Mundane Is Too Mundane An Expression For This

Thursday morning saw me back in the office away from all human contact. Well, apart from the stream of phone calls obviously. The day started in a similar way to the Thursdays when I was on holiday; with a taunting e-mail from the National Lottery saying I had won a lucky dip. In the last three weeks I’ve had seven e-mails, five to say I’ve won lucky dips and the others saying important news about your ticket, which both turned out to be wins of £2.50. From occasional teasing they have moved into full on mockery now. I’m not greedy, I don’t need the sextuple rollover of tens of millions of pounds, just enough to be able to retire and never have to deal with a holiday or position management query ever again.

I didn’t realise quite how much I had written in notebooks whilst on holiday until I actually got around to typing it all up. Thursday night saw the next batch of travelogues being typed up and posted on my blog, and in the case of the Leicestershire ones on Medium as well (I can add as many, better quality, photos on there without using up all my site’s file space)..

Friday wasn’t pizza Friday this week. Instead, we were heading to a field just outside Rusper for a barbeque. This may sound a bit random place to go for a barbeque, but friends keep horses in a field here. They rent part of the property from a lunatic who uses the rest of the space to store random conked out vehicles. We have been a few times to help them sort the place out, removing ragwort (I had something else to do that day), and build stables. There is plenty of space to socially distance and so a few of us gathered.

I’d been a few times, but never walked up to the other end of the land. I haven’t seen as many old, rusted and immobile tractors in one place since news reports on French farmers’ blockades. Lots of four by fours, a couple of sports cars and various other cars are strewn in different places, most of them in danger of being completely reclaimed by nature. It is like a proper old junkyard.

It was a lovely warm evening; right up until the point where the sun started to disappear and the temperature dropped like a stone. And then the pyromaniacs came out to play building a fire, enough to keep people around it until it was properly dark and time for everyone to head home.

Saturday was wet, which suited me as I just spent all day finishing catching up on typing everything up, then linking everything to my social media, and loading the hundreds of photos to Facebook, both to my personal page and where appropriate to my interest groups (i.e. History of Leicestershire). It wiped out most of the day, as it was soon quarter to seven and time to drop Helen off at the Parson’s Pig for her to meet colleagues for a birthday meal.

I got back and had pizza Saturday, and looked at the laptop, and the next thing I knew it was nearly eleven and time to pick Helen back up. I’m sure that days at the weekend go at three times the speed of weekdays. It was the same Sunday morning, I looked at my watch and it was about eight, blinked and woke up at eleven.

Helen was taking her mum for lunch, so I had Charlie walking duties. I found out that to walk around the field at the end of the close takes exactly 571 steps and equates to 0.29 miles, which means that four laps of that (three of which used exactly the same amount of steps), three laps of the park behind the house and to and from the front door of the house works out to be two miles in total.

Whilst the final games of the Premier League season were on, I got around to collating pictures of street signs I’d taken photos of before my birthday, so were over a month old. I know we’d been away in the interim, but it was a shock to find I’d not done anything with them for five weeks. Two more collections finished – Norfolk Settlements and Forestfield Conservation Area.

I would have loved to have blinked for as long Monday morning as I had Sunday, but instead of blinking when I see the time is eight o’clock, it’s a panicked reaction as I have to get showered and into work. At which point time slowed to a trickle again and the next eight hours took four days. And then the evening went in about thirty seconds.

My mum rings me on my mobile, and she sounds all worried. “Just checking you’re alright, I’ve been ringing your landline for a few days but no one was answering”. Considering we were in most of the weekend, and at the time she said she called this is confusing. Right up until she says she copied all the numbers into a new address book last week, and she had copied the wrong number. Just leaves the question of who was she actually calling?

We’re watching the last few episodes of the last season of The Wire, and I was gutted that Omar wasn’t the last cockroach standing; he has made me laugh out loud so many times watching the whole thing from the start in the last couple of months.

