Pour ceux qui comprennent le français … Un ami facebookien m’a envoyé ce vidéo … C’est très marrant, mais (mot d’avertissement), c’est dégueulasse!

Moi, j’ai déjà eu la grippe A, mais malheureusement j’étais trop malade pour bien profiter des journées passées chez moi

Last night, I ate at My Old Dutch Pancake House in Holborn with K., S. and A. 

K., A. and I ordered three meaty pancakes to split and share;  S. is vegetarian and ordered some kaasballen (deep fried cheese balls), which were marked with a (V).

After she’d taken our order, the waitress said, “Just to let you know, the kaasballen are fried in the same oil as some of our meat dishes”.

S. queried why, in that case, there was a vegetarian (V) symbol next to kaasballen in the menu.  The waitress explained that this was because the dish was  … wait for it … ”vegetarian”.

A discussion then ensued along the lines of the following:

Us:   Why are the cheese balls labelled as being vegetarian when they’re not?

Waitress:    The cheese balls themselves are vegetarian.  It’s just that they have been cooked with meat products.

Us:   Well, they’re not vegetarian then, are they?

Waitress:   [Completely missing the point].  Yes, they are.

Us:   No, they’re not

etc etc….

What the fuck?!  Surely that’s like making a lamb and vegetable stew and calling that vegetarian because it contains carrots.

S. didn’t have the non-vegetarian cheese balls.  She had to make do with some soup instead, which was supposedly vegetarian … although who knows?  I don’t think it was very nice, either, as she left half of it.

Later in the evening, we decided to order some coffees, only to be told that we couldn’t have any hot drinks because the restaurant had “run out of hot water” !?!   Not quite sure how that works – don’t they know how to boil a kettle?!  Maybe they order in their water ready-boiled or something. 

I’m ranting and moaning as usual, but I actually had a very nice evening.  I hadn’t seen K. and A. for a while.  And S. is my Sri Lankan friend who returned home a while ago and who is now back in the UK for several months.  It was great to catch up.

Overall, the restaurant gets 6.5/ 10.  The pancakes were rather yummy, and reasonably priced.  And they have giant clogs that you can play in and take silly photos of at the entrance.  Not brilliant for coffee drinking vegetarians, though.

That was the question on everyone’s lips today at work.

An email came round offering us all the swine flu jab.  We’re “front-line NHS workers”, you see.

I was surprised by just how many of my colleagues are choosing NOT to have the jab.  Many were saying they just didn’t trust it, and were worried about it making them sick.

I had to chuckle to myself.

These are the same colleagues who talk about how irresponsible parents who choose not to give their kids the MMR are; colleagues who know the percentage of people that need to be innoculated against measles in order that ‘herd immunity’ be achieved, and who gently humour parents who suggest a link between the MMR and the sudden onset of autistic behaviours in their child.*

They don’t seem to realise the irony of their behaviour. 

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*   As everyone knows, there is thought to be no link between autism and the MMR.

Get ready.  Here I go again - whingeing and moaning. 

If there’s anyone still out there reading this blog, I can only apologise.  But then it’s my blog, innit?  And if I want to complain, I’m allowed to.

My frustration today is with STUFF.  The amount of stuff I have.  And I have tons of it. 

Yes, I know I already mentioned this a couple of posts back … but I really do have SO MUCH STUFF.  I feel like I have much more than other people. 

When I say stuff, I mean bits of paper.  Bank stuff, teaching resources, things acquired at long-forgotten SLT courses, university notes, letters, photos, souvenirs, important documents.  The list goes on and on …  And it all resides in dozens of bags and boxes … mainly all shoved in in a pretty random manner.

Thinking about it all gives me a real feeling of uneasiness.  I want to sort it all out.  Organise it.  Throw stuff away … and  I do try! 

I am constantly trying to take control, but never seem to manage it.  No time.  So much to sort.  Maybe my standards are too high?  

Having it organised would massively improve the quality of my life.  I would be able to find things.  I could tick it off my mental ’to-do’ list. 

Should I be ruthless and chuck everything non-essential away?    What is ‘non-essential’, though?

Should I keep my uni notes?  Or scan them (a mammoth task)?

Am I the only one who feels as if they are being controlled by a mass of papers?  Or am I just being a complete nut-job and getting this completely out of proportion? 

Maybe everyone else  lives underneath a mountain of papers and files, and just learns to accept the chaos.

