Out of ideas

Things I have done today:

1. Dressed in tracksuit bottoms so elderly there’s a couple of places you can practically read through them, and an orange tee-shirt of more than usual grottiness.
2. Read the newspapers.
3. Put a shirt wash on, then, later, hung said wash out to dry.
4. Washed the cooker hood (getting S to dismantle and remantle it, as I am Girl and hence completely defeated by a piece of metal that clips onto another piece of metal if you give it a firm push).
5. Scrubbed the terrifyingly disgusting stove-top, which involved removing all the removable parts and scrubbing those in the sink. Also, bad language.
6. Cleaned all the kitchen surfaces, including sink and drainer, which needed Ecover’s finest lime-scale remover.
7. Cleaned both lavatories.
8. Had lunch and stared glumly at the state of my hands.
9. Cleaned the Bath That Is Not Busted, the floor after rinsing the bath too vigorously, and both sinks, one of which was so perfectly laminated in tooth-paste it smelt minty while I was doing it. Which is horrible.
10. Hand washed an assortment of delicate woollen and silk garments guaranteed to morph into hideous little shrunken voles if put in the washing-machine.
11. Realised with a kind of exhausted fatalism that I haven’t done Tuesday’s coursework. Or answered my emails. Or resent my CV to my tutor, who thought it could do with a quick re-jig (I disagreed, very very quietly, but he’s the tutor, so I lose).

(Meanwhile S did the washing up, all the hoovering, went to the supermarket in the sleet, made me lunch and (breakfast for that matter) and has spent the past two days wading through the Swamp of Unregarded Paperwork that has been seeping through from the study to the kitchen table and beyond for the past several months).

All of which makes this meme, from that most excellent source of memery, Charlotte, so much the more fun.

Six guilty pleasures no one would suspect you of having:

1. Gingerbread lattes. I am supposed to avoid dairy, and sugary things, and generally I like to give off a black coffee and Soubranie vibe insofar as such a thing can be done by a dumpy Englishwoman who has never smoked. Occasionally I snap and have a gingerbread latte. Sorry.
2. Tintin. Asterix is pretty respectable these days, but Tintin?
3. Oh, and milk chocolate, which again I should not eat, touch, look at or consider, in case all my skin falls off and my pancreas implodes. And again, I have always made a bit of a big deal out of being a tiny squares of black chocolate girl, to keep temptation well away. Lies, it’s all lies, I tell you.
4. Perfume. Not big brand, designer ones – I violently dislike smelling ‘my’ perfume on someone else. I however do own a fair few odd, recherché perfumes (I got married while scented with grapefruit, roses and fennel, for example) and I do spend serious amounts of time politely sniffing my own wrists.
5. Not answering certain relations’ phonecalls or emails. I rather wish I did this more often, with less guilt.
6. Watching Star Trek reruns. Any old Star Trek will do, but Jean-Luc Picard has my heart. You all know this, but, I can assure you, there are many that don’t. Despite my tendency to mutter ‘Make it so,’ during moments of tension.

Six guilty pleasures you wish you had the courage to indulge:

1. I do so want to die my hair ink black.
2. And while I’m at it, ladle myself into something seriously corseted and extra-skirty (my wedding dress was a total triumph in this regard, and I felt like the Queen of May) and drift through S’s teeny home-town’s market square. With coordinating Doc Martens on.
3. I have often pondered getting a small, classy tattoo. But I was brought up to believe any kind of tattooing is declassé, and the whole concept an oxymoron.
4. I want to take a week of work, send S to, oh, I don’t know, somewhere very nice indeed that is not here, and spend it all in bed, reading. And eating chocolate no doubt. Because though I love S with the power of a thousand suns – and if I announced I was spending the week in bed with a pile of books he’d even make me tea while I did it – alas I was brought up by Catholics and the idea of anyone watching me do nothing at all brings me out in a cold sweat. I mean, I can’t even let the man do his own laundry without feeling I have somehow been betrayed into selfish idleness and I ought to be therefore cleaning the carpet with my tongue (ought, but bloody well won’t, by the way).
5. One day I will take every stupid figurine, vase, attractive bottle, candle-holder, nick-nack and decorative plate and bowl I own and smash the lot in the back garden. Except the papier maché cats S gave me. They can stay.
6. I keep promising myself an opal ring. When, and if, I deserve one.