Charlie has picked up two new habits in the last week or so. The first is to pick up his bowl and wander the house and garden with it, as if he is hungry, even though he’s just been fed. The second is morning attacks on my rucksack, trying to ransack it. He ignores it from when I get in, all night and before he goes for a walk, but once walked and fed he is relentless in trying to get into my bag, regardless of whether there is food in there or not.

Just Eat’s TV and radio adverts are showing up just what a rent-a-rapper Snoop has become. Seriously, get a grip, you’re showing less self-respect than Joe Hart did in the Head and Shoulders adverts a few years ago.

Speaking of things on the radio, Absolute 80s plays Wham’s “Club Tropicana” a lot. Yet it’s only recently I’ve noticed (after thirty seven years of hearing the song), that they contradict themselves in it. The chorus has the line “all that’s missing is the sea”, yet the second verse has the line “watch the waves break on the bay”.

A couple of recent meals Helen has cooked have included artichoke. To me that sounds more like an instruction than a food stuff, especially if it wasn’t chopped up into small pieces. I now can’t help but hear it as Artie, Choke!

After quite a few weeks I’ve levelled up in Jigsaw World, I’m now at level 18 and I’m called a Jigsaw Shark now. Who would have thought there could be such a thing? I’m just hoping this doesn’t mean that all the jigsaws at this level are of sharks.

Important Information About Your Ticket

Those are the words that you want to see in your inbox, whether its Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday or Sunday morning. After signing off the previous blog complaining about a lack of e-mails from the National Lottery, I got two on Thursday morning. However both of them read – Congratulations! You’ve won a Lotto lucky dip. They’re just taunting me now.

We found the probable cause of Charlie being under the weather last week, there was an enormous tick attached to him. When I saw big, it was a toss-up as to whether we were removed the tick from Charlie, or Charlie from the tick. Since separating the co-joined twins, Charlie has been back to his normal annoying barking self. Not content with trying to escape every night, he now waits until the lights are turned off before going off on a barking spree. Being so intent on trying to escape he forgets to go to the toilet and then barks the house down to be let out to go. This inevitably leads to the cat appearing in the kitchen to be fed. Then it’s back to bed, the light goes off and there is a whining cat outside the bedroom door sounding as if he’s being murdered. I open the door to deal with him and he’s in and on the bed like a bloody ninja, kneading the covers over the feet of a fast asleep Helen. He then has to be removed to one of the other bedrooms, and closed in so the dog can’t bother him. And then finally I can get to sleep.

I saw Lianne moaning on social media that it appeared that cold callers were back at work now. And I had a little vision of a call centre full of people ringing people up and going through this script.

“Hi, I’m calling from Temperature Check UK, and we’re doing a quick one question survey today. Are you cold?”

The sesame seeds are back. When rinsing with mouthwash last night a mystery sesame seed came out from between my teeth. This has been happening on a regular basis for months, despite not (knowingly) eating anything with sesame seeds in. The only respite for this was last week when I was working my way through a pack of sesame seed bagels; not a single sesame seed to be found whilst mouth washing. But now they are back and it’s bugging the hell out of me as to where they are coming from. If anyone has any answers to the conundrum, then I’d be glad to hear them.

Dress down Fridays, do you remember them? It happens every day now, jeans and t-shirt is the standard dress code here every single day – including weekends. If I went to try and dress down on a Friday then I would need to take some clothes, stab random holes in them and bury them for a month. Then they might just be trampy enough for a lockdown dress down Friday. I’m already showing the signs of having the unruly hair and beard for it.

As the poor attempt at lockdown and social distancing goes on, the greater the clamour for us to use tools and apps like Zoom, Houseparty, Kahoot, or Menti. “It’s easier to stay in touch, and you can see each other and interact in “fun” games.” I hated people before lockdown, so really, now that there is literally no chance of people being able to turn up at my desk or on my doorstep, what chance do you think there is of me using an app to connect to people? That’s right, absolutely none. The only upside of the lockdown is less people and less interactions. Why would I want to spoil that?

