Harold Marvin Llamaar

This little cutie has been landed with the best name. If I had a kitten I would call it Melvill Dewey Decimal.

Conversation on a bus #2

[2 boys this time, probably about 17. On their way into town on a Saturday night.]

Kelvin: “Oh look at me hair, it looks awful”
Shayne: “Nah mate it looks fine”
Kelvin: “Seriously, I shouldn’ ‘a left the house like this, what do I look like?”
Shayne: “You look good! Where are we goin’ first?”
Kelvin: “We’re meetin’ Shazza and Kazza and Dwayne and Stevo and that lot in the Drunken Monkey, then we’ll see where we flock”
Shayne: “Are you goin’ to Time? I ain’t goin’ to Time. There’s no way I’m goin’ to Time”
Kelvin: “No idea mate, I don’t know where we’re goin’. See where we flock to yeh?”
Shayne: “But I ain’t goin’ to Time”
Kelvin: “Seriously mate, I’ve no clue”
Shayne: “Who’s gonna be out then?”
Kelvin: “Dunno mate, probably Kez and Jez, Bazza sez he’s bringin’ his new bird Crystal and some of her mates. Might get lucky”
Shayne: “But what if they go to Time? I ain’t goin’ there”
Kelvin: “Dunno mate, if there’s girls goin’ it’ll be a laugh. See where we flock eh?”
Shayne: “Well if they go to Time I might go”
Kelvin: “Look at me hair. Seriously mate, just look at it!”

The joys of online shopping

I have discovered the joys of online ordering for food. After spending over an hour the week before fighting through trolley jams, fat people standing in the middle of the aisles, and trying to find where the food had all been moved around to, I thought “That’s it!” and got on the computer. And it was a breeze. I found everything I wanted, lots of it was on offer, and they could deliver whenever I wanted.

Day of the delivery dawned and the van pulled up about 15 minutes into the delivery slot. The man was lovely, so lovely he almost stopped for tea, and the shopping was done! It was SO exciting; we unpacked the bags going “Ooh! Look! Teabags!” and “Ooh, mushrooms! Look!” like we hadn’t actually ordered it all ourselves. Everything we wanted was there, the only substitution was alcohol so that was fine. I can drink pretty much everything.

I’ve already started my list for next time! My life is so much easier now.

Conversation on a bus

[Setting the scene: back seat of a bus, 2 girls who are 17 based on their conversation, but who looked about 45. Girl no. 1 (Carly) is upset about her forthcoming 18th birthday. Girl no. 2 (Kia) has just been bought a car for hers. They both sound like Chantelle from Celebrity Big Brother]

Carly: "They wanna take me away for the weekend, but I ain't goin' if it's in this country. There ain't no point."

Kia: "But a 14 hour flight ain't no good for a weekend away, you gotta go somewhere closer. And they said they couldn't afford to go abroad."

Carly: "It ain't on Kia. They say they can't afford to take me away for the weekend somewhere worf goin' to but it's coz they hate me. I ain't sayin' nuffin but it's me 18th and they knew when I was born that someday I was gonna be 18. They say they can't afford to take me away for the weekend somewhere worf' going to but they're lyin'. They woulda saved up if they wanted to, they went to Lanzarote last year and took my bruvver and they had the money for that. They've had all me life to save up, they just spent the money on themselves."

Kia: "Yeah but I only got the car coz my parents had the money, I wouldn't 'a got it if they couldn't. You know your mum ain't got the money."

Carly: "Yeah I ain't sayin' nuffin' but she's working now."

Kia: "She only started last week."

In the ghetto?

So the Labour Government are going to create a "Minister for Social Exclusion". What sweeping powers the lucky minister will have – “I don’t like the look of you sonny jim, off to the walled ghetto that is Birmingham for you”. None of us will be safe.

Bank robbers wives!

Imagine the planning that goes into stealing almost £50 million pounds (or about 8 billion dollars, it sounds SO much more). It must take months and months of planning, scoping the joint, spying on people who work there, learning the routines of the place, getting the top criminal masterminds involved and copies of those funny blueprints of the layout that they always have in films. Then the day dawns. It goes without a hitch. Brilliant! The TV is full of reports about the heist, the amount stolen goes up every half hour, everyone is amazed at the nerve of the robbers! You are made for life, if there’s 50 people involved, that’s still a cool million each. And who knows 50 criminal masterminds who can keep a secret?

But then your wife decides to go to the bank. And pay in her share of it. And she forgot to take the wrappers off the bundle. These handily say “from Tonbridge”.

Any criminal mastermind knows you lie low for at least 3 months, you don’t go the bank and say “I’ve suddenly come into some money. Can I open a high interest account please?”

