Outa Here...

(Please consider this as Friday's offering, although am sending now to get it off my increasingly busy desk.)

Right. mrs househusbandnot and I are off on holiday until 10 May. (Holiday from what I hear you all say. Well, thankfully mrs hhn likes going on holiday with me.) My mate (*& is concerned that I am giving out too much information about myself on hhn, and that it is only a matter of time until I find myself a stalker with some logistical information about my movements - as opposed to Madame B who just stalks from a distance - so I am not telling you where we are going, other than to say it is a country interestingly uninterested in sandwiches. (Chew on that one Mr Stalky Man.)

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves while I am away. And if you are missing hhn I leave you with a few links (first one care of Bad, who has discovered youtube out there in darkest Suffolk):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SVnEkRaKvQ

and

http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/Boxhead-More-Rooms.html (highly recommended and deeply addictive)

and

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodsandwiches.html

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls9lCSUs1Wo (9.16 minutes of purple perfection, and at 8.01 minutes in a reason - only one I can think of - why KT Tunstall or whatever she is called deserves to be left alive)

After some deliberation about taking the laptop on holiday, I have decided against it. hhn and the great unfinished novel can take a back seat for a week or so. So will be in touch after 10 May.
hhn x

Eggsadelica

7.17am

"mrs househusbandnot?"

mrs hhn looked lazily up from the cook book she was reading while she was waiting for her taxi.(Unlike me, he does not get worried when being addressed by her hhn name. She - after all - has a real life beyond hhn.)

"What should I write the blog about today?"

"How about how disgusting eggs in coconut sauce sound? Oh, there's my taxi. Bye darling." And they said marriage was about being a team.

Actually eggs in coconut sauce does sound bad, but not bad enough to fill a whole post. (Although judging by the acres of words we have generated about sandwiches lately, I imagine we could probably stretch a discussions about eggs through another couple of paras, especially if The Waunch is prepared to do more research and get back to us with a few definitions from The Royal Society Of Eggs. Still waiting for blokewho's thoughts on sandwiches blt...sorry btw.)

In response to Madame B and her query about traffic versus comments, we have a consistent audience to hhn thank you very much. (You can work it out yourself love with the site meter.) It is neither in its 10s nor its millions, but we are getting there - wherever there may be. I am still basking in having had our 5,000th visit to hhn a few weeks ago, and am only sorry that I could not identify that 5,000th visitor so I could reward them with an hhn cd compilation and or a hhn coffee mug tree. (Glad we lost Mr Scary Patch along the way though. He was just a little too real.)

That other blog I have started writing, the serious US-based one. I was most read blogger for a whole 36 hours on the site. So there are audiences and audiences I guess. Here at hhn I am not going to go the populist route by writing more topically in order to try and build up audiences, mostly because I have no idea how I would do that, other than in a really self-conscious manner. (David Cameron, David Cameron, David Cameron, Manchester United, Russian wives.)

I'm afraid that you - all seven kerbillion of you - will have to get by with what I (and or mrs hhn) come up with of a morning. And today it was eggs and coconuts and me. (In vaguely related news, I met with some people the other day about some work, and was googling them before the meeting , and I thought maybe I should google myself - my real self - in case they had too. Google? Hmmm. First search result is a letter from me to a music mag about Bobby Gillespie. So I tried Yahoo. First search result is from another blogger who says "%^&$%^ writes amusingly about hanging around doing nothing." I'm hoping the interviewers were big Primal Scream fans.)

My name is househusbandnot

I had an hour to kill yesterday, so sat by the river listening to some tunes. I offer the following househusbandnot tribute to Steve Earle:

My Name Is househusbandnot

My name is househusbannot
I'm forty one years old
I was born in Manchester England
Quarter English I'm told

Don't remember Manchester
Been so long since I left home
Seems like I've always been blogging
I've always been alone

Didn't mean to hurt nobody
Never thought I'd cross that line
I was sending hhn postings
Like I'd done a hundred times

The commenters were pretty silent
So I just wrote more and more
Guess I'll never know what made me
I just wasn't keeping score

The posts rang out like thunder
My ears rang like a bell
No one came running
So I taunted the commenters myself

Took their time to get here
And I guess I coulda run
I knew I should be feeling something
But I never shed tear one

Hell I didn't even make the papers
I only wrote the blog for me
But my trial was over quickly
And the commenters were still free

Commenter appointed pedant
Couldn't look me in the eye
He just stood up and closed his briefcase
When they sentenced me to die

Now my waiting is over
As the final hour drags by
I ain't about to tell you
That I don't deserve to die

But there's twenty-seven bloggers here
Mostly stoned or bored or poor
Most of 'em are guilty
But who are you to say for sure?

