That's what Christmas means to me...

All that fuss and nothing’s changed.

How’s that for a depressing start to 2011? Sorry, I don’t really mean it that way, it’s just that once more there was a huge build-up and in the space of a few weeks, we are back to the way were. Poorer, fatter, possessing a lot more socks than is decent for one individual and wondering just how long its going to take to use all that Lynx.

Eating Pringles and watching old Only Fools & Horses Christmas specials. Sorry Mariah, but that’s what Xmas means to me.

Sorry, I’ll stop this now before a trio of overused Xmas cliche ghosts visit me in the night.

Of course, this year it was all about the snow, the ice and the slipping. In a moment of light premonition, I blogged about the snow a few weeks before it all arrived, never imagining for a moment that it would hit us all so hard. In Plymouth, we were quite lucky and for the first 10 days or so, we were a lone strip of tropical greenness on the weather maps. It just rained a bit really and once more we all thought the lovely Gulf Stream would keep us out of trouble. Unfortunately, it was not to be. I can’t remember the exact day it happened but down it came, not in huge amounts but enough to cover everything and enough to make sure ice would stay around for a few weeks. I think it only actually snowed three times but it might as well have kept coming down. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but if we had all just shovelled it away from our paths and parking spaces on those three occasions, we would probably have been ok. Alas, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in reality. What does happen, amazingly, is that some folks still insist on clearing their windscreen with warm water. Whilst this is probably better for the environment that the litres of de-icer I personally employ, it does create selfish sheets of black ice on the road a little while after these cretins depart. It’s a level of stupidity hard to imagine. It’s almost up there with the idiots who drove around with 5 inches of snow on their car roof, only to have it slide off onto the car behind them at the first set of traffic lights.

Brilliant idea.

I just wanted the roads to stay drivable until Christmas Eve, at which point I would pull up the drawbridge until January 10th. It mostly did but the few weeks of icy hell were not without incident. Only once did it look like I wouldn’t be able to get to work but by 2pm, the road was just about navigable. It was slippery as hell of course but only for the first few hundred yards. Once you made it onto the main road, it was ok.

It doesn’t sound too bad does it? Unfortunately, the black ice and snow didn’t leave our home streets at all and some people had it far worse than me. Maybe those who lived closer to main roads or in town need to swap with us next year. The small slope into my close was as dangerous as any in Devon and twice it forced me to park half a mile from my front door. Private car parks were unusable and everyone had to resort to parking on the street which meant that by 10.15pm when I got home, I had to hunt for safe place to park up, often in places that were far from safe.

As I have often said, I used to like snow and then I learned to drive. Until you have felt the wheels on your own car lose traction and experienced your big heavy box of metal glide slowly out of your control, you don’t know what you are talking about. It all seems like a bit of fun when it’s not your car (or person) involved.

At this point, I am wondering just who I am writing this for. We pretty much all had a white Christmas this year and I know you probably all experienced something similar.

Still, I have typed it all now.

Christmas itself didn’t disappoint. As is traditional these days, it was first heralded in early September in most of the shops. Sure, we complain and laugh at this absurdity but as soon as they start selling the crap, we all start buying it. I am not actually sure why we moan so much. If we all went out and bought a few bits a pieces every week, by the time December came round, we wouldn’t all be trying to buy presents, cards and decorations out of one paycheck.  My mother does this and bathes in a almost intolerable smugness once her last present is wrapped just after bonfire night. I start every year intending to do the same sort of thing, but I can give you very good odds on my not managing it once again.

Happy Christmas!

One of the newest, and possibly most annoying aspect to the moden Christmas is the the (vaguley) solicited Christmas email from someone whose online services you have availed yourself of at some point. I say “at some point” to be generous. To be honest, I swear that some of these people have never benefited from my custom or interest. Whether I had or not doesn’t really justify the email, but still they come. I had several this year, mostly from “services” I had used – web site counters, online bookmarking services etc – and all the email did was to remind me to unsubscribe successfully from their services. I can’t help but think they dropped a bollock somewhere there.

“Happy Christmas from Statcounter.com”. Really? Can a web service actually want to wish me a Happy Christmas? I doubt the staff give a fig about me, so I doubt it’s from them. Pointless, humourless, ingenuine marketing. There’s enough email crap in the world chaps. Facebook takes care of that nicely thank you.

At least the bottle of wine and card from the Indian Takeaway meant something. Joyeux Noel Sanjeeb!

