Gazing through the Glass

It was my birthday today, and my Dad gave me a laptop, which was incredibly kind of him, so I can get back to my blogging. After the last post I had a bad few weeks when i didn't feel like posting, and then I managed to find a nightmare job in an office selling roof insulation, where i have no access to the internet. It is SO TERRIBLE. I know that the job isn't going to last long as it is run by two dodgy brothers and they're always telling me to delay sending out the payments etc. IT's miles away from Hammersmith, too, so getting there takes a tube and the bus.
I work surrounded by stacks of files and papers so all anyone ever sees is the top of my head. And you wouldn't believe the men they employ to do the insulation. They're basically unemployable - huge, scary and tattooed.All they want to do is earn enough money to get completely rat-arsed, so they work like mad the first part of the week, and then they go out on a huge bender, and on Fridays I get endless customers complaining no one has turned up - or that really foul-mouthed, grimy workmen have arrived and accidentally hit the head off a garden gnome carrying a pack of insulation in, or else used the toilet to be sick etc.
Ho well, at least i can pay the rent and buy catfood and just about keep up with the credit card payments. I feel really envious of Rache. She keeps sending me lovely postcards of Greece and telling me she's in heaven. Apparently the spring is the best possible time there: it is all green and there are loads of birds, and it is warm enough to swim. Sigh. Poor little Mirabelle seems really sad. There's a pigeon building a nest outside my window and she just watches this pigeon all day. She's worn a little bald patch on her lip rubbing at the glass trying to get out. I know how she feels.

Is This the End?

Oh well, apologies for not posting for weeks, but I like to be an upbeat, optimistic person, and everything has been so terrible recently that I just wanted to hide and cry. But I’ve resolved to be upbeat EVEN ABOUT THE BAD THINGS.
Well, before Christmas there was a huge rush to finish work for this company, which made me quite optimistic that we’d all keep our jobs and everything would be fine, etc. But there was a huge meeting a week ago and we were told we were all ‘being let go’. A few people are staying on, in case things get better, but not me. And I’ve only been with this company three years so I will not get much redundancy.
I’ve been frantically looking for work since, but the problem is that it’s expensive living in London, so I can’t just work in a sandwich shop or something. And meanwhile, it’s weird going round the shops and seeing how cheap everything is (that I can’t afford to buy). It’s like how people describe a tsunami: this weird thing happens of the sea retreating. And then there are all these huge fish flapping in pools, and you think; ‘Wow! Free treats and bargains!’ And you don’t realise what a horrible thing is coming over the horizon.
Incidentally, what IS going to happen? Does anyone know? Will all the shops shut? Will armies of grey-faced unemployed be trudging along the motorways? Will money become worthless? (In which case, I’ll be happy, as my overdraft will be meaningless.)
Rache has decided to go and live in Greece. Vasilius has found her a job working in a café run by another cousin of his, and she says she doesn’t care if it doesn’t work out with him. All Greek men are so gorgeous (in her opinion) that she’ll just find another one. She was wondering if I’d like to have her evil cat, Oskar, but I said No! She’s just going to release him on to the streets if I don’t take him, as she reckons there will be too many cats in animal shelters and he doesn’t stand a chance there.
It feels like the end of so many things,
Anyhoo, I’m going to post every few days now, filling you in on what happened over Christmas etc. So no more long long gaps.

Swede Teas

I’ve just spent hours Christmas shopping. HOURS. My feet are sore, I’m more drained than I’ve ever been in my entire life, and I’ve only got a small bagful of stuff. So, obviously, I’ve got to go again. And again. I kind of half-wish that the government had banned Christmas this year, to save money. A bit the way Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas back after the Civil War. Wouldn’t that have been great? Then no one would have felt they had to buy loads of stuff any more, or send any boring old cards, and there’d have been all the joy of secretly, illegally buying presents, and secretly celebrating, in a small way. Sort of like prohibition, with illicit Christmas parties going on in the cellars of innocent-looking shops.
At about 3 I met up with Glenn for tea, because he wanted top see me, and I do not want to end up sleeping with him, and tea is a meal it is pretty well impossible to:
a) get drunk at
b) extend late into the evening.
It isn’t romantic, either. I wanted a cream tea, but the nearest we got was scones and jam and a pot of tea, along with a smuggled tub of clotted cream in my handbag. (I’m going to leave the remains under my bed for Mirabelle to find, in a bid to enrich her environment, as Topiary has suggested . (The best way to enrich her environment and stop her being bored, of course, would be to buy a mouse from a pet shop and release it into the flat. But that would be cruel to the mouse, so I can’t do it.)
Glenn was wearing a truly gross black T shirt reading: ‘For my next trick I need a condom and a willing volunteer’. I asked him where the lovely cat-fur one was, and he said he’d borrowed it from a friend of Jasmine’s, just to please me.
Also, as we were eating he told me that most jam is about 60 per cent swede. Even strawberry jam. It’s used as a filler, as soft fruit is so costly. He knows this cos a farmer near him in Cornwall grows Swedes for jam. Isn’t this depressing? Next he’ll tell me clotted cream is made of pig fat or something.

What is Freedom?

