The one with the good, the bad and the ugly...

2009 prepared us well for this week. Yup, back to the bad luck of yore... though not after some extraordinarily good luck.

OK, so for the good luck first - last week my laptop died (yes, the laptop that had to be brought back to life last year). It really died - it melted some nearby keys and fused the room. I was resigned to buying a new laptop, budgeting and searching for them online. Then, along comes the Head of Library Services to the front desk where I work. She asks for me and tells me that I've won a laptop for entering a super geeky competition - you had to fill in a questionnaire about library services at the University of Westminster. It's a cute little Acer Ferrari Netbook and I'm really pleased with it - it works faster than a snail on strike, it doesn't have several broken keys that I've learnt to bash and it doesn't threaten to set fire to our room... all in all it's a very good freebie.

That was Wednesday of last week. On the same day the Dean of our School said that Fabio Capello (The manager of England's football team) was going to come to our office on Friday. We were all talking football at the time and figured it was some strange little joke on the Dean's part. However, as the week unfolded it seemed he was either creating a ludicrously elaborate hoax or he was telling the truth. Friday comes and a few of us have decided that it's worth bringing in England shirts for him to sign. Sure enough, 3pm rolls around and Capello walks into the office. He was doing an interview for The Independent alongside an artist exhibiting at the University, the Dean's good friends with the artist and he volunteered his room for the interviews. My boss was brave enough to run after Capello to get her shirt signed, encouraged by work mates I followed sheepishly behind and got my shirt signed. I also wished him luck in South Africa, so the World Cup for England is all sorted now;-)

All in all a great week, but then...

Last weekend my ear started swelling up and I started feeling ill - really ill. I've had a sebaceous cyst in my ear for years. Sometime during the last month it'd become infected. I went to the doctor on Monday morning, got prescribed antibiotics and then went into work. I was told to stick with the antibiotics for at least 48 hours, so I did. I spent two days feeling absolutely awful whilst they did nothing, by the time I went back to the doctors on Thursday the cyst had formed into an abscess. I was sent to Accident & Emergency to get it drained and removed, however the surgeon decided that given the size this was not a good idea - I needed to take two types of antibiotics, an anti-inflammatory and a painkiller, to cope with the pain and the infection before they could operate. I go home and a few hours later it bursts - however awful this sounds it was far worse in real life, Raine nearly threw up on my head! I then had to go and see an Emergency Dr, who said I had to go back to A&E... now I continue on the tablets, have to get it dressed every day and have it removed when the infection goes. I am starting to feel better, which rocks because it was not nice and I would not like to die from an infected ear;-) If you are especially gruesome you can follow some of The Ear's development on Facebook...

OK, and for the final piece of bad luck (I'm going to skip my mother's potential Stroke and the car dying for fear of you getting too depressed;-))... we're meant to be in Fuerteventura right now (think for a moment, would I be blogging if we were on holiday?)...we thought Ear Gate might put a stop to the holiday, but no, it wasn't an exploding ear - it was an exploding volcano. The UK is a no fly zone because of volcanic ash and that means no holiday for us (Raine has suggested that we've had good luck at the start of 2010 because the god that's been torturing us has been busy planning volcanic eruptions to blight us - narcissistic, perhaps, but possible...?;-))... We were so looking forward to this holiday - our second time abroad in our five years together. Granted it was meant to be a surfing holiday and I could not longer surf (The Ear doesn't like sea water and threatens to try to kill me again if I go near the sea), but my first All Inclusive sun and sand still sounded sweet. Now we are trying to think of a Plan B. We can't get the money back straight away so we are a little cash strapped but we are determined - we are resourceful after 2009! Even if it's not a match to the original holiday we have started our ironic holiday album, so wait for its publication - it's going to be good, in some form or another...

The one with the secret supper and blackouts...

