househusbandnot

Lord Andrew

2008-04-29T08:12:00.003Z

In other celebrity-related news, mrs househusbandnot and I were extremely entertained that one of the contestants on The X Factor referred to Andrew Lloyd-Cabbage-Head as "Lord Andrew" on the show the other night. Americans? Don't you just love how they just keep on being wrong. Not that I am at all biased because I had to explain what The Council Of Europe was to an American audience the other day. ("It's like, well you know, got 47 countries in it, and they, well, debate stuff, but none of it is legally binding, but it does means something, kinda, in a 47 country kind of way, and some of them are Dutch...")

Not a lot else today people. I finished Half Life 2 over the weekend with my brother in law's assistance. I am a deeply cheap date when it comes to X Box. I have been playing Half Life 2 since Xmas. My weekend success was accompanied to jeers of derision from mrs hhn on the other sofa, as her brother jogged through sections of the game that I have been stuck on for weeks. And he and I did a bit of Xbox Liveing, which is a bit odd and creepy playing games with complete strangers across the airwaves. In a vague pretence at having a life, the three of us did discuss going to the Rock Against Racism gig, but am glad to report that we didn't actually manage to get off our arses and hung around eating jaffa cakes and X Boxing and watching crap TV aka X Factor instead.

Anyone got any good ideas what I could buy my father in law for his 65th birthday btw? (And yes he has all the aviation simulation games and accessories he needs already. Darn, I've married into a gamegeek family. Excellent. )

And..

2008-04-24T12:36:00.004Z

...I just saw a sheep in a playground near Russell Square

And The Waunch didn't pick up on my typo in my headline yesterday...

And my mate (*& has just secured me tickets for Massive Attack* during their Meltdown thang at The Festival Hall...

And mrs househusbandnto woke me up at four am this morning because she wanted to hear me say 'muesli'...

And, and, and...

*Yeah, yeah. I know. But they are great live,and (*& and I have had quite a lot of fun at the Meltdown thangs over the last few years. One of the highlights involved me deciding to talk to Bono when I was twatted. Another involved one of the best gigs I have ever seen (Tricky and Lee Perry together, which shouldn't work, but did. Karma Coma Dwop..)

Raspberry Bonbons Scottie?

2008-04-23T11:44:00.002Z

I was sitting in Russell Square having some lunch just now, trying to read a big old document I am writing an article about. A bloke came up to me and said: “Excuse me. I know you are busy. But I am conducting some interviews. If you were organising a Scott of the Antarctic expedition, would you include raspberry bonbons on the menu?”

I have nothing else to report today.

Shakespeare, Sister

2008-04-22T07:53:00.002Z

I assure you there is nothing very Shakespearian about modern Denmark, or indeed me in modern Denmark. (Anyway, I don't buy the whole Shakespeare thing. Sure, I muddled through a handful of his plays at school, and kinda pretended that I thought they were deep. But, are they really? Really? And I don't buy whole Shakespeare wrote the only eight stories that ever need telling. Did he write the screenplay to 28 Days Later? No. Did he author The Diggingest Dog In The World? Er, no. Purple Rain script? N[o]. Any of the Hitchcock movies? NO. Did he ever drag his bearded little ass over to his desk to engage in anything on modern man and his struggle with his ipod? Or addiction? Or man on man lurve? Or religious war? [Sorry, just been reading The Second Plane.] Or living with wolves? [Or anything on animals come to think of it.] Or detectives? Or serial killing? Or the dilemmas facing a band forced to reform in order to make money although they hate each other? Or being unable to cope with winning the lottery? Or having cosmetic surgery and marrying a computer hacker who has overextended on his property portfolio? Er...no, no, no and...no. He didn't even know how to spell his own name. And a good line here and there does not make for eternal fame. If that was the case, we could/should be studying Howard Devoto. I'd go with Marlowe. And anyway, Shakespeare has kept a lot of actors in work for far too long, treading the boards with big balloon pants and billowing white shirts thinking they are up to something profound, rather than just making tits of themselves and boring the arses off of the groups of sixth formers forced to watch their plays when they would much prefer to be reading manga or playing Xbox or getting off with girls/boys.)

Making Sense Of Your World

2008-04-16T12:03:00.002Z

Recovering as we all are from that flurry of Smithiesness – And which of you loonies thinks we should give money in our wills to Moz and Marr? Any donations should surely go to Rourke and or Joyce? I am reminded how Moz dismissed Rourke from The Smiths. It came in the form of a note left by Morrissey under the windscreen wiper of his car, saying “Andy, you have left The Smiths. Good luck and goodbye, Morrissey”*. - we should move on back in the real world, rather than remain within the distant memories of our teenage years lying on the bed in our bedrooms thanking God that The Smiths existed.

I am glad to report that mrs househusbandnot is on the mend, as evidenced by the pile of magazines on our kitchen table on my return home last night. Grazia? Yep, good, although it is printed on weird paper. Heat? Yep, always good for a two minute read and a reminder that I have no idea who most of the people they are writing about actually are, other than Callum Best and that Hilton beast. Time Out? Yep, always useful in a thank you God that I don’t have to go to The Jazz Café tonight kind of way. Psychologies Magazine? Er, hang on mrs hhn. Are you trying to tell me something by buying this publication? (which has the strapline of ‘Making Sense Of Your World’ btw) And it is open on an article about whether or not you really know your partner. (I didn’t even dare to read the other well thumbed article on sexual honesty.)

But we got through the evening, with – or without – the expert advice offered by the stuck in the `70s quacks who write for Psychologies Magazine. (‘Talking Bollox About Your World’) And watched last episode of Shameless and that frankly v odd programme about people going to a clinic in Birmingham with their embarrassing medical conditions and complaints.

And are now preparing for a trip to Denmark tomorrow evening. (My sister lives there, not in nice and civilised Copenhagen, which is populated by some of the best looking people in the world, and where one can sit at elegant cafes , sipping good coffee and watching the world go by in a most civilised manner, before heading off to one of a number of great galleries and restaurants. No, my sister lives on the mainland of Jutland, where people marry their cousins, where the next village to my sister is called Dark, where the only industry appears to be pig and mink farming [there is a mink farm near my sister’s place, just left out of Dark], where the people in supermarkets are so unsocialised that they have no sense of personal space and will stand completely and entirely so close to you that you think they want to have sex with you [or your wallet], where the food consists of..yep, you guessed it, pork and what I can only imagine is mink pate, where it is bone-snappingly cold 11 months of the year, where the next door neighbour wears a tshirt with Gays Deserve AIDS on it, where there are only two tv channels the first of which’s broadcast schedule consists of re-runs of a kids’ programme with two rather ropey looking glove puppets [I think they are supposed to be a dog and a bear] hitting each other, where my sister bought a dog last year which was sold as a terrier/Labrador cross but actually turned out to be a wolf/great dane hybrid giant hound that leaps on people and breaks their arms he is so big, and where the definition of entertainment is waiting until Xmas again when you can scare the children with the Xmas tale of the nasty black man who is going to come and steal their toys.) This is going to be mrs hhn’s first visit to Denmark…

* This just in from The Waunch: “Dude, the will thing on hhn was me, by the way. "Johnny Marr and Morrissey in your '"Will. I am. It was Really Nothing"' compared". I dunno, pearls before swine, innit?”

What Difference Does It Make?

2008-04-15T07:54:00.003Z

Re "Madam B here, darned you hhn, your beloved is poorly and you snipe away like a thorn in a jockstrap - have some pity and tend to her you MAN"

I know. I know. (Most of the post was an excuse to have a Smiths song as a title anyway.) The minute I posted yesterday's post I felt bad about it. I can report back that I went home and made mrs househusbandnot sausage sandwiches last night, and spent some time thanking her for coming to Denmark with me this weekend. And generally tried to be nice, as I avoided the piles of tea cups and other ill-related litter around the flat.

So sincere apolgies to mrs hhn, who incidentally did say last night, when I had gotten off the phone to various people, "When you are on the phone it sounds like you are actually being nice to me when I am ill." I will try and be - rather than just sound - nice this evening.

Still Ill?

2008-04-14T08:06:00.002Z

So as The Pope prepared for his first visit to the USA, Britney crashed her car again, Gordon Brown faltered, The World Bank warned against food shortages, Prince wrote another song about me, butterflies spread their wings on mountain sides in Malaysia, and tigers yawned in India...mrs househusbandnot got sick.

Which in the grand scheme of things should not be such a big deal. But in this scale of things it is. You see, mrs hhn - when ill - turns into a bloke. She lies in bed or on a sofa, hating the world that made her (him) ill, lashing out at anything and anybody (that would be me btw) that comes within lashing at range. She makes mad demands like wanting tea and fish soup at the same time, hates the world some more, and explains that technically no-one has ever been in such abject pain as she is.

This would be okay if I reciprocated with the gender reversals at this stage. But I don't. I can't. I remain resolutely male, bored by other people's illness, angered after the first three demands for tea/soup, irritated by the detritus of the patient (tissues, apple cores, empty mugs etc.), and constantly reminding myself that actually this is not real pain, not pain like I have felt in my life as a sick man.

So what with the staring down of each other, the quiet and not so quiet sulks, the general butlering around after the corpse on the sofa, the recognition that I am a crap nurse (which annoys me, and annoys mrs hhn), and the utter tedium of watching someone being ill, not a great weekend really. I have escaped to the office this morning to let mrs hhn continue her man illness alone.

2008-04-09T11:39:00.002Z

Re: "Being nice to mrs hhn isn't a job, it's a privilege, surely?
And I've done the Writing the Words for the Back of Crisp Packets job, and it's turbo-money for old rope. Any crisp manufacturers out there, I'm your man."

As ever The Waunch(is this blog turning into TheWaunchnotisshouldbe?)puts his finger on the burning issues of the day, the first of which was addressed this morning at hhn HQ as mrs househusbandnot and I were preparing for our day...

hhn: "So, in theory anyway, now that I have run your bath, made you tea, and been downstairs to get the delivery of organic vegetables, I have been a good husband, no?"

mrs hhn: "It is not what you do hhn. It is the manner in which said tasks are performed. And it is not a competition."

hhn considers witty or pithy response to this, but can't come up with anything stronger than "I am only in competition with myself, so it is a competition".

Thus begins another day in the lives of hhn/mrs hhn.

And the crisp packet copy thang? Indeed The Waunch has done this. The place where I always go for my pre-gym coffee stocks the very same crisps for which he wrote the copy. So I think about him and crisp packet copy and his crisp packet copy most days. What I have thought has gotten no further than `There are the crisps that The Waunch wrote the packet copy for.' Actual and factual, if not edifying or illusitory.

So this crisp packet goes into a bar, and asks the barman...

Jobs...

2008-04-08T11:26:00.003Z

...I've been thinking about*

Dog Walking
Those Blokes Who Clean Public Phones In The Middle Of The Night
Inventing New Fireworks
Blogging
Testing New Versions Of Rez (google it)
Inventing New Airlines Menus
Writing The Words For The Back Of Crisp Packets
Being The Duke Of Edinburgh
Hard Core Wrestling
Developing The Software For The Quite Ridiculously Complicated Canteen Swipe Cards At The Court Where I Have Been Doing Jury Service
Living A Lie
Dog Whispering
R and D For Ribena Inc
Coffee Tasting (I met someone who did this once, possibly the maddest person I have ever met)
Being A Community Police Officer
Henry VIIIth Impersonators
Cloud Bursting
Badger Culling (Shame on you sir)
Life Coaching
Inventing Different Forms Of Stress Balls
Being Nice To Mrs HHN
Designing Train Tickets
Being One Of Those Complete Knobbers Who Paint Themselves Silver And Stand Still On The Embankment
Whatever Madame B Does
Prince's Chef
Prince's Anything
Theatre Critics

*Not in a I'd Like To Do Them Way - although I'd go for the firework inventing. More in a just thinking about them, and the fact that people get up in the morning and go and do these things.

Waunchery

2008-04-03T11:27:00.003Z

Strike a light. hhn just got clever (And there was me going to get back on track with thoughts on last week’s demonization of sausages as a health risk, some predictable gags about judges wearing women’s underwear, and a few other cheap gags about jurors and me being a juror etc.)

A few qualifiers to the hhn interregnum – or should I say justitium or tumultus* - while I was/am out doing jury service, and The Waunch was/is at the helm (Fyi, I am technically still on jury service until next Tuesday but happen to have a day off today, so you can all look forward to some more The Waunch musings should he feel so inclined.)

1) I believed the April Foolery about Carla Bruni becoming a style advisor to GB
2) Her husband should have surgery to make him a bit taller
3) Remind me where you went to University Waunch?
4) I absolutely don’t believe mrs househusbandnot’s story about her April Foolery when she was at university. This is a woman, dear readers, who has such a ferocious belief in right and wrong that she would probably engage in citizen’s arrests if she was not such a nice woman. (Although, I am glad to report that she did engage in some excellent criminal activity a month or so ago. She can provide details, when she is not busy engaging in conversation with Madame B that makes even Madame B look vaguely savoury.)
5) The Waunch seeing himself as `a kind of wise but kindly trendy uncle-type’? A comb over does not make you avuncular dude. It is pity, not respect, in their youthful eyes The Waunch. I should know. I see it most days myself when required to engage with anyone under the age of 35.
6) And further The Waunch thoughts: `if I wanted to write a blog, I could have started my own long before now. The fact that I haven’t is due to a natural timidity, or modesty, which people who normally only see me when I’m in a socially enthusiastic mood – which, to be fair, is most evenings – might find difficult to believe.’ Calling Nick Bartle. Comments please.
7) Will Anonymous who wrote about Tumbleweed Central Population The Waunch please contact me for this month’s - no year’s - prize for funniest thing on hhn.
8) My favourite story about The Waunch’s time in Hong Kong is the story Mrs The Waunch tells of the regular knocks on her front door early in the morning from the local shop keepers complaining “He no good. He bad for business”, their problem being that The Waunch had yet again almost made it all the way home, but had once again failed on the last leg and fallen asleep in a shop front near his apartment.

And just in case you are feeling I am on a The Waunch bash, don’t. He is a good man, and rose admirably to the hhn challenge.

*Fuck you Will Self

April Fools’ day, by Avril de Poisson

2008-04-02T00:23:00.002Z

Was April Fools’ Day ever really fun? I only ask because yesterday was so emphatically self-serving and smug that I feel like I need to towel myself off after consuming the British media all day long. Was there a newspaper or website that didn’t offer its consumers a ‘prank’ story of such utter banality that it made you want to weep blood?

So we had Carla Bruni to become style advisor to Great Britain, Nicholas Sarkozy having surgery to make him as tall as his wife, the face of Big Ben being replaced with a digital display and weight-loss cream that had to be used while wearing special socks.

