Highly Strung

I’m not sure this week was the best week to go brunette for real. We are just coming out of the other side of winter and my skin is therefore a whiter shade of pale, I’ve had a pesky cough for over 2 weeks and now it’s turned into a fully fledged cough which has made me even paler and more red eyed than usual. I wish I hadn’t spent the last two weeks telling myself that I can’t possibly be getting a cough because I am never ill for more than a few days. If I had just gone to the doctor a week ago, I’d have felt better by now.

And so it is that under these conditions I choose to colour my hair with a hair colourant called Brasilia Brown. This colour is so dark the packet features a mixed race woman on the front – so possibly a shade too far for us ladies of anglo saxon origins. I’ve chosen to counteract this with the only weapons I have in my arsenal at this time of year – bronzing powder and blusher. I now look like a TB patient – red watery eyes, pale skin and a high bloom on my cheeks – lovely.

So I have the hacking cough and cadaverous complexion, all I need now is a jittery laugh at inappropriate times to complete my slightly unhinged demeanour.

Got lost on the way home today. I was trying to avoid cycling up a particular hill by cycling up a shorter sharper pne, but I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere and ended up cycling up another hill. The good thing about hills though is that it’s much easier to spot landmarks from the top of them – hello Ally Pally…

The good news is, I made it home in time to meet the BT engineer and I am no longer a comms free flat..the bad news is that this post is bought to you by Dial-up, crazy outdated technology…

I’m not afraid to tell him how much I care for him, or to show him. But I get scared that if I extoll his virtues to others I’ll just jinx the whole thing and it will go tits up. So instead I tell funny stories of the ‘oh arent boys silly’ variety.

I don’t tell friends about the fact he likes me to hold his arm as we walk along the street. That sometimes he stops abruptly, squeezes me too him and tells me he loves me. That when his ex is around he makes sure that I’m happy and feel secure. I’ve never known him to fetch a glass of water for himself at bedtime and not get me one (even though I sometimes forget to get him one). He likes to do things that will impress me – like racing up a hill like a demon on his fixed wheel bike. He can always tell when I’m pretending to be in a good mood. Sometimes he even compromises and lets me decide what time we leave for work in the morning…..

Me and the Boyf went to see This last night. We had both read an article about it in a weekend mag some months ago and the Boyf expressed an interest in seeing it. Personally, I wasn’t so sure. It’s definitely unsettling subject matter, not morbid exactly, but difficult. Now that I’ve seen I can’t say I enjoyed it, because that seems insensitive, but I do think it was very well shot, compelling, sensitive and oddly beautiful.

One of the women in it was particularly memorable. She was an older woman, with an overly tanned crinkly face and watery eyes. She was wonderful to watch because aside from her characterful face, she was also so pragmatic and accepting of people’s differences in a way that you don’t often hear.

As we floated to the pub afterward, feeling slightly drained but happy to be alive and together on a crisp wintery night, The Boyf said “I’d like to recommend it to a friend, but at the same time it’s an odd film to tell people they should watch…”

A conversation in the office just now has raised some interesting questions. A colleague just told us that his wife once found a file called salary.xls on a shared drive. I asked ‘did she look at it?’ to which he replied ‘she agonised over it but couldn’t resist in the end’. For me, I don’t think I would have looked, not for any high moral reasons, but rather because I’d rather not know. What use is to me to know if someone is earning more or less than me – I can hardly use this information to my benefit – so what’s the point. I just think its of no use to me whatsover.

After expressing this to my colleague he said ‘yes it’s like that thing in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which tells you your ranking in the universe’ and I think he’s hit the nail on the head there – it’s too depressing to discover where you rank in terms of monetary worth.

Brilliant episode of Life on Mars last night although I’m afraid I did manage to figure out whodunnit about 10 minutes in.

In other news; the bed I’m sleeping on is the squeakiest and most irritating ever. My window frames are so gappy the wind whistles through them in icy blasts. Last night I fell alseep to the melodic tones of a dog howling downstairs. However despite all this, none of it seemed to matter this morning when I woke up in my boyfriends arms … It’s all so much easier than trekking across town to spend time together and I love being able to cook in my kitchen with my own stuff, not to mention having my entire wardrobe at my disposal.

My new flat has the loveliest view, Alexandra Palace is sitting atop a hill in the distance and from my bedroom window I can see for miles over North London. Such a shame then that in order to get this view I must reside at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree (ref: Enid Blyton).

I have come to this conclusion after dealing with a number of utility companies in the weekend who are of the opinion that Flat G does not exist – they all have records for flats A-F, but insist G does not exist. I have just ended a phonecall with BT wherein they told me that they had no record of my flat whatsoever. I did assure them that I do not live in an alternate universe and that my flat does truly exist..they remain unconvinced. Meanwhile – I have no broadband! This is clearly an unacceptable state of affairs. I feel as if my right arm has been removed – and I don’t think that is overstating my loss.

A friend emailed the other day to tell me that she had just found her first grey hair as month before her 35th birthday. I’m a year younger than her and found my first one at the age of 26…

A more worrying sign of my fast advancing age is an incident which occurred on Saturday. I had popped into Woolies to pick up a toothmug and en route to the checkout had spotted an oven glove, picked it up and tucked it under my arm. Thing is – i didnt get to purchase my items as the checkout queue was just way too long. I replaced the toothmug and left. It was only as I was leaving tescos ten minutes later and adjusting my shopping that I noticed I still had the oven glove under my arm… I’d only gone and nicked the bloody thing by mistake. Rest assured i popped back to Woolies and put it back on the shelf – face burning with embarassment. Could have been worse I suppose – I could have been hauled up by security on the way out the door.

New geek post at Techno Babel

Fully passported up!