Six pleasures you once considered guilty but now have made peace with:

1. My caffeine habit. S never takes caffeine and thinks coffee smells like Beelzebub’s own gravy. I felt bad about my inability to keep the tin tabernacle of my body pure of the Black Bean for years. Now, I cheerfully announce every bit of media fluff about how coffee is good for you, and swig back another dose.
2. Knitting. I always felt being ‘grannyish’, as certain peers called it, was something of a disadvantage and also a marker of my immense social ineptitude. Now I think, you know what? Geeks rule. Even yarn geeks. And my socks are cuter than yours.
3. Which segues neatly into, Knitting for myself. Naughty Reed, how dare she spend hours and hours and money even on making something for her own unworthy feet? Answer, she totally dares, also, is knitting a sweater out of pure [Read, expensive - Ed] merino now and will look so very damn cute in it. So there. (Aside: I think I saw what will now become my slogan the other day: ‘I knit so I don’t kill people’).
4. Eating peanut butter out of the jar with a teaspoon. Look, it’s high protein, it’s full of essential fatty acids, and spreading it on bread just adds unnecessary carbohydrates to the mix. Leave me alone.
5. Staying in the bath for hours, reading, and adding more hot water as it cools down, so I can stay in it for hours. At boarding school, hogging the bath and the hot water was a Cardinal Sin. I think it is because I spent years not being allowed to that it feels so very good now.
6. Refusing to eat in the canteen with my colleagues. OK, so it’s anti-social. But a) I need to eat something that tastes nice and is not made of cheese, refined carbohydrates, cooked carrots or gristle or I’ll be unspeakable all afternoon, and b) I need to sit quietly by myself and read a book and generally decompress or I will take a swing at someone with a Compleat Dictionary by 4pm. I am very much a small amounts of people in small doses person. I just am. It’s not personal.

Anyone else fancy a spot of revelation?

I had a lovely idea for a post. It was something to do with librarianship coursework, subject headings, and my poetry book collection. Unfortunately, I had said lovely idea while on a train, and when I got off the train, the idea dissolved in the drizzle.

I had a simply fantabulous post brewing about George Eliot. No idea where that went to. It might turn up. Then again, it might turn up unrecognisable and covered in lint.

I wanted to tell you all about Christmas, agony of, and what I shall be doing instead, but it was coming out repellantly maudlin, and you know a post is no good when you can’t bring yourself to hit the ’save and continue editing’ button.

I could babble excitedly about S’s new computer (dear God, we have three iMacs in the house. Three. How?) but nobody except a MacHead would want me to, and all MacHeads sneer at me because I am still going ‘ooohhh, shiny, buttons, swoosh!’ and looking blank and/or distraught when asked about Firewire and graphics cards. [It sends cards? - Ed].

NaNoWriMo asks a great deal of a girl, you know. Talking! Every night!

We have a pointless, somewhat masochistic ritual in mid-November. We get in beer, and a takeaway, and our best bad attitudes, and we pile all these up in front of the telly and watch Children in Need until the small hours, bitching, kibitzing and sneering our way through the rice noodles. And then one of us cracks and reads out our credit-card details to an exhausted minor celebrity over the phone, and then we go to bed.

A somewhat extreme cure for insomnia, but hey. I’ll try anything at this point.

Missed highlight of the evening so far: a little skit by two cast members of Robin Hood. Guy of Gisborne (phwoar. Seriously. PHWOAR) confiscates Maid Marian’s Pudsey Bear, but agrees to return it if the Public donate some money. Of course the suckers do, and Pudsey is once more pressed to Marian’s anachronistically clad bosom. While I urgently shouted that I’d've paid very good money indeed to see Guy drop the beastly yellow object into a wood chipper. So disappointed.

I am a tired Reed. With insomnia. I am very well aware that listening to people droning on about their blasted insomnia is a good narcotic. So I shan’t. I shall go and paste vague, emotional and misspelt comments all over everyone else’s blogs instead.