Happy new fuck right off

Being off work the week after New Year has its advantages, but mainly it's nice to prolong, or even avoid, the agony of the incessant volleys of "Happy New Year", "Did you have a nice Christmas?", "Did you get anything nice?" that usually fly around the workplace in those few days back in work after the break.

I hate New Year, fucking loathe it. At best, it's just another day. At worst it heralds the beginning of two of the most depressing months in the calendar. You think you can start to look forward to spring, to longer days, to warmer weather, new beginnings even. Instead, it's still dark all the time and freezing with it. You're still in the same shitty job that has put you on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. Spring is still at least three months away, the next long weekend is, let's see... the 14th of April. Three bloody months away.

So there's nothing to look forward to for ages and you're faced with the now. The now consists of clothes that are too tight and bank balances that are terminally ill. Perhaps if I was terminally ill, my clothes would fit me and my bank balance might be healthier.

I have a headache.

I have a headache and a job that I hate, that I really can't face going in to on Monday. With my day off tomorrow and the weekend ahead, I have two options:

1. Make the most of it: go to the gym a couple of times; think of some nice (healthy) things to eat; do some cooking of nice things.
2. Mope around: take as much codeine as possible; lounge around the gloomy house in a confused haze (I'm sure there used to be a tiwnkly tree over in that corner); get pissed; plan suicide; eat own body weight in remaining salty snacks and chocolate.
   

I'm edging towards Option 2 at the moment.

Even my little cat Max couldn't be bothered to come and see me on my return from Norfolkland; he's upstairs asleep, curled up in a corner. If I was paranoid, I'd say he was trying to avoid me.


Oower Eewer
So Norfolkland. What was on offer this time? I arrived in snow, which was very picturesque and in stark contrast to the hot sunny day that I left behind back at the beginning of September. My friends had been struck down with a vomiting bug that was using their eight month old as a vector to transmit itself across the country, and they weren't really up for much.

Having assumed that the diseased bag of snot couldn't possibly be shedding any more virus particles, I thought I'd be in the clear when she sicked up on me on Thursday. I had porridge coming back up through my nose by midday on Friday. Laid low by sickness, headache and systemic achiness, I lost Friday, but found that sicking up porridge (yummy sweetness) is much nicer than sicking up wholemeal bread. Sicking up bile at 4am while your head is pounding and joints are aching is not nice at all.

Bile is a strange colour, produced in the liver from bilirubin and biliverdin (brown and green) and stored in the gall bladder (other words like cholesystokinin and pancreozyminsomethingorother also drip back into my mind - something to do with the pancreas - but I can't be arsed to remember any of that shit anymore). It's nice the way bile makes its way into your stomach to be the icing on the cake of your general shit feeling when you're ill.

Before Friday, I hadn't been sick since very early on in 2000, so I suppose that's not too bad.

Other things from my time in Norfolk: avoiding thinking about having to come home (go back to work); playing with the baby (who, despite her snot, dribble and penchant for rubbing chewed up biscuits in my hair and clothes, was extremely lovely); ate nice things. It was good.

Maddie/Beanie/Snotbag has started making vocal sounds, well, she calls everything "Dada", or DAHDAH!!!!! (followed by excited squealing, bottom-bouncing and arm-waving)when she sees Lucy the cat. I was feeding her (the baby) yesterday and I swear she called me "shithead".

On my journey home today, I discovered that overtaking when perhaps you shouldn't (or wouldn't normally) is quite good fun, exhilerating even. I saw this big Audi do and realised that the vehicles you're overtaking and oncoming traffic sort of move out of the way for you so you can drive right up the middle of the carriageway. And chevrons are only made of paint, so they don't hurt if you drive over them.


Coming up...
No, not my porridge again. Of all the wonderful gifts I got for Christmas, two of the most brilliant were books:

"Is it just me or is everything shit?"
This is essentially this blog in book form and I recommend it.

"You are what you shite"
This is essentially this blog in book form and I recommend it.


And back to New Year. I hate New Year because it's one of those times of year when we're supposed to reflect on what we've done and to look forward to what we'd like to achieve in the next twelve months. Each year for the past 12 or so years, I've got to January, reflected on how things have gone, tried to look forward and realised that I really hate my life.