Last weekend we went to our first Secret Supper Club, held by Green Onions. For those of you who don’t know what a secret supper club is you can visit http://england-travel.suite101.com/article.cfm/different_dining_at_a_london_secret_supper_club to find out more. Basically it’s a guerrilla restaurant scene – chefs set up a one-night-only restaurant in someone’s home, you get a restaurant standard three course meal for a set price. It’s such a brilliant idea, it’s something that we’ve want to go to for a while but they’re really popular and you’re lucky to get a place. I had Thursday and Friday of last week off work and I happened to spot that Green Onions had a good menu for Sunday and a couple of cancellations, I rushed off an email requesting the spaces and they were ours. I planned it as a surprise for Raine and she thought it was brilliant – she had no idea what was going on, but kept thinking it was weirder and weirder when I made her take the train to suburbia on the other side and London and insisted that we stop off for a bottle of wine along the way. She was very happy when she found out what we were doing. It was such a chilled atmosphere, we were just in someone’s flat, temporary tables had been put up in the living room, we shared the table with three other diners and we all sang happy birthday to one of the guests, while a surprise cake was presented, at the end of the meal. The food was excellent and we had lots of fun, it’s definitely something we’ll do again and would recommend to others.

I’ve been playing a lot of music lately. I’m planning to home record a mini album of six songs before the summer. I have a title for it and we’re going to be taking shots for the front while we’re in Blackpool this weekend.

We’re heading back to Blackpool over the Easter weekend, we’re visiting family and friends and we will be out at our usual haunts on Saturday night so give us a shout if you’re around and want in!

Most exciting news of this blog - we’ve booked to go on holiday next month. We’re off to Fuerteventura for a week - we’re going All Inclusive which is quite exciting for me. I’ve never been on a package holiday before and I am like a small child thinking of all this unlimited food and alcohol on offer:-D I’m going to put all my weight back on in a week! We are going to be doing quite a lot of surfing while we’re there, so hopefully that’ll help keep some of the lbs at bay. This is only our second holiday abroad in the whole time we’ve been together, so we’re really excited – we decided that we just wanted to go somewhere sunny and relax for a week. We’re also planning to go to Australia for three weeks in December, fundage permitting!

We want to do a festival this summer and we’re open to suggestions, preferably one that doesn’t get cancelled on the day it’s meant to start…still not quite over last year’s festival disaster! We’re not sure we want to do a big rock festival. We could be convinced to do a day of Leeds/Reading: Friday (Reading) or Sunday (Leeds), but not the whole weekend; we can’t keep up with the kids any more – camping in a war zone doesn’t hold the attraction it once did… sad, but true. I’m attracted by Latitude, but I’m holding out on buying tickets until the Cambridge Folk Festival line-up is announced.

We went to see Waiting for Godot a couple of weeks ago. That was pretty amazing. We got to see Ian McKellan (and Roger Rees) in action and he was brilliant – he really blew everyone else off the stage. Matthew Kelly was also in it, in a bid to be recognised as a serious actor rather than that bloke from Stars in your Eyes. He did an ok job, to be fair – but he didn’t match up to McKellen and Rees.

We’re going on a mystery theatre trip when we come back from Fuerteventura, courtesy of Paul, we’re intrigued and excited!

Final news – our flat took Saturday’s Earth Hour deadly seriously… the power went out (in the whole of our building) at 8pm and didn’t come on for around 15 hours… There was some problem with the power lines and the electricity company had to come and dig up the road on Sunday morning. It meant that we spent Saturday evening in darkness and realised that we need to buy some candles for the new place… Earth Hour was known as Earth 15 Hours in our flat.

The one with the big move and the big news

I’ve been living and working in London for a month now and it’s all going really well. Raine moved down here permanently a couple of weeks ago and she started work - at the University of London – on Monday. In the end we only had to spend three weeks apart (this broke our four and a half years of not spending a single night apart, but it was a lot less time than we’d originally feared), one of those weeks was a half week and we saw each other every weekend. On Raine’s final day in Lancaster I secretly took a day off work, spent seven hours creased up on a National Express coach to Blackpool and arrived in Lancaster in my dad’s car. Raine was outside our house packing our car; I got out of my dad’s car and asked if she needed any help – big hugs followed! Who says romance dies after the first couple of years!?;-) We spent that weekend ooop north together before heading back to London.

