Diary of an up and coming sociopath

It’s odd. I’ve done so much over the past two days, I’m too tired to even write about it all. I’m going to bed soonish, but I’ll probably do some updatage tomorrow. However, let it be known that:

1. We got a house in Ealing, near Northfields, it’s almost a done deal, such that we’ve put down the holding deposit, but nothing’s ever certain until we’re actually in the place, as far as I’m concerned. More on this tomorrow.

2. I am 22 on the 2nd. This is not OLD. For some reason, when I was 21, people kept telling me it was cool; it was a landmark; it was really weird and yet, strangely exciting. Suddenly, at 22, people are saying “Hey, granddad, where the hell are your false teeth, you fucking codger?” I’m genuinely baffled by the logic that drives people to think 22 is old. It’s only about 2/7ths of the average lifespan, and if it all goes to plan, I’ll still be around to bury you all. Some earlier than others.

3. The town and country does wheel out the pigs, but not as much as the royal show. More on that one tomorrow, too.

This weekend marks the first August since 1998 that I’ve not attended a music festival. I mean, it’s hardly a tradition, long standing, since I missed Reading last year, but I somehow ended up at V Festivals every year from ‘98 to 2003, even though I didn’t plan to be at a couple of those. I really enjoy music festivals, and it’s something of a pity I ddin’t go to any, because generally, I don’t go on a lot of holidays and I consider Reading and/or V an adequate reason for that. Ultimately, the bands playing didn’t grab me enough to actually want to go, when I had the money, and by the time it seemed like a good idea, I couldn’t afford it. I’m not exactly upset at missing the Pixies since I got to see the warmup show, but I wouldn’t have minded, say, Placebo, or Easyworld.

Syill, having the festival weekends free has let me explore other avenues. Did you know, for instance, that Coventry has a carnival this time of year? I sure as hell didn’t. Josh, Nikki and I found ourselves in the middle of it on Saturday. At first it seemed like a slightly less shambolic version of the Cowley Road carnival, with dancing and strange music. We passed a few clans of various ethnicities or religions, but we weren’t really prepared for the group of knife-weilding cooks. Clearly, chef awareness is an issue demanding much attention, because I admit that until yesterday I wasn’t at all aware they needed any. After that, we spotted a 12-feet tall grim Reaper floating about the place. Josh got a photo on his cameraphone that I might one day have appended to this entry. There’s something about seeing a Grim reaper float above a Coventry crowd, pointing his bony fingers at people, that seems so utterly apt about Coventry. After that, things got slightly more bizarre with the group of satanist children, who we assume were the reaper’s minions of hell, and then the giant gas-mask tubing gimp, on stilts. He looked a little like something out of a post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi TV programme. Josh also got a photo of that guy traumatising a small child.

Later on taht day, after going to Forbidden Planet, we went, at my insistance, to have a look at where the old Laser Quest used to be. They knocked it down recently, and rebuilt the area, and I’d never seen it, so when I got there I was astonished to see a huge open modern-looking area with a giant bridge-structure monument. It was truly shocking, to see how Coventry had been transformed. Along with the new shopping mall they built, it seems that Coventry might actually be on its way to becoming a decent place to shop. I never thought I’d see anything like this - urban regeneration that’s actually working. It makes me feel bad, though, that Ian, who expressed serious interest in seeing what a shithole Coventry is, won’t get to see the black shit heart of Coventry as we knew it, only the polished up version. Luckily, I’m sure the suburbs are still horrendous places.

This morning, I got to download another new Pixies track, which is a cover version that’s going to be inclued on a tribute album. It’s excellent, as ever. I also downloaded it from quite a nifty MP3 blog thing, Fluxblog. Looks interesting, so I’ll keep an eye on it. Tomorrow, Nikki and I are heading up to the Town and Country festival. it’s been a good 5 years since I last went, and Nikki’s never been, so I imagine this’ll be an interesting day for us both. I forget if they have the pigs and stuff out for this, though…

It occurs to me that the (Warning! Accidental pun ahead. –ed.) oft-employed term “Graduate Opportunities” is a good example of an oxymoron. Similarly, because I have no experience, I am apparantly just plain “moron” as far as any people offering jobs are concerned.