Went out with Glenn last night. I think I said yes because when he asked me he was wearing a T shirt that said ‘No Outfit is Complete Without a Little Cat Fur’ – and I was touched. We just went to a pub in Hammersmith, and had sinister pub pies. (The kind where you honestly couldn’t say what the meat is. I thought mine was probably chicken with gravy browning, but Glenn, who knows a lot about cheap food, said it was more likely New Forest Pony, bought cheap in the autumn round-up, or else mechanically recovered meat slime, pressed into believable shapes.) It’s quite slimming going out with him.
He was going on about the Five Freedoms – a thing to do with chickens, where a well-looked after battery chicken is able to run, dustbath etc. Anyway, then he got on to what he thought the Five Freedoms for humans were, well, what they were for him, specifically.
1)The Freedom to live in a warm dry place with no rats or mould.
2)The freedom to eat food that doesn’t make you sick (or creep you out)
3) The F to be in a place where you possibly COULD have a relationship if you wanted
4)The freedom not to be hassled by The Man (ie not to be bothered by letters from the bank or credit card companies complaining about debts). (This would include freedom from landlord types popping in unexpectedly to see if you are breaking your tenancy agreement re cats.)
5)The Freedom to dream about the future and not be stressed out by global warming and governments doing nothing about it.
Every time Glenn talks I realise how different he is from me, in a kind of puzzling, disturbing way, that almost entirely cancels out how great-looking he is.
I said that one of my Freedoms would definitely be the freedom to wash in a lovely bath whenever I wanted, and put on perfume and crisply ironed laundry and a selection of (possibly vintage, to be ecologically sound) clothes and shoes. Oh, and have access to a hairdryer. He replied oddly to this. He said: ‘Yeah, that’s why we put in the bath-house.’
‘Where?’
‘At the farm.’
‘What farm?’
‘The farm where I live. In Cornwall.’
‘Aren’t there bathrooms in the chalets?’
He looked puzzled, and then started laughing. Strange man.

Mirabelle Goes Hunting

Yesterday Mirabelle slipped through my legs as I was coming in from work, and shot down the stairs and into the street. She’s so fed up with being shut in the flat all the time. I suppose it’s not much of a life for a cat, but what am I to do, when she isn’t even supposed to be there?
It took ages to find her, shouting along the street and hoping that my landlord didn’t suddenly decide to pop up and ask me what I was doing. And eventually, when it was really dark, and I was frozen stiff, I found her in one of the gardens in the next street. She had a bird in her mouth. A blue tit. I put my fingers in her mouth and to get her to open it, and the bird got free and just flew straight out into the sky. I hope it survives. But I suppose it couldn’t have been that badly injured if it could fly.
I was so glad she hadn’t got hit by a car or something. Apart from anything else, I hate going to the vet. It is a bit weird the way vets behave, don’t you think? Especially the way they give the pet your surname, and call out the whole rigmarole when the vet is ready; ‘Stripy Jenkins’, ‘Flufflepuff Mackintosh’ etc. Makes me wish I’d called Mirabelle ‘The Marchioness of Mirabelle’ just to make it all sound stupider. (It is strange, really, when you think of how even old, very dignified human beings are only called by their Christian names in hospital wards.)

Strange Religious Episode

Ho well, haven’t posted for ages as usual. I’m always promising myself to be a much better blogger, but I get swept up in things, and it just doesn’t happen. It is like dieting. I always want to be much thinner, and intend to do something about it, and then time slips by and I realize I’ve just GOT FATTER. I hadn’t weighed myself for weeks, and a few days ago I noticed my favourite trousers were really hurting round the waist, and had actually given me a sore, where the buckle goes, and so I got on the scales and was just horrified. How could I have put on so much without eating any more than normal? Also, it’s been cold recently, and I thought that made you lose weight.
Anyhoo, work is more stressful, as quite a few people have left, and we have to do their stuff, as well as ours. I asked Jasmine about Michael, and she said that she’d heard his company was really struggling, and he’d been spending a lot of time in the US recently trying to get refinanced or something.
Last weekend I went home, as Jacob was being confirmed, and they wanted me to go to the service. I can’t think why this was happening, as he’s never struck me as religious at all. Also, all the other confirmation candidates were frail little girls in sticky-out frocks, and it was strange seeing this large, shambling teen in a badly-ironed shirt in the middle of it all, with an uneasy smile flickering across his face. Ever since the poisoning incident I’ve been so suspicious of his motives. It’s wrong.

Life Gets Stressful

Well, I’ve spent all week working on a campaign leaflet thingy and being ceaselessly bothered and harassed by the design department who’ve kept demanding it earlier, even though it was impossible to it do that fast. I even took it home, and worked on it in the evenings, which is unheard-of for me. (Mirabelle jumped on my computer keyboard and pressed the wrong keys – just to rack up the tension.) And in the end I had to hand it back before I could do it half as well as I wanted to AND no one even said thank you for all the extra work I did. It left me feeling so let down. Like that famous remark someone once made about working for the BBC, that it made you feel like a mushroom: kept in the dark and with sh*t dumped on you at regular intervals. Really, work is getting so stressful now. Every one is in a state all the time. The designers were almost in tears yesterday.
Just as a sort of relief, because I felt so let down, I spent the early evening doing my hair and make-up and choosing an understated outfit. (Black, of course, plus some amazing gladiator shoes that I can hardly walk in, and cost far too much.) Then I tottered off round to see if Michael was in, and I could have a chat with him. His house was in darkness, and as I got closer I saw a For Sale board outside it.
Anyhoo, I’ve rung his number a few times since then, and I’ve only got the answerphone, so I don’t know what could have happened to him.