Shhh!

Marching Band apparently taken up residence in my head?  Check.

Hot and cold sweats?  Check.

Me laying on the sofa, moaning slightly with both self inflicted pain and flashbacks from last night?  Check.

Blister on one foot following the inevitable 3 mile drunken walk home as a taxi can’t be summoned for love nor money?  Check.

Then it must be New Years Day and I have the traditional New Years Day hangover from hell!  It was worth it though.

I hope you all had a good one whatever you got up to.

Happy New Year everyone! 

Christmas Conundrum

How many adults does it take to put together a toy for an 18 month old?

More than 4 apparently!  The addition of an 8 year old doesn’t appear to help either.

In true Christmas tradition style, there was a toy that baffled the grown ups and refused to be put together.  This year it was my fault.  I had bought Little Person (Mini Adult’s sister) a drum kit!  Now, in my defense, Mini Adult’s parents had bought her an electric guitar and amp, so as far as I was concerned fair’s fair.  Plus it was only a small one.  However, it beat us all and the four grown ups just couldn’t put it together.  This didn’t seem to bother Little Person though, when I left she was making good use of it!

She may only be 18 months but she’s already able to beat out a rhythm.  We’re obviously heading for a family band.  Mini Adult has always been a bit of a rock chick and seeing her with her guitar (she can already play) just proved where her future lies!

After doing the family thing for a few hours, I headed over to Best Friend’s house where I had been invited to spend the day.  As her parents were also there, I was on my best behaviour and managed to get through a whole day without making an idiot of myself or saying something I really shouldn’t.  Something of a record!!  It was a fantastic day.

I was also lucky that I didn’t get the traditional dodgy Christmas jumper.  I did get a Fondue set though.  I got some lovely presents and am now surrounded by chocolate and books.

Oh, and a Tiffany’s necklace.

Yep.  Go back and read that line again…

Best Friend gave me a Tiffany’s necklace (Sorry, I know I’m showing off.  I can’t help it.  It’s a necklace from Tiffany’s!!)

I knew she’d got something big planned but I’d never thought it would be something like this.  It was one of those once in a lifetime, heart stopping, shit I’ve forgotten how to breathe moments.  There were tears, there was girly squealing (all very odd, I can’t remember the last time I did a girly squeal!), there were hugs and lots of “I love you”’s.  Best Friend’s Bloke and her Dad sat there looking very confused with a clear look of “It’s just a necklace” on their faces.

Anyway, a couple of pictures.  Sorry about the quality, they’re taken with the phone on my camera and for the life of me, I can’t get them to rotate!

So.  This is the necklace.  It’s 3 rounded silver cubes, each connected with a link.  It’s very simple but so beautiful.

This is all the stuff it came in, the bag, the box and a little suede pouch to keep it safe.  I didn’t even know it came in a little suede pouch!

Even now, a few days later, I randomly let out a little squeal.  But I think it’s allowed with something like this! 

I hope you’re all having a good time this Christmas and if I don’t speak to you before then here’s to 2008.  Have a good one!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

I’m posting this now as I’m likely to be off line for the next couple of days. 

I’m spending Christmas Day with Best Friend and her family, after visiting my aunt and cousins for a couple of hours in the morning.  I’ll be meeting Best Friend’s parents, which I’m a little nervous about as I don’t have a good track record with friend’s parents.  But it will be a lovely day and I’m looking forward to it, even with the threat of karoke!!

Boxing Day will be spent with my aunt and another of my cousins.  I’ll be on-call for work, so it will be a quieter day than Christmas Day, but still lovely.

I hope you all have a brilliant time and get to spend it with the people you love.

Love to you all,

Alcoment xx

Something strange is happening!

I appear to have been infected with the Christmas spirit (no, not the vodka kind!).  Normally, I’m quite cynical about the whole thing and end up getting stressed and grumpy, trying to get everything done in time.

Today though, it was all quite odd.  Though I have been known to get a little sentimental when I’ve heard a brass band playing carols, that isn’t my normal reaction.  Today, I found myself singing along to the Christmas songs playing in the shops, enjoying – yep, that’s right – enjoying doing my present shopping and wishing random strangers a Merry Christmas, rather than fighting them for the last Terry’s Chocolate Orange on the shelf!

I’ve also spent some time this evening wrapping some presents, feeling all Christmassy with candles lit and a glass of brandy!

What concerns me more though is that I willingly caught two buses today (I’m normally very much a taxi girl) and happily chatted to some random kid at the bus stop!  As most of you know, my usual reaction to children (apart from very specific ones) is to feel the fear and run away screaming!

So, am I ill?  Do I need to go the doctor?  Or am I just getting soft in my old age?  Answers on a postcard (or email) please!

Oh, and I also wanted to publicly apologise to Stealth for my Facebook flirtations. Those of you who read her comments to my last post will know that she hasn’t taken it well.  As my punishment, I have accepted a Meme tag but I will apologise anyway.  Stealth, it didn’t mean anything, I just got carried away in the moment, it was the drink, Facebook made me…

Infidelity and tights.

