Many thanks to Brennig Jones for bringing this clip to my attention.
For those in the UK, Peaches Geldof may well be known to you from the pages of The Sun, for anyone who has escaped her, she's the air-headed daughter of the scary haired two hit wonder, Bob Geldof. And she is another of these girls who is famous for being the daughter of someone who actually did something to become famous.
And so I give you Peaches Geldof, surely a future guest speaker on the intellectual conference circuit....
Blergh.
Thanks to the BBC, I discovered this story from the BBC. Apparently energy "Smart-Meters" are now the way forwards. The way it works is this - The Department of Energy and Climate Change (and no, I wasn't aware we had one of those) wants to see "47 million meters in 26 million properties by 2020". Good luck with that chaps. According to the Beeb, it is hoped that the technology will help people cut their energy bills by giving you a visual display of how much electricity you are using. This, to my mind, is avoiding a fact - if you're too stupid to realise that by leaving all the lights on and boiling the kettle you're going to be using more leccy than if you sit in the dark drinking orange juice then you shouldn't be in charge of anything as potentially lethal as a plug switch, just in case you're overwhelmed by the urge to discover what happens if you ram a fork into it. Anyhow, dispensing with the detail, let's look at the practicalities shall we?
Trials of smart meters have suggested that SOME people may be prompted to moderate their energy use and that the £8bn scheme may help people save £28 a year. May I be the first to say that I don't personally think spending £8bn in order to get a few people to switch off the light and save the monetary equivilent of 8 pints a year is terribly practical? The meters are going to cost about £340 per household anyway, so their first 12 years of savings are going to be spent paying off the sodding thing. Lord Hunt, our esteemed climate change monkey-in-charge said, without a hint of irony that 'Smart meters will put the power in people's hands, enabling us to control how much energy we use, cut emissions and cut bills", entirely missing the point that people have been able to do this since electricity first arrived in houses just by using the 'off' switch. In days gone by the populace was even deemed intelligent enough to work out that having the bedroom light on upstairs when they were sat downstairs was unnecessary without the aid of a little electronic gadget that produces a pretty coloured graph. And uses up more electricity to power itself. He also said that case studies showed the meters 'could' get people to reduce their bills by about £100 a year by changing behaviour but we can safely ignore that figure because we all know that the government doesn't believe the electorate can understand a number unless it starts with '1' and ends in '0' and so they've clearly just rounded up the £28 mentioned to the next largest figure that follows this rule.
The energy suppliers are going to be able to recoup the cost from customers through higher bills or upfront fees. Quelle surprise. And what, ladies and gentlemen, do we think the energy companies will do if (and we're taking a wild leap of faith here, following the fatally flawed assumption that the scheme makes any difference) our energy use begins to tail off dramatically and profits begin to fall? Any guesses? Yes, that's quite right. They'll ramp the bloody prices up so they can still make umpteen billion quid a year.
So am I going to be applying for a Smart Meter? No, I'm not, because I'm intelligent enough to figure out the times when I use most power and what to do to reduce it and frankly I think that a list should be made of all the people who don't think that they can figure it as well so require a meter. This way someone can be sent round to all their properties to disconnect the electricity and the gas before they hurt themselves...
This is the time when, as women, we’re supposed to be the most liberated isn’t it? We can have it all – family, career, kids etc etc.
This is the time when your marriage is supposed to be a fulfilling aspect of your life, married to someone who you love and who loves you back, a partnership. You don’t need to stay in a bad marriage if you don’t want to in the same way that our mothers/grandmothers did way back when.
Apparently that’s bullshit.
I met up with a couple of friends recently, one of whom – S – I’ve known for 22 years now. She’s an Asian girl who I met during my first week of university and back then was always a bubbly, giggly, fun person to be around, as well as being a good friend. She studied law like me, but unlike me, she qualified as a solicitor and started practising law. But in her family that mattered for nought because she was taking her own sweet time about getting married – the be all and end all for her Asian family.
S is incredibly attractive and during uni she had a number of boyfriends – from a lovely Sikh guy to an English guy four years younger than her. While they were special relationships to her, with men who clearly adored her, she always knew that it was never a long-term thing, that she was never going to marry any of them. Because she was always going to do what her parents expected her to do....... marry a nice Hindu guy. Not just any old nice Hindu guy, but someone from the right caste.
Years after uni she met the ‘right’ Hindu guy (how she met him escapes me now) and she did end up marrying him thinking that he was sufficiently westernised (he smoke, he drank, he’d had Western girlfriends) that would mean that she wouldn’t end up in that age-old Asian trap of living with her in-laws.
Oh wow, how wrong could she be???
