Until New Year's Eve, then...

It seems the nutjobs were indeed wrong, since the world did not end at 11.35am today.  However, today is the last time I’ll have guaranteed access to the internet until December 31^st.  So, the continuation of history notwithstanding, this is probably my sign-off for 2012. 

If the world does end today, just a little later than predicted, it’s going out on a high of sorts for me.  The sun is shining, the temperature is above zero, I saw a jogger dressed as Father Christmas this morning (complete with heart-rate monitor), the trees on Brentford Eyot are gleaming in their winter bark colours of red-gold and olive- green, there’s a lovely dog running about on the Green, I have coffee and nougat and sesame biscuits in the office, I’ve revised and typed up to the end of chapter two of “Gold Hawk” and am happy with it so far, and I have the next nine days off work.  And last night I met TCI and G for a pre-Christmas beer-and-nachos at the Prince’s Head in Richmond, and a cute chap a couple of tables away kept making eyes at me.  Think a balding Jason Isaacs crossed with a balding Liev Schreiber; i.e. seriously attractive, despite the follicular issues (the nachos at the Prince’s Head are excellent, too, but that's not my photo, just one I swiped off the internet.  Our Nachos had lots more cheese, plus lashings of guacamole and sour cream, and the beers should be Fuller's Organic Honeydew, not whatever that is [looks like a Guinness and a pint of orange squash, actually]).

Got home, a little tipsy and very cheerful, packed my bags for Christmas, discovered I had not posted K’s present – boll*cks! – put it to take to the post office in my lunch break today, and actually got myself to bed at a reasonable hour.  I then dreamed I was hiking in the snow in the Cairngorms with a certain JL Renner.  When we stopped for lunch he made hot chocolate over a campfire for me.  Good man! 

That makes three really delightful hunk-dreams in the last few days; I am now married to William Houston, RDJ drives my removal van, and Mr Renner makes me hot choc.  It seems my subconscious is on a high of sorts as well.

Solstice Greetings, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to you!

The curate's ball gown/opera/ dream

Well, I had a very mixed day yesterday.  

I’d booked a day of annual leave, thinking it’s nice to have a midweek day off before Christmas to do any final bits of shopping and so on.  Also I had a ticket for “Robert le Diable” and that started at 6pm, so I was going to have to ask to leave work early at the least.  Since in the event I’d done all my Christmas shopping, I had a lazy morning and then went to the V&A to have a mooch and see the “Ball gowns” show (which closes in early Jan).  

It was a very odd show – the first half (mostly from the 50s and 60s, with a few more modern classics) was about 80% terrific, and the second half (contemporary designers’ red-carpet gowns) was about 80% terrible.  If it had been selected with the express purpose of demonstrating that the contemporary applied arts are just as desperate as the contemporary fine arts to be innovative at any and all cost, even if it means being crap, it couldn’t have made its point better (& I think it was meant to have demonstrated how damned hip and wonderful they are!).

 

And as for the opera; well, I actually left at the interval – only the second time in my life I’ve ever done that.  It STANK.  The music itself was uninspiring (alternately hammy-rumbly and sugary-tinkly), and the production was irredeemably bad.  It was “ironic”, and so heavy-handedly so as to be just plain embarrassing.  I’ve seldom seen anything so unrelentingly cheesy in my life.  

At least if one went to Disneyland the cheesiness would be sincere; this was all eye-rollingly superior.  I swear it was more self-consciously knowing than a Carry-on film, and without the redeeming silly humour.  It sucked.  My heart ached for the poor cast, who were bravely doing their best, with rubbish to sing and a director with his brain up his arse.  

You will gather I hated it.

I then went home, feeling rather cross, and got on with some typing, and the laptop got hiccoughs and wouldn’t save.  In the end I left it running, with its little error message saying something along the lines of “I can’t do this, why are you asking me to do this?” and went to bed.  I arranged a large book propped open to mask the light from the screen, and tried to ignore the constant chuntering-computer sound, but of course I couldn’t sleep with it purring away a few feet from me.  I got up at 1am and checked, and it was still jammed, and I thought “sod you, then” and switched it off at the wall...  So will probably go home tonight to an injured complaint of “you switched me off in a bad way, you’re a mean missy”.  I don’t know if the stuff I had typed (about two thousand words) will have been saved or not.  There’s supposed to be an automatic back-up-save every ten minutes, so in theory I shouldn’t have lost too much (cross fingers).  Poor old laptop, I think I do have to accept that it’s nearing the end of its useful life.  

At any rate, by the time I had relaxed enough to actually get to sleep after all that, I had less than six hours before my alarm went off.  I think I was still pretty stressed about the laptop, since I then had a really weird dream.  It was a glorious summer day, and my mum’s friend Ninetoes and Robert Downey Jnr. were helping me to move house.  I had bought a lovely big house with a garden, and as house-move-help goes, Ninetoes and RD Jnr. made a pretty great team (at least once she had stopped making eyes at him), so things weren’t all bad by any means.  The downsides were RD Jnr. insisting on playing just one song, over and over, on the stereo in the pantechnicon (I have nothing against Duffy, but “Beggin’ you for mercy” has fairly repetitive lyrics when you hear it just once, let alone six times in a row) and the bizarre house-warming gift I had been given from work; a urine-driven coffee-maker. 

My subconscious goes to some very strange places at night.  As new green energy concepts go, I think wee-power will take some beating.