The Slimming World regime went out of the window on Christmas Eve and only came back into force yesterday. According to my scales, 4lbs seems to be the result. Not too bad but it does mean I go back to group on Thursday weighing only 1lb less than I did when I joined a year ago. Brilliant. 1lb lighter and about £250 poorer. It could be worse though. If I didn’t go, I would be a lot heavier. I have proved I can go a lot lighter, but the celebratory fallout from such success always pushes me back up. Yes, I know it makes no sense but it’s the truth. I have another medical in about 3 months. I just need to lost a stone by then. Onwards and upwards.

So, Xmas 2011. To sum up. Pringles, log cake, Top Gear, Upstairs Downstairs, Eric & Ernie, True Blood, Supernatural, Twilight Blu Ray Boxset, not enough visiting, too much insomnia and 4lbs. That just about takes care of it. Oh and one more thing. WD Live TV. A thing of beauty.

Until later, word fans, when I shall beguile you with my 2010 top 10′s. If I don’t do it, who will?

The Bleak Midwinter

Sliding, Scraping & Staying Home

It’s a funny thing, winter. Certainly in Plymouth it is anyway. It happens about once every five years and just like it did last January, it completely screws things up for a week or so. The snow falls unexpectedly to a depth of about an inch and no-one knows what the hell to do. You switch on local TV news to see kids sliding down the merest hint of a hill on a dustbin lid, a poor driver trying and failing to drive his car up an icy incline and worst of all, a local reporter has been driven to the middle of nowhere to show us the scarf he got for Christmas and to indicate with a sweep of his arm what chaos awaits you outside.

Commuter Chaos!

Important-looking officials impart the most pointless instruction in the world “stay at home unless your journey is absolutely necessary” and everyone ignores them for fear of having no milk in their tea, no fag in their mouth and possibly the kids at home all day. Seriously, how would you classify a journey as “not absolutely necessary”? Certainly, no employer is going to let you off a days work because someone on the radio told you stay at home. What usually happens is that you chip your car out of the frost and drive gingerly away. You sit forward enough for your nose to touch the windscreen and you grip the steering wheel in the hope that the harder you do so, the more grip the tyres are going to have on the road. It doesn’t help of course. You are almost certain to start sliding sideways the moment you touch the brakes and if there’s one thing worse than a high speed accident, its an incredibly slow one that you can do nothing about. Nevertheless, your employer still expects you get there and its once you are there that your problems really begin. If it has stopped actually snowing by the time you get to work, it will start again not long after you arrive. You and your employer will then do little work anyway and instead stare at the window and the slow-falling flakes of chaos. You will be hoping to be sent home soon and they are hoping that it will stop and that they won’t have to send you home soon, whilst simultaneously hoping they CAN send you home thus enabling them to go home as well. Ahh, the stress of management…

At some point, you are allowed home and more horror awaits. Annoying people in 4X4 monstrosities seize the moment to smug you to death. Most of the year we scorn their selfish choice of oil burning machine, but for today at least they can be comfortable and safe. Their unnecessary blight on the ecological landscape still bruises the planet for 350 days of the year but for now they can be warmed by their own superiority and our palpable jealousy. If you look closely, they have probably given a lift to a few non-drivers and saved them from slipping and sliding their way home in the bitter cold. They will no doubt find time to stare at you as they drive away, their judgemental, bobble-hatted gaze futher burning into your angered heart.

By now, you may be wondering why I am talking about this on Halloween. Well, it was a bit frosty on Monday morning and I was caught unawares. The car warmed up eventually and the windows cleared, thanks mostly to the drippy remnants of last year’s de-icer and the edge of my bank card. On the way home, I bought two cans of de-icer and once home, I topped up the anti-freeze.

The next day, the temperature soared by about 5 degrees and nothing but warm morning drizzle has greeted me since.

You are welcome. I like to think of the first moments of Winter panic as a kind of public service.

TV

Upside-down Eyes!!

A recent phenomenon is the autumn TV surge. In recent years, SKY has started showing US TV series only a few days after they broadcast in the States. Due to my hours of work (evenings), I have to SKY+ all of these programs and watch them later. For some reason, I end up saving these for the weekends and starting on Saturday night, I have to methodically watch each of the 11 programmes. I make it sound like torture, when it is actually the opposite, but there is something about seeing all those recorded programmes lined up that fills me with dread. It happens every week and then, around May, the series all finish and there’s nothing on. I could quite easily leave all these programmes and watch them at anytime. The SKY+ box kindly stacks them all up in little folders but I MUST watch them and watch them NOW.