So when the preacher comes to get me
And they shave off all my hair
Could you take that long walk with me
Knowing hell is waiting there

Could you pull that switch yourself sir
With a sure and steady hand
Could you still tell yourself
That you're better than I am

My name is househusbanddnot
I'm forty one years old
I was born in Manchester England
Quarter blogger I'm told

(Other songs that I thought might benefit from an hhn edit were Teenage Wildlife, Fake Tales Of San Francisco, and Held Down by De La Soul, but Steve Earle always works for me. Now where's my coronation chicken shower gel?)

Good Sandwich Bad Sandwich

(I'm writing this last night, because by the time you are reading this I will either be in 1) the swimming pool 2) pitching for a piece of work at a PR agency 3) drinking pint sized cups of coffee - or vodka - in a bar somewhere because the pitch went well/badly.)

So, yeah. Sandwich rules. I like Styx's contribution. Nothing like a too fussy sandwich to become something that you don't really want. One of those ones where they put that big watercress in it before you can stop them. You know the deal. One of my rules I've just thought of is no fruit. Or more than one cheese. Both are wrong, on levels I am sure I do not need to go into with you my learned readers. (I will be very interested to hear from blokewho's thoughts on sandwiches, which he tells us occupied his whole weekend. Good on you blokewho. (Sounds like a Fall single.) Not least of all because blokewho - well last time I saw him, which you all know is ages ago - was a vegetarian, so looking forward to him trying to fight his corner with a hummus wrap against the mighty roast beef or coronation chicken sandwich.

A story: I have good friends who used to live in the centre of the hip part of San Francisco. They were always saying that when I visited I should go to their local sandwich shop where I would encounter the sandwich vending equivalent of Good Cop Bad Cop. I couldn't really get my head around this concept, until I visited said shop where I was confronted by Good Sandwich Seller: "What would you like sir? We have some very good pastrami in fresh. With apricot? Coming right up. Good choice if I may say so." And the next day in the same shop the Bad Sandwich Seller, possibly the most difficult, opinionated, inflexible man on earth: "You what? You want egg salad with a tomato? What the fuck are you thinking there buddy? Why not some cheese? We got all sorts of cheese. What? Cheddar with onion? Are you out of your fuckin' mind buddy? Do you expect me to put that in between two pieces of bread? What? What do I recommend? That you get the fuck out of my shop before I come around the counter and batter you with these gherkins." All deeply true, as could be confirmed by my two friends if they read this blog, which they sadly don't. The politics of sandwich purchasing took on a whole different meaning in that shop, which I hope is still running.

Another story from same friends in California: Another friend was in a really cheap fried chicken bar waiting for his really cheap fried chicken fix. In front of him, a very grand old Californian dame was ordering:

Grand Old Dame: "I'll have five of your whole roasted chickens."

Stoner Girl Behind Counter: "Will that be for here, or to take away?"

Grand Old Dame: "Do you honestly think I would sit and eat in a dive like this?"

Stoner Girl Behind Counter: "Hey fuck you bitch. I don't know your life."

I'm sorry to report that the manager was summoned, and Stoner Chick was fired on the spot.
Sandwiches. Fried Chicken. It's a jungle out there, and sometimes I just don't know how we keep from going under..da da da da da.

thewaunch@wrong.com

Monday morning, and in the dog house with mrs househusbandnot because I questioned the merit of using the Pete Tong/Ibiza Rave ringtone on the alarm on her Blackberry again this morning. (It really does sound as though Tongy is in the bed with you, mixing up a storm. I guess it wakes mrs hhns up. It certainly wakes me - and the dead - up too.) Anyway, not a good start to the week. mrs hhn left in not v good mood with me, which of course ruins my day because - underneath it all - all I care about is her being happy, despite not showing it that often.

