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.

Shake shake. Yeah.

Thanks also for all the lovely comments everyone left. You’re all fab, darlings. Fab I say.

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.

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.

“Rachael, are you busy?”

“Er…”, I look at my screen, which is probably showing my email, or a blog, or occasionally the google home page, for when I am struck with an urgent need to know something obscure, like “contents tartare sauce”, or “dream of corpses significance”.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What’s up?”

“My friend had a dream last night when she had shit all over her hands”. She extends her hands to me as if to demonstrate where the shit was. “What does it mean?”

I’m stumped. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“No, it’s ok, I’m looking it up on the internet. But how do you spell shit? Is it s h i t?”

I pause, trying to work out whether she’s likely to find a dream interpretation website that uses the word ’shit’, and wonder whether to tell her to use an alternative, like ‘faeces’ or ‘excrement’, and decide against it.

“Yes” I reply. Succinct, if nothing else, that’s me.

She wanders off, wiping her hands absentmindedly on her skirt.

************

Some kind visitors from South Africa brought a copy of The Express international edition into the office. I fucking hate the tabloids, but it was a joy to see a British newspaper, even if it is crap. I leave it lying on my desk and Kennedy walks in and absentmindedly starts to leaf through it.

“Wow, that palace is big”, he says, showing me a picture of Buckingham Palace. “Where is that palace? Is it in Liverpool?”

I stare at him, confused. “Nooo, I don’t believe it’s in Liverpool,” I reply.

“But the Queen, she is from Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“Er, no. No, the queen isn’t from Liverpool.” I’m trying not to laugh, even though there is no earthly reason why he would know where the queen is from.

“But she supports Liverpool in the football.”

“Does she? I didn’t know that.” I’m struck with a mental image of our monarch sat in front of the TV in a Liverpool shirt with a can of Heineken, shouting “You’ll never walk alone” at the TV, while Prince Philip plays keepy uppy in the corner.

“So where is this palace? Do you have one in every city?”

“It’s in London. No, there’s just that one. And a castle in Windsor. I think that’s it.”

He goes back to the paper, looking thoughtful.

**************

(1) Tell your readers three things about you that would make you the Ideal Housemate if you were imprisoned in a house with ten random strangers for weeks on end. Then three things that’d make you the Housemate From Hell.

(3) Tag as many people as possible with this meme. Quickly! The voting ends at midday on Mon 2nd July!

OK. Why would I make the perfect housemate? Well:

1. I have a history of sharing accomodation with complete lunatics. I’m serious. I know there’s a rule that says if there’s three or more of you in a house, and you think no-one is weird, or nuts, or scary, then the weird/nuts/scary one is you. However, that’s never happened to me. This means that if you live in a house with me, not only will you have a shining example of how to be normal, but you’ll never be bored, because I am a magnet for freaks.

2. I always make sure that number 2s are fully flushed before leaving the bathroom.

3. I am excellent at sharing bottles of wine with people. Therefore anyone sharing a house with me will always have a convivial, erudite and witty drinking companion for those post breakfast lulls in conversation.

And as for my faults, there are but few. However, if I dig really hard, I can tell you that:

1. Darlings, I live alone. Anyone else occupying my space does so on the proviso that they become a slave to my whims.

2. I refuse to eat anything that has mayonnaise in it, or near it. I am usually fairly dramatic about this (convulsions, retching, turning blue), and this could put other people off their food.

3. All chocolate in the house is mine. Mine. Do you hear me? I’ll defend it with my life, and I have very sharp nails.

So, anyone else want to answer these questions? Please feel free to be tagged.

Apparently, according to Theo Hobson, ‘Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming…to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is’. In addition to this all atheists fundamentally object to religion, and are on a mission to eradicate it from the face of the earth. He is taking as his example Christpher Hitchens, who has just publisehd a book entitled “God is not great: How religion poisons everything”.

He makes these pronouncements, and then negates any reasonable argument (for example on the grounds that an atheist is godless, or denies the existence of god, and doesn’t necessarily conform to any ideology surrounding that denial) by saying, in essence “Well, atheists would say that”. That’s mature, Theo – I haven’t used that kind of argument since I was in primary school. Would you please explain to me why that makes me wrong, or why it vindicates your ignoranct generalisations?

He then goes on to say that atheism in itself is a faith. I actually don’t understand how he can have arrived at this conjecture. Just because Christopher Hitchens believes that standing up to dogma will encourage people to use their brains does not mean that all atheists have faith in the fact that this will make the world a better place. My personal beliefs are about a lack of faith in a God. If I agree with Hitchens, does that mean I take his book and those of all other atheist philosophers as my bible? That I am therefore by default on some kind of anti-religious crusade? I don’t think so. I’ve been accused here before of laughing at people’s faith and of thinking it stupid. Perhaps to some extent I do, but people are entitled to believe what they want – although when it comes to things like honour killings and violence against abortion practitioners and faith-based conflicts I’ll hold my hands up and say that I think this aspect is harmful. It’s not just atheists who think so.

And as for the feeble joke about ’sexual repression’, shame on you Theo. You should know better than that. Women have been repressed by the pronouncements laid down in religious texts for thousands of years. It happened. Accept it.

And finally, he says “I consider the atheist’s desire to generalise about religion to be a case of intellectual cowardice. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty.” Oh bravo. I completely agree. Would you care to reread the what you just wrote? I know he says he’s talking about militant atheism, but it doesn’t sound that way to me.

It’s not religion that I have a bug bear with. It’s people like Theo who presume to tell me what I do or don’t believe, because believe me, they couldn’t be more wrong.

However, what really annoys me, and it happens ALOT, believe me, is when I spell my name out and people still don’t get it.

The conversation usually goes something very similar to this:

“Can I email it to you?”

“Of course. My email address is rachael, that’s spelt r, a, c, h, a, e, l at [my organisation] .org.”

“OK, I will do that.”

Phone rings two minutes later.

“That email address you gave me, it is not working.”

I know already what the problem is, and I always find it difficult to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“How did you spell my name?”

“R, a, c, h, e, l”

“No, it’s a, e, l.”

“r, a, e, l?”

“No, that’s Rael. Rachael. With an a before the e.”

“R, a, c, h, e, a, l?

“No. A E L. A. E. L.”

“Ah, ok”.

Then I will usually get the email, because they’ve managed to retain the information for long enough to type in the address, but it will start off “Dear Miss Raecheal”, or “Dear Miss Rechal” or some such nonsense.

Over and over again, this happens. Do people not have ears? Do they not learn the alphabet? Why is it so difficult?

Gaaah.

I do not understand.