Just got back from quite a long day out, poking about Ealing. We have narrowed down the choices of houses somewhat, by which I mean, I know there are definitely 2 houses in Ealing which we won’t be moving into. That could be considered quite a significant reduction (if you are a blinkered and insane individual –ed.)

The first we saw was quite cool, it had a huge lving room/dining room/kitchen area, and a garage, and 2 decent double rooms. The problem was that the small rooms were damn small. Like, uselessly so. No-one could reasonably be expected to live in the larger of the two smaller rooms, and it was an expensive house, so we had to pass it up.

While in the Agency, we had seen another house. We eventually go to visit it, about 5 in the afternoon, but it stank quite badly of mould inside, which is never a good start. This time, the biggest double room was huge. Utterly cavernous. You could’ve probably fit St. Paul’s Cathedral inside it. The other two bedrooms were both adequate, but again, the smallest room was uninhabitably tiny. Oh, and the “living Room” area was pretty much just a sofa propped up next to the kitchen.

It’s quite frustrating, having to find a decent comprimised between the various aspects of a house. What we’re looking for is 4 adequately sized rooms, all of similar dimensions, and then we can work from that. As it is, we seem to be getting houses designed for 2 parents, a teenager and his baby sister, which leaves one room far too small for Al, who would be in the smaller room.

So anyway, the plan is to go back on Tuesday and figure that one out…

Something we can’t figure out, however, is getting a job. I nkow that Job agencies must emplo some people, simply by virtue of the fact that they exist, but I can’t fathom how we can go into so many job agencies and be flat out rejected by them. Ian and I had planned to spend an hour or so investigating the agencies and signing up, in about 15 minutes were done, having been turned away. They want 9 months experience, they aren’t taking people on, they think you’d be better off looking at the website. Just what do these peopel do all day? The first one we went to didn’t even have any employees visible, and eventually one strolled out of the back and dealt with us in an annoye manner, as if we had perhaps interruped her hanging around not doing any work time. At one point, someone suggested we go to specific graduate recruitment agencies. WELL DUH. COULD YOU PLEASE LET US KNOW IF ANY EXIST? Gah. I would very much like to find such agencies, but it seems nigh-impossible.

The short of it is, I’ll be sticking to applying directly to companies and/or through online agencies. I did find 2 excellent jobs to apply for, which pretty much asked for my exact skillset. PHP, XHTML, it was so good, I sent the application mere minutes after finding the job. It’s almost too good to be true, which suggests I won’t hear jack shit back from them.

And, speaking of rejection, I did finally get that confirmation of failure from SPG. Ah well, better late than never, I admit.

I’m trying to figure out if the day was wasted, really. On one hand, we developed a sense of what we didn’t want and how to go about things in the future. Unfortunately, we didn’t make what you could describe as “forward momentum” with the house or jobs. We’re still more or less in square one, homeless, jobless, but now with a better idea of what shape the next step will looklike, perhaps.

Well, it’s Tuesday and the week isn’t showing many signs of doing much. On Thursday I’m going to London to see a house and sign up to some job agencies, but in the meantime all I’m doing here is getting ill somehow. I have a really bad sore throat, and it’s quite annoying. It’s making it hard to play Megaman, which incidentally, I am up to number 8 of. Productive.

This morning, I awoke to find 2 issues of Demo had arrived for me. I know most people here won’t know what I’m even talking about, but Demo is just a great comic. I could talk about it for ages, but for now I’ll have to say that Demo seems to get better with every issue. #8 and #9 are probably some of the best comics I’ve read all year. That brigtened up the morning considerably, and then some time in the mid afternoon I found the absolute holy grail of jobs to apply for. A job that wanted PHP, CSS, XHTML and SQL, for a graduate getting their a first or second job, and pays £20k a year. I sent a CV and letter there and then, because it’s almost too good to be true. It’s rare I see a job advertised that wants exactly the skills I have, and doesn’t require 10-15 years of experience. In fact, I get the feeling someone’s playing a joke on me. Let’s hope I hear back from that one.

