Atavism Blog  -

Was she a real, live person or did America just make her up to scare the bejeezus out of us?

Ta-da! A mere three months since my last blog entry, here I am again. How on the ball am I??? Doesn't seem like there's a whole load of news to tell you, to be honest. I've cheered up a bit since my last post at least, which is a little odd given the onset of winter and the fact that I've accepted a permanent job (yes - The Suck, Infinity Version) but hey, who cares why? I'll take the cheery any day.

It may be something to do with feeling better after having labyrinthitis, a truly nasty illness that, in the words of a very scared young doctor with numerical memory failure on what seemed to be her first time out alone, "really knocks you for seven". I spent three days doing stunt vomiting every time I moved due to the severe vertigo, felt weak and feeble for weeks and am still deaf in one ear, permanently dizzy and unable to walk in a straight line for very long, but at least am now more myself, which anyone who has seen me in the last couple of months will confirm I haven't been.

Also just spent a very lovely weekend in Brighton catching up with friends, eating sushi and being buffeted by the enormously strong wind. Failed to take a single photograph, I'm afraid - a shame in the case of the Brighton bit but probably a relief in terms of the return journey on the train home. I looked around the carriage at my fellow travellers, gently stewing in an overpacked mass, steaming up the windows, eating crisps and stinky burgers, gabbling away on mobiles, berating their children and smelling hideous and thought, "mmm, skank casserole." Next time we drive.

No, I'm not talking about the outfit, although that also could not really be described as my most flattering ever.  It's from the play, dontcha know, in which I got to wear the biggest laugh of the night and in doing so lost a fair amount of the sheer embarrassment I generally feel when people are looking at or photographing me. It's not the biggest theatre in the world but by the end of the week's run over 1,000 people had seen the show and therefore me looking like that.  Hence I am now ok with sharing the photographic evidence with you and am actually a little sad that you can't really see the shoes and the bra straps in all their technicolour glory.  Perhaps the pink footless fishnets complete with marks halfway up the calf where they had to be shoved so as not to show in previous scenes will be enough for you.

More on the play in a bit, but back to what can't be good:  the fact that the last entry on this page (before I post this one, which will move it off) was written on Christmas Eve and that in it I used a phrase that I unwittingly repeated verbatim in my post the other night and in essence also in all the other posts in between.  Clearly work really IS The Suck and no mistake.  I feel it behoves me, as a general malcontent, to refuse to just suck it up (dear god, I am reduced to repeating my repetitious vocabulary in various forms ad infinitum, not to mention smatterings of improperly used Latin in the manner of a somewhat tragic middle manager from the Midlands.  Hang on, I am a... etc.) and to accept the fact that life is currently distinctly turgid in general and to meddle in my own settledness one more time.  One does not enjoy, one's utterance is reduced to platitude when it surfaces at all, therefore one shall not continue. 

Not past the end of one's contract, anyway.  One's contract with work (having ill-advisedly wandered into the third person, one can't now get out of it elegantly) finishes at the end of December.  The rest of it, the living in the Midlands etc. one does not actually seem to have signed a contract with at all. 

Are you feeling a familiar "Holy crap, she's/they're surely not about to blunder about wildly for a bit before making yet another over-dramatic move, is she/are they?  Why the frick can't the pair of them just make a decision and be done with it?" stealing over you?  Me too, and I LOVE it. 

Oh dear, has been so long since I blogged I had actually forgotten my password.  Apologies of a ginormous and most sincere nature to everybody I haven't contacted in the last few months (that would be all of you); we're not dead, at least not quite. 

Work is The Suck and no mistake.  It was bad enough when it was just one of us hitting a crunch time but at the moment it's both of us, and nothing else ever gets done.  It has to stop; no fun is being had which is a sorry state of affairs.  We've been back in the UK for nearly two years and I gotta tell ya, that may well be enough.  It won't be easy to up sticks again (bigger sticks, for a start, like a whole house) but I think we're going to have to unless we want to spend the rest of our lives as the living dead.

Have to go and wash the ginky mess that is an over-dried face pack off my face now before I go to bed but I'll be back, maybe even at the weekend, with smoother skin and more to say.  Promise. 

YAY!  We finally have broadband at home.  Such a relief after three months of feeling totally unconnected - whatever did we used to do before the internet, I wonder?

I think it's time for a complete redesign before posting too much further.  Shall have to entice my code monkey to the PC by cunning distribution of figs, tea and ginger biscuits.  There is news aplenty to be disseminated.  For example, our chimneys (and all our other bits) were horribly jiggled the other day by an earthquake that measured 5.2 on the Richter scale; a local church group is trying to build a homeless shelter at the end of our road (yes, we are being somewhat NIMBY about it, I'm afraid, but we live in a cul-de-sac and I can't honestly see how this venue is suitable for the large scale project they are planning) and in July, I shall be in a play.  On a real stage, in a real theatre that people pay money to enter, in a part with actual words. Really not quite sure what made me go along to the audition in the first place, or why the directors chose me for a character from Manchester in her mid-40's (probably best not to ask) but should be good fun, if hard work to keep up the accent for a sustained period of time, not to mention the eight weeks of rehearsals during May and June.  Perhaps I had better be Method about it and insist on behaving and speaking as though I were Vera Duckworth or similar from now until the end of performances.

Unfortunately, the play itself doesn't strike me as particularly funny, even though it's supposed to be a comedy, so perhaps I'd be better off taking lessons in how to flog dead horses.   Shall have to spend some time watching Lenny Henry's Premier Inn commercials.