Do you read xkcd? If you don’t, you should, but go and have a look at it now, to get the flavour of it. Then have a look at this entry, from last week, which I think is just fabulous.
(You’ll have to click on it to launch the version with the special surprise in it – and then click and drag your mouse on the last panel.)
Here’s one reason to live in Essex:
Another is that it is the driest place in the UK. That distinction belongs specifically to St Osyth, just up the coast from where the photo above was taken, but all of North Essex is fairly dry. One of my clearest memories of university is that it never rained – which can’t be true, of course, but it certainly rained less than it does in, say, Sydenham.
My other main weather-related memory of Essex, not including the one with the bottles of wine and the icy slope (it was, at least, cheap wine, the Co-op’s Vin De Pays Catalan at £2.49 a bottle being our staple in those days) is that it was very windy. Partly that’s because we were close to the sea, and partly it’s because the original undergraduate accommodation at Essex University consisted of six tower blocks (the tallest unreinforced brick structures in the country, we were told, thrillingly – so high that, less thrillingly, there was no fire engine in Essex with a ladder long enough to reach the top storeys). Here they are looming over the landscape from a couple of miles’ distance:
The way the towers were arranged – especially the four north towers, where I lived – meant that as you walked between them you were constantly buffeted by the most extraordinary winds; winds so strong and unrelenting that just leaving the building was an adventure. I have vague memories of late-night experiments with raincoats stretched out to their fullest extent in an attempt to create sails that would lift us into the air, though why we thought that was a good idea I am no longer clear. It never worked as well as we hoped it would, fortunately.
Anyway, the wind was exciting, and even when it was cold and sharp you didn’t have to wear any protective clothing and as soon as you were inside you felt alright again. Wind is not like rain, which seeps inside everything and makes the whole day miserable, unless you go out in something waterproof, which means airproof, which means sweaty. I don’t ever remember as much rain as we had between April and July this year – I expect even Essex got wet – and rain is wretched.
In contrast, the sparkling September sunshine of the last few days has been glorious, carrying it does the slight chill which promises bonfires and fireworks and roast dinners and Sunday walks through piles of crunchy leaves. Autumn is the best season. Spring and autumn are both full of promises, but only autumn always delivers on them, because there is supposed to be rain in autumn and winter, so nobody minds when it happens. Best of all, autumn is when you buy new boots. I am currently lusting after these:
If you spot a version which doesn’t cost £325, please let me know.
This is a historic moment.* I have just checked my bank balance and realised that this month, for the first time in about two years, I will not veer dangerously close to going overdrawn. I achieved this feat by writing down my monthly income and outgoings, subtracting the one from the other and working out how much I could sensibly spend each week, and then doing it. I know! Rocket science.
In celebration of the fact that it’s taken me two years of nearly (and sometimes actually) going overdrawn every four weeks to work out how to stay in the black, here are some more things that it took me ages to figure out:
Just because someone disagrees with me, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I still have trouble with this one, even though I know it’s objectively true. But when I remember to act like it’s true, I get into less trouble.
It’s fine to bring two pieces of hand luggage. Those warnings about having to pay extra if you carry an extra bag are LIES. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve squeezed everything I needed for a trip overseas into one bag, only to arrive at an airport and find everyone else has merrily brought a handbag, a rucksack, a shopping bag and a laptop case and nobody minds a bit. IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP (thanks Egon): this doesn’t hold true for Ryanair, where you can’t even carry a bottle of water outside your one weeny bag without being told off and charged an extra hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
I am the only person who notices if my nose is shiny. Amazing, but true. I look in the mirror and see the swamp thing, everybody else sees the same person they see when my nose isn’t shiny. I can’t decide if this is good news because I must always look like the person I see in the mirror on a non-shiny day, or bad news because I must always look like the person I see in the mirror on a shiny day. Thoughts welcome, even though I now know nobody cares but me.