And then added to that steaming heap, you had the huge companies that think that displaying some humour – and I use the word loosely – will flog more of their awful shit. Guinness offering a backwards pint which was all froth, with a head of stout (‘For One Day Only’, just in case you didn’t get it). BMW had a car that electrified dogs that pissed on them (one that electrocuted the herd of douchenozzles that drive ‘beemers’ would be more to my liking) and Google offering a web application that can predict the future. Give me a break. The normally sainted YouTube stole someone else’s joke (sorry, internet meme) and made all their front page vids link to a Rick Astley clip. Kill me now.

And the BBC offered us flying penguins. Look, BBC, I’m not that stupid. I know penguins don’t fly. So your joke doesn’t work. And if you think it does work, on lots of people who aren’t me, then you should be slapped for being so patronising. With all your resources, couldn’t you have put some real thought into it? Although someone there managed to put together a smart piece on stories in the news that sound like April Fools’ stories but actually weren’t, including a smoking turtle, pay-per-view cremations, and tattoos for the teeth, which provided a far more lucid and ironic commentary on the world we live in than flying penguins and Gordon Ramsay forswearing swearing.

The whole April Fools’ thing has just become a lazy shorthand for having a sense of humour, like those ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!’ signs by peoples' desks that thankfully I never see anymore.

There probably was a golden age of April Fools’ jokes: The Guardian’s supplement on the island of San Serriffe was clever and convincing. When the BBC did its Spaghetti Harvest thing, that fooled lots of people. But yesterday had Alistair Darling playing a lottery scratchcard in a newsagent, Daniel Craig saying that James Bond should be bisexual, and the US scrapping the dollar and joining the euro. Don’t any of these highly-paid media professionals credit us with a scintilla of intelligence? It would appear not.

As it happens, I do remember once when I had fun with an April Fools’ joke. I used to live on a small island about an hour’s boat commute from Hong Kong. The island was, because of the difficulty of getting there, a haven for hippies and artists and writers, who revelled in its relative isolation (and the absence of police). There were a lot of big infrastructure problems going on in Hong Kong at the time – airports, bridges and so on -- and my flatmate came up with the idea of persuading people that the MTR (the underground system) was going to extend its lines out to the Outlying Islands. So he had incredibly convincing posters made (he worked for an ad agency), in full colour, in two languages, with maps and perfect logos, explaining that construction was about to start imminently.

Late at night, after the last ferry had come in, we pasted up the posters outside the ferry terminal, not just on our island, but on all the other Outlying Islands’ ferry terminals. We got up early the next morning to watch the three or four thousand deeply-isolationist reluctant stoner commuters digest the bad news, that paradise was ending, as they shuffled to the ferry. It was chaos. The joke was simple, believable, and beautifully executed. Everyone fell for it. There were questions in the Legislative Council. Later that day, it made the TV news, and, we heard afterwards, had been mentioned in British newspapers. In their roundup of all the wacky April Fools’ pranks from around the world. Which kind of killed it for me.

Anyone got any better stories? Journalists need not apply.

It ain't what it used to be...

2008-03-31T22:15:00.002Z

OK, thanks for that vote of confidence, Madame B. To deal with your points: I'm an author myself, although an unusually unsuccessful one, and I know quite a few others, and I haven't noticed the knobbishness quotient being particularly high - certainly not in a world that features investment bankers, Premiership footballers and members of the Burmese military junta.
As to why two people can read the same thing and construe different meanings: I studied this at university, and could put a pretty resonable explanation together for you. But, trust me, your eyes would glaze over in seconds as soon as I started droning on about critical discourse analysis, semiotics and syntactics, and linguistic philosophy. The quick answer is that some people are stupider than others. That's all.
And does God exist? What an absurd idea. We all know our lives are ruled by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, right? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_monster).

As to doing stream of consciousness. OK, here goes:

The office in which I work is mainly filled with people who are much younger than me – I’d guess that the average age is about 26 or 27, which I waved goodbye to quite some time ago. Mostly this is fine; I do a lot of mentoring, answer a lot of questions on procedures and stuff, and see myself as a kind of wise but kindly trendy uncle-type. They don’t ask me about My Chemical Romance and I don’t tell them about Wishbone Ash, and it’s all good.

These youngsters decided to organise a trip to a club last Friday which specialises in 80’s nights. Apparently people enjoy wearing skinny leather ties, burgundy cardigans, white socks, leg warmers, ra-ra skirts and harrington jackets, while listening to shit music. Yeah, I was mystified too. But they all wanted me to come along.

However, I was handed a lucky escape. A guy started playing a bunch of 80’s songs on his computer – ABC, Spandau Ballet, Europe, Kajagoogoo, Culture Club - and I was forcefully reminded of how much I loathed them, and so I sidled off quietly into the night when no one was looking.

The whole thing was apparently much like those School Disco nights. Now I’d rather stab myself in the face with a radioactive knife than dress up in a school uniform and dance self-consciously to music I hated when it first came out. But then I’m not in the market for getting off with anyone, and even of I was, I wouldn’t want to do it to the soundtrack of my adolescence. It was bad enough then. As the philsopher Satayana noted, ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ and I’m sure as shit not going to repeat the 1980’s. Once is enough.

The 80’s are when I actually did a lot of my growing up. When I look back at the 80’s, I think of the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, O and A levels, Greenham Common, cheap speed, going to university, falling in love for the first time. Stuff that was important, then.

But why do these kids, who are bright, and interested, and thoughtful, want to revel in a decade that they don’t really remember? Perhaps that’s the point – they don’t remember it, so they can colour it in any way they want. It still seems like a complete waste of time to me, a commodification of culture to be sold to people who don’t have any connection with it. Maybe I just work with very dreary and unimaginitive people. Get off my lawn, pesky kids!

NotHouseHusbandNot

2008-03-27T19:29:00.002Z

Flattered as I am that the always-fragrant Madame B and hhn think that I could fill The Master’s boat-sized 16-hole oxblood Doc Martens, I’m in two minds about it. For starters, if I wanted to write a blog, I could have started my own long before now. The fact that I haven’t is due to a natural timidity, or modesty, which people who normally only see me when I’m in a socially enthusiastic mood – which, to be fair, is most evenings – might find difficult to believe.
But I don’t think I’m particularly egotistical. So I usually restrict my ranting to people who know me well enough not to care about it. And out of the five readers here, I’m afraid that that won’t work, and you’ll all peel off and not come back and hhn will never forgive me. My second reason for being chary about taking on hhn’s mantle is that the two of us work in rather different ways. He is a natural orator, a folksy, genial communicator. I’m more - I dunno – considered, detail-oriented.
The way this blog works is that hhn turns out 500 words of charming nonsense, Madame B manages to remind everyone that she has a clitoris, I point out how little hhn knows about a particular kind of mammal, and we’re all happy. I don’t know what you’d like me to write about if I tried to take over. Maybe if you suggested some subjects I could come up with something. Or not.

WaunchWaunchNot?

2008-03-25T10:13:00.002Z

I'm all for The Waunch writing hhn while I am at my civic duty on jury service.. but is he man enough to take up this challenge? If you see nil new posts on hhn in the next two weeks, you can assume that he is not...

Ipods Ishmods (Chapter IV)

2008-03-18T13:06:00.007Z

Moving swiftly on from my relationship with mrs househusbandnot - something I did vow some time ago only to share thoughts on only with her, rather than her and you six - hmmm, may have crossed that line by mistake there for a moment, for which apologies to mrs hhn - and my other relationships, namely the one I have with that piece of junk known as my ipod.

Taking on board Styx's qualifier/complaint about the incessant need/demand/expectation for listening to music every waking hour (rather than as we used to: having raced back from the record shop, waited until your mum had finished listening to something on the radio, and then finally finally finally being allowed to listen to your new record), my ipoding is...

...you know what? I had a whole post worked up about the shuffle mode versus the other modes, and a discussion about some of the 3,988 songs on my ipod, and about the fact that a third of those songs are from my friend (*&'s collection, and what a laugh it is sometimes to get some obscure songs from his collection shouting at you when you least expect them (well, you can’t prepare for something you don’t know is there, right? – even if it is another Janet Jackson remix), and a whole ode to (*& para about how much I think about him because I spend at least a third of my ipod time listening to his music and reminding myself what a cool guy her is etc., and/but that I never tell him that, and somehow think it is good enough to be thinking about my friends warmly rather than actually getting my ass around to seeing them, and that really really annoying equalizer option on ipods which has about thirty different settings all of which sound the same – Lounge? Vocal Booster? Deep? Who cares? (well I obviously do), and also about quite how flat everything really sounds on ipods, and itunes being the most annoying piece of software ever invented by man or woman or beast or badger, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But in the end of the day it was a sad rant from a sadder man about his electronic toys. And there are quite enough of them out there already. (Although, of interest may be the fact that if you Google image `ipods', about three pages down there is a picture of a woman performing a sexual act on what looks like a horse. Another fine Google moment. [I wonder how often you have to mention Google on a Google owned blog space before Google use their Google rules and Google regulations to a) ban you from blogging with Google or b) employ you at Google as a Google employee?] )

So, there it is. Bring on Easter.

BTW I am on jury service next week for a couple of weeks. Am also – for reasons I will not bore you with - off line at home at the moment, so not sure when hhn will resurface. Am hoping – as I hope Google is – that it will be soon.

In other news, have decided that The Waunch is the ideal man to organize that largest group of people ever to gather in one place to play the guitar event that was cancelled last year. So easy to decide what other people should be doing with their own lives, eh?

In other other news,…no I’ve dried.

hhn x

The Hollyoaks Years

2008-03-18T08:52:00.005Z

Re the 'Since you got married, hhn, have you managed to wean yourself off your habit of frotting* on the sofa in front of Hollyoaks?' comment.

[hhn enters into daydream mode]

...Ah, the Hollyoaks years. You know/knew me too well. Nothing to do on Saturday morning, other than crawl to the sofa with a bacon sandwich and watch the goodly gorgeous young people of Chester getting off with each other. Although when I was watching it there was far too much of a focus on that storyline about the bloke having to bring up a small child. (I never did work out why he was having to bring the kid up, of if he was the father, the uncle, the godfather or whatever. ) An idle Saturday morning day dreaming about moving out of London to Chester if all the girls really looked like that, and were that easy. And a vague post mortem of the Friday evening, out with a few people from work, getting drunk in a - looking back on it - really rather unpleasant bar off Spitafields where the highlight of the evening was trying to stop the drunk city boys getting too eager ith the women from your office. But also realising that that was what the girls wanted, rather than hanging out with old gits like me. And after these idle thoughts, trying to work out what to do for the rest of the weekend once all my friends on Hollyoaks had acted out their slices of life for me. Swim? Nah. Shopping? Nah? Watch more TV? Ah the choices were endless, and endlessly endful. At the time it seemed normal. But, God it was depressing and pointless. I was suspended in a non-life, too old to be watching Hollyoaks for any other than prurient reasons. And too immature to do anything about it...........Sorry. Hollyoaks? Hollyoaks? Never heard of it mate. Is is some sort of game show?

* Incidentally, I googled frotting, and first search result started: 'A favourite of sex-starved Japanese businessmen on the sub-way. I caught him frotting the fridge once, it was just wrong.' I didn't dare follow the link. Speaking of links, did you see the Google ad generated by yesterday's post? 'Who Is My Wife? What Is Adultery And Fornication? Discover Your True Life With TheWay' And a link to another site I didn't want to follow. Ahh, the internet, and all those links in our lives Google is trying to create and develop, to mould us into the lives they want us to lead. Don't you love it? (A while ago I started writing a story about someone who lived their lives by their horoscope from a really crappy tabloid. And then that comedian Dave Gorman did a show based on the same idea - bastard. Maybe someone should do a show - or a piece of research - based on what Google would like them to do next, starting with a search for something like `What Does It All Mean' and their first and last names. { I just tried this btw. Tres dull.})

Sofa Storms

2008-03-17T09:21:00.005Z

"There are people you are allowed to fancy. And people you are not allowed to fancy. She would be one of the later." This from mrs househusbandnot yesterday after a passing comment from me about the sultry French girl who had just served us in Oddbins, and had made "That will be £13.00" sound like a very serious proposal of group sex.

I didn't - and don't get it. This from the woman (mrs hhn) who thinks it is entirely acceptable to sit on the sofa watching James Martin every Saturday morning while stroking a copy of one of his books. And who thinks I will be okay with her fancying one of those fat Geordie cooks who motorbike their way around Asia because, she says, they remind her of me.

A little later we were watching television, and mrs hhn comments that a particular girl from Gavin And Stacey looks sexy (The Blond one btw.). I agree, saying she looks a bit like an old girlfriend...

...and the storms came in from the North, and the frozen winds blew, and then there was a third ice age, centering in and around the sofa in hhn/mrs hhn's sitting room. And the planet - well our sofa - was surrounded by a devastating cold and bone-chilling waves of solid white frost, and all living things that came in the way of the storms were frozen solid.

After a lot of stares that would stop a polar bear in its tracks, and refusals to be consoled, and serious assault on me with the TV remote, mrs hhn eventually came back down from her icy domain and would talk to me again...kind of.

Again people, I don't get it. It is not like I said anything wrong. Or am I missing something here? ("OBVIOUSLY" I hear the entire female population scream.) I get that it is not cool to stroll around saying "Oh, she's hot. She's great. She's...etc" about every other woman on the street, or TV. But mrs hhn had said it in the first place. It's not like I would have said it if she hadn't mentioned it first. And what about the whole We Can be Honest With Each Other thang? I'd rather mrs hhn told me about fancying people than not telling me. And we do have jokes and stuff about people we know who fancy her. (And about the occasional woman who looks at me with anything more than withering derision or blank disinterest. [This does include an old bird who lives around the corner who kind of melts every time she sees me. She is scary, and looks like a thin version of that ugly old woman off Bo`Selecta. ]) What was so wrong?

Maybe it was the double thing? With the girl in the shop and then the girl on TV. Or was it because neither of them looked anything like mrs hhn? (This opens up a whole other area of disconnect between mrs hhn and I re it being a good thing when I fancy women who look like her.) Or it could have been that we had just had a bad time at the Vanity Fair photo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery? (I'm fishing here I know. But as an aside, I/we have never been to such an appallingly badly organised show, which was also being - as far as we could see - exclusively visited yesterday by people who 1) had no concept of personal space 2) had forgotten how to walk in a straight line, and 3) were just IN THE WAAAAAAAAAAY.) Was it because I was reading the Emma Bunton How I Lost Weight Eating Chocolate story in the News Of The World magazine for too long? (Reminding ourselves that my admittance at the end of last year that I fancied Emma Bunton resulted in a long long time in mrs hhn purgatory. [Actually, I just checked Emma's official site, and realise that that particular punishment was fair enough She does look like a sectioned receptionist at a Trust House Forte hotel.] ) Was it...well whatever it was, I blew it pretty badly with my various comments on other women yesterday. I am going to stick to not saying anything any more. (Which I do still feel is exactly how stalkers get their first feel for their chosen recreation. But anything for an easier life. Damn it was cold on that sofa last night.)

