Eyeful

I had an eye appointment yesterday and managed to muster up the energy to make the visit after feeling ill the last few days. I decided it was best to shave as I felt a felt of hair all over my face usually terrifies people let alone me.

Everything happened as usual in the eye shop, checking in and sitting down while I waited for the optometrist. It is strange being involved in a social situation but the reason for being there is business. Like when you go to the doctors or dentist you are only there for business reasons but whilst waiting everyone is in a social situation, well you are if there are other people waiting as well. In this case there was and as usual no one really talks to each other which is fine with me. I had a guy in suit but with jack-ups almost scratching his knees sitting next to me while a lady on my right looked pensively ahead staring at the optometrist’s closed door. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable at the way she stared at the door in such an intense manner. Her brow frowning and her mouth grimacing slightly. I wondered if she was here to see the eye man for personal reasons. Perhaps she was here to collect an outstanding debt or maybe she had been left jilted at the alter and she was now here to exact revenge, leaving me and Jack-ups as potential witnesses to a murder. My concentration was broken by the call of my name and I noticed the optometrist standing a few metres in front of me carrying his clipboard. I looked to see if he noticed the lady boring her eyes down on him but he was only concerned about the clipboard. As I headed to the office I turned back to see the woman now looking at me with a look of disgust spread all over her face, Jack-ups just had his arm folded probably wondering why his ankles were so cold.

The optometrist got me to sit down and read letters off the wall as they all do. I was really good on the first two lines but once I reached the middle my sight failed me and all I could see was little black blobs. I was then asked to place my chin on a little machine where it enabled him to examine my eye. I did so and almost immediately was hit by a bright light, I blinked to block its brightness and the eye man said not to blink. I told him it was hard when he is flashing a light directly into my iris. He said nothing and instead got up and pulled out a small pipette full of liquid. The eye man told me this liquid would brighten up any scratches I had on my cornea and pulled my head back with some force. Next thing I know he squeezed the pipette and drops of liquid were swirling around in my eyes. I blinked profusely but he shoved my head back on the machine. Looking back into my eyes he announced there is no problem with them at all. He shuffles me out of his office where his assistant tells me that I will be contacted once my contact lenses come in (the whole point of the appointment was to check my suitability for a new type). So off I went wandering around town looking for Season 2 of Alan Partridge.

It was about five minutes that I noticed people staring at me rather oddly. First it was an old lady pulling her trolley along. I just assumed she was odd. Then it was a woman in her thirties who looked at me as she walked past. Everyone seemed strange as I ventured into HMV. There I picked up Partridge on DVD and headed to the counter. It was there that the till guy took the merchandise for scanning before asking why my eyes were orange. I asked him what he was on about and he just told me that my eyes were orange and so was my eyelids. It then dawned on me that the optometrist had been pouring random liquids into my peepers. I bought the DVD and quickly found a mirror in another shop where I saw in front of me exactly what I would look like if I was a zombie in 28 Days later. I cursed the eye man but grinned at my new look before heading home.

I am sick

Grrr, I have been struck down by what many of the opposite sex denote as Man Flu. However, in my humble opinion it is a terrible illness that has rendered me unable to perform daily tasks such as shaving. At work, I sniffle through meetings and rock my head in front of my computer. When I talk it sounds like I’m chewing eight pieces of toffee whilst trying to ask where the train station is, in German. When I get home I just crash on my bed and delve underneath the covers until nestled in a comfortable position. In bed I have listened to Andy Murray beat Nadal in the US Open and then heard him get spanked by Federer in the final, all this in between sneezing, coughing and the occasional groaning.

