The last resort

Well, faced with the alternative of reading The Observer magazine supplements and their incessant bombardment of ethical living, I thought that contributing to my blog would be the best option prior to turning in this Sunday evening.

FIVE MORE WORK GET UPS TO GO!

Thank fuck.

I have been very tired and a bit down in the dumps of late. The lack of summer and now the long darkness of winter have had an adverse effect on my mood. As such, I am lacking in motivation for many things.

Still, it's nearly Christmas. Yay, and all that.

Oh for the excitement of bygone years. Now I just look forward to Christmas for the time off work with Trump and my Mum's Christmas dinner. In the future, with any luck, we'll be looking forward to resurrecting the excitement.

I'm planning on having dinner parties if and when we get to buy our little house near the hills. But who would you invite? An occupational hazard of being queer and having queer friends is that they tend to be a bit liberal and, horror of horrors, vegetarian... arriving at the door with strict ethical principles instead of a bottle of plonk. You'd try to impress them with simple but tasty cooking and they'd insist on checking the source of all the components - "Is it organic and free trade?"

"Well, no, but it's cheap and it tastes nice, so eat it, el fucko!"

I don't think we'd ever get to the coffee, what with my insistence on using either Illy or Lavazza.

Tap water OK, or do United Utilities exploit their workforce too much?

I was out on my Christmas do with my colleagues on Friday night. It was excellent. I sat opposite my manager, the one who outed me a few years back. She was telling me what she'd bought for her partner's birthday presents and told me that she'd only given "ethical" gifts. As I shouted a disparaging "Oh, for fuck's sake!", she cut in and explained "No well, ethical means that I buy things that she wants and will enjoy."

Hang on a minute, so ethical presents are things that people actually want? Well, I've been trying to do that for years! But you don't want to go as far as getting a list from the recipient so they know what they're getting - you might as well just give them the cash.

For goodness sake.

Or you could always buy a cow for some village in the back of beyond where the locals end up sacrificing the poor thing and smearing themselves in the blood in the name of some backward religion.

But that's Barnsley for you I suppose.

I'm sorry, but if I'm not spending money on my loved ones, I'm spending the money on me... and gadgets, which I need far more than some heathen in a hot place needs fresh water!

But back to the Christmas do. I wasn't drinking, of course, but my colleagues were and my manager showed no inhibitions in front of her team. Good on her! We tried the normal pubs in Manchester, but they were packed, so we ended up making our way to Canal Street. She kept trying to make me dance, I was having none of it. I don't do dancing anymore. And it didn't seem appropriate somehow.

I really hate dancing now that I don't drink. It just seems like one of those activities that you should only engage in when you're totally off your tits. Same as job interviews I suppose; much easier to deal with (both during and afterwards) if you're shitfaced during the experience.


SAD
I'm sure I suffer from seasonal affective disorder. I really feel rubbish from the end of August to the beginning of April. For my birthday, I'm going to insist on a SAD lamp. They're a bit expensive, so I might have to slum it with a couple of torches strapped to my eyeballs.

And, along with the possibility of buying a bungalow, so begins the decline of wanting things from the Sunday newspaper supplements (not The Observer, obviously - I'd end up with a cow in Darfur).