The early morning workings of the lady brain

The missus started a new job this week. I was broadly in favour until she dropped the bombshell that, for no apparent reason, her working day now begins at 8.30am. This means she is furthering her career at the expense of my quality of life.

In her old job she started at 9am, which as a long-standing and indulged member of staff she treated as a nominal estimate of the time she might, under exceptional circumstances, aim to be not too much later than. But now she's new and keen and the new regime is costing me about thirty minutes of sleep every morning. That's about 10 hours a month - this is serious stuff.

So the alarm now goes off at 6.30am. Once she is coaxed or, more often, driven out of bed by a sturdy shove to the lower back, she puts the kettle on and gets in the shower. If I haven't had to pull her out of bed by her feet I may fall back into a light sleep. This lasts until the kettle starts whistling. I stomp downstairs and take the kettle off the heat, bang on the bathroom door and issue her with a 4,879th final warning about sorting her bloody tea out without waking me up.

She breezes past to make the tea, perhaps with a derisive "Alright, Dad", and plonks herself in front of the TV. There she will sit, with a hairbrush in her hair as she clasps her mug of tea, and she will absorb herself in absolutely anything that is on BBC Breakfast. She will give the same attention to an update on the Manchester United defensive injury crisis as she will a feature on the decline of the Norfolk duck population. If the TV shows her an image of a child or any form of cute animal she will grin. If the TV shows her an image of either of these in any kind of sad context she may have a little cry. If an irate boyfriend pokes his head around the door she will feign, feebly, a hair-brushing motion or a peer into a make-up mirror.

Somehow, many hours later, she will have done her hair, make-up and got dressed. Then she will begin drifting from room to room in a listless hunt for the items she has scattered around the flat the night before. She will emerge from the spare room holding a sock, and trudge upstairs to get her glasses from the bedroom. Then into the bathroom for hairclips, the kitchen for shoes and living room for her phone. Then spare room for different shoes, back up to the bedroom for a second sock, the top of the stairs for a coat and the living room for a handbag. After a few more laps she'll reach the door and start rummaging through her handbag. She's got her purse, keys, phone, she's walking out of the d...."Oh shit! Where's my Oyster card?" Then back in the flat for a hunt through every pocket of everything she wore the day before, as the Oyster card sits ignored on the kitchen table.

This all adds up to why an early start time is such a disaster. I accept that boys, who only have to decide which of five pre-ironed shirts to wear, have it a little easier. I also accept that things like long hair and face paint are a factor. But the fundamental disorder of the lady brain is laid bare at times like this. Perhaps there's a morning routine efficiency class I could send her to?

Aftermath

We had a couple of friends around for dinner last night to see in the new year. They're married and everything. I cooked a lasagne. It couldn't have been a more civilised, mature set-up.

Woke up feeling like I've been kicked in the head. Empty wine bottles all over the flat. Shards of glass all over the kitchen table. Curtains ripped from the wall and now lying on the floor in a pool of wine.

An enormous sausage sandwich later and I've hidden the wine bottles and dealt with the glass but the curtains will need some sort of professional intervention. All I'm fit for now is The Wizard of Oz.

It's 2010. Bloody hell.

Akira the Don - I Am Not Dead (Yeah!)

Why wasn't this number one? It's a ruddy great video and a ruddy great song. I meant to go along and be a zombie for the video but I forgot. More fool me. Sod Coco Sumner and her pointless crowd - 2010 will be the year of Akira the Don.

The limpest of protests

Anyone moving into the Kennington area soon realises they have a decision to make that will define their time in the neighbourhood. Yes, the gang colours thing is important, and on behalf of the Oval Souljas I'd like to issue a polite warning to the K-Town Bludz that I don't want no more displayin' in my front yard. But there is a more fundamental choice to make - are you Kennington Tandoori (aka the KT) or Gandhi's?

