Flying the flag

Good news!

I managed to make my way into work (A total of around twenty-five miles) with plenty of walking either side blissfully unaware that I had my flies undone for the entire journey.

Result.

Just one look at you

"... and I know it's gonna be a lovely day."

A Bill Withers song that couldn't be farther removed from the truth yesterday, although I wasn't looking at anybody in particular to quantify that song having some meaning to me.

I woke up feeling cold and tired, and went into the bathroom for the morning pee. When handling the toilet roll, it falls out of my hand, and straight into a toilet bowl now filled with urine.

Great start.

Off I go downstairs for some breakfast. Did I miss the bowl with both cereal and milk? You betcha.

In the three minute walk from the car to the office, I manage to get attacked with approximately three-hundred gallons of water due to the torrential rain.

I then spend most of the day concentrating on one small part of what should've been an already simple task. I look at the clock, and it reads 10.00am. I look at some work, and look back. 1.00pm. Hardly any ground has been made. I look again - 5.30pm and I have to get home.

Sometimes you know from the outset that your day isn't going to be filled with accomplishment, and it's not always your mindset that convinces you of this. It's the fact that you dropped a toilet roll into a toilet full of pee.

Getting up in the middle of the night

Some of us get up for the daily commute. Some have it worse than others, I'll admit. Some have to get up at stupid o'clock to be in for 9am. I have to get up at 6am to be in for 9am. That's stupid o'clock.

When I wake up it's dark, even at this time of year.

But what makes this worse is the main point of this blog. What I'm driving home is that your partner or family remain peacefully asleep in bed enjoying their extra healthy hours in bed while you fall over various obstacles on your way to the shower.

You can almost audibly hear the Zs being produced while you sit in front of crap early-morning news programmes with your Rice Crispies.

If I didn't like my job, I'd have shot someone by now.

The lie-in

I wrote this because I have exhausted my catalogue of thoughts for the week, and I can't very well go an entire week-day without publishing, can I?

So I had a lie-in this morning.

Except I didn't mean to.

I was supposed to set my alarm for 6am, inadvertently set it for 7am, and woke up to the sound of my girlfriend's alarm at 6:50am with a panic-stricken look on my face.

What you may be missing from the situation that's instilled panic within me, and confusion within you is the fact that Weston-super-Mare engages in a mass-exodus from between 7am and 9am.

An average of about 1 billion people (I'm throwing that number out there) leave Weston-super-Mare to get to Bristol for work because there isn't any work in Weston-super-Mare unless you want to sell sticks of rock and postcards of women with their bums out on sunbeds with the caption "Beach-bums" or something equally repugnant.

I have to leave Weston-super-Mare before this hits the motorway, and I'm late for work with nowhere in Bristol City to park. The only spaces available after a certain time will be so far away from the City centre that it'll probably be quicker for me to begin a pilgrimage to Mecca.

I had a curry the night before (Chicken-tikka bhoona) which was delicious, but is now going to haunt me for the rest of the day because I haven't had time to wipe the crusty stuff out of my eyes, never mind having a shower. I did the absolute bare-minimum (how much that is, I will leave to your imagination) to be reasonably clean, and raced out of the front-door. I was onto the motorway in record time, and parked in the best space I've parked in since I started my job nearly eight months ago.

Bonus.

I put my new Miles Davis album on my MP3 player, and started my treck to walk under a beautiful blue sky with a crisp breeze in the air.

You should really try walking anywhere whilst listening to Jazz music. It's amazing. You feel like the pink panther and it's the soundtrack to every action you make, from sitting on the toilet to pouring the kettle. Every nuance of every song seems to match whatever mundane action it is you're doing.

My headline picture is something I took on my way to work to capture the fact that somehow my day turned into something that could've been absolutely horrific to a really good start to the morning, feeling like the pink panther.

The party-goer of death

There are plenty of them.

Most of them are staff party related, and most of them are your partner's staff party related.

Those who've been in that situation have been met with at least one person they didn't get on with. What would make it worse is if that person is sat on your table for the majority of the night.

This brings me to describe the kind of staff party person that I simply don't get on with.

I'm not saying that others don't get on with this sort of person, I'm saying that I don't get on with them.

You greet the person, and they seem perfectly normal. You engage them in a bit of chatter to get friendly, and ease them up. I usually find that after the alcohol's been flowing for about an hour, most of the participants of the conversation tend to loosen up anyway.

After the alcohol starts to loosen their tongue as well as their brain, they begin their butterfly-like transformation into the person that people at parties hope sits somewhere else.

For the sake of argument, and as I have done in the past, we will refer to this particular party-goer as B.

B gets a few drinks in, and begins talking to other people on the table.

Someone else tells a story about their life experience, and about a quarter of the way through with an audience listening intently, B decides that this is a perfect opportunity to tell their story a bit louder, so as to shift the focus of conversation onto themselves. The story is usually either unfunny or unflattering, or both.

A new person visits the table in a bid to mingle with the rest of the crowd. B sees this as an opportunity to say something entirely innappropriate and usually sexual to make the person laugh. This usually makes the table-mingler uncomfortable, and they leave the table, B and the other attendees along with B, flagging and losing patience.

The laugh.

My god, the laugh. It's loud, it's obnoxious and it's happening only when B says something that B finds amusing. Nobody else. In fact, the probable reason that B isn't laughing at anybody else is because B doesn't give them a chance to finish whatever it was that they were trying to say.

The entire evening becomes about B. Half the table can't stand B, and the other half are like B and are therefore loving every minute of it.

The evening comes to an end, and B essentially snatches at the chance of a lift home instead of flagging a cab. B is either unaware or doesn't care whether it's out of the lift-giver's way or not. Only that it gets B home.

I know that you know this person, and whether you like this person or not, they actually drive me insane.