I’ve taken Charlie out for a couple of walks this week. Now, it may not be known, but I’m terrified of dogs, having been bitten over thirty times by all shapes and sizes of them. I’ve just about got used to Charlie, but it’s still a bit sphincter tightening when he starts being woofy and growly. Whilst out on walks he is like a magnet for other dogs, so I spend a great deal of time muttering under my breath “stay away, go on eff off back to your owner.” Charlie doesn’t encourage this, and he tends to ignore all dogs. However, on Saturday there was one little thing. Now, I’m not great on what the different breeds are, but this was some kind of pug or bulldog, because it looked like it had been smacked in the face with a shovel. This thing would not stop following Charlie around, sniffing his backside. Right up until the point where I had to drag it away as Charlie squatted to poo. Charlie looked much aggrieved that it wasn’t on the other dog’s head.  It did stop the other dog from following him anymore though.

I took a look in the mirror and realised I’ve got eyebrows that can be seen from space. I’m not saying they are bushy, but when I wiggle my eyebrows, we have a force nine tornado appear in the house. I even got a message from Denis Healy on the Ouija board saying “well jel”. But at least they’re not permed like some bloke from Kibworth on “The History of England”.

After three weeks of it being sat next to me at the kitchen table the framed jigsaw finally made it up in to the hall of maps. How long it will stay there based on the last wall fixture DIY I did is anyone’s guess. We’ll probably be revisiting this in a couple of weeks, when the frame, glass and jigsaw will all need putting back together. Meanwhile on Jigsaw World, I’m up to level 16 and only have a dozen or so left to do, all the larger ones on there at 294, 300 or 315 pieces. But they take a bit longer now, so it’s down to one a day.

I got myself a cheapo Fit-Bit equivalent back at the end of February. It would emit little buzzes as I passed goals. However as time has gone on, it seems to be less impressed with me as lockdown continues. It’s more of a Fat-Bit now and it turns on its bright white display in shock if I move at all, including turning over in bed, blinding all around. I might have to go back to wearing a normal watch for the rest of lockdown.

Monday; monotonous, maddening, melancholy, miserable, moaning, meeting-filled, moronic, muppet-filled, misanthropic, meandering, muddling, manic, morose, morbid, mysterious, monkey-tennis, murderous, malevolent, mithering, messy, moping, misfits, merciless, myopic, mundane, masochistic, mindless, misery-laden Monday. And Tuesday and Wednesday weren’t much better.

I hadn’t realised that the Do Not Disturb feature on Skype automatically turns itself off after twenty four hours. It’s like being in a video game, and you’re smashing it with a power up; you’ve just reached the big boss level and then the power up runs out and you’re suddenly overwhelmed and defeated. Only in this case with random Skype messages.

Ooh look another e-mail headed important information about your ticket; it’s a life changing £2.90. Damn it, another week of work is required.

Surgery

No sooner had I finished and posted last week’s update on working from home, than I was distracted again by goings on in the garden. The cat seems to be on some new kind of drugs as he’s become very energetic these last couple of weeks. (It could be he’s just leeching off the energy I’m not using.) There he was pouncing, jumping, leaping and batting a poor mouse all around the garden. At one point throwing it up in the air so high it flew over the washing line. We open the back door and it looks up and runs in at top speed to eat. At which point the dog wanders out to investigate the dead mouse, but somewhat miraculously he didn’t eat it. Helen retrieved it and put it in the bin to prevent more playing with it. The cat meanwhile was panting more than the dog; the strenuous exercise obviously didn’t suit him. I know the feeling.

It’s not just the humans and pets that are struggling to cope with the confinement. One of the glasses committed suicide, just flinging itself onto the kitchen floor from the sideboard when there was no one near it. The bananas had escaped from the fruit bowl and given it a push, but it certainly woke me up. I hadn’t realised I was sleeping with my eyes open staring at a spreadsheet.

And why did I have the theme from “Heidi” playing on repeat in my head?

The daily safety message was about “Binge Sitting”; I think I can safely say this applies to me. I’ve been in the office chair at the kitchen table for so long now without moving, that it has claimed me as one of its own, and it now goes everywhere with me. When we exit lockdown I am going to need it surgically removing from my backside. It does make things difficult when I go to sit on the sofa instead. I’m far too fat to be able to bunny-hop the chair onto the sofa a-la BMX style.

