Tomorrow is the day I've been dreading for weeks.
This is the song Nikki chose to be played as we entered the crem.
I've been absent for a week or so, thanks to my laptop wishing me a happy christmas by dying on its arse while my live-in computer fix-it man was in Inverness visiting his family, so apologies to anyone whose comments or posts I've not replied to/ written about. As I'm back at work now with quite literally bog all to do until the sites start generating some work for me I thought I'd have a look at some of my stats for the years 2000 - 2010.
Things Lost/ given away:
- 3 grandparents, 1 sort of surrogate grandmother brought in replace one of the actual ones who was a cow, 1 great aunt and 1 great uncle. Blimey, there's been a bit of a cull in the family this past decade!
- 2 boyfriends, one of whom was a nice guy but just not for me, one of whom was a complete twat that I can't believe I bothered with. Let me give you the benefit of my wisdom - never date anyone you met on a train, it didn't end well for me and it ended even less well for my cousin who married the nutjob she met on one. Now that's a long and bizarre story which also happened in my 'decade under review'!
- 1 family dog, Barney, a hairy creature that moulted more than I ever believed a creature could without ending up bald. His ability to start a random fight with dogs much bigger than himself, leaving the owners clinging onto their beasts for dear life while I tried to drag the grouchy bundle of hair and teeth up the road by the scruff of the neck was awe-inspiring. I will also never forget the time he chased a chav down the road and over a fence for no better reason than that he had a rabid dislike of anyone in a beanie hat. Plus his attacks on the hoover never stopped being funny. He was put down last year after the tumour on his back began to affect his mobility and I'm sure that wherever he is he's having a great time starting fights with dogs 4 times his size and scoffing his own bodyweight in dog biscuits.
- 1 job, when back in 2003 my dad fired me as an incentive for me to go out and find a proper job instead of flouncing about being the cook for the nursing home they own.
- 3 cars - my first car, Cyril I, a silver Nissan Micra that was 12 years old when my parents bought it off my grandparents (as a way to stop them driving) and that ran like a dream until my then boyfriend Ben had been driving it for a while. After that you had to get up early if it was set to rain because you'd have to disconnect all the plugs and wipe them out with WD40. The RAC man was out to it so often that I got a christmas card off him. Nice chap. I loved that car. Also a ginger Peugeot 106 that coordinated beautifully with my ginger best friend and a harlot scarlet Ford Fiesta that ended up with my brother in London after a rather complicated swap involving my parents, my brother, a Peugeot 307 and a bank loan.
- 1 friend/ flatmate who turned out to be a sociopathic slut who would offer my live in boyfriend sex while I was at work. He didn't take her up on it but it pissed me off none the less. Possibly it was not a good idea for me to attempt to have it out with her while fuelled up on cheap vodka but to be honest, she deserved every single one of the names I called her and I feel no guilt about aiming for her weak spots - popularity and looks.
- Umpteen thousands of pounds on pointless crap that I didn't need/ alcohol/ cigarettes/ clothes that I looked shocking in and shoes I couldn't walk in.
- 7 guinea pigs. Shit, that sounds really bad when you write it down doesn't it? I swear I'm not some sort of psycho small furry critter killer.
- 1 job. I've been here 7 years this march which is truly terrifying.
- My 30s, and I don't want to even think about it, let alone talk about it.
- 20 odd pairs of shoes / boots (conservative estimate). This decade I made the awesome discovery that is Duo, a company who makes boots in different calf widths, meaning finally I could have a pair of knee high boots that didn't look like wellies. A revelation, I'm sure you'll agree.
- 1 dog - Geoffrey, who has featured in the blog before. He's a barmpot and as camp as christmas but everyone loves him.
- 9 guinea pigs. 7 of which I have managed to dispatch to that great rabbit run in the sky, leaving me with 2 currently. Who, to the irritation of my other half are currently living in an indoor cage in the conservatory because it's minus 8 outside. "Of course they'll only be inside for a couple of days" I said 2 weeks ago. Smirk...