I think the alarm argument was part of a deeper malaise starting with mrs hhn asking me yesterday if I felt I had yet achieved what I wanted in life, followed later in the day by me being attacked by a swarm of flies that are hanging around the wormery at the moment. It was all just a bit Mr Bean Gothic, and I spent most of the evening sulking, followed by a series of dreams about mrs hhn and I being forced to move houses over and over again, with breaks in the dreams of me lying in bed (awake) wondering why I am having these dreams in the first place. (There is nothing worse than wanting to know why one is feeling anxious.)

Anyway, yes. Sandwiches. Sandwiches eaten this weekend: 1 x cold pork and mustard on white, and 1 x bacon and mushroom on granary bap. (Bap is a horrid word. Not nearly as good as muzzle.) We actually had mr anonymous aka The Waunch aka The Sandwich Nazi over for supper on Friday evening, and he had his ass royally busted by mrs hhn when he admitted that he thought wraps were sandwiches. He comes out with all these rules and regulations and then tries to sell a soggy old pancake as a sandwich. Weak Mr Waunch. Weak. And you know it.

He and mrs hhn had a whole further conversation about those fold over pizzas and whether or not they are sandwiches, but he had lost his (self appointed) place of authority by this stage in the discussion, and was forced to concede defeat (moral, factual, actual etc. etc.) and padded off to our roof terrace to drink scotch with me, where I was holding court about something or nothing. Being married to an American, The Waunch is no doubt considering litigation about the public humiliation mrs hhn dealt to him. But he knows - and we know - if you live by the sword, you must also die by it.

In other news, my sister arrived at our place on Saturday with her new laptop, which "has some sort of lock on it, so I can't open it". Hmmm. Turns out my sis aka Bill Gates was trying to open the laptop from the back, which puts her right up there in that bracket of people too dumb to be allowed to own a computer. I feel I can say this without sounding too harsh, because - although I have worked out how to open a laptop - I am currently feeling the need for considerable improvements in my IT skills to match (or allow) some of the things I want to do in the coming months: spreadsheets on sandwich favourites; hhn taking over world; automated apology email notices to mrs hhn; infrared beams to get rid of cat on balcony; joining on-line wormery discussion groups; downloading Gordon Brown/David Cameron podcasts to make me sleep more deeply; spam bombing The Waunch etc etc etc.

Quick One

Probably a little late in the day for you London office readers, but thanks for various on sandwiches, which is an agenda I will return to on Monday or later next week. (It comes as no surprise that given the choice between commenting on my godson's education and sandwiches you all went for the sandwich debate, except for Bad who seems to be mixing the two subjects up in a Bad-like manner.)

In related news, we are roasting some pork this evening = cold pork and mustard sandwiches tomorrow. Sandwichtastic.

Have a gd weekend.

In Da School

As mentioned the other day, mrs househusbandnot and I went down to my godson's parents evening last night. (His parents live abroad.) It was...well I don't really know what it was (and neither did the organisers/staff at the school).

Ostensibly, it was about hearing how the school is preparing the pupils for exams when they are 12 or 13 for their next schools. (I should qualify at this point that this is all about private schools, so anyone interested in education in general - rather than the rarefied population that is those who are going through private education and their eager parents - should tune out here.)

But the organisers couldn't really decide how they wanted to pitch their pitch. In an introduction, they were keen to say that their school had a good track record of getting kids on into the better schools, but also that there was no shame in not going to those better schools, and that there were scholarships to some schools, but that you shouldn't get too upset if a decision is made that your kid is too thick to try a scholarship, and that there is enormous competition to get into these schools, but you should also be aware that - and they didn't say this overtly but it was implied - if you have a load of cash your kid/godkid will do okay if you give your kid/godkid loads of extra tutoring in the holidays.

