Sneezy does it

Culture is terrible for your health.  In a burst of holiday vim I took myself off to the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate.  The exhibition itself was excellent (the Viz-curated room being a particular crass highlight) but I got lavishly soaked on both the walks there and back, compounded by a couple of hours in between of marinating in swampy dampness.

As a result I have been suffering from a catastrophic cold for the last couple of days.  I've been self-medicating like a sneezy Elvis, gobbling strepsils, sudafed, lemsip and paracetamol pretty much at random.  Sadly I also made the grave error of going out for a few drinks last night, condemning myself to a hangover/head congestion combination at 6am this morning that felt like someone had filled my entire skull with glue.

As the missus is away for the weekend I've resorted to a day of recuperation tragic even by my horribly low standards.  Having taken quintuple doses of every medicine in the flat I shuffled into the living room wrapped in a duvet, yanked out the sofa bed and spent the entire morning watching Spaced DVDs, swallowing satsumas virtually whole and creating an arctic blizzard of used tissues.

I then dragged my stinking carcass to a pub for a roast I couldn't taste before returning to the sofa bed base camp and seeing off the afternoon by snoozing raspily to my favourite football podcast for morons, the Sky Sports Sunday Supplement.  I love the porcine tabloid hacks passive aggressively squabbling over favoured contacts ("Of course, you'd know that from your little chats with Sir Alex, wouldn't you Tony?") and straining to suggest intimacy with millionaire players ("Let me tell you, Lamps/JT/Stevie G ain't happy with the situation Brian, not one bit") who in reality must absolutely loathe them.  I woke in a state of confusion and had to calm down by blowing my nose 14 times, watching the X-Files and eating a few more satsumas.

It's actually been quite an effective tribute to the endless school summer holidays that I frittered away goggling at the Big Breakfast, Saved By The Bell, Roseanne and Quantum Leap for weeks on end without feeling the slightest shame or compulsion to leave the house.  If only I had access to Championship Manager 1995/96 the replication would be complete.

Porklife

Am off work this week and bloody loving it.  I even took a jog around Kennington park this morning, accompanied by the steady hail of local squirrels dropping their breakfast nuts in disbelief.  Three startled pigeons slamming into tree trunks and an inadequate number of laps later I strode out of the south gate newsagentwards for my morning milk and Guardian.

Disaster, though - my favoured shop on Brixton Road had the former but not the latter.  I was forced to try the shop known to me and my girlfriend as Dog Piss Onions, after we reported to the owner that an enormous Alsation had just widdled all over his fresh produce and he responded with barely a shrug.  Rationalising that a similar attack on the newspapers would be easier to detect I braved it, and strode in brandishing my milk from the previous shop.

Me: "Just the Guardian please"
Dog Piss Onions owner: "I'll have to charge you for the milk as well"
Me: "You wag.  Here's the quid for the Gaurdian, cheers"
DPOO: "No, really.  You need to pay for the milk"
Me: "I just walked past you while holding it.  This plainly isn't your milk"
DPOO: "Sir, I NEED to charge you for the MILK!"
Me: (hotly) "You REALLY don't!"
DPOO: "Ha ha! I am joking of course sir.  You have a good day now"

This country.

Talking of this country, I spent last week in a totally different one.  The missus and I vacationed on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy, sharing our hotel with Germans wearing unironic moustaches and a frankly weird amount of lesbians.  Having accidentally booked a package holiday on lastminute.com we received a cultural overview of Italy on the coach from the airport ("Now, to order what I think we'd all call a "real" coffee...") and were given a welcome pack which included a definition of bolognese ("a meat and tomato based sauce").  Unfortunately the translations page omitted the Italian for "Thomas Cook are incompetent pricks", which would have been useful when we discovered that they'd taken our money and not told the hotel we were coming.  It's a real larf changing rooms three times in seven days, let me tell you.

Luckily the rest of the holiday was excellent, thanks for asking - sun, clear water, tasty food, foxy Italian wo many areas of historical interest.  And now I've got this week off too.  And a bank holiday weekend.  Lovely stuff.

brian harvey sausage rolls

A side effect of my summer blog design meltdown (see previous post for more griping) was that I temporarily disconnected myself from Google Analytics, the programme that tells me stuff about who comes here.  I was somewhat concerned when the entire internet, from my closest friends to strangers and spambots, simutaneously decided to boycott the site.  Discovering that it was a coding problem, and it is just the vast, vast majority of the internet population who don't bother dropping by, was a huge boost and inspired me to dig a little deeper than usual into the Analytics reports.

I was particularly fascinated by the one showing the Google searches that lead people to the site.  My favourite ten are below.  I hope the person who needed London Underground advice wasn't in a hurry.

• morrissey communicates with faxes
• new york sunset now
• famous wankers
• green wankers
• self-indulgence goat
• "luke haines" "old weirdo"
• wrongfucksex
• jubilee line closed
• self cruelty
• brian harvey sausage rolls

If it ain't broke...

Once upon a time a man had a blog.  Not being notably technologically savvy, he nicked the template from the blog of a friend.   It looked ok after he supplemented it with a nice picture for the header and he was perfectly happy with it for a while.

But after a few months he got bored with the template. There were too many columns and it looked all blocky and square.  So in a burst of activity he ditched the old template and installed a new one.

And then this happened.



Honestly, blog fans, it's been a real pain in the bum.  No one seems to like the new look, every time I change something another part breaks, and I can't stop fiddling with it.

Today started well. I found a picture of a lovely monkey for the header and, after much swearing and fiddling around in Paint (the premier editing software of the Jurassic era), managed to install it.  Then I noticed that although it's fine in Firefox, the new header appears for a few seconds in Internet Explorer before disappearing.

So if you read this on IE and are wondering what's going on, it isn't subliminal ape propoganda.  I don't know why it's happening or how to fix it.  If you do, please let me know.