I’m enjoying my new job. It’s a very quiet time in the office and I’m looking forward to things getting a little busier, but the people I’m working with are really friendly and the office is very chilled out. My biggest work based problem is deciding what to do with the enormous amount of leave I get! I get seven weeks paid leave, on top of University closures and bank holidays. We are thinking of going to Australia for three weeks in December. We both have a week booked off in April and we’re planning to go abroad surfing, either to the Canary Islands or Morocco.

Things are going pretty well down here. Having one room of our own, rather than a whole house takes a bit of adjusting to (though it’s luxury compared to our first two years together, when we lived together in a single student room), but the accommodation is really great. The location is excellent– the area feels really safe and we’re only two miles out of Central London. We can either get the tube or a bus from outside the door into Central London. It takes me 20 – 25 minutes to get to work in the morning, which means I can go to the gym (which is in the basement) or have a good lie in on weekdays – I don’t start work until 10am. The accommodation’s social space rocks – we have a gym, a cinema, table tennis, fuse ball, a lounge (with three games consoles) and a patio with a BBQ. There are drinks for all the flatmates each Wednesday and other events through the month.

I think London’s everything we imagined before we moved here. There’s always something to do – which is what we wanted. We’ve been to the theatre several times and the shows we generally want to see don’t break the bank. We went to our local theatre last Monday; unfortunately the play: The Dead School, was a bit disappointing, but the theatre is really cool – fairly progressive and innovative, it tends to get plays by new writers. We’ve enjoyed both shows we’ve been to at The National Theatre. Most recently we saw Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves A Favour. A full orchestra was incorporated into the production which made for really interesting viewing. We’re going to try and see Waiting For Godot whilst it’s on at the Theatre Royal, we both really like the play but have never seen it together before.

People ask us a lot if London is expensive… I think the only thing we’re really feeling the cost of is cinema, you pay the best of £10 (if you’re lucky) for a cinema ticket, which is hard to justify. We’re going to try and get to Orange Wednesday showings, but everyone has the same idea so it’s always packed and hard to get tickets on a Wednesday. I feel like I should make a stand. There’s this advert that they show at the start of every film, an incredibly patronising woman comes on and tells us that Piracy is killing cinema…I’m going to make an advert for the cinema owners, telling them that their prices are killing cinema.

We bought a couple of DVDs the other day, rather than going to see MicMacs – the two DVDs were considerably less than two cinema tickets. We might start making movie nights a home affair (though it seems sad), we’re thinking of investing in a flat screen TV, as the TV we currently have in the room is miniscule and the one we’ve left up north is gigantic and bulky and would almost involve a whole car journey of its own.

We’ve found some great places to eat out and there’s a wonderful music venue in Camden. Richard Shindell’s playing there in August (one of the few artists I love but have never seen live) and Eric Taylor is playing there in the autumn. They also have an Open Mic every Sunday, which I’m planning to play fairly soon.

Finally, the most exciting piece of news – I got to sing with Nanci Griffith in Belfast last month! This is a life time ambition come true and I still can’t believe that it happened. We sang Well Alright and If I Had A Hammer together. I kept opening my eyes whilst I was singing, seeing Nanci and thinking, ‘Oh My God – that’s Nanci Griffith!’

Luck, or lack thereof

I haven’t blogged since August, have I? Back then – ‘summer’ (ha, ha, ha – summer? Aka: Rainy season, but warmer than the other rainy seasons) - I was talking all about our bad luck. Well it certainly hasn’t turned. We must have stepped on too many pavement cracks and walked under too many ladders... I got attacked in Liverpool at the start of November, some guys came up behind me, threw stuff at me, then, later, yanked my hair back – they managed to rip a ligament in my shoulder – ouch! I had to be signed off work – I was like a baby, I couldn’t support my own head for a few weeks. I’d only just started my job, and out of the blue I got a letter saying I was fired because I was signed off. Apparently, because it was so early in my employment, I didn’t really have any rights. Bah! To be honest I’m kind of lucky – that place is messed up, I’ve yet to meet a happy employee from there, but I miss the money! I’m on the mend now (but not better) and hunting for jobs hard, I tried to sign on (get Job Seekers Allowance and Housing Benefits) but because Raine works we’re not allowed anything, even though her wages don’t even cover the bills – we’d be better off if she didn’t work! My laptop’s died; we have to climb in the boot of our car, because the locks have broken (we can't afford to fix either); I keep getting interviews for jobs, but there’s always an internal applicant and interviewers with no intention to employ anyone but the internal candidate... I could go on, but you get the idea – don’t come near us, we’re cursed;-)