Within a couple of months of her wedding her father-in-law died and S’s husband – being the oldest sibling and all – moved him and his new bride into his parental home – utterly against her wishes but she bit her tongue because her husband was grieving so it would be wrong to make a point about ending up in a place she never wanted to be. The weeks turned to months, turned to years – all despite her husband’s reassurance of it being for “just a little bit longer”.
They finally did move to a place of their own (5 minutes from his mum’s house) but each time I saw her she seemed more and more unhappy and each time we met up, me and mutual friends from law school would remark on how defeated and frighteningly thin she was becoming and how her wonderfully lively spirit seemed to be seeping out of her at every passing meeting.
It was bad enough that she was in her husband’s parental home but S slowly began to realise how driven her husband is about his work. Whilst she was traditional enough to want someone that was able to provide for them (especially once they had kids), she didn’t quite appreciate that It.Was.All.About.The.Work. And, any minimal amount of time S’s husband isn’t at work, is spent being in the house (though not necessarily interacting with their children) or playing golf. Seven years after having their first child and she feels that she’s more or less been a single parent.
Talking to her about her marriage last night made me indescribably sad for her. She’s in a marriage with a man who’s unable/unwilling to show her any affection, who isn't really involved in their kids and routintely doesn't really seem to consider her in the decisions he makes. He also thinks that being the 'provider' for his family is paramount, is enough and that it more than makes up for the fact that he's not 'there' physically or emotionally for his boys.
And the really sad thing? That she just sits back and accepts it. At least now she does. I think at the beginning she would flag up issues she had with her husband which led to massive arguements which made her incredibly miserable and depressed about the whole sad, sorry situation and how her life had ended up precisely how she'd never wanted it to.
I just don't know which is worse though - being depressed by being in a bad marriage or just accepting it and getting on with life, understanding that however much you fight it, things won't change. I thought that we were so beyond the times when you just resigned yourself to a shitty marriage for the sake of the kids/because culturally it wasn't the done thing.
She said something the other night that worried me but thinking back on it I realised that I'd already come to the same conclusion - that one day she'll get so fed up of being starved of affection she'll have an affair.
I've got a presentation to do on the 30th for work. It's talking about the kind of work my little department does and how it could help another department in my firm.
And I am cacking myself.
I was watching a film at the cinema a couple of nights ago and in between concentrating on the film, I noticed that I was feeling v. nervy and getting palpitations and traced it back to the fact that this frigging presentation is really freaking me out. I even started thinking about calling in sick on Monday and landing someone else in it at the last minute to cover my presentation.
The last time I did a presentation was 6 years ago - that's how much I hate doing them, I've managed to stick my head in the sand, avoid and totally ignore them for 6 glorious years.
But it's just my luck that the TWO other people who could've/should've been doing this presentation have BOTH got annual leave booked that day.
FFS - I've given birth to two babies, so how the hell can a 10 minute presentation be freaking me out so much?????
But it is.
So many people I know - husband included - give presentations with such ease; they don't bat an eyelid, filling their presentations with witticisms and funny stories and totally comfortable in their own skins.
And me?
My presentation is just going to give it to them straight in the hope that 10 minutes won't really feel like 10 hours and I won't somehow fuck it up.
- 06:05 Using Digsby to manage IM, Email, and Twitter from one application - twitter.digsby.com #
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- 06:12 total busyness #
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It's been quite a busy week so far in my world.
