Hello New Readers
It occurs to me that because we put the addresses of our blogs on our Christmas card, it's possible that some people who haven't been by before may be visiting, so I jutst wanted to say hello.
Slightly startlingly, I've been keeping this thing for getting on for six years now, sometimes posting very frequently, sometimes less, and at one point going on a break for a few months. I'm in slightly sporadic mode recently, with the festive break increasing the gaps, as I've been trying to avoid sitting at a computer.
But anyway - if you are here because of the card, welcome, hope you liked it, and hope you enjoy this place. Feel free to comment on any posting that catches your eye, though comments close two weeks after publication as otherwise the evil comment spamming swine try to move in and take over.
Grim TV
No, astonishingly, at this point I'm not going to write about the Christmas Day episodes of various soaps, as I don't give any of them enough attention to warrant it - though Eastenders was on in our house and sounded every bit as grim as you'd expect.
No, this is about something I caught one night last week while wrapping presents. In a quest to put something suitably wallpaper-ish on, I turned to one of the inevitable episodes of Friends that you can guarantee to find on E4 every evening. So they burbled away while I folded and taped and disentangled the cat from everything I was doing, eventually to be replaced bu the programme that followed it, an end-of-season double-bill of a programme called Hollyoaks In The City.
Now, again, I've never really watched Hollyoaks, but David used to be quite into a Sunday morning blast of Popworld and the Hollyoaks omnibus, so some vague sense of it had sunk into my head. I gather that In The City shows what happens when some of those old faces move to the city and grow up a bit. At least physically.
I confess that after a while I had to stop wrapping and start giving it my attention, because I literally had a hard time believing what I was seeing. Really and truly, it made the average episode of Eastenders look light and frothy. In the course of the double bill, all of the following happened (and I'm assuming no one is worried about spoilers at this point):
- Someone called Lisa gave up her job as an escort working in one bar to go and do the same job in a gambling den/club.
- Her (former?) boyfriend wasn't happy about this and got a job in the same place.
- The owner of the place then set out to seduce him and set her up to provide undefined services to some 'special clients' (more on this later).
- A woman arrived at the home of two orphaned sisters to reveal that they weren't sisters, and one of them wasn't orphaned, because she was her mother, which led to the revelation that the older sister had faked records and essentially abducted the younger one, telling her that her mother was dead, apparently so that she'd avoid the sexual abuse that the older one had suffered (more on these two later).
- A would-be actor discovered that his younger brother had found a gay porn movie he'd been persuaded to make on the internet, and was disowned by his family.
- A male teacher was accused of having sex with a sixteen year old gay male pupil. It subsequently transpired that they had in fact kissed while drunk, but the kid was making up the rest as revenge for the teacher not being honest about his sexuality and not returning his love.
(All the above, bad as it was, was basically set up in the first episode of the two - the second is what pushed the whole thing into 'had to be seen to be believed' territory):
- Lisa's 'special services' involved being abducted to a warehouse in order to be raped for the benefit of the watching (and filming) special clients.
- Having been seduced by the club owner, her former boyfriend discovers that something is going on, and persuades their former boss to explain all. He races to Lisa's rescue, awaiting directions to her exact location from said former boss, but:
- Former boss is the person who got the would-be actor to make the gay porn movie, so the actor throws him through a window and beats him to unconsciousness before he can communicate the location of the abductors.
- Would-be actor then has a row with his girlfriend and breaks up with her.
- After a blazing row in which the younger 'sister' leaves, the older of the two supposed sisters decides to have a pills and booze overdose.
- Teacher man tells his wife of three days that he thinks he's gay, that he was caught in a compromising position in a public toilet the day he proposed to her, and first had sex with another man the day before their wedding. He then leaves for a snog with the pupil before going with him to a gay club, where he dances topless, takes some undefined drugs and starts snogging with a stranger, thereby breaking the pupil's heart further. Pupil leaves in tears.
- Boyfriend finally arrives to rescue Lisa from the hairy-arsed (seriously) rapist and friends just as she manages to make a break for it, grabbing a gun in the process. Startled by boyfriend's unexpected arrival, she shoots him.
- Cue closing montage of weeping teen, unconscious suicide, off-his-face teacher, three abandoned partners and shot boyfriend.
I mean, really, this is somehow seen by the people who make it as entertainment??????
Season’s Greetings
Happy Christmas to one and all, and for those who don't celebrate it, Happy Winter's Veil 
One Of Those Days
I'm currently in an airport departure lounge awaiting the boarding of a delayed flight. The delay is nothing. So far today, two separate flights I was booked on, to two separate destinations, have been cancelled.
"What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?"
Ho Ho Ho
Well I'm finally starting to feel festive, despite having spent the weekend on the coast of the Med with the sea warm enough to swim in.
The festive spirit is slightly assisted by the fact that we finally got our Christmas cards and I started writing and sending them. My Better Half designed our cards this year and they're very sweet.
Additionally, there's the looming prospect of Friday, when I'm going to be playing Santa for some of my workmates' children. This fills me with a mixture or trepidation and amusement. But there's no denying, you can't get a lot more festive than that.
In the meantime, Amsterdam on Wednesday and a trip up north on Thursday beckon. There's no rest for the wicked.
Oh, and….
.... people are so fucking stupid. We've got a Wii. We've used it a fair bit. We've played baseball, which essentially means swinging the controller really hard in an arc that ends pointing at the screen, and we've never even had a slip.
If It’s [Fill In The Day] I Must Be In An Airport
Heathrow, Terminal 1 to be exact.
For once not having had to leave the flat at 4.30am for a crack of dawn flight. This is a work trip, but it's for the Annual Meeting, so the entire company is travelling at the moment, and there's no massive pressure to spend every spare second working. I've even got books with me to read on the flight, which isn't something I usually manage to do.
I missed Adam and Ian's wedding on The Archers last night, but I gather that Brian was ultimately reconciled to the idea, so all's well that ends well there.
Unlike in the absolutely outrageous decision to terminate the SFO investigation into the BAE Systems/Saudi Arabia corruption case, which of course was ended due to national security concerns and not at all because of commercial pressure or because a bunch of backhander-receiving establishment types were at the heart of the whole fetid, stinking mess. God help those of us without money or connections, because it's fucking obvious that the legal and political system won't.
Civil War at British Airways
So I flew back into Heathrow Airport last night, on a flight which was somewhat delayed in taking off by the late inbound aircraft and bad weather. Due to limited restrictions on the way in, the actual landing time was only around fifteen minutes later than scheduled, which was an unexpected bonus.
But then at the stand we waited and then waited some more. Eventually, the pilot announced (and I quote as directly as I can):
"We're very sorry for the delay ladies and gentlemen, but unfortunately we're having to deal with what we're incrasingly coming to expect when flying into Heathrow, which is that we do our very best to get you here on time and safe, and then we're let down by our own British Airways colleagues on the ground. Unfortunately your flight and cabin crews, who have worked our ten hours with the specific aim of getting you to where you want to go on time, have no control over the impression of BA that you're left with, caused by the ground staff."
I was horrified. Okay, so you might think it. You might even say it, either to your fellow flying crew or even to the managers of the ground staff, but you never, ever try to pin the blame for a problem on your colleagues when talking to your customers. It's just not done. And once upon a time at BA it absolutely wouldn't have been.
Not the kind of person I'd like to work with.