pick a card, any card

I've just been looking for Christmas cards for those in my address book who live far far away, so I've had a chance to savour the Across the Miles.... section. And very lovely it is too.
You can get lovely glittery cards with robins on them to send to people who are sweltering in sunnier climes.
You can get lovely non-glittery cards with drawings of a 'cool' Father Christmas in boardies (shorts to you and I) drinking a can of beer with the heartfelt message 'Across the miles to Australia'. I picked it up. Behind it was another version that said 'across the miles to Spain'. I carried on looking but couldn't find one that said 'Across the miles to Birmingham'. Never mind, eh.
I then started looking for a card for my nan. I couldn't find one that said 'have a merry Christmas, it might be your last!' so I got one saying something about mixing all the bestests Christmases ever and making a happy wish for my lovely granny, which I'm sure she'll love – she's one of those people who chooses cards for the words and not the picture, which always meant drawings of vintage cars with a nice ditty inside.
Next to the nan and granddad cards, however, was a selection that made all of the above pale into insignificance.
Yes, next to the cards for the oldies was a selection of cards 'To the cat' and 'To the dog'. I looked and looked but 'To the spider in the bathroom' was nowhere to be found. Nor, bizarrely, was 'to my bed, thanks for a great year'. Now, I know it's better to give than receive but all I can say is that if I don't get a card back from the kitty, it's the first and last time I send her one!
And while we are on the subject of Christmas cards, my twin sister once sent a card to our parents and signed it Wendy Short.
Bless!

fancy!

now, you know how i feel about fancy dress parties.
pretty much the same way i feel about eating someone else's vomit. ie, not very enthusiastic.
i don't usually go to our work xmas parties because they are themed: wild west, jungle, members of Crossroads etc (though there is someone who always just puts a massive ear onto a leotard and adapts it to the theme - western was the western frontier – geddit - and the final frontier for space, which is so bad as to be admirable).
i shall be attending this year's shenanigans though. because the theme is casino, so all i need to do is put on a black suit, shirt and tie, and voila, instant gamer.
i won't get such a lucky escape in March, however.
no, in March the boyfriend and i are off for a weekend in the country to celebrate one of his friend's 40th.
did i mention that it will be with 12 gay men that i don't know?
in a two bedroom cottage - we have to take sleeping bags?
and that the Saturday evening is 'drag night' and that we have been christened 'the fashion girls' and must 'dress up' accordingly.
i'm currently massively in denial about the whole thing.

and... action!

‘oh my god’ that’s me!
That was my reaction the other day as I watched Notes on a Scandal on DVD – you know, the scene where Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett are sitting on Kite Hill on Hampstead Heath with runners jogging by.
When I saw the film in the cinema the same thing happened – a tall, skinnyish runner went past and I got one of those stomach rushes as I thought ‘oh wow! It’s me!’
it took me a few seconds both times to realise that had I been running on the Heath (which I do from time to time) and run past Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, I might actually remember.
The huge film crew might also have alerted me to the fact that they were there.
Bless me!

mind your language

in a previous existence i was an english teacher (i was also a highly evolved monk and a peasant who starved to death, according to a physco, i mean psychic i once saw).
i moved to spain in 1987 and for the first four of my nine years there taught kids and adults and had great fun (for the first year i only worked for 12 hours a week yet still had money to be out every night. imagine – i sometimes do that in a day now!).
i remember classes doing pronunciation - hours spent trying to get students to hear and reproduce the difference between ship and sheep, which both cease to have any meaning and blend into each other if you repeat them too many times. As do chip and cheap and flabberghast and rubberneck (actually, i made that last pair up).
i also remember one student arguing with me that 'overcoat' was the same as 'above all' because it said so in a dictionary her grandmother had given her. bless.
one thing students found it hard to get their heads around was question tags.
you know:
you're double jointed, aren't you?
he has six fingers on each hand, doesn't he?
it's cold in here, isn't it.
then of course, they got more complicated:
if you won the lottery, you wouldn't throw me out of the house, would you?
plums were cheaper before the war on terror, weren't they?
i've been thinking how much teaching must have changed since those heady days. i expect the lessons of today are much simpler, for there now seem to be just two question tags:
u r fat, innit
its gr8 here, innit
my tailor is rich, innit
and to express interest:
'i'm training to be a brain surgeon' 'is it?'
'excuse me, but i think you are standing on my foot' 'is it?'

prepositions also seem to have gone the way of Spangles, route masters and b*witched.
no more i'm going to the park but i'm going park
can anyone get me Lynne Truss's phone number?

remind me to tell you about my lovely student Nao and how she taunted me for being boring (i actually typed boredom there, which would have made me sound very punk).

you've been sminted...

do you have one of those friends who is always 'having trouble at work'. you know, the kind where people are always horrible to them, the boss is unbearable and the work undoable?
the kind of person who is always having to leave positions because it's not working out and they can't take anymore? it's never their problem, of course, always the fault of their co-workers (hate that term!).
you finally get to the point where you want to sit them down and say, 'look, it can't ALWAYS be other people!'
i've got a couple of friends like that.
i'm actually having a bit of an 'it can't ALWAYS be everyone else' moments myself, alarmingly.
not about my job or my 'co-workers' (i mentally did that irritating waving of fingers thing there), i love my job and my colleagues (that's better).
no, my 'it's YOU!' issue is that everyone has really bad breath!
it seems i can't have an intimate(ish) conversation with anyone without thinking 'have a chewing gum / clean your teeth / go to the dentist / oh my god i'm talking to a cadaver'!
it can't be everyone else, surely. perhaps something has crawled into my nasal cavity and died.
help....

you spin me…

so, day three of not boozing. and can i just say that i feel tired and listless, even though i was in bed before 11pm and didn't actually have to get up to pee. and set the alarm for 6.20. i feel much more tired, in fact, than i do when i go to bed smashed at 1am and get up at 6. weird, huh.
and talking of weird, are you left or right? brained that is.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html
find out here. it's all just a question of what way the naked lady spins (ain't it always). she was doing it any which way when i logged on – i'm obviously perfectly tuned into my practical side and my touchy feely bit too. you'll often hear me saying to one of my team 'just get a bloody move on with that f-ing page will you, there's a love, you ok over there?'.
they don't say what it means if she's not turning - you are probably dead.
which is a shame.

my schooldays were not, as the old adage would have it, the happiest days of my life. i was fat, effeminate, wore beer bottle glasses and, apparently, had a posh accent (in common as muck suburbia) – go figure.
report days were particularly grim. i remember the dread of turning the blue cover to reveal the opening page, which included not only comments from the Head and Head of year but also number of days absent. This figure was always alarmingly high and always needed adjusting. I'm not sure why but my parents never questioned the fact that term after term, whoever was responsible for totting up our days off never got it right first time.
my favourite quote (and believe me, there were many from which to choose) from one of my end of term roundups came courtesy of my games teacher. Not only did he give me an E for effort and an E for attainment, he added 'Steven has made steady progress this year despite his obvious lack of coordination'. Obvious lack of coordination! Now there's a euphemism for you.
Anyway, I was reminded of these comments the other day when I lost a game of bowling. Not only was I beaten by my sister and her boyfriend (he's a footballer and cricketer so more 'sporty' than me) but by my other half, who had never picked up a bowling ball in his life! It seems you can take the boy out of Northolt… I definitely deserved more than an E for effort though