He's Fired....

Sitting in the departure 'lounge' of an airport surrounded by itchy fellow travellers. We're ringed with shops, like a pioneer family circled by wagons, all trying to entice us into parting with our credit-crunched dosh. Lots of us do. Anything to lift the boredom of the wait for the gate.

In order to be able to sit down at a table and use my laptop properly, I have had to buy a skinny latte from Starbucks. The alternative is to slump in one of those rows of sling seats, fine if you want to practise contortionist typing, but not if you want to work. Behind me, tinkling faintly, is the sound of truly execrable covers of 'Christmas Classics'. Sung by what appear to be Pinky and Perky's tenor nephews. On crack.

I'm on my way home from a weekend tryst with the Part-Time Boyfriend. Great weekend, usual parting. He's been separated for a year-and-a-half and is wary of saying anything other than "be great to do this again, sometime." By the time I get to the airport I have decided that it wouldn't be so great, really.

Can you do P45s by email?

Free at last...

After much manoeuvring I am no longer a wage slave. I have officially given up my nice salaried prison of a job.

In the middle of the the biggest economic crisis since Jesus cleared the temple. Yes, I know. My timing has always been fab, I feel.

I aim to keep body and soul together by freelancing a bit, by consulting, in the things I used to get paid a salary to do and by not listening to Robert Peston anymore.

I have not done this, I hasten to add, because I have delusions of grandeur about my capacity to earn a crust as a writer. Perish the thought. (Although living in hope has always been one of the things I was best at. Or should that be "at which I was best"? Anyway.) It has been with a view to escaping the rat race. Downshifting. Living simply. That sort of thing.

I have been practising this downshifting thing for the last two years, saving as much as I could for the glorious day when I had enough to take the risk. It's amazing what you can do with a bit of budgeting, thrifty living and buying all your clothes on ebay. I did waver a bit, back in August, when markets were crashing all around and city financiers were fleeing to their summer homes in Barbados. However, faint heart never won fair lady, or something like that. Make lemon omelettes whilst the sun shines. That sort of thing.

I may be completely mad, or just unlucky, but I have to try to do this. The alternative is just not very pretty, really. I've been working full-time since I left college twenty-two years ago, without a break and something had to give. It was either the salary or my sanity and I'd rather be poor than unhappy. Of course, being poor is no guarantee of being happy, which is why I had better become the JK Rowling of romantic fiction. Or else.

Meanwhile the evil fuzz have given me a speeding ticket, which nearly caused me heart failure, when I thought I was going to be up before the beak. Had to phone a friendly brief, who chuckled at my failure to interpret the fixed penalty notice as a licence to print money for the boys in blue. He didn't relieve me of any cash, but he got a nice single malt nonetheless. I am the sort of a girl who knows how to do these things.

Even if I am on my way to the workhouse. In a handcart, via hell.

Falling Down

Note to self: get back yard powerwashed this weekend.

I went out to the bin yesterday to dutifully recycle some glass bottles. I took one step out the door and skidded into a clumsily executed crouch. Ten out of ten for degree of difficulty, but not so much for artistic impression. I remained on my knees for a good few minutes after I fell. Mainly because I had caused myself a fair degree of pain in my right knee and my right wrist and getting up from that position was requiring some serious concentration. Is this a sign that I am getting old? My knee and my wrist are still throbbing, 24 hours later.

The cause of the acrobatics was the slimy patio which hasn't been washed down this year and is consequently wearing the latest in green algae. No doubt my nosy neighbour, who seems to have a high definition telescope trained on the back of my house from her bedroom window, will have put it down to the empty bottle of wine I was clutching at the time.

If she saw me again this afternoon, she'll be on the phone to Alcoholics Anonymous. I took the dog out, between thunderstorms, or so I thought. Five minutes down the hill and another downpour began. Dodging under some trees, I missed my footing -- again -- and went down on my backside in a less than graceful slide. I now have a lovely skid mark on my green skirt and the abiding memory of a knot of sniggering schoolkids as they passed.

I wonder can I get fitted with stabilisers?

A Romantic Heroine Writes...