Operating within a few doors of each other, they have very different styles. Gandhi's is an old-school curry house whereas the KT is more inclined to put your food on an oddly-shaped plate, drizzle unidentifiable red and green sauces around the corners and charge you 25% more for the privilege. The two compete fiercely for the custom of the local politicians and omega-list celebrities. Gandhi's scored a knock-out blow by being chosen by Alistair Darling to feed the late-night deliberations over the October 08 banking bail-out, but the KT seems to have the edge on the random celebs ("the best naan in London" - The Kaiser Chiefs).

In fact, Hot Stuff in Vauxhall is the best local bet by a mile but only has a tiny amount of seats, so my Plan B of choice is a vegetable thali at Gandhi's. I've generally found the service more friendly, the food equivalent in quality and the bill less cheeky. But the KT has been boarded up for weeks undergoing major internal surgery, and as I'd be remiss in my duties as a prominent local fatty if I didn't give the new incarnation a chance the missus and I popped along at the weekend.

The immediate impression is that they've increased the size of the restaurant by 20% and the number of seats by 40%. As before tables hug each side of the narrow space, but now a wobbly line of two-person islands form a thin spine down the middle, leaving two incredibly narrow tracks on either side for customers and waiters to walk down sideways like crabs. Sit as we did in the middle and you'll get a constant parade of crotches passing extremely close to your face as people squeeze past, sucking in their stomachs and apologising.

The food is exactly as competent and overpriced as ever, with the clip joint practice of charging £3 for two papadoms still especially vile. The service is exactly as piss poor as ever. My starter lagged ten minutes behind the missus's, and my desperate attempts to make eye contact with the waiter to hurry things along were complicated by the good old natter he was having on his Blackberry. It took four requests to get some tap water, although a paid-for lager arrived within seconds. The bill was full of fictional beers and after I paid a corrected version the guy wandered off with my credit card still hanging out of the chip and pin.

I paid the tip, of course. I'm English. Rather than take any kind of action at the time and risk causing a fuss I'd rather brood for a couple of days, then set out my complaints in tedious detail on a website the waiter will never read. I'll quietly boycott them in a way that they couldn't possibly notice until some social circumstance lands me back in the middle row, nose to groin with the same waiter as he calculates how to spend the tip he knows I'll give him whatever he does to me or my food because I'm such a completely craven pussy. Yeah, I'll show them good and proper.

There's no such name as Brabara

Having been a slavish devotee of the first series of Flight of the Conchords I was quite disappointed with the episodes that I caught of the second. The songs in particular had too much money and not enough chuckles thrown at them. That said, in a moment of chronically hungover iTunes weakness yesterday I bought the album of the songs from the series and there are definitely some gems that passed me by. Like this brilliant R Kelly pastiche:

Photographic evidence

In January 2003 I didn't have much going for me. I'd left university the summer before with a history degree and no idea what to do next at all. On realising that I was only directly qualified for a job requiring me to toy with the G2 crossword all morning and play Championship Manager all afternoon, and that such opportunities seemed scarce, I returned to my home village in Nottinghamshire and sunk into a deep malaise.

By January my parents were understandably weary of accomodating a bad-tempered, rarely employed and expensively hungry layabout. My father, then an executive recruiter, did some work for a woodchip factory in North Wales and in the course of the conversation learned that they needed a short term marketer. By the time he left they somehow had the impression he was harbouring an available and keen young man in proud possession of a marketing degree. I had no good excuse not to take the job, so I was signed up - for six months I would commute from Nottingham to Wales on Monday mornings and return on Friday evenings, staying with a local couple in the nearby village in the week. My job would be Marketing Assistant to the Product Development Manager, primarily helping with the organisation of a wood-based design show intended to showcase the factory's fine range of medium density fibreboard and associated other woodchip-based products.

The strangeness of those few months cannot be incorporated into one blog post, or possibly even one hundred. But last week I was remembering one of my stranger regular jobs and thought it might serve as a stand-alone snippet.

The woodchip factory was owned by a scary old Austrian millionaire. I know he was scary because all the very hard and manly men who ran the business were plainly all petrified of him. Living as he did in Austria but liking as he did to shout at people, he wanted a way to make sure his Welsh factory was being maintained to his own Howard Hughes-esque standard of cleanliness.

