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Two tiny stories of country-living…

The downstairs loo is out of bounds for me at the moment. Being back in the country has its benefits and its horrors. Prime amongst its horrors is the presence of thousands of bloody spiders. As a child, my bedroom floor was a spider graveyard – two or three spiders would be spotted a week, I’d leap feet into the air, find something aggressive to hit them with and then be too horrified by the corpses to clear them up. Two days ago I went into the downstairs loo to discover that I would be observed by a huge spider sitting half way up the wall. I haven’t been in it since. Six hours after meeting my arachnid nemesis my brother went for a pee. He reappeared seconds later saying that he’d have to go upstairs because of the huge bloody spider. At least I’m not alone…

Returning from a film this evening with my brother in the car, we look up at the full moon and notice something neither of us have seen before. Surrounding the moon is a huge circle of difuse light – clean edges on the inside fading gradually to black on the outside. It looks like a huge iris in the sky – electric blue and black. My parents arrived shortly afterwards. Neither of them had seen anything like it before either.

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Random

On The George Bush Funeral Home…

Pictures – presented completely without commentary – of a building in Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom – just off the inner-link between Gas Hill and Anglia Square. Taken shortly after Christmas 2001 while my mother waited in the car.

Addendum: Please read this later note pertaining to the situation in Iraq.

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Random

On eating Chocolate Covered Crickets…

The most successful Christmas presents I have given this year have been the dumbest. I gave my brother some chocolate covered crickets and ants and the entire family has been talking about them ever since. Everyone’s eaten some. My mother got almost hysterical and turned purple with horror after being forced to eat them by peer pressure. Very entertaining.

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A challenge for Cal…

Oi Cal! I’ve got something for you to play with! A list apart is looking for people to tell them about Mac IE5.1 CSS rendering bugs. And Lord knows I know you love talking about that!

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Problem with Blogger security…

For anyone who’s an infrequent user of Blogger – be warned, security at Pyra was compromised recently and you should change your server log-in passwords and Blogger user names. You can check out the “sorry” message here and read up about what happened here. [Metafilter discussion about the problems here.]

Categories
Religion

Is Mark going to hell?

I’m worried about Mark: “One more thing I’d like to record is that today my father implied he thinks i’m going to hell. He explained to me his concern, that he’d like me to be with him when we both eventually die, and he’s worried about that not happening, because I study different religions …now, that’s pretty horrible.” Of course I’m an atheist, so at one level this would of course sound horrific to me. But I suppose the core question is whether it is worse to believe that your son might not experience an afterlife, or to enforce your beliefs upon them. A horrible situation to be in, for all concerned…

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What is London?

London is a place a hundred-thousand miles away from here, where all the evils of the world live, and they don’t know where I am at the moment, and they can’t contact me by phone because it’s turned off and has been for days, and they could e-mail me, but I’d probably not pick it up. The world outside Norfolk can go fuck itself for one week. I’m not in the slightest bit interested in what is happening out there.

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I AM THE KOTTKE…

Last time Jason asked me to do something, he told me I must do what he told me because “I AM THE KOTTKE”. I laughed indulgently, as you would. Poor chap’s losing it!

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It's snowing in Norfolk…

I woke up this morning and it was snowing. And when we went shopping in Norwich, it was snowing. I feel so much more relaxed in Norfolk than I do in London. And weirdly, I feel much in control of my life, and therefore considerably more adult and responsible. To undercut this sensation, I watched Lord of the Rings with my little brother, and bought some more pointless things to give to people for Christmas.

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Random

On flirting with people on trains…

I was on the train last night from Liverpool Street to Norwich, and I was sitting opposite this really cute guy. And at the end of the trip I offered him and the other passengers around me the Opal Fruits (sorry Starburst) that I had left over, and he took them, and unlike last time when I did something like this he didn’t smile and reveal a massive gap between two of his teeth or have a grating maniac voice – which made the separation all the more poignant for me.