I am bloody weak and it’s annoying. Physically I have the strength of Mr Muscle from those adverts. It seems my legs can only carry me a few metres before needing to rest. My arms have trouble holding on to an egg mayonnaise baguette and a bottle of blueberry juice. They were twitching in strain and I was glad to throw them on the counter once I reached the till. The till lady looked at me pathetically as my unshaved face and gaunt eyes looked around for the right change in my pocket. Mentally I’ve become slow, no more am I able to throw a four syllable word in a conversation to give my sentence some extra poignancy. Instead I grunt and if asked a question my mouth tends to open and my eyelids lower a little. It’s not a pretty sight and neither are the words that come out of my mouth which tend to be ‘bah’ or ‘whaaaa’. Even reading is draining my energy and I cannot seem to get through a paragraph without having to close my eyes for at least one minute. It is really annoying and highlights how much I miss being able to do things quickly and on a whim. At the moment I’m stagnate and morose unable to do anything or think of anything.

So to combat my ‘man flu’ I’ve adopted a fruit based assault. A concoction of tea, lemon and honey has had some affect. However, realising that it is only the lemon that contains the any useful properties I attempted to eat one on its own. This was not a good move on my part and shoving half a lemon in my mouth only made me contort my face into features even the elephant man would have been proud of. Still, after the initial gush of bitter juice running down my throat it got a bit easier. Someone also recommended drinking boiled water with ginger in it which again does not taste amazing but I’ll drink anything right now. I really cannot wait to get back to full strength again as I feel really weak and just in general, rubbish.

Ok, can anyone tell me why on every episode of The Midsomer Murders it is always sunny? How do they do it because England is such a rainy place (yes, these are the things that keep me awake at night)!

Sleep Remedy

I find it quite difficult to fall asleep, it's probably my own fault because I cannot settle. I go to bed but need to watch television for a bit even if it's utter rubbish, although I can never watch the late night bingo. That truly would signal the death of my charisma. I then spend about an hour tossing and turning until I decide to turn on the radio. Sometimes that sends me to sleep straight away but lately that has not worked and I find myself listening to repeats of the shipping forecasts! I am not too keen to gulping various over the counter narcotics so I have been drinking a glass of red wine instead. This chills me out, relaxes me after a pretty rough day at the orifice and generally get's the creative juices flowing. So every evening around nine I go and pour myself a glass and sit back relax and watch either Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Family Guy, Heroes or of course The Mighty Boosh ( I have these all on DVD and not on Sky +). Doing this over a period of time, only broken when I go out, means that I have tried a few wines now and although cannot claim to have a cultured pallet I have by polishing bottle after bottle can claim to know which wine makes you the most sleepy (well for me). No, I have not spent months swishing it around my mouth like that lady used to do on BBC 2 in the nineties. Instead it was more of a case of me traipsing around the aisles in Tescos pointing at a bottle and remembering that I had already tried that one, then by some stretch of the imagination I recall it's affect on me. Soon I found myself standing in front of the red wine section able to select the one that would send me into a drowsy state quicker than the others. So the wine that manages to send me to sleep the quickest is some Australian wine called Rosemount Estate Shiraz which you can pick up in your local Spar, Co-op, Sainos or Tescos. Do check it out if you have trouble heading to dreamland it's completely sorted me out. Perhaps drinking one of those really cheap high percentage beers would do a better job but I don't want liver damage and touching something like Super Tennants is the first sign of your life ending. Plus, I like to enjoy the taste of what I drink and down something that resembles the taste of ear wax.

In other news, I'm loving the new football season starting. It has been a painful summer watching the Euro 2008 but now the Premier League has started and all the buzz has come back, especially on a Saturday afternoon. Hopefully Torres will turn on the style again this season and deliver the goods. He better do, he's in my dream team!

Simon Reeve

It was Tuesday night and I was laying in bed unable to sleep. Moving around trying to get comfortable I cut my losses and switched on the television. Skipping past late night bingo on ITV 1 I came across a programme on BBC 2 called Equator. It’s where this guy called Simon Reeve cruises around different countries that lie near the middle of the equator. In this particular episode he was in Colombia and apart from dodging the terrorists and army he found himself in the Amazon. Whilst paddling in a boat up the Amazon River he would give a very conservative yelp in triumph every time he crossed the imaginary line of the equator. The boat driver would just look at him in an odd way as Simon looked at his GPS satellite device in wonderment. The whole programme was quite interesting because he got to see some of the culture and highlight the poverty going around. This left me thinking ‘wow, I want his job’. So the next day I went on to Wikipedia and it turns out this television presenter is also a bestselling author on subjects like terrorism and the Munich massacre (not much humour circulating around him then). He has also presented another programme called Tropic of Capricorn where he went off gallivanting around countries such as Madagascar and Mozambique and in general seems to be doing pretty cool stuff for a living, writing books and making television programmes which I found quite inspiring. So the last few days I’ve been falling asleep with the idea that I one day will go around the world getting into adventures and mischief but also get paid for it! Sadly, this still only remains in my dreams.