Tea Tyranny Part Deux

2008-03-12T09:57:00.003Z

4am in hhn/mrs househusbandnot's bedroom

mrs hhn; "Tyranny of tea? Where the fuck did you get that from? You don't even make decent tea."

hhn [thinks] 'How can they look into my eyes And still the don't believe me.....'

Rules? What Rules?

2008-03-11T08:06:00.003Z

hhn and mrs househusbandnot are in bed. hhn's alarm has just gone off. He lies, staring at the gap in the bedroom curtain wondering if the new next door neighbours ever spy on him when he is asleep.

mrs hhn: "Are you awake?"

hhn: "Yes."

"Will you make me a cup of tea?"

[pause]

"I will make you a cup of tea. But don't ask for it. I was going to make you a cup of tea. But don't ask, because I won't make you one. I was already okay about making you tea. But I won't stand for this...this...this tyranny of tea."

"You have too many rules."

"What do you mean?"

"Er, tyranny of tea?"

[pause]

"You have more rules than me."

"But your rules are more insane."

"I am going to have a bath, and when I get back I will be expecting an explanation of that accusation."

[hhn exits to have a bath and contemplate those gentle, slight rules...nay mild expectations he has of life, those inoffensive little regulations and hopes he carries around with him in an effort to understand this mortal coil. He returns to the bedroom.]

"So? Thought up any of my rules, other than the tea thing?"

[mrs hhn takes a deep breath]

"You won't eat anything that is beige. You won't let me order the same thing in restaurants. You have a frankly weird love hate relationship with eggs. You won't let me pour you drinks. What do you think I am going to do? Put a date rape drug in your drink? You won't talk to men if they are under five foot ten. You think it is entirely acceptable to eat with your hands. You freak out if I sit on the other sofa. You think that when you go swimming everyone else should get out of the pool. You don't think you should have to pay to go on trains. You hate cardboard. If someone is more than 20 minutes late, you think it is okay to go home. You ask people ridiculously personal questions two minutes after you have met them...

[hhn considers interrupting to point out the difference between rules and behaviour, but realises he doesn't really know what that difference is]

...You think tomatoes are evil. You spend way too much time thinking about socks. You regularly jump out of your skin if I walk into a room in the flat, even though you know I am there. You think it is normal to growl at people. You do - fundamentally - believe that you can talk to dogs. You feel the need to go around thanking everyone when we are at weddings. You claim you can't use certain pens. You hate cushions. You straighten pictures in other people's houses. And you stare at people in restaurants and then ask why they are being so odd. I will be adding to this list during the day as I think of more."

hhn looks at mrs hhn. He considers what she has just said, and realises that - although he absolutely knows that he has found his soul mate in mrs hhn - there are just some things she will never understand about him, and his hopes and his fears, and his attempts to make sense of all the senselessness in life. And it is only Tuesday.

"Well enjoy the tea babe," he says, struggling into his coat and heading for the front door.

...

2008-03-10T08:25:00.003Z

The Waunch was concerned on Friday that Friday's hhn was the last every hhn post. (Bless his little Hilditch & Kean cotton socks.) Fear not dear reader(s). I was not planning on stopping yet. (Although I have bugger all to report back on since Friday. mrs househusbandnot and I went to see that teen pregnancy movie Juno, which was good although terrible music almost killed it. And I found out that young shepherds learn their trade by herding ducks rather than sheep. And I have just soldiered my way into work on what the weather boys [and girls] are threatening is going to be a day of vigorous storms. [How they feel the need to react since they got caught on the hop by that storm in the 1980s.] And I...no that's it. No it it. But just it for today. But didn't want you to think I was not coming back, ever...

Shmumbleweed

2008-03-07T09:19:00.004Z

Enough of the Tumbleweed Where's hhn's Post comments please. (If you six like it so much, why don't you get a few other chuffers to read it?) I've been busy - which of course articulates that Anyone Who Has Time To Blog Regularly Doesn't Have Anything Of Interest To Say equation.

What with going to Birmingham, and while there managing to miss Crufts by a day but procure an inflatable fruit carrier and a purple 99 Flake baseball cap for mrs househusbandnot, and spying a Tibetan monk in Pizza Express, and interviewing an MP, and trying to avoid two Russian men wrestling in the changing rooms at my gym (I went to the gym late the other night, around nine. It is v different at that time of the evening. Gone are all my usual friendly pals, and gym bunnies and smiley gym attendants. At that time in the evening the gym is peopled by determined bankers and bankeresses who have no time for the fruitlings of the six to eight o'clock crowd. They have just re-schemed a small Latin American country debt, or bought Pret A Manger, or funded the Swiss Grand Prix, and are at the gym to WORK OUT. And the Russian wrestlers too.), seeing The Catholic Building Society on the high street - what is all that about?, and overhearing a girl on the bus boasting that Paul Weller was going to DJ at her birthday party (What a terrible idea . "All the ladies say You Are Better Looking Than Bruce Foxton. All the men say We Love Your Feathered Perm. Right here's a Faces track that should get you jumping."), and dreading going to a meeting where I knew I was going to bump into a hardline lesbian I know and worrying about whether or not I should shake her hand or peck her on the cheek (In the end, she elected to give me a sort of hand/fist sort of hand shake, which made my efforts to bond with the Masai veritably elegant.), and deciding that anything other than a plain black or white coffee should be the norm in coffee shops now (I waited behind a woman in a coffee shop in Birmingham, and all that extra shot soya milk grande vente polar bear skinny latte bollox she was ordering just sounds ridiculous. I should have realised sooner in my life.), and marvelling that Madame B has managed to dig up a more offensive word than the C word, and spending a whole day standing up, and swimming two miles last night (I Rock.), and having a chat with mrs hhn about what songs we would want played at our respective funerals, and buying an egg poacher that you can use in the microwave, and wondering if it was mrs hhn or a squirrel or mrs hhn dressed as a squirrel or a squirrel dressed as mrs hhn that has entirely destroyed one of the small bay trees on our balcony, and being tricked by mrs hhn into offering to go downstairs to the loony to see if she will let me into her flat to read our gas meter, and preparing for an evening with The Waunch, and watching paint dry (which incidentally was the topic of one of the very first hhn posts way back when), and...

WARNING THIS POST HAS BEEN TERMINATED DUE TO IT BEING OF NO INTEREST TO ANYONE OTHER THAN THE AUTHOR

The C Word

2008-03-04T08:33:00.002Z

Re 'Madam B here, actually I am C list...And that bitch Ms Charlton, as I now call her, has actually started seeing one of my conquests - cheeky mare.'

You see Madame B, I want to believe you, I really do. But:

1) You respond to hhn posts fairly early in the morning. If you are a celeb, shouldn't you be languishing in your suite at The Sanderson, recovering slowly from another heavy night at China White rather than up and about by 8.30am and reading hhn? Although, maybe you have been through rehab now, and are up by five, meditation with personal swami Vas Dali Bshitta done by six, colonic irrigation completed by seven, conference call with Madonna delayed, quick look through your property portfolio eightish, and on line and tucking into hhn by that 8.30?

2) In today's Either You Are In Or Out segregation of celebs and non celebs, I just can't - don't - get that a famous person would have any interest in my little old life. hhn is about badgers and sausages and the regular compromises of the little man. Not about where to get the best customised seats for your Hummer, or whether you should be blanking Sadie Frost this week, or which entrance to go into Selfridges to avoid/attract attention of the paps. Aren't you too busy reading Jordan's blog to have time for hhn?

3) How come you are going out with a gardener if you are so famou...shit maybe you really are famous, and have seen the light having gotten bored of being Kevin Spacey's beard in the late nineties, and having been treated so badly by Denis Rodman when he was over here for Celebrity Big Brother, and that whole are they aren't they speculation about you and Shane Warne can only have hurt.

In other news, anyone got any suggestions for how to have fun in Birmingham tomorrow? Am not looking forward to it, not least of all because I have to get a train at approx a thousand o'clock am in order to get to my meeting in time. And train travel is so grim in the UK now. Years ago, I remember going on trains with my mother, and it was rather glamorous. I remember sitting in the buffet carriage aged approx 10 with my mother on a train up to Glasgow, and ordering French Onion Soup. I never thought it was going to get any more glamorous than that. (In many ways it didn't.) On the train nowadays you are lucky to get a) a seat b) a sandwich that does not look like it was remaindered from a corner shop in Vauxhall [and it will cost you five and a half quid] and c) away without a beating from some train-raged commuter, and all for ridiculously inflated ticket prices. Privatisation? Smyvitisation.

It Might Not Be You

2008-03-03T08:47:00.004Z

Re which celebrity Madame B is, I would like to think it is that bird that Ashley Cole cheated on, and that by reading hhn over the past two years she has come to be a wiser, better, stronger person thanks to my observations on life.

Sadly however, moving back from my fantasy of hot women reading hhn, I imagine Madame B to be rather C - D? E? F? G? - list. Probably one of those nutty old birds who do that show about how dirty your house is, or a weather girl who lost her job to someone prettier and younger and without any real qualifications, or just someone whose 15 minutes/seconds of fame came in the shape of being selected to take part in a competition/challenge on the last series of that Ant and Dec Saturday show.

Actually, I happen to know that Madame B is none of the above, shunning the lime light for the more important things in life, like reading hhn and tending to her partner's needs when he has had a hard day's gardening for the local council. She works in PR or something for a bank or a law firm. mrs househusbandnot has further theories about where she works? Or was it The Waunch? Something about a landmark she mentioned once that she could see from her office.

There is much - too much - speculation about the identity of Madame B. No, I really don't know her. No it is not me. No it not mrs househusbandnot. (I quizzed her about it one morning when she was still half asleep, always a good time to get a straight answer from mrs hhn.) Occasionally, I do worry that I do know her - Madame B not mrs hhn [I will hopefully spend the rest of my life trying to get to know mrs hhn]- and get a bit freaked that she knows me. (And remember dear people that I did - very very early on in hhn times - send Madame B a photo of me and mrs hhn. Dumb I know. But we were young and foolish and blogger naive.) But then I think, hey she reads my blog. She must be getting something right.

In other unrelated news, we won a pound on the lottery last night. mrs hhn has set up an on-line account whereby you get an email telling you when you have won something. The notification email reads something along the lines of `We have exciting news for you at the Lottery website'. So while mrs hhn was logging on in the sitting room, I was in the kitchen going to myself `Don't get excited. Don't get excited. It is only going to be a tenner, or maybe twenty. Could be £200, no £200,000...don't don't don't. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck we've won five million. Don't get excited. It is only going to be £200,000. Who should we tell? We'll tell everyone we've only won £100,000 and give them each a thousand. Don't get excited. Don't get excited. What is taking mrs hhn so long to log on. Maybe she has fainted because we've won a few million. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Could it be. If we win £50, we should put it back on the lottery, and then we are BOUND to win a few million. It's just a numbers game. How could you not win if you bought 50 tickets? Don't get excited. Don't..........a quid? A quid? (a quid). Incidentally, a sincere apology to my mate The Duchess who told me the other day about how she reacted in exactly the same way when she got her lottery email. At the time, I was like `God, why would you get so excited Duchess? Chill out dude. It was only ever going to be a tenner.' Which it was. And could not have gone to a better person.

Deeply busy this week, trying to get someone with an oxygen tank to give a talk in a v high security premises in central London, travelling to Birmingham for the day, attending a conference back here in London, and then starting a new project for a new client at the end of the week. All this, and I've started running too. Decided both gym and swimming were not making me any trimmer. To date have done two runs on the running machine...well, I say runs. More like slow glides with the tumble weed flashing past me as a trudge my weary way along the conveyor belt to thinnerness.

Peace to all who do the lottery.

What Next?

2008-02-28T07:19:00.002Z

Earthquake in England? What next?

An interesting sandwich in Pret A Manger?
That whole Barack Obama and the honey badger and that missing tequila from the mini bar story ever being really explained fully?
Bruce Forsyth admitting he is a c*&^?
Will Self giving it all up and taking a job at the Inland Revenue in Wales?
Posh Spice, Paris Hilton and Elton John `fessing up that they didn't read the small print on that contract they signed with the devil, and announcing their full retirement from public view after a full disclosure of exactly how much Posh n Elt have spent over the years on air flights and their hair?
A Canadian person managing to get through an evening without complaining about being mistaken for an American? (You are fundamentally the same thing guys. Brian Adams and ice hockey do not maketh a real nation.)
An Australian in London not shouting, or complaining about the cold/the lack of beaches/the expense of housing etc?
mrs hhns saying "Oh just put it anywhere in the fridge darling. There is no real 'proper' place for stuff in fridges, or indeed any real rules or regulations on fridge storage. Just shove it next to the pickles or on top of that loaf of bread there"?
Madame B managing to drag herself beyond vulgarity? (Although she did say something funny the other day. I've forgotten what it was. But it wasn't vulgar and it was funny. [See also below re blocking her comments.])
The Waunch being able to hide the fact that a comment to hhn is from him? (Death to anyone who doesn't read books anyone?)
Ken Livingstone sending out a press release starting `You are all right. I am a twat and I lost the plot a while ago and started thinking that it was you who were lucky to have me as your Mayor rather than me serving you. And re my annoying voice, I sincerely apologise...'
God finally waking up and saying `What? Whaaaat? What on [my] Earth has happened to pop music? Why is it all so crap now?'
The Devil doing ditto? (Smirking to himself that no-one has figured out that all those people who write musicals have not read their contracts either, and are gonna burn in Hell tonight, forever.)
A shrew being asked to turn on the Christmas lights in Oxford Street?
Steve Martin ever being funny again?
That hhn movie ever getting the green light?
Howard Devoto getting to Number One with a reworking of Generation Landslide?
Me becoming a gerzillionaire with my emailing food contraption?

Who knows?

Incidentally, excellent site find from mrs hhn here. The Waunch, you are going to like this one.

And yes I could block Madame B's comments, but it would mean that I would have to block everyone's and it is a really dull process - involving approx three emails per comment - going through all the ones I want to accept and block. Sorry guys, freedom of speech - however pointless and vulgar - reigns here at hhn HQ.

Gym Laughter

2008-02-27T07:57:00.004Z

So I was at the gym last night, kinda getting into it although it was quite hard work. And I'm thinking no this is good. My routine is still hard work, but I'm gradually adding a few more reps every week and increasing the weights I use, and my gym kit is fairly normal and...and...and this girl who works at the gym looks at me and starts laughing. (I'm about two thirds of the way through my session by this point, so I know I look a sweaty wreck.) And by way of explanation to her boss the manager of the gym, she just points at me and says "It's him" and laughs again.

