no sleep till…
Well I’m tired. After a week which has included some fairly athletic activity – far more than expected in fact, considering that the usual yearly pattern around now leans towards something of a slowdown; no sign of this yet! I can possibly blame a little of this at least on a spanking-new review on Captain 69, a members-only site which I admit to being less than familiar with (not being a member haha), hence my not posting any link on my main review bit, although bona fide paying members can find it from here. And maybe they could tell me what it says…
My not inconsiderable travels towards the latter half of the week sent me first to Sheffield for a charming assignation in a very delightful city centre hotel (and I was unexpectedly treated to my favourite Wagamama ramen, raw juice and even cherry cheescake after) followed by a late return to the less-than-delightful Ibis by the station, where one can choose whether to freeze all night or be warm but deprived of sleep with the hot air blower on (bearing in mind that the noise this generates is comparable to that heard from the runway at a provincial airport first thing in the morning) and back home via the red-eye for a couple of hours to shower, change, repack and feed fishes before setting off at lunchtime for Manchester and Other Business, of which as ever, more soon. The pictures in this weeks hastily put together BlackBerry collage (from Doncaster, Scarborough and Piccadilly stations) were all taken on the same day.
Arrival in Manchester on Thursday afternoon was brightened considerably by a couple of hours of tea and cake with the exotic and very lovely Nadia, who I am hoping to catch up with again in Jersey next week (tea and cake and shopping, more’n likely), but despite this, plus a very good Pizza Express cannelloni surrounded by the pretty fairy-lit trees on Piccadilly Gardens and an encouraging, informative and productive meeting on Friday I returned home late that evening with the sort of sleep-deprived, brain-scraped-out, exhausted feeling that I always hoped to leave behind with civvy jobs but does occasionally get the better of us all, and it has since taken two good lies-in, a homemade steak and kidney pudding, more mince pies and half a big bag of satsumas to set me back on an even keel.
So to this morning, and I wake up to the news that the scabrous inbreds at a certain Sunday tabloid have taken it upon themselves to expose yet another of our number, a formidable lady in her eighties whom I have long admired (along with her illustrious contemporaries, the fabulous Libby Ellis, for one). I am posting no further details – anyone who wants to look at the story can find it for themselves, and since this tawdry, scurrilous rag has published enough personal details for anyone who may have said hello to her once in the paper shop to recognise her and most incredibly, work out her location without too much difficulty, I do not intend to help them further. Would she (a UK citizen going about her legal business and bothering no-one) have been subjected to this had she been an octogenarian mobile hairdresser? I doubt it.
Oddly enough, earlier in the week I had a lazy, spammy cut-and-paste email from a man (I cannot bring myself to call them gentlemen, and reserve that term for my infinitely more deserving customers) requesting information from me as an advertiser on the TLC website regarding whether I have been paid by the local authority under a new scheme intended to provide those in receipt of specific disability allowances with more autonomy over how their cash is spent; I am not an expert in how these things work, but having had it explained by a far more knowledgeable friend, in a nutshell, previously it was decided in advance and by others how much of each payment recipients were to spend on food, bills, clothing and so on, but from now they will receive an ordinary sum which may be spent in any way they see fit, just as the majority of adults receiving any kind of income do already. Obviously some people will spend some of this payment on visiting sex workers, and apparently this has (somewhere along the convoluted line) been blown up and twisted around to paint a picture of eager (PVC-clad for preference) prossies lining up en masse outside the local Town Hall to register for their Mr and Mrs Taxpayer-funded Disabled Punter cheques and get our desperate, greedy hands on some public moolah. You get the general idea.
I freely admit that I may have at least given it at least a passing consideration had the individual in question’s most recent articles been for publications not sporting cheery red tops, but I shudder to think of the likely outcome here. If Mr Dagnell is reading this, the sorry tale above should be ample demonstration of why we don’t want to talk to you (and for the record, it is considered polite to address people whom you are emailing by name). Oh and incidentally, the ‘significant amount of money’ that your non-story commissioners are apparently offering (and the faux-confidential, carrot-dangling tone in which this was mooted actually made me laugh out loud) is unlikely to raise a flicker in many of us. I’ll be the judge of what is significant to me, pal. Have you seen my Rates page?
Life’s not always fair unfortunately – my best wishes go out to the lady, her family and her happy punters; I have made comment on the online article and would like to suggest others do likewise. As for the coming days, I am in Scarborough until the end of the week before I set off for lovely St Helier once again and still have a handful of appointments left on Monday, Tuesday lunchtime and Wednesday afternoon. I have some availability left in Jersey too, but since this is scattered about (to say the least), as ever, emailing requests is the way to go (and the same applies to London which is filling up at a hellish rate, and I will soon be having to plan my excursions to see the lights and shop windows far earlier than I had anticipated). For the moment it’s gym, swim and back to the couch – I’m starting to think I’m getting too old for all this charging about. Only kidding…
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