Lessons I have learned in life

1) Never go to sleep with wet hair.
2) If you buy a pair of trousers that are too long for you and fail to take them up, you will spend a lot of time tripping over your feet.
3) If you buy a pair of trousers that are too big for you, solely on the basis that they are cheap, you will spend a lot of time yanking them up.
4) Buy the right size trousers in future.
5) When you suggest going out for an evening with a man, make sure you have a full plan of action already sorted to avoid the usual “where shall we go” debates.
6) If you keep to your resolution to drink more water, you will also get lots more exercise by your extra trips to the loo.

Booky B FM

This week I have woken up with the following songs in my head:

Kelly Clarkson - Since you've been gone
KT Tunstall - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree

I don't own either of these songs, hell I don't even like them very much. KT has a cheery riff (with me everybody..."whoo oo"..."whoo oo") and Kelly is very angsty ("grrr") but I didn't hear them on the radio or on the tv or anything. How did they get in my head overnight and what does it mean?!

New shoes?!

Too bloody right! When do you ever find two beautiful pairs of shoes at the same time and they have them in your size and everything?!

Timber!!

In the news today there was a report of a floor collapsing at an office in Manchester. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but some cad of a journalist managed to get into their report that the people were in a health and safety meeting at the time. That really made me laugh! Sad I know.

Work and wine

I think I’ve found a cure for the work time blues. Go to the pub at lunchtime and have a glass of wine. Just one. Don’t go overboard. Then the afternoon is so much better. It really is. And the best thing about it? I was at a meeting in the pub, the best venue to hold meetings I find, so I can even feel virtuous about working at the same time. Marvellous.

It's spring!

These are the first bulbs* I have ever grown. I am so proud.

[*on the phone I excitedly declared to hubbie that my bulbs were growing. He heard "boobs" instead of "bulbs" and was very disappointed when he got home and I dragged him to the garden instead of the bedroom.]

Who's gonna drive you home?

Recently I have noticed a weird thing. There have been loads of cars driving around in the dark with no headlights on. Drivers in London are scary enough when you can see them coming towards you. Normally I would flash at them to tell them (with my headlights stupid), but then if the "not being able to see where you're going" in the dark doesn't alert them, hell what would? I read something in the paper a few weeks ago and it's stuck in my head and is really putting me off getting involved with the mad drivers. In Japan (or was it Brazil?), some gang had an initiation rite where the gang members drove around with no lights on. Whichever kind samaritan flashed them to warn them was followed home and killed. They had marked themselves to the gang and were the next victims. The police had to issue a warning to people not to flash at cars with no headlights on.

Now this may be a cunning urban myth, I'm easily fooled (just ask Lady L), but it has put me off warning people just in case they are going to try and kill me. The fact that they may kill me anyway as they can't see where they're going, and I can't see them, seems irrelevant.

Me? Nuts? Discuss.

Not cool

Yeah, brown just wasn't sexy. Due to the risk of being mistaken for a depressed librarian (librarian?! Perish the thought!), I rethought the colour scheme. This is better! [Note to self: learn more html so I can make it purple instead!]

New look

Is this look just too brown?

A rant

The Nanny State has gone into overdrive this week. Banning smoking in a "kind of" way - exceptions include stadiums with open roofs, royal palaces, and army barracks. So this means that Parliament (counted as a royal palace) is exempt from the restrictions they are imposing on the rest of us. How fair is that?! The leader of the House of Commons has said that he does not expect anyone to smoke there even though they can. How many politicians do you reckon are gonig to be smoking in their offices?! Not that I smoke or want to. But it smacks of hypocrisy. The Queen can hang out of her window smoking a big old cigar and nobody could stop her.

More hypocrisy from David Cameron of the Tories emerged today. He had a little baby on Valentine's Day - aahh. He has taken the full 2 weeks of paternity leave that were recently passed by Parliament. Which would be fine, except that he voted against it when it came up for vote. If he had his way new dad's would have less time off with their new babies but when it applies to him it's fine. It makes me mad sometimes.

And don't tell my paranoid colleague, but they think they've got bird flu in France...

Bo Selecta!

Sometimes something is so ridiculous it makes you want to laugh hysterically, cry and vomit at the same time. This came to my attention today. Craig David (aka The Most Boring Man in Pop) is the star attraction at a mobile phone convention. He has been waxing lyrical about how his mobile helps him with his music. He even compared himself to Sting:

“When I was out in Asia, I was on the bullet train travelling between two different performances. I felt inspired. It was my first time in Japan and I felt a bit like in the Sting classic an Englishman in New York. I took a picture of the bullet train and the people walking on, then stored that onto my phone and linked it to the song, got back to my studio, downloaded it and it put me right back into the moment”.