The main presentation was led by a nice safe middle aged woman who (I thought I heard) was introduced as Mo Da or Moz Dev or something, assisted by a nice safe middle aged man who (I thought I heard) was introduced as Mr Bore. I have to confess Moz Dev had one of the most soporific voices I have ever heard, and 10 minutes into her presentation I was jabbing a pen into my thigh to keep myself awake. mrs hhn, being mrs hhn, was taking eager notes at this stage, until 10 minutes later she too was hit by the gentle sleep inducement that was Moz Dev's voice. (Incidentally, if you are thinking we were failing in our godparenting duties by nodding off , it was pretty apparent from the outset that this presentation/event was not particularly relevant to the situation that my godson is in, which is having been asked - as you must be through a pre-exam exam process exclusive to the school his parents want him to go to - to sit exams for that school. So he is three quarters of the way through the hoop already [if he manages to figure out in the next six months that playing the electric guitar with his teeth will only ever win over half the world, and that the fact that he can hold a very civilised conversation about the relative merits of starting a conversation when there is nothing to say {a characteristic of his about which I am deeply proud btw} may disarm some grown ups he comes across who would like children to be a little less self aware and chilled out about the world].)

Anyway, Moz Dev had some slides to keep us awake. I had tried to listen to her voice and look at the slides, but that BBC research about people only being able to take in information from one information source at a time is right. So I concentrated on the slides, which included some pretty random messages: 'Listen To Your Children'; 'Sleep Is Important'; 'Friendship', 'Pressure'; 'Don't Panic'; 'Keep In Touch At All Times In This Crucial Time'; 'Role Models'; and (most inexplicable of all) 'Broad Church In Autumn'. I think the idea was to let us know that Moz and the gang have our children's/godchildren's best interests at heart (which I am sure they do btw), but on their own the slides were a bit too Gilbert And George for me, and full of euphemisms and half threats qualifying themselves as guidance. (My favourite euphemism was 'Captain Of IT' which in my day was 'Computer Geek'.) So I tried to listen to Moz Dev again with the old pen in thigh trick.

Eventually - what seemed like many many many minutes later - a colleague of Moz Dev's (not Mr Bore who had obviously gotten stage fright or had dozed off and missed his slot) stood up and summarised in four minutes what she had been saying in four thousand, which was that they will do anything they possibly can to get our kids/godkids into the schools we want them to go to, and that if they don't then they apologise in advance.

mrs hhn and I left a little dazed and confused, and spent a very jolly journey on the train back into town taking turns at playing her bomb game in her Blackberry, and playing what is your favourite sandwich. It was an hour's journey so we extended the sandwich game to include choices for toasted and open as well as your standard sandwich. Answers in my pigeon hole by lights out please.

mrs hhn's Zoo

7.13am

A guilty voice from the kitchen: "househusbandnot?" I recognise this voice. It is the one when mrs househusbandnot has done something wrong by trying to do something right. I hear it mostly when mrs hhn has given all her spare cash to a Big Issue seller and doesn't have any money to get home, or when she has accepted an invitation for us - rather than herself - to someone I don't like's place for supper, or when she has told her best friend that I [hhn] would love to go to her best friend's fiance's stag night after I [hhn] have expressly indicated that I don't want to go to it. This is the voice mrs hhn uses when she is about to tell me that she and her mother have agreed it would be nice if we all went on holiday together soon.

7.14am

"Yes" I reply, lying in bed and waiting to see what mrs hhn could have done so early in the morning.

"I may have let a cat into the flat." This possible "may" proves to be a definite "have" as a cat jumps onto my stomach.

mrs hhn sticks her head cautiously around the bedroom door. "Can you get up and give it some food and a cuddle. It looks a bit lonely."

"I'm not getting up for a cat."

"You have to. You know I can't touch cats."

"So why did you let it in?"

"Because it looked a bit lonely."

7.16am

The cat looks at me. I look at the cat. The cat dives under the bed. I get up, pull the cat from under the bed, and put it on the kitchen balcony with some milk. (mrs hhn has locked herself in the bathroom to avoid the cat action.)

7.30am (or thereabouts)

mrs hhn has unbarricaded herself from the bathroom.

"If the cat is lonely, will you give it some lunch?"

"No."

"You could give it some fish, or some cheese?"

"And then it will want to be ours."

"Cats like fish..." [a pause for me to have a chance to think about what a sad thing a hungry cat must be] "...and cheese. There's some in the fridge. You could have lunch together."

7.40am

mrs hhn goes to work, but not before I have stepped up onto my high horse, and reminded her that this is how we (that would be me) ended up with a wormery that requires much maintenance that mrs hhn bought without telling me, and then took one look at it and decided that the wormery and, more specifically, its wormy contents were disgusting and she could not bring herself to go anywhere near it.