Apologies for the absence everyone, sometimes life just gets in the way.  I also have to confess that I have been rather unfaithful.  I’ve ended up on Facebook (Thanks Student Nutty Nurse!) and seem to be temporarily addicted to wasting time taking stupid quizzes!  I shall try my best to be a better blogger!

Last week was the beginning of the Christmas party merry-go-round, with both work parties (the client meal and the staff party) happening within a couple of days of each other.  True to form, I was not able to be in public without making an idiot of myself at least once.

The client meal was going well, people were eating and chatting, everyone was happy.  Little did I know that I was about to provide the entertainment!

I’d had quite a bad cold and, though I was better, had been left with blocked ears.  The sensation was driving me mad and I decided to try unblocking them again.  You know the one, hold your nose and blow as hard as you can.

I sat there, blowing, when all of a sudden something unblocked.  But not my ears.  Yep, I had just sat there and done an incredibly loud fart!  My natural response was to collapse in hysterical laughter, surrounded by my clients and colleagues just looking on with bemusement.

The staff Christmas meal was fun and it was my skirt’s first outing – it seemed to go down well.  I’d forgotten what a problem tights could be though.

As I haven’t worn a skirt in years, obviously I haven’t worn tights either.  Getting them on in the first place was interesting and only achieved with a considerable amount of swearing and threatening them with the bin.  Having got them on, I was reluctant to repeat the experience and decided to only go to the loo when it became a desperate situation.

I managed a few hours, but obviously nature (and a considerable amount of alcohol) eventually called.  By this time, we had done the restaurant and the pub and were all back at the bosses house.

Having dealt with the matter in hand, it was time to do battle again with the tights.  They had been difficult in the first place but add in a few vodka and cokes and then it becomes more like Mission Impossible. 

All was going relatively well until, on the final tug, I lost my balance and slowly toppled sideways.  Ending up sitting on their bathroom floor, again laughing hysterically, I could only be glad that no one had been around to witness it.  I think it’s back to stockings for me!

And relax!

Ok.  The audit is over.  The preliminary report isn’t too bad and there shouldn’t be any surprises in the final report, so it looks like that side of things should be fine.  Everything else also seems to be calming down so it’s time for me to relax.

I’m still knackered so I’m just popping in tonight to say Hi, but will be back properly in the next couple of days.

Oh, what I did want to tell you about was a conversation I overheard this morning in Starbucks. 

The two barristers (is that what they’re called? I’m sure it’s something like that) were talking about the local Christmas display in the shopping centre, complete with Santa’s grotto.  One was making the point that taking your kid to visit Father Christmas is quite an odd concept really.  Her point was that we spend all year telling our kids not to talk to strangers, yet at Christmas we actively encourage them to go and sit on some strange blokes knee.

I’ve never really thought about it before.  On the one hand we have what should be a fun, innocent Christmas tradition, on the other there’s the knowledge of what people can unfortunately be capable of.

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because I work in mental health and one of the side effects so to speak, is that you can end up seeing the possibility for abuse everywhere but I could kind of see her point.

Still.  I wouldn’t miss seeing the amazement in my niece’s eyes when she was younger and saw the Main Man, for anything.

Duck!

It’s the only thing to do when the shit hits the fan!

Finding the time to blog recently has been a bit of a push and I wanted to let you all know I’m unlikely to be around until next week.  I’ll still be able to check emails and read all of your blogs (thanks google reader!), but commenting and posting my own will be difficult.

It’s bad timing when both your work and personal lives decide to go a bit screwy at the same time.

A combination of clients either in court (naughty boys) or having major surgery (in London!), a colleague resigning with immediate effect and a three day visit from the auditors next week means that I have been (and will be) working all day, in the evenings and at the weekend.  Can anyone explain the concept of free time to me?  I appear to have forgotten what that’s like!

Add to that two friends in crisis, a demanding family, long standing commitments and the occasional need to sleep (I know, very selfish, but there you go!) means that I seem to find myself just moving from one situation to another wishing for a remote control to pause time so I can at least have a cigarette in peace.

What do you reckon the chances are of me finding a scientist on a Tuesday night who would be willing to clone me NOW?!

Oh, and when I get back can someone please remind me to tell you about my day spent in a hospital with staff who appeared to think they were in a Carry On film!

Wish me luck and I’ll see you all as soon as I can!

Art and sticky carpets

Last Saturday I went out with The Arty One from work.

We started off with a bit of culture at the local art gallery.  The Arty One has a degree in art, has some stuff displayed at another gallery and seems to know her stuff.  I, on the other hand, don’t.

I don’t really have a clue at what I’m looking at, though can sound quite convincing and can just about blag my way through.  There were two artists displaying their work, one I liked and one I didn’t.  The Arty One did her best to instill arty type knowledge into me, but I was kind of stuck on blagging my way through.  It was interesting though.

Then it was time to hit the pub.