We had a really good holiday in London, back in September. Then we went back – Raine had an interview there, for a job she didn’t take because I’d just gotten my job up here *sob*! We went back a few weeks ago for Santacon – so cool. Raine was Hippy Santa, and sewed fabric flowers into her suit, I was ‘The Dreaded Santa’, There were thousands of us, all dressed as Santa, marching through the streets of London (past the occasional bar/off license) celebrating Christmas – and that’s all we were doing. It was so fun going through Camden market and onto the Underground, we just kept spilling out, in all our Santafied glory. We made it into The Guardian on Saturday - we were the centre spread – a picture of lots of us, taking over Trafalgar Square. It took me ages to get the pictures onto Facebook – Raine’s camera died, we got a replacement, it died (yes, you see, we’re cursed) but they’re there now.


We had a quiet, but nice, Christmas and New Year. Both spent at home in Lancaster – due to money and circumstance (we were meant to be away, surfing in the Canary Islands). We enjoyed the snowy backdrop, lit our fire and ate a Vegetarian Christmas Dinner in front of it; then, New Year’s Eve we burnt resolutions on it. Our New Years Eve was so rocking I nodded off and Raine had to wake me before midnight!

I’m so happy 2009 is over – it was such an awful year, it really feels like a new leaf. Even if believing that the end of the year will make a difference makes no rational sense, I feel like it’s good for my soul - I have a new outlook on things – I was getting so jaded... well, hysterical, actually – Raine and I both started laughing when our car locks gave out, there was really nothing else to do at that stage – it was either laugh or cry, and I prefer the crazy option.

We have lots of resolutions, I won’t bore you with them all – there’s the usual: lose the rest of my weight, carry on exercising (me), start exercising (Raine!)... We’re also thinking seriously about starting our own business – it’s something we both want to do, and we both hate being apart for the best part of the week. We’re working hard towards it, and will be going for advice on business start ups in the next few weeks. It’s basically going to involve my cooking and a lot of travelling. That’s all I’m going to say for now, but I might turn this blog into a business/cooking blog soon, I think it’s going to be an interesting ride - or at the very least it’ll be nice for us to have it documented!

The one with the series of unfortunate events

We are cursed, if you’ve been following previous posts you know how much bad luck we’ve had over the past year, but this week’s been a bumper pack of punches in the face. We have no money, so we planned a budget holiday (it’s our first wedding anniversary, Raine’s been made to take time off work (she’s only taken about 5 days holiday all year), it’s her birthday, and we feel like we deserve some sort of break). It was to start with a local festival, a few friends and a lot of beer, followed by a camping roadtrip to Bristol (to see the Banksy exhibition), Brighton for our anniversary/Raine's birthday, and Newquay to surf. Sounds good...

Thursday I went to pick up Chris, and on the way back to Lancaster the car died – great start to a roadtrip. We managed to get it to a garage, where we were told that the starter motor had gone but, for a large amount of money we don't have, they could have it fixed by the next day. Chris and I unpacked all our stuff, and waited in Blackpool until I could take my dad’s car back to Lancaster.

My dad's car full of people and camping stuff we arrived at the festival on Friday morning, to find that it had been cancelled – apparently the site was waterlogged. We thought it was a joke, some man with a can of Strongbow and a rollie quite jollily told us it was cancelled, we didn’t believe him, but then a slightly more official man (he was scruffy, but he had a clipboard and no alcohol about his person) told us the same thing. We looked it up on the Internet, and it had indeed been cancelled. We talk to the man with the clipboard about a refund, apparently he “couldn’t think about giving us our money back” at that moment...cheers...

