So you will understand that it took a great deal for me to stump up the energy to review Indiana Jones’ latest offering. Here are some of the things that I found annoying:

1. The cute gophers. Anyone who lets George Lucas near a film these days is asking for trouble. It’s a good thing he wasn’t involved in Schindler’s List, otherwise all the Jews would have been rescued by little furry chipmunks shouting ‘oy vey’ and looking alarmed when the Nazis goose-stepped past.

2. It’s nuclear. New-clee-ar. Not new-cew-lar. George W Bush says new-cew-lar. Don’t be a moron.

3. Just how many women who’ve been jilted at the altar would greet their ex-paramour with anything less than a winklepicker to the gonads? Just how quickly did she succumb?

4. Sword fighting on the back of jeeps. Yawn.

5. Cute monkeys (see cute gophers above) teaching Indy jnr to swing through the jungle like Tarzan. George Lucas should be shot (see above).

5. Everything else.

Awful. Just awful. Don’t waste your precious, non-commuting time.

In other news, thanks for the lovely comments to the last post, which I will answer, as each and every one deserves an answer.

However, Gordon has said (with increasing firmness, the more time we spend with friends who have more than one child of toddler age) that we should probably check that we’d make good parents first, by getting a kitten and practising on it.

So, we have a kitten. We haven’t named it yet as no names really seem to stick, apart from Kitten. It’s been four days, and I’m wondering whether we would make good parents. For example, is it wise to let your six week old (as yet unnamed) child hurtle up and down the stairs, stick its head through the bannisters, fall backwards off the sofa onto the wooden floor, and play delightedly with a small pile of gravel in which it has just buried its own excrement? I even lost her the other day, only to find she’d got stuck in the cupboard under the sink while investigating our bleach collection.

I admit I’m trying to give her the care and sustenance she needs. She likes to try and suck on my eyeball, which I’m trying to dissuade her from doing, as it is a) uncomfortable and b) unhygenic. I mean, she’s usually just licked her bum clean. Conjunctivitis anyone?
I also let her sleep in our bed, which I understand can be comforting for young children. However, waking up at 5.30 am with a cat on your head isn’t the best way to ease yourself into your day. Particularly when she generally attacks anything that moves, which includes your bleary, blinking eyelid.

She is very, very cute, which is why people get kittens in the first place, I imagine. She’s also completely insane. She stalks us eveywhere we go. Our toes have puncture wounds that would be the envy of a bevy of lorikeets. Nothing is safe.

We bumped into the neighbours from whom we got her yesterday, and he asked us how it was going.

“Bonkers isn’t she?” he said, with a certain degree of schadenfreude. I thought all kittens were bonkers, but he assures us that of the litter of six, this one was particularly nuts. I expect to come home to find her swinging from the light fittings one day very soon, and like most mothers, I like to think that this is merely a reflection of her extraordinary brilliance.

On a weirdly serious note though, it struck me that cats live for 14 or 15 years. I hadn’t really thought about this before. She’s probably going to be our cat for a very long time. For the first time, I’ve actually had to consider the very real nature of our commitment to each other, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the excitement of moving in with Gordon and planning our wedding. It’s bizarre that it’s taken something as tiny as a kitten to bring this home.

Naturally it hasn’t changed anything - just clarified a few things to my satisfaction. However, it’s also made me consider our relationship through a further layer of understanding. It does make me wonder whether anyone really knows what they are getting into when they say ‘I do’, or when they get a kitten together.

Above all, spending time together with the kitten has made me realise that we’re really going to have to do the dusting a bit more often. If anyone sees the amount of fluff on Kitten’s whiskers, we’ll soon be getting a visit from the RSPCA, and I’m not ready to start the recrimination stage of our partnership just yet.

*Although they can do wonders with science these days, so I might just store my eggs and wait til I’m 60.

I like birds anyway - I became known for my ability to identify birds while in Namibia. ‘What’s that?’, people would cry as we passed some bizarre avian specimen. ‘It’s an ostrich!’ I would reply confidently, astonishing everyone with my ornithological knowledge.