Now a few points on this. 1) Isn't there some sort of people who work in gyms code about not laughing at the client? I know they all have pretty perfect bodies etc., but isn't it just a bit, well, rude to laugh at people/me? 2) Okay. I get that we don't need to be too serious at the gym, and it should be fun and friendly. But laughing? And then telling her boss it was me she was laughing at? Bit harsh 3) Obviously, I reacted to it in a really grown up and cool way by finishing my routine and then doing half an hour on the exercise bike as fast as possible to try and impress on this woman that I 'deserved' a place in the gym and was/am - despite appearances - actually rather fit. (The bikes are at the far end of the gym from the men's changing room, and I did the bike a bit too fast, so had to stumble all the way from one end of the gym to the changing rooms looking like someone had just stuffed a pole up my ass. Impressive, huh?)

I retired to the steam room for 10 minutes to recover, only to be questioned about my routine by one of those perfect bodied gym bunnies who's physique just makes you want to go and buy a lazy boy chair and take it home and sit in it eating four fried eggs and a family sized chocolate swiss roll. All rather distressing, especially as I thought I was beginning to be thought of as one of the normal people at the gym, rather than the one they whisper about keeping an eye on in case I break the running machine or something.

Speaking of food, I had a dream last night that I was sitting at my desk trying to work out what to have for lunch and someone emailed me some food. I told you it would work.

In other news, mrs househusbandnot and I worked out last night that if you spend no money at all your debts get smaller. Genius, huh? (Now all I need is some Brian Enoesque lateral thinking equation - it was him after all who suggested that they should use all the power being used on machines in gyms to generate electricity - re exercise and food and money, and everything will be okay. Ah, the stuff of life.)

PS My legs still ache this morning from the cycling. If you see a middle-aged man on the bus looking like he's just been rodgered by a buffalo, give us a seat.

PPS Just discovered Google Image searches. Hence the cracking new quality of the pictures on hhn.

Overheards

2008-02-26T13:37:00.002Z

This morning I was having a coffee before work, and there was this old bloke sitting next to me in the cafe with some (other) bloke. They were obviously reading a tv or film script, and the first bloke looked up from the script and said "Diss? Why would someone want to diss someone? It's a town in Suffolk."

Some of my other favourites;

Two v posh old blokes on a bus in Chelsea. One to the other "I had the most marvellous kedgeree last night. Best I've had since...since...well India."

Two blokes standing having a fag by a Scottish Loch. One to the other "Everyone said she was really shy, but she took all her clothes off and let me fuck her up the arse."

A genteel old couple in a pub in New Forest. Him to her "Will you have the usual my dear?" She nods. He goes to bar "Two pints of Stella please".

One bloke to another walking down Oxford Street "But they were some sort of hermaphrodite weren't they?"

One bloke to another "I'll tell you what also really really annoys me. Cheese."

My colleague was telling me this morning that he was forced to listen to a couple for 22 minutes on the train home. The woman started the conversation with "So what are we doing tonight darling?" and ended is 22 minutes later with "I never want to see you ever again."

1987 Bitch

2008-02-25T11:10:00.003Z

Me 'n' mrs househusbandnot were up north this weekend. And I can report that it is still grim. Driving across the edge of Crewe I spied some graffiti '1987 Bitch'.

What does that mean? 1987 was a bitch of a year? 1987 was the year that Bitch really really wants us to think about. A reminder to Bitch that 1987 was when it all happened, or didn't, or should have, or will (if it was written before 1987)? Just a tag? ("Yeah, my graffiti tag, it's 1987 Bitch. Cool, huh?") Bitch in 1987 more than you did in 1986? Just a general hello from Bitch with a mention of when they stopped by with their can of paint? V strange. Or not strange at all.

Anyway, up north was fun. (I was brought up outside Preston, so I feel I am a little bit northern - a fact that mrs hhn, who is genuinely from the north, regularly dismisses as a southerner's whimsy. [Before our first date, she sent me a text telling me she was firstly a woman and secondly a northerner.]) Although the food was relentlessly terrible. Gordon Ramsay (Ramsey? Ramsay? Can't be arsed to Google him.) should be up there on a train this morning seeking out some of the people who fed us while we were up there. We had to stop at a motorway service station on the way home to get something resembling something with fresh ingredients in it.

Best overhear while we were up north was "Yes, but that's owned by Linda Lusardi now isn't it?"

The Correct Use Of Plastic Bags

2008-02-21T13:33:00.003Z

I was swimming last night (Swimming chum reader btw, 100 lengths in an hour, which I was pleased with - This in the context of swimming 90 lengths the other night and going home where mrs househusbandnot looked up from the sofa, holding out her glass for a g and t refill, and said "You are not taking your swimming seriously enough" which hurt. [Hey lady, those oversized clown's shoes I wear while swimming help me to go faster.]) and this young guy kept on getting in the way and stopping and walking in the lengths lane. And I suggested to him that he maybe swim in a straight line, and he got out of the pool and sulked on a lounger by the pool. This made me feel bad, but it also got me thinking about how much younger than me he was, which got me thinking about how much I knew when I was his age (maybe 20), and when (if?) I had/did get to a stage of actually knowing anything...about anything. I decided around 35 was when I actually started to manage to look at the world with anything other than a completely self-validating/in my own head/vacuum. (mrs hhn may not have agreed with this assessment when she got home last night to find me playing Xbox with an empty packet of biscuits on the sofa next to me.)

I was thinking more about this when I was walking home. And stopping to take a call, I overheard three students from our local art school (it is one of those ones you pay to go to, so it's just full of rich nobbers) talking about having kids. And one of them said "I just don't think that it would be fair on a woman if I was sitting in my studio all day, because that's what I will do, I NEED to paint, and she would be having to look after our children. I know Caravaggio had 15 children, but I just don't think I could do it." Fighting back the urge to force a plastic bag over this loser's head and dropping him in The Thames, I made my way home, validated in my thinking on young people, and my emerging maturity and clarity of vision on this world.

In related overhear news, I overheard some bloke at the Steve Earle gig the other night saying "I even had breakfast with Nancy Sinatra once". In related music news, the Brits was terribly MOR wasn't it? And I'm sorry, but watching Macca whistle and play the mandolin is neither music nor entertainment. Good duck noises from the Arctic Monkeys though.

Incidentally, re the tumbleweed comments, to quote Howard Devoto "It is harder than it looks". And I'm kinda busy - in a very unhousehusbandnot manner - at the moment. I even have a meeting on a Friday tomorrow, which is usually unheard of. After all this industry, you will be glad to hear that I am having lunch with Styx tomorrow afternoon. If you see two old gits in a restaurant tomorrow laughing at young people, and whistling Magazine tunes, you will have chanced upon entirely paintable scene of Styx and hhn at play.

My Space

2008-02-19T08:05:00.003Z

I was talking to a lawyer the other day (Get me. A mathematician yesterday, a lawyer today. Me and the Candle Stick Maker are out on the lash this evening.) about that nuts Old Etonian in Kenya who has finally not got away with shooting locals who stray onto his vast estate. And the lawyer was saying that this old school fool had no real perception of anything other than the space six yards around him. Which reminded me about someone in Kenya talking about the Masai Mara and how all the animals there basically live in - and breathe and see and perceive and worry about - a six foot square existence around them.

Which is a nice way of carving up the world, and indeed trying to make some sort of sense of huge spaces like the Masai Mara, and how all the animals and people and bugs and dust work together, around each other, and with each other.

It's the same in London. The same arena. We can text someone in Nairobi, and download something from Washington, and email someone sitting in a hotel lobby in Sydney, and check a website that is promoting an ice cream stall on the beach in San Diego, and drop a zombie or whatever on someone living on the moon via Facebook. But it ends up being about that six square foot parameter.

All that really affects us is that Big Issue seller who is there in our face trying to sell their magazine, and the looney on the bus, and person in the queue in front of us, and the crush by the deli counter in Waitrose, and that walk from our seats to the bar, and the two losers who would not stop talking right in front of me at the Steve Earle gig last night, and...just small stuff (which can get big I know, if the looney kicks off or the person in the queue pulls out a gun). But it's all carved out for us to respond to. Seems both reassuring and also rather dull.

In related news, we are having amazing Maybethereisagod sunrises and sunsets here in London at the moment. Good reminder about looking beyond our six foot square. [On which note, hhn posted his blog, and went and sat on a mountain with his thumb up his ass.]

Maths And Dwarfs

2008-02-18T08:09:00.003Z

I was talking to a mathematician turned banker yesterday who told me he has created a matrix for meetings at his bank. Something along the lines of length of meeting times decisions made divided by actual money made as a result of those decisions.

I guess we are creating and using these sorts of equations/indexes all the time...

Number of things to say divided by need to share them with six other people equals likelihood of an hhn post
Level of boredom times access to internet equals likelihood of posting a comment on hhn
Need to get to work times warmth of bed divided by protestant work ethic equals likely time of departure from beneath duvet
Styx plus hhn in a restaurant equals generous bar bill
Level of interest in a meeting times number of good looking women/men in that meeting equals life
Number of socks times likelihood of finding a matching pair equals what I spend too much of my life doing
Daniel Day Lewis plus award acceptance speech equals one first class ticket up his own butt
Importance of meeting times likelihood of pen running out of ink divided by picking up the wrong notebook before the meeting - so you sit down and feel all ready and open the notebook and it is the one that you have been doing big doodles of spiders and sharks holding revolvers in and the big old other people in the meetings see the doodles - equals v likely
Distance of sisters from place they have agreed to meet you at the time they agreed to meet you equals approx three miles
etc.

In other news, off to see Steve Earle in concert this evening. Ironiccowboytastic.

In other other news, this from Vinderama on how he managed to insult a dwarf in California last week: "I genuinely didn't see him. He was shorter than the car door, and when the dog walked by and I nearly hit it, I apologised to the 'little fella' meaning the dog, not the three foot owner."

hhn Events Anyone?

2008-02-15T12:31:00.002Z

Anonymous, you are probably right that we - few - writers and readers of hhn should not engage in competition. (Too splashy you say? It's about pulling your arms up to high - he says sounding like an expert swimmer rather than the Free Willie monolith in the shallows that he actually is.)

But I like the idea of hhn events:

hhn spellathon?
hhn cocktail invention competition?
hhn animals quizz?
hhn sponsored swim? (all proceeds to a charity of mrs househusbandnot's choice)
hhn air guitar comp?
hhn all six of you stand in a line up and have to guess which of you is which game?
hhn readers pet parade?
hhn puppet show (we would win because we have a badger puppet btw)
hhn sitting around and drinking scotch and talking bollox event?

The opportunities are endless, and probably unlikely, since you all - or most of you anyway - are still hiding as Anonymous. Incidentally, where are Styx and blokewhodoesnotappeartobereadinghhnanymore?

V Day Gifts

2008-02-14T10:27:00.005Z

So the Valentine's Day gifts to mrs househusbandnot were: a Fortune Pork toy, a photo of a lion from our Kenya trip, and some modelling clay. Someone just suggested that I could have saved some time by just making a model from the clay of a wart hog for mrs hhn.
What did you six get then?

Re the swimming query, I reckon it would take me approx 12 minutes to do 16 lengths. Actually I got that wrong. It would take me approx 9.6 minutes. Maybe we should have a race?

Ahhh...

2008-02-13T14:13:00.005Z

...as I walked into work today, it was with a sense of deep calm and relaxation (helped I might add by the 150 lengths I swam last night with the news goggles), it was deeply pleasing to see men with THAT look on their face, and women with that OTHER look on their face. For, people, unlike said men and women, I have - for once - actually got it together to get mrs househusbandnot a Valentine's Day present. Not for me those last minute male feelings of `what the fuck should i get i still don't know which restaurant she wants to go to god those roses are a bit bloody expensive bloody valentine's day commercial rip off what did she mean by no need to go to any trouble just get me what you want can i get away with an expensive card i bet all the girls in her office get loads of flowers and stuff and its soooo unfair and and [looks at hot girl in street] she's hot, and and and ...' Or indeed those female feelings of `he'll get it together [contented love sigh]'.

Smug? Moi? Organised? That's me. (As to whether or not mrs househusbandnot will actually like what I bought her remains to be seen. But I hope she will see the time and effort and lurve I put into buying her three small tokens of my deep and sincere love for her. [Not withstanding her telling one of her colleagues that I was pretty happy with what I had bought her, and her colleague saying "So what album does he want at the moment then?"])

And restaurants? I am happy - very happy - to report that I may get my ass whipped pretty much every other day of the year for not ever booking restaurants, but mrs hhn hates going out for supper on Valentine's Day (my wife rocks).

And, I also took the long term punt on asking mrs hhn to marry me on Valentine's Day, so I get added...er lurve points for that every 14 Feb too.

(Somehow, some way, I know I am going to regret having written this. If you thought the laminator was an odd present. Will report back tomorrow. )

In other news re: 'I don't get it - you say that you may have cracked one of the high-stress areas of your life, then limply say that you've bought yet another pair of goggles, which may or may not be OK. If that's cracking something, I'd hate to meet your idea of a lame-ass half-hearted attempt at something. Devo rock!' Bugger off you nobber. And mrs hhn is on your case about unsupportive and nasty comments on hhn too dude. You have been warned. And she knows who you are.

On Swimming Goggles

2008-02-11T18:15:00.000Z

I think I may have cracked one of the perpetual stress-high agendas in my life: buying new swimming goggles. For those of you who swim suggest you tune out now and go look at huge domestic cats on youtube or something. For those of you who don't, welcome to a whole new deeply stressful world...

...so you need a new pair of goggles, because they do break or wear out or you forget them at the gym. Easy peasey, buying new goggles easy. NOT. Because.... for a start, they never have the ones they had last time in the store - which you came to love and cherish and fondle sometimes, and you are not allowed to try a new pair on without someone trying to arrest you. (My theory on this is that somehow the bridge of the nose has taken on some totemic semblence to the gusset of women's swimwear: once tried on, forever unhygenic. Which sucks. Because you do really need to try on a pair of goggles before you know if they will fit you. But they display them in security-tagged and selotaped plastic cases to stop you doing this. Come on people. Would you expect me to buy a suit without trying it on. Where's the pro-swimmer karma here?) And everyone who works in sports shops is completely uninterested in swimming goggles. They are far more interested in trying to sell you a pair of gold football boots, or a Nike tshirt for fifty squid, or a pair of trainers with a USB port. When you ask where the goggles section is, they point listlessly to a remote and dusty corner of the store, which is manned by the girl who started that morning, and is not allowed to sanction purchases over £2.99 because it is her first day. You can see it on their faces when you ask about goggles. `Obviously a fag. Get him out of store asap. Oh, here comes someone who looks like they might be interested in the limited edition snooker shirts we got in last night.` "Hello sir. Can I interest you in a David Beckham limited edition spunk cloth we've just had delivered from the Castro?" (And hey, I'm not even going to go there with the who is gayer than who in the whole marketing of sports products.)

