I should know better. I was rejoicing on Saturday that my asthma, which had been reaching worrying levels, appeared to have gone away entirely, to the extent that I hadn't used my inhaler in weeks.
So yesterday afternoon, evening, and night, it was of course back with a vengeance, worse than I can remember it in ages, and I'm left with a painfully tight chest that has kept me awake most of the night.
Not nice.
Anyway, yesterday I cleaned the flat, cooked a roast, mulled wine, and generally tried to be The Host With The Most. Did I succeed in this endeavour? You'd have to ask someone else about that.
Senility seems to be setting in:
I took the afternoon off yesterday to try and get organised for Christmas ñ Chris and I went shopping, and I saw some cutlery that matched the set I got as a house-warming present. (Sidenote ñ this cutlery is really nice, but usually bloody expensive in this country ñ the original set was bought for half the UK price in Germany (rip-off Britain? Donít be ridiculous) ). This set was massively reduced, so Chris offered to get it as my Christmas present.
(Sidenote 2 ñ Iíve got the gang from work coming over tomorrow, and Iíd been thinking of getting one extra setting of this stuff to supplement the four I already have.)
So, since this set was *so* cheap, I decided that yes, Iíd have them as my present. So weíre at the till, Chris has paid, Iím just trying to remember where the original set is, and suddenly, a bright light goes on in my head, and I realise that the original 24 piece set is of course, actually six settingsÖ This is after Chris has asked at least twice ìAre you sure youíve only got four settings?î And Iíve confidently asserted that Iím quite certainÖ.
So we had to ask the saleswoman if it was possible to ëreturní them (without even having left the counter), which led to a credit card refund palaver and me having to keep apologising for my advanced senility, while the completely lovely woman and her colleague maintained an admirable equanimity about the whole thing. Talk about embarrassed.
Anyway, for the first time in living memory, I think Iím completely sorted on the pre-Christmas organisation front.
This evening Iím off to Alisonís for dinner, then tomorrow Iíll be getting organised for the work teamís visit. Busy busy busy.
"It's officially nippy.
So say my nips."
I love that line - and today, I can use it with entire accuracy. (People familiar with my usual situation of sweating uncomfortably in arctic conditions may express their surprise at this point.)
Well, the office party was fun, if rather small scale. There are photos, but we don't talk about them......
In the interests of doing a bit of a news review, I'm going to draw attention to a couple of items that caught my eye today:
Dame Shirley Porter has had the £27million fine for corruption that she'd previously wriggled out of re-imposed. She has 14 days in which to pay. And all I can say is that it couldn't happen to a more deserving person.
And I can't find a detailed story just at the moment, but off the back of Bill Clinton's Princess of Wales Memorial Lecture, the TV news mentioned that St Mary's Hospital, Paddington is to start trials of a possible vaccine against HIV. I'll keep looking for the details when I'm back online, but I just felt like sharing some at least potentially good news.
It's the company Christmas party tonight, so I'm expecting not to be blogging later. In fact, as I'm not even going to take the laptop home with me, I can guarantee I won't be....
So to make up for that - the second in my occasional series of Blogs I like:
Blogadoon is a real slice of life Blog - offering incidents from Ian, the author's life, together with a regular update on the excitements of The London Review Of Books (seriously), and occasional diversions into interesting stuff on the web. I like Ian's frankness (there's a great entry about his date on Saturday night showing this week), and the fact that a lot of the things he finds interesting, I do too. I also occasionally find that I disagree with his perspective, but that it's well-thought-out enough that I can also respect it. Check it out.
Spam Madness... I received the same piece of spam 121 times today. Am I the only one who thinks that this is entirely outrageous?
On a different front - the following search term turned up in my logs yesterday - I suspect it's another one of those 'person who was on that search page then came here' situations, rather than an actual referral - it certainly doesn't sound like my kind of content.... http://www.google.com/search?q=why+men+feel+rejected+when+women+dont+swallow
I'm officially disturbed. And I have the feeling that I'm going to be for the rest of the day.
I had to go out to the bank at lunchtime, and on my way back, I was standing at the bus stop, perusing the timetable, when out of the corner of my eye, I registered that someone had walked past, stopped, and was staring back at me. I glanced over, saw that it was a woman who was still looking at me, but I didn't recognise her, so I returned to my perusal.
The bus came along, I got on, and sat towards the back downstairs. The next thing I knew, the woman was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and shouting at me:
"Oi, baldy!" When I looked her way, she asked (very loudly and aggressively):
"Have you got a problem?"
I said that "No, I don't." and she said, "Well stop acting like you do then", and as she turned to go up the stairs, called back "Just because you don't have a black cock!"
(At this point it might be worth mentioning that she was black, but reiterating that she had been looking at me, not the other way round.)
Anyway, my confusion was obviously very entertaining to the other people on the bus, and a couple of people gave me a very disdainful look, but I ignored them as best I could.
Several stops further on, the woman came down the stairs to get off, and once again, I was greeted with the friendly "Oi, baldy". When I looked up, she said, again very aggressively, "Bet you don't notice the black men, only the women, don't you?" and got off the bus then stood and stared at me as it pulled away.
Why am I so disturbed by this? Well, once she'd got off, I realised that she'd decided that I'd been eyeing her up, and that this was both sexist and racist. I'd like to think I'm neither. I *know* that I'm not one who goes round eyeing up women, for obvious reasons.
Once I understood this, I actually got quite angry that I'd been branded racist, sexist slime in front of a busload of people, and had I had the wherewithal, I'd have opened the window and shouted back "Exactly how self-involved are you, you arrogant fucker? Of course I wasn't eyeing you up; I'm gay." Well, I probably wouldn't have, but in my head I did. Really loudly.
Chris having posted the photos, I now feel like I'm not stealing his thunder - told you it was an odd excursion....
I'm recently back from a slightly strange excursion in which I took some photographs of ChrisR. I'll leave him to give them their premier, which is only right, but I will post them up myself once he's done so - you'll understand what I'm talking about once you see them.
Otherwise, I'm in the middle of reading the first part of Frank Miller's Dark Knight 2 which I'll try and get a review up for by the end of the day. Also thinking about hitting the cinema this evening - oh it's a giddy social whirl I've got going on here.
Stepping briefly away from reflective mode for a minute: I seem, rather worryingly, to have been in at the start of a meme. 'Woo-Hoo' seems wholly inadequate to describe my excitement at this singular event.
If you haven't been following the saga of ChrisR's minor run-in with KPMG which has turned into an apparently-significant item picked up on plasticbag.org, Metafilter, Wired, and who knows where else, I'm not going to link to it here, because that would just be silly - suffice it to say that a Google search on "KPMG web links" will take you right to the story...
And as Chris points out - as the first person to have linked to his original posting on the subject, which I did a week ago today, it's all my fault.
Though to be honest, given the huge chasm between the size of our readerships, Tom at plasticbag.org is probably more worthy of the credit/blame...
By the way - on a hunch, I checked my traffic, and the last two days have been the most-visited in the history of this site, for which I was assuming that ChrisR's most recent reference to me was responsible. Looking more closely, I see that much of the traffic is coming from him, but actually more is coming from GBlogs, which is interesting, as I'm not even notifying weblogs.com of most of my updates, and therefore shouldn't be appearing on the recently-updated list..... Anyway - the more the merrier - Happy Friday, and please feel free to come back.