It would, as they say, take the skin off a badger's backside out there. I have just taken the dog for her daily bark and widdle and it is cold enough to almost make one forget about global warming. I wore my russian-style fur hat which usually only gets broken out in December and I spent the walk wishing I had dug out the woolly gloves as well. I haven't really worn a coat for about five years: the winter hasn't been really cold enough to merit more than a couple of fleeces and a chunky jumper. Yet already this feels like it might be time to get that new lining put in my decade old cashmere number. It's one of my favourite pieces of clothing -- floor length grey cashmere wool, bell sleeves and a hood lined in black velvet. It makes me feel like a romantic heroine, or at the very least, that dame from the Scottish Widows ad. All I need is the dashing hero to go with it and I'll be set.

Ah well, you can't have everything.

I spent the last two days waiting for a delivery: I treated myself to a lovely new Netbook, even paid extra to have it delivered on a specified day. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Several phone calls to various "customer service"* numbers later... the Netbook MIGHT be delivered tomorrow, provided the auguries are good, the van driver actually remembers to put it in his van and stuff like that.

The annoying thing is that I kind of expected this. The computing company concerned are notorious, but the durn thing was such a good deal I couldn't help myself. Should have stuck to Dell, who at least deliver on time, with mimimum fuss.

But worse than the customer service from the computer company was the rancid old bag on the end of the line at the courier depot. Her rudeness was almost refreshing, in the era of keeping the customer happy, if ill-served, where people murmur platitudes at you from the fastness of their call centres and hope you'll go away, quickly. I don't often ring head offices and track down customer relations managers to complain, but I did today. That'll teach you to hack off a girl like me, missus.

-----------------
* Why do they call them that when in fact, they are there to placate the customer by telling them lies, rather than serve the customer by actually providing a service?

Rain

It has been raining, almost solidly, for almost a month now. I don't mind a bit of rain, now and again. Sure, we'd all be living in a desert if it didn't tip down now and again. The reason this country is so fecking green is because of all that precipitation. It's a wonder we don't all have moss growing up us, to be honest.

But this constant, incessant, stultifying rain is wearing me down. You can't do anything, not even laundry. And it's cold, too. It's not the soft mizzling rain of a warm irish summer. It's more like the chilly, sinew-tightening rain of late october. It's not much fun being a pagan in summer anymore: try to dance round a handy phallic standing stone at midnight and you'd get your death. Not that I have ever danced round anything at midnight. Well, not unless you count the back garden during an infamous party a few years back. But that was down to the drink and the company, rather than any spiritual urges.

The thing is, I don't remember the summers of my youth being so wet. There was that dreadful June to August when I was seventeen, when it did rain almost every day, but that stands out in my memory because it was so unusual. This place is hardly the CoteD'Azur, but we used to have summers that passed for summer, with long, balmy days and warm evenings, where you could sit outside with a nice glass of wine and watch the stars.

Nowadays it's all rain. And I can't see the stars when it rains.

I was sitting in my garden this afternoon, beading and making jewellery.

Beading soothes me and I can lose myself in the rhythmn of it. That's one of the reasons I have always liked working with my hands -- you become lost in the task and your mind only works on that. Your brain gets absorbed by the problem of choosing the beads and the sequence to put them in and how to knot the thread so that the bracelet stays tight and true. Should I put charms on this bracelet and if so which ones? And those earrings: should I make them long or short? The only interruption is when abead rolls off the tray or out of my hands and I have to get down on my knees to retrieve it.

The dog lies in the shade to one side of me, only rousing to snap at a passing fly and the cat is tucked somewhere in the couch grass that will not be banished, no matter what I do. For once the neighbour with the loud radio is quiet: asleep or away somewhere and I have forgotten to bring out my radio, so all I hear is the birdsong and the breeze. The beach would be nice for a walk, I think, but that thought will also have ocurred to several dozen other people this evening, so I leave it and promise the dog we'll go tomorrow morning instead.

But tomorrow I will be a day closer to a bridge I don't want to go over. I try not to worry about it, knowing it is just a bridge from here to there, and I really want to be there but I know the land beneath it is swampy and infested with monsters and it's a bit like that rope bridge in The Temple of Doom, ricketty and with a posse of fierceness poised to push me off. The dog rolls over and sits up. I think she heard me think the word walk...

"First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates.

Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation.

Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place."


-- Anthony de Mello

I had a book returned today. Now, I know that one has to persevere with numerous submissions to many publishers before one gets even a sniff of interest, but it still dwindles one's little writer's heart when you get a rejection. Especially when it's from the premier pusher of pulp romantic fiction telling you to read more of their output. Clearly I need to ramp up the purple in my prose...