Speaking of which, I never did hear back from SPG, despite repeated attempts at getting an answer out of them. Ah well, I guess that means I didn’t get the job, though I can live with that, it would’ve been nice to have been able to find out exactly why, though. A pity, it seemed like a cool place. At least now I nkow they exist and have some kind of history with them rejecting me like some kind of raggied doll, I do get to look at their share prices in the paper and mock when it goes down a quarter. That should teach them.

I spent he weekend not watching much of the olympics, though I was quite interested in the marathon, if only because it was actually beginning in Marathon, like the original one. It wasn’t entirely like the original because that one started with a large battle, the runner died at the end, and in europe it’s called Snickers, but from a historical perspective I think it’s quite cool to have the Olympics in Athens, and to have people running the “original” Marathon. Of course, in watching the marathon, I also found out a lot about Paula Radcliffe, who I had previously never heard of. She was going to be our big medal hope, and then she dropped out, and then I noticed the papers were calling her a “hero” which seemed a little more than patronising to me, but maybe I’m just too cynical there.

Besides that, in the whole Olympics, I’ve watched some Archery where the archer woman got annoyed and didn’t take a shot, and cried when she was knocked out as a result (which seems to be a theme with the olympics, be you male, female, or women’s weightlifter) We watched some women’s weightlifting at Dad’s, and it was pretty disturbing. Most of them were androgynous, but not in a brian molko way, more like, eastern european hormonal abuse way. Some scary stuff.

Luckily, a remedy for that was provided by the women’s volleyball. Finally, a sport I can appreciate. A sport where the taking part is what counts. Do they even keep score? I don’t remember taking notice of any. Whoever thought it up was a genius. That, however, ends my interest in the Olympics, though. Oh, I’ll be interested to see if Paula Radcliffe runs in the 10,000 metres, actually. Nikki and I agreed that she probably should’ve taken a dive to save her dignity. All her weeping and physical torture kind of remnded me of this year’s big brother, now that I think about it. No wonder she’s so popular with the papers.

Okay, obligatory “post-gig” update. As you may have gathered, being an avid and frequent reader, I spent yesterday at a Pixies gig. For a change, I took a camera with me, though I didn’t bother using it very often because I’m not much of a photographer. However, that does mean that for a change, there are images to go with this update.

The day began, sometime on Friday morning. I probably slept through that part. I left for Oxford at around half 2, remembering to grab my expensive and much-coveted Pixies ticket. Here’s a picture of Fillerbunny guarding it for me, to ensure that I knew where it was and that it was in sight enough for me to remember it.

“Here you go, sir.”

The drive to Oxford was a familiar one, I’ve done it so many times that I barely need to even think about it. Just sit back and listen to whatever radio station can be received at that given minute. There was a large smash up on the other side of the A34 as I approached Oxford, but by the time I remembered I had a camera, it was too late. I parked outside the old house in Oxford, re-using my parking permit which technically, I should’ve surrendered. The house seems to be empty still, but then, they’ve also totally removed the bushes at the side of the house which ian and I occasionally sliced under control.

I took a walk down to the comic shop. Another photo opportunity was ruined when I walked passed a homeless person who had presumably, collapsed and/or died on the street overnight. People had just found him, and the ambulance was there with paramedics shouting his name in an attempt to wake him. I doubt they’d have taken kindly to photographs at this point, so I decided to just let the assembled crowd keep gawping and not draw attention to myself with flashes and whatnot. On my way around st. clements and cowley road, I was looking out for the stickers we put up a week ago. The ones on scaffolding and a lamp-post were still there, but the one on the crossing light had gone. It was pleasing to see them there, I’m not sure why exactly, but it gave things a sense of continuity. I don’t live in Oxford now, but the proof that I did recently is still here.

