skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I have no motivation whatsoever on this overcast, wet Saturday morning, which isn't a good thing considering the various things we have to do today while on a flying visit to the folks up north - visit the grandparents, meet with our wedding photographer, try and find a memory card for Da Boy's new phone, do some food shopping for my mother...
Oh well, another ten minutes lazing around in this unbelievably comfy bed won't hurt...
Dear God above!
Today I was given a stark and overdue reminder of why I stopped using public transport back in my early 20s.
In the past year or so, I've ventured on and off the odd bus and train when necessity has dictated it and found myself thinking each time that it really wasn't all that bad and wondering why I didn't do it more often.
Yet I was brought crashing back to reality with a thump today when I had to get the bus home from work. It was 45 minutes of pure Hell.
First, the driver was snotty with me as I didn't have any change and had to give him a £10 note. Well, excuse me Mr Happiness with your rather rude tutting, but it clearly states you only don't carry change for £20s and £50s, not £10s, so screw you. If I had the change or had been able to get it between visiting the cashpoint and racing for the bus stop, I would have given it you!
Then I turned to walk up the aisle to see the bus is absolutely rammed. There were about 20 loud, gobby and annoying students from the sixth form and further education colleges, various middle aged and old people shooting glares in the teenagers' direction for being so loud, gobby and annoying, two overweight women with a huge pink suitcase on the floor between them, a bloke fast asleep and snoring on his holdall and countless other people all piled onto this usually fairly quiet service.
I did manage to get a seat next to one of the overweight women (well, half a seat anyway as she was taking up one and a half all to herself and her ample behind) and am immediately hit with the overwhelming stench of body odour.
So I spent the next three quarters of an hour trying to keep my balance on my six inch wide seat as the driver hurtles up the twisting rural road home, while also keeping hold of all my bags on my knee as there was no room on the floor and trying to take only shallow breaths and not heave all over the place at what a close relative of mine refers to as "council house deodorant" (think about it, you can't deny it isn't a good description!).
I all but ran off the damn bus the second it came to a stop and made a point of not saying thank you to the misery guts of a driver.
I don't care what anybody says and I don't care how much this planet is slowly burning up from greenhouse gasses.
I am never going on a bus again unless my life depends on it at that second in time and am not giving up my lovely little car for anything!
Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme, but I honestly can't deal with hangovers with the same Blitz Spirit that I used to in my younger years!
Seriously, the moment I turned 23, that was it. Whereas before I could quite happily head out on a week-long bender and only be rough for a few hours, I'm now sick as a dog for at least 24 hours!
Saturday was no exception. Dear Lord, I have not felt that rough in a long time and it's all Mr B's fault. Well, that's what I'm claiming anyway, I have decided the blame for me being stupidly drunk on white wine and sambucca lies solely with him. I've yet to decide why but I do know it was definitely his fault and not mine. Having to get up at 6.30am to traipse back and forth across two counties didn't help either (long and rather dull story), given we didn't stop drinking until after 1am!
Still, I had a wicked time on Friday night, even so far as to say it was worth the pain of a deadly hangover.
The Jackdaws rocked the sh*t out of Crewe and, biased or no, I and all the others thought they were the best band on that night by far. The boys even slipped in a new song that even I had never heard and it was bloody fantastic!
It was such a random night too. My cousin Radio came down from up north to show her support and immediately hit it off with all my friends she had not met properly before thanks to her wonderful craziness. I am not exaggerating when I say she is actually, genuinely nuts but in a fantastic way. In fact, some of the blame for me being ill should pass to her and her sambucca-buying as the night wore on!
There were many drunken declarations of love (the friend sort), crazy dancing down in front of the stage when The Jackdaws played and lots of staggering down the streets of Crewe making complete prats of ourselves.
Mr B even did a cartwheel down the road, which I thought I had dreamt until he confirmed it had happened at work today, followed by a second cartwheel when I apparently yelled at him to do it again! No wonder his wrist is knackered this week, this is the man who broke both of them twice in a matter of weeks as a child so officially has the weakest wrists in Shropshire!
Anyways, after the taxi driver finally got us home (and said taxi was not obtained by some dodgy back street deal, despite what certain people might claim!), having had no sat nav and relying on a stupidly drunk me to direct him in the dark when I had only ever done the journey to Crewe by road twice before and then in the daylight, everyone pretty much collapsed into bed or couch with the sounds of the best thing to come out of Shropshire since the A41 ringing in their ears.
Top night!
And I'll be doing it all again this Saturday. The Sound Bar, Birmingham - The Jackdaws are headlining and will totally blow you away if you do pop down, I promise!
Check out www.myspace.com/thejackdawsuk for more information.
Oh my God, today has seriously got to go down in the record books as one of my worst days ever. Honestly, nobody has died, but how can so many shitty things happen in the space of 12 hours?!
It started with the most annoying drive into work I've had in ages, with every single slow-moving vehicle from carawankers (sorry, caravan drivers) to Culina lorries doing 40mph to tractors to old men incapable of getting out of third gear all along the nice, wide, national speed limit country road that takes up most of my traveling distance.
Then, when I finally get to work with minutes to spare before I became officially late, I'm told a poster I had Da Boy design for a project we're doing, which is exactly what we need and will do the job perfectly, STILL did not comply with, and I quote, "the Disability Discrimination Act or our Corporate Branding Guidelines".
This despite our publishing department having already returned it once with a list of things they wanted changing to make it compliant. All the changes were made and they still weren't happy, I am convinced simply because I didn't pay them to do the poster in the first place.
So, a week after it first got sent for printing, I'm still waiting and have basically told them I'd had it and THEY could do the work to make it "compliant". (Christ, how I've grown to hate that word!)
Then, after a really frustrating day with just about everything else I also dealt with, I get a phone call from 3 Mobile who inform me they will not be repairing my phone handset, despite it only being four months since I got it, because the fault was "damage". What a load of b*ll*cks! The 0 button stops working and they try and make out I had caused it?! Seriously, if a phone can't even take being bounced around in the average woman's handbag a little bit, then it's not fit for purpose!
Therefore, I am heading into the 3Store I bought it from first thing Saturday morning to argue for a replacement phone. However, my chances of winning will be slim to none if my current experiences of jobsworth bureaucracy are anything to go by.
And just to top off a perfect day, I get home to be told Da Boy's work will not let him have the two days off for my national awards ceremony in London simply because one other person is off on those same days. Never mind that there are however many more people still in the department who could do the same job. No, they will only allow one person from each department to have leave at any one time. Jesus, my department at work frequently runs on ONE member of staff and that's covering an entire sodding county!
Which means I'm stuck with heading down to London all on my own, again thanks to some jumped-up jobsworth who won't make an exception for anything.
So, all in all, it's been a Thursday I can't wait to forget.
I wonder if there's a bottle of wine in the fridge...