This meant me being dispatched every Friday morning to do a lap of the acres of factory floors and the woodchip yard with a digital camera and strict instructions to take photos of certain areas from specific angles. I would then paste these photos into a template and email it to Austria, where I like to think he poured over them with a magnifying glass in a darkened oak-pannelled study, slamming his wizened fist on the desk every time he spotted a stray pallet.

Unfortunately for him, his rigid process didn't really raise the average cleanliness of the factory. For the first couple of weeks I plodded around, striking a incongruous figure in my suit, long black overcoat, reflective jacket and hard hat, snapping away and no doubt getting a lot of the foremen a trans-European telling off. Then they all got wise to the connection between my Friday morning saunter and the earache, and I started to notice forklift trucks whizzing stray crates out of my way, people with brooms racing across the site towards me and large men appearing at my elbow to say things like "Hows about you takes this one so's that large pile of crap over there don't appear, know what I mean?" before cracking their knuckles and gobbing on the floor.

The risk calculation was clear and the scary but far away man lost out to the scary and quite close indeed men. So a travesty of a pantomime ensued for the remaining weeks of my stay where I would go to each point, wait patiently for a small area to be emptied and swept, dutifully take my photo and be sent on my way with a gruff "good lad".

I actually enjoyed that job. It meant the end of the week was almost here and got me out of the portacabin I worked in for the rest of the time. But of all the pointless tasks I've performed for money, it was certainly represented the most elaborate waste of time.

Written in the glow of office lighting

There's no Ho-Ho-Ho in my life at the moment, no matter how many times I see Jason Donovan warbling about prawn platters in a festive Iceland ad. Before I can clear off for Chrimbo I have to do my feeble best to plough through a work mountain so large that Ranulph Fiennes is tackling it from another slope.

I may be flat out but rest assured there's still time in the schedule for some serious self pity. Canteen yoghurt for lunch again. WHY AM I SO CURSED? All the sectretaries have legged it at 17.29 and 59 seconds sharp, as per bloody usual. WHY CAN'T I BE A SECRETARY INSTEAD? There's people moving around in the street outside who are laughing and smiling and happy. WHY DON'T THEY COME IN AND HELP ME?

This isn't helped by my brain increasingly becoming a morning person. Or brain. 7am - I'm on fire. 11am - cooking on gas. 2pm - oooh, slowing down. 4pm - starting to slur words. 6pm - white noise. Still I sit here into the night, gamely staring at dreary Word documents to no avail while a gentle snoring leaks out of my ears.

There's only one hope - the lottery. Operation Derren Brown Kidnap starts here. Who's in?

Parklife

Every morning I walk through Kennington Park on my way to work. It's usually quite pleasant - the squirrels scampering, the joggers huffing and puffing, the council estate devil dogs tearing across the grass, weights dangling from their necks as they train for their next cage fight.

Unfortunately whoever opens the various gates each morning has set up his own version of the laboratory experiment where a rat has to sniff out some cheese in a maze. The gate in is always open, but it's become a lucky dip as to which gate out will be unlocked. On Wednesday, already late for an early meeting, I was blocked at two exits and and ended up doubling back half the length of the park.

I assume I was being watched by a park keeper wearing a lab coat and perched on a tree branch, making notes on his clipboard. "Subject 17: grows increasingly panicked and kicks a pile of leaves in frustration. Other active subjects openly amused by this display of effeminate rage. Note: tomorrow, see if Subject 17 is fooled by fake Exit sign pointing towards pit filled with dog crap".

Bad Santa

Wandering around a grimly festive Tesco last week sparked a long-forgotten memory. I was shopping with my mother at the age of about 8, and my eye was caught by the cover of the Christmas Radio Times. It was a photograph of a chortling Santa sitting on a snowy log and brandishing his Radio Times. He looked pretty excited about the Birds of a Feather and The Russ Abbott Show seasonal specials, and rightly so.