I've just been into the kitchen and checked the balcony. The cat is basking in the sun, showing its milk-filled stomach to the sunshine. Animals 1, hhn 0, mrs hhn a no show. Which is cool. It's just a bit of milk, and a dumb cat that has lost its way around the balconies behind our flat. But it is reminding me not to let mrs hhn get any (more?) animals unless she signs an agreement to actually deal with them in some shape or form. I know she thinks she is doing the right thing - and she probably is - but the accelerated process from the doing to the not wanting to have anything to do with leaves me with a lunch date with a cat, which I don't really need today. (The really annoying thing is that mrs hhn knows that by lunchtime, if the cat is still around, he/she/it and I will be best friends, and I will have fed him/her/it all our best fish and cheese, and will be considering going up to town to buy him/her/it lots of cat toys.)

Search Me

Thanks for your various thoughts on my dream yesterday, and yes - being half Apache as discussed some time ago - I had already translated it as your bog standard anxiety dream, even if it did involve David Cameron - or maybe because it involved David Cameron. (I am just putting David Cameron in here as often as possible because I got a lot of visits when I mentioned David Cameron on my post yesterday. You know, the one that mentioned David Cameron a few times.)

Actually, speaking of visits and key words and searches etc., I am having great difficulty understanding a big edit we are needing to do on that real website I work on. I have been merrily putting up articles onto the site every day, but my keywording - I am told by my web expert friend - is a little nuts. As a result, we are not being picked up by search engines as much as we should be - which in turn would...well you know the deal.

My web expert friend has been trying to explain that I need to be find phrases or words that (normal?) people are searching for. This is fine, and logical etc. But the trouble is, as I engage in this process - or analysis - I get into a real spin about who those 'normal' people are, and where they live, and what is going on in their heads as they tap in searches. How do normal people in Chicago or Utah or Denver or Dorset look for things on the web? If they are say looking to respray their car, do they type in 'car respray' or 'Car Respray' or 'Car Respray?' or car respray?' or 'respray my car' or 'respray a car' or 'my car needs repsraying' or 'can you respray my car' or 'Can U respray a car?' or...well you can tell I am thinking about it too much, and worrying about details rather than looking for generalised language and phrases. I'm hoping this will all be sorted out when I meet up with the web expert later this week, when what goes on in my head will be replaced with what needs to be going on in my head to engage in this process.

In other news, I sent off my second real blog yesterday - the one I am being paid for by a US-based website. I'm not telling you what it is, in case Madame B goes there and uses profanities in the discussion area. It is also quite a serious site, and I don't imagine that there is much of a cross over audience with you househusbandnot regulars, unless you guys are bored of honey badgers and really want to hear what I think about health education in the UK.

In other other news, mrs househusbandnot and I are back off to visit my godson's school tomorrow evening, representing his parents who are based in Nairobi now. It is an open evening to discuss how my godson and others are getting on. They sent us through his report to look at before we go and grill his teachers about why he is not this and could be trying harder at that etc. But it looks, from the report, that he is doing just fine. But will report back on how it goes, the 'it' being me trying to get away with being a grown up rather than my godson's academic progress.

Incidentally, if you have come here looking to get your car resprayed in Utah, I'm thinking it would be a month to learn how to respray cars, and at least another six months to relocate from London and set up shop in your area, so if you are looking for a rush job I may not be your man.

Cricket Highlights

So I go to this new job, and I am a bit worried about my suit being a bit too tight, but am trying to be positive and avoid tugging away at the jacket and trousers to keep them in place. And it turns out that I am going to be working for David Cameron. But he is not around, so his Head of whatever shows me around. (He is also called David, as is - it turns out - every other man in the office, except for me, which they [the Davids] all find rather amusing.) Everyone seems very very rich and well dressed, and very very unbusy, except to nose around asking me exactly what I am doing there.

And I get shown to a desk which is in my old prep school, except they have lots of new computers all running on systems that I don't know how to work. And after a bit of being nice to the rather frosty woman I am sharing an office with, David Cameron turns up and bursts into our office to meet the new bloke aka me. He seems nice, but incredibly vague about what he needs. He asks me to write a four page promotional brochure on "Anything you want. Just make us look good". I plug away, and show my work to the Head of whatever, but he hardly reads it. He is too excited about some car journey he is going on with David (Cameron). And he invites me to come along, but I am a bit worried that my suit is falling apart, so I go to get changed, but the two doors on the changing rooms don't have locks, so I have to do this balancing thing trying to hold the doors closed while I get changed. And then, I look in the mirror at the new shirt I have on, and it is a faded denim woman's blouse. If I put a tie on, it looks quite normal, so I go for that option.

