I'm starting to fall behind and haven't written about last weekend yet. On Saturday I made one of my thrice-weekly visits to see Ellie, who now weighs 8 lbs 12 oz and is cuter than ever. She smiles now and is able to lift her head a little; I sit and read stories to her and take her for walks in the park. She's lovely.





Sunday, Buffy and I went to help my fellow Nova*-victim Tamara celebrate her 26th birthday in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington. The journey from south to north London felt like the journey from the south to north poles. What is it about hot weather that f*cks up the trains and buses so badly? Heat on the line? Drivers absent due to sunbathing? Is it beyond the wit of man, etc, etc? It was good to see Tamara, though, and there were deer and turtles and toilets just like the ones in Trainspotting. We drank two bottles of wine in about two hours, resulting in us being in the following state:





There's a hole in my memory where the journey home should be, but apparently I disgraced myself by loudly mocking two goths on the bus (being an ex-goth is a bit like being an ex-smoker; we're the biggest critics). Well, one of them was wearing a T-shirt that said 'Dark is my call' which doesn't even makes sense. I also have a vague memory of wandering around Sainsbury's in Brixton holding a tin of boilable veggie hot dogs. Boilable! It's not even a word!

Buffy has already written about our journey home from Bletchley - where we saw that famous code-breaking machine plus some really cool old BBC computers and ZX Spectrums; I didn't know they had them during the war - which was truly epic. We entertained ourselves for 30 minutes by writing a poem. This is part of our get-rich-slowly scheme. Every week, Buffy's fave real life mag, Pick Me Up! publishes a poem sent in by a reader, for which they pay £25. Read this, and you'll see we already have that £25 in the bag. It's written in the voice of a typical PMU reader:

Thursday morning - get kids dressed
Leave the house, feel really stressed
Late for work, the boss is grumpy
This uniform is really frumpy
I hate this shift, it's oh-so-busy
Come five o'clock I feel quite dizzy!
Oh no it's raining, forgot my brolly
At the shops can't find a trolley
Lug my basket down the aisle
The magazine stand makes me smile
When you need a tonic, there's one you can't beat
That's Pick Me Up - it works a treat!

*Nova was the language school in Japan where I 'taught' (in the loosest sense of the word) English for a year.

Referendum results in...

The people have spoken and they said, 'Oui!' Yes, let's move back to the old MarkCity.

Everyone out?

The comments on the original MarkCity appear to be working again, so I'm thinking about going back there. I preferred the old site and since moving here I've hardly posted. So let's take a vote. Should we move back to the old skool MarkCity?

I do have a number of excuses why I haven't posted for ages. There was the whole house-moving thang, and apart from the DIY bit below I haven't even told you about the floorboard nightmare, when the fitters turned up to lay our new flooring only to refuse to do it because it was crookeder (is that a word?) than Shane McGowan's teeth, downing tools and leaving me sobbing on the floor. It's fixed now, to cut a long horror story short. Then I went to New York for a week, managing not to get arrested by any Subway cops. I will write that up, though I don't know if I'll have time this weekend. We had some sad news yesterday - Claire's grandad died - so we have a funeral to go to next week. Please bear with me - I will be back. But will it be here or on the old site? Let me know.

D.I.Y. (Destroy It Yourself)

DIY has never been a great passion of mine. The letters B and Q have been known to bring me out in a rash, and my tool-wielding skills just about stretch to knowing which end of a hammer you use to hit things with. But this week has been like a crash course in Do It Yourself. That's crash as in 'crashing down' or 'crash bang wallop'. I'm finding it hard to type this because I nearly cut off the tip of my middle finger today when I shut it in the front door, but let me soldier on.

We ripped off the seventies wallpaper, along with a lot of plasterboard, to reveal more holes than the plot of the Da Vinci Code. Our walls are now 60% Polyfilla and are waiting for several licks of paint. Actually, make that several slurps of pain. To smooth them down we rented a buffing machine - an enormously heavy thing that made me its bitch for a day. There I was, Sars mask on, earplugs in, goggles in place - oh, how I wish I'd had a camera. Every time I breathed the goggles steamed up so I could hardly see the walls I was meant to be buffing. We pulled up the carpet - great cathartic fun, ripping its green hideousness to bits - thinking that we would find beautiful floorboards beneath, waiting for sanding. But no. We found two great slabs of concrete among the wood and a hole that appears to lead to the centre of the earth. One moment of sobbing despair later, we had arranged for a man to come round and put down new flooring. There goes our home improvement loan.

We also put up coving, which was like trying to solve one of those fiendish Chinese puzzles, removed the skirting boards - more big holes - and tried to level off the concrete slabs. Butter has learned to use a chisel like Michelangelo, but she had a number of what I like to call 'episodes' today, especially when the 'No More Big Holes' stuff we'd just bought at, deep breath, B&Q (where we've spent £300 this week and only seem to have a piece of sandpaper to show for it), turned out to be missing a nozzle. Then I dropped the sugar soap, lighting the touchpaper of her fury and unleashing a torrent of naughty words. I would have got her to wash her mouth out with sugar soap afterwards, but there wasn't any left.

Of course, it's going to look gorgeous when it's finished, like something from the wildest fantasties of that foppish decor-meister Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. But without the bright purple MDF. There are no photos because I keep forgetting to take the camera, but just imagine a building site. Then add mess.

Our House

We are now the proud owners of this house.





I know some people have problems viewing this site, so you can see the pictures here too:

Front

Back

My company held a poker afternoon yesterday to celebrate our 5th birthday. We went to a poker club called Gutshot, were given £5 each and then taught how to play. I've never played poker before in my life and started out thinking my poker experience was going to last 30 minutes after losing hand after hand. Somehow, though, I hung on - and ended up in the final nine prizewinners (out of 40 people) then the final 8,7, 6... In the end it was just me and Giles, battling it out, hearts thumping, mouths dry. At one point I had such a huge stack of chips that I couldn't concentrate - I just wanted to sit and count them. And perhaps it was this lack of concentration, or bad luck, or fear, but he beat me. I still won £58 though. And the adrenaline! My God. I felt like I'd climbed a mountain afterwards. Fantastic stuff.

We get the keys to our house today. More news of that to follow.

'Pol-axed

Interpol were slick, professional and tight but never at any point threatened to spontaneously combust or do anything else spontaneous. There was no interaction with the crowd apart from a couple of thanks yous and one "thanks for coming out tonight". So I was underwhelmed. I could have sat at home and listened to their CDs.

Butter ran 15 miles today, her longest distance yet, and has retired to the boudoir to rest her legs. She smeared peppermint lotion on her feet which meant the rats kept trying to lick them. Aah, sweet. Not so sweet when they nip.

We played a fun game at work the other day - you had to guess the previous jobs other people in the office have done. Things like underwear model and handy person for the Adult Channel, whatever that involves. Not fluffing, I'm told. I've had some awful jobs in the past: child support officer was the worst; complaints handler for Connex a close second. But I've also been a broad bean picker, a cornflake checker (picking out the brown cornflakes on the conveyor belt), a Kleeeneze salesman (going door to door flogging buckets and cleaning liquids), a pickle maker, a pizza chef, a washer-up, a tyre stacker, a greengrocer and a jelly baby packer. I've suffered, man. And it wasn't even for my art.