Lilac
After work I went for a burger on the High Street. Not a Macshit burger, a genuine culinary delight, a tantalising concoction of real meat and all the trimmings. It was juicy, it was tasty, it kept me quiet for a good ten minutes. I rate biting into rare beef as one of the great pleasures of life. (Dating a vegetarian would involve too much restraint on my part.)
The table next to us was taken over by a Family of five. Out of the three brats, two started fighting over a hair band; the youngest creature hissed, sticky fingers were waved, hair was pulled, teeth were bared; the oldest of the two retaliated by simply poking her sibling in the eye. I thought it was a rather brilliant move. The parents were simply engrossed in the reading of top quality daily news rags featuring naked women.
The underclass also need advice on how to educate their children, don’t they? I usually want to advise parents on the ten best ways to drown their kids. So here’s:

Oi! Wot you looking at? How to raise your kids the Trashy British Way in twelve easy steps.
FAQ section

Should I worry about providing my kids with a balanced diet?
Worry? Why, no. There is no excuse in Modern Britain for not ensuring that your child has a balanced diet. Just look at your local high street – there are so many different types of fast-food outlets that it would be a positive failure to ensure that your child doesn’t eat a variety. Try a menu planner : Monday, Burger King. Tuesday, Kentucky Fried chicken. Wednesday, MacDonalds’. Thursday, Wendy’s. Friday, Dunkin Donuts; Saturday, for a treat, Pizza Hut, and so on. On Sunday, the local chippie will do.

Communication is a real problem. I don’t seem to get through to my kids anymore. What to do?
Besides changing mobile phones operators, try the traditional method: shouting. This technique works especially well late at night in tower-block stairwells, where you can get a decent echo to reinforce your point.

Apart from that, it’s Friday night.
The lilac is in full bloom.
My tan is fading already.
Today I wore my purple shoes.
After a 48 hour stint, our gas supply is back on; we can now wash with hot water, and consume hot food. On the downside, there is a hole in our front garden where a Jean Genet lookalike (but with fewer teeth and a Yorkshire accent) had to dig to ‘find the pipe’; Twice.
I miss my girlfriend.

Car boot sale

This afternoon I worked a bit more on my malignant melanoma, in-between bouts of frantic spring-cleaning and completing the cat's asymmetrical haircut. I thought the neighbor's cat Sid ( we call him Sid cos he's vicious) was laughing at him, and I couldn't be a bad mum.
I have a wardrobe full of black clothes to sell, size 10/12, some barely worn at all.

What will I do with them if I decide to propel myself onto the other side of the Atlantic? And the three million books? And the fluffy feline? And the two huge mirrors, and flea-market finds? And the ten sets of 100% Irish linen bedsheets? I'm a classic case of being tied down by my possessions. Sometimes, I wish the house would burn down so that I would have to start from scratch. Ok, maybe only my room, or it wouldn't be fair.
It's the dilemma that keeps me up at night. Especially before I fall asleep, and also between 2 and 5 am, when I have to be up in an hour's time and I should bloody well get some sleep. What to do, what to do; so much to leave behind, ten years of loves and life in London, a lot of learning, in front of me a straight enough, if narrow, path. Reliable people and places. Comfortable grudges and complaints. Well-worn habits. I know what to expect of winter and where to go for a good falafel. I know the buses that never run on time and the leaves that are the wrong kind on the tracks. I have made mine the pop culture references, even if anterior to my arrival here. I know what's going on. I know which TV station is coolest, even if I never watch TV. In fact, I know what's cool. I feel at home in pubs and cinemas and on the streets. I blend in, not too much, just enough. I look like I know where I'm going. I display the right code to the right kind of person. I'm a purposeful Londoner. This is home. How do I start all over again? I've tried making lists of what I'd leave, what I'd lose, what I'd gain, what I'd risk. They're so long, all of them. This is so scary and exhilarating.
Maybe a bad case of grass being greener on the other side.
Maybe a chance at getting the jigsaw together.


Vanessa inspired me with her list of 'books I've read'.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (x4)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights and all the others, too
Camus, Albert - The Stranger I even taught it for four years
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers and all his other ones
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved - and all the others
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find and her other ones
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide at least 5 times, including at school
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple (x5, and the sequel,,and all her other books)
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (x4)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son


I tend to read everything by one writer before moving onto the next.
All the books listed above are for sale.. Bargain: buy one item of black clothing from me, get a classic for 1p, how's that?

Where is this list from again?

Today was a sunny and industrious day. In an attempt at not surrendering to existential angst, I kept myself busy cleaning, mowing, weeding, washing, sweeping, whilst getting a burnt back in the process. Lovely. I also gave the cat another asymetrical haircut. His fur gets all matted and only the snips can sort him out. Then to further the anti-hair crusade I shaved my legs. That's my day so far. Productive. I'm good at avoidance.

St George's day!

In these days of equal opportunities, isn't it time we celebrated the dragon as well as saint George?

I'm still bored.

I am bored.


You are the grammar Fuhrer. All bow to your
authority. You will crush all the inferior
people under the soles of your jackboots, and
any who question your motives will be
eliminated. Your punishment is being the bane
of every other person's existence, because
you're constantly contradicting stupidity.
Everyone will be gunning for you. Your dreams
of a master race of spellers and grammarians
frighten the masses. You must always watch your
back. If only your power could be used for good
instead of evil.


