Tuesday 1 August 2017

Mrs Terence McCann

Sonya McCann sighed as she placed her suitcase down on the scuffed limo - damp, dreary old London beckoned. She'd returned to the country of her birth with her late husband Terry's ashes in a decorative urn; it was his dearest wish to be buried outside The Winchester Club, but obviously flying the bloated twenty-two stone former boxer's corpse half way across the world wasn't really an option.

Poor Terry had died of advanced knob rot, brought about by excessive amounts of unprotected sex he'd indulged in between 1979 and 1988. In fact, his John Thomas had been amputated in 2011 and a hosepipe fitted instead ...

Thursday 1 October 2015

Sunday 25 January 2015

Why Is My Life So Bizarre?

Well readers, that's because I am in the process of being diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, or Asperger's, Aspies for short.  What on earth is that you may say and then you might add - but you're female, surely that's only a geeky bloke thing?  Wrong.  I have been having temper tantrums since I was about six-months-old according to Mother - really bad ones - imagine a small blonde girl bawling her eyes out with snog coming out of her mouth and you're halfway there.  All of my life I've been called 'unreasonable' 'over-reactive' 'arrogant' 'odd' and just downright crazy, but I'm not, this is me and I'm an Aspie.

Yesterday was pretty awful - I won't give too much detail lest I be discovered, but basically I arranged a get-together for a Facebook Interest Group and it all went quite wrong.  I just really hate big groups and meet ups, especially when they include copious amounts of alcohol.  Last Monday I reacted to a dodgy tweet which escalated up and I was slagged off for it, in public yesterday.  I left really early and never went back.  I've now left the group, blocked and de-friended all of the group so that I can make a fresh start - I've even deleted all of my Facebook comments dating back to October 2014.

Here's to making 2015 work for me; sod people who cannot accept the serious limitation my condition imposes upon me.

Wednesday 27 November 2013

Fake Christmas Greetings Cards

Last week whilst whiling away the day looking at the 'best of the Mumsnet talkboard' weekly round-up email and noticed the following thread had been highlighted as one of interest: http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/a1911919-Fake-Christmas-cards-Janet-and-Roy so I dived straight in and I'm so glad that I did.  Truly brilliant.  Basically it's a bit of a practical joke: sending a card pertaining to be from an unidentifiable couple called 'Janet and Roy' or maybe 'Pierre et Sylvie' if one has a continental background.  So I thought I'd join in by purchasing a set of 'three for £1' card from my local cheapo shop and penning the robin one to my parents (a round robin inserted into a card decorated with a robin: scary.) 


I shall ask one of my colleagues to post it from her home location tomorrow as Mother would smell a rat if it was postmarked London.  I can imagine Mother now, ruminating on who could have sent such a greeting and indeed if she's missed somebody important off of the Christmas Card list, which tends to diminish as every year goes by anyway.  I will also write something cryptic such as 'So nice to see you back in September, we must meet up again in March'.  God I'm evil at times, but I'll let you know what happens anyway.

Friday 4 October 2013

There's a guy who works down my local BHS I swear is the actor Phil Davis

What a silly title for a post, yes I agree but quite frankly I haven't a clue who, if anyone, is reading this blog anyway.  Sometimes I think I'd love to know, but as it's piggybacked onto a porn site, it could be anyone on the internet who's in possession of wi-fi, fingers and a soggy raincoat.

Right, back to today's topic, which is the purchase of odd things from town centres.  I don't work on Mondays and Fridays and as a result I tend to take a wander around the shops after dropping my son off at school.  I bought the following things today:

So, why the hairbrushes?  Well, they were on special offer in Boots - buy one, get one half price, which presupposes that you'd have lot of hair to groom or indeed had a friend or relative who'd also appreciate such a gift.  Actually, I think if somebody gifted me a hairbrush, deodorant or shower gel I'd be annoyed - basically because they're inferring that you smell or your barnet's a complete state.  Talking of hair and I'm sure it's top of your conversation topics this rainy Friday, I'm trying to grow out my short cut back into a bob style and thus, it's a bit of a mess.  My hair is a bit of a nightmare anyway because it never looks tidy because of its flyaway nature.  I suppose if you work out the cost of two new hairbrushes (£13.45) as opposed to regular 8-week cycle cuts to maintain a short style (£40+) it's cheaper in the long run.

Finally (zzzzz) - cushions.  My house is now filling up with so many cushions (plus shoes) that I'll barely be able to circumnavigate the laminate flooring in the near future.  I am building my winter nest on my sofa though and quite frankly, often I feel like morphing into a state of hibernation because I've just about had enough of stuff at the moment.  Wake me up in May 2014 if you could please?

Sunday 8 September 2013

Exactly What About The Internet Makes People So Darn Nasty?

