I spent a lovely weekend doing countryside things, specifically, seeing my dad and my sister on board her houseboat, currently moored near Bath. She had invited us up for a barbeque, and what a barbeque it was! We had burgers, bratwurst sausages (the best kind), and three types of kebab, not forgetting corn on the cob and a lovely salad (healthy options so we didn't feel so bad about wolfing all that meat down!). Just when we thought we had finished, we had to try and make room for toasted marshmallows, which I managed to do quite successfully, even if I do say so myself.

Hearing some of the 'landlubbers' comments as they walked past was quite funny, "Ooooh look, they're having a barbeque on that one!" Yes, we can hear you! My sister told us about a time when a family looked into the boat and one said to another "Wow, they've even got bread and butter!" Woooooow. It's amazing that people treat the boaties as if they are unable to hear anything that is said on land, even worse, that they could well be an entirely new species, albeit one that 'even eats bread and butter'! Ah well, they don't know what they are missing!

I was still thinking about this when we drove through Putney later that night on the way back to the ghetto. Some young cretin and his mates were spraying graffiti on a brick wall, using a rather dull orange colour (which barely showed up, by the way) at only 8:30pm, still daylight at the time of year, with barely a care in the world. You would have thought that they would have chosen a contrasting colour, dull orange really doesn't get the job done, and if they got caught (which they wouldn't as no one seemed to be taking a blind bit of notice) would it all really have been worth it?

Looking forward to getting out of the city for good....

I feel like I've saved up a whole load of annoyance since my last posting. Top of my Things That Annoy Me list are people who leave their dog's mess on the ground. OK, I own a dog, so I know that you can't always help when and where your little darling goes, but for goodness sake! It looks and smells dirty, it's unhygienic and particularly in the autumn it's well disguised by the fallen leaves in my local park I've noticed, which occasionally leads to a 'sticky shoe' situation a la Phoebe from 'Friends':

We've recently had a new pavement laid down near our flat. It looked lovely and clean, for about half a day. Then it began to get marred with dog poo, just like the old one. The local council obviously had a lightbulb moment when they stencilled the below image onto the pavement at regular intervals. Do they really envisage this having any, I mean any effect on the non-pooper-scoopers around here? It looks like a 5-year old painted it! And what's with the atrocious font choice? I'm no typographer but I'd like to hear what one of my typographery-type (?) friends has to say about it! I really can't see these poor excuses for stencils having much of a difference. In fact I'm tempted to go and paint polka dots on them one night but I'm too scared I might get arrested. Hold on, if I used chalk, which washes off, that would be ok, wouldn't it? Watch this space....

Also I'm annoyed already with the darker nights and colder weather. I feel like I've been robbed of a summer that was promised but never even arrived. I've been stood up by summer. My flip flops didn't even get a look-in. Still, look on the bright side, at least it isn't raining. Much.

However, even I have got something to be thankful for. Whilst out with a friend for dinner the other week, we toasted those commuters who have the daily grind to work on over-packed trains and tubes, allowing us lucky few to work at home, only having to bear the grunting, sweating masses on rare occasions when a meeting calls us into central London.

We were surprised by the long queues stretching out of restaurants in London. On a Wednesday of all days! No sign of the credit crunch in the dining industry then, lucky things. Shortly after that I heard the great phrase 'dead cat bounce', which was first coined about 23 years ago. It basically means a small and temporary recovery in a financial market following a large fall, the idea being that even a dead cat will bounce if you drop it from a great height. Fantastic.

As my friend Tom asked me "Isn't it about time you updated your 'once-every-quarter-whether-you-need-to-or-not' blog?" Well, yes, obviously it is, since someone has actually asked.

I was going to write about my strange dream, which involved living in a mobile home at the top of the Alps, June Sarpong and a nun with a broken leg, but I can't really remember the details of that one. Instead I'll have a rant about my lovely neighbours. I'm not talking about the ones on the ground floor that play extremely loud music until 5 or 6am. Though they do at least play it loud enough that I can hear the words and sing along if I want to, and they play pop, rather than drum and bass, so that's also better than nothing I suppose, still I do draw the line at badly sung karaoke, especially at that time of the morning. Anyway, onto my 'real' rant.

It's about the neighbours below me, the ones with the small white fluffy dog that bit me and my dog when we were out a couple of weeks ago. The other night, Y and I were rudely awaken at some god-forsaken hour by the sound of crashing, banging and much shouting from the flat below. We could clearly hear such politely phrased questions as "Where's my f*@%ing money?", "Why are you touching my f*@%ing stuff?" and kind requests like "Get your hands off my f*@%ing clothes" and things being flung across the room. I was pretty close to calling the police as it sounded like a full-on bust up down there but I was too scared. Not sure what the arguement was about - Y reckons it was about drugs. If that's true, maybe I got off lightly, just being bitten by their dog.

I do like most of my neighbours really! Except the ones that wee in the lift, that's pretty gross.

Y is taking his cleaning antics outside the flat now. He wiped down the buttons in the lift with a wet-wipe, not that I minded! He also bought us a new vacuum cleaner to try to hoover up the dog hair. I arrived home to a post-it note saying

"The new hoover has arrived - yay!
Have got it out of the box, but haven't
had a chance to play with it yet.
Feel free to do some hoovering if you like."

"A WOULD-BE shoplifter squirted her breast milk at a store detective when he tried to stop her pinching goods. The woman exposed her breasts, and fired away after being confronted at a Co-op store. The attack in Leicester is thought to be the latest in a trend in which theives try to get their DNA on security officers so they can accuse them of sexual attacks if caught. Graham Collins, of security company Citywatch, said "It started off with people picking their noses until they bled and then accusing staff of assault." Metro newspaper 26th September 2007

What IS the world coming to? It's madness I tells ya.

So I'm safely ensconced in my new flat. I don't have any carpets, or a fridge-freezer, or a washing machine, or a cooker. But I'm here, I've got a bed and an internet connection and it's all good!

Or is it.

I'd only been in the flat for a couple of nights. I'd hired a van to move my stuff from storage and roped a couple of lovely friends in to help me. Saturday's move all went well, we were tired but got pretty much everything moved in. Just a few bits left in storage and I had to go to my mum's to pick up a table and chairs. I got up the next day, only to find that some b*stard had thrown a breezeblock through the window of the hired van, and also smashed the windscreen. Glass everywhere.

Not pleased.

I went back upstairs and moped around for a bit. Of course I was annoyed, but also a bit worried. I was hoping that it wasn't a personal attack, but there were four other cars in the car park, including mine, and none of them were touched.

A couple of hours later I caught the dog weeing in the flat. At that point everything was still new to her and she hadn't worked out where she was allowed to go. Needless to say, I picked her up and chucked her out of the front door. Which shut firmly behind me. I'm sure you get the picture, the dog and me one side of the door and my keys the other side of the door. (This is obviously no-ones fault but my own, although I did try and blame it on the dog.) Despite being a skinny so-and-so, even my stick-like hand couldn't reach far enough through the letter box to be able to unlock the door from the inside so I was obliged to call out a locksmith. He promptly got a bit of plastic from his bag of tricks, slid it down the doorframe and popped the lock open. £140 please. Kerching. I expect any one of my neighbours could have done the same thing (not that I'm casting aspersions about the area in which I live of course).

By this point I've well and truly had enough of the day. I took the dog for a walk, hoping that would calm me down a bit. She ran in a big circle round me, the lead tightened around my bare legs, and now I have about seven inches of rope burn on my calves. Good job it's not hot enough to want to wear a skirt this year.

Anyway, I'm hoping that that was my three bits of bad luck that day (or, even better, for the whole year!)

Insurance to pay for smashed windows of van = £260
Cost to pay a guy to break and enter into my flat = £140
Cost of hurt pride and angry feelings = priceless

For those of you still reading, it doesn't get much better....

Before I left my previous flat, I asked BT to reconnect at my new place. At least I'd have dial-up... But when I moved in, no dial-tone. Eventually I discovered that not only did the previous owners disconnect from BT, they also removed all the BT wiring! I was informed by a nice lady at BT that they could reconnect it all free of charge, since it wasn't me who removed it. I just had to perform one test to make sure the line was definitely dead, which it was. I called back in the afternoon to ask them to come in to reconnect and was told that it would be £116 call-out fee plus an hourly rate for the work. I pretty much cancelled my account with BT straight away, but not before having a heated discussion with one of their staff in the 'Customer Services' department, who 'didn't want to enter into a debate about this' because there definitely WAS a call-out fee and not only that but it wasn't £116 it was £128 (yup you're really selling it to me, love). Right-hand doesn't know what left-hand is doing, anyone??? I was told to expect a final bill, which I could dispute once I got it. I said I would be doing so.

The bill arrived today. £79.36. Laugh? I nearly died. £70 for stoppage of services before the minimum term has expired. 1) I wasn't ever informed there was a minimum term 2) I wasn't ever informed that there would be a £70 cancellation fee (and for a service that wasn't even usable in the first place it's laughable quite frankly).

I called BT and told them I wasn't paying the bill. A nice lady said 'I'll give you the benefit of the doubt this time', and let me off paying it. Dunno what she means by 'this time', it's not like I'll be going back to BT anytime soon so there is unlikly to be a 'next time'...

Ahhh, I feel better now. If you've read this far, congratulations, you're a good person.

Whoever would have thought that writing a blog would be so cathartic, and that moving house would be such a hassle.

"Police squirted with breast milk
Startled cops were sprayed with breast milk as they tried to arrest a suspected shoplifter.

Staff at Lizard, in Richmond's Hill Street, stopped the teenager as she tried to leave the clothes store on March 29.

They found a pair of shoes under her dress and some small wire cutters, which could be used to cut off security tags.

But when police tried to arrest her, she stunned them by grabbing her right breast and showering them with milk.

Incredibly, the store manager said suspected thieves often resorted to such tactics...."







I wonder if the 'lady' in question looked anything like this...

I've really got nothing more to say about this...