I haven’t even mentioned the programmes that actually go out live on Saturday night, namely Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor. I usually watch these on Monday morning and fast-forward through them – especially Cher and her upside-down eyes, funny mouth and hugely annoying leg twitch.

Radio

I have no desire to return to the angry young blogger that I became in the first part of the year but I must allow myself a little bit of release now and again. All this week and for a lot of the preceeding few months, the broadcasters on Radio 2 have been endlessly plugging this year’s “Electric Proms”.

Electric Proms

Quite what separates this annual event from every other live performance they broadcast, I am not quite sure, but this hasn’t stopped them elevating it to the status of an indisputable religious miracle. This is annoying enough but not the whole story. What really gets my goat is the way they talk about it like we could all go if we wanted to. Let me explain. Only 7 million of of us live in London. Let’s be generous and say that maybe 10 million people live close enough to go without too much inconvenience. The remaining 50 million are a bit stuck, even if they wanted to go. This doesn’t seem to stop our favourite radio station pretending that this wonderous event is for all of us. They do the same with productions in the West End. Its “our theatre” and “the nation’s theatre”. No it isn’t. Shut up. It’s for people who live in London and not for those who live 100s of miles away.

As a side gripe, it also seems that it is for BBC staff too. A quick glance at Twitter or a quick listen to the station’s output the next day made it clear that an event so exclusive that tickets were given away in a telephone lottery, was attended by any DJ who wanted to go and quite a few hangers on as well. Not good at all.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am still proud of the BBC. I listen to Radio 2 and Radio 4 every single day and they are both wonderful. I just wish they would stop talking about Neil Diamond, Robert Plant (all hail) and Elton John like they represent the second coming. They are good musicians, all very good at their “jobs” but that’s about it. Get a grip people.

School

I didn’t have much to blog about this week regarding school or writing. It did occur to me that, in two weeks time, I will be back in Dover for Old Boys Weekend and it’s the first such visit that has taken place during a blogging phase. I can’t let this pass without doing something appropriate so I am going to do some sort of blog from there. I am not sure exactly what to do but I’ll think of something. I do have a dictaphone and I do know people who like to talk a lot so that might be one directon to go in. My travelling companions probably just swallowed something hard and jagged but I promise they are safe.

I am going to take some more photos certainly and I have compiled a list of things to check up on. I have been writing about things that took place 30 years ago and 400 miles away for ages. It will be cool to actually check the memories out.

L8r

I bloody hate this. I may well have mentioned it before. For some reason, my corner of Plymouth is blessed with the humidity of Thailand. If I hear one more person on TV, the radio or within reach of my fist go on and on about how lovely it is, murder will be done.

I used to think in my pre-medication days that I always hot due to my simmering blood sugar but now I realise that everyone else is just mad. As I sit here writing this, I would swap my large and moderately valuable Star Trek comic collection for something resembling a breeze.

So anyway.

Hello.

Sincere aplogies for the long gap and all but nothing too exciting has happened. I have been off work all this week and before that it was 5 weeks of Excel, Visual Basic and thinking a bit. I am sure there are 3 or 4 of you who would find that intriguing and interesting. In truth, its quite fun and it does have the distinct advantage of getting me off normal work duties. On the down side, I not earning any more money than usual and Friday arrives with alarming frequency. Normally this would be very cool but when you have a deadline, its bloody frustrating.

I had the first part of my annual Diabetes checkup last week. It was a surprise event as I had only gone in for another jab and the nurse noticed it was due. One feature of each checkup is the foot feeling. Yes, the nice lady feels my feet and checks my pulses and nerve responses. It may be immodest of me, but I do have very nice feet but mild panic did set in when she sprung this spot check on me. I wasn’t even sure I had matching socks on inside the Timberlands. Luckily all was fine. My pulses are still strong and I can still read the bottom line on the eye chart. Finally, she took a pint or so of blood out of my arm for testing and the second part takes place next week with my GP.

I see that the O Level Pass rate has gone up again. Something that seemed to begin the year after I sat mine. My O level tally still shames me like a former life of male prostitution and I have no intention of telling any of you who don’t know already. Suffice to say I now earn a respectable salary and always have.

So there.