- 6 second cousins, 3 of which were born to the same family. No family should have more than 2 kids, at least not if they expect me to remember all of their birthdays and buy them decent gifts at christmas.
- 1 husband. We've been married for 4 years this year and that means that even if we were to divorce tomorrow we wouldn't have the worst marital record in my family, as two of my cousins only made it to the 2 year mark. Happy days.
- 1 degree and 1 diploma. I am now a very highly qualified time waster, an achievement indeed.
- Some wrinkles, the number of which I have not had the courage to count.
- About two stone in weight, 1 of which I think I put on this christmas. I put my work trousers on this morning and decided, as I desperately struggled with the stupid button that either the mischief gnome had been in the wardrobe over the holidays and altered the dimensions of all my clothing or I needed to step away from the Terry's Chocolate Orange and head towards the salad. Sigh...
- The ability to get from A to B without major injury. Only one this decade, a fractured kneecap, which was a vast improvement on the previous 2 decades when my inability to judge what was going on at the ends of my limbs led to me practically having my own dedicated seat in the A&E department. I think it might have been a family thing because my brother was also well known for his ability to fall over or into things as well.
- A number of friends I'd lost touch with but in particular the lovely BGS girls who I went to school with and a girl who I went to primary school with and lived down the road from. I can't imagine now why we didn't all keep in touch, it seems ridiculous when we have such a good time.
- A sister in law. Which is weird because that means my little brother is married. I realise that at 26, 6ft 4 or so he probably isn't that little but still....
- Lots of lovely friends on Vox and even a few from back in the days when I started out online, on Diaryland!
So there we have it, my review of the decade, some things good, some things bad but on the whole I think I came out of it relateively unscathed....
This clip is a year old..cracks me up though.
Luke always spent xmas with me and the kids, then with us when I married.Xmas 2007 he brought Nikki home to meet the family. Wearing an eye patch and experiencing double visiona nd headaches. The following week he was to have the MRI scan.
I spent the last week alone. The kids got back at 4pm so this afternoon was nice.I needed the break and the fact it was xmas really wasn't an issue.
Merry Christmas friends and here's hoping for some good times in 2010.
I'll ;leave you with some Xmas tunes..
TOP RETRO
TOP CHEESE
TOP 'IF SOMEWHAT OVER-PLAYED' XMAS SONG EVAR
Just a very quick message to say a huge happy christmas to all the lovely Voxers who have dropped by since last christmas. May your day be happy, your turkey be salmonella free, your dog not get hold of the sprouts and smoke you out of your house and your inlaws be a minimum of 500 miles away. It's christmas eve and I've been on the crimbo wine for some time now so......
Happy christmas everyone!
Have a great day!
Entertainingly, the race for the Christmas number one single has not been won by the winner of the X factor, as anticipated by Simon Cowell and presumably the winner of the X factor. In days gone by, i.e. before the X factor, who was going to be christmas number one would be something you talked about during breaktime at school. Or in the pub, depending on how old you were but now it's just guaranteed to be whichever beige clone with good teeth, modern hair and a pliable nature won the X factor. Dull dull dull. Until this year, when the public rebelled, presumably appalled by the idea that the long cherished christmas number one spot could be occupied by a shit remake of an originally shit Miley Cyrus song. Plastic pop at it's most tedious, I'm sure you'll agree. No, this year it's been taken by Rage Against the Machine's 'Killing in the name of', a song which serves the dual festive purpose of not only narking off Simon Cowell by slowly raising a middle finger to the X factor but also irritating the hell out of the Christmas PC brigade by being rather aggressive sounding and, shock of all shocks, containing the word 'fuck'. Imagine, someone using the word 'fuck' in a song, it's truly the end of days, or at least it was to the woman I heard interviewed on the radio this morning. Serves Cowell right, this is man who inflicted on us the eternally screeching Leona Lewis, a woman who with one chorus can send bats into the side of buildings and cause dogs to go temporarily insane as her high pitched caterwaul sends their hearing threshold into freefall. Added to this insult is the fact he actually had the idea of putting the two giant egos of Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden onto the one TV show, a plan of such unparalled evil that he should have been tried for treason and swiftly beheaded. So Cowell, let this be a lesson to you, we're bored of beige so next time you're picking an X factor winner, how about going for someone a little bit neon pink or sparkly black instead?
