My father talking about their new foster child:
Oh you’ll like her, you have lots in common: she’s vegetarian!
She’s also 14 (I’m 31) so presumably when we hit a dry spot in conversation we’ll always have Quorn.
Update: Having been up to Birmingham to visit family I find out she’s no longer vegetarian! Fortunately we did find a few other topics of conversation.
Work folks were all outside The Salisbury last night to give Jasper a good send-off when this strange Australian girl attached herself to our crowd. There’s been a lot of turnover of staff recently so at first I just thought she was someone new from the office, but her bizarre behaviour soon put that straight.
Eventually we worked out that she was waiting to see Avenue Q with some friends in the Noël Coward Theatre next door, but they hadn’t turned up yet and she had all the tickets. Also she had been given a lot of cocktails earlier by her boss which accounted for her drunken state.
I say “eventually” because establishing these simple things took around 10 minutes; she was very drunk and most of her conversation was punctuated with “oh my god!” and “Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!” if she was trying to explain something and someone else was talking nearby. One of these overly-lengthy topics of conversation was when she tried to explain that the distance lengthwise across Australia is “the same as the moon.” I asked, “is that diameter or circumference?” which for some reason sent her off into fits of laughter for a while. I don’t know why; it was a perfectly serious question!
Surprisingly she wasn’t an annoying drunk, it was more comical than anything. In an enclosed space she would have been too much but out on the street in a big group you could at least move away and let someone else talk to her for a while. I have to say it also helped that she was quite cute!
Things started to take a turn for the worse though when she decided to start tipping her drink (cranberry and vodka I think, maybe a cape codder) into our drinks (beer), and when she started eating crisps out of my hand it all got a bit weird and people started to move away! Fortunately at this point she nipped off to the toilet then came racing back, grabbed her drink out of my hand and shouted, “my friends are here!” as she ran back towards the Noël Coward. I have to wonder how much of the plot of Avenue Q she will have been able to follow in that state.
The whole thing took me back to being that sort of age (she said she was 19) and getting completely wasted, being an annoying drunk. Fun, but too risky to get yourself into that sort of state where you can’t look after yourself. I learnt that lesson in a not too terrible way when I was 18 or so; I hope you get a chance to learn it the easy way too, Sarah.
Anyway, I left at about 22.30 because I was beginning to get wasted on the cheeky vimtos Jasper was buying and really didn’t fancy 3 hours on night buses to get home after missing the last train. But it was a good send-off, a good turn out and a good night. I don’t do post-work beers that often but I think I’ll miss The Salisbury when we move to Gray’s Inn Road.
As you may be aware, I was quite ill the other week and ended up spending a night in hospital. Anyway, I’m fine now, but had a follow-up doctor’s appointment today.
One of the things I wanted from the doctor was a sick note for the two days I had off work last week due to my illness. Legally I know I don’t need a doctor’s note because you can self-certify for up to seven days. However, I’d already had some time off for man-flu type things and really wanted to make clear that I wasn’t taking the piss and had been seriously ill.
I explained all this to the doctor and he said, “well I didn’t see you at the time so it would have to be backdated. I can’t give you a backdated sick note on the NHS, but I’m happy to give you a private one. That will cost £10 though.” At this point I’d like to point out that I went to the doctor’s office directly from being discharged from hospital last week partly in order to get this sick note, but the receptionist wouldn’t let me see the doctor then as “sick notes are not emergencies,” instead booking me this appointment 8 days later.
So I go to pay the doctor and only have a £20 note. He rummages in his own wallet to hand me two well worn £5 notes. I don’t get a receipt. Then, “what would you like the note to say?” This experience is making me feel like scum to be honest, but it had to be done, so I went through my whole story again. He actually interrupts my story and says, “..okay that is enough, I will just put vomiting blood, severe pain, hospital attendance, not fit for work, okay?”
Nice doing business with you, doctor. :(
I’m sure there are people all over the country doing this sort of thing to be signed off work for weeks while they do cash in hand work.
Bryn, I have been generally happy with smile. Since online is the only place you get to do things with them they tend to have it all worked out. The only thing I dislike about their web interface is that they make the back button log you out “for security reasons”, but at least you can do everything you need to do in a fairly sane manner.
I should say that last month they tried to charge me £20.53 for something I don’t think they should have charged me for. It’s a long and not very interesting story so I won’t go into it, all I will say is I have no time for people who complain about their overdraft charges and there was more to it than that! Anyway I complained in an online message and they removed it.
Being a treehugger, the Co-op’s ethical policy also appeals to me.
