Googling cheery thoughts

What did the buffalo say to his boy when he was going to school? Bison!

http://www.lolcats.com/view/9953

What a shit few days

G and T and Shaun the Sheep to the rescue.

When a date is not actually a date

Part of what I do now is all about expectation management. I call up people and I say TV and ears prick up. Mention money and heads spin. There's a skill to talking to people and getting permission to film, or just logging their interest without causing undue over-excitement.

You'd have thought, then, that I could manage my own expectations well. Before this job, I learned the lesson again and again in Japan: things were never as I expected they'd be and sometimes I was disappointed, sometimes surprised to the good.

But now I work managing expectation every day, so I should be better at it. I should.

6 years separate me and the latest ex I met up with, Danielle, who wore short skirts to sell magazines at Edinburgh Festival while I lost the job because I didn't sell any.

One dinner turned to a second dinner and I got excited. Japanese, and then Chinese in Soho a few weeks later, around the corner from Carnaby Street and a line of pink reindeer helium inflatables strung up. I didn't want to think it might a proper date second time round, but I did anyway.

We talked and talked and then we talked about ex-boyfriends and girlfriends who couldn't deal with meeting up just as friends. By this point it had become clear what kind of a meeting ours was.

Meeting an old flame to just check they're doing ok, because you were once close with them, doesn't seem to be such an altruistic thing to do any more, in spite of what me and Danielle agreed last night. It seems almost a little self-serving, like you want to satisfy an inclination without thinking about what effect it has in the end. I realized I'd done exactly the same thing to another old girlfriend, a month or two ago, but with a more dramatic end to the night. Which makes me feel like a big fat hypocrite really.

So I woke up today and thought, 'I knew this was going to happen and now it has, what do I do?'

Being heartbroken by the same girl twice seems beyond cliche, so it's time to get on, again.

I ran in the rain and mud, and hoovered.

Maths

Numeracy tests and data interpretation. All the rage these days with online applications.
I've never really been one for maths.

So I've been trying to put maths into my everyday life. Chiefly, this means keeping a running total in my head around the supermarket.

I get to the checkout, hand over my basket and watch as the checkout lady scans the barcodes, one-by-one.

Then she says, 'That's 7 pounds 38 then please love' and a tiny voice at the back of my head says

'I know!'

Cheat

The makers of the Guardian G2 crossword, take note.

You have reduced me to cheating.

No more will I be frustrated by clues pertaining to Oscar winners in the year of my birth, or before. Never again will I fumble for synonyms to words which I don't know in the first place. You won't catch me out with any more obscure legal terms neither.

No no. I've got the internet now.

Behold -

Spoon boy:

http://www.impactlab.com/2008/04/04/spoon-boy-breaks-world-record-by-balancing-16-spoons-on-his-face/

A-mo-zing

I became a Mo-man on the 1st November.

The premise of Movember (the month formerly known as November) is simple; the execution, dangerouly open to interpretation and the results until last night, miserly (I am of course speaking personally - I am certain there are far better Mo Men out there than I).

So, the premise. Shave at the start of Movember and grow a moustache in aid of men's charities, in particular prostate cancer charities.

And the results... until last night my wispy toffee-apple tickler had barely attracted the attention of my flatmates. In fact, it hadn't at all. After 10 days there was some semblance of a shadow of a Mo developing that I then carefully sculpted into what I like to call a 'lip-winger', reaching all the way down to my chin line. Except it didn't reach all the way and had bits missing in between.

So I scrapped that plan and had another go with the razor, redesigning my lip-winger into a cute, fledgling 'che' (after the famous Cuban revolutionary and celebrated Mo man). Last night I met a friend and two of his friends, one of whom commented without any prompt,

"Is that for Movember or what?"

My Mo, finally given the recognition it deserves, after 12 days of semi-existence.

Now I'm a proud Mo-man.

Year of the Ex-

We had a bridge we called ours back then, when I briefly went out with Mareike the German while living in Amsterdam for a year. It was one of those bridges that collapses fifty times a day to allow canal boats through.

Last night we walked to a Sam Smith's pub an American friend Sebastian knew and I didn't. I've got a lot to learn about the city of my birth. Sebastian led me and Mareike and a stranger wolf-whistled. Her hair is dyed bright blond, shorn on one side and chin length on the other and I guess she's always attracted attention. She bumped into people and we three talked as we drank bad beer Sebastian had swiped from work - a posh bar-restaurant by St. Paul's. Later Mareike said she's sleeping with an Irishman or a Frenchman. Nothing seems to have changed.

I'm ploughing back through a past I thought I'd left a distance behind. One friend once said he returned to England from Japan and the most overwhelming feeling he had was relief. But sometimes I find myself wanting to tug at my hair and scream out in frustration at having landed right back where I worked hard to move on from.