The main thing I wanted to do was visit the Lory Loft, as I had heard that you could feed the birds and get close to them. ‘How lovely!’ I thought, picturing myself covered with delightful little feathered creatures that would eat demurely from my hand, whilst batting their eyelashes for the camera.

I am now older and wiser. Lorikeets are noisy as fuck, have very sharp claws, defend their food viciously and have thick grey tongues that are, quite frankly, unsettlingly reptilian. But enough of the wordy descriptions. Here, let me show you…

I left the Lory Loft with somewhat depleted hearing, and a number of deep puncture wounds in my arm.

Also I think they had fleas.

In the meantime, the first thing that we had to do when we got back was to visit the registrar to state our intent to marry each other. I had no idea you had to do this kind of thing - get permission from the council to get married? What the fuck have the council got to do with it? Aren’t they responsible for refuse collection and digging up the roads in an inconvenient fashion?

Of course, I realise that there has to be a record of births, deaths and marriages, and that this has to be done by the parish. However, I’d not given much thought to the fact that you have to go and hand over a cheque for £60 and answer questions about your intended in order to prove that you haven’t imported them from a developing nation for tax breaks.

I actually started to get a bit worried when Gordon, having been asked the relatively straightforward question of his age at the current time, had some trouble answering. Would the registrar think that he had failed to memorise his cover properly? I hoped he didn’t sound too Lithuanian.

‘You’re 41′, I hissed, hoping to support him (in a future-wifely fashion) through this mental meltdown.

‘Don’t help him! You’re not allowed to help him!’ said the registrar.

The same thing happened when it came to the answering of questions about his bride, amongst which were details of my age, occupation and length of time lived in Bournemouth. There is only so much information you can convey with your eyebrows, and ‘34′, ‘Trust Fundraising Manager’ and ‘7 months’ tends to be a little specific. We did get there in the end, although I think my gurning may have alarmed the registrar.

So, we have no officially declared our intention to get hitched, and with any luck, no lunatics (you know who you are) will write in to the council objecting on entirely spurious grounds in the next 15 days.

It feels like I’m practically married already.

During my second wrestling match with depression last year, my doctor put me on Effexor. I wrote about the debilitating initial effects on this blog some time ago, as well as the cavalier attitude of my doctor, who said “I knew I shouldn’t have given you that information leaflet. Just take the bloody pills”.

Effexor has really been a miracle drug for me. It lifted me out of a hole, and made me feel normal. I was able to make rational decisions, and approach daily tasks like food shopping, and washing up, without weeping with stress and confusion. I stopped having fruitless, angry conversations with people in my head. Life improved.

Unfortunately, now that I’m ready to stop taking it, I’m discovering that I am physically dependent on it. I didn’t know when I started that Effexor withdrawal can be a very long, painful and traumatic process, but boy, am I learning now.

It goes like this (and this isn’t from a sudden stop – it’s from a slow tapering of the dose as recommended by the doctor):

Stage 1: Brain Shivers.

I have discovered that someone has given a name to this unsettling sensation. To be honest, though, I don’t think ‘brain shiver’ really describes it. It is more as if you’re going along happily as normal, and you suddenly decide to turn your head to the left. Your brain is not ready for this, goes “Whoah there, cowboy!” and refuses to move. Your eyes feel a bit squiggly, and you are momentarily disoriented. The sensation, which is amusingly ticklish at first, worsens the longer you go without the drug. It usually results in

Stage 2: Nausea

Intense, although never actually followed through by the stomach, so not even throwing up will relieve it. Tends to happen suddenly, in shops or meetings. Inconvenient. Followed quite quickly by

Stage 3: The Shits.

There’s no delicate way of putting it. Suddenly, the contents of your intestinal tract have turned to liquid, and begun to boil. Understandably, your intestinal tract no longer wishes to accommodate this bubbling, toxic mass. On no account should you mistake this feeling for trapped wind, unless you have a change of underwear handy.

And as if these physical manifestations of withdrawal weren’t distressing enough, you also have hideous emotional symptoms.

Imagine, for example, that your perspective shifts suddenly, and you come face to face with your worthlessness. It becomes a logical deduction that anyone who says they love you must be lying, because frankly, why would they when you’re like this? Ergo, they are certain to abandon you unless you start behaving like a rational human being. Unfortunately you no longer have any idea how to behave in a normal fashion. It feels like being trapped in an invisible box.