In other news I saw Knocked Up for the first time last week, it’s pretty funny but nothing on Superbad. The main character kept reminding me of Yogi Bear which kept me amused. I also, check out Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay which cracked me up, it’s sick but if you need a quick dosage laughter it may do the trick.

Here’s a trailer to a new film called Watchmen that’s coming out next year. It’s based on a comic book/graphic novel I have never read but the film looks damn good.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/med.html

Drenched!

It happened last week but the British weather haunts me like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Last Tuesday I decided to head to the shop to buy a few things at lunch. It’s not too far about a five minute walking distance but as I stared from the window I saw tiny speckles of droplets splash against the window. Thinking it was a light shower, I plugged in my digital radio, slipped on the rain coat and headed out. Within a couple of minutes the sky decided to vomit gushes of water all over the UK. I flipped up my hood and thought that it was just a brief down pour but I was wrong. Within thirty seconds my trousers became soaked until they stuck to my legs. My brown shoes became a darker shade as I found it too hard to dodge the puddles. However, it was my jacket that let me down*. I was about midway through my journey when I started to feel the water trickling down my back causing me to sway all over the place. As the rain come bucketing down the jacket became less resistant to the water, I looked up at the sky silently asking for it to show some mercy for someone who wanted just to buy something to eat. There was no mercy at all, and it flew down ferociously until it was seeping through my jacket and reaching my skin.

I then heard a pop in my ears. At the time Bjork was playing and had thought it was a quirky beeb from her song. It wasn’t. It was my radio dying on me. I quickly unzipped my pocket and scooped up my radio and a small puddle of water. The rain had gotten through to the radio and the screen was flickering blue and white until there was crackling, a bit of fuzziness and then a flatline. My digital radio had perished. No more 1xtra, 6Music, BBC7, World Service they were all taken from me and instead it would have to be local radio for the next few weeks with the cheesy DJ deceiving the naïve into thinking he’s cool when really he’s a washed up prick. ‘Texas, what a great new band!’ I was irascible, wet and there was nothing I could do apart from venture forth. I carried on to the shop dripping all over the floor and the newspapers as I leaned over to the magazines for anything of interest. After deciding there was nothing about I brought my sandwich where the woman at the counter gave me the stink eye for creating a small reservoir in between the pot noodle and soup aisle. Handing over my wet coins I headed back in the rain.

Although it whipped across my face making it red I decided to accept the weather. It was raining and I was outside, there were a lot graver situations I could have been in. Besides I could not have gotten more soaked considering my clothes had absorbed half the River Ouse. So I flipped my hood down and casually made my way back in similar fashion as the movements seen in the opening credits of Superbad.



* I later found out that my jacket is only shower proof.

Wener

It was my last blog entry that sparked the interest of the Britpop epoch. A comment that mentioned the band Menswear had me thinking back about the bands that had only relative success during that time. Elastica, Bluetones, Nothern Uproar all spring to my mind but it was the band Sleeper who I had forgotten about. Their music rang vaguely in my mind as I tried to dredge up the memories of that hedonistic era of Adidas Campus trainers coupled with black rimmed glasses but it was the lead singer that was the most notable part of the band. I could not remember her name but recalled she had a short brown bobbed hair and it tormented me. It was like an itch that would not go away, and at various times of the week I would try to think of her name and the band she was from. It was not until I spoke to my pal Coldbrain that he told me it was Sleeper and Louise Wener was the lead singer. As soon as I heard her name it all came rushing back. The surname used to make my chuckle because of its colloquial American connotations of being a sausage. I still could not remember any songs but the small release of nostalgia had me suitably content. That was until he told me she had become an author. My ears pricked up and the curiosity ran rife inside me, apparently she is quite good.