I collected some comics, bemused by the conversation two guys in the shop were having - one of them had bought 7 issues of a comic worth 50p because he was convinced it’d soon skyrocket in value, which is an utterly hilarious notion, and I could tell the shop owner and his employee thought so too. After comics, I walked up Cowley Road to go and buy some Ear Plugs from boots. I remembered somewhere on the M40 that I’d neglected to bring any, and since I’m quite concerned about the damage 10 years of gigs has done to my hearing, I’m very conscious about keeping the necessary safety equipment to hand. I also bought a paper, and some Fanta, and chocolate, which I left in the car for my late-night journey home. It was a hard decision to make, as well, but I also left my jacket in the car. I didn’t really want to have it during the gig, since they can get in the way of a good time, and cost money and time for the cloak room. I decided to chance the rest of the day in just a t-shirt.

On the new and improved, and excessively huge Oxford Tube, I read about Google’s “botched” flotation and the devaluation of the degree. Apparantly, according to a new report, I’m completely fucked. The bus driver seemed unusually sarcastic; I get the impression he wasn’t too thrilled with the new buses. As part of his safety announcement he informed us that “today’s challenge, a starter for ten, is to find the flush on the new toilet.” Later he informed us a delay leaving one of the stops was due to a low oil pressure light illuminating, but after he radioed through it turned out to be software error. He informed us that “for reasons he has no understanding of” there would no longer be a stop at Palace Hill (or something like that). When we were going through London, whatever road that takes us out of Notting Hill and towards Marble Arch was closed off, and he said “The next stop will be Marble…or maybe not, since they’ve closed the road ahead.” His intercom was also picking up his conversations with the other drivers, and it was amusing to hear him accuse the BMW driver in front of being slow turning out because he was taking coke or shooting up.

Once at Victoria, I planned out my route and bought tickets. I had planned to get off the victoria line and change for the northern line at Euston, but just as we arrived, they informed us that there was a “suspicious package” on th eplatform and that Euston had been evacuated, so my plans fell apart. Luckily, King’s Cross was the next stop, and that also allows you to change to the northern line, so I just did that. The Kentish Town Forum was really easy to find (not least because you could just follow the trail of touts) and I queued up outside, just before the doors opened. Unfortunately, the heavens opened at roughly the same time, with a comedy-style downpour soaking me and everyone else thoroughly. You could probably have seen that coming after I decided to go t-shirt only.

There was no support band, my personal favourite way of doing things, though I did have to stand around for 2 hours until the Pixies came on stage. I had almost dried off when they did, but shortly after I was soaked again, this time in sweat and beer. I’m always glad when someone spills their beer in a moshpit because it’ll teach them to be a fucking idiot bringing the damn thing in there in the first place. It’d be better if people who smoke in moshpits all had their eyes burnt out though.

The pixies opened with “in heaven” which is currently one of my favourite Pixies tracks, so I was pleased. I took my earplugs out because it turned out that the sound was actually really good, which increased my enjoyment immensely, even if it meant I did waste money bying them earlier. They then went into the slow version of “Wave of Mutilation” so I seized the opportunity and took a picture of Frank. I did it blind, so I was only just pointing int he right direction, and I had to up the brightness a bit, but I got Joey in too.

“Giving hope to the balding and overweight.”

They played just about every song I wanted them to (I could’ve done with Bam Thwock, but they haven’t played that live at all yet) including a load they didn’t last time I saw them. As if to prove how much of a hardcore fan I am, but the time it got to the encore I was trying to figure out what songs were even left ( of the ones that they’re playing live) which they hadn’t already done, only to have them play Debaser. I’m such a hardcore fan, I forget about one of their most popular tracks. After the first 12 songs, I was planning to go and get a drink, but I didn’t want to leave the pit in case I missed Velouria and Gouge Away, so I decided I’d stay until those two tracks were done. Unfortunately, they were the penultimate two tracks of the first set, so I ended up just staying there. The full setlist, so you can all drool over it, was like so: In Heaven/Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)/Blown Away/The Holiday Song/Nimrod’s Son/Mr Grieves/Winterlong/Here Comes Your Man/Where Is My Mind?/Vamos/Planet Of Sound/Crackity Jones/Isla De Encanta/Something Against You/Broken Face/River Euphrates/Gigantic/I Bleed/No 13 Baby/Monkey Gone To Heaven/Dead/U-Mass/Velouria/Gouge Away/Cactus/Caribou Encore: Wave Of Mutilation/Debaser/Tame

It was good to hear “where is my mind?” since they didn’t play it last time and it’s the song which literally introduced me to the pixies. I also took a photo of Kim during Caribou, which I present here:

“Also giving hope to the balding and overweight.”

