The Piano of Temptation

Phew, long week.  Had to organise a work event on Friday/Saturday which meant the days before were grizzly.  I am not designed to work long hours.  My brain acts like a mobile phone - at peak capacity when I wake up and unplug it from the power supply of snores, it then depletes in power steadily throughout the day.  By 4pm I'm on two bars, and by 7pm can only make emergency calls.

Which means when I get home around 10pm, as I did on Thursday, I am in a burned out and uncommunicative state.  I beached myself on the sofa and turned on Big Brother.  I was just thinking what a shame it is that Shabby is so pretty and yet so utterly deranged when the front door slammed open.  A lady-shaped shadow loomed over me and leaned in for a boozy hello.  "How much have you drunk?" I asked nervously.  "Beer AND a wine!" she announced with slurry pride.  "And I was too busy to have lunch and I didn't eat dinner either!"

Code Red.  A mixture of drinks on an empty stomach.  As she crashed onto the sofa I could hear a faint crackling sound.  Sure enough, there were sparks shooting out of her nostrils and ears.  Complete lady brain malfunction.

Under usual circumstances this sort of situation requires immediate preventative action, such as finding an episode of Gok Wan's Fashion Fix for her to watch.  I was feeling foolishly obstinant, however.  Man work hard.  Man tired.  Man not need to deal with loopy lady.  So I focussed hard on Big Brother while she tottered off to make some tea.

The Tree of Temptation was involved, which I always enjoy.  The Tree is a dismembodied voice in the bathroom that doles out unpleasant secret tasks and is very rude to the housemates (to posh layabout Ben - "Oi, Brideshead!").  As I was considering the witty retorts I'd have up my sleeve to counter the Tree if I was on the show, a gruff voice growled up at me from floor level in the gap between the back of the sofa and the landlady's piano.

"Hello!  I am the Piano of Temptation!"  The Piano of Temptation sounded far more feminine than the Tree of Temptation.  "I have a secret task for you!"  Appalling news - I was much too tired for a task.  I grabbed a nearby towel and swatted it in the direction of the Piano, which yelped and was silenced.

A short time after my girlfriend re-appeared.  I considered telling her about the Piano of Temptation but her mood seemed to have taken a turn for the worse.  My lack of general chit chat then only worsened it.  Time for bed.

I emerged from the bathroom to find my girlfriend sitting up in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, frowning hard.  If a cartoonist had drawn the scene, he would have found it difficult not to add a small storm cloud above her head.  I opined that she might be in a mood.

Several minutes later, as her footsteps stomped down the stairs and the spare room door crashed shut, the point had been forcefully made that she was not in a mood.  I lay in bed, trickles of blood seeping from my ears, and considered the theory that often the best approach is to do nothing at all.  The short term benefits were compelling, but experience suggested that this would not be the best overall strategy.  I went downstairs to retrieve her and found that the volcano, whilst still spitting out the occasional lump of burning lava, had largely burned itself out.

I got home yesterday to find the flat cleaned from top to bottom to a standard unprecedented in three years of co-habitation.  She knows how to appeal to my innner Kryten.  How long this contrition will last for is unsure, and I suspect it may have evaporated at about paragraph 2 of this blog.  Maybe the whole thing was a task from the Piano of Temptation.  Maybe I'll have to pretend to be drunk next week.

Anyway, I'll leave you with this, which iTunes tells me I've played 28 times in the last three weeks.

PowerPointless

A punishing weekend.  Out and about both nights and consumed by a work problem that began at 7.30pm on Friday with a request from my boss to find and send him an old PowerPoint presentation.  This has since become a mind-bendingly unpleasant quest worthy of a Peter Jackson-directed film adaptation.  Imagine Frodo Baggins spending much of a weekend:

• desperately checking messages on his hand-held magic message-displaying shard of rock;
• negotiating with the hideously uncaring Trolls of Weekend IT Support;
• howling with rage on realising that he can't access PowerPoint on his lap-crucible;
• making two separate, and futile, trips to the main place of work in the Shire to fax large amounts of paper that turn out to be the wrong large amounts of paper; and
• sighing as he gets yet another terse message on the rock from the Swedish hotel room in which Gandalf is fuming and drawing up a hobbity P45.

I have basically failed, so I could be blogging on the streets for loose change soon.

I did cheer up enough to do a little karaoke last night, which I like to do about every half decade or so.  The venue lost a huge amount of goodwill from me by employing a Bubbles-type character in the lavatory to bully punters into paying a quid to wash their hands and by squirted with water from a designer scent bottle.  "Don't get sprayed, don't get laid!" he leered as I feigned an important call coming in on my mobile.  It's a great way for bars to ensure men don't wash their hands.

I've also been listening to the brilliant new Indelicates album, Songs for Swinging Lovers.  They've done the Radiohead thing of offering it for as much as you want to pay for it, without the Radiohead comfort blanket of already being multi-millionaires.

This isn't really representative of the album but it's the only one on youtube.  They're usually much nastier: