What · I · did · on · my · Holidays.

I have a colleague and friend - we'll call him Ewan because that isn't his name - who is mad. It's the only explanation for his behaviour. For example, a few days ago I was driving out to join Ewan on a tricky little DSL problem when he rang me to let me know where to meet him.
No problem with that.
It's a sensible thing to do.
What wasn't sensible was what he told me next. The conversation went something like this;

Ewan: Don't rush, I'm looking at yachts on E-bay while I'm waiting.
Pete: Ewan, mate, you're broke. You're the most broke person I know and I know me.
Ewan: Well I'm thinking of re-mortgaging. There's money in the house.
Pete: Have you talked to your wife?
Ewan: No. But I think she'd like a boat. This one looks good. It's a forty foot catamaran
Pete: Do you know how to sail?
Ewan: No. But it can't be that hard.
Pete: Do you understand what tacking is?
Ewan: No. Is it important?
Pete: Quite important if you want to sail anywhere.
Ewan: It's only 15 grand.
Pete: But you're skint!
Ewan: I just fancy an adventure. I can buy it and sail it home
Pete: Mate, you'd never get it out of the harbour. Anyway, where is it?
Ewan: Greece.
Pete: GREECE?! And you want to sail it back home?
Ewan: Yes. How difficult can it be?
Pete: Very difficult.
Ewan: Oh, come on! I'll take me a day or two to get the hang of it. I should be OK by the time I get home.
Pete: You may want to book a few days off work . . .
Ewan: There's a long bank holiday weekend coming up.
Pete: Put the laptop down mate.
Ewan: I'm going to bid
Pete: No! She'll kill you . . . and then you'll drown.

Eventually he decided against it because he wanted to talk to his wife first. Luckily she's a sensible girl. Well she is in most respects.

There is a chance that I may be leaving my homeland in order to work overseas. It's certainly not definite but I have a couple of mates who are now doing it and I have sent my C.V. over for consideration. There are too reasons for this. First, I dislike the company I currently work for whilst still enjoying my work and, second, the money being offered to work overseas is INSANE!
"How insane, Pete?", I hear you ask and, well let's just say that it's pay-my-mortgage-off-in-twelve-months sort of insane. OK, it will involve me registering myself as a Ltd. Company, leaving my beloved Julia on her own for months at a time (a prospect she will bear with fortitude I'm sure . . .) and being inoculated against more tropical diseases than you can possibly imagine. However, if it turns out to be tolerable or, it's not impossible, actually fun then who knows where it may lead . . .

Naturally, I'll keep you all posted if anything happens but don't hold your breath!

. . . or to put it a better way, the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Charles Dickens.

The airwaves are full of his books and short stories right now and, mostly, I've been enjoying them and yet I still find him unreadable.
A crashing, waffling bore who wasn't paid by the word but might have made more money if he had been.
I've tried to read him, really I have. Julia once bought me a small, beautifully illustrated Nicholas Nickleby telling me that it's her favourite Dickens and I would love the story and adore his sister.
I didn't.
The writing was florid and she was a drip.
I've tried others of his books, usually after enjoying a radio adaptation, but try as I might his literary style always leaves me wanting to hurl the book at the wall whilst yelling, "For fucks sake do you ever use one word if twelve will suffice?"
Mind you, he's not the worst I've ever attempted. Leaving aside Shakespeare (E. Blackadder sums it all up) the worst case of verbosity blocking story that I've ever encountered was Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. I swear that the first sentence contained an octuple negative and ended half way down the second page* - and I can't have been the only one to feel this way because I was later given, by my brother, a much slimmer volume that had been reduced (I won't say abridged) by Somerset Maugham. Once again, I had been suckered into reading the book because I had thoroughly enjoyed the 1963 film** and, as with Dickens, the language defeated me. I shouldn't have been surprised. At 'O' level, I got a solid B in English Language and a U (unclassified - i.e. too bad to be awarded a grade) in English Literature. My teacher was in despair. Why, she asked, did I answer literature questions as if I was writing up a chemistry experiment? Probably, I thought, because I find chemistry far more interesting than the books I've been forced to read for 'O' level English!*** It may be worth remembering that I was 15 at the time and, as is almost compulsory for teenagers, I though that The Lord of The Rings was the greatest book ever written or ever likely to be written - a position I no longer hold since I now find The Lord of The Rings to be , if not unreadable, at least unsatisfying. I'll give Mrs Stevens her due, she tried to inspire me but she was on to a loser from the start. I have a literal rather than a literary mind. Most poetry either confuses or annoys me - unless it's 'Goblin Market', makes me laugh or cry - don't know why. I fear, I may be romantic. Poetry at school was either the classics (Assyrians coming down like a wolf on the fold) or, basically, unmemorable. I remember once being asked to write about a poem entitled The Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden. The exercise made me want to scream. First of all, I didn't care what the poet was trying to convey. Secondly I certainly wasn't going to try to translate something that was written in English into, well, English. Finally, it comes down to language used for aesthetic purpose in which apparent meaning is subsidiary to rythmic and/or evocative qualities being, to my mundane little mind, just plain wrong.
And generally boring.
Although it's not as wrong as starting a sentence with 'and'.
I think I'd better end here before I have to wipe foam from my lips.