Bless him. I can imagine him sitting on the train humming little ditties into a voice recorder (“I’m Craig Daviiiid”…) then going to his “studio” (read “bedroom”) to hammer them out on a little bontempi keyboard.

And how uncool is it for any kind of musician to prostitute themselves to the big mobile phone companies? I bet he got some cool freebies, but at the expense of the rest of his reputation? And do you know anyone with a Craig David ring tone on their phone?

No snogging in class!

Lord preserve us, there’s another ban on the way. Every now and then the EC or some moralistic body decides to ban something in the name of decency. The EC usually try to ban bent cucumbers or dodgy sausages, presumably on the grounds that we might get saucy ideas from looking at them? I kid you not. I have a vague memory that they also tried to ban small condoms in case they offended anyone.

Anyway, today’s papers are full of this. New guidelines want to stop kids in plays at schools from doing love scenes, in case they are exploited. Now when I was at school the raunchiest scenes our plays did were Mary kissing Joseph on the cheek in the Nativity. (Though I am convinced one of the shepherds “accidentally” on purpose brushed against one of the sheep. That wasn’t in the script). It’s ridiculous. Kids know the difference between acting and real life, and if teachers are asking them to do plays that call for sex scenes and nudity, as reported, then the teachers should be banned! Stopping pretend kisses on the grounds that kids are open to abuse is just crazy. And how else will the prettiest girl in school get together with the handsomest boy? It’s the law that they have to play Romeo and Juliet and spread the joys of budding romance round the school. I don’t remember them being required to get jiggy with it as well.

I once worked in a carrot factory in my holidays. A lot of carrots often looked rather like genitalia. Are they going to ban them next?

Quote of the day

"Always go to the bathroom when you have a chance".
King George V.

Never a truer word was spoken

Cruise news

Well the dearth of celebrity gossip surrounding TomKat has been replaced by the most bizarre rumour mongering! Yesterday the paper ran a quote from Katie saying she knew she would end up marrying Tom as “her medium told her” she would. Uh oh? And today some mag claims they will split up as soon as baby Cruise is born. Where do they get these rumours from?! Some old friend of Katie, or some man who sat in the next booth to her at the diner, knows this for gospel truth? Though we all know Katie is just a machine for the future of Scientology, a pretty face with the right genes at the right time. So it wouldn’t surprise me if she was disposed of after producing the goods. But splitting up isn’t good for PR, wouldn’t she just “disappear” into obscurity instead? They already said she would give up films to look after young “Damien”, so she could be locked up in a huge nursery somewhere until everyone forgets about her. What was that film where the bloke had his mad ex-wife locked up in the attic?

So sue me!

I think I am mental. Over the weekend in my jet lagged state, I emailed the travel agents that took all our money and tried to ruin our honeymoon, hell I'm going to name names here - Thomas Cook - to tell them how great Lastminute.com and Virgin Atlantic were this time round. This was because my unbridled joy at the smoothness of our trip made me realise how much I still hated TC, and I decided I wanted to tell them. I also emailed the others to tell them how much I hearted them.

But now I feel guilty. I don't want to check my email in case I have one from TC saying: "you are SO petty, get over it. We don't want your money anyway, and every holiday you book in the future we will be watching and try to ruin it. We have spies everywhere. We RULE the High Street".

Though if I have one from Richard Branson thanking me for my praise and offering me a free holiday on that island he owns, why, I'd be thrilled! You have to take the rough with the smooth baby!

Is this normal?

Be my Valentine?

My colleague (the one who is obsessed with bird flu and sudden death) has her birthday on Valentine’s Day. As did her predecessor. Weird. Anyway, that aside, she has decided that she wants to get married and Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to find herself a husband. She hasn’t got a boyfriend you see, and she has decided that she just wants to be married, never mind who to. And despite the possibility of sudden death at any moment, she still clings on to the romantic notion of marriage. She wants to leave her resume on the Enquiry Desk for any interested male library users (hey, she might be open to female such is her desire for wedded bliss). And oblivious to the slightly desperate vibes she is giving off, she is telling any man who stays at the desk long enough to listen. Poor girl, I don’t know why she is so fixated.

Apparently in Belgium they are doing speed dating in libraries, there is a definite market. It’s all based on what your favourite books are, and if you like someone you talk to you can arrange to meet them again – perhaps by leaving your phone number in a book? It would help the shy people, and give us librarians something else to moan about! All this lovey dovey stuff ain’t because of this in the news today. A survey claims that wedded bliss only lasts a year, then it’s all downhill till death/divorce. As I am only just over a week past the year mark, it makes me worry that I am going to wake up tomorrow morning miserable as sin and hubbie will take to sitting around in his dirty pants drinking beer and watching porn. Who commissions these surveys anyway? And who do they ask?! I’m sure it’s not all that bad, surely if you have married an idiot you would realise within the first couple of weeks? And then there’s the 7 year itch to look forward to. Honestly, are they trying to promote marriage or what?! There aren’t enough houses for everyone to be single!

