Diary of an up and coming sociopath

When we moved into this house, we noticed a large tree outside. It towered above all others in the area and when looking out of my window, it filled a significant portion of the view. It looked quite nice, didn’t block too much light and otherwise obscured the view between this house and those opposite, providing a slice of nature to the suburban surroundings. Imagine, then, our surprise, when yesterday morning we were awoken by some guy hammering on the door requesting that I move my car so that they could cut the branches off the aforementioned tree. It was enough of a burden, trying to drive a car half a minute after being woken up, but that was left unreleived by the constant chainsawing that the next few hours involved. It was, in fact, second only to the chainsawing that awoke me this morning as they cut down the branchless pilar of trunk which had been left, toppling it into the road less than 2 metres away from the car which I had moved the day before. We now have a less tham impressive looking tree stump outside our house, and we’re all quite put out by the fact that we didn’t really get much say in this.

However, despite the defoliating, dual victories beseiged me over the last day or two when, yesterday evening, the internet connection became active 2 days early. Joy and elation spread throughout the house as Ian and I set up all the computers to access the extra-glorious 2 Megabit connection. The process of job searching has became mercifully faster.

No sooner had the felled tree been hauled away than an Argos lorry turnedup outside, and delivered me my new bed, flat packed, though ‘flat’ is some exaggeration. The Argos delivery surgeon mentioned that he used to be a tree surgeon himself, and tol dus how the guys who did the tree surgery left a horrible mess which was unprofessional, and we were inclined to agree with his assessment, since it left most of our front garden covered in sawdust. The next couple of ours were spent assembling the bed, though it mainly involved screwing in hundreds of tiny screws until your arm, hands and wrists ached quite badly. Despite our combined lack of DIY knowledge, Ian and I proved ourselves quite capable of following instructions and produced, from assorted wood, one bed, fit for use and being tested personally, by me, later tonight. It doesn’t appear that it’ll fall apart anytime soon, at least, which is the best I could’ve hoped for, and I’m left with the extra storage space I so desired now that the divan-style bed is gone.

Tomorrow the fortune should continue, as we are due one cooker to arrive. In theory, this will let us actually do some cooking, rather than merely burn the food in a filthy and dented cooker. In theory…

A planned trip to the job centre today turned out about as well as yesterday’s dinner. While in previous years, going to a job centre might involve the classic activities of say, “talking to people” and “finding a job” today’s modern job centres streamline the entire process. Upon entering today, we were told by the bitter and apathetic clerk to essentially, go away and phone them up. If this seemed like too much effort, we were invited to use the phones there to phone them. As near as I can understand, this is a government initiative to get the unemployed out of job centres and back into their homes where they can get out of the way. The job centre is now essentialyl a really large telephone box. It’s quite annoying because the reason I hadn’t already phoned them up was because I waned to go in person, and now I’m discovering that it was a total waste of time to expect to speak with someone who could help me face to face. Great.

This leaves me no closer to getting a job, of course, and given that their website hasn’t had any new jobs in the area for weeks, I can probably assume that the issue of “Recruit” we got in the job centre is the best bet for some speedy data entry work.

It’s not all bad news, though. Today our ADSL line was activated, which means we’re well on track for when our ISP account gets activated. I also received a letter from Argos, in which they requested that I phone them about my order to confirm my address and postcode. Quite how it works that they send me a letter to confirm the address they sent the letter to, I honestly don’t know. Presumably if I don’t phone them up, they’d assume the address was not correct, or something. Anyway, having confirmed my address, they let me know the bed would be arriving on Thursday afternoon. That’s a fast delivery time and I’m quite looking forward to it.

While in town, Ian won some money in a gambling machine-based arcade, lieterally tripling his £1 investment, and he bought the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen DVD, a film which really doesn’t beg for repeated watching. I think twice this decade is enough. Yesterday with dinner we watched the pilot of “lost” which seems like it’ll turn out to be quite good. It’s mildly annoying that all the decent TV programs I’m waiting for seem to be starting some time next year, and this season I’m being left with Enterprise, Joey, and the Simpsons, all of which are thoroughly mediocre. Hence having a look at Lost, really. American TV seems to have more scope for the decent original action/sci-fi programmes I enjoy, even if there is a huge olume of reality shite like UK TV. I barely even watch TV anymore, though I am still mildly annoyed that I can only get BBC1, ITV and Channel 5 to tune into my TV Card ’round these parts. I don’t think I’ll want to watch them often, but when I do it’ll change form a mild annoyance to a large annoyance. At least I’ll still be able to get Jonothan Ross, though.