Oh, but if we’re on the subject of how not to do things, I’d been trying to use the “e-banking” feature of my new Abbey business account since last Friday, and after putting in my login details I would get a page that said this every time:
ANIB JSP Diagnostic PageBackground
to : from (localhost) (host )Error
bean error not found within scopeAdditional
Content Length:
Content Type:
Remote User:
The site had also been occasionally displaying “temporary error” messages over the weekend so I left it until this week thinking they were having problems. After trying again on Tuesday and having the same message, and also confirming with another Abbey user that they could log in to theirs, I decided to call them and ask wtf.
The answer is that they have not yet received my security information that I posted back last week, so I havent yet been “setup on the system”. Was I supposed to deduce that from “bean error not found within scope”?
I’m not going to FOSDEM because I have spent most of today since about 4am alternately vomiting or curled up in a foetal position with incredibly painful stomach cramps.
No throwing up in the last 5 hours and cramps reduced to the point where I can actually use the computer, so fingers crossed I’m past the worst of it. Even so I don’t think it would be wise to try to get out to Brussels in this state.
I’m really pissed off that this had to happen now and ruin my weekend. I was really looking forward to it.
Recently I’ve been slagging off Russell Brand, because the association with Big Brother and the constant appearance in the gutter press really turns me off.
It still does turn me off and I do think he’s in danger of everyone becoming sick of it, much like nobody cares to hear about Pete Doherty anymore, but I have to concede that I had formulated my overall opinion without actually giving a fair assessment of his other work.
To give him a chance I had a few listens to his show on 6 music of a Sunday late morning, and I must admit that I find it very funny. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.
They edit it up a bit and put it out as a weekly podcast which I’ve been listening to on my way to work, and I know I must make this apology because it’s given me that “oh god I am laughing on the train and people are looking at me” problem at least once with every episode so far.
So if like me you thought there’s no way you could find this annoying reject from Adam and the Ants amusing, give him a second chance and have a listen to his podcast.
Last night we finally got around to having our Strugglers Poker Night. Unfortunately I did not do anywhere near as well as in my first poker game!
There were four of us present: myself, Matt, Phil and Simon. We started playing just after 8pm, and stuck to the plan until just after 10pm when we decided the chips were going too slowly and decided to double the ante, blinds and betting limits.
Matt had to leave at about 11.30pm and so we decied we’d allow cashing out, i.e. counting up your chips and taking away the equivalent amount of money. Matt was up by about £2.82!
At around midnight Simon ran out of chips leaving just Phil and I playing head to head. This was going far too slowly and I was seriously low on chips so I decided it would be best to call it a night at that point. Phil came away with over £4 of profit and so was the clear winner, whereas I was left with a loss of about £2.20!
I did make a few glaring errors later in the night due to being a bit tired and not paying enough attention but other than that I don’t think I played too badly, I was just unlucky.
I hope that we will do it again, but I think we need to change things a little so that the chips go faster. The increased level of betting worked well, but maybe we should look at playing no limit instead (so raises can be any amount)?
By the way, the poker set I bought for the occasion is really quite impressive. The chips are reassuringly heavy, and it came in a nice aluminium case.
A few weeks ago (yes, I suck at blogging on time) I took a brief trip up to Birmingham to visit my parents. I think the last time I was up there was Christmas 2004; I’d missed out last Christmas because of work committments, and I was under a lot of pressure to make the trip in the break between finishing at Aspective and starting at Venda.
It was a largely uneventful trip but I did get to meet Chalky, my father’s new greyhound. Like most greyhounds he enjoys nothing more than somewhere to lounge about sleeping, but I was surprised by just how placid he is. He didn’t even get up to greet me for about an hour! Isn’t he a cutie?
“People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.” — V
I went to see V for Vendetta last night at Odeon High Street Kensington, with Tim, Matt and Phil.
I’d been trying hard not to build this one up because most adaptions are a severe disappointment to those who enjoyed the original work — and the original graphic novel is something I really did enjoy. Add that to the fact that Alan Moore disowned it, then I was really expecting this film to be as bad as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from the moment I first heard it was in production.
Once it did get near to release though the hype did start affecting me a little and I did reconsider it enough to check out the score on IMDb: 7.6/10 — pretty high for IMDb! So I thought maybe I should try and keep an open mind.
I’m glad I did, because this was a pretty enjoyable movie. Not perfect, but I think the Wachowski Brothers captured the style of the novel quite effectively.
If you have no debts and some savings then hurry to set up a cash ISA as then you don’t get taxed on the savings. You have until the end of the tax year on April 5th to have an ISA set up with this year’s allowance.
Money Saving Expert now recommends Alliance and Leicester’s Direct ISA, which is a recent change from First Direct‘s ISA offering, so I’m now in the process of switching (although it’s not going to make much difference with only a month left).
If you have no idea what I am talking about then you should probably read the full MSE article.
(I am not a qualified financial adviser and this article does not constitute financial advice.)