Monday and its cold. The car looks like a choc-ice and I know it’s going to be no match for my flimsy plastic scraper. Its been the first night without snow for about a week but mother nature is making up for it with inch-thick clear ice. Two choices:

1. Empty a whole can of de-icer all over the glass. 99p well spent.
2. The always scary jug of tepid water.

As I am a) Dukie & b) A Man, I have no idea of the value of money so it looks like the aerosol ammonia will be my weapon of choice.

I have wheeled the portable gas heater into my bedroom in the hope that I will warm up. The window is open, as directed in the helpful instructions, but I may still pass out before I finish this.

Yesterday’s nap didn’t do me any good as I woke up with a migraine. This is the worst kind of migraine as its very difficult to go back to sleep. Sleep, as any fellow migraine sufferer will tell you, is the best cure for a migraine.

Its my own fault really. I was web coding all yesterday from early morning until whenever it was I stopped to blog. At work when keying, we have to take 5 mins break every hour, something I should do at home I suppose. Still, its Monday now. Work is in 4 hours or so and I have Frank Skinner’s audio biography to listen too.

Happy 6th of March.

The Management

There is always so much month left at the end of the money. Here I am, just about managing to scrape through the month and now i have lost my bloody mobile phone. It fell out of my pocket on Tuesday morning between my car and the little corner shop. Of course, some baseball-capped cretin found it and has already inserted his own simm card inside. Bummer. I didn’t use it much, indeed I set a personal best of making a £10 voucher last from November 2004 (bought in Dover trivia fans) until … well, until I lost it last week. I am very much a receiver…not a sender. I bat, I don’t bowl if you get my meaning.

On a brighter note, its a lovely bright, crisp day today and I might venture out to take some more photos of my wonderful back yard woodland. Apparantly, the swans are about in the river.

Click.

The legalised noise pollution and pet terror that is Guy Fawkes night is upon us again. Actually it was on us last night. Actually it has been upon us since the “authorities” saw fit to allow the shops to sell fireworks to anyone with a glassy gaze and floor-dragging knuckles at the end of British Summer Time several weeks ago.

I have harped on about this before on the forum and I will continue to play my large instrument every year until we take notice of most countries in Europe and ban the sale of fireworks to the public. Sadly, last night’s accident proved that not even council organised displays are 100% safe, but the time when we allow anyone with a few pallets, a tesco shopping trolley and a stupid idea to set a mighty blaze on half an acre of grassy knoll is surely past. Anyone with a rose-tinged perspective who remembers waving a sparkler in front of their rosy-cheeked face whilst dad went to get you a toffee apple, should visit my manor anytime between October the 20th and well….January 5th. Every year a huge mountain of bad sense is piled up on a little green near me. Every year the authorities drag it down and every year it goes back up again. The fire lights up the sky until one or more fire engines (or “appliances” as Frankie Howard called them) turns up and wastes some more public funded time amid the abusive cries of local urchins.

As I sit here a 10:07pm on November 6th, the fireworks are still going off and Sam my elder cat is hiding under my bed. His heart almost beating out of his chest. Its pissing down with rain but the noise started before 5pm and will go onto at least 3am if last night is anything to go by. Last night a neighbour (in my nice quiet estate) was lucky not to lose his car when some baseball-capped loser threw a firework at it whilst riding pillion on a (probably stolen) moped.

Don’t even get me started on “Penny For The Badly-Stuffed Bin Bag”.

I am no spoilsport.

Well…

Actually I am.

Stop this now. I wouldn’t trust most of the people I have seen buying Fireworks to sit the right way round on a toilet.

Neil Argue. Reporting for “My Two Cents”. Plymouth, Devon.

Man alive…how can 28 degrees seem so hot? One 35watt fan burning away all night and I still only managed about 2 hours sleep. Its now 8.56am and I am back to work at 1pm, fit and ready. Around 3am I gave up trying to drop off and instead dove into the ever-expanding Argue DVD collection. It’s quite surreal to be watching John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (set in the antarctic) when its hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum. My mind however, was not fooled and the long night drew on.

Sunday afternoon was disappointing. After a quick jaunt to the garden centre, I slammed my car door and the window dropped down into the door cavity like a guillotine. It took me nearly an hour to close it enough to be safe from rain and car thief. I took the car in this morning and they can’t do it until Thursday.

..and now the exhaust is blowing.

Never mind. Work in 4 hours.

Yes, another one.

Bear with me. I need to unload this weirdness. I have thought back and this dream was not induced by anything imbibed the previous evening.