Fortunately, I have a very understanding fiancé, who listens to me ramble on in tearful lunatic fashion, and when I ask him anxiously what he is thinking, he says things like “I was thinking that I’d like to go base jumping off El Capitan”*, which is just so irrelevant to my personal internal crisis that it is like being offered a firm piece of ground to stand on.

This phenomenon can last between anywhere from ten minutes to (in my case) four hours.

Also, I like to rant, but I’m now occasionally afflicted by brief, but irrational bouts of absolute fury. I can now empathise with screaming, purple faced toddlers in Sainsburys. We are as one. It’s almost zen.

Other, more minor side effects include uncontrollable teeth grinding, sudden bouts of intense apathy, memory loss, time-slips, loss of concentration… the list goes on. At this rate, I’m going to be toothless and temporally confused by the time I’m 35.

This has now become a personal challenge. I simply can’t stomach the idea that this one small pill is causing me so much trouble, even though once it made life so much easier. I’m not belittling the wonderful transformation to my life that Effexor effected, but why does it insist on hanging on in there where it’s not wanted? It’s like the one remaining drunk guest at the end of a really great party, and it’s really objecting to being evicted.

So here I am, stepping into the ring for a battle of wills against my own brain. It doesn’t get better than this.

*I am assuming that this is not necessarily translatable as “I wish to die, now, please”.

So when walking along a London street last weekend, and spotting a sign on a door that said “No! Junk mail please!”, I simply had to stop.

“What earthly sense does that sign make?” I said to Gordon in disgust, gesticulating wildly at the offending door. “I’m surprised they’re not inundated with pizza leaflets and free ads papers. They’re just asking for junk mail. Why can’t people get it right?”

At that very minute a man with a bag of shopping walks through the gate of the house. I had seen him, but what are the chances that the only other man on a long London street should live in the house at which I am staring as if it is a piece of dog poo on my shoe?

He turned out to be Chinese. And to speak English as most definitely his second language. I discovered this when he explained to me that “We put this sign, no junk, we don’t like - too much paper.”

I think I’ll go back to being a pedant in private.

So, now that I have a job I can afford (for ‘afford’, read ‘get further into debt by being able to say I can pay off a loan’) to go to Australia to be present, wear a dress, get drunk, fall off things and embarass the family - although by the sounds of things, I may yet be outdone by some of the groom’s more interesting relatives.

Anyway, on the way, Gordon and I are stopping off in Singapore. This is mainly so that he can do the second leg of the journey in the Airbus A380. The larger that passenger planes are, the more they alarm me, so I naturally think this is a marvellous idea, and can’t wait for the experience. ‘A flying metal coffin with three times as many people in it as normal! Woo!’, I will say, as I down my diazepam and bloody mary combo, and try not to imagine the headlines.

We are extremely excited about this three day jaunt, and have made extensive plans, which we have annotated and marked on corresponding maps. Not an hour is unaccounted for. And it was this process that made me appreciate once again that I’ve found someone who is perfect for me; the process for selecting our activities went thus:

1. Work out exactly how many meals we had to eat between landing and taking off again.
2. Go through the ‘food’ section of the guidebook, marking off restaurants that we like the sound of.
3. Repeat, eliminating surplus eateries with the equation “priority = cost x distance from sites of interest - hawker centre interest rating”.
4. Work out list of bars in which to drink after dinner drinks with views of the harbour.
5. Mark on map.
6. Write list, with favoured dishes annotated (e.g. curried soft-shell crab; hainan chicken rice; banana leaf curry)
7. Salivate until forced to over indulge on cheese.

And I wonder why I’m not losing any weight.

I can only imagine the look on the farmer’s face. It must have resembled the look on mine - incredulity shaken up with contempt, and a splash of disgust. Do people actually do any research before they interview people? Do they actually know anything about Africa?

It was really the cherry on the cake of a most annoying weekend. The volunteers were all great, apart from the guy who insisted on telling me in minute detail about the trials faced by the Papua New Guinean people, when all I wanted to do was drink my wine and gossip about stuff unrelated to third world development issues. It was the VSO employees running the gig that really annoyed me. I just don’t understand why they would organise a weekend designed to address the complex issues faced by returning volunteers and staff it with non-volunteers with a collection of caring faces, and a tendency to say “I can’t imagine what it must be like”.