So you are buying blind, hoping you can accurately guess the size of the bridge of your nose to the size of the bridge of the goggles, through a plastic case which is usually covered in stickers with random demarcations like `Trainer' and `Sprint' and `Silver' and `Triathlon'. (Guys, if I was a triathlete I'd be getting my goggles made and sponsored by Porche or something.)

And the whole tint thing. Normal plain lenses is good, but you worry about looking like something ot of Alice In Wonderland. Blue? Yes, but a bit weird, and it kind of fucks with your head - in a bad and good way I admit - when you are actually swimming. Grey? Too Garry Oldman when he is slinking around London in Dracula. Black? Yeah, but no, but yeah, but...fuck I don't know. Other colours like orange and purple and red? Do I look like I am going to a Devo reunion gig? (I have also considered getting one of those swimming hats with an MP3 player, but that is a whole other story re music and swimming.)

Anyway, I bought a new pair of goggles last night. A quick try on on the bus going home last night does suggest that these new ones may fit. Will report back.

So Munoz

2008-02-11T11:29:00.000Z

Went to the Juan Munoz retrospective at Tate Modern yesterday. I am embarassed to say that I had never heard of this bloke, but mrs househusbandnot read a review and fancied it. It was: playful, arch, clever, amusing, and craftsmanlike. But check out what the little booklet you got at the show said we should be looking out for:

"He was fascinated by the tension between the illusory and the real, using tricks of scale and perspective to choreograph the viewer's experience"
"In Spain, the balcony is a vantage point to look down on the street"
"The patterned surface simultaneously invites the viewer into the space and elongates the distance between the spectator and the small bronze figure sitting demurely on a shelf"

And

"Our movements and our relationship to the object are guided, not to direct our interpretation of the work, but to ensure that we appreciate the illusions without being distracted by the mechanism of the trick"

What absolute cock. Simon Bolitho and Kerryn Greenberg - who wrote this bollox - should be forced to sit in a room and listen to Daniel Day Lewis award acceptance speeches for 24 hours solid, so "they can realise that the viewer is forced into a false sense or irony, before accepting that the motif is not just the motif but the reality as seen through the eyes of the bronze figure sitting demurely in Day Lewis's hand."

mrs hhn and I were forced to hurry home and watch two hours of American Idol to remind ourselves that there is life beyond being a pretentious twat (or twats). During American Idol, mrs hhn admitted a secret crush on Randy Jackson, until she saw him standing next to Simon Cowell, and realised he was smaller than Cowell - which, according to those who have met Simon Cowell which includes mrs hhn, is quite an achievement in man as dwarf stakes.

Great show though. (The Munoz, not American Idol. Although I love American Idol. Did anyone seee the So Paula show about Paula Abdul afterwards? Absolutely shocking. Why would she think that that was ever going to work?)

Emailing Food

2008-02-08T09:32:00.000Z

I had a dream last night that one of my sisters was a big old famous chef and she needed to email the smell of some of her dishes around the place. This got me thinking when I woke up - and if you are wondering about why I had the dream in the first place, being a dream interpreter par excellence, I can tell you: it is because mrs househusbandnot has started using my Xmas gift of a laminator to laminate menus, and this translated in dreamstate into how to move menus, and therefore food, around the place easily - about emailing food.

I ran this concept of emailing food by mrs hhn as she was getting ready for work. Her assessment? "You are insane."

But IF you could email food, it would:

Make getting a takeaway a whole lot more interesting, although it would put all those sweet pizza delivery guys out of business.
Eradicate world hunger, assuming the UN or whoever could get it together to email the food to the right food to the right people at the right time. (Having worked for a UN agency, I find this unlikely. They would probably send pork chops to Isreal, shepherds pie to Mogadishu, bubble gum to the Ivory Coast, and fish fingers to Paris - and then try and blame it on a lack of resouces.)
Create a whole new market for new products, like slinky flat fridges for keeping your emailed food in, and new spam filters (boom boom)*, and pop up plates and bowls, and cool wireless systems that sent the email straight to your microwave etc.
Generally fuck with people's perceptions of how and why and where and when we eat.
And give Google and Yahoo and Microsoft a whole new agenda to try and carve up amongst each other.

And if you could email food, you could probably email other stuff like drinks and drugs and swimming goggles (oh the hell of getting to the pool without your goggles) and dogs and people. I'll just keep dreaming...

* While looking for a photo for today's post, I came across this site http://www.spam.com/ And You think my idea about emailing food is a waste of time?

Supper with (*&

2008-02-06T10:33:00.000Z

Supper with (*& last night. Conversation included:

Whether or not a comedy sitcom script that (*& has submitted to a film company had been read and considered to be a script for a pantomine
Whether or not Randy Jackson was in the Jackson five
Here Come The Warm Jets
Rick Wakeman's involvement in David Bowie's early career
Sisters (both (*& and I have three each)
Air travel
Denmark, and ita place as possibly one of the most depressing places in the world in winter
Dogs versus cats
Whether or not there is ever going to be anything good on TV ever again. (Perhaps (*&'s pantomine?)
USB record players
Shelves
Gin
Garry Numan (A big favourite of Styx's btw)
A poem that (*& wrote for a friend's wedding a few weeks ago. (According to (*& it went down well, and made everyone cry - which is the point of wedding speeches [I cried all the way through my speech at my wedding])
Etc.

All in all, everything and nothing discussed, all to excellent (*& selection of music. And lots of white food too.

FB Fs

2008-02-05T11:08:00.000Z

Failed to watch the new David Attenborough TV show of reptiles last night. Remiss of me. I could have reminded myself of some of my FACT-BASED facts on animals etc.

In unrelated news - as Yahoo and Google and Microsoft battle their various battles in terms of who should be search giant - I do have to ask why Google would place an add Discover What Self Defense Masters & The Army Don't Want You To Know on hhn yesterday? Donna Summer? Oh, yeah self defence. I don't get it. I probably don't need to.

Crap caps

2008-02-04T12:16:00.000Z

First sign of madness The Waunch: talking about yourself in the third person. Re your comments, you obviously spent time out over the weekend by googling snakes in Australia, which makes you 1) sad 2) annoying (Because you are right, I could not remember what sort of snake it was at the time of writing. I remember now it was a brown snake. Brown snake fact: they are so venomous that they bite tractors and combine harvesters. And snakes only bite things that they think they have enough venom to kill.)

In other news, excellent misread on a lucozade sports drink at the gym yesterday: "Warning: This crap is not safe for children under the age of three. (It was cap not crap btw.) My mate *&^ collects these misreads if he has any to share with the group?

In other news, so yeah jury service. I was thinking all John Grisham, sultry blonde femme fatales in the witness stand, aged drink defence lawyers up against the might of captains of industry etc. But apparently - according to mrs househusbandnot who has done jury service - it is much waiting around being herded from courtroom to courtroom with not a lot to do. (Thinking about it, I am probably committing some heanous crime by mentioning that I am doing jury service at all. Better not let slip any more details.)

In gym related news, my v gay mate at the gym wants me to download his Donna Summer greatest hits album so that we can go running together on the treadmills together.

Bumps

2008-02-01T10:09:00.000Z

Futher to Madame B's tales of serendipity:

I was walking along a beach in Dar es Salaam, and about to get mugged, when a girl who had taken over my job in Brussels five years beforehand skidded up in a yellow jeep and whisked me to safety. We went and drank expressos and she showed me a voodoo tree, and then confessed that she often was tempted to jump naked into the gangs of men working on the roads.

I was in a bar in Almaty with a colleague when the best man at her wedding walked in. She had not seen him since the wedding 20 years beforehand. Random fact about her husband: he was bitten by a black mamba in Australia. The venom completely destroyed his immunity to anything, and he would have died if he had been stung by a bee. (He actually died of something else, by which time my friend had divorced him.)

Last time I met up with The Waunch in a pub, we got wasted. Amazing, huh?

In other news, the software that I use to generate hhn is now available in Persian. Cool, huh?

In other other news, v much looking forward to doing absolutely very little this weekend, other than not bumping into people I have not seen for a decade. Lord, give me the anonymity I deserve.

Chance Meetings

2008-01-31T10:19:00.000Z

I bumped into a bloke I know on the way to work this morning. Well, `I know' is not really the case. I know I worked with him somewhere, and he was in the IT department so I was always bothering him about printers and remote access etc. (hhn rules of engagement in the office Number 1 btw: always get on with the people in IT, the security guards, and the person who orders the printer cartridges.) But I can't remember where we worked, or what his name is, other than that he was an IT dude.

Sad and rude really, since he remembered my name and was asking about my work etc. All I could come up with was asking about his Xmas and what he was doing wandering around near my office. I felt bad, and rude, and arrogant. And I can't even google him for next time I bump into him because I don't have his name to google.

But that is one of the problems with London. You can't really ever hide from your past - or lack of memory about it. Two of my colleagues - at the office I work in now - step out to get their sandwiches every lunchtime in mortal fear of bumping into a) someone one of them fired and b) someone who took over their old job. And by chance both these two other people work with each other, so it could be a real giant double whammy of my colleagues are out together and bump into both of the other two people out from their office together. (Maybe we could do a triple attack with me being with them when they bump into those other two And the bloke I saw this morning. Perhaps Tracey Emin will be there too to do a quick sketch of this London meeting.)

In other news, I HAVE BEEN CALLED FOR JURY SERVICE. What has happened to this country....

Wavers

2008-01-29T08:47:00.000Z

I was reading somewhere yesterday that Nicolas Cage has a clause in his contract that you are not allowed to check out his receding hairline if you are on set with him. (This reminds me of one of my sister's theories about Elton John and Mick Jagger that they are so powerful that people just won't tell them when they are being uber bell ends. "A wig. Great look Elton. Very..er..wigtastic dude." "No Mick, you don't look at all ridiculous standing next to your girlfriend who is a foot and a half taller than you." etc.)

So I can see how people get to a place where they CAN make ridiculous demands upon other people just because they are famous, but...well I'd be cool, and only have a few quite reasonable expectations.

hhn film set wavers:

1) Anyone with a comb over to report to makeup/hairdressing immediately
2) No men under five foot ten to be taken seriously
3) (Absolutely) No euro trance/chill out music on set
4) Any white men with dreadlocks to be escorted off set immediately
5) Any white South Africans to be escorted off set immediately (White South Africans with dreadlocks to be deported to Wales immediately)
6) Everyone to wear a decent cologne/perfume of hhn's choice
7) Any warthogs to be given priority service at canteen
8) No tomatoes/comedy ties/people in trainers and suits/red pens on set at any time
9) hhn's swimming pool strictly out of bounds to anyone except hhn
10) That bloke who holds that long pole with the microphone with the fluffy cover to explain exactly what he is doing
11) hhn's trailer to be filled with fresh flowers at all times
12) No-one to tamper with big gold hologram star on door of hhn's trailer
13) No-one to approach hhn unless: 1) hot 2) female 3) armed with good animal stories, or good Etch A Sketch tips
14) Anyone with baseball hat on backwards (or forwards thinking about it) to report to security with white South Africans
15) When Prince arrives to discuss film soundtrack, tell him not to (*&^ with hhn's guitars when he is waiting in hhn's trailer

All Wrong

2008-01-28T14:16:00.001Z

Monday morning...

...alarm goes, mrs househusbandnot puts alarm on snooze, alarm goes again, mrs hhn puts alarm on snooze again, alarm goes, mrs hhn puts it on snooze, some other electronic device starts peeping after every 10 minute interval of alarm going off and being put onto snooze by mrs hhn. This continues for approx two hours, as I drag myself into Monday morning mode, with some satisfaction that I am not alone in this journey, and that mrs hhn will shortly be joining me as I prepare for the new week.

mrs hhn: "I'm not feeling well. I'm not going in to work today".

All wrong. All wrong. Unfair.

But then I have to remind myself of those many, many, many mornings when I was a true househusbandnot, and mrs hhn had to get up and go to work with me still holed up under the duvet refusing to take part in the real world on any sort of level.

But it is still wrong. Weren't we supposed to be doing everything together? For richer for poorer. In going to work and not going to work. (Actually, we had a civil marriage, so we didn't do those vows, but you know what I mean.)

So I goof around some more, and try and disturb mrs hhn from her slumber. And generally complain about me having to go out into the real world. And go to work. And...brood, thinking about all that fun mrs hhn is having at home as I sit at work. Is she playing on my Xbox? Is she playing my guitar? Is she trying on my clothes? Is she making herself fishfinger sandwiches? She certainly isn't out here in office world doing office stuff, which never involves Xboxes or guitars or fishfinger sandwiches.

Dogging

2008-01-24T12:46:00.000Z

Point taken from Zagazoo (get you mr/mrs new reader and commentator) re the relative relevance and pertinence of my news feeds. mrs househusbandnot has agreed to my request for her to wear a dog's leash for the weekend, and I am only going to talk in dog all weekend too. Thanks for the suggestion.

As to the other comments yesterday:

Madame B? What can I say? I like your loyalty. I like your tenacity. It's your personality I am struggling with.

Anonymous aka The Waunch? More on animals? I was trying that with the crocodile and dog translator news pieces. I can report that mrs hhn and I are seriously considering getting a dog this summer. Although mrs hhn wants a Bison Frisee. I'm kinda cool - as in lukewarm - about this choice of breed, mostly because I will look like a monster gayer walking around with a dog like that. I was thinking something a little less like a San Francisco Gay Men's Choir's mascot. The discussion continues (although mrs hhn assures me I agreed to the choice over Xmas [probably after a few kilos of her mother's trifle when my vision was less than clear]). Any suggestions for what breed of dog would befit mr and mrs hhn welcome. (I grew up with Samoyeds, but they really are too thick and interbred - like a hairy Hapsburg - to be a serious option in London, or anywhere. And should we be getting a dog when we are in London anway?)

And I am a little concerned about mrs hhn's capacity with animals, based - in some small way - on her reaction to our wormery. Loyal hhn readers will recall that mrs hhn ordered the wormery and took one look at it on its arrival and fled from the room. Worms are worms I know. But...well whatever.

In other news, am happy to report that it is Thursday, which is my Friday.

I will...

2008-01-23T17:13:00.000Z

Guys, what's up with you. You get stories about how to talk to dogs, a bloke who got shot while he was being eaten by a crocodile, and goths being dissed by bus drivers. What more do you want or need to keep you entertained?

I was...

2008-01-23T15:18:00.000Z

...going to write about these three cracking stories, but it seems easier just to provide the links

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7204543.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7193713.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7203988.stm

Welcome Zagazzo

2008-01-22T10:05:00.000Z

I read – or heard or was told or fooled into believing – that the game wardens in India are so scared of the Bengal Tigers that they make as much noise as possible when they are `seeking out’ the tigers. Hence very few sightings of the tigers for the tourists. (Bengal tiger facts: they can eat as much as 30 k of meat in one sitting, and their roar can be heard two miles away.)

In related news – as in having just been on my first ever safari my expectations of what constitutes entertainment have risen quite a lot – is it just me, or has TV just gotten really crap. Even the usually reliable Shameless and Curb Your Enthusiasm are not generating much of a reaction on the hhn/mrs househusbandnot couch. (One notable exception to this TV IS CRAP trend is American Idol, which remains excellent viewing primarily because Americans are so darn weird. Mrs hhn and I also watched a deeply entertaining documentary about an elephant orphanage the other night, but how could anyone go wrong with that sort of content? [They almost did by having Michaela Strachan anthropomorphising all over the elephants.])

Bearing in mind that the Big Brother and News At Ten (which really is truly terrible now) bubbles appear to have burst, maybe this is the beginning of the end, and those overpaid dullards who make tv shows are actually going to have to stop and think about the programmes they want to/should make, and take into consideration a few currently ignored bottom lines like: being amusing; being interesting etc., and not rely on celebrity to sell very very weak ideas/gags etc.

You could accuse me of some sort of lack of irony or consistency by confessing a liking for American Idol. But, hey, my blog. F(*K U…

Incidentally, welcome Zagazzo as a new hhn reader. (You have just increased hhn readership by approx 20%. FYI though, Madame B is nuts.

Warthog Memories

2008-01-21T14:28:00.001Z

“If a warthog forgot what it was doing while it was running away from a lion, it would get eaten. So how would you know it forgot what it was doing? It's hardly going to be discussing it later with his warthog mates down the pub. "Oh yeah, blimey, what am I like? I was scarpering this afternoon, and I completely forgot what I was supposed to be doing. I'd forget my own head sometimes..." I dunno, unreliable on hedgehogs, dubious on honey badgers, and now highly unlikely on warthogs…”

This from Anonymous aka The Waunch aka Mr Flowers over the weekend. Wrong Mr W. If a warthog has no memory, then he would be going to a new pub every night (or so her would think). He would not have any friends to have a drink with until he had met them, and would then have to re-introduce himself to them every time his memory clocked off, which – if I am to believe what I was told – is approx every 15 seconds. Afternoon? He is only just capable of remembering the last thing he said, and only then only long enough for him to forget it. So hold on the highly unlikely attacks dude. At least until we have sat a warthog down and interviewed him. (Which I assume would be a pretty laborious process, unless we could find a warthog that can read, so we could show him the notes of what he had just said.)

Speaking of memories, I forgot to tell you that while in Kenya I found myself standing next to Tracey Emin at a beach bar. The temptation to say something was pretty ferocious, but for once I managed to keep my gob shut and left her in peace. (She was also surrounded by some of the least pleasant people I have ever seen. mrs househusbandnot came into the bar a few minutes after me, and reported that she had never felt quite so assessed and dismissed by so many people so quickly in her life. Real eurobeachtrash. [Them. Not mrs hhn.] Don’t know what our Tracey was doing hanging out with them.)

In other news, it is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year today. It is working so far…

Out Of Africa?

2008-01-17T11:38:00.001Z

Thank you for your various concerns about our welfare while we were steaming around Kenya after Xmas. Somewhat predictably we were fairly well protected from any violence in our host's comfortable expat home, and or being ferried around in nice 4 by 4s. We did drive through a burning roadblock and got eye-balled by an un-uniformed man who was holding a Kalashnikov*. (There is something disarming lawless about a man with a gun without a uniform.) And we saw ominous columns of black smoke rising up out of one of the shanty towns we drove past in Nairobi. But nothing any more John Simpson than that I'm afraid. There was an air of menace, and real disappointment about the derailed democratic process. And mrs househusbandnot was denied any g and ts on our safari because the tonic had not made it through the roadblocks. And someone borrowed my phone to call his family to make sure they were alive. But nothing more than that...he says, neatly summing up another whitey experience in Africa. (I was disappointed by the lack of a decent cigar humidor storage system in Lamu too.) (Those of you who know the whereabouts of my column for that US development site can check my serious thoughts on our experiences, and the implications of what is going on out there.)

Re the whole safari experience, it was quite magical being driven around the Masai Mara. The unexpected stars of the show were the warthogs. I am told that warthogs have such a short memory that they often stop running away from lions etc half way towards their freedom. We saw a whole bunch of stuff, although failed to see the elusive rhino and leopard. (There is something quite surreal about looking for animals that have spent the last few thousand years figuring out how not to be seen.) There was even a crocodile in the river below our camp site - which was cool. We were accompanied on our regular trips out to the game park by a random selection of other guests: a bumbling Old Etonian who spoke fluent Swahili; John and Anna from Clapham [enuff said]; and a great Ned Flanders lookalikey from Alaska. My favourite comedy moment was a van full of Dutch people pulling up in front of us and one of them - in a perfect impersonation of Goldmember from Austin Powers - shouting "Look. A lion chasing a cheetah. Look. Over there".

I guess you have either done a safari, and know what I am talking about, or thinking it all sounds a bit naff. It wasn't. It makes you think there may be a God. And having a lion or an elephant or a huge buffalo checking you out makes you wish you had done a little more praying to Him too. I am sorry to report that the elusive honey badgers remained just that, despite my requests to see them. (Probably all in Nairobi looking for the next riot.)

A lot more to say about Kenya, but will keep it for the next hhn post.

* Random hhn fact: I have been to Mikhail Kalshnikov's home town in Russia.

Tis Christmas...

2007-12-19T14:24:00.000Z

...and Madame B is complaining that she is the only one working. Nonsense. The Waunch is busy trying on different bandannas and leather waistcoats in anticipation of heading off to see Bruce Springsteen this evening. Styx and I are busy trying to work out where to go for lunch on Friday. *&^ is...well whatever. mrs househusbandnot is clearing the decks for drinks with her team somewhere in The City. blokewho is still trying to figure out how to comment on hhn since Google changed the rules AGAIN. (Guys, there is progress and refinement, and also TO MANY changes to process.) And Anonymous is into his fifteenth hour of wearing his new scarlet gimp mask in training for a full 24 hours lying in the urinals of Liverpool Street Station on New Year's Eve. Busy? We are off our feet.

In other news, everyone - except for us - getting animated about me and mrs hhn heading off to Kenya on 30th a few days after elections there. Seems there is often civil unrest of some sort around elections, often after it. We have discussed this in a rational manner, and decided to go ahead with the trip. We have also agreed to spend a mammoth seven days on the trot with my family and then mrs hhn's family over the Xmas period, so will be prepared for any sort of hostage experience in Kenya after that. (I suspect the food would be better too.)

Actually have mother in law descending on London this Friday. She wants to take her daughter to Covent Garden. Again, good training for any kidnap deals in Kenya. It will be hell on earth out there. But my mother in law is not one to be swayed by opinion - indeed resistance only makes her stronger. (And she is a bit too arch for any double-bluffing, especially when she has a retail target in her sights.)

I was going to do a big hhn Xmas quiz with a prize of those spare Kimono My House tickets. But not sure I will have time. Will try before Xmas. But if it doesn't happen, take consolation that I am probably out buying mrs hhn her xmas presents, of which more about in the New Year. I told real house husband what I was buying her the other day, and he laughed for approx 20 minutes.

Peace (in our times) hh(ho ho ho)n x

PS Was discussing with The Waunch the fact that the spellcheck on my phone accepts both Burlington and mdma. Who decided these things? Freddie Windsor?

Where's Vinderama?

2007-12-18T10:39:00.000Z

Oh, he's here

Conditionally Accepting

2007-12-11T17:26:00.000Z

In other news (I'm just going to ignore Madame B on the pull again), for various reasons went to visit an animal testing laboratory today.

We saw a seven kilo rabbit called Claus. We were shown 27,000 zebra fish, and some marmosets, and mice, and rats, and guinea pigs - all doing their quiet sad thing for medical research. The people who showed us around were all deeply nice and good. (They are called animal technologists, and they don't do the research, just spend as much time looking after the animals as possible, and reporting researchers when they think they are distressing the animals too much, or not understanding the animals' needs.) It was all...

....I don't know really. You read about it all the time. And think you have opinions and moral limits and ethical concerns about animal research. And seeing the actual animals and talking to the people who actually look after them was provocative (not least of all when one bloke - and I swear this is true [like everything else on hhn btw] - saw that I was standing on the wrong side of the sign warning people not to stand there because that is where they keep the radioactively-tagged mice).

The guy who runs the lab really really wants a new frog system (it is what you keep frogs in). He also taught me a great new word: `phenotypic'. The saddest thing I saw, or heard rather, was that animals who have not yet had diseases or drugs put into them are called naives. Telling that the science community can describe something that has not yet taught THEM something as naive, or that naive could be considered a lack of having an administered disease or drug regime.

Actually one of the other really telling things on this whole weird day was when we were being given a talk about the rights and wrongs of animal testing, and the presenter said that the general public were on the whole `conditional acceptors' of animal testing. What a ridiculous euphemism. I would conditionally accept looking forward to death, or drinking snake blood, or having my (*&^ trapped in the doorway, if the conditions were constantly having my (*&^ trapped in a vice, or drinking snake poison, or having my (*&^ and my (*&^%$% trapped in a door covered in snake poison. I would conditionally accept that hhn is the greatest contribution to moden day raportage if I thought anyone was dumb enough to believe me. I would conditionally accept that I was a looney if enough people told me I was. I would conditionally accept that I was a better dancer than Prince if I had drunk enough tequila.

And another speaker, who was obviously brilliant, but spent too much time telling us how often he hung out with Ministers.

I'm sounding like I am against animal research, which I neither am or am not. It was just very very interesting seeing where it happened, and who did it, and who looked after the animals, and the animals themselves. Sorry to put a downer on the whole Xmas thing, but it is what I did today, which is just about all this blog is about I guess.

Thank God It's Not Christmas

2007-12-10T14:27:00.000Z

(Have been reading a long long Brian Eno interview this morning, so may suggest that you read hhn while banging an Italian bell slowly and naked shortly.)

Although in no less surreal - if less oblique - news, (*& and I managed to buy each other exactly the same xmas present this year. What is the likelihood of that, considering all the things we could have bought each other? Who would have thought that two friends could separately - and togetherely - come to the conclusion that the other one needed a ticket to see Sparks perform Kimono My House in its entirety in March. Amazing co-incidence huh? (Actually it pretty much happens most years with (*& and I. Not the Sparks thing. But the same presents thing. There are - after all - a finite number of Sparks/Eno/Jay McInerney/Andy Warhol-related gift ideas out there, especially at Xmas. And I think (*& and I are just about the only two people in Europe who consider Kimono My House a seminal album.

?

2007-12-06T15:19:00.000Z

Is nobody reading hhn any more?

hhn Xmas Present List

2007-12-05T13:09:00.000Z

a) A dog

b) A wolf

c) For the linseed oil and rabbit glue that I have been asked to take over to Kenya with me by my host (he is an artist) not to be considered a weapon of mass - or minor - destruction by the customs officers at Nairobi airport

d) For The Spice Girls to internally combust

e) For the competition I entered to win Led Zepp tickets to come up with meeeeeeee, so I can sell them and take mrs househusbandnot to the Maldives

f) For c) not to burst open in my suitcase on the way to Nairobi

g) For mrs hhn and I to get upgraded to Bzniz Klass on the way to Nairobi

h) For Jeremy Clarkson to forgive me for being a bit of a tit when I 'met' him the other day

i) For me to have time to learn Stairway To Heaven on the guitar to impress my Zepp-obsessed godson when I see him in Nairobi (If you are wondering why I would not give the tickets I am about to win to him, he will be in Nairobi by the time the gig is on)

j) For *&^ to have time to worship at my feet because I have technically bought him the greatest xmas present of all time (And the stakes are high here people. He got me The Man Who Fell To Earth fridge magnets last year.)

k) For loads of free stuff at the Google seminar I am going to tomorrow

l) To be able to do the gym routine required 15 knee drops in a row without faltering and dropping to the floor like Peter O'Toole after seven or eight of them

m) For that bloke off of Mobile Act Unsigned to look just a little less like me (Have been wondering why so many people have been checking me out on the street lately. I thought it was the 10 kilos I have dropped of late.)

n) For our Xmas tree and me not to explode (mrs hhn is effectively undoing all the effects of our year-long recycling by bedecking our tree with four sets of lights. The room is humming with throbbing electricity waiting for me to go near an electricity socket. Planes are rerouting as they fly over our flat.)

o) For the Thai Girls And Women Searching For Friends website to stop advertising on hhn

p) For Prince to be back in contact

q) For honey badgers to get everything they want in their four little Xmas stockings (Honey? Honey-coated snake? Better publicity with less focus on the whole testicle-biting agenda? A haircut?)

r) For that - much delayed - call to come in from MiraMax re hhn: the movie

s) For a go on my father-in-law's lazy boy chair after Xmas lunch (v v unlikely)

t) For some of those blokes on my side to get out of the +*&^ing way when I am trying to kill Germans in Call Of Duty 2

u) For my boss to like the present I am buying her in the office Secret Santa

v) For mrs hhn not to guess what I am buying her for Xmas (If she does, it may be husbandnot status for me)

w) Another dog for the first one to hang out with

x) For Facebook to go away, zombies and all

y) For a bit of peace and quiet from the two blokes I am sharing an office with who are not talking to each other because they have had a disagreement about databases (snoozo)

z) And P.E.A.C.E on earth

Fingers crossed. hhn x

Yesterday:

2007-12-04T08:43:00.000Z

"Househusbandnot?"
Alarm bells (like the ones in the freak's house in Silence Of The Lambs) go off as mrs househousehusbandnot uses my proper name. I try to act cool.
"Er, yes mrs househusbandnot."
"I had a dream last night."
Further alarms, since 1) mrs hhn rarely remembers her dreams and 2) when she does, they are usually about me behaving badly by selling her in a market in Morocco, or burning down an off licence, or eating a wolf without a knife or fork in front of her parents.
"Oh, yes."
"Yes. You came home from work and said that your penis had fallen off in the office, and I was freaking out because you had obviously been waving your penis around in the office, and you were going `Can we focus on the main issue here that my dick fell off today?'"
"Hmmmm."
"But I've realised that the dream was just about me not wanting you to sleep with anyone else."
"Babe, it's not like I am about to sleep with anyone in my office."
"Wrong answer. I think what you meant to say was that you were not going to sleep with anyone else at all."
"Yes, that's what I meant to say." (Got out of that one, NOT.)

And all this on our wedding anniversary. May our dreams - well some of them anyway - not come true.

In other news, in and around the various wedding anniversary events over the weekend - including a great great meal last night [Styx, you would love this place], I saw an old friend of mine on Saturday who I have not seen for two years. It has been bothering me a lot that we had not met up for so long, with some concern that our long friendship had/was...I don't know, just had or wasn't. Anyway, it was a testament to that friendship that we pretty much picked up where we left off. (This meeting was also attended by The Waunch btw who was there to fill in any pregnant pauses - of which there were none - with his thoughts on Bloody Sunday, Jimmy Page's lack of oeuvre since the 1970s, and what cheese you would take to a desert island.) And a deep treat to be reminded that although we sometimes don't see people for too long, friendships last if they are meant to. (No snide comments on this one please people, unless you really feel the Xmas need to take the piss out of me for being honest - a temptation I am aware Madame B will be unable to resist after she has put up the Xmas decorations in the office this morning.)