So far, so unexciting. But then I realised what Santa was holding. The same magazine that I was! With the same cover showing Santa on a log waving a Radio Times. And in that picture, the Santa was holding a magazine with a cover showing Santa on a log waving a Radio Times. And so on until the final miniscule image of Santa's magazine was indecipherable.

Bear in mind that this was in the days before Photoshop or digital trickery, and that I had a tiny brain more used to thinking about Silly Putty and Micro Machines. I literally stared at it for about 10 minutes, trying to comprehend what this could mean. Was I dreaming? Did Santa travel in time? I asked my Mum how it was possible, and she said she didn't know. I felt unnerved and uncomfortable, and thought about it for days afterwards.

I think that was the first time I really wrestled hard with a problem that I couldn't make head nor tail of. I've obviously had plenty of practice since (the last episode of Battlestar Galactica recently provoked a similar reaction) but that was when my general ignorance in the ways of the world became brutally clear. Thanks, Santa.

Oi won’t harve it!

Don't worry readers - I survived the stag weekend. Phew.

The cult of the stag is presumably an invention of the International Drinking Games Association and the Guild of Strippers. Luckily the best man sensibly rejected the lure of the grottier parts of the easyJet empire and booked a house near Exmoor that could sleep 20-odd thirsty men.

My group arrived late on the Friday, having spent a while hopelessly lost in the depths of Devon's windiest lanes. At one point I went to a B&B for directions and had a bellowed conversation with the owners through the glass door. The wife wanted to let me in ("Oh, you poor dear!") but got extremely short thrift from her proto-Tony Martin of a husband ("Absolutely not - oi won’t harve it! Oi don't know 'im, see"). God knows how anyone actually gets a room there.

We made it in the end and had a boys night of booze, crisps and pool. But then Saturday dawned with black clouds and horizontal, thunderous rain. "Shame", I said to one of the stags, just about containing the glee in my voice. "We'll have to not go paintballing or quad biking. I'd been so looking forward to it. Drat!" I then just about contained the panic on my face as he reassured me that both are designed to be enjoyed in Somme-like weather conditions, and that there was no chance at all of a cancellation. "Hooray!" I croaked before going to my room and staring at the pitifully inappropriate selection of clothes I’d packed. I would be fully waterproofed, but only up to my ankles.

Hours later I was standing outside a portacabin in a dismal strip of wood. The other stags milled about adjusting their face masks and overalls, except for the husband-to-be who was dressed in a full-body fox costume. A distinctly feral guide whittled a stick into a spear and bragged about taking down a pheasant that morning with his trusty paint-firing penis extension. We ran around for a bit - well, some people ran. I took the coward’s option whenever possible of defending our flag which, due to the fact that the arena was a three-level crag that a mountain goat would find a bit tricky, was rarely in any danger from the other team.

For the last game I was sent on a diversionary run to draw the other team’s fire. The team captain cut an inspirational figure as he emphasised the critical nature of the mission, before re-adjusting his tail and grimly flipping back his nose and whiskers. This was war. I headed along a steep, densely wooded ridge, stopping only to fall into bushes and trip over roots. I heard a distant round of paintball fire and fired a few rounds in its general direction. After a short pause I was immediately shot at least five times in the chest and started the long stumble back to the portacabin, passing my fellow crack divertee as he howled in pain after a tussle with some nettles. Our captain may have over-estimated our capabilities.

I skipped the quad biking as I was literally 100% sure I would die, and probably take out a few other people, if I went anywhere near it. Then it was back to the ranch for a great night of steady boozing, including a simple drinking game based around rude words that led to a 20 minute argument about whether “hymen” qualified. The final say went to the most passionate objector, who thought that if a word could appear on the 6 O’Clock News it could not be construed as being rude. He then undermined his argument somewhat with the example “Bong! A female celebrity was today involved in a road accident. She may have injured her hymen.” The drinking game dispersed and I moved to the pool room where I was having a grand old time until around 4am when someone described Showgirl by The Auteurs as “boring” and skipped the track, whereupon I went to bed in a huff. I am 28 years old.

It’s the hen night this weekend. Rollerdisco. Girls are too smart for paintball.