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Spent the whole of yesterday working on my get rich not very quick idea, steadily progressing through most of my CD collection and a large swathe of Radio 4’s output - both live and archived on the net. By evening, when I’d been sitting there nine and a bit hours, watched the sun go down and heard countless news bulletins, my legs were aching and my mind was filled with thoughts of economy class syndrome, blood clots and imminent death.

Calmed down in the bath with the lights off, the candles lit, and a steaming mug of Jaipur Orange tea.

The night was slated for a quiet evening in alone, the first time in weeks, and an early bed. In the end, I was still up at gone two this morning, snapping away and Photoshopping the results. I got rather carried away with my lighting and texture effects and am very pleased with the results, but it rather threw my plans out of whack and I ended up sleeping in until 10h this morning - so much for an early start.

Flopped around in my robe for a while, snapping more pics, and fretting at the state of the flat. In the quest for the best pictures pretty much every piece of furniture had been moved in the lounge and the lights were balanced on boxes and crates to get then pointing where I wanted them.

Called it a day some time around lunchtime, when I started to get hungry and realised there was no food in the flat, so showered, dressed and ran out to Asda for supplies. Jon called on my way out of the door and we arranged for a 15h30 meet, so I bought muffins and then spent the next hour and a half putting the flat back the way it should have been.

Got quite into it and ended up bleaching the kitchen from top to bottom and doing the same in the bathroom. The difference between how the place looked twelve hours ago and what it looks like now is quite unbelievable (and gratifying).

It was only going to be a flying visit, but Jon and Trevor (and Paul, too, in the end, who had been on the verge of crying off on account of illness, so it’s a good job I bought extra cakes) stayed for a couple of hours. We listened to the chart show, which I’m still not convinced works - it’s on for 45 minutes before you even get to number 40 - and talked about holidays - the one Trevor and Jon have both come back from, and the possibility of the four of us heading off somewhere (likely Florence or Rome) at the end of June.

They left around six and I texted Kevin to see if he fancied a trip to the pub later to make up for my quiet night in last night, then sat down to hunt out links for tonight’s Through the Night feature. Decided on mangled English as the theme, in honour of heading out to Berlin again tomorrow, where I know they sell loo roll called Happy End.

So, first stop the Engrish site, which is an absolute gold-mine of abnormalities. My particular favourites:

• A rather extreme and terrifying safety warning from a child’s toy.

• Nonsense on a t-shirt (”Lovable black cat, count me is your friend. Can you really do everything I wish I could to Billie-Jean.”)
• …and of course who could do without the indespensible Horny Remover?

The net has its fair share of mad food, too.

• How about a refreshing bowl full of Swedish Bra?

• Or the rather unsavoury-sounding Coq Fromage (cock cheese)

And some links to random UK placenames:

• Dancing Dicks

• Spunkie
• Buttock

I don’t think I dare suggest a trip to Wankers Corner.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2003 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.