After several hours of drinking, somehow obtaining a mission to collect a balloon from every pub in the area and an incident of having to escape from an overzealous drunk bloke, we ended up in the local meat market. 

I’m still not entirely sure how this happened, but we obviously thought it was a good idea at the time!  I haven’t been in one of these places for years, preferring my nights out to involve food and a decent pub where I don’t have to resort to sign language to talk to my friends.  However, there’s something reassuring about finding that some things don’t change!

Every city has one of these.  And they’re always the same wherever you are.  Generally an odd pub/club hybrid, unable to make up it’s mind which it wants to be.  They seem to share the same designer, with a passion for chrome, fake leather sofas and random steps, just waiting to trip up the next unsuspecting person. 

But the touches that I’m certain the designer wasn’t after are the sticky carpets, sweaty walls, toilets with no loo roll and the obligatory drunk person who has fallen asleep on the stairs!

Other characteristics of a meat market are the girls (they do tend to be girls!) dressed in very little and the blokes wandering around with an air of desperation as female after female rejects their (very) clumsy attempts at pulling!  An apparent mass aim to consume your own body weight in alcohol inevitably leads to the existence of Crying Drunk Girl and testosterone fuelled fights over a spilt beer.

It was here that we had the night’s second incident of escaping a dodgy drunk bloke.  Orange T-Shirt Man and his friend had been watching us for a while, smiling from the other side of the room and making unnecessary detours past our table to get to the bar.  As neither of us were interested, we just sat back and watched, amusing ourselves by taking bets on how long it would take for him to come over (43 minutes for the record). 

He spent a few minutes slurringly telling us that as we were both his type (I’m assuming by that he meant alive and female as the only similarity between us looks wise is that we are both tall!) he didn’t mind which one of us he had, but promised that whoever he ended up with would have an unforgettable night!  Unable to comprehend our lack of interest, despite quite bluntly pointing this out, he seemed to expect us to fight amongst ourselves for a while, informing us he was going to return to his friend (who looked like he was about to become the passed out person on the stairs!) and come back in a little while to see who we had decided he was going to dance with. 

As soon as he was safely back to his table, The Arty One and I decided it was more trouble than it was worth, downed our drinks and made a swift exit.  I don’t think either of us will be going back there in a hurry!

A lost art?

I was reading the back of my conditioner bottle in the shower this morning (it’s amazing what you do to amuse yourself whilst you’re waiting for a deep conditioning treatment to work!) and noticed what was written under the ‘Contact us’ bit.

The bottle encouraged people to “Give us a ring, send us an email, or why not go mad and pick up a pen – and combat the global disappearance of handwriting”.

It got me thinking, I rarely write letters anymore and I’m not sure I know anyone else who writes them either. Sure, I write quite a few at work, but they don’t really count, plus, they’re typed. In fact, I only write two personal letters a year, both at Christmas, to two family friends. But when I was younger, letters and notes were a common thing.

When I was kid, every Birthday and Christmas I would have to write ‘Thank you’ letters to anyone who had given me a present. As much as I knew I had to do them, I hated it. I mean, when you’re a kid, what else do you say when you’ve got as far as “Dear Great Aunt Mable. Thank you for my book token. I have put it towards a book.”? I would sit there for ages, trying to turn 20 words into a letter; I would often end up drawing a little picture, just to fill up space.

When I was a teenager, it was all about passing notes in school (when I was there, I played truant a lot!). The notes were far more important than whatever class we were in, but mainly consisted of “Jamie is soooo fit”, “Are you coming for a fag at break?” and “Lucy snogged Darren on Friday!”. Exciting stuff!

It just doesn’t cross my mind to write a letter. Now, if I want to contact someone and don’t want to phone, then I will send them an email. It’s quicker than writing, but I guess it’s kind of sad that no one writes letters anymore.

Hunting in packs

I’ve heard several blokes say that one of the scariest things to see on a night out is a group made up purely by women. I have to say that a group of blokes is just as off putting.

When I was in London for the day with Mr Flirt, we ended up sitting outside a pub in Camden. It was a pleasant evening, only marred when a group of lads took up residence at the next table.

They were a typical group of lads, out on the piss and on the pull. They were quite loud, having already had plenty to drink and clearly felt, that as they were obviously undisputed Sex Gods, they were in a position to comment on every poor female that happened to walk past.

We sat and listened to their conversation for a while, not that we had much choice. After enduring a few minutes of tales about “shagging some bird” and some stuff about football that I didn’t understand at all, I turned to Mr Flirt and commented that this group of fine male specimens was an example as to why some women prefer to be single.

He just smiled.

A few minutes later, a group of girls (I can really only describe them as girls) came spilling out of the pub. By this stage, the only seats left outside were on mine and Mr Flirt’s table. They asked if they could share with us and we agreed.

We were then subjected to a mixture of screams and squeals over one of the girls’ new top, the sad news that the bloke one of them had met last week hadn’t called and the problems someone’s sister was having with her new partner. After a while, Mr Flirt turned round and informed me that this was an example as to why some men prefer to stay single.

Touche!