Just a very quick message to say a huge happy christmas to all the lovely Voxers who have dropped by since last christmas. May your day be happy, your turkey be salmonella free, your dog not get hold of the sprouts and smoke you out of your house and your inlaws be a minimum of 500 miles away. It's christmas eve and I've been on the crimbo wine for some time now so......
Happy christmas everyone!
Have a great day!
Entertainingly, the race for the Christmas number one single has not been won by the winner of the X factor, as anticipated by Simon Cowell and presumably the winner of the X factor. In days gone by, i.e. before the X factor, who was going to be christmas number one would be something you talked about during breaktime at school. Or in the pub, depending on how old you were but now it's just guaranteed to be whichever beige clone with good teeth, modern hair and a pliable nature won the X factor. Dull dull dull. Until this year, when the public rebelled, presumably appalled by the idea that the long cherished christmas number one spot could be occupied by a shit remake of an originally shit Miley Cyrus song. Plastic pop at it's most tedious, I'm sure you'll agree. No, this year it's been taken by Rage Against the Machine's 'Killing in the name of', a song which serves the dual festive purpose of not only narking off Simon Cowell by slowly raising a middle finger to the X factor but also irritating the hell out of the Christmas PC brigade by being rather aggressive sounding and, shock of all shocks, containing the word 'fuck'. Imagine, someone using the word 'fuck' in a song, it's truly the end of days, or at least it was to the woman I heard interviewed on the radio this morning. Serves Cowell right, this is man who inflicted on us the eternally screeching Leona Lewis, a woman who with one chorus can send bats into the side of buildings and cause dogs to go temporarily insane as her high pitched caterwaul sends their hearing threshold into freefall. Added to this insult is the fact he actually had the idea of putting the two giant egos of Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden onto the one TV show, a plan of such unparalled evil that he should have been tried for treason and swiftly beheaded. So Cowell, let this be a lesson to you, we're bored of beige so next time you're picking an X factor winner, how about going for someone a little bit neon pink or sparkly black instead?
And so, as we head towards christmas, the usual round of christmas disasters appear on the horizon and head towards me at a rate of knots. Am nto doing too badly this year, I've only had a few and these include:
The Christmas tree stand.
I ordered a christmas tree stand off Ebay. It said 'suitable for large tree'. I liked the idea of a 'large tree' and since anyone who was reading back in 2008 will remember last year's christmas tree fiasco, I was determined not to be caught out the same way again so I wanted a big tree stand. The unfortunate thing about Ebay is that it's rather difficult to tell from the little grainy picture how big something actually is. Unless you read the dimensions written in small print, obviously, but who does that? So I get the card through the letterbox saying the postman hadn't been able to deliver my parcel (or, more accurately since I'd been in all day, the postman couldn't be arsed to deliver my parcel and fanny about getting a signature) and off I trundle to the post office. The man appears with my parcel and I'm not going to lie to you, it's fucking huge. I mean enormous. FAR too big for our living room but if anyone knows a person who is looking to prop up a mature Canadian Redwood tree, a bundled collection of telegraph poles or an upended Chieftain tank, I have the accessory they need. This meant that when I bought the christmas tree I had to buy another stand for a further twenty bloody quid and even then I've managed to put the thing in squint. So my tree leans to the left. This, coupled with the fact that my tree has plenty of branches at the top and loads at the bottom but a big stretch of trunk in the middle with no branches at all, means I have a 'character' tree. Lovely. I suppose it fits in well in our house, a bit dishevelled, about to fall over and generally a little bit shambolic.