Finally, I’ve moved into the house in London. Everything has gone pretty smoothly, though my first act upon enterting the house was to accidently break the curtain rail. I kind of pulled at the curtain and it fell off, it was quite brittle, though I’ve managed to fix it by redistributing the working fixtures, so there isn’t a huge problem. Might go easy on it for a while, though.

After I’d unloaded the car, and hung around moving boxes from one end of the room to the other in the guise of “tidying”, Ian and I walked up to the small Tescos near us to get some dinner, to fuel ourselves that we might go to the larger Tescos later on. We managed to find less than half of our projected items, which made cooking dinner quite impossible, and instead, we just drove straight up to the big Tescos. The plan was to buy a week’s shopping, and using Nikki’s time-honoured method of planning each day’s meal in advance, we feel like we accomplished that. Certainly, 5 days of meals are accounted for. The trick, of course, will be in making this £12 of shopping last for a week. I also realised that, in my ravenous hunger-driven trance, I totally forgot about buying less edible things, like toothpaste and shampoo. I haven’t had to buy that stuff for some time, so I guess it’s no wonder the thought never crossed my mind. I’ll be picking those up tomorrow, though.

We discovered recently that our broadband connection doesn’t get activated until Friday. At the moment, we have one dialup connection shared between everyone, which makes for slow browsing, though it’s actually not that bad as far as IRC and MSN conversations go. In theory, we’ll only get a problem if we’re all trying to browse at once, and that doesn’t happen often. Friday is, of course, 11 days after we ordered, rather than the promised 7-10. I don’t know what Nildram think they’re doing, but it’s not the lightening fast installation some might have you believe ADSL can do. The true test, however, will be on how the connection works once it’s here though…

So anyway, that’s it for now. As long as this dialup connection holds out I should be on the internet for a bit in the late evenings, which will certainly allow for the odd blog update, and maybe you can get in a quick word on MSN. Feel free to send house-warming gifts in the absence of conversation, though.

I’ve finally moved most of my stuff up to London now, after Nikki and I made a trip down there today. Most of the stuff seems to be ready now, I’m still waiting for Argos to sdo what their website claimed and ring me to arrange a delivery date for the bed, then I have to make the bed, but besides that I’ve got enough stuff to at least live there until the rest of it turns up. An internet connection would be kind of nice, though. Let’s hope BT get their arses in gear.

There are many decent things about the room I’m in at the house. Not least of which is that it’s actually got a window. I always kind of missed having a window, in the last house, skylights don’t let in a lot of light, and there’s nothing to see out of them besides open sky. This window has fake leading, which at least means I can get away without the horrendous net curtains that were in there. I took in the chest of drawers which we had previously been without a home for, because I don’t have any storage space of that kind, at the moment. Just the wardrobe. It’s fitting quite well, so I’ll probably keep it, and then soon I’m hoping to get a bookcase to display my books and DVDs in a proud fashion. With that in mind, I also have to start thinking about posters. I’m clearly old enough that framed posters are the way to go, and I’m on the look out for some Marvel posters with the inconic style Jack Kirby art on them, but they don’t seem immediately available. Something like this Silver Surfer would be excellent. It’s either comic art, some movie posters, or, er, Warhol prints, though that might make me obsessed with soup or something.

I don’t profess to know who had this house before us, but whoever they were, they did not enjoy cleaning. The sofa and chair are nothing short of filthy, and will require som serious work for us to want to sit on them. Luckily, there’s no reason for us to, at the moment. I realised earlier the reason the cooker was so knackered was probably because it hadn’t been cleaned. It’s not an old cooker, it just appears to have been neglected over the years. In an astonishing display of actually appearing to give a shit, a landlord turned up and actually spoke directly with us. In Oxford, this only happenned if something bad was going on, or if the guy wanted his mail. One thing remains consistant, though, in that this is the second person to turn up and claim to be the landlord. I theorise that all landlords exist only as a gestalt between a young and old half of themselves, each claiming to be the landlord, one half obsessed with maintainance, and the other obsessed with collecting mail.