You can clean everything with baby wipes. I used to think you needed a different type of cleaning product for every surface in the home. This always felt like too much effort, so I combated the problem by only cleaning things made of glass (because cleaning mirrors is fun). Then one day I used a baby wipe instead of a piece of kitchen towel to mop up a spill, and noticed that the bit of kitchen I’d mopped up was cleaner than all the rest of the kitchen, so I carried on mopping until my kitchen was sparklingly clean, and I’ve never looked back. Just, don’t get the ones that smell of nappies.
Frank Lampard and Jamie Redknapp are cousins. I found this out a year ago and told everyone I knew, and they all shrugged and went “yeah, everyone knows that”.
The Kylie Minogue who played Charlene in Neighbours is the same Kylie Minogue who sang I Should Be So Lucky. Yeah, I know. In my defence I was eleven, but for a good six months I was absolutely convinced they were different people. I even knew what they both looked like.
* Not really, but I can almost never resist quoting Clockwise, even when I should absolutely know better.
I love this. Here is a (not very good, because made by me) video of the Japanese women’s football team bowing to the crowd after losing the Olympic final 2-1 to the USA. When they came back out for the medals ceremony, the USA and Canada (third-placed) teams waved cheerfully around, but the Japanese women held hands and did mini-Mexican waves. They were my favourites.
More photos of the game here.
I have been trying not to write about the Olympics, because I haven’t got anything to say that someone else hasn’t already said better, and because I am too busy watching to think about writing anything anyway. But having spent the last two evenings at live events (table tennis on Tuesday, football on Wednesday), I have realised that – whisper it – the Olympics are kind of better on TV. Of course, being there is super-exciting, and you get to be a part of the crowd and talk to people you’d never have talked to otherwise, and if you’re lucky get within sniffing distance of a superhuman. But you also get to spend a lot of time standing around, or queueing, or spending a lot of money on not-very-nice food, and I realised as I stood penned-in by police horses outside Wembley Stadium last night that I could have been spending all that time watching the fricking Olympics. It’s bad enough that I have to go to stupid work and be in stupid meetings while people are winning medals, but it’s worse when I’ve paid £80 to stand in a queue and miss out on it all.
So I have come to the conclusion that the best way to enjoy the games is by mostly watching them on TV, and just sticking your nose briefly into the action itself. After all, a single ticket to most of the sessions costs just about what the license fee does for a whole year, and with literally every event available via the BBC you will get more sport for your sterling by sitting at home, where the food is cheaper and the toilet queues much shorter, than by buying expensive seats which allow you to sit quite a long way away from everything that’s actually happening.
This is all good news. The Olympics are designed to be watched in person by tens of thousands of people, and on TV by actual billions. In this case, you lose nothing by being one of the ninety nine per cent. So use your Mastercard to buy a Pepsi, settle down in front of your Sony TV and enjoy the freedom and the luxury of watching from the best seat in the house.
(All of which said, please note that I will happily accept gifts of free tickets to anything you like.)
The good news is that there are still designers in the world who know how to make something beautiful. The bad news is that Rio’s logo and font for their 2016 Olympic Games makes ours look even worse:
(That said, I am – despite the ridiculous ticketing system, the derangedly horrible security arrangements and the unfathomable and offensive mess they made of the corporate sponsorship – super-excited about the London games, just as long as I can spend two weeks looking at the athletes and not the logo.)
There is a stretch of tunnel at London Bridge station, linking the Underground with the Southern Railway platforms, which is lined with half-a dozen shops of the sort that you make an emergency visit to when you are on your way to someone’s birthday party and you have forgotten to pick up a card. It is dingy and badly-lit, and the clock overhead is wrong for at least six months of the year. It is not a place you would choose to linger for longer than it takes to buy a birthday card.
In the last few months, though, it has become even more offputting. Now, as you walk through, you have to dodge large puddles of water, in the middle of which sit optimistically-placed buckets and the odd “Caution Wet Floor” sign. Sometimes, you have to dart at odd angles across the corridor to avoid being dripped on.
Now. We’ve had a lot of rain this summer, I know that. But it rains a lot in winter and autumn, and it has never caused the roof of the station to develop this many leaks. Call me crazy, but I can’t help wondering whether the 310-metre-high building which has been built inches away from the tunnel could be at least partly responsible for this sudden instability.