We decide to cut our losses, go out in Blackpool that night, and then head off on our roadtrip a couple of days early. We go out, have an ok night, but I slip on some rubbish in the road, I’m in pain, and the next morning it looks like I have an egg stuffed down my sock - add a sprained ankle to the list of unfortunate events.

I hobble about and help Raine pack up the car. We get in the car and we're off on the roadtrip - the car doesn’t start, again. We call the AA out, they say we have indeed got a new starter motor, but won't actually start the car. It’s Bank Holiday weekend, so no garages are open. Say goodbye to the Banksy exhibition because it finishes on Monday and we can only afford to camp in Bristol - so we need a car.

We retreat to Raine’s mum’s house firmly believing that we are cursed, but that we have to do *something* to stop ourselves jumping off Blackpool Tower. We start to investigate non-car reliant budget holiday options.

Now, here is the plan (and it’s quite good considering the time we took to come up with it, the lack of money, and the despair we were feeling). Tomorrow we take the coach to London – it’s absolutely amazing how cheap coaches are, yes they take *forever* to get anywhere, but they are cheaper than petrol and you can read while someone else does the driving (look at me looking on the bright side – eh!?!). We’re staying in a hostel that costs £30 a night for both of us, and that we’ve been to before, so we know it’s not flea infested. We’ve got free tickets to watch the Big Brother eviction tomorrow night – so, so, so sad, but free, and it will be entertaining. We get another coach to Brighton for the day on Wednesday, and hire some surf equipment, ankle permitting – it’s not Newquay, but it has surf, most of the time. Saturday we’re sitting in the Gods to watch an England friendly at Wembley – cheap because we will need binoculars to see the pitch (and we’re probably sat behind a pillar). Then there are the free museums and galleries, if I go ahead with some spray paint I can tell Raine that Banksy has been to those galleries...

The one with the swine flu

I’ve had swine flu for the best of two weeks. I’m slowly getting over the horrible thing. I’ve been so incredibly bored, and I blame daytime TV for my slow recovery. For the first couple of days I didn’t think it was too bad, just like a bad cold; it seemed so mild I thought it couldn’t be swine flu, just some virus I could shake off quickly, but it was just warming up - settling in to its new home. At my worst I’ve been ridiculously short of breath and tired, I had to take breath in the middle of even the shortest sentences, and even now I’m out of breath climbing a flight of stairs. I can understand why people are being made seriously ill by this thing, it’s nasty, and if you have breathing problems before you get this I think you’re going to be in trouble – once there’s a vaccine out, if you have underlying health problems, go and get it, asap. I’ll be glad to get over it, knowing that I can’t catch it again, especially considering the predictions that it might get worse come winter. Raine’s had a very mild version of it - because of her super-human immune system, she’s back at work and seems to be getting over it now.

I’ve not written a blog for ages, so I’ll add in some highlights of the past couple of months. We went to Rome at the end of June, for my 26th birthday. Very cool, very romantic, and very sunny:-) All in all: amazing! We were very impressed with how much we managed to pack into our two days there, I think we saw every major site – Vatican/Sistine Chapel, check; St Peter’s, check; the Pantheon, check; the Trevi Fountain, check; the Coliseum, check – you get the idea! Our pictures are up on Facebook, if you’re interested. It was amazing – all of it, I don’t think anywhere let me down. If I had to pick the highlight, though, St Peter’s was just awe inspiring – I was not prepared for the magnitude, and the splendour. We stayed in a wonderful hostel, right in the middle of Rome, it was reasonably priced and we got our own room – big bonus when it comes to hostels. On my birthday the hostel threw a pasta and wine party (for 2 Euros a person) on the hostel roof, the roof is several flights up, and it overlooks the whole of Rome – in short, it was an absolutely beautiful setting, and the food was excellent. There were big jugs of red wine, and it was really good wine – better than any house wine I’ve had in the UK. Generally the food in Rome was so good – we were on a budget, but it really didn’t matter, the cheap pasta and pizzas were so much better than anything I’ve ever had at an ‘Italian’ restaurant.