In further news, went to a party with mrs hhn on Saturday where a man took his shirt off, mrs hhn asked a woman if she was okay because she could not stand up and the woman confessed she had drunk a bottle of port before coming to the party, the host showed us his light saber, I ate pretty much all of the canapes, and mrs hhn had a little dance. All this in Oxshott, which those of you in the know know is possibly one of the strangest places in the world - apart from my wife's dreamworld.

A Reader's Letter

2007-11-28T12:39:00.000Z

OK, I’ve had about enough of this. For years, hhn has been a positive place, somewhere where gentle reflection and playful comment held sway, where thoughtful conversations, built upon respect and garlanded with wit have been the norm. It seems that is at an end. And I want to protest.
Many Eastern philosophies are built on the idea of an antithesis between objects or phenomena, combining to create a unity of opposites. This means, roughly, that there are two sides to everything. And so it proves in the case of hhn. Because I am the dark side of hhn, Evil HHN, the bad-tempered, intolerant rule-nazi, the cruel, plain-speaking avenging fist of righteous truth.
So I’m not going to mince my words. This blog is fucked.
It may be fucked beyond repair. I don’t know. But any chance it has of survival, this sylvan glade of happy discourse, lies in your hands, you, the reader. We may be able to tempt the Good hhn back, to share with us his thoughts on fridges and honey badgers and sandwiches and godsons and swimming pool etiquette and brown paint and Prince and weddings and Scotland and iPods and the banality of the quotidian, but only if you stupid fuckers stop being stupid fuckers.
So we need some new rules. And here they are:

Madam B
We want to love you, really we do. But you keep being horribly crude, and you don’t need to be. You seem feisty and highly entertaining; please join in the conversation without showing us your knickers – you’re not three years old.
RULE: Don’t mention your (*&^

Blokewho
There seem to be several of you. Can you sort this out? And the whole anti-celtic to-and-fro? Nobody gives a fuck.
RULE: Don’t argue about how shit Irish people are

The Waunch
Tough. Please stop being right about everything. I was listening to Santana the other day, and you know what? You were right. And about the Tragically Hip. I’m sorry I ever doubted you. You rock!
RULE: Don’t take a minute off from being yourself!

Styx
What the fuck happened to you? Surely you can’t be too busy to check in a bit more frequently? We value your input.
RULE: Don’t order that third bottle

Mrs hhn
Look, I have to tell the truth, my love. I’ve been decieving you for what seems like an age. It is, I’m afraid, a wig. And I’m gay.
RULE: Don’t believe anything I say, ever

Blokewho (again)
Look, let’s face it: Carlos Santana is pretty cool. We don’t really have a leg to stand on. Let’s just give it up, eh?
RULE: Carlos Santana…just is… Ok?

Honeybadgers
Look, we’re big fans. But we’re not getting that reciprocal vibe. You get a bad press almost universally – “piebald nutsack-ripping mini badgers of death” – but do we get a word of thanks for our support? No, we do fucking not. Get with the fucking program, you ungrateful (*&^s.
RULE: Someone else’s scrotum, please…

I can’t remember who else reads this blog; to be honest, I can barely remember why I started it in the first place. Oh, yeah, I was unemployed. And this kept me writing. Nowadays I’m employed up the yin-yang. And I’ve become shit at my own blog. But if you try harder, then I’ll try harder. If not, I just won’t either. So let me know if you think I should carry on with it, or if we’ve all come to a natural crossroads. And if so, you can all just fuck off…

Heroin Or Haggis?

2007-11-21T09:06:00.000Z

Although most of it appears to have been from Madame B - aka Madame Don't Have Enough To Do At Work Or At Home - there is something vaguely satisfying about watching comments ticking in to hhn. Maybe I really don't need to be writing any new content, and I can just let the six of you get on with it within the hhn arena...oh God, I've turned into a moderator.

I have news. mrs househusbandnot has bought a groovy silver scooter. So if you see a hot brunette on a silver scooter with a red helmet in and around London, there is a slight possibility that it could be mrs hhn. If you are in need of stalking me (or her), I'd suggest that you follow her, and she will eventually lead you to hhn HQ. All roads lead to and all that.

In other news, mrs hhn and I are getting excited about our Kenya holiday in December/January. (mrs hhn sent me a fantastic youtube clip of a honey badger killing a cobra yesterday. I could almost smell the Serengeti earth.) I made a tit of myself with Jeremy Clarkeson on Saturday. Robert Wyatt wheeled past me the other morning when I was listening to one of his songs on my isquad. And I finished Lost Planet on the Xbox the other night. It is approx the second or third ever game I have finished on PS2 or Xbox. (Had a go on a Weii the other night btw. Amusing, for three seconds, although Styx assures me that a quick round of golf on the Weii is great when you are twatted.)

And had a good discussion with mrss hhn the other night about what we would have for our last ever meal if we were on death row. We eventually decided on fish finger sandwiches, a bottle of vodka and some heroin. (I voted for a haggis starter too.) We got a bit carried away at one stage, thinking it could be a whole day of meals and not just one in the evening before they come and shave your head and ask if you want to have a final chat with the priest. Not sure how it works. I guess it varies from prison to prison. (I imagine the request for class A drugs would be met with differing responses from prison to prison too.)

Recent overheards/comments/observations:

mrs hhn: "I hate rules, unless I am in charge"

Styx: "But hhn, does Zanzibar really exist?"

And recent news.

PEACE hhn

Question B

2007-10-16T13:45:00.000Z

Questions for Madame B:

1) How many other blogs do you haunt?
2) Was that really you partner (Master B?) on hhn the other day?
3) Did you cry when Stephanie Beecham got kicked off Strictly Come Dancing the other night?
4) Why are you so vulgar?
5) I can provide a photo of Anonymous if you want one. Do you want one?
6) Where is your photo?
7) How often - tell the truth - do you visit hhn every day?
8) What is your favourite J Mascis track?
9) Why?
10) When?

(Sorry guys, been kinda busy about which more later.)

Re Stuff

2007-10-10T10:20:00.000Z

Re blokewhos, now I am really confused. And what kind of kick do people get pretending to be someone else on a blog that is read by approx six people (interesting and attentive as this dirty half dozen may be)?

Re not answering questions, bring it on dear readers. But I will not answer questions that are not interesting. (See terms and conditions below.) On the bloke from Hawaii, good question. Blokewhoaskedthisquestion I am impressed by your historical knowledge of hhn content. However, I have no idea whether or not Mr Hawaii is still out there, logging in to hhn in between sips of his tropical cocktails. Sorry.

Re regular employment and hhn status? Good call, but it is too much of a hassle to change the name of the blog. And I might lose some of you in that process. You may be small, but so is dynamite – as Prince said at the last of his gig’s I went to.

(Anonymous aka The Waunch, isn’t it time you came out of the anonymous closet, not that it is difficult to figure out when it is you or not. `Now that hhn has clarified what he meant’? `I don’t think you phrased this very well’? Dude, get that pole from out of your butt.)

Re air keyboards, you are all missing a trick. Only this morning I managed to make mrs househusbandnot laugh with a quick bit of air keyboards to the first verse of Sometimes It Snows In April. Other air keyboard favourites include A Song From Under The Floorboards, Beauty And The Beast, the beginning of Deep In Vogue, We Used To Be Friends, Everything In Its Right Place, anything from Fearsome Jewel, the Orb remix of Higher Than The Sun, All The World Loves Lovers, most of The In Sound From Way Out, and You Below To Me. (I could go on.)

Re stuck for Xmas presents? Buy all hhn posts to date as a hard copy. In the spirit of recent rumblings in the music industry, you can pay what you feel it is worth.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

I will not answer any questions that are not interesting, hhn.

blokewhosavesmylife

2007-10-08T19:08:00.000Z

As is often the case as I absolutely can't think of anything interesting to say to all six of you, blokewhoshouldbewritingthisblog comes up trumps with a suggestion for content. (Anonymous aka Brandon Flowers aka The Waunch aka Robert Malborough, 53 Cheshire Place, London Sw17 NE4 [just around the corner from the Notting Hill black pudding shop where Ben Elton wrote We Will Rock You] is also good at pestering me with good ideas, but he does it face to face rather than via the comments pages of hhn - which would - I guess... - explain why blokewhoihavenotseenforages earned his name.)

Being pretty hip, I am more interested in user driven content aka web stoners have run out of ideas, so you six cats aka blokewhozfirstonmylistofsixcats, Styx, Brandon Flowers, Bad, &^%, and Madame B (talk to me people if there are more of you), riddle me this:

1) I look most like....
2) My biggest hero is....
3) Ideal holiday destination....
4) Favourite air guitar track....
5) My favourite Prince track is....(and no you can't have I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man as answers to 4 and 5)
6) Favourite air keyboards track...
7) The person I think really has written a pact with Mr D in order to strain their modicum of 15 minutes of fame into a career...
8) Is Madame B a geezer... (I'm not convinced by this one. I do genuinely think Madame B is a genuine stranger, vulgar as she/he/she is.)
9) The Shield or Shakespeare...
10) When you are in bed on Sunday mornings, what are you thinking about...(If you say Leonard Cohen or Tindersticks please remove yourself from society asafuckingp...)

Alright Already...

2007-10-03T19:24:00.000Z

...chill out you freaks (x6):

1) Red or white cheddar?
2) David Essex or Mark Ramprakesh?
3) Playstation or Xbox?
4) blokewho or styx?
5) Open or closed sandwich?
6) Madame B or Mr B?
7) The Waunch aka Anonymous aka Brandon Flowers or John Cooper Clarke?
8) Scott Gorham or Scott Gorham?
9) Facebook or facelift?
10) Richard Long or Keith Richards?
11) East or South Asia?
12) Badger or Honey Badger?
13) hhn or mrs hhn?
14) Danni or Kylie?
15) Simon or Louis?
16) England or Scotland?
17) Pasta: on or off the plate? (Rem, please be there to explain this one.)
18) Prince or Imagination?
19) ipod or the other stuff?
20) Trying to be cool or admitting you are a chuffer ringtone?
21) Peter Andre or Pete Wylie?
22) Which of the two Joy Division films coming out?
23) Gastro pub or a nice place where they won't charge you 14 and a half squid for a couple of sausages on celeriac mash?
24) hhn or Billie Piper taking her kecks off? (Alright already...)
25) Blog or fist fuck?

McHHN

2007-10-01T15:44:00.000Z

Back from a sunny Edinburgh to a rainy London. The contrasts don't stop there.

In Edinburgh, everyone seems to know my family, and all my cousins live in massive houses, and there is hospitality and largess all around, and talk of publishing my Grandfather's memoirs, and huge huge plasma TVs to watch the rugby, and every other building you go past is pointed out as having been of some significance or ownership or management to or by my family. (There was even an article in the Scottish Daily Mail about someone trying to do up their private plane in the same style as a house that my cousins used to own.)

Quite a contrast to London where the only recognition is from the drunk fuck sitting on the steps of the Church at the end of my road, and the only thing needing publishing is another complaint to our neighbour about her dog barking. But I guess contrast is where it should be sometimes. I got back to London with a renewed vague warm feeling of family, and a sense that I will be back up to Scotland in the not to distant future.

Highlights of my mcvisit included a great Richard Long show (I know, I know, but I like him), a goofy Andy Warhol show, and a quiet walk around a park outside Edinburgh listening to Music For Airports. Also saw a friend of mine, and her son in law who is now almost entirely covered in tattoos - which was entertaining. We went to The Borders of Scotland to see my friend. It is a bit like that opening sequence of The Man Who Fell To Earth, although I managed not to sell my wedding ring, or meet anyone called Mary Lou.

Edinburgh is rapidly gentrifying itself, although there are still some pretty run down looking areas, populated by women who have obviously self-tattooed because they didn't have time to get to the tattoo parlour in between pregnancies, and a lot of rough old fuckers, who would knock my block off if they heard my accent. But I was safely protected from this threat, being chauffeured around in my cousin's enormous 4 by 4 (approx size of small flat in London), and being warmly received into mansion after mansion. (All three of my sisters where there too, which might explain the slight blip in the ether you felt over the weekend.)

Anyway, back to London life. Now, where's my mace and my scowl to get me across town...

McComments

2007-09-26T11:21:00.000Z

Interesting intervention from Mr B in the comments section, proving that he is pretty unhinged, and in need of a bit of attention (from qualified practitioners). It's all in your head mate. There is no-one out there.

Anyway, off to Scotland tomorrow for a bit of clan gathering. (All three of my sisters will be there, which is a rare occurrence and one that invariably results in me getting into trouble.) Have not as yet purchased blue face paint and sporran, but will see what I can do when I get there. Actually hoping to have a pretty mellow time, taking in a few galleries and trying to blag my way into a great spa in Edinburgh. While not where my heart is, Edinburgh is as close to the city my family comes from as there is.

Will mcreport back.

And Mr B, please don't comment too much on this post. It is about me, not you you freak - something we have been trying to explain to your wife for some time.

Like A Rolling Stone

2007-09-24T09:45:00.000Z

Following a deeply frustrating week or so – involving me trying to secure a celebrity’s involvement in an appeal I am working on, and after many, many, many crawlings through hoops, unanswered phone calls and email and texts etc., finally getting through to this particular celebrity’s ‘people’ who turned out to be the rudest, most disorganised and pointless people I have ever spoken to – am trying to get back on the straight (allowing of course for toothpaste gifts to men) and narrow.

I took a lot of my frustration out on the one person who doesn’t need it aka mrs househusbandnot, for which I here deeply apologise. (And also a tub of ice-cream , which has been lurking at the back of our freezer since we started our diet.) I doubly apologise because I am not going to be around this coming weekend when mrs hhn has to give a reading at a wedding. (I am going up to Scotland for an aunt’s birthday, while mrs hhn heads off to somewhere in the home counties to give said reading.)

I take some anti-celebrity solace in the fact that just as I was forced to go to a musical in London this weekend, so too was Mick Jagger who was sitting a few rows in front of me. He looked deeply bored, and was no doubt only kept awake by the prospect of any of the songs having a Stones’ riff in them so he could claim royalties. (This was all after a pre-show pizza when we discussed quite how pointless he is, not knowing that he would be at the show. I read in the Sunday papers that he is releasing a dvd of his solo work. Staggeringly pointless.)

Anyway, back to basics: don’t work with celebrities; don’t try and work with their people because they are deep morons; have a Plan B (which I do kind of have, thanks again to mrs hhn); and know who your real friends are.