The Eyelashes
With the party season in full swing I decided to get some false eyelashes put on for a party I was going to. The usual girl I go to has quit and so I booked in with a friend's cousin. The eyelashes she attached weren't in a strip like the ones I'd had done before, they were little individual ones and once on they looked fantastic. So I went to my party, came back a bit the worse for wear and decided that since the beautician had said some other girl had still been wearing them 3 weeks later, that I'd see if they were still there in the morning. And hey presto, when me and my hangover got up, they were! But they were beginning to annoy my eyes so I decided to take them off. I took hold of one little clump of them and pulled gently. Nothing, they didn't budge. So I pulled a bit harder. Nothing. So I yanked and was rewarded with the removal of a little clump of eyelashes. Sadly they weren't the false ones, they were actually mine, the fake ones were still firmly fixed to my face. Fuckity fuck. So I tried soaking them in eye makeup remover and then yanking. All I achieved was the removal of a few more of my own lashes and a searing pain in my eyelid. Eventually, with both eyes watering and looking suspiciously red I rang the girl to ask how I take them off. She asked if there was anything wrong with them, in a tone that suggested only someone who should be incarcerated in some sort of secure unit would be removing them the day after they were applied. I said there wasn't but I wanted to take them off so she advised using baby oil or vaseline to break down the glue and then pulling them off. I didn't have any vaseline but I did have baby oil, from the time that some fool advised me to use it to clean the stainless steel cooker top because it didn't leave streaks. I know, I know, oil and naked flame. Or I know now. Who knew the fire blanket would ever come in useful? Anyway, I dug the baby oil out from 'cupboard under the sink' and soaked the eyelashes for a while then yanked at a clump on the least painful of my eyelids. One little bit came out but the rest were still stuck fast. Fucking brilliant, now I've got a bald spot in the middle that means I'm committed to remvoving the whole lot but they're all still frigging superglued to my damned head. Cue half an hour of fannying about with baby oil soaked cotton wool pads, tugging, whimpering and howling. Eventually I managed to wrestle the bastard things off but my eyelids were so beseiged that it looked like I'd been smacked in the face. And 60% of my own eyelashes had been pulled out too. Beautiful, it's a good look for christmas. And because I'm a complete prat, I've booked in to have the eyelashes done again on Friday morning but this time I've thought ahead and bought some false eyelash remover. I'll let you know how it goes.......
Today is the day that Alistair Darling launches his pre-budget report. Normally I would ignore the pre-budget report because frankly it's as dull as fuck and he never says anything very impressive or funny so it isn't worth commenting on. However this is the last one before the election so in the spirit of 'I can't bitch about it if I didn't listen to it', I thought I'd give it a go.To be honest, most of it was still as dull as fuck but one thing caught my eye: Alistair's idea to levy a one off 50% tax on bonuses over £25000 paid by banks to their employees. Possibly unusually in today's society, I think this is morally fucking bankrupt and I'll tell you why.
Mr Darling claims, without even having the grace to blush, giggle a bit or twitch up and down like a schoolboy caught having a cig behind the bikesheds, that this one off levy is intended to deter big bonuses rather than raise revenue. Pull the other one Darling, it's attached to the foghorn. If you were going after big bonuses then your first port of call would have been to the appalling British Gas, whose reputation for ripping off the little man is second to none. In 2008 their CEO Sam Laidlow was given a more than handsome bonus of £1.65m in monetary reward and £1.8m worth of shares. Or perhaps Ally would have been requested the sort code and account number of Peter Rogers, the Chief Executive at Westminster City Council, who was given a bonus of £45,000, straight from the pockets of the Westminster City Council taxpayers. So 'intended to deter big bonuses'? I don't think so Alistair, let's have a bit of honesty. Let's call it like it really is.
