Titles galore vied for pride of place in the post line “ Electric Dreams, Flatline and the ante post favourite f**${45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}&{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} E*${45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}&£$£ which was just pipped at the line in a close race.

Southern Electric are mucking about with wet powestring outside the house and getting frisky with some new fangled electric cabling. Well not Southern Electric per se as they’ve subcontracted the work to EDF energy, who’ve been properly French and bribed some Catholics from the UK’s most western isle to do the actual work.

It’s not job creation though, the power here is hamster strength at best and when a new neighbour moves in, we greet them with candles and torches. Many times we’ve been plunged into unexpected darkness resulting in Ow! Who the fuck put that table there?” lunges for alternate light sources.

So at 9am this morning, some hard hatted fella pulled the big red switch, watched by three other blokes in this hi-viz quartet, and it all went dark. This choreography has continued through the day with the youngest sparky being dispatched up and down a line of telegraph poles like a amphetamine spiked squirrel, while his mates lounge at poles end smoking and pointing in a vaguely managerial fashion.

A man up a pole, today.

Continue reading “It™s all gone dark “ Part iii.” →

There’s a worrying backpressure in my head as an ever increasing nonsense of articles serially stack up, impatiently waiting for their electronic passport to the blogsphere. A ruthless first in-first-out approach has so far served me well. But my blog-time-slice today has rejected a serious discourse on the heath and safety realities of pear trees, once a non maskable interrupt delivered this queue jumping injustice.

I completed a piece of work, so tedious it almost triggered a career change and retraining as a goat fimbler, under the strict and binding understanding that my reward would be a chocolate of sufficient calories to power a small army.

But the days of a deal being done on a firm manly handshake and look in the other fellows eye are lomg gone; I received instead an e-mail with this picture inside:

The chocolate of complete deception

While it ticks all the boxes in terms of mixed with cow juice and a total absence of praline, it is somewhat let down by its’ electron only form. I’m sure you’ll agree that my grievance is well founded; rather than tucking into a vision of chocolately loveliness, I’m left with nothing more than an Inbox based facsimile. This episode of cruelty by a colleague, who I’d naively treated as a friend until this blatent instance of non delivery, has left me shocked and stunned

Also, even as an image it lacks something. Kind of stumpy and imprisoned in frilliness. Not really a boys chocolate which should be crafted in the shape of a motorbike, and of a similar scale.

You see, I told you it was important.

Anway to make the point, I’ve eaten the monitor. Kind of glassy with a hint of plastic but a robust capacitor and a stomach pump finish has almost made up for my intense disappointment.

I’ll not name and shame the scandalous individual but you know who you are DON’T YOU SARAH.

Cold and Dark have stormed the seasons through unwanted planetary revolution. Rain and wind will inevitably follow and lock out the light for the next six months. Joy. A slicing headwind cut through the thin summer clothing defences this morning, so I arrived at the station shivery and little miserable.

Chiltern Railways responded by slipping in their Fall Timetable which grants them an extra hour or so in case there is a leaf on the line. More than one leaf, and the whole shebang gets cancelled for a couple of days.

Bad Karma is generally an ASBO threesome, so it was hardly a surprise that the two tiny pleasures of the train journey were cruelly denied me. It was only when firmly seated, with the pinging of the closing doors for company, did I realise my freshly poured but lamentably untested coffee and pristine newspaper were on the wrong side of the window.

Having indulged in a bit of comedy stretching, these carefully placed mandatory train companions were pitilessly abandoned as the early arriving train caught me grunting away at a tight hamstring. I waved them a sad goodbye as the train exited the station leaving me with fifty minutes of captivity and nothing to do with it. I filled the first five looking out of and pulling faces in the window. This dulled to the point of such tedium, that I was forced to do some work instead “ well at least write down in great detail a list of things I had little intention of doing.

And the most painful thing? Is it the prospect of a hundred slogging commutes through another testicle shrivelling winter? No? Then it must be the full horror of losing twelve hours a week to the travelling grind? Not that either, it’s the simple fact that there’s£1.65 I won’t be seeing again and I bet some bloody Daily Mail reader nicked my commuting stash for their cat litter.

Or maybe it’ll still be there, preserved by the honest citizens of Aylesbury Vale, lovingly wrapped in a waterproof box, with a tasteful note and a small box of chocolates, as befits a man of my status.

It’s the cat litter isn’t it?

The daily seat scrum, which passes for appropriate middle class train entry behaviour, spat me out next to a rather chubby bloke in a sharp suit. Nothing wrong with that, but an impartial analysis of the surprising juxtaposition of weak autumnal seven AM light and pitch black Oakley’s would decree a considered final satorial judgement of pretentious wanker”.

Still he was reading MacWorld or rather not reading in on account of his peril sensitive eyeware, which goes some way to explaining his peculiar behaviour. Accessorising eyeballs may be an old sell for the eighties red-braced marketeers but someone really should have a word.

Trinny and Sussanah, step away from those middle aged cacophonies of too much food and too little self esteem and perform some useful public works. Whip off your shades and shout it out Wearing Sunglasses Indoors in Fucking Moronic. Now stop it or it’ll be me decking you out in flares, wide lapels and chest wigs“

Still what do I know about cool. While the preening cats were aping their New Romantic heroes and messing about with eyeliner, I was hunched over a teletype terminal acoustically coupled to the University computer.

All my friends had NHS glasses, centre partings and pen protectors. We’d been told the Geeks Would Inherit The Earth and by God, we believed it. That was the great trick with the eighties, if Martin Fry could get away with Gold Suits and the Human League with those haircuts, attainability became the new aspiration. To paraphrase Gordon Gecko Geek is Good” “ accepted we didn’t get many girls (ok then, none) and the word wasn’t ready for Socks AND sandals but you know we’re we just a little misunderstood. No, honestly.

Not a great deal has changed but even in the pits of deepest denial could I ever dream that Waiting for a Star to Fall�? by Five Star would ever warrant the default entry on my mobile phone. Not even in a post modern ironic kind of way. An entire branch of mathematics would have to be created with that deal with that level of wrongness.

And yet Sunglasses man let it belt out the first two stanzas before flicking his tasteless jukebox open with a pudgy wrist. Maybe the shades were an inspired choice, as this is the kind of free carriage theatre that receives critical acclaim on the 6:48. For the sake of his therapy bills, I hope he thought we were laughing WITH him.