- On Monday I travelled up to Dunfermline with a colleague, for a meeting that we were having at our site there the following morning. We arrived at the hotel about 5 and I set off with my key to find my room. When I opened the door I was surprised to find that by stretching my ams out, I could almost touch all the walls but I'm not especially bothered by small rooms so this wasn't really an issue. The sub-tropical temperature was, especially when I discovered that turning the radiator thermostat to 'off' only succeeded in ramping the heat up further. Unusual. After mush wrestling and swearing, I finally ascertained that yes, the window catch was indeed fucked and had two settings - sealed shut and wide open. Given the torrential rain, my only real option was 'sealed shut' and so I resigned myself to kipping in a sauna. As it happened, this wasn't the biggest obstacle to sleep that I was going to find. After dinner and more drinks that I intended to have (more of that later) I went back to my teeny tiny oven and got into bed. I was just getting comfy when the man in the room next to me arrive back at his room. After bellowing goodbye to his friends, who seemed to be at the other end of the corridor, he went into his room and turned on the tv, ramping the volume up to 'stun'. This pissed me off but I thought 'No Vicola, let it drop, he'll turn it off soon'. An hour later, I was really pissed off and after a further hour I was ready to kill. On careful listening I detected, above the roaring of the telly, the distinctive sound of snoring. Oh fucking brilliant, the pig ignorant twat had fallen asleep with the telly on, so wasn't going to be turning it down anytime soon. Enough was enough, I got out of bed, put some trousers on and went and banged on his door. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. So I went downstairs to fetch the man from reception. He came up and banged on the door a few times. Nothing. He turns to me "I think he might be asleep". D'you think? "Well I can't go in and wake him up so do you want to be moved to another room?" It's now 2am, what I REALLY want is to have been asleep two hours ago but in the absence of that option then yes, I'll move rooms. The new room turns out to be a lot bigger than the other one and absolutely freezing. When I turn on the heating it belches out clouds of searing heat and there doesn't seem to be any way of adjusting the levels. If I leave that on I'm going to be found in the morning with all the water from my body evaporated, like a large raisin in pyjamas, so I turn off the radiator, put my coat on and get into a bed that seems to have been made from the leftover asphalt and hardcore used in road building. At 4.30am or so I finally go to sleep, at 7am the alarm goes off and I get up, safe in the knowledge that I'm going to be a complete fucking cabbage all day but too tired to actually care. On arrival at breakfast I notice that my 4 colleagues also look completely wrecked. Seems that they also had the asphalt mattresses. Let that be a lesson to all - if a hotel is the cheapest in the city, there's usually a reason.
- After dinner in the hotel, my boss went upstairs to do some work leaving me and the 3 blokes who act as regional advisors in the bar and the drinks started flowing. The Scotland advisor (who I had previously thought was a nice, failry respectable bloke) got most of the drinks on his room tab and after a while it occured to me that the drinks seemed to be a wee bit strong, however I figured that it was probably just cheap vodka. At about the 6th drink, I mentioned this. "That's because they're doubles" he grins. Ok, I've no problem with joining in the manly drinking session, I really don't, but if I want a fucking double, I'll ask for one and if you're buying me doubles, I expect to be informed because otherwise I'm going to inadvertantly end up flat on my arse in a hotel bar and sitting in a meeting with the HSE sporting the world's greatest hangover. The thing about vodka drunkeness is that is doesn't come upon you a bit at a time, it waits till you get into the bright lights of the ladies for a pee then it clubs you round the back of the head, leaving you a dribbling idiot with no control over your legs or your destiny. Hence the fact I'd like to actually know how much I'm putting away. The other thing is that earlier in the evening, in fact all through the evening, tales of the Scotland advisor's antics had been surfacing. Bearing in mind that the guy is living with his long time girlfriend, he is - to put it nicely - at it like a rat up a drainpipe with anything that has breasts and a pulse. According to a tale told when the guy went to the loo, he turned up at one of the work christmas parties with two women and a bottle of champagne, all of which bypassed the bar and headed straight up the stairs to his room. This makes me uncomfortable, not because I care who he sleeps with, I don't give a toss if he bonks man, woman and beast, but because it leads me to think that perhaps his office flirting isn't quite the harmless banter I took it for. Add this to the fact that he seems to be trying to get me plastered without my knowledge and I'm now on my guard. If he thinks he's adding me to his list of bedpost notches he's got another thing coming.
All this excitement and it's only Wednesday. How do I manage?
In the absence of anything exciting to report, I thought I'd share some photos from mine and the dog's autumn wanders. Sadly since these were taken last weekend we've had gale force winds and torrential rains so everything looks bald and wet now. But at least I got a few pics of the autumn colours before our charming British weather trashed the landscape....
I've no idea what the hell this is. It looks like a witches hut to me but I am assured that there are no witches to found in these parts as it's the posher end of town, which restricts itself to key swapping parties and tax fraud. Sorcery is SO passe.
Walks can be a bit slow in Autumn as the dog insists on sniffing every pile of leaves, on the off chance there may be something interesting under it. Imagine his surprise when he encountered a disgruntled hedgehog...
Some of the trees seem to change earlier than others...
And some already have bright orange. Or did, before the storms, now they just look a bit bald and twiggy...
We came across a farm dog that had the unusual physical attribute of being as wide as he is tall. You don't see that very often.....
The holly berries have come out and are not yet shrivelled and grim, like dangly raisins.....
However there's still the odd flower to be found.
The woodland is beginning to change and those horses should be rugged up in this weather ( as an aside, I've been watching -and feeding- these horses for nearly three years now and if anyone knows of anyone who is chucking out or replacing any old, scruffy winter horse rugs could they let me know because the rugs she puts on these three about January time are utterly inadequate for a British winter).
We walked past the field where I buried the last of one of my guinea pigs to shuffle off this mortal coil. It is indeed private land however the dog loves to run there and it is a most excellent place to bury dead pets, should you have a garden created from builder's rubble with a 1 inch layer of topsoil plonked on the top.