And then David (Cameron) disappears and everyone says the thing I have written is excellent, but he wants to talk to me about it in person, and he will be back soon anyway. So I kill a bit of time by going to buy a cigar to smoke, but none of the shops have anything other than huge great Cuban cigars when all I want is a little cheroot or something. Eventually I find a shop that sells me a small cigar, but I am now running late for the boss. And I run back to the office, in the process of which I lose my tie so the woman's blouse thing is going on again. But I figure he will be cool about this, since I am noticing that all his male staff are dressed up as school boys anyway.

But then I have been given a massive hedge trimmer and my sister to help me trim the hedges around a cricket pitch where Cameron and his staff are playing a 50 overs game against some other team, all of whom look pretty sharp in their whites. So I get to trimming the hedge, thinking they will want it cut right back so that everyone can see the pitch. But the Head of whatever turns up and freaks that I have opened up the view for anyone to come along and watch us play. My sister gets annoyed with him and tells him we didn't have any decent instructions, a conversation that Cameron gets involved in, and he agrees that we have done the right thing by trimming the hedge right back. (Somewhere around here, there is a passage about having a meal, but I forget the details, and am too stressed to eat anyway because I am the only person there to bowl.)

So I end up opening the bowling, and they show my performance on a massive screen which indicates that my accuracy etc is pretty perfect, and also unplayable. So we - well I - get our opposition out for 49 runs, and I am invited to open the batting, which I decline thinking I should let someone else take over because I still need to get back to the office to finish that report I was writing which no-one has given me any feedback on yet.

And I run back to the office, and think it will be okay to use the changing room now that everyone is at the cricket. So I am changing into my old shirt when both doors burst open and all the Davids are laughing at me in my too tight trousers and sweaty shirt.

All this before I've even woken up to engage in the real Monday, where mrs househusbandnot looks down at my in my exhausted state, and asks "Bad dream babe?"

HHN 5,0000

Well it wasn't Madame B - which is pretty surprising since she does check this blog approx every four minutes (your employers must be proud of you Madame) - but at 5.32 pm yesterday we had our 5,000th visit to househusbandnot. This particular visitor looked at one page, and stayed there for 0.00 seconds. But hey, stats is stats.

I did promise an hhn prize to this person, but it was not one of the usual culprits - Madame B, anonymous aka The Waunch, blokewho, Y.O.U., Bad, Nick Bartle, Styx etc. - so I am not sure that I will be able to track them down. (Shame. I was looking forward to doing an hhn comp cd for them now that Apple have given us all free reign to bootleg.) Instead, he or she will have to bask in that 0.00 second of learning and entertainment he/she got from hhn. And the assurance that you leave me (hhn) a happier, more 5,000 Visits To My Blog kind of guy today. No longer a quiet voice in www ether, I now feel that I truly exist. So here's to mr/mrs/ms 5,000.

And here's also too:

• All the usual culprits
• mrs househusbandnot
• Blogger for making blogging so easy
• Google for trying to make it so hard
• The Waunch and (*& for their proofing of hhn
• Google ads which have made me approx and actually not one single physical pence or cent to date, despite promises and regular updates about how blogging makes you rich
• That scary bloke with the patch
• Everyone whose photos I have stolen for the blog
• And all 10 of you who have diligently each visited hhn approx 500 times - may you all click on the adverts and continue to comment back on the blog

I will be getting hhn 5,000 t-shirts and mug trees made up over the weekend.

Just Do It

I was talking yesterday to my new best friend (well he is an old friend, and our paths have crossed again after a break of a decade or so) about work and working in offices.