I wasn’t particularly with it Friday morning. I spent ten minutes looking at the screen wondering why it was such a rubbish picture before I realised I hadn’t turned it on and I was staring at my reflection.

I was reflecting on closing down for the weekend and noticed that Helen seems to get a lot of calls scheduled in for after four on a Friday, and that I had two booked in before ten on Monday. This leads me to believe that we have a lot of sociopaths working for the company, and that these times shouldn’t be blocked out with meetings. They should be set aside to allow people to finish off anything outstanding for one week, and to set up everything needed for the forthcoming week. Instead of finishing an hour late or starting an hour early, impinging on the weekend.

A new sturdy folding table turned up at the weekend to replace the wall desk DIY catastrophe. The only assembly was to add the leg lengtheners. So far so good, the table is still standing.

In the past week we should have had two outings that have been postponed. We were due to be going to see Simple Minds at the Brighton Centre, but that has been put back to February 2021. I have played the greatest hits play list in its place. Then there was the Gin and Rum festival. That has been put back until October. We haven’t recreated this at home, we don’t have enough variety. Plus it’s probably for the best as I have developed a bit of an allergy to alcohol.

Therefore for entertainment I’ve taken to trying to embarrass the dog to the extent he slinks off to another room. It’s surprisingly easy to do – just dance. When I start to dance round the kitchen or living room, the dog looks at me as if I’ve come from another planet, then looks plaintively at Helen as if to say ‘can’t you stop this lunacy’ before skulking off to another part of the house or garden where he can’t see me, much like an embarrassed teenager. Much to my amusement of course. How cringe worthy must a person’s dancing be to shame a dog into leaving the room?

Reading continues apace, seven more books this week, and more old maps of Leicestershire have turned up during the week. Jigsaw output has relaxed a little, it took a couple of days to transfer the Old London map one into the frame, and the jigsaw world app didn’t take quite so much of a beating either. Sporcle however did have a bit of resurgence this week. A couple of hundred quizzes added to the total, and a dozen new badges. Not quite the three hundred quizzes a day I was doing at the beginning after James and Richard introduced me to it when they first started up in recruitment and we were on our own bank of desks at the top of the office. Writing, apart from the blog piece, has reduced to a small drip feed of odd sentences (in all senses of the word odd). With no change of environment available it is stifling the writing flow. It should be easier with nowhere to go, but I’m filling my time doing pretty much anything apart from writing.

Work is somewhat monotonous; it’s like déjà vu all over again. It is like Groundhog Day here, only without the chance of getting with Andie McDowell at the end (mores the pity). So, what comes to mind is Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat, and I’ve come up with a new version of it – Change, Key, Load, Report, which is what it seems we are doing all the time now.

So there was this Katya who was like kicking off

I don’t know what she was on about

But it was urgent

Like really urgent

All hands on deck

And then the cat walked in

The fat whining cat

Stood at the door

Wanting to go out again

Then

You know in came the dog

Damn cats and dogs

Ooh look squirrel

It wasn’t a squirrel

Someone skyping

And I don’t know what they really wanted doing

All they kept saying was

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Suddenly I find I’m on the phone

Trying to get my point across

But I don’t

I’m just wasting

I’m just failing

I’m just hoping

I’m just shouting

I’m just swearing

I’m just repeating

Yes maam

No maam

Three bags

Full maam

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Change, key, load, report

Life In The Backwards Lane

Life carries on at a pace never known before. It appears there are now only two speeds in this life. Dead stop and backwards. In the last week I have managed to leave the house just twice, each for about ten minutes, as long as it takes to walk up to the local parade of shops to restock the supplies of Pepsi, Crème Eggs, bread, milk and cereals. I’m doing quite well at this isolation thing. If only another member of the household took it so seriously, not content with going out several times a day, including round to their friends flat, over the weekend they’ve now wangled their effing girlfriend to be living with us. It was thought this might reduce the number of exits from the house, but it hasn’t, they still aren’t paying a blind bit of attention to an increasingly irate Helen.