So there I am in the school dining hall, ready to eat. Myself, Stan, Matt Colgate and various people I now work with are filing past the hotplate which for some reason is now about 100 yards long. I can’t decide what to have and end up at the other end with an empty plate. For some reason we all exit the hotplate queue at a point roughly where Marlborough House sat. Surprisingly, this is now where my back garden is….and I woke up.

Actually, this is unusual in as much as this was a morning dream. I got up at about 8am, made a cuppa and went back to bed. This is when I had it.

So how has your Bank Holiday weekend been? I have spent 3 long days painting my bedroom whilst not removing a single item of furniture (don’t ask). It was fun, but I managed to listen to Radio 2 from 8am this morning until about 20 minutes ago because the radio was in an inaccessible corner of the room and I couldn’t re-tune it. Honest. I got 33 points on Ken Bruce’s Popmaster quiz, but only my cat witnessed the thrilling and memorable performance.

The Olympics was fun. For some reason, I was more into it this year than in the past. Maybe its another sympton of growing old. At work, the break areas all have TVs now and I spent far too much time catching  a quick glimpse of the Grecian Goings On. Greece looked great and reminded me of my ideallic youth in Cyprus, wherefrom the bronzed Veaseys recently returned. You have to wonder though, with those crystal clear seas, blue skies and shimmering sun whether Manchester ever has a chance in hell of ever hosting the games. Having said that, Beijjing in 2008 hardly promises similar scenes.

I am sick to death of media coverage of grinning school kids and their 15 ‘A’ grade O level passes. No particular reason I suppose, other than a certain camerardery I share with those slightly less successful souls. I am seriously considering going back to college to get 10 or so of my own. I quite fancy some of those A levels too. What say you Sean? I don’t wanna go alone.

OK…so it wasn’t purple, but it rained and rained and rained…in fact it still is. In between showers I managed to become B&Q’s best customer by buying more decorative bark than anyone this side of The Chelsea Flower Show. It really is good stuff. You chuck it down on top of any annoying flower beds and you never have to weed them ever again. I wish I’d known about it years ago. We had new photo ID badges issued at work this week, something that involved posing for a very uncomfortable head shot in the personel department (ok…HR dept, something I refuse to call it). It is safe to say that I am far more comfortable with looking at photos of me since I started the website. Yes folks, despite what many say, there are plenty of photos of me on it. Anyhow, I could show you the photo but apparantely that would be a breach of security. Suffice to say, I look adorable.

A week of bad news. Both DYRMS and both not warranting detailed mentions for now. One of the  events generated a mix of emotions I have only shared with my closest of chums so far, and thats how things will stay for now. I find it strange that I can still surprise myself.

But I digress….

It is so damn hot. I  dragged the mower over what passes for a lawn earlier today and lost about 8 pints of fluid in the process. I then came inside and drank several pints of water and got a headache. I then took two Ibruprofen and then peed…and so on. The circle of life.

In a related matter, I recommend the book “Fast Food Nation” to anyone who can get hold of it. The name of the author escapes me for the moment, but the their description of how the ingredients in the products of some of the Fast Food companies are manipulated to put most customers on the “salt-sugar-drink-pee” cycle will ring true with many of you. Have you ever eaten a burgar without a drink? Me either. Try asking for fries without salt next time, it really annoys them – as does asking for drinks without ice.

So a cracker of a weekend comes to a close. How cool is life when the most fun I had was carrying 6 bags of gravel round the back of the house? On the plus side, the flower bed/rockery now looks great and promises to be maintenance-free. I was surprised it looked so good considering the messy earlier stages in it’s construction. I am not gifted in the horticultural area but I mostly get there in the end, even if I do have to walk away, take a break and come back later.

It looks like it will be hot again tonight.  The fan has been on 3 hours and will probably be on all night. Its funny, but it reminds me of those hot nights in Dover, when my Lower 6th study was the small cupboard to the right of the 3rd form dorm. Room for a bed and a desk and a chair and my good humour. Still it was home for a while and certainly beat sharing a dorm with everyone else.

On a final note, I had a nice Email from a guy called Eric Goddard in Australia today. It started with those always welcome words that compliment my website the memories it brings back. He was a Dukie of the 60s and has only been back during the 1986 summer holidays. I extended my usual invitation to a swift 10 or so at The Britannia Pub, but we will have to wait and see.

Ta Ta