15 March 2010

It's only Tuesday and it already has the taste of a sad of week and one that is fraught in the extreme.

It was just about time that I took these ridiculous broken glasses to the shop and so I did, yesterday. As I unwrapped the band-aid and cellotape, the man at Specsavers already had an ominous look on his face. The news that followed was devastating. They were broken beyond all repair. My mother bought me these spectacles when I was seventeen. I was in seventh form and boy did I look chic with my black rims that were just coming into fashion. I was certain that I needed them because I read so much. Luckily , the optometrist agreed. These glasses have been through so much. I lost them at a Rhythm and Vines festival one year along with a whole bag of things and managed to recover them at the Lost and Found booth the next morning. I've treated them so terribly and still they've come back for more... until now. I guess they just couldn't take another stomping.

Specsavers refused to use my current prescription in new frames so I made an appointment for this morning to get my eyes checked and then headed back to the office where I threw a small paddy and let a few tears well up in my eyes and Sandra, good woman that she is, told me to get over it - and so I calmed down.

I rushed home that evening to get this job application in. I want this job so badly! I only found out about it on Friday when I bumped into my previous manager at my last job whilst on the course and he advised me that he had come across it somehow. I'd been working on the application all weekend whenever I had a moment to spare. The deadline was midnight last night! Well, you just wouldn't believe that the wheel of fortune can spin quite as low as it did and I seemed to be riding it right down to its nadir. Once home, I found the ruddy broadband wasn't working. If you happen to be a BT customer, you'll understand how hard it is to get through to the right department let alone an actual person. The diagnosis was that the phone line was faulty and it would take 48 hours to fix. I'm sure I was talking to a customer service desk in India.

You cannot imagine the blood-curdling, harpy-like scream that ensued once I had hung up the phone. I surprised myself! I had to rush down to the nearest internet cafe and smash through the application there.

It's in. It's fine. I'm having a little chuckle to myself now about how wretched the ordeal was. We can come out the other side stronger, surely. I'm quite sure I'm not being melodramatic.

Now, the optometrist checked my eye health this morning. He said that the front of my eye is very healthy and the back of my eye is "quite" healthy. There's a definite difference between the two terms "very" and "quite" and it troubles me. But, I have chosen two sets of frames, as the second pair was free, and hopefully I'll look just as chic in them as I did when I was seventeen, if a bit less sprightly and rather more wizened with age. The collection date is Thursday. Until then, the cellotape remains.

Happily for you the BT engineer called today. Unhappily for me, it meant that I had to leave work at midday to come home and let him in or else he threatened to "redistribute the job"! So I rushed home and remained here for three hours waiting for him to fix the problem which was apparently a result of the incompetence of the first engineer. Fine. Done. Whatever. I went back to work at three and have been there for most of the evening...

I'm listening to the Rolling Stones. It's that charming song from Wes Anderson's aforementioned The Darjeeling Limited. I just love that film so much and I do unashamedly go on about the fact.

Tomorrow morning there is another course on Planning Law in store for me. This time in Holborn. Perhaps I'll pop down to Leather Lane and replace the lovely gloves that I lost in the fray at the pub. The fray being the having of to many things and the lack of hands to hold them all.

The flat is too quiet tonight. Nick is lying on a beach in Thailand. Tom is somewhere in Venezuela, the country of his birth, and seems to be a little vexed at the disappointment of it all. Well, soon he'll surely head to Cuba and then onto the rest of Central America. I think it beats being here in this little flat, where I've forgotten to turn the heating on, and goosebumps are forming on my cheeks of all places... What I'm trying to say is that I think his life is comparatively going just swell.

Carol Ann Duffy is the current Poet Laureate. Chloe and I went to see a performance of The World's Wife years and years ago in Auckland. It was extremely well done. When a discussion about the theory of evolution arises, I always remember the poem about Mrs Darwin:

7 April 1852
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him—
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

But this is not why my thoughts turn to our Poet Laureate. It is because she wrote Words, Wide Night:

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

I'm listening to MGMT now. I know everyone calls them one-hit-wonders, but they remind me a little of the Flaming Lips and I really do like the Flaming Lips and so I think that MGMT deserve more. Besides, they're fun.

I think I hear the kettle calling...