If you are an engineer and can tell me why I’m completely wrong, please do, ideally before this evening when I will have to make the journey again. A crowded, sweaty, stinky commute is one thing. One carrying even a minimal danger of becoming crushed in a collapsed heap of brickwork and birthday cards is quite another.
Over the years I have got better at cooking not gradually, but in a series of leaps that look like this:
1976-1994: No cooking at all.
1994-99: University years. Specialities: pitta-bread pizzas, cheese toasties, tuna pasta bake.
1999-2005: Spent living with a chef. Learned a few bits of proper cooking, but mostly left it to him. Specialities: stuffed peppers, chilli con carne.
2005-2008: What I like to think of as The Wilderness Years. Very little cooking. Specialities: pasta with grated cheese, buttered crumpets, crisps.
2008-date: Sudden keen interest in cooking, wedding vouchers spent on kitchen equipment. Specialities: roast chicken, roast beef with yorkshire pudding, chicken pie, lasagne, apple crumble, sausage rolls, bread, cheese scones.
From which we can conclude that if you want to come over for dinner, you should do it now and not five years ago. Unless, that is, you want baked potatoes. I love baked potatoes. They are one of the simplest, cheapest, most honest and unfucked-about-with things you can eat, and a big one is a meal all by itself. But here’s the thing: I can’t bastard cook them. I have tried every method, and whatever I do they end up unevenly crunchy where they should be soft and soft where they should be crunchy or else so dried out as to be more or less inedible. There is no in-between. Occasionally, like one time in twelve, they have turned out OK, which makes it even worse because it’s just encouraging enough for me to keep trying, with almost-inevitable disappointment each time.
If you have a miracle method to share with me, please do. I will probably make a cock of it, but I’ll give it a go. The perfect baked potato is:
Damn, I’m hungry now.
I have never felt about international football the way I feel about club football. I have never been an England “fan”, or worn an England shirt, or been devastated when they lost a game (all right, maybe for five minutes after the Germany game in 1996, but I was young and impressionable and quite probably drunk).
It’s partly to do with the disagreeable connotations of the English flag, and partly about the wearying media hysteria which surrounds England’s presence at any international tournament. But mostly, it’s just that I’m not all that interested. It’s not them, it’s me: Crystal Palace have a prior claim to my heart and I can’t love two teams the way I love one.
(There’s also something in there about feeling part of my local community, which is an inclusive group, in a way that I don’t feel “English”, which is an exclusive group, and something else about Crystal Palace footballers not being the kind who get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, and an unrelated distaste for drunken topless men shouting in the street when England win.)
But I’m not anti the England team. I like to watch them play, and I am happy to see them win. Or I used to be. But this time around (there is, in case you hadn’t noticed, currently a football tournament taking place), I am disconcerted to discover that I actively want England to lose. Watching them play France last night I found myself silently egging France on, and occasionally shouting inadvertently (and, once, clapping like a hyperactive child) when they came close to scoring. I wasn’t supporting France the way I support Palace, but I was certainly supporting them the way I support, I don’t know, West Brom against Chelsea.
And there’s the reason: the Chelsea connection. Or more specifically, the John Terry connection. Here’s the thing: England won’t win this competition. They’re not good enough. They will probably go out in the quarter finals, to the usual lamentations from the press and vaguely exasperated eye-rolling from everyone else. And after a bit, we’ll all forget about who played well or badly in which game, or whether the right substitutions were made. But we will all remember that Roy Hodgson chose to take John Terry and not Rio Ferdinand to Ukraine, a month before Terry is due to stand trial for the racist abuse of Ferdinand’s younger brother Anton.
I don’t know how the trial will go. But I do know that John Terry is an awful man (Rio isn’t a saint, but compared to John Terry he is a shining beacon of humanity and intellect), and that stacked against all the excellent reasons not to take Terry to the competition is the single argument in his favour: that he is a good footballer. But we already know that England won’t win, so what have they gained by taking him and leaving Rio, who is also a good footballer, at home? Approximately nothing. When by doing the opposite – by using John Terry as a scapegoat and a symbol for all the loutish, entitled, ugly behaviour that footballers can exhibit – they could have sent out a message that says: we will punish footballers when they behave badly, and we don’t need to stick our thumbs up our bottoms and wait for bad behaviour to be legally determined in a court before we see it happening and call it out.
