Living for Disco

Despite a certain over-fondness for commas, I’m not a fan of bad punctuation. Grocer’s who add apostrophe’s to their potato’s deserve to be hauled into the street and pelted with copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (hardback, naturally). In my opinion. However, I am a coward and will generally not pick people up on their punctuation, because I don’t want people to make faces at me behind my smug, gramatically correct back.

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.

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….

My sister announced mid-last year that she was hitching herself to a tall Australian who likes to take her fishing at silly o’clock in the morning, and does stuff like buy her flowers, and tell her she is wonderful. This is excellent, as my sister is lovely and historically has had a tendency to go out with guys that are a bit shit.

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 departed from Birmingham early on Sunday, after having decided to skip the morning sessions, and turned on Radio 4. A serious sounding man was interviewing two members of the Zimbabwean diaspora about the current Mugabe shenanigans - a black doctor and a white farmer. So far, so interesting. He starts off by saying in a ‘I’m being very serious and political, hmmm, yes indeed’ voice “So, tell me about farming in Africa. It sounds so mysterious - almost impossible…”

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.

We’ve been very lucky with our lodger. She’s so quiet as to be almost invisible; she spends most of her time in her room, studying; she pays the rent on time. She’s about as unobtrusive as you could wish for. So when she disappeared about two weeks ago, we hardly noticed.

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.