We had booked a couple of days off to bookend the Easter weekend, so instead of four days sat in the house unable to go anywhere whilst not working, we now had six. Which meant that there were a number of things that needed doing around the house. And worse for me, the garden. If you haven’t heard me moaning about being outside, then you haven’t known me very long. There was a reason I liked living in second floor flats.

However, to get me to do jobs you have to prise me out of my office chair at the kitchen table. Whereas the previous weekend had been spent doing a physical jigsaw, this extended weekend found me unable to continue in the same vein, as I had bitten the bullet and ordered a frame for the old London map one I’d completed the weekend before, and needed to wait for that to turn up before I could start on a new one. (Jigsaws have to be zipped up in the case overnight to prevent pet related problems.) What I was doing instead was using the jigsaw world app on Facebook to do virtual jigsaws instead. Twenty-eight of them since last Friday. I’d say it was helping me to pass the time. Helen may have other words for it (effing obsessed for example).

When I did manage to drag myself away from jigsaws, it was rarely to jobs anyone wanted or needed me to do. I did shuffle the records and books around in the living room, cleaned the patio with the pressure washer and erm that’s probably about it. I’m fairly sure an accurate spoonerism to describe me in the last week will have been twazy lat.

I did spend some time away from Jigsaws. Mainly reading and looking at maps. Three old ordnance survey maps of Leicestershire from various years back to 1831, a modern-day A-Z of Crawley, and two old maps of Crawley and Three Bridges. I’ve read this year’s Playfair Cricket annual, and I’m now fully up to date on all the cricket matches that won’t be taking place this year. Then a book called “Logo for London” about the design and use of the roundel, and onto a very geeky book called the “Atlas of Closed Railway Stations”. I’ve also read five novels, Dean Koontz’s “The Night Window”, the last in his Jane Hawk series, Robert Crais’ latest “A Dangerous Man”, Phaedra Patrick’s “The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper”, Gail Honeyman’s “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine”, and last night finished Stephen King’s “The Outsider”, which means I can now get round to watching the TV series that is stacked up on the Sky box. I like to read the book first before watching things. I did the same with “Good Omens” earlier in the year.

Some of this reading has lea to me doing bits of writing. A couple of pieces on the lost railways and station of Leicestershire and Rutland (I know, riveting stuff), and a couple of pieces for Crawley Library’s competition on writing inspired by Crawley’s history. But, despite all this enforced time inside and no work for six days, not one word written towards any of my three novels in progress or any of the list of competitions I’ve ringed in the diary to try and enter. Refer to my previous twazy lat comment.

Of course, because I was on leave, the large screen I’d ordered from work turned up in the middle of the Bank Holiday weekend. I managed to ignore the urge to rip open the box and use it to plug into my personal laptop and do jigsaws on (that really might have pushed my luck too far), and left opening it up and setting it up for work use until last thing Tuesday night. Knowing full well that my eye hand coordination is even worse first thing in the morning, so it would be better to set it up whilst awake the previous night.

Which was probably a good job, as Wednesday morning, as Helen was setting up to start work in the spare room, my previous DIY (more apt to be Destroy it Yourself) handiwork was coming to its inevitable conclusion, as the wall mounted desk parted company with the wall. Therefore, we are both working with big screens on the kitchen table, which is doubtless distracting for both of us. I don’t need any excuse to be distracted at home (no squirrels, but a demented cat chasing and harrying a stationary tennis ball and falling out of a tree have kept me entertained this week), so my efficiency might not even hit the high of thirty percent it did last week.

Now it’s a case of waiting for lockdown to be over so that I can pay for someone competent to put the desk back on the wall so that it will manage to stay attached for more than two weeks (during which over half of those days were non-working ones). Buying a foldaway table in the meantime is a sensible stop gap measure to prevent the wall ending up with more holes than a string vest.

On a positive note, as I’ve been away from work for most of the last week there has been a great reduction in pest led skype messages. Speaking of which, where’s that Do Not Disturb button?

P.S. The frame has turned up, to paraphrase myself when timekeeping on pub crawls. NEXT JIGSAW.