On the way out, I considered getting a bootleg t-shirt, but I really didn’t have the money, and they all seemed a bit low quality. I considered bartering to get a T-Shirt for a fiver instead of a tenner, but it was raining still, and with only a t-shirt on my back as it was, I felt like getting to the train station. Back at Victoria, I got a coke from Burger King because it’s loaded with sugar, and guaranteed to not have been shipped over from korea in some crooked shopkeeper’s effort to save money. I took a picture of me on the Oxford Tube as well, just to prove I exist. I’m not exactly looking my best, but that’s becaue I’m knackered.

“I am riding on a bus.”

The drive back from Oxford was pleasant and much less tacxing than I was worried it’d be. I was totally awake, which was something I was concerned about. The fanta and chocolate also got eaten, which vindicated my earlier tentative purchase of them. I listened to Virgin Radio’s “The Edge” on the way back, and was surprised to hear Easyworld’s next B-Side, a cover of “Young Hearts Run Free.” Especially since The Edge claims to be about new guitar music, and the b-side clearly contains a piano and no guitar.

So anyway, that’s the Pixies for you. Or for me. Whatever. Worth the money? Well, yeah, but then it wasn’t me who paid. This was technically a birthday present (2nd September people, note it in your diaries.) so happy birthday me.

I took a brief hiatus the last few days, because, well, it’s all a bit uneventful here in Leamington. That, and I made a silent resolution to try and be a little less utterly pointless with what I update with. I even bore myself sometimes.

That said…

Yesterday, I took Nikki to Stratford where she took and passed her Driving Theory test. We sat in the car revising for it shortly before, and one of the questions we did came up when she was in the exam, and therefore it’s all down to me that she passed. Me. ME. She got 34/35, which she claims makes her smarter than me. It’s clearly bunkum, though, because if I’d done my theory test when I was 21, I’d probably have got that amount too. Damn technicalities. I admit, though, she is smarter now than I was 4 years ago. There is also the small matter of the hazard perception thing, which I didn’t have to do, back in the simpler time in which I took my theory test. I tried to follow this when she was doing one online, but I didn’t have a clue. As near as I can tell, it involves watching very grainy videos for signs of anything which can be called a hazard, for instance, a plane flying overhead which might soon drop inexplicably out of the sky, or a dimensional rift opening up in the road. After discussing it further, I discovered that by “hazard”, it means “idiot” - y’know, as in “that idiot who just tried to overtake me” or “that idiot who just stepping into the road without looking.” It’d have made much more sense initially to me had it been called the “Idiot Perception Test.”

Speaking of idiots, listening to the radio earlier, we heard that some genius has come up with a plan to house the unemployed with the elderly, “to take care of them for free room and board which searching for a job”. In reality, that can be rephrased as “to steal their money and keep them living under a constant blanket of fear while avoiding getting a job.” I’m certain it’s not just my total lack of faith in humanity which causes me to think this scheme would be a total clusterfuck of battered pensioners and the mooching jobless. Meanwhile in Birmigham a 13 year old avoided prison after holding up a newsagent with a sawn off shotgun for some sweets and cigarettes. It’s an unpopular viewpoint, but I’m beginning to wonder if a few years of conservative rule might not brutalise the people who need it… I’m not wondering enough to actually vote or anything, but you get the idea.

I’ve been silent on this issue long enough. Something needs to be said. Not least to relieve my mounting boredom…

Now, I don’t want people to get the impression here that I have some kind of vendetta against Mozilla, the open-source movement, or other such fads. I am more than aware that Mozilla’s rendering engine is great, and I go out of my way to make sure my sites look correct in IE and Mozilla-based browsers. My problem, here, is in no way with Mozilla.