I got a temping job at Raine’s work. Unfortunately the flu has gotten in the way, and I don’t know if I’ll be going back – I have to wait for a temp space to come back up. I’m applying for other jobs at the moment, there are some I’m really enthusiastic about, but they’re very ambitious, so we’ll see.

Next month is a big month – Raine’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and our fourth anniversary...actually it’s more of a big day, since they all fall on September 4th. Raine has a week off, we go to a local festival the weekend after next (it’s called Tommyfest, it’s a charity rock festival, and if you’re in the Blackpool/Lancaster area you should come and join our camp!). We’ll be camping there for three days. Then we’re planning to head off with our tent wherever we feel like heading to. I’m hoping we’ll get some surfing in. We’d both like to see the Banksy exhibition in Bristol – but the enormous queues are putting us off the idea.

Finally, on the weight loss front – I should hit the 2 stone lost mark very soon:-) At which point I’ll be half a stone away from my target weight. I’ve lost quite a lot while I’ve been ill, but I miss the gym – I’m a gym junkie...

Welcome Home

I’m excited about a few things this week.

First: I’ve lost a Stone:-D Little victories. It feels really good but I didn’t think the consequences through – my clothes are falling off of me, and my wedding ring is getting increasingly slack. Since I have at least another stone and a half to lose there’s no way I’m going to get away with keeping the clothes and the wedding ring. The ring will be lost – it’s already slipping down to my knuckle; I went into the shop we got the rings from, it can’t be shrunk but they still make the rings so I should be able to get a replacement. As for the clothes - at best I’ll look like a child waiting to grow into my clothes, at worst I’ll lose my trousers regularly - they’re already starting to make embarrassing bids for freedom.

Second: Nanci’s (Nanci Griffith) new album rocks. I’d strongly recommend it. Of course I’m probably the most biased person in the world when it comes to Nanci Griffith, but if it helps it’s been getting rave reviews from more evenly balanced music journalists and bloggers. For the Nanci educated it’s a real return to her folky routes, so much so that she bought the engineer from ‘Last of The True Believers’ in - she wanted it to have that album’s vibe (this is exciting, ‘Last of the True Believers’ is a masterpiece). She’s really got something going with this one, sound and writing wise. The sound is tight and organic – a small group of acoustic musicians just jamming, but really working together – they pull of some really lush stuff. Lyric wise I really like a new approach she seems to have taken, most of the songs are lyrically sparse, leading you to places but not taking you all the way. I’m only just listening to it second time through, but man it’s making me happy:-D

Third: we’re in the house! We got the keys yesterday. I had to wait six hours longer than Raine to get in there. I had my intensive Bible and Culture class, which goes on for five and a half hours. It was worth the wait, though. It’s such a great house. It’s really beautiful. Loads of character, the soul hasn’t been ripped out, leaving a homogenous shell that hopes to match every other house in the world. It’s creaky and colourful, old and new. We’re slowly moving ourselves in; we’re only using our car at the moment. We kind of like moving in slowly, it gives us time to unpack without feeling overloaded with boxes; it lets us think of what we really want to bring next. It’s a good process, we love the house so much, it’s somewhere we’re growing into and that’s growing around us, I think that’s going to be an ongoing process...I feel really positive here! We’re having a house warming a week on Saturday, it should be a lot of fun; I really hope the weather holds out because we’re planning a BBQ.

We’ve seen a few films lately. If, like us, you really want to go to the cinema but the only thing that seems passable is ‘Terminator: Salvation’, let me tell you – find something, anything, else to do. A truly, truly awful film. ‘Star Trek’ was better - it fulfilled its role as an action film. On the other hand, ‘Milk’ is a truly, truly excellent film – go see! We finally saw ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, it was ok, but I think it was way too long, and the short story’s a million times better, the film cuts the soul out of the short story.