So anyway, only a couple more boxes to take up now, and a bunch of furniature which I may have to let someone else deal with bringing down. Then I can begin the process of being a Londoner, though I suspect in truth I’m always going to be a midlander who lives in london, if we’re arguing semantics. Or, as Ian would claim, a Crazy Northerner. I did apply for a couple of jobs over the last few days, but as usual, it’s hard enough to get any acknowledgement from the companies I apply to that they’ve even received my application, let alone anything claiming they’ve even made a decision about it. One job application was for Titan publishing, which is such an excellent job that I can’t help suspecting it’s a trap. Titan publish, mostly, Sci-Fi and fantasy magaines, and some comics, and I’ve read most of their magazines at some point or another ever since I started buying the Star Trek magazine well over 10 years ago. The job is, to heavily distill the concepts, to update their website with news items and stuff, something which in my mind translates to being paid to be a full time geek, and some general admin. To describe it as the most perfect job I could ask for at this point would be a gross understatement. I have been repeatedly foiled by adverts claiming to want website maintainers with knowledge of football, or cars, but Sci-Fi? I’ve got it nailed. Unfortunately, the degree with which I would love to do the job makes me all the more pessimistic, because when I can’t get jobs that I don’t like, I find it hard to believe fate would work so that I could get a job I do.

Something I’ve noticed, in trying to find a new bed for the house, is that bed companies have some really bizarre scam going on. If you’re the kind of person that I am, who thinks Divan type beds are a waste of good storage space, you find, upon searching for a bed frame to procure, that the aforementioned beds are quite likely to be missing large chunks of their essence. It seems that they are often sold “without slats” which means, for anyone not well-versed in bed terminology, that they’re actually missing the quite vital part of the bed which holds up the matress. Now, I’ve struggled with this. I find it hard to believe there’s that big a section of the bed-buying public that only wants the useless frame part. This level of modularity seems to me like selling armchairs without cushions included.

My ultimate conclusion is that in order to appear to knock £40 off the price of a bed, they sell it in 2 parts, making it seem like a better purchase than a more expensive bed which would be positively overflowing with slats. “Wow,” Joe Idiot might think, “This bed is £40 cheaper than that other one I looked at. I’d better buy the accompanying slats, though, at £40 for the set.”

In other news, I got a replacement car battery and had it fitted. The car is working now, but it’s rapidly becoming a totally different car. In the same way you might have a broom for 15 years and only replace the brush head 5 times and the handle twice, I have had this car 4 years and it’s only had new windscreen wipers, tyres, brake pads, brake discs, exhaust and battery. I’m just waiting for the windscreen to cave in in now, then I’ve got the whole set of repairs or something. Dad texted me the radio code though, so I didn’t have to play russian roulette there trying to get it working again. At least next time the car breaks down I’ll have some music to listen to.

I’m starting to wonder about my car. It’s clearly getting old now. In the past 4 months, the exhaust fell out, the same weekend a tyre burst, and then the brakes needed replacing just mere days before the battery died.

That last one happened today. I went to the house in London to deposit some of my belongings, that I might soon move there. I was planning to leave after dinner, so in order to get dinner, we went up to Tescos. After leaving the supermarket, the car failed utterly to respond, and remained that way. I called the RAC, since I am a member by way of Dad, and they sent a guy out to tell me what I’d already guessed: The battery is fucked and it’ll need replacing. He told me to drive home and avoid turning the engine off, and since I wasn’t equipped for an extended stay in London, I set off more or less immediately for Warwick.

Further problems arose in the form of petrol, because it became clear that despite my extra-slow driving, petrol-saving measures weren’t going to stretch out what was in the tank enough to actually get home. Getting more petrol meant turning the engine off, and turning the engine off meant that I’d quite likely end up being stuck wherever I did it. I managed to get to Banbury, which was far closer than my original estimate of Oxford, and close enough that I could get someone to pick me up without it seeming like an incredibly ludicrous prospect. Even so, I faced a 40 minute wait in a car with a radio I was locked out of by bizarre security measures, and not enough light to read anything by.

A jump start got the engine going again, which got it home, and hopefully will get it going again tomorrow so we can find a replacement for it.