You're skint. Or, more accurately since you're a cabinet minister and are therefore creaming vast sums out of the taxpayer in salary and bonuses, the treasury is skint. It needs more money but the taxpayers don't like being asked for more and there's an election coming up. So, who do the taxpayers hate, with the exception of politicians because we all know that they're more likely to vote for Wales to be sold to the Arabs than a cut in their own income? Bankers. The public hate bankers because they earn shitloads and have been conveniently scapegoated for the entire mess that the UK is in. So, if Alistair levies a big tax on their bonuses then it's a vote winner and a money-spinner. Plus, he gets to give a massive kick in the nuts to some jumped up little shit who is 25 years younger than him yet earning 4 times as much. How very dare they? And that's what it's all about. It ignores all the cogent facts, such as the fact that levying a massive bonus tax on banks who haven't received any government money is akin to donning a pegleg, parrot and bandanna, raising the Jolly Roger over Westminster and broadsiding the Barclays building. Such as the fact that many, many organisations give out bonuses based on money they've extracted from the taxpayer but they're being ignored. Such as the fact the public aren't blind to the way that the government have carefully sculpted the image of bankers as horned bringers of penury, disease, pestilence and doom because as long as the public are blaming bankers for the mess the UK is in and spitting at them in the street then no one is looking too closely at the way nothing much has happened about the expenses scandal or enquiring too deeply about the fuck up the treasury have made of virtually everything they've touched in last 10 years. Some of the top bankers have warned that they will move out of the UK to avoid the tax but Darling says he 'will not be held to ransom by the banks'. This is because he's an utter moron and has not yet worked out that a wholesale walkout of banking personnel would wreak absolute havoc on an economy that has already contracted more than he expected. He's also not thought about the fact that these people earn such a huge amount of money that they can afford the very best lawyers. You can bet your payrise, if indeed you got one, that all over the City mobile phones are being pulled out and lawyers are being retained because you can be sure that they'll appeal this on the grounds of human rights. And it's a fair point, if you've not received government bailouts and you're not paid by the state, how can it be legal to levy a penalty based purely on your occupation and no other? It's discrimination of the clearest and most blatant nature.
Yes Darling, we're not nearly as thick as you think we are, we're not convinced by the reasons you've given for this and after over ten years of your government's spin and lies, most of us have learned that if it's emerged from Westminster and it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and walks like a duck it's probably still a CCTV camera which will digitally record your DNA and up the tax take on your salary for the privilege, all in the name of the national interest.
Many thanks to Brennig Jones for bringing this clip to my attention.
For those in the UK, Peaches Geldof may well be known to you from the pages of The Sun, for anyone who has escaped her, she's the air-headed daughter of the scary haired two hit wonder, Bob Geldof. And she is another of these girls who is famous for being the daughter of someone who actually did something to become famous.
And so I give you Peaches Geldof, surely a future guest speaker on the intellectual conference circuit....
Thanks to the BBC, I discovered this story from the BBC. Apparently energy "Smart-Meters" are now the way forwards. The way it works is this - The Department of Energy and Climate Change (and no, I wasn't aware we had one of those) wants to see "47 million meters in 26 million properties by 2020". Good luck with that chaps. According to the Beeb, it is hoped that the technology will help people cut their energy bills by giving you a visual display of how much electricity you are using. This, to my mind, is avoiding a fact - if you're too stupid to realise that by leaving all the lights on and boiling the kettle you're going to be using more leccy than if you sit in the dark drinking orange juice then you shouldn't be in charge of anything as potentially lethal as a plug switch, just in case you're overwhelmed by the urge to discover what happens if you ram a fork into it. Anyhow, dispensing with the detail, let's look at the practicalities shall we?
Trials of smart meters have suggested that SOME people may be prompted to moderate their energy use and that the £8bn scheme may help people save £28 a year. May I be the first to say that I don't personally think spending £8bn in order to get a few people to switch off the light and save the monetary equivilent of 8 pints a year is terribly practical? The meters are going to cost about £340 per household anyway, so their first 12 years of savings are going to be spent paying off the sodding thing. Lord Hunt, our esteemed climate change monkey-in-charge said, without a hint of irony that 'Smart meters will put the power in people's hands, enabling us to control how much energy we use, cut emissions and cut bills", entirely missing the point that people have been able to do this since electricity first arrived in houses just by using the 'off' switch. In days gone by the populace was even deemed intelligent enough to work out that having the bedroom light on upstairs when they were sat downstairs was unnecessary without the aid of a little electronic gadget that produces a pretty coloured graph. And uses up more electricity to power itself. He also said that case studies showed the meters 'could' get people to reduce their bills by about £100 a year by changing behaviour but we can safely ignore that figure because we all know that the government doesn't believe the electorate can understand a number unless it starts with '1' and ends in '0' and so they've clearly just rounded up the £28 mentioned to the next largest figure that follows this rule.
The energy suppliers are going to be able to recoup the cost from customers through higher bills or upfront fees. Quelle surprise. And what, ladies and gentlemen, do we think the energy companies will do if (and we're taking a wild leap of faith here, following the fatally flawed assumption that the scheme makes any difference) our energy use begins to tail off dramatically and profits begin to fall? Any guesses? Yes, that's quite right. They'll ramp the bloody prices up so they can still make umpteen billion quid a year.