The best website in the world?

I love this site. I could watch it for hours. How sad am I?

Who's the Daddy?

American tv is just mental. We caught a fair bit of it in the late afternoons when we had run out of money for the day. There's a lot of Jerry Springer style shows, Maury, Oprah, Judge Joe Brown. My highlight was a Maury show - "I am testing a man to see if he is the father of my baby". Only thing was, he was the 10th man (yes the 10TH!!!) this lady had dragged on national tv to do a paternity test on. And they showed clips of the previous 9 shows, when the men were declared not to be the daddy she threw herself to the floor and wailed and screamed. The 10th man was not the daddy. Lady declared herself to be "cursed". How many men could she have been sleeping with in a month?! She thought she was just unlucky!! Now it is very difficult to get pregnant when you're trying, the window of opportunity is very small every month. This woman must have been riding them like no-one's business. And no-one thought to tell her that maybe, just perhaps, she should have kept her legs shut?! The poor 10 men that were humiliated on tv and screamed at for not being the daddy were the ones who got the grilling. She was treated like a poor unfortunate woman who had been badly treated. I suppose they want her back for the next 10 paternity tests. Dirty old tart!!

Viva las vegas!

Some highlights of our trip to Vegas:

1) Seeing Elton John at the Colliseum in Caesar's Palace. He was amazing, and very funny, and he really doesn't like Celine Dion at all (she's also on in Vegas, sadly Barry Manilow wasn't there yet). There were lots of images of random nude women on the screen behind him, we were warned about this (some "female nudity") when we booked the tickets, the explanation was that "well this is Vegas". Oh righty. Entertainingly both hubbie and I were expecting showgirls dancing round Elton's piano, but no. He was surrounded by 4 long haired grizzly rockers instead and the nudity was all on the screen behind them. Elton didn't even take his top off.

2) The audience at the Elton John concert. They were mental. First of all there were 2 men in the row in front of us. One was very small and the other must have been well over 6ft, he reminded me of Crazy Legs Crane who used to be on the Pink Panther. Hubbie said he looked like a spider. When he sat down his knees nearly took out the person in front of him. Anyway. For the 40 minutes before Elton took to the stage, they argued and argued in hushed whispers. They were clearly having a domestic about the bottles of Bud that Crazy Legs was drinking with abandon (plastic bottles in case anyone is worrying about Elton's safety at this point). But then 2 songs in, they both bawled like big old girls, and this carried on to the end of the show. Bless.

Then there was trailer trash lady behind us. Most people had dressed up for the occasion, I mean, the tickets weren't cheap. This girl had a shellsuit on and the minute Elton started tinkling the ivories she was up on her feet whooping and hollering and singing along very badly out of tune, and at least 2 words ahead of Elton. At one point she declared very loudly, "Gee that kicked ass!". I am sure Elton was very proud.

3) Getting a VIP pass for the buffet in the MGM Grand hotel. We spent a lot of time here, it's our favourite casino. And one day Raymond who was in charge of the roulette tables, came up and gave us the pass as it was our anniversary. We weren't even staying there. It was amazing. I have never seen so much food in my life, and they even had sugar free cakes which hubbie could eat. He would have cried with joy but the 2 cakes he was stuffing in his mouth were taking up all his attention. And we got to go up the VIP line and bypass all the other people. One lady waiting in the queue said loudly to her husband, "they just walked past us all" so I looked at her and said "we've got a VIP pass". So stick it lady!

4) Winning the 1000 jackpot on the Wheel of Fortune twice!! Sadly we were only playing with quarters, but we still got nearly $300 from a $5 play. The Wheel of Fortune is great, if you're lucky you get to spin the wheel at the top of the machine, and win anything from 25 to 1000.

5) Putting our last $3 in a random machine and winning $50 back. We won so much this time round, that we must have spent the money we took with us, then the same again and then some more. On our second to last day we thought we were going to have to hit the atm machine, but then we couldn't stop winning. It was great. Not huge amounts, hubbie wanted to win the big old jackpot by this stage, but enough to keep us going for another day or so.

6) On our actual anniversary we went to a posh restaurant in the Bellagio. It was lovely. Though despite the "smart dress" requirement, it didn't stop them letting any old person in. Typically we got 4 trailer trashers sitting next to us, all blinging it and wearing shades even though it was NIGHTTIME (what is it with that?). One girl announced to the entire restaurant that "I only drink champagne dahling". I think in Vegas, you can't be sure who has got the money, most of the eccentrics are probably millionaires, so be nice to everyone!

7) Drink of choice? Long Island Ice Tea. Mmmmm......