And so, as we head towards christmas, the usual round of christmas disasters appear on the horizon and head towards me at a rate of knots. Am nto doing too badly this year, I've only had a few and these include:
The Christmas tree stand.
I ordered a christmas tree stand off Ebay. It said 'suitable for large tree'. I liked the idea of a 'large tree' and since anyone who was reading back in 2008 will remember last year's christmas tree fiasco, I was determined not to be caught out the same way again so I wanted a big tree stand. The unfortunate thing about Ebay is that it's rather difficult to tell from the little grainy picture how big something actually is. Unless you read the dimensions written in small print, obviously, but who does that? So I get the card through the letterbox saying the postman hadn't been able to deliver my parcel (or, more accurately since I'd been in all day, the postman couldn't be arsed to deliver my parcel and fanny about getting a signature) and off I trundle to the post office. The man appears with my parcel and I'm not going to lie to you, it's fucking huge. I mean enormous. FAR too big for our living room but if anyone knows a person who is looking to prop up a mature Canadian Redwood tree, a bundled collection of telegraph poles or an upended Chieftain tank, I have the accessory they need. This meant that when I bought the christmas tree I had to buy another stand for a further twenty bloody quid and even then I've managed to put the thing in squint. So my tree leans to the left. This, coupled with the fact that my tree has plenty of branches at the top and loads at the bottom but a big stretch of trunk in the middle with no branches at all, means I have a 'character' tree. Lovely. I suppose it fits in well in our house, a bit dishevelled, about to fall over and generally a little bit shambolic.
The Eyelashes
With the party season in full swing I decided to get some false eyelashes put on for a party I was going to. The usual girl I go to has quit and so I booked in with a friend's cousin. The eyelashes she attached weren't in a strip like the ones I'd had done before, they were little individual ones and once on they looked fantastic. So I went to my party, came back a bit the worse for wear and decided that since the beautician had said some other girl had still been wearing them 3 weeks later, that I'd see if they were still there in the morning. And hey presto, when me and my hangover got up, they were! But they were beginning to annoy my eyes so I decided to take them off. I took hold of one little clump of them and pulled gently. Nothing, they didn't budge. So I pulled a bit harder. Nothing. So I yanked and was rewarded with the removal of a little clump of eyelashes. Sadly they weren't the false ones, they were actually mine, the fake ones were still firmly fixed to my face. Fuckity fuck. So I tried soaking them in eye makeup remover and then yanking. All I achieved was the removal of a few more of my own lashes and a searing pain in my eyelid. Eventually, with both eyes watering and looking suspiciously red I rang the girl to ask how I take them off. She asked if there was anything wrong with them, in a tone that suggested only someone who should be incarcerated in some sort of secure unit would be removing them the day after they were applied. I said there wasn't but I wanted to take them off so she advised using baby oil or vaseline to break down the glue and then pulling them off. I didn't have any vaseline but I did have baby oil, from the time that some fool advised me to use it to clean the stainless steel cooker top because it didn't leave streaks. I know, I know, oil and naked flame. Or I know now. Who knew the fire blanket would ever come in useful? Anyway, I dug the baby oil out from 'cupboard under the sink' and soaked the eyelashes for a while then yanked at a clump on the least painful of my eyelids. One little bit came out but the rest were still stuck fast. Fucking brilliant, now I've got a bald spot in the middle that means I'm committed to remvoving the whole lot but they're all still frigging superglued to my damned head. Cue half an hour of fannying about with baby oil soaked cotton wool pads, tugging, whimpering and howling. Eventually I managed to wrestle the bastard things off but my eyelids were so beseiged that it looked like I'd been smacked in the face. And 60% of my own eyelashes had been pulled out too. Beautiful, it's a good look for christmas. And because I'm a complete prat, I've booked in to have the eyelashes done again on Friday morning but this time I've thought ahead and bought some false eyelash remover. I'll let you know how it goes.......