So am I going to be applying for a Smart Meter? No, I'm not, because I'm intelligent enough to figure out the times when I use most power and what to do to reduce it and frankly I think that a list should be made of all the people who don't think that they can figure it as well so require a meter. This way someone can be sent round to all their properties to disconnect the electricity and the gas before they hurt themselves...
I've got a presentation to do on the 30th for work. It's talking about the kind of work my little department does and how it could help another department in my firm.
And I am cacking myself.
I was watching a film at the cinema a couple of nights ago and in between concentrating on the film, I noticed that I was feeling v. nervy and getting palpitations and traced it back to the fact that this frigging presentation is really freaking me out. I even started thinking about calling in sick on Monday and landing someone else in it at the last minute to cover my presentation.
The last time I did a presentation was 6 years ago - that's how much I hate doing them, I've managed to stick my head in the sand, avoid and totally ignore them for 6 glorious years.
But it's just my luck that the TWO other people who could've/should've been doing this presentation have BOTH got annual leave booked that day.
FFS - I've given birth to two babies, so how the hell can a 10 minute presentation be freaking me out so much?????
But it is.
So many people I know - husband included - give presentations with such ease; they don't bat an eyelid, filling their presentations with witticisms and funny stories and totally comfortable in their own skins.
And me?
My presentation is just going to give it to them straight in the hope that 10 minutes won't really feel like 10 hours and I won't somehow fuck it up.
It's been quite a busy week so far in my world.
- On Monday I travelled up to Dunfermline with a colleague, for a meeting that we were having at our site there the following morning. We arrived at the hotel about 5 and I set off with my key to find my room. When I opened the door I was surprised to find that by stretching my ams out, I could almost touch all the walls but I'm not especially bothered by small rooms so this wasn't really an issue. The sub-tropical temperature was, especially when I discovered that turning the radiator thermostat to 'off' only succeeded in ramping the heat up further. Unusual. After mush wrestling and swearing, I finally ascertained that yes, the window catch was indeed fucked and had two settings - sealed shut and wide open. Given the torrential rain, my only real option was 'sealed shut' and so I resigned myself to kipping in a sauna. As it happened, this wasn't the biggest obstacle to sleep that I was going to find. After dinner and more drinks that I intended to have (more of that later) I went back to my teeny tiny oven and got into bed. I was just getting comfy when the man in the room next to me arrive back at his room. After bellowing goodbye to his friends, who seemed to be at the other end of the corridor, he went into his room and turned on the tv, ramping the volume up to 'stun'. This pissed me off but I thought 'No Vicola, let it drop, he'll turn it off soon'. An hour later, I was really pissed off and after a further hour I was ready to kill. On careful listening I detected, above the roaring of the telly, the distinctive sound of snoring. Oh fucking brilliant, the pig ignorant twat had fallen asleep with the telly on, so wasn't going to be turning it down anytime soon. Enough was enough, I got out of bed, put some trousers on and went and banged on his door. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. So I went downstairs to fetch the man from reception. He came up and banged on the door a few times. Nothing. He turns to me "I think he might be asleep". D'you think? "Well I can't go in and wake him up so do you want to be moved to another room?" It's now 2am, what I REALLY want is to have been asleep two hours ago but in the absence of that option then yes, I'll move rooms. The new room turns out to be a lot bigger than the other one and absolutely freezing. When I turn on the heating it belches out clouds of searing heat and there doesn't seem to be any way of adjusting the levels. If I leave that on I'm going to be found in the morning with all the water from my body evaporated, like a large raisin in pyjamas, so I turn off the radiator, put my coat on and get into a bed that seems to have been made from the leftover asphalt and hardcore used in road building. At 4.30am or so I finally go to sleep, at 7am the alarm goes off and I get up, safe in the knowledge that I'm going to be a complete fucking cabbage all day but too tired to actually care. On arrival at breakfast I notice that my 4 colleagues also look completely wrecked. Seems that they also had the asphalt mattresses. Let that be a lesson to all - if a hotel is the cheapest in the city, there's usually a reason.