However, I really can’t understand this whole firefox movement which has become obsessed with tabbed browsing. People seem to like the one-taskbar item for multiple pages situation which they’re offered, it’s something that they frequently claim is positive reason to use firefox over IE. I don’t want to sound foolish, but the last time I checked, Windows XP could also do exactly that, with its grouping feature. A feature which enraged me so much, I turned it off, because it was fucking horrendously shit. A feature invented by Satan himself and coded by one of his lesser minions, I’m sure of it. Adaptive interfaces is a whole other rant, actually. Despite the fact XP has been offering what is essentially tabbed browsing with XP’s grouping, a whole bunch of people have become obsessed with Firebird’s ability to tabbed-ly browse.

So, okay, admittedly, XP’s grouping feature was crap. Maybe Firetapir does it better. So, and this is kind of my point here, why the hell are people attracted to tabbed browsing anyway? It’s only adding an extra layer of abstraction to what needs to be a simple process. Okay, you can only read one website at a time, but various transactional issues mean that having several open at once is a far better way of doing things. Very few people seem to browse exclusively while online, too, I usually have mIRC open, people have their mail programs, MSN, whatever. Using tabbed browsing in Firekomodo merely ensures that, should I be reading IRC, the probability that I can get back to a page I was using in one click is decreased by a significant percentage. More clicks means more time, and as we all know, the theory of monetary relativity states that time = money. Ergo, tabbed browsing is costing you people money.

So, of course, the other argument that people like to fall back on is the horribly blatant lie that firekookaburra is quicker. I don’t know what the hell you people are smoking. My PC isn’t the fastest in the world, but it takes as long to open a new tab in firelobster as it does to open a new IE window, and that’s not counting the fact that firejackalope had to be launched in the first place, where IE is resident as part of the OS. That’s near-instant loading times. Still, maybe on decent PCs, that’s not an issue.

Opera, back in the day, met with almost entirely indifferent results when it introduced its MDI web browser, so when we couple that finding with XP’s grouping feature going almost entirely ignored, I am forced to conclude that the thing people like about tabbed browsing is, er, the tabs. Which is fine, as long as you tabbed browsing psychopaths keep in mind that you’re all fucking nuts and wrong, many times over.

That’s it then. I’ve left Oxford for the last time. Well, 28 Morrell Avenue, at least, I’m relatively certain that at some point in life I’ll return to live in Oxford, since it’s a pretty nice place. Small enough to walk around, yet large enough to be diverse. I would not be against living there in the future. However, that day, should it ever come, is far off. Far, far off. Foor today, focus was placed on actually leaving Oxford.

But first, yesterday. Friday the 13th. That didn’t actually affect anything, now that I think about it, but still. Yesteray we finished packing and tidying (more or less) and had a brief chat with the crooks at Isis. We seem to have sorted out everything that needs it there, for now. Terry came up in the van and took a load of furniature home, and then after he’d gone we walked down to the comic shop and I got the latest batch of releases. On the way, I stuck some of the stickers I bought to various things. These stickers read simply “Trapped in sticker factory - send help” and I stuck a few of them about Oxford in order to add a touch of surreality to people’s days, or at least, I hope it does. Speaking of which, when we walked down to Isis, we spotted, written on the pavement, the missive: “CHALKING IS THE PREROGATIVE OF THE ACTIVIST” A powerful message, I’m sure, but it doesn’t really mean anything, nor was it spelt correction. That’s their misspelling, not mine.

Later on, we got fish and chips for dinner. We had no place to sit and no way of cooking any food, so there seemed little reason to try and cook any of the food we pretty much didn’t actually have left anyway. I ran into the co-op and got two mint crisps, and it made me wish I’d taken the opportunity to buy more while I was so close to a place that sold them. Ah well. I went to bed reasonably early.

Saturday morning, Nikki and I packed up the last stuff in our room, chucked out all the crap we had no room for, and then loaded it up. We got to vacuum seal the duvet, which turned out great - we now have a kind of ultra-dense duvet/rock/carbonite thing which is quite small but still strangely heavy. Vacuum sealing certainly is the future. I took Ian and his stuff to George’s place, and meanwhile Nikki began her drive back, since she’s learning to drive again. Reminds me of the time I drove to Worcester, before I had my license. After dropping off Ian and his stuff, I drove back with all my stuff crammed into the car. It’s often a worry to consider that were I to crash, not only would my car be destroyed, but most everything I own. In fact, it’s best not to think about it at all.