This is Sylvie's favourite. We have to watch it before bed every night. She nearly knows all the words.
Today is the day that Alistair Darling launches his pre-budget report. Normally I would ignore the pre-budget report because frankly it's as dull as fuck and he never says anything very impressive or funny so it isn't worth commenting on. However this is the last one before the election so in the spirit of 'I can't bitch about it if I didn't listen to it', I thought I'd give it a go.To be honest, most of it was still as dull as fuck but one thing caught my eye: Alistair's idea to levy a one off 50% tax on bonuses over £25000 paid by banks to their employees. Possibly unusually in today's society, I think this is morally fucking bankrupt and I'll tell you why.
Mr Darling claims, without even having the grace to blush, giggle a bit or twitch up and down like a schoolboy caught having a cig behind the bikesheds, that this one off levy is intended to deter big bonuses rather than raise revenue. Pull the other one Darling, it's attached to the foghorn. If you were going after big bonuses then your first port of call would have been to the appalling British Gas, whose reputation for ripping off the little man is second to none. In 2008 their CEO Sam Laidlow was given a more than handsome bonus of £1.65m in monetary reward and £1.8m worth of shares. Or perhaps Ally would have been requested the sort code and account number of Peter Rogers, the Chief Executive at Westminster City Council, who was given a bonus of £45,000, straight from the pockets of the Westminster City Council taxpayers. So 'intended to deter big bonuses'? I don't think so Alistair, let's have a bit of honesty. Let's call it like it really is.
You're skint. Or, more accurately since you're a cabinet minister and are therefore creaming vast sums out of the taxpayer in salary and bonuses, the treasury is skint. It needs more money but the taxpayers don't like being asked for more and there's an election coming up. So, who do the taxpayers hate, with the exception of politicians because we all know that they're more likely to vote for Wales to be sold to the Arabs than a cut in their own income? Bankers. The public hate bankers because they earn shitloads and have been conveniently scapegoated for the entire mess that the UK is in. So, if Alistair levies a big tax on their bonuses then it's a vote winner and a money-spinner. Plus, he gets to give a massive kick in the nuts to some jumped up little shit who is 25 years younger than him yet earning 4 times as much. How very dare they? And that's what it's all about. It ignores all the cogent facts, such as the fact that levying a massive bonus tax on banks who haven't received any government money is akin to donning a pegleg, parrot and bandanna, raising the Jolly Roger over Westminster and broadsiding the Barclays building. Such as the fact that many, many organisations give out bonuses based on money they've extracted from the taxpayer but they're being ignored. Such as the fact the public aren't blind to the way that the government have carefully sculpted the image of bankers as horned bringers of penury, disease, pestilence and doom because as long as the public are blaming bankers for the mess the UK is in and spitting at them in the street then no one is looking too closely at the way nothing much has happened about the expenses scandal or enquiring too deeply about the fuck up the treasury have made of virtually everything they've touched in last 10 years. Some of the top bankers have warned that they will move out of the UK to avoid the tax but Darling says he 'will not be held to ransom by the banks'. This is because he's an utter moron and has not yet worked out that a wholesale walkout of banking personnel would wreak absolute havoc on an economy that has already contracted more than he expected. He's also not thought about the fact that these people earn such a huge amount of money that they can afford the very best lawyers. You can bet your payrise, if indeed you got one, that all over the City mobile phones are being pulled out and lawyers are being retained because you can be sure that they'll appeal this on the grounds of human rights. And it's a fair point, if you've not received government bailouts and you're not paid by the state, how can it be legal to levy a penalty based purely on your occupation and no other? It's discrimination of the clearest and most blatant nature.
Yes Darling, we're not nearly as thick as you think we are, we're not convinced by the reasons you've given for this and after over ten years of your government's spin and lies, most of us have learned that if it's emerged from Westminster and it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and walks like a duck it's probably still a CCTV camera which will digitally record your DNA and up the tax take on your salary for the privilege, all in the name of the national interest.
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.