He - like me - works from home, and we got ourselves into a big old self-validating lather about how little work actually gets done in real offices, and about the three or four concerted hours he and I do at home adding up to a whole lot more than the 28 minutes or so of labour the average office worker gets done every day in the average office in between:

• lunch breaks
• coffee breaks
• discussions with Nick from Finance at water cooler about what a tosser boss is
• discussions with boss in his office about Nick from Finance's lack of team spirit
• footling around on the web
• discussions with colleagues about last departmental meeting, planning next departmental meeting, preparing presentation of self justification for next departmental meeting etc.
• reading househusbandnot
• robbing of stuff from stationary cupboard
• diversity training
• internal email discussion about Ugly Betty
• internal email discussion about who is going to get a cake for Petra from HR for her birthday even though she was rude to Jackie from Office Services' boyfriend at the Xmas party
• posting a comment on househusbandnot
• getting to know Outlook Express properly
• long playing around in kitchen infusing fruit tea drink
• looking around office blankly
• checking to see if the company still has an internet block on Amazon
• checking to see if anyone has commented on your comment on househusbandnot
• thinking really really long and hard for a reason to go and bother your boss aka remind him you exist
• thinking about what to have for lunch tomorrow and whether or not you should really take a proper break at lunchtimes rather than just working the whole day through because no-one else really understands how much work you have to do here
• sending another comment to househusbandnot
• picking nose
• trying not to look at (tntla) bloke from IT's arse/tntla girl from press office's cleavage
• etc etc etc etc etc etc.
  

So we were rather pleased with our non-in-office productivity. Mind you - and I wish I was making this up - I have been looking at a diary entry in my diary for a few days which says Do Summit and trying to figure out if I had a conference call about a summit or a meeting or something. It just dawned on me that I wrote it in the other day when I was bored 'working' at home, and it meant Do Something rather than just sit around.

Beggars' Banquets

Thanks to Styx for further example of the urban hustle, and thoughts on when and if we should give money to people on the street. Having sounded all knowing and surprised by mrs househusbandnot's naivety at giving the woman at our door a few quid the other night, I gave a `Got Any Spare Change For Something To Eat Guv' guy a couple of quid yesterday who was almost certainly going to spend it on drugs and or alcohol. I know this with some certainty because I overheard the next person he approached offering to buy him a sandwich and he ran off.

But I really agree with Styx about There But For The Grace Of God. As we come marching home from work with only an eye on the first - and second - gin and tonic, who are we to judge those who are doing the same thing but just in a rather more overt and less socially 'acceptable' manner? I am not sure it is any less 'acceptable' to be needing heroin than it is to be needing a drink after work. They are just both wants, and needs - and addictions too I guess, although never really sure about that one (as in I am not sure where addiction starts and need stops, or that addiction is treated very well in this country, unless it is Robbie Williams or someone).

Me? It depends. I gave an old woman a fiver the other day and she said: "Thanks love. The last man I asked wanted me to give him a blow job. That wasn't very nice was it?" And some other bloke with home-made tattoos on his face said to me "Thanks for not just telling me to fuck off" when I gave him fifty pence last week. I didn't want to hear anything about these people's lives. I just wanted them to go away. But both responses gave me a jolt to be reminded that it was about them and not just about me and my vacuum magnanimosity.

I guess we would all like not to be being hassled for money on the street, so that we don't have to stop and think about whether or not we want to give any out. But it is better (more socially acceptable?) than being mugged or having our credit card details robbed. It is a pretty honest exchange, even if the guy says it is for food rather than a drink or some drugs. And God it must be depressing begging, especially in London where we give or don't give or want to interview the poor fucker about what sort of sandwich he is going to buy.

Country Life

Sorry for the complete lack of blogging action over the Easter period. Not sure what happened. Just didn't want to blog. (Nothing biblical in that is there?) And thanks for your various comments and demands for a return (resurrection?) of househusbandnot. I didn't know you cared, although I do rather like Madame B's post-modern take on blogging whereby the blogger doesn't actually blog and the commenters just carry on commenting.

Anyway, back up and running with..er not much to say really. Had a good Easter weekend with one of my sisters in Kent. Highlights included: getting back in touch with an old friend who was down there too; stroking my sister's pigs; playing catch the bubbles with my sister's dogs; and generally hanging out in the country. (Although Kent is so deeply gentlefied I am not sure it really counts as country anymore. The main street of the village where my sister lives looks more like Marylebone High Street than Marylebone High Street, full or rich urban mothers and their well dressed kids who look more out of place in 'the countryside' as I do.)