Speaking of basics, my colleague in the office has just put on some French pop music. My French is not that good, but I think the singer is singing about washing his pyjamas. As my colleague said, you get some French person saying “Oh, you really need to listen to this new band/singer. They are really innovative and really blow away Johnny Halliday” etc. etc, and it is just the same as any other French music for the last 200 years. Rubbish. I like Air, but is that really all they have come up with since chamber music?

In other news, has my niece to stay this weekend (hence musical goings to), which was a real treat. We spent an extremely enjoyable two hours back to her parent’s house yesterday, listening to each other’s ipods. Panic At The Disco rock (assuming they are not French).

Stuff I now know

2007-09-21T09:18:00.000Z

1) Madame B is nuts
2) Celebrities - and more specifically their PAs - suck
3) What a double blind clinical trial is (mrs househusbandnot's first ever boy friend recently created a mouse with a glowing leg)
4) They have hedgehogs in New Zealand, but not in Australia
5) I sing that song Would I Lie To You at least once a week
6) I am thinking it is time for the Gill Scott Heron revival
7) Am looking forward to the violent revolution against celebrity cooks
8) There may be a god, because I bumped into one of the nicest waiters I have ever met the other day, and he had got a part in Eastenders
9) Winter (in America?) is coming hurrah
10) Mobile phones really really suck, especially when you have turned something on on them and you don't know what it is ("Oh great, I've been emailing Mongolia all afternoon")
11) Dry cleaners rule the world (unfortunately)
12) If you buy toothpaste for the gay man at the gym, congratulate him on listening to Donna Summer, and playfully punch him in the pecs, it is not unreasonable of him to assume you are a secret gayer
13) Sometimes when you are playing Xbox, you have a rush of quite how deeply pointless it is playing Xbox (Mind you, one gets the same feeling of despondency in the pub. at work etc., so no big anti-gaming agenda here)
14) At the gym, I have been listening to *&^'s cd collection on my ipod. Forget Donna Summer. I am working out to ambient John Foxx and early Roxy Music - very strange
15) Those electronic cars make the people driving them look really goofy

We are all editors

Me N Prince We Talked

2007-09-13T06:59:00.000Z

So chapter eight billion of me and the Prince tour, and I went off to see him at the main show last night. (You will recall dear readers the various problems I've had with the After Show parties, whereby he didn't show up the first time I went, and I almost died, and then he did show up the next time I went, and played for two hours, and I almost died. [The After Show parties are in a much much smaller venue within the main O2 arena, and - somewhat predictably as their name might suggest- after the main shows of the evening.])

Anyway, I spent most of yesterday engaged in an inexact science of trying to figure out some sort of pattern for when Prince did or didn't play the After Shows, and wondering whether or not to go and try and buy an After Show ticket. mrshousehusbandnot was on my case on this agenda btw, having had to cope with the fall out when he didn't play the first After Show and I spent approx three days - make that seven - thinking the world had officially ended, warning me that I should not get too excited or expectant or...too late...I did buy an After Show ticket when I got to the stadium, and spent the next half hour fretting about it while I waited for my sister to go to the main show.

Main show was pretty hot, amazing actually. I won't go into details (perhaps The Waunch would like to since he was there too?) other than to say my sister and I had great great seats, and Prince pretty much played his ass off to us. In many ways, I was regretting having bought the After Show ticket because we actually had a better and closer view of him in the main arena than I had had at the After Show where he did show up. (Keeping up?) But what the fuck. I'd bought the ticket so I decided to hang around and wait for the After Show.

There was a massive queue for people with tickets to the After Show, and I was pretty fed up with having to queue for everything else at the O2. (The should call it the Q2. You could quite easily miss a whole show queuing for a drink and then a burger or whatever in that place.) But I wandered to the end of the queue, and got talking to two young guys from Dublin about...well just Prince and whether or not he would show at the After Show.

And we were chatting away when someone pounced against the metal fence right next to us. It was Prince. And the approx 10 people who could see him - including me - were completely stunned. He was - admittedly with a metal fence between us - standing right next to us. And he said "I'm not gonna do the show tonight. I'm sorry." And I said, well kinda chirped, "You've got to play." And he said "I'm sorry man. I just can't tonight. I'll play tomorrow." And then he mumbled something about "one song" or something, and turned and strode into the back of a Mercedes which drove off. (When you are five foot one, you can stride into a car btw.)

It all happened so quickly me and the Irish boys just stared at each other. And then one of them - who was a bit too Father Dougal anyway - said."Well if I'd known it was Prince I would have just crawled under the fence, see there look there's a gap I could have got under, just there see. And I would have given Prince a big kiss on the face so, and then it would have been really embarrassing because I would not have known what to say to him so, and and, there look that gap in the fence, I could have got through there for sure". Etc Etc Etc. I have a feeling that Irish kid is still talking about it this morning. Which I am too, but hey what the fuck. Me N Prince We Talked.

(And so ended The Purple August/Septembers of hhn. And it came to pass that mrs hhn sighed one massive sigh of relief.)

X Marks The Spot

2007-09-11T12:33:00.000Z

Someone asked me what Xbox games I am playing. That would be mostly Tetrus and er Tetrus, since this is just about the only game mrs househusbandnot will tolerate, and beats me at regularly.

I have also been playing a game called Lost Continent which is about some kid looking for his father on some frozen desert which is populated by giant insects and dandelions that shoot flaming rockets at you. You get machines and tanks to romp around in while you are trying to kill of this nasty forna and flora. And every so often some massive tank tries - and invariably succeeds - to run you over. All pretty uncomplicated stuff story-wise, although my old fingers and addled brain are finding it hard to get our young hero through the game. I am currently stuck on a ledge in a factory with one massive drilling tank to kill, with a few rounds of ammo and not enough rockets. You know the gaming deal.

We also have a pretty entertaining table tennis game. (There is a really huffy French player you can be, who has a real attitude when he is drummed by the cunning East Asian master.) And I bought a world war two game, but you have to be in the Russian Army, which really sucks since gaming is not - or should not be anyway - about being cannon fodder. And I keep setting off smoke grenades so none of my comrades can see what the fuckski is going on, and get shot by the Germans who seem to be able to see through the smoke. (Cunning those Nazis.)

And I got Bioshock which is one pretty fucked up game, all about changing your DNA as you sneak around this art deco warehouse being attacked by manic prostitutes with cat masks on. Great graphics and all that, but I do wonder exactly how much MDMA the designers needed to scoff to come up with some of it.

And some more Tetrus.

I am officially a teenager, in mind if not body.

Speaking of which, my pool is closed at the moment, so I am being forced to use the gym. Man, is it gay out there. Last night I was squeezed in between a couple of gym bunnies who were making my efforts look pathetic as they further toned and pumped their already pretty toned and pumped bodies as they talked away about night clubs. (Not being able to do much more than grunt when I am working out in the gym, it was the talking that most impressed me.)

So that's what I've been up to while you six have been waiting around to hear what I have been doing. Sorry it is no less cliched than sad man with Xbox and fat man with weights. But getting there (although mrs hhn and I have been suffering from end of summer blues these last few days. Strange because I hate the summer so much).

Incidentally, I did not understand any of what you were saying in your comments, although they cheered me up realising that I have a life and a new best friend called Xbox.

Hair Day

2007-09-04T10:21:00.000Z

Just saw a bloke with officially the worst hairdo of all time. He was about 26, ginger and balding. His take on addressing (re-dressing?) the last two ailments had been to shave the back of his head, grow a turfy quiff at the front, and add medium sized sideburns which were a completely different colour (really orange) and texture (like astro turf) to the rest of his head hair. He looked like a monk and an orangutan's love child. (I am aware that three of my six readers are a bit touchy about the old bald deal, so I will not go on about it any more, but Mr Ginger really had put a lot of thought into his baldness, and made himself look like a complete zigoid. Mind you, I am currently sporting the sad middle-aged man grows his hair hairdo, a particular agenda that mrs househusbandnot has quite a lot to say about having just had a great new haircut herself.)

Speaking of hair, did I mention that I went to the Prince After Show gig on Saturday?

In other news, was watching Nigella Lawson's new show last night - I don't know what it is called, Nigella's Chocolate Knickers or something - and I got to thinking that she really must have signed a pact with The Devil. She is deeply untalented and unengaging but still keeps popping up for more. Actually, maybe her whole family got a Satan Family Reward Scheme.

Others who may well have taken this route to success by signing up with Old Red Fork Tail:

1) Ant and Dec
2) People who have organised the tube strike this week. (How do they get away with it again and again and again? My bus to work this morning was like trying to commute into Bombay.)
3) Those people who paint themselves gold or silver and stand still on the pavement. (When was that ever entertainment please? But people give them money.)
4) People who design computer printers. (They do not work, but we just keep blaming ourselves and buying new ones.)
5) Dr John (obviously)
6) David Walliams
7) The Pope (He has to doesn't he, so he and The Devil know the deal. Actually, maybe he signs a slightly different contract. More of a Memo Of Understanding with promises to mention each other at meetings, and no stealing each other's thunder at Easter and stuff.)
8) Whoever invented the sandwich. (As mentioned by %^& before the Prince gig the other night, sandwiches are just so not where it is at but we keep buying them and talking about them.)
9) Francis Bacon (although I reckon he was a bit pissed and didn't read the small print about being miserable all his life and having terrible hair days every day forever.)
10) And people who write musicals. ("Okay. Let me get this right. One soul, my soul, and all I have to do to become rich as buggery is to use four chords and get my mentally frail aunt to write a few lyrics about it being dark and then the sun coming out? Bring it on Dr D."

So there.

After Show Show

2007-09-03T13:16:00.000Z

Well yes, there is some truth that I have been a little pre-occupied with the Xbox since I got it last week. (Out for a drink with mrs househusbandnot the other night, I was saying that I just didn’t have time to write hhn at the moment. And she said “Waddaya mean? You got time for a pint. You got time for your friggin’ Xbox.” mrs hhn as Ray Winstone shocker.)

So apologies (of sorts), but have had a good break from hhn, and I guess we should be preparing ourselves for Madame B’s return (To form? Hmm.)

In other news, actually managed to see Prince at one of his After Shows on Saturday night. Having already trekked along to one of these After Shows and been forced to watch Dr John (who remains deeply dull), I was trying not to get too excited this Saturday. But by around 11.00pm I was bouncing around the walls of %^&’s flat eager to get over to the O2. We got there around 12.30, and were just getting a drink in the venue, and %^& was grilling some innocent bar girl about IF Prince did come on, what time did he usually come on, when…Prince came on stage.

And played for two hours. I’ve checked a few official and unofficial Prince-related sites, and I don’t want to turn into too much of a purple geek, but it was absolutely extraordinary. (If you want details of the set list, you can go to any of the sites and check it. My login is hhn and password is purplegeek.) It was just ridiculously good, with Prince axing his ass off surrounded by some or all or half of The NPG etc. (I find Maceo Parker a bit too jazzist, but his extended sax solos kinda worked.)

One of the things that does really get me about being a Prince fan is other Prince fans. Apart from the odd hot chick, one of whom I had a chat with about her Prince tambourine, most people in the 2,000 odd audience were real tossers. There was one old MILNF in front of %^& and I just talking through all the songs. (“Didn’t I tell you he’d be great. This is so great. I am so great. Must remember to log onto MenWhoLikeSeeingPicturesOfOldCockneyRotters.org when I get home. Here luv, get us another pint of Stella” etc.) And a bunch of old white taxi drivers. And a few Germans, and me and %^&. %^& was wondering if Prince must be frustrated by how unfunky and white his audience is.

Anyway, despite rest of audience, had a great time. It’s up there in top five best gigs I’ve been to. (Others would include The Clash on the London Calling tour, Tricky and Lee Perry at The Festival Hall, Van Morrison at the Corn Exchange in Stoke before he turned into a full-time jazz loser, and Siouxsie And The Banshees at Blackburn Town Hall on their first national tour. [Naturally, I am managing not to mention some of the truly dreadful and unhip gigs I have been to in my life. Paul Simon, Level 42 anyone?])

So all Princeness restored, and I have now officially forgiven him for not showing at the first After Show. And I still have a main show of his to go and see with my sister in a week or so.

I have not much other news, other than the fact that I bailed out of my own birthday party before any of our guests had left, which was a bit embarrassing. (I blame the vodka smoothies, as designed by The Waunch aka Mr Flowers.)

C U 2MRw

Boredom And Death Bread

2007-08-22T11:39:00.000Z

In an interesting role reverse, mrs househusbandnot is working at home today while I am in the office. She has called in approx eight times already this morning with various comments/requests including: "I am cold", "Will you buy some eggs?", "I'm bored" x4, "Should I watch some daytime TV?", and "My remote access won't work". (Welcome - dear wife - to my world.) My suggestions that she turn on the heating, learn the guitar, do some work, go and buy me an XBox, and not to watch daytime TV - since that is the turning point when you should really just give up even pretending to be anything and go out and buy some crack - have fallen on deaf ears. (She just called again while I was writing this post to say she is buying us tickets to Nairobi. She must be bored.)

I am never bored at home on my own. In fact I have not actually been bored for quite a long time. Maybe the odd dull 10 minutes waiting for a train, or waiting for mrs hhn outside the cinema, or watching the last three minutes of the previous TV show before the cricket highlights. But not really bored. I've been mad and angry and frustrated and depressed and sad and nuts and hot and cold lately. But not bored for a while now. (I guess this is some sort of testament to mrs hhn, although I can't work it out since she is currently bored at home.)

In mrs hhn-related news, as part of this diet we are on she has managed to procure some of the heaviest, darkest, driest, nastiest bread known to man (or beast or devil). I have no idea where this Death Bread comes from, but is sure as hell fills you up. Just carrying a small loaf of it from the fridge to the chopping board burns 100 calories. Eating one small slice of it requires both stamina and concentration, such is this bread's density and also complete lack of taste. You really have to work at it to finish a slice. (Naturally, one is not allowed to decorate Death Bread with anything like butter or some other ingredient that would make it all seem a bit less like eating a nutty floorboard. Although I don't really think there is much you could add to the Death Bread to make it any more acceptable to palate or jaw or gut. [A laptop dancer maybe?])
(Ohh, mrs hhn just called again. That's twice in 10 minutes. She will be watching Jeremy Kylie before lunchtime.)

Anyway, I am off for the next few days. Will be back to hhning sometime early next week after the bank holiday. In the meantime, don't watch daytime TV, if you know her give mrs hhn a call (she is available for comment on pretty much anything under the sun after two and a half hours at home on her own), wish me a happy birthday for Saturday, and don't go getting too bored.

Incidentally, cats busted at last.

Cut'n'Paste

2007-08-21T12:25:00.000Z

I like the idea of cutting and pasting hhn posts, as suggested by - I'm assuming `cos he likes playing with words as well as with celebrities - Brandon Flowers aka The Waunch. (Although mrs househusbandnot informed me the other night that she has been making a few anonymous comments to hhn, so I am