The next day I went onto Amazon and did a search on her name, it was true she is an author. She has written three books, The Perfect Play, Goodnight Steve McQueen and The Half Life of Stars. Eager to learn more I started to read each synopsis of each book before taking the plunge and deciding on Goodnight Steve McQueen. I’ll probably have to wait till Thursday before it arrives which is fine for me because that gives me time to finish my current tome. I will let you know if her book is any good.

In other news, I’m heading towards the end of my Spanish course and I cannot wait. It feels like a weight around my neck regulating how I feel about the day. When I finish work, in theory I should be hitting the books but no one wants to work during the day just to get home and work during the night and in fact I have been flagging greatly of late. Soon it will be all over though and I can continue to learn at my own pace and feel free from obligation.

Downgrade

Yes I know, I have been rubbish over the last two months but this is the holiday season so I have refrained from bashing the keys in hope that my brain might seep out something worthwhile. It has not of late so I gave it a break and exposed it to the usual cult cultural pulp that seems to stimulate it to the same levels as a teenager watching a porno movie. However, now it is time to awaken it and start tapping again.

You may recall an entry I posted last year babbling how I managed to blag a great deal on a new mobile phone with luck, a sprinkle of hard nose attitude and some nous that was bequeathed to me by someone I met once. So eleven months later I am now able to upgrade whilst sitting on my chair pondering about what to get I realised that there is not much out there. The iPhone looks gorgeous and the fact tech geeks and the layman both salivate at the mere mentioning of the name lets us all know Apple are on to a winner. And I am tempted but their camera is utter pants considering the cheapest tariff going is £30 a month not to mention the £99 for the handset. The N96 is the behemoth of phones packed with more gizmos at hand than Data from the Goonies but it is a slide phone and does not compete with the sleekness and smoothness of the iphone where surfing the internet is actually a pleasant experience on a mobile device. So, I ditched that phone. There is a Samsung out which is supposed to be good but upon inspection it was not even an improvement on my current phone. I was pretty annoyed with the conclusion that mobile technology has not really progressed in the last twelve months leaving me with little choice but to downgrade. Yep, I decided that I want to fall downwards because to get a top of the range phone you need to be on a £30 tariff, which to me is quite pricey, for a phone that has not really improved over the last year. Not even the mouthiest telecommuniocations salesman could hide the fact that if you own the N95 then there is nothing out there to really beat it. So instead I wanted to reduce my tariff even further to less than £20, regardless of the handset they chucked at me.

It must have been an odd experience for the salesperson to hear someone go 'I want to downgrade, what pretty standard handsets have you got?' He did stumble on his words a bit, and tried to persuade me that a £30 tariff was the way forward. 'Nope, I want a tariff less than £20 a month, don't care how pants the phone is.' There was a bit of silence then an admission that they could do a £20 tariff but it was for something like 75 mins free a month. Now way, I thought and told them I want to quit, I'd rather try my luck on the pay-as-you-go gravy train than pay £240 a year for about thirteen hours worth of free talking. Finally he said I could revert to the sim only scheme for £15 a month for 200 free mins and texts per month. 'Hmm' I replied whilst pondering the offer. I almost went to that scheme last year but managed to wrangle a better package to stay contracted, it felt a bit like I was going backwards but I said 'Ok, lets do that'. I do not get a new handset but that does not bother me, in fact I am going to sell my current phone on ebay and hopefully get £150 for it. I recently bought a phone from the site for £15 and will use that. This means I will have made £135 profit which I plan to reinvest in my bills meaning I will only need to spend £45 on phone bills for the year while I wait for the Apple dudes to bring out a new iPhone with a decent camera on it.

P.S. Anyone want to go see Shed 7 with me? I don't care where.