Actually I like the countryside, despite the people and having to drive everywhere for everything. The animals thing is a bit much too, as I was reminded when my sister's cat dragged a massive rabbit in under the dining room table just before supper. And there was a really really noisy owl that kept me from my country retreat sleep. But it was a nice weekend.

Back in London, it did all seem quite loud and brash and aggressive. On the way back from the gym, the driver of the bus stopped because there was a gang of kids refusing to pay for their ride. Being England, we all tutted and looked affronted but didn't actually say or do anything to help the driver out. I got off the bus and walked home. I can't be doing with any of that bolloxing around. And one of the kids had a pit bull terrier that was eyeing my leg with interest. All very London, very..well boring really. And then later in the evening mrs househusbandnot got hustled by some woman claiming she was a neighbour and needed a few quid for her electricity meter. (I know it was a hustle because this woman did the same thing to me a few years ago.) So mrs hhn and I ended up having a row about who is hustling who, and whether or not you should answer the door to anyone in the evenings in London.

mrs hhn has trundled off into the London morning back to work, and I am back here working on the website and trying to figure out what I learned last week about work. There was something. but I can't remember what it was. Oh, yeah. Do what you want to do, and what people think you are good at.

Just spoke to mrs hhn who was asking if I had written a blog yet today. I said yes, but that I thought it wasn't very interesting. She says that doesn't matter, as long as I am getting back into the programme, which I will do in the next few days. Thanks for your patience and loyalty.

MMMM Onday

Since we spoke last I have - amongst other things - been invited to go and meditate at Stonehenge at six am in the morning. Although I appreciate people need different stuff in their life - or perhaps because I understand that people need different stuff in their life - I will not be taking up this invitation.

Speaking of people needing stuff, I ended up sitting next to a life coach at a wedding on Saturday evening. I'm kind of on the fence about life coaching, but we ended up doing fun stuff like deciding what animals everyone else was at our table and talking about what we would be if we had absolute freedom etc. It was fun, because it was just social and we were having a drink, and it was much better than talking about the congestion charge or reality tv. I have no idea if I was being coached in the conversation, or if this particular coach is writing up her blog as we speak with comments about sitting next to a freak on Saturday night. But it was a good wedding conversation. (I guess anything is fun if it means as much as it needs to, and if the person you are talking to is engaging and interesting.)

The wedding was a heavy duty mid-afternoon to midnight gig, involving three different venues around Chelsea, including a great church where Henry VIII married his third wife. (Insert your own gag about this here. The vicar certainly did.) By about 10 pm, mrs hhn and I were ready for Mr Beddington, having become pretty light weight over the last few years when it comes to socialising. Also, the whole point of weddings - I think anyway - is to enjoy love: whether it is seeking it out, or having it, or watching the bride and groom radiate with it. And all that smiling and feeling good about the world gets quite tiring. (I am also a really bad cryer at the speeches, so was pretty much emotionally wiped out by the time it came to pudding.)

I may have mentioned in the past that one of the real regrets about my wedding is that I did not do much dancing. Actually what happened was the new mrs hhn and I did the first dance, and the second, and the third, and absolutely no-one joined us on the dance floor, so we ended up looking pretty foolish up there on our own. So I always try and join in the dancing at weddings now, so that the bride and groom don't get marooned like we did at ours. But it was Irish dancing at this wedding on Saturday, so I gave it a miss.

My other wedding habit it wandering around thanking people at the end of the evening. Again, I managed to avoid this too on Saturday, which was a relief to mrs hhn, who has - in the past - been seen to be physically prising me from the bar where I am buying the DJ a drink or congratulating the harpist or telling the vicar he did a jolly fine job. (I think I'm being polite and affable. mrs hhn thinks I am being drunk and insane.)

In other news, didn't get that contract I interviewed for the other day, which was annoying. But I got another piece of work...writing a blog. Strange but true. Sadly I can see very little cross over between this blog and that one, but will see what I can do in the coming months. And will let you know how it it going.

I am not sure if it was the conversation with the life coach, or something mrs hhn said to me on the way home in the taxi from the wedding about being who you need to be (it's the sort of thing mrs hhn likes to talk about when she's had a few water melon martinis) , but am currently thinking I need to concentrate more on getting more writing jobs - although, having trudged through that dull para about why I didn't dance at the wedding on Saturday, you may disagree.

What else? No, I'm done for today.