That's the question I'm debating today and as I've just Googled the subject in hand, it appears that it's a very common occurrence.  Further to my earlier post about being depressed, I truly believe that it's lifting now, but it has been a pretty awful few days.  I have made the decision to suspend my Facebook account for the foreseeable future and it's now my policy to only exchange emails with people I actually know in real life, I think that it's easier that way.

So, what makes people feel the need to write awful vitriolic forum posts or send horrible messages?  Speaking as somebody who would probably have engaged in a bit of keyboard sparring in the past I can kind of see how addictive it can be, but there are real people sitting there behind screens and it's not nice.  When I hear on the news or read in the papers or read about those teens who commit suicide because of cyber bullying my heart goes out to them and their stricken families.  Whilst growing up in suburban London during the 1980s I was subject to a fair amount of both physical and mental bullying and it's soul-destroying, literally, believe me.  Sometimes I wonder what's behind it all and what exactly to the bullies achieve in the long run?  Being a bit different and slightly (well, greatly) eccentric isn't a crime.

OK, so you want examples do you?  Fine, as it's anonymous then I'll share.  Right, picture the scene: a suburban girls secondary modern school in the fashion-conscious 1980s and it's non-uniform day and we've all paid the princely sum of 20p for the privilege of not wearing the navy blue and red hues of our daily grind.  So, I'm stuck - my clothes have never been the height of fashion at the best of times and this is one of the worst times of the year for me because I just can't keep up with the Tinas or the Donnas who rule the playground (I think we can tell that we're not talking about grammar school girls here, can't we?).  So what do I do?  I had a best friend at the time, let's call her Caroline for reasons of anonymity and we'd recently been shopping at the local mall and I'd purchased a Betty Boop nightshirt from M&S and she suggested that I may like to wear that, actually looking back I'm not sure if she was setting me up from the start and her report did state that she had and I quote: 'a bitchy streak'.  Anyway, I wore it and it didn't look unlike an oversized t-shirt which were fashionable at the time, it was grey, but slightly resembled the image below:

Somebody discovered that it was indeed a nightshirt and I received ribbing about it thoroughout the day until I removed it.  You see, I really should have begged my mother to purchase an expensive Naf Naf suit from her limited funds, which I believe retailed at a whopping £40 circa 1988.  They were the 'in thing' then and every Nicola, Shelley and Angie was sporting them then. 

Yes, horrible isn't it and this is one of the only images I could find online.  I seem to recall that many were acid shades of pink, purple and green and some even had a dice print, which made them even more clownesque in my opinion.  Nice.  Such a shame that I still live in this borough isn't it?  However I did reside elsewhere for a great number of years but family ties plus low property prices made me return.  Sigh.


Friday 6 September 2013

Life Is Difficult But You Have To Embrace It Anyway....

What choice is there?  Well, we're aware of the alternative aren't we, but that just isn't acceptable - surely one suicide in the family is enough to bear?

I'll start by saying that depression's a terrible thing, a really nasty condition which creeps up on you when you least expect it, but I'll tell my story as best as I can.  There's a history of it in my family, so I've inherited a tendency towards it; the first time I ever recall experiencing it was one Christmas when I was about nine or ten - I'd contracted bronchitis and it laid me low, both physically and mentally.  I kept on thinking that my mother would die and as she was my only surviving parent, that was pretty awful.  From then on I've suffered from fairly regular bouts of it, it's improved as I've got older but it still creeps up on me.  I have cripplingly low self-esteem which is hard to deal with; in the 1990s when I dated I tried to make myself feel better by dating a selection of totally unsuitable emotional fuckwitty men.  Casual sex is awful: it tears out my soul.  One prime example of this is when my brother died in 1995, I was so depressed that I could barely function and the emotionally stunted tool of a bloke I was seeing at the time wanted to take advantage of that situation - how pleasant of him, I hope karma has come and bitten you firmly on the bottom.

I've never really taken much medication for clinical depression, often with a combination of exercise and a light box in the winter, it clears itself.  I have had counselling though, two tranches of it to be exact and like in a Woody Allen film, it's really addictive - just talking about yourself and your feelings for ninety minutes a week is really cathartic, albeit slightly neurotic.  I'm actually going to study psychology at City Lit - the course begins in a couple of weeks.  I think it'll be illuminating in so many ways.

So here's the thing, we all get sad at times, but sometimes it's worse.  What I really would like to underline is: don't use people - they have feelings too you know and it's never easy.  I keep on finding that people aren't particularly interested in the characters which surround them - it's seemingly getting much more uncaring out there.  Perhaps this is written from the perspective from a woman who has finally let all the tears out she's been hiding away for so long, but it feels good to be able to express it in words anyway.