What is your grammar aptitude?
Quizilla

Let's face it, I'm back

Around 2 am, still on San Francisco time, my brain decided it had slept enough. I tossed and turned, admonished and begged, turned and tossed some more, resorted to 50 mg of diphenhydramine hydrochloride; the Maximum Strength Softgels gave me about an hour of respite.
At 4 am I was fully, painfully awake, and ready to clean the flat, reorganise my cupboard and take some life-changing resolutions.
It is now 6pm, I’ve been through a day’s work like one goes through a meat grinder, the flat won’t get cleaned or reorganised any time soon, and I’ll have to postpone the life-change for a little while longer. Such are the joys of 8 hour-jetlag. At this point I would like to shamelessly borrow my girlfriend’s favourite words of wisdom: it’s hard being me.

So I’m back. Better get used to it, it’s likely to last for a few weeks/months.
London is ever so slightly leafier than when I left, three weeks ago. The cat remembers who I am. The job is the same, I realised today how familiar and comforting the place and its people are. We greeted each other with something akin to warmth.
After three weeks of being a guest, the too quiet girlfriend of the most popular girl in the room, a foreigner with a cute hybrid accent and very little idea of what’s going on, I’m back to my realm; my accent is not so cute here, and I’m not nearly as quiet. I’m back to rules I know, people I don’t have to win over anymore, my things, my bad habits.
I wish it wasn’t such a relief.

My life-changing resolutions all have to do with hubris. I wish it came in 50 mg pills.

I'm back from SF. Sleep deprived, mopey, pining, not wanting to be here. so I keep myself busy and unthinking by doing the following:

INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

I'm trying to not breathe too hard right now.

Spring in San Francisco: two days ago I got burnt rolling around semi-naked in Dolores park. Since then it's been cold. I have to wear my thickest wooliest jumper, which grates against my tender, sunburnt skin.

Slow, slow breathing.

That's all I have to say right now.

The only Robin Hood we need?

Clad in a blue leotard and wielding a saw, a man claiming to be the UK's first wheel clamp vigilante is offering his services to motorists.
Angle-grinder Man - a self-proclaimed superhero - patrols by night looking for unhappy drivers who have been clamped and then sets their cars free.
He promises to take on clamping firms, speed cameras and the congestion charge on behalf of drivers.
An odd-job man by day, he claims to operate in Kent during the week and in London at weekends.
A hotline number on his website offers a free wheel clamp removal service.

I for one am prepared to fight for what is fair and am making myself available to the public
Angle-grinder Man


The whole article, with picture, is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3112670.stm

I have many other things to report, but am presently in a sort of coma. Atonement and house of sand and fog might have something to do with it - another story of grossly unjust fate, another tale of suicides.
Bleh.

Street walking to the sound of the bouzouki


The first time I came to San Francisco, my grandmother thought it necessary to warn me about the two evils I was facing : 1) earthquakes 2 ) prostitution.
We all know that living in SF is akin to constant denial about the imminent collapse of the place; one day a pretty city, the next day, crack, shambles, no survivors. That's how she pictured it anyway.
As to prostitution, I tried explaining that I was living in London, that it was just as dangerous a place as that tiny Californian city, and that, in spite of my rosy-cheeked naivety and wide-eyed innocence, I was yet to fall into the evil greedy clutches of pimps and drug pushers.
In fact, I think it's the guns that worried her most. She probably pictured just about everyone carrying one of those sleek metal jobs, and willing to use it at the slightest loss of temper. (We Europeans associate the US with guns quite a lot; French people think of the guns, and the death penalty, and then people wonder why America is thought of as a violent country.)
So, prostitution.
Well. I'm not so rosy-cheeked now, but I still don't charge for sex, or at least not often. I was idly perusing the SF Weekly paper earlier, marvelling at the wide selection of big-busted ladies eager to sell their services. 'Rita - 38DDD', one claims. I wondered if she gets her bras custom-made. 'Spanish beauty - 40-24-30' . She must keel over. 'Will you teach me Greek?' Pardon me? 'I speak Greek'. ' Into Greek'. 'Kim, Greek Goddess.'
Huh? Am I missing something here?
I asked my girlfriend if Greekdom was suddenly a secret code for kinky activities. She claims ignorance. I bet for anal sex. What's so wrong about the words anal and sex? And, while I'm at it, why French kissing?

On my best behaviour

I'm becoming a jet-setter.
Well, almost.
I'm getting used to regular 14 hour jumps across the world. I now have a whole system worked out, tried and tested, in order to arrive as fresh as I possibly can and propel myself into my girlfriend's arms, in SFO domestic terminal. My special kit involves earplugs (at least 3 of them, as one always escapes), elasticated eye-mask, inflatable pillow ( looks stupid, is heavenly), and Nytol sleeping pills. Exactly 5 minutes after a successful take-off ( if figure that if the plane crashes I'll either need all my brain to get out through the flames, and that if we all die it won't matter if I'm drugged up or not anyway), I pop 2 pills, and out I am for 8 hours. I only surface for food, opening one eye at a time, head still lolling on said pillow. I wake up 30 minutes before landing, stretch, and get ready to face the customs people.

- Good afternoonofficer! ( me, breezy, smiling, on my best behaviour)
- Why do you come to the United States ? ( uniformed man impervious to warm eye contact)
- On holidays,kind Sir ( slight , hopeful lilt)
- what will you be doing in the United States?
- sex, drugs, general bad-mouthing of your incredibly incompetent government, oh, and trying to steal your job.Well, you know... holiday stuff
- When were you here last time? For how long?
- February, 9 days
- Who paid for your ticket?
- I did... ( slightly indignant tone)
- Are you seeking employment in the United States?
- yawn - no, I have a job, thank you very much (internal sigh)
- who lives at this address? (points at landing card)
- my girlfriendboyfriend
(stamps furiously)
- thank you Lieutenant! have a good day!

It gets more fun every time.