One good bit of news today, my Shaun of the Dead DVD arrived. I watched all the extras and they’re all great, though I’m most interested by the video diary of Joe (of Adam and Joe fame) being a zombie extra, and Lauren Laverne doing a makeup test as probably the most attractive zombie ever. I’m looking forward to the commentaries. In fact, if the car doesn’t get fixed soon, I expect I’ll have quite some time to be watching them…

Okay, I believe I was saying something about teh brakes being almost fixed. Well, that wasn’t strictly the case, when the time came. What follows is a list of the steps taken in order to get the brakes repaired.

1. Remove wheels and dismantle brakes. Discover new discs are needed, as well as pads.
2. Go to Halfords and buy new brake pads. Reserve new Brake Discs, to be collected in 1 hour.
3. Wait 1 and a half hours for a phonecall that never comes.
4. Return to Halfords, buy brake discs.
5. Fit brake discs.
6. Discover brake pads are the wrong kind.
7. Return to Halfords, to discover that the brake pads needed aren’t in stock.
8. Travel to Leamoco, who have the right pads in stock, for a few quid more.
9. Fit pads. Do the same for the other wheel.
10. Never return to Halfords for the rest of your life.

I didn’t do most of this, though, just tagged along. The dubious honour fell to my Dad’s friend Roy, who fixed the brakes up good and stopped me from being what he described as “an accident waiting to happen.” It’s kind of good the problem didn’t manifest (fully) until I got back from London, I guess, else it would’ve probably prevented the house from being acquired, and Ian from moving in. It would’ve been quite the run of bad luck.

The rest of the day was unremarkable, though we did go up to Josh’s for a few hours in the evening, where Sam had finally returned from europe, and he showed us all kinds of images from the continent, accompanied with tales of hostels that would make your flesh crawl. Well, if you hate hostels as much as I do, at least. I’ve never actually been to one, I suppose, but I had a bad experience with a hostel-esque place back in year 9 of Myton and I never really got over it. It pretty much convinced me that I might as well be at home than freezing and hungry in the middle of nowhere.

Earlier in the evening, Jo was asking me to help her with her English homework quickly, and I realised I probably am really good at English still. I impressed myself with the stuff I was managing to haul out of a quite generic poem. Doing a computing subject doesn’t let the bullshit muscles flex that often, but I reckon I could’ve written that essay and got an A for it, which kind of makes me wish grades mattered for anything these days (or indeed, wish that they had mattered back then…)

I stayed over at Nikki’s, and then in the early hours of the afternoon we went up to Coventry so I could spend my £10 virgin voucher. I was angling to buy Star Trek 2, but for £17 I was unimpressed with the assortment of extras, and I later found out it’s only ~£13 on play, so I was quite pleased with my ultimate purchase of Charlotte Hatherley’s Grey Will Fade album, and Battle Royale 2: Requiem, neitheer of which I knew much about, and both of which I took an unusually large risk buying as far as my spending habits are concerned. I mean, I paid full price for a film I’d not seen before, AND a CD which I’d not heard before. That practically guarantees they’ll both be crap…

A quick update on the situation wouldn’t go amiss, I guess. We did finally get the forms sorted out, so Tuesday afternoon I stepped on the gas and made my way to Oxford, collected Ian, and then continued on to London, where we signed our contracts and made our payments, and then got Josh and Al to do the same. We now are officially renting that there house which we have been eyeing for some time. After the contractes were signed, we celebrated by visiting the local tescos. Being close to a Tescos (or at least, a supermarket) was quite an integral part of our eventual choice, after the cintinued usccess of the revious house’s proximity to one. Cheap prices and high quality, if you dont’ shop at Tescos, you’re just deluding yourself. They don’t pay me to say that, it’s an independant judgement. The closest to us is a “Tescos Express” which means it’s tiny and doesn’t stock a lot. We were previously used to a Tesco Metro which had a far wider range, and was slightly closer. However, the smaller and further away “small” Tescos was more than compensated for by the closer and far larger “large” tescos, which unlike Oxford, is a superstore. So things about even out nicely.

After Tescos, we went and found our new house. It’s a great place, with very few flaws. A good job, really, given the price we’re paying. When Dad saw the monthly rent he said “Do you know what sort of property you could buy with the kind of mortgage?” I admit I don’t, but I assume from his exclaimation that it must be quite a good one. Ah well. For our first order of business, we moved the furniture into the correct rooms, which involved performing feats of geometry I’m not entirely sure were even possible, yet we somehow accomplished them. We passed a bed down the stairwell, and a sofa up. The sofa required some serious cleaning - it was already filthy with dirt, and when we pulled up the cushions, we were bemused to find a lot of pine needles. In my experience, these kind of needles come from Christmas trees, which indicates about 9 months, at least, of not having cleaned that sofa. Urgh. More amusing was the empty Def Leppard video case under one of the armchair cushions. Less amusing was the makeshift support being provided in teh broken armchair by a piece of wood.

