nikki’s in Leamington for a few weeks. There’s also a 3R gig at the Zodiac, so score one for gigs in and around home.

Oh, finally, when I got home tonight, my Zim DVD had arrived. A week later than I’d hoped, but no less awe-inspiring because of it. To think, I’ve got to wait until August to get the next…

Today began not unlike a farce. Nikki is going to be in Leamington for a few weeks at the minimum, so I’m essentially here by myself. I was preparing to get dressed, when I was forced into a confrontation with a spider roughly the size of my head. I had to beat it to death with an empty plastic bottle, though it took a while because it had me trapped in a corner of the room. It stood menacingly between me and the weapon. malevolently. As if to say, “Go on, come near me, I DARE you.” Given that these days, the spiders around here are filled with poison and eggs and occasionally like to jump a foot in the air, I’m pretty cautious about going near them, especially since I’m a complete wuss when it comes to spiders. I can blame my mother for that. Without Nikki here to throw me the bottle, I was totally weaponless until I accomplished a feat of gymnastics and propelled myself over the huge beast without disturbing it, uniting myself with the bottle, and striking at the beast, causing it to go the way of the dinosaur. By which I mean, buried beneath many thousands of tonnes of rock for 65 million years.

After that, though, the actual getting dressed portion of the day began, and I discovered I was unable to complete a set of clothing, because most of it was due to be washed. Fair enough, but since we got a new washing machine and Nikki tended to do the washing well before I was even awake, I was left completely confused as to how, exactly, I was supposed to wash clothes. I used to do it myself in the first year, but christ, I didn’t have a clue. So many settings, so little idea of the difference. We didn’t have tablets, either, but liquid, which I’ve never used, so I was again completely ignorant of the procedure. I was supposed to choose an amount based on the quantity and nature of the wash, but I had no idea what the terms on the bottle pertained to for a bunch of t-shirts, so I just chose the average amount, and things seemed to work out fine.

Great. I’ve been alone here one day and this is the kind of situation I’m having to contend with. I can hardly wait for the next few weeks’ hilarious hi-jinks.

Okay, let’s get back up to speed then. First, an hilarious anecdote, to lighten the mood.

Something I had intended to mention about Wednesday, but obviously didn’t have the chance to, was that in our…e-business… lecture, I learnt how incredibly stupid people can be. The lecturer, a genuine Dot Com failure, was telling us about purchasing law and errors of pricing. He mentioned about some guy seeing TVs were being sold for £2.99 at Argos.com, and immediately bought 1700. In fact, he put up a slide for this, showing the fact, before he talked about it. When he finally came to reading it out, everyone laughed dutifully. I can’t decide whether this makes people incredibly stupid, or patronising. I mean, we already knew what was coming, we had just read it ourselves, and yet the erupting laughter filled the room. I just kind of sat there astonished at what idiots business students truly are. The crossover business modules I’m doing are just, filled with completely manufactured knowledge. Terms like “Reach” and “Richness” which are chosen to attempt to obscure the true conceptual underneath, and so forth. I have no respect for people studying business, and I imagine I’ll elaborate on that at some point or another.

Of course, later that day, I was just sitting down to watch a Samurai Jack and Gargoyles episode with Ian, when Nikki came and got me and pretty much explained what had happenned, and asked if I’d take her back, which was clearly not a problem. We threw together some impromptu packing and I hammered it down the M40, completely needlesly because I got stuck for an hour and a half trying to go over the longbridge roundabout. Gah. It would’ve been quicker to drive up to the next exit, nearer birmingham, and turn around. The most annoying thing is that I *almost* turned off at the A452, knowing there were roadworks at longbridge, but I could see no queue and I honestly didn’t think they’d be so bad. Next time, I’m staying the fuck away from it.

So, on to the somewhat less upbeat yesterday. We spent most of it sitting in a hospital waiting room, attempting to get some progress updates from the mostly absent staff. I took Nikki and Jo there in the morning so we could get information from the “incredibly punctual” Doctor (as described by nurses the previous day) a mere 40 minutes late. He was pretty blunt with the chances and facts, but that’s better than some kind of magical fairy sugar coated version, and after that they got to work, with scans, an operation, and post-op that lasted most of the next 11 hours. The doctor left us at about 11am, and they were allowed to see her again just after 10pm. After the operation, we got to talk to an incredibly slow-speaking doctor who described the operation and various other factors, though for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, a couple of nurses were kind of hanging around then too.

To stave off boredom, we did crosswords, I proved to Nikki that skeleton crosswords weren’t imposible, and we figured out that yes, logic puzzles are a mere exercise in futility. Nikki’s mum’s operation went well, so let’s hope things continue that way. The room we were in was shared with a couple of other families, including a group of people who were in a terrible situation. Their elderly family member had come into hospital with problems urinating, and mild kidney pain. The doctors did an internal examination with a keyhole camera, but accidently punctured his bowels, which is bad enough, but that in turn caused his kidneys to fail, effectively killing him. He was being kept on life support so that his family members could see him before they switched it off and allowed him to expire. They literally flew people in from Scotland to see him off. There was also a young child in the room who was holding out a packet of crisps to people, and then yanking them back when anyone tried to take them. I was reminded of a creature from black and white, who will occasionally repeat the same trick over and over in some kind of loop. I assume the child’s neural net needed more training.

Hospital waiting rooms aren’t really great places to stay for long periods of time. There’s nothing to do, really. We read the paper, we bought FHM, did puzzles, sat, stared, the whole range of activites, and we occasionally walked around the hospital trying to figure out which lift would take us where. I spent a lot of the day looking for the opportunity to lighten the mood with the rarely-relevant simpsons quotation “It’s not rocket science, it’s brain surgery!” Proof, if any was needed, that there’s a simpsons quote for every situation. I kind of realised that one of the reasons I find hospitals so uncomfortable (besides the stench of death) is that they’re seemingly kept at a temperature that’s just slightly too warm for me. It constantly feels incredibly tepid. This particular hospital was also filled with Coventry scavs, which isn’t especially compassionate, but by god, they’re scavs even if they’re concerned about ill relatives.

Obviously I’ll leave out the details, save that things appear hopeful, though plenty could still go wrong. I came back to Oxford today, because I didn’t bring enough stuff back for an extended stay, and because if nothing else, Nikki needs me to collect stuff from here. This morning I took Nikki shopping and we shoved it all through a robot till, which was proudly announcing in an exceptionally high volume things like “EIGHTY-NINE, PENCE.” I also take back my claims that humans are deprecated. The till kind of shut down at one point, and the operator woman walked up to it, said “ah, it does this quite often” and then proceeded to give it a good kicking, about four times, on the side, after which it sprang into life. The checkout operator of the future will be far more violent than the checkout operator of today, it seems.

So, I mean, that’s it really. Just thought I’d get a bit down before I forget everything. Speaking of which, it’s quite likely that Nikki’s mum won’t remember any of the last few days. It’s a concept I find quite strange, because it makes me feel like I’m living in a limbo period or something. It’s probably quite disorientating to wake up and find the world has moved along without you. Quite like Tom must feel, I imagine, after his 12-hour marathon sleeps…

Just in case anyone is wondering where we are, Nikki’s mum had to go in to Hospital this morning - anyone who knows about her previous stay will have an idea of why. Needless to say, it’s pretty serious, and we’re back in Leamington at the moment. She’ll be here until Monday, under current plans, but they’re obviously subject to change. Nikki would probably appreciate your text messages and stuff, or if you want to ask me anything I’ll be on MSN for a while. Normal service will resume here at some point in the near future.