Ian McAskill's hot (and cold) flushes

I can't cope with this bloody weather. I'm just about to go and change for the fourth time today. Perhaps I should move to the Urals or something.

Grumpy In Excelsis

My downstairs neighbours moved in a couple of weeks ago. They seem very nice - she quiet, he more outgoing and full of sub-Hugh Grant charm. But they do have the most enormous sound system, with a bass that seems to reverberate through my flat on even the lowest settings. Last night - or rather this morning, at 3.30, it woke me up. So after a few experimental bangs on the floor, I went downstairs and asked (well, told, to be honest) them to turn it off.

Now I'm feeling like one of the Dick Emery spinster characters ("It's MISS!") and coming up with all sorts of self-justifications to show that they are being unreasonable, not me. But I still feel like a complete killjoy.

The List of Justifications:

a. It was THREE THIRTY A. SODDING M.

b. I have slept through some very loud noises (e.g. bells of St Marks in Venice from 200m away, dustbin lorries, a military parade going underneath my hotel window), so it must have been VERY LOUD.

c. The lease says (if it's the same as mine) that music etc must not be audible outside the flat between 11pm and 7am.

d. I have as much right not to be woken up as they do to play music.

e. It was THREE THIRTY A. SODDING M.

Domestic Bliss

I'm not at work today, and so I have just been pottering around putting things away, hanging up things that have been lying around, watering plants and so on. I love my flat. I've lived here for more than 10 years, and despite its creaking shabbiness, leaky roof etc (it's amazing how Zen you can be about these things when you don't actually own the place), it's a lovely place to be, especially on mornings like this when the sun comes through all the windows.

I don't understand people who can live out of rucksacks for months on end. I admire them, but I know I couldn't do it. I need my books, my clothes, my mug with the Victorian gardener on it. Most of all, I need my front door, and the lovely feeling that when it's closed, it's entirely up to me how much I interact with the world.

This post brought to you by Antisocial Old Bats Ltd.

A Few of my Favourite Things

The sparkly blog-fest, which reminds me of the school scrapbook/holiday diary, is focusing at the moment on writing lists of good things about yourself. Several people have commented on how difficult it is not to qualify them, or question whether they are really all that good, so I won't. But it's true!

Good things about me:

I am good at grammar and spelling

I have good skin

I have a lovely singing voice

I am very good at being a friend

I am funny

I rarely throw up when drunk

I can match colours from memory

I remember a lot of poetry

I am discreet with other people's secrets without making a big thing about it

I am very good at organising and sorting things out

I run a mean meeting

My chocolate mousse is truly delicious

I stand up to bullies


Now I'm getting embarrassed so I'm going to go and do something that I'm really bad at just to take me down a peg or two. But I shall come back and look at this until I can read it through without squirming.

Wall 1, Mother 0

Well, last Thursday I got in from a friend's birthday supper to hear the phone ringing. It was a friend of my mother, telling me that she had had a call from said mother and gone round to find her in a pool of blood where she had fallen and hit her head on the corner of a wall. She had to stay in hospital overnight and had 19 stitches in her forehead (they didn't x-ray her head. They didn't need to. They just lifted up the flap of skin and saw that she hadn't fractured her skull).

My ma is 65, but she's quite fragile physically. Mentally, she's fine, and her character is - ahem - decided. I find this slide into parenting one's parents increasingly distressing - the acknowledgement that there are things they can't do, and never will be able to again.

I know that part of the reason I am so worked up about this accident is that it's five years since my dad died of a head injury. Caused by hitting a different bit of the same wall that took care of my mother last week. Should I send in a demolition crew, I wonder?

This is a test life. It doesn't really count

So here I sit at the kitchen table (oh GOD how Margaret Drabble) thinking what can I possibly write that someone else hasn't written.

Well. Today, in my corporate cyberwarren, where only those on over 60k merit their own desk, whereat to pin pictures of their identikit Aryan moppets, I was awarded a desk by the window. So I was not overlooked, or visited, or... well, anything really.

Once upon a time, I dreamt of this. Being uninterrupted. Left to get on with Important Stuff. To draft papers for Important People. Today, I just pissed around on the internet, wrote a few appraisals, kept pressing the refresh button on my email and... went off for lunch with a lovely internet friend.

What's happened to me? I used to be an ideal employee: working hard, working late, doing more than was asked of me. And now, earning A LOT more than I did then, I can barely motivate myself to get out of bed or complete my timesheet. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of what I ought to be doing: sadly, it's often stuff that my employers either don't value or don't understand. For example, I was asked, at the last minute, to come along to a meeting about some fancy new bells-and-whistles tool we are supposed to be using to evaluate everyone in my department. When, after playing with it, I said "But there are no criteria that apply to more junior members of staff... isn't that a bit demotivating?" - well, I might as well have said "Here, chew on this not-quite-dead rat". There was a long silence. Followed by "well, that's a valid point" in a Reaper-like voice from the main man. Oh dear.

And the thing is, I can't decide: am I taking the corporate system for a ride, or is it taking me for a mug? Does the money I get paid make up for the fact that half the time I end up feeling that I am about to be unmasked a la Scooby Doo? And most of the rest of the time, I spend heartily despising at least half of my colleagues.

This is a test post. It doesn't really count. Besides, I think I'm premenstrual. I must be; I've just eaten about a pound of shortbread. And I'm not normally this gloomy. Ask anyone. Anyone who manufactures gin, at least.