- After dinner in the hotel, my boss went upstairs to do some work leaving me and the 3 blokes who act as regional advisors in the bar and the drinks started flowing. The Scotland advisor (who I had previously thought was a nice, failry respectable bloke) got most of the drinks on his room tab and after a while it occured to me that the drinks seemed to be a wee bit strong, however I figured that it was probably just cheap vodka. At about the 6th drink, I mentioned this. "That's because they're doubles" he grins. Ok, I've no problem with joining in the manly drinking session, I really don't, but if I want a fucking double, I'll ask for one and if you're buying me doubles, I expect to be informed because otherwise I'm going to inadvertantly end up flat on my arse in a hotel bar and sitting in a meeting with the HSE sporting the world's greatest hangover. The thing about vodka drunkeness is that is doesn't come upon you a bit at a time, it waits till you get into the bright lights of the ladies for a pee then it clubs you round the back of the head, leaving you a dribbling idiot with no control over your legs or your destiny. Hence the fact I'd like to actually know how much I'm putting away. The other thing is that earlier in the evening, in fact all through the evening, tales of the Scotland advisor's antics had been surfacing. Bearing in mind that the guy is living with his long time girlfriend, he is - to put it nicely - at it like a rat up a drainpipe with anything that has breasts and a pulse. According to a tale told when the guy went to the loo, he turned up at one of the work christmas parties with two women and a bottle of champagne, all of which bypassed the bar and headed straight up the stairs to his room. This makes me uncomfortable, not because I care who he sleeps with, I don't give a toss if he bonks man, woman and beast, but because it leads me to think that perhaps his office flirting isn't quite the harmless banter I took it for. Add this to the fact that he seems to be trying to get me plastered without my knowledge and I'm now on my guard. If he thinks he's adding me to his list of bedpost notches he's got another thing coming.
All this excitement and it's only Wednesday. How do I manage?
In the absence of anything exciting to report, I thought I'd share some photos from mine and the dog's autumn wanders. Sadly since these were taken last weekend we've had gale force winds and torrential rains so everything looks bald and wet now. But at least I got a few pics of the autumn colours before our charming British weather trashed the landscape....
I've no idea what the hell this is. It looks like a witches hut to me but I am assured that there are no witches to found in these parts as it's the posher end of town, which restricts itself to key swapping parties and tax fraud. Sorcery is SO passe.
Walks can be a bit slow in Autumn as the dog insists on sniffing every pile of leaves, on the off chance there may be something interesting under it. Imagine his surprise when he encountered a disgruntled hedgehog...
Some of the trees seem to change earlier than others...
And some already have bright orange. Or did, before the storms, now they just look a bit bald and twiggy...
We came across a farm dog that had the unusual physical attribute of being as wide as he is tall. You don't see that very often.....
The holly berries have come out and are not yet shrivelled and grim, like dangly raisins.....
However there's still the odd flower to be found.
The woodland is beginning to change and those horses should be rugged up in this weather ( as an aside, I've been watching -and feeding- these horses for nearly three years now and if anyone knows of anyone who is chucking out or replacing any old, scruffy winter horse rugs could they let me know because the rugs she puts on these three about January time are utterly inadequate for a British winter).
We walked past the field where I buried the last of one of my guinea pigs to shuffle off this mortal coil. It is indeed private land however the dog loves to run there and it is a most excellent place to bury dead pets, should you have a garden created from builder's rubble with a 1 inch layer of topsoil plonked on the top.
The city looks cold and hazy. Because it is. Very cold and very hazy....
Sometimes, in a heap of mouldy old leaves you spot one unblemished one. I didn't even have to place it, it was just sat there....
The Japanese Acer in my parent's front garden is dark red in summer but goes this scarlet colour in Autumn and it looks stunning. I'd have taken a shot of the whole tree except that the picture was somewhat buggered up by the builder's skip on the driveway. Rarely a thing of beauty. Sadly, this tree is also now brown and twiggy and the pretty red leaves are plastered all over the road and, amusingly, my dad's car.
So there you have it, Autumn in Manchester. Not quite as amazing as Autumn in New England or the forests of Canada but still pretty in it's own way and with little hidden delights that you don't see unless you're looking out for things to photograph.