Mum helped me unpack my stuff, and with nothing else left to do for the day, I went up to Nikki’s, realised Id forgotten the CDs I was supposed to be taking, brought he back here, gave her the CDs, took her home, and then went to meet Josh, Al, Jo and Si at the pub. We spent an hour or two at the expense of about £3 each playing ont he quiz machines, and basically, we lost all our money, but in a fun way, so it’s alright. At Josh’s we watched some live Cure concert, and it has to be said that, like Frank Black, Robert Smith has really put on masses of weight these days. He looks like an old woman. He should probably give up his goth makeup because it no longer works.

Well, that’s that then. 3 years of Oxford living comes to an end. Hopefully a few years of London living can soon begin.

We spent most of today cleaning up the house and packing up our stuff. It’s almost all done by now, and I expect I’ll comfortably get everything home. The cleaning was primarily to prepare the house for the impending inventory. The first inventory, taken when we moved in, involved some guy walking around every room of the house and writing such insightful comments as “pencil marks on door” and “3 marks on walls.” Imagine, then, our surprise, when a man we could loosely categorise as “a hobo” turned up to do the inventory this time. He stank of beer and cigarettes, and just kind of followed us around the house looking confused, ticking boxes seemingly at random. Apparantly, we passed with flying colours, which means that in about 8 weeks we might get a deposit back, or something, though there’s still time to be gouged.

We should’ve realised things weren’t going to go well when Isis phoned us in the early morning and requested that we allow the inventory to be pushed back an hour because they couldn’t fit us in. I pointed out we had people here who had driven for hours to get here and who wanted to get back as soon as possible, and it was suggested that we have the inventory on another day then, which kind of misses the point entirely. If there’s one thing Isis can be relied upon, it’s to totally miss the point.

We got it done, though. Sure, the back wall of the kitchen is a different shade of yellow to the rest of the room, and sure, there are some suspicious looking marks where we pulled the paint off the skirting board by accident and painted over it, but generally speaking we’ve left the house in a condition far better than we got it in.

Yesterday, I finally bought the pixies tickets. Cost £120 for 2, and the plan is to keep 1 and sell the other, and the one I keep will be my birthday present off Mum. At least the turmoil is over. The tickets should be arriving at home tomorrow, so finger’s crossed. Of course, after winning the tickets on eBay, I was then rewarding through the medium of scrubbing the toilet. Quite the fall from grace.

Part of the cleaning process involves chucking stuff out. People keep saying that moving out of the house is the end of an era, but I’m not so sure, to me it was no different from halls, in the “home” sense. One could more insightfully label the disposal of my first ever saucepan the end of an era, since /that/s sentiment. That saucepan hung on by a thread for the last few months (the handle of it, I mean) and having finally cast it into the garbage, it truly heralds a new era of saucepan ownage. I should get upgraded versions. Tangentally, it also marks the first partial set of saucepans I’ll ever own, since the one I chucked away also had two pan-brothers, of differing sizes, which now represent two thirds of a set. I remember quite vividly that, over the years, we never seemed to have a full set of pans at home, just the intact parts of other sets, so now it feels correct to have an incomplete set of my own.

Reading this back, I’m reminded that cleaning is terribly boring. It seems all I’ve had to talk about this week has been cleaning, pixies tickets, and the total embargo on any information regarding that job I was interviewed for. Here, I’ll stick a link in. Photos of Relly’s wedding, which you may remember me attending. I can be seen looking like a total moron, wearing a shirt, in at least two pictures. One is me, with Nikki, and is the better of the two, and in the other I am entertaining two of the non-girlfriend bridesmaids with my dry wit and total lack of enthusiasm for dancing, though when the photo was taken my eyes were closed, so that ruined the effect and I look like I’m really pleased to be seeing the inside of my own eyelids or something. Did I mention how unsporting I think cameras are?