Having completed various derangements, we dropped Al and Josh back home, and Ian and I were left unable to contain our excitement and drove up to the big tescos to have a look at the nirvana that it is. Situated in the Hoover Building, we expected it to be pretty good, and it was quite excellent. The font appears to be a cross between las vegas, and a Tescos, with lots of neon coloured strip lights. The shopping spiralled out of control and we found ourselves purchasing quite a large amount of food, in the end. We bought some fries and chicken dippers as part of Tescos’ “American” food selection (headed: “American Meal Solutions.” Solutions!?) The reasoning behind this was that it’d be easy to cook and eat out of the ackaging, only, the packet wouldn’t actually go in the oven, it was only for microwaving and, er, once we bought chips, we needed ketchup, salt, bread and butter. We didn’t have any plates, nor any baking trays, nor any cutlery, and we’re both far too paranoid to use what we left in the house by the previous weirdoes, at least, without washing it, we are, so we rinsed off one of the less dubious looking aking trays, sterilised it in the oven, then cooked our food on that. We ate it out of the remaining packaging. We buttered and cut our bread with our swiss army knives. It felt not unlike living rough, in our own house.

The next morning, we drove back up to Oxford, handed in our forms at isis (deposit will be returned soon, only one more bill to go…) and bought some comics, then finally got Ian’s stuff out of George and Karis’ surprisingly cramped house, leaving it far less cramped. I made good time in both directions, and we were unpacked fast. A short visit to the agency to outline our biggest problems with the house followed (1 x Knackered Bed, 1 x Knackered Armchair, 1 x YOU CALL THIS A COOKER!?) and then I came back to Leamington. It took me slightly longer to get out of ealing, and even with that, it only took me 11 hour 30 minutes, so I’d estimate that after three years, I’m about twice as far from home as I was. At this rate, in 2020 I’ll be living down in Guatemala.

This evening, I went out for a post-graduation celebration dinner at a local Toby Carvery, with Mum, Terry, Nikki, and her sister and mum. Even by my standards, I ate a lot, and I was quite astonished by the amount of turkey I was given. So much did I eat, that I was unable to finish my dessert. A grim spectacle indeed, though I get the feeling my intestines are paying for my foolhardy ways.

To get to the carvery and back, I had to drive Nikki’s mother’s car, because mine has been making some strange sounds over the last few days. We marrowed it down, eventually, to the brakes, and then Terry had a look and declared the brake pads to be DOA. Actually, they were so much DOA as MIA, since one of them has completely flown the coop, and the strange scrapy-metal sound I had been hearing was indeed metal scraping on metal in a valiant attempt to provide some braking force unto the wheels. “Unsafe to drive” apparantly, and it’s probably a good job I didn’t hear that the first time the noises occurred, otherwise it’d have provided yet more obstacles to the house. Luckily, the scraping wasn’t actually happenning all the time when I drove to London, so I wasn’t in immediate danger, it was only when I got back that they jacked it in completely.

So, tomorrow maybe they’ll get fixed. Hopefully. It’s not a hard job for someone who knows what they’re doing, I hear. I dno’t, but I know people who do, so that’s good. Now, with the house out the way, the car’s repair as good as sorted, the deposit nearly back form Isis, getting a job is once again, the only huge problem I’m faced with. If that can finally come to as smooth a conclusion as these other few bumpy rides, I will, no doubt, be most pleased. If…

Well, I guess that’s university officially over with. For now. Slightly more immediately relevant was the partial success of sorting out our house forms. It’s pretty late and I got up early, so this is one of those blog entries which isn’t going to be very funny, and is going to be very long, rambly and meandering. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I ended up going to bed later than I expected last night, because I was trying to set up my modem to receive a fax. I more or less had it set up, or at least, as much as I could, and I worked out a contingency plan in case that didn’t work.