The city looks cold and hazy. Because it is. Very cold and very hazy....
Sometimes, in a heap of mouldy old leaves you spot one unblemished one. I didn't even have to place it, it was just sat there....
The Japanese Acer in my parent's front garden is dark red in summer but goes this scarlet colour in Autumn and it looks stunning. I'd have taken a shot of the whole tree except that the picture was somewhat buggered up by the builder's skip on the driveway. Rarely a thing of beauty. Sadly, this tree is also now brown and twiggy and the pretty red leaves are plastered all over the road and, amusingly, my dad's car.
So there you have it, Autumn in Manchester. Not quite as amazing as Autumn in New England or the forests of Canada but still pretty in it's own way and with little hidden delights that you don't see unless you're looking out for things to photograph.
Sadly nothing very exciting has happened in the last few days. I think I may have PMT because life is currently a patchwork of little irritations woven together to create a quilt of annoyance. These include but are not limited to:
Telephone Twat
I pick up the phone yesterday and there's some bloke on the other end. Great, they've put another marketing monkey through to me. Why do reception always stick anyone selling crap through to me? Only this one turns out to have arrogance factor 10.
"Can I speak to the head of sustainability?"
"We don't have a head of sustainability, we aren't a huge organisation and so sustainability is split between a few different departments.
"Well then I'd like to speak to the head of engineering sustainable development."
"We don't have one of those either. Like I just said said, sustainability is split between a few different departments."
"Well I'll speak to the person in charge of all those departments."
"They are DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS. This means they have DIFFERENT MANAGERS. See? There isn't someone in charge of all of them, each one has a manager of its own."
"Oh don't bother then, I'll just speak to the MD." And he hangs up.
Good luck with that mate. If he thinks I'm the most unhelpful person our organisation has to offer then he's in for a rude awakening when he's put through to the MD's personal assistant, a woman whose unhelpful manner and ability to take a marketing call for the MD as a personal insult are legendary throughout the organisation. And the arrogant little git deserves it too.
The Fridge Witch
I got into the office this morning and on a Friday the lady who usually mans reception from 8am till 9am doesn't come in, meaning the Fridge Witch is on the desk. So at 8.10am she rings up, as per fire regulations, to find out who is in my end of the office.
"Hello. Is it just you in your office?"
"Yes. Just me."
"No L & N?"
Of course they're here, that's exactly what I meant when I said "just me".
"No, they're not here, it's just me."
"Where are they? Are they coming in today? Are they out for the day?"
Mind your own fucking business you cheeky cow. That woman is terminally nosy. For the purposes of fire regulations you are required to know who is in the building. Where the other members of my department are if they aren't in this building is absolutely none of your concern. It's not like they submit their itinerary for the next fortnight in to me for approval and even if I did know, I'd say I didn't because I know it bugs the hell out of you not to be in the know about everything that's going on. Work is making me even more childish than I was to start with. If things continue there's every chance I'm going to end up buying a slingshot and lurking behind the fake potted palm in reception flicking inkballs at the old bat.
Bonfire night
Last night was bonfire night and as per usual, the folk of my estate had spent a fortnights salary (or benefits, depending on which house you're referring to) on buying the loudest illegal fireworks they could get their hands on. And for the third year running, next door won with what sounded like colourfully filled depth charges illegally purchased from the armed forces. The first one went off without warning, causing me to drop a mug of coffee on my own feet, the windows to rattle and the dog to go entirely rigid with his eyes on stalks and the look of a rabbit in headlights. After 10 minutes of talking the dog down we seemed to be making progress. Until the next one went off and the animal shot under the dining table. He stayed there for over an hour while what sounded like an airstrike on the next town along went off from the back gardens and even this morning he went 2 feet in the air when I dropped a plate in the kitchen. At about ten o'clock I decided to go and look at the fireworks from out of the bathroom window, a great vantage point because it looks out over a section of the town. As I opened the window a dead spider was hanging from the outside of the frame. I bloody hate spiders so I took a ball of loo roll and lobbed it at the spider corpse to knock it off, figuring I could just go and pick the loo roll up out of the garden. What I had forgotten to take into consideration was that we've just had a new conservatory put on the back of the house so my big ball of bog roll landed square on the shiny new glass roof. Fuckity fuck. I can't reach it with a broom handle, I tried. So I went to bed. I offer a hearty mental apology to the boys next door who Mr Vicola thinks threw the loo roll out of THEIR window, mistakenly assuming that his wife would not be thick enough to lob it out of theirs. I promise I will 'fess up when I get home.
