Just another... Monday

It's a curious business writing a column for a website. Especially your own website. No one has approached me and said they think I lead an interesting life and will I share it with their readership. I decided to do it myself based on no criteria other than I felt like it. That I chose to do a scattergun approach and not limit myself to any one subject (for fear of boredom) was meant to free me. My admiration for Mr Hunt's dedication to writing about Doctor Who every day (in order!!) is immense. If I'd had that kind of dedication the episode guide wouldn't be as patchy and incomplete and, frankly, random as it is today. And that's after a fair bit of tidying up over the festive period. 

My point (and in the words of Ellen DeGeneres, I do have one) is that I look around for things to write about. It isn't so much that I lack ideas (the quality of those ideas isn't mine to speculate upon) more that I lack the oomph to make them work on "paper". I want to be topical and do a thousand words on this appalling Kilroy business. I want to write a 24 things I love about... Planet of the Daleks. I want to tell the world how much I loathe video/DVD/tv people who use the word "uncut". I would go off on tangents and flesh out those ideas but I still have hopes that one day I might actually write them.

I went into Manchester this morning, cadging a lift with parents as they went to book their latest foreign jaunt. I was up earlier than would otherwise have been necessary as my lil car had to go to the car-doctor to have her window fixed. Said window was functioning at 50% capacity as it would go down without a problem but wouldn't come back up again. This is an admirable trait in some quarters but in car windows it is not to be advised. I feared that the garage would do their worst and, as you will see, I wasn't disappointed.

One of the problems of being "between jobs" (not a euphemism as I've left job A and have been accepted for job B but they won't tell me when I start and I am beginning to think they've changed their minds) is that I am going shopping too often. It begins to lose its appeal after a while even though this is the first time in my short(ish) life when I can be said to have both reasonable funds available and lots of time to shop. I decided that I needed a "mission" to justify going to the temple of commerce once more and that mission was to find "Preludes and Nocturnes" - volume one of the insanely popular Sandman series. Waterstones had lots of graphic novels, several Sandman volumes but not vol. 1. Waterstones on the other hand had no graphic novels at all. I knew that WHS would be useless and faced the slog to Forbidden Planet unless... ha! Hidden behind a lot of hiding behind things was Books Etc's graphic novel section and within that were no less than two copies. So today I officially became a new type of nerd. Already a Dr Who nerd and a computer nerd (an Apple nerd at that) I am now the owner and reader of a graphic novel. Maybe soon I'll be able to watch "Chasing Amy" without gritting my teeth every time someone calls a comic book just a "book".

I remembered what Dennis Brent would call a "convention calibre anecdote" while I was in Manchester. A sign that  was attached to all four tills at the Pizza Hut Express in Manchester Arndale Centre's Food Court which caught my eye back in November when I hoped that a pizza would cure one of my worst dizziness attacks. I went back up today to see if the signs were still there but, alas, they were not. They meant to say "Knives and Forks available" but, on the life of my complete set of Telos Novellas, it actually read "Knifes and Folks available". I wouldn't normally remark on an obvious typo as my own grasp of English is comparable to Gollum's relationship with his Precious - I know it's important, I know where to put it but I have no real idea of what it does or how it works. But this sign was printed four times and had been laminated for crying out loud. When you're struggling for material, such an anecdote helps fill a few inches.

I came home, did too much pasta for lunch and spent the afternoon bandying ideas with young Benny. That resulted in my learning how to do Javascript pop up windows (the good sort - the kind that you want rather than the kind that want you) and the production of several new Encyclopaedia Britellica entries. Not the most productive afternoon on record but I've learned something useful and that is a good thing.

Then it was time to pick up the car. The problem of a window that was out of phase in some way had necessitated a whole new window and frame gubbins. A hefty bill which improved my mood as much as a trip to the dentist's would. Oh the comic irony... The dentist x-rayed me (and I don't care what anyone says - if it's so horrible that a even a dentist has to leave the room then I am officially worried) and made two appointments for me to go back and see him. They're only fillings but he said he wants to do them on separate visits which sounds ominous. I suspect the construction of some kind of North Sea type apparatus as molten metal is poured directly into my jaw from a height of about an inch and a half. 

So it's been a rambling sort of day. I came into it worrying intensely about three things - what the garage would do to my car (because they always find other things wrong too - last time they concluded that my engine was illegal under European law and required a battery of computer tests - costing me several hundred quid and two weeks without a car), what the dentist would do to my mouth and what my new (potential) employers would do to my future. As of right now I have a car, I have a mouth but I don't think I have much of a future.

13th January 2004