In the morning, i conferred with ian, and we discovered that one of the credit checks had failed for the house. Initially, we though it was my mum, but it later turned out that no-one had failed, but Ian’s mum’s workplace had not returned the correct information, which lead to the agency’s mystic calculations somehow going awry and somehow implicating my mum. Once that was sorted, we gave them a pair of numbers to fax the forms to, and departed to get graduated.

First I went up to Dad’s with mum, and we then went to Oxford in Dad’s car, which he is about to sell and replace with a BMW X5. That doesn’t mean a lot to me, but it has satellite navigation which turns into a TV when the car is stationary, and that’s enough to make me think it’s pretty cool. I wonder if you could get Sky on it. While in the car, I received a call from a Job agency which I had given up trying to contact after they kept claiming the person I wanted wasn’t there, and my calls went unreturned. I was asked “Is this a good time to talk?” and the only answer I coudl think of, was “No, not really.” what with being in the car and being unable to realy hear what was going on. At least that avenue’s back open to me, I guess.

When we went past the house in Oxford, some of the furnature was stacked outside and the front door was open. I guess that means they’re doing some kind of work on it. Doesn’t appear to be anyone living there, though. Seems almost a lifetime away after only a month, really. I often find it strange to think that I will never again be in that building. Indeed, today my memory of it, of wheatley, are clear as day, but I guess over time they’ll fade. If all goes well, tomorrow I’ll have a new building to situate in.

We parked at the top of morrell Avenue, abusing the guest permits I had left over to ensure we could park near to the Uni. I’m not too sure what we’d have done had it been, say, raining. When we got there I dragged my parents to the Gibbs building, which was previously functioned as the source of £5 notes and which famously has 8 floors, but only 4 storeys. You cannot get between odd and even numbered floors without returning to the ground first. Inside there was a big room where we could collect tickets based on our surnames, only not until 12 o’clock. This meant I instead went to face the gruelling ordeal of getting my gown put on. They were quite heavy, and really hot, especially on a sunny day, and that’s about where the confort began and ended. Had it been a cold day, I would’ve been grateful for such sack-like coverings.

I wandered around in that state for the rest of the day, and spent the next, say, 30-40 minutes being repeatedly photographed and, for the love of god, filmed. This is the kind of thing you’re not going to be seeing, if I can help it. I’d estimate there are about 15-20 photos of me in various places, and standing with various combinations of parent (including a couple of all 3 of us, thans to a helpul passing asian girl who seemed confused by our cameras.) We were then able to get the tickets, and while waiting I witnessed a scottish girl driven to tears by the knowledge that she was going to be the first person from her group to be called up. With my tickets procured, Dad and I went to get some coffe and met mum back outside on one of the benches outside Galliano’s. A fitting venue to finsh the University experience, since it was also one of the first places I remember meeting with George and Ian.

Ian and his present family later joined us there for the ceremony, and we all sat around looking stupid. I may have remarked at one point that “This is the stupidest we’re ever going to look.” and at least my parents found that to be highly amusing, and quite untrue. I wonder what they know that I don’t…

Eventually the time came for judgement, and we headed to the main hall. Dad and I found my name on the £10 Graduation T-Shirts which contained the names of everyone graduating that day. It was great. Blue print, tiny writing. “JR Hunt.” is ssaid, in ALLCAPS Arial. How proud I felt to think that some real chumps are walking around with my name emblazoned on their total scam of a t-shirt.

And so, the time for the ceremony arrived. I was delighted to find I was sitting next to George, which made the ceremony far more bearable. When there’s someone you can talk to during the boring parts, it makes lectures go much quicker, and I imagined that it’d be the same for this. Ian was, unfortunately, stuck off by himself not able to join in with our sarcasm and general sniggers of disbelief, so During the opening speech where some woman included the phrase “Our watch-word is Relevance.” I was content to remain sure that ian was, in his absence, clearly laughing at the stupidity of that sentence as hard as I was. Inside. At one point we were encouraged to spread throughout the world with the “Brookes Brand” behind us. Universities are pretty corporate these days, I’m finding. Soon we won’t be students, but ‘Clients’ At one point we received a message from the head of the university, Jon Snow. i’m not sure how he got into that position, but rest assured it wasn’t his dedication to turning up to congratulate the graduates, for we received the briefest of video messages only. As Paul put it:

[paul] “I’m very sorry I couldn’t be there today, but I have far more important things to do. Like being TV’s Jon Snow.”
[paul] “I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best for the rest of 1997 and the future.”