Work is still crap - just in case you thought normal-ish service had been restored.

*I'm probably wrong but it certainly felt that way.
**especially Joan Greenwood who might just have been the sexiest woman ever to grace the planet. Mind you, Susannah York looked remarkably sexy whilst smoking a pipe. I wonder what Freud would have made of that. On second thoughts, no I don't.
**These included Lord of the Flies (ridiculous drivel), Spring and Port Wine (I remember NOTHING about this bar the title), Romeo and Juliet (We didn't read it - just watched the 1968 film -and now I'm thinking about Olivia Hussey - which is bad as she was only 15 at the time. . . ),Z for Zacharia (a book I remember with particular loathing) and Hobson's Choice (great fun but don't ask me to analyse it). There were others, of course, but I can't remember them.

I've not posted anything in months because, as I've said before, all I seem to do is whinge about work and enthuse about Oxford.
Unfortunately, work is so bad that it's taken over my entire life. Over the christmas week it got so bad that I was literally screaming and weeping with frustration at the side of the M6.
Maybe I'm a little stressed.
The fact that I refused to sign my annual appraisal can't be helping much either. The boss tried to mollify me by saying that it wasn't a bad appraisal whilst neglecting to explain how "partially meets expectations" in eight of the twelve areas on which I was assessed can be taken as in any way good - not that any evidence for my failures, real or imagined, was presented either. I countered with the tired old gambit of pointing out that if it wasn't a bad appraisal then how come I only warranted a 0.5% pay rise. He promised me a meeting to discuss it all and to explain why I was looking at it all the wrong way. That was three weeks ago. I'm not holding my breath.
There was a time when I wouldn't have cared. So long as I was being paid and wasn't actually threatened with redundancy, then I'd just have shrugged and carried on regardless. However, I have come to realise that I actually have a conscience. I actually care about doing a proper job. This came as a surprise although it was less of a surprise than realising that I actually like doing my job. And I'm good at it. I know I'm good at it because the customer has told me so on several occasions. So have my colleagues. The big questions, for me at least, are, "How come the management rate me so poorly?" and "Since I'm so little regarded here, where can I get another job that I will enjoy as much or more than this one?"

Oh, and "Where can I get a better company car" crosses my mind a lot too - but I reckon this is because I'm as shallow as an ant's bidet.

We now have access to SyFy.

Julia loves it. For an intelligent, sensible woman she certainly has some bizarre eccentricities. One is a fondness for truly awful disaster, horror and monster movies. So far this week she has watched Camel Spiders (I watched a bit with my mouth open is disbelief . . .), Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus (somehow, I don't know quite how, this was actually WORSE than Camel Spiders - although I think the title should have given me a clue) and, finally, when I got home from work this evening, she was watching Octoshark. . .

Now I sometimes enjoy bad TV. Sometimes, if it's played well with it's tongue firmly in it's cheek it can be a lot of fun - I used to enjoy a bit of Xena every now and then, for example - but these films are played dead straight and are just astonishingly bad.

Friday was supposed to be Holly's last day in Oxford until the new year so we had arranged to go and pick her up - and all her stuff. Exeter college insists that you empty your room at the end of term even though you will be going back to the same room when you come back. We were, however, spared this because Holly has volunteered to help with the new intake of students who will be coming for their interviews in the next couple of weeks.
However, just because she was no longer coming home didn't mean that Julia could survive another two weeks without seeing her Kitty so off we went for an evening out with Holly and her friend Hannah. Hannah turned out to be a bio-medical student and was, like Julia and Holly, no more than 5'1" tall. I began to wonder if everyone in the college was short or if I was abnormally tall . . .
So we went out of town (parking in Oxford is well nigh impossible without re-mortgaging your house), found a chinese restaurant and went for a pleasant meal. During this meal Hannah informed us that she had left her mum back at her room in the college packing her (Hannah's, that is) things! Julia and I were shocked. Here we were eating, drinking and making merry while Hannah's mum slaved away back at the college!
After dinner we went back to Oxford and went for a drink in the Oxford Union Bar with the girls and Hannah's mum - apparently she'd finished packing and was now allowed to join us for a drink. Hannah's mum, Alison, can't be much over 4'9" and is an ex-england gymnast. By this point, surrounded by students and small women I felt not only over-height, over-weight and unfit but I was beginning to feel old too. Oxford does this to me.

I have a week off work.
I had to take it because it turns out I had still got thirteen days leave to take before the end of the year.
Well it means I'll finally have the time to recover my motorbike from my mum's place, to clean the house, paint the stairwell, landing and back bedroom and - well the list is pretty much endless.

However, once I've done all of these jobs then I can relax and start putting the christmas decorations up.
Which means buying a tree.
Which I hate.
But Julia loves it - what's a boy to do?

Finally, on friday, we're going down to Oxford for an evening with Holly.

This is seriously going to cut into my Guitar Hero time . . .