Many people in my (speech and language therapy) workplace arrive unfeasibly early in the morning (7.30 or 8am).  This means that they can leave at 4 pm, or, sometimes on a Friday, even at 3.30! 

Whilst I’d love to be able to work to this schedule, it just doesn’t suit my body clock.  (Actually, if I didn’t have to work at all, I would probably wake up at 10am and go to bed at around 3 in the morning). 

I usually get to work at 9 ish, or if I am not seeing any children, sometimes even 9.30 or 9.45.  This means that I often leave later than everyone else – sometimes at 5.30 or even (gasp!) 6 o’clock!

Frequently, as they are leaving on a Friday (as I’ve just had my mid-afternoon cup of coffee) my colleagues will say to me and the other late starters things like “don’t stay too late”,  or “make sure you don’t work all weekend” etc etc.  And I laugh, but it really pisses me off!

The subtext, of course, is that people who stay ‘late’ only do so because they don’t have a life/ are working too much etc.

In my case, this may well be true(!), although that is really not the point.  The point is, it’s ONLY FOUR O’ CLOCK AND I DIDN’T GET IN TILL QUARTER TO TEN!

It can make working after 4 o’clock on a Friday pretty stressful sometimes, and I just wish they wouldn’t say it.

I haven’t written for ages.  I would like to say that this because my life has been one long social whirlwind, but alas, that is not the case.  Instead I have been working.  Fucking working.  Non-fucking-stop.  Bane of my life.

Nothing has changed.  I am still in the same rut.

My life is still utter chaos in many, many ways.  Bags of stuff everywhere.  Half organised files with notes and stuff – mainly because I don’t have time to do anything other than work.  Or that’s what it feels like, anyway.

I can see no light at the end of the tunnel.  I cannot just chuck in my job.  And any attempts at organisation are quickly scuppered by the Gods of … what’s it called?  When stuff just goes back where it was ‘meant’ to be? 

And things are pretty shit in my personal life at the moment, too.

So it’s all pretty depressing, mainly.

And I’m only writing this now as I wait for my trusty laptop to burn a disk that I need for my class tomorrow — because I have lost the original.  I spent an hour looking for it this evening (THIS MORNING! It’s 1.15am) before remembering that I had the audio files it saved on my laptop.

Blah blah blah.  There’s more to life than this, isn’t there?  Please tell me there is.  I have forgotten what it’s like to be normal!

Will I ever learn?

A freecycler has just turned up an hour and a half late!

My friends and family would no doubt tell you that I am not always the most ‘punctual’ of people, but an hour and a half, with no phone call, is taking the piss, don’t you think?

Admittedly I don’t have any major plans for this afternoon… but quand même … I couldn’t relax properly waiting for her to get here.

She called when she arrived outside to ask what number I lived at … so it’s not as if she didn’t have my number with her.

I was tempted to say I was out, and that she had missed her slot … but,  keen to get rid of the items in question, I in fact acquiesced.

No explanation or apology was proffered until I asked her (with an exaggerated grumpy face) why she was so late.

“I missed my train” . 

And?  There are trains all the time in London.  And that still doesn’t explain why she didn’t call.

Grrr.

Even though I had two lovely, prompt people who came to collect items yesterday, flakes like Little Miss Late really do put me off the whole scheme.

1. Put items for sale on ebay – free listing till 31st August!

2. Sort out this big bag of shite, aka teaching resources. (This is just a small sample of the many that I need to sort and organise, but I need to start somewhere!).

 
3. A bit of work —- boooo hissssss! (Gonna try and get it all done today, though).

4. Relax with Mr Jones’s book.

5. Later: Scrummy food, and paradoxically, this film.

Hope you’re all having a bank holiday blast.

ps I am so pleased because I have managed to fix my camera … with a Lego brick!  This means I won’t have to use my crappy phone camera in future – hooray!

I’ve drunk a lot of wine this evening.  Wasn’t  intentional but somehow one glass turned into many.

D (best female friend) and I met up with J., an old friend, who we hadn’t seen for 18 years – Facebook hook-up.  We went to school together from the age of 4 up to 18, and I don’t think I’ve seen him since.  I had a bit of a crush on him when I was younger.

We had drinks and more drinks in a bar near Liverpool Street Station, then tapas and more drinks in a restaurant nearby … Then D went home and me and J went for even more drinks at a very swish hotel.  (Bar looked like something out of an episode of Sex and The City!)

Very nice evening.  Weird to see J after all this time. Lots of talk about the past.  

I’m off to bed now.  Hope my head doesn’t explode during the night.