Uncannily accurate. You know, he didn’t mention the year. It could’ve been recorded at any point in the past.

Once the initial speeches were done with, our subjects and names were read out, and we received a firm handshake from someone who was either the head of the school of technology, or the deputy vice-chancellor. Or possibly the relief deputy vice-chancellor’s intern, I don’t know. I had wondered if Graham Upton, the vice-chancellor himself woudl appear. It would’ve been slightly hypocritical to accept a handshake off him, when I once attended a meeting for, and voted in favour of no-confidence in his dubious administration, particularly the switch to Semesters. I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say as I understand things, he ran a University into the ground, they fired him, and he was hired at Brookes, where he plans to implement the same changes that ruined the last place. The students were consulted on semesters, but when they voted against them, it turned out that we were being actually asked, so much as it being given the chance to agree before we were overruled. Students leave after a few years, you see, and can be replaced by new ones unaware of how the semesterisation has more or less ruined a previously decent modular program.

Anyway. He wasn’t there, so I receveid my handshake, and sat down again, and that’s all there was to it. We were then given a speech by a nerd who had more honorary qualifications than real ones, and who was giving us a speech because we’d added another fake doctorate to his pile. Then, it was more or less over. I got a few more photos, returned my extortionate gown, and then we set off back home. Dad took us for some food on the way back, which was nice, if overpriced, though for some reason my chciken came with a sausage in bacon, which I’d always thought was only served at Christmas. I konw we’re close, but not that close, surely. When we got back it was just beginning to reall chuck it down with rain, so there was a mad scramble to get into Mum’s car with all the correct stuff, and then I came back here to try and sort out the forms.

My Faxing-to-modem idea didn’t really pan out. I could get the modem to answer the phone, just not receive the fax. My other plan, to fax the form to Terry, didn’t work either, because his machine never received it. I was fast running out of ways to get the form before Tuesday, and I’ll be damned if I was going to be the reason things got held up yet again. With time becoming a critical issue, I phoned up dad and got him to plug in his fax machine there, and then got on the phone to the agecny. By the time I called Dad back up to check it was okay, the fax was already receiving, which saved my ass. If Ian can get his form tomorrow, and Josh and Al their monies, we’re all set for a Tuesday move in. Finally, the end is near.

After going to nan’s today, where the eXtreme Weather of the previous night (lots of rain, fast winds) had managed to mangle their new garden canopy, I went to Dad’s and we finalised his eBay sale. Apparantly car wheels are worth a lot these days. When I got back, I went to see nikki, who had returned from her grandparent’s on saturday evening (I spent Saturday going to Tescos, Dad’s, and fruitlessly aplying for jobs)

I fixed her “broken” mobile phone in a manner that really she’d rather I didn’t talk about, but I’ll spare her some dignity and say that yes, it was a little more complicated than just pressing the power button down. A little. We eventually decided to watch “The Girl Next Door” which looked, in the cinemas, like a disturbing teen-sex comedy, not unlike, say, American Pie. Perhaps with a little more taste. However, this version was “uncut” which, like American Pie Uncut before it, meant that it has more nudity. Nothing is more likely to make me see a Romantic Comedy than nudity, to be honest, though the Zombies of Shaun of the Dead might just have it beat. It turned out to be not that bad a film, there were plenty of funny moments, nothing cringeworthy, which is my normal probalem with such films, and in the end it all turned out great for everyone, which is generally the point of the film.

It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind, nor is it going to win many awards, and the plot isn’t even that good, but, well, Romantic Comedy with lapdances. It’s the perfect film for couples. To be honest, the scene with lapdancers was the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in a film this year (well, again, maybe not as much as shaun of the dead.) It was the main character having an awkward conversation with his father’s friend, while they each received a lapdance. I was laughing so hard I almost forgot there were naked women on screen. If they made a flim called “Awkward Conversations During a Lapdance” where that was the entire plot, I’d go see it.

Tomorrow, or rather, today, is my graduation. I’m quite worried there’ll be pictures, but rest assured if there are, they’re not going anywhere near this blog. I also have to try and sort a bunch of forms out, and then maybe, just maybe, we can get into the house within the week. We’re aiming for tuesday, but with the way things have been gong, one of us is likely to be struck down by rabies or malaria or something, delaying the contract signing. Securing this house has probably turned out to be the most complex logistical operation I’ve ever faced.