Well, I’ve been brimming with updates recently, but unfortunately Wordpress decided it didn’t like me any more, and for several days now I’ve been unable to get access to the blog. But it’s back now, thankfully (although looking a little odd), so….
Well, that was a brief spell of blogging busyness. Apologies (to anyone still reading) for failing to answer comments - I normally would but for some reason, I think my blogging mojo was not fully recharged.
Not much has been happening, generally, except for the following little bits and bobs:
1. Wedding planning. All going well, except for extremely rude woman in bridal shop who seems to think I wear steel galvanised lederhosen which can be seen at armpit level under a corset. I think not.
2. Bird watching. Not going well. Grandly extravagant ‘bird-feeding station’ purchased, and yet no birds. However, the food is disappearing, so I’m thinking that we have discovered a new species of feathered garden friend - the stealth-bird. I even set up my new camera to do time lapse photography on the damn things, but still no birds. However, somehow, the meal worms I left out still got eaten. So, as I say, stealth-birds. I probably have to trap one and shine some special kind of light on it. Much planning to be done.
3. Fitness regime-ing. After a particularly distressing episode just before new year when I had to be ripped out of a £95 dress in Monsoon, I have been going to the gym. After 4 weeks of cycling, swimming and spinning, coupled with strenuous calorie control, I have put on 2lbs.
4. X-boxing. Project Gotham Racing. I have many fast cars. I drive like a demon. Hands a bit seized up. Dreams of power-sliding round corners. I have no life.
5. Work. Don’t get me started. I’ve gone from a frying pan full of crazies into a burning hellfire of crazy, masterminded by the queen of crazy.
Life is good though. And I hope to be blogging more regularly. Particularly about my upcoming holiday in Australia, courtesy of my sister’s impending wedding. Rah.
Well, I’m back, if there’s anyone still out there. I missed disco. No other blog site I opened seemed to be quite the same. So I’ve finally given in to temptation, and returned to boogie on down.
Shake shake. Yeah.
Thanks also for all the lovely comments everyone left. You’re all fab, darlings. Fab I say.
I have been a bit quiet these last few days because my head has been like one of those bingo ball machines. I have been all a-flutter, and haven’t known what’s going to be spewing out next. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I won’t go into in case crazy ladies start spitting up bile all over the comments box again, and you know how I hate having to go and get the bucket of sand from my special blog cleaning cupboard.
However, one reason is that yesterday I had a job interview. It’s for a job that sounds absolutely brilliant, and which I would very much like to get. The interview was over the phone, and so I found it difficult to gauge how I’d done, but it seems that they want me to go in and meet them, so I’m flying home for a week, in two weeks time.
Over the last few hours my head has been filling with all kinds of things, both good and bad, that I can look forward to in the UK that I don’t get here. These include:
my boyfriend
real ale
more kinds of cheese than you can shake a stick at
jaffa cakes
crumpets
rain
news features about pointless morons trapped in a house
sausages
clouds
ben and jerrys ice cream
book shops
television (not sure yet whether this is good or bad - I suspect mostly the latter)
grass (the kind that lawns are made from)
traffic
It’s alarming me how many of these involve food.
My sister has just had one of her wisdom teeth out. She wrote about it on her blog, and my response (Just one? One wee wisdom tooth out? Pah, you know nothing of pain…) reminded me of my own torturous experience of dental extraction.
I hate going to the dentist. I think this comes from having a lifetime’s worth of bitter, emotionally shrivelled dental witches jab ruthlessly at my gums with instruments of torture and then tell me to stop being such a baby, while blood dribbles down my chin, and tears dribble down my cheeks. I was convinced that they had no empathy, sympathy, or other human feelings. Until a few years ago, dentists would be considered by me to be living definitions of a sociopaths.
Then I met the dentist who removed all my wisdom teeth. He was lovely - a gentle, Chinese man with a nice line in valium and a willingness to pander to my pathetic fear of his tray of tools.
He told me that, despite my horror of all things dentist, I should have the impacted teeth out under local anaesthetic, because the root was positioned in a way that it might sever the nerve in my jaw. I thought it over for about a week, and then, reluctantly, agreed that I could probably live with long term facial paralysis less easily than, say, a mere hour in the butcher’s chair.
It was horrific. I won’t go into it in detail, but it involved a lot of valium, a large needle, blood, sweat, tears, whimpering, moaning, a small saw, a pair of pliers, blood, bits of tooth flying all over the shop and some more blood. I was a shadow of my former self at the end of it, and on top of it all, I had to ask him for the teeth because my ex wanted to see how gory they were. (They were gory. He was pale.) When I left, he had to shut up shop early because no-one was left in the waiting room.
So, at this point in my life I was living in New Cross (immortalised by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine). New Cross is a bit shit, but that’s beside the point. The point is that my dentist was in Putney. Now those of you not aware of what this means in terms of geography - London is big. New Cross is about as far east of south London as Putney is west. It’s a pain in the arse getting from one to the other by public transport, even when you’re healthy. When you’ve got a mouth full of bloody cotton wool and you’ve just started to feel the effects of the second valium the dentist felt obliged to give you, it’s next to impossible. So I got a taxi.
The taxi driver, so papery yellow and shrivelled he looked like he smoked 60 Bensons an hour, kindly picked me up outside the dentist’s office. I fell across the backseat, moaning gently. I had to write down where I wanted him to go.
“What’s wrong wiv ya, love?” he asked me, his smoker’s voice making him sound like a scary cockney gangster type person.
“Keef. Hag isgom keef ah. kain kerrigle.”
“Oh, that’s nuffing love. I remember when I ‘ad all me teef aht. Some geezer did me wiv a poker.”
He turned round, and smiled at me. Through the valium haze I could see that most of the teeth in the top of his jaw were missing.
“Uh.” I said. What do you say? “Gosh, how unfortunate, I’m dreadfully sorry. Why would he do such a thing?”?
I decided instead to pretend to go to sleep for the journey.
Very quietly asleep.