Bits of it were good, like the feedback to the Chief Executive, who actually listened and responded. Generally, however, I felt I really could have done with a bit more of the sessions about coming home, and less of the ones about how to use a photograph to tell a story.

It was a relief to get home, and do normal things for the afternoon, really. Being at the weekend was alternately unsettling, confusing, upsetting and encouraging, with rather too little of the latter. Could do better, VSO.

I did start to wonder whether she’d just decided to move out without telling us, but I thought this would have been out of character. I have since learned that it is possible for me to be wrong occasionally.

So, in the character round up, we have:

*1 lodger, Doncastrian, quiet and slightly overweight, apparently studying for an accountancy degree.
*1 Russian boyfriend, as wide as he is tall, who does nothing when at our house except sit on the phone saying ‘Da’, ‘Nyet’, and shovelling stewed pork chops into his boulder-shaped head.
*1 clearly ‘new to the job’ policeman, who seems almost as voraciously curious as me about the contents of the lodger’s recently vacated room.
*1 slightly befuddled parent of above mentioned lodger, who seems unable to write much English, and thinks that the Secret Service is tapping her phone.

Two days ago we received a very badly written letter with some suspect phone numbers on it from the parent, who informed m,. once I finally deciphered the number, that her daughter is not returning to her room because she has been set up as a mule and is currently languishing in Brooklyn jail. We had a bit of a ‘Oh My God’ moment, and then sat down in couply bliss to stick stamps on our wedding invitations.

Last night, at around 5pm, I got rather panicky phone call from this woman, who I’m beginning to suspect is not all there, and possibly not even lodger’s mother, as she claims to be, informing me that the hulking boyfriend had just left Doncaster en route to our house, and on no account were we to either let him in or to ‘give him any paperwork’ because he’s the one who set lodger up. Having met this boyfriend on several occasions, I was rather less than comforted by Gordon’s assurances that he would simply not allow him in, given that he is about the same size as one of this guy’s arms. So I called the police.

Enter stage left, one rather intrigued young officer who almost immediately finds something fishy afoot, and suggests a thorough search of lodger’s room. This search reveals that she has, in fact, absconded. She’s taken all her underwear, for starters. However, she has left behind all her accountancy textbooks, some clothes, a closet full of unworn prada shoes, a brand new ipod still in the box, some heavy-duty expensive looking stereo equipment, a ‘Complete Russian Course’ complete with DVDs and some bank statements, letters from debt collectors and evidence of very shady dealings indeed, including a copy of a bounced cheque for £14,000. The boyfriend’s car is also registered under her name at our address, and she set up a business from our home at the end of last year, which we knew nothing about. Boyfriend is identified from her Russian notes as being a known ‘violent male’. I start to gulp at my wine a bit.

Officer Newby decides to open lodger’s waiting mail. It contains statements for yet another bank account, which has been recently emptied, an incorrectly filled in tax return quoting bizarre income, and a book about adrenal stress disorder (Ha! I think I will nick it).

I have gone from being incurably curious, to wishing that she’d never set foot in our house. I’m also worrying about being shot, stabbed, or buried in concrete if we so much as breathe a word of this to the… oh.

Then, Officer Newby decides to give lodger’s Mum a call on her mobile, as the landline number she gave me is suspiciously one digit short. At this point, she tells him that boyfriend is no longer en route to our house, and that he’s just left her with an envelope containing £5,000 in cash for reasons she seems incapable of explaining. She can’t tell him her landline number because the Secret Service have bugged her phone, but apparently lodger is ok, and being kept in Brooklyn jail for her own safety. My mind is still boggling.

We are told that CID will get on the case, and then Officer Newby departs, telling us to call 999 immediately should anyone show up wanting lodger’s stuff.

This is why I am still recovering from a bilious hangover, induced by lemon martinis that seemed terribly necessary in the aftermath of these unsettling revelations. I have a feeling I’m going to be drinking rather alot of them over the next few days.

Watch this space.