Football isn’t a matter of life and death, but its morals and values seep through into society. The England management had the chance to do a good thing, the repercussions of which would have played out in small but important ways across the country, and they didn’t take it, and that’s why I hope they lose.
(I am still waiting to pick my team for the office sweepstake, because the person inside whose desk drawer the all-important envelope is locked ran over his foot with a lawnmower at the weekend (I’ll get England now, I expect). I am of course supporting Ireland, but they didn’t have the best of starts, so I am going to be boring and tip Germany for the win.)
Do you ever have days when everything feels like too much effort; when the outrageous unfairness of all the stuff you have to do weighs so heavily that you can feel yourself grinding to a physical halt?
Standing in a café this morning, I contemplated the free magazine which had just been stuffed into my hand and for which I was now responsible, the change from my breakfast which needed to be replaced in my already-overstuffed purse; the chaotic interior of the bag from which I would shortly need to retrieve the keys to the office – and I thought O God, I can’t be bothered with ANY OF IT.
There’s no quick fix for feeling like this. Winning a million pounds and going to live on a desert island (my usual cure for everything) wouldn’t fix it, because you’d still have to decide what to wear and when to eat. But one thing that works a bit, because really for a psychological problem what you want is a psychological solution, is thinking about all the things you don’t have to do. Yes, you might tell yourself, I have to reshuffle my belongings and climb a flight of stairs in the next five minutes, but at least it’s warm and sunny and I don’t have to hang up my coat or find somewhere to put a wet umbrella. And you’d cheer up a bit.
On a larger scale, this works even better. Thinking about stuff you don’t have to do is a liberating and joyous experience. You’ve heard of the “bucket list” that people make of things they want to do before they die.You need to be an energetic sort of a person to make and act on a bucket list. For those of us of a more languid disposition, I propose an alternative: a list of things we are happy to go to the grave without ever having done. The “fuck it” list, if you like.
The beautiful advantage that the “fuck it” list has over the bucket list is that once you’ve made it, you’re done. You’re better than done – you’ve reduced the number of things you need to think about ever again. If life is overwhelming you, make a “fuck it” list today! Here’s mine:
I will never go mountain climbing. I don’t mean the kind where you wear boots and walk up and down hills – I’m happy to do that. I mean the kind where you have to stick spikes into rock and get stuck on ledges and carry oxygen. I like nature and I like views, but there are ways of appreciating both which don’t involve vast amounts of equipment and a significant risk of injury. I am sure it’s wonderful, I am happy for the people who love to do it; I don’t need to join them.
I will never watch Gone With The Wind. It’s too long.
I will never run a marathon. I like running, but not at the expense of doing anything else. Preparing for those things takes months, which could be better spent cooking and watching TV and lying in bed looking at the wall.
I will never run a company. Even more than I am not built for running 26 miles without a meal in the middle, I am not built for 16-hour days or having the power to fire people.
I will never read all of Dickens. I have read Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations and half of David Copperfield. I liked them, but not enough to devote the necessary time to reading the others – or even the second half of David Copperfield. There are a million writers out there whom I’ve never read at all: Boz has had his fair share of me.
Counterintuitively, the “fuck it” list is less restrictive than the bucket list. If you are planning the holiday of a lifetime and you have Guatemala on your bucket list, you will feel obliged to at least consider going to Guatemala, even though you really want to go to Las Vegas. The “fuck it” list will let you go to Las Vegas unencumbered by doubt, guilt or other unproductive emotions. Here’s another reason the “fuck it” list is better: removing something from your bucket list because you can’t do it equals failure. Removing something from your “fuck it” list because, as it turns out, you ended up going mountain climbing and it was the most fun you’ve ever had, is a triumph.
With a “fuck it” list, you can’t lose, and you get to stay in bed all day and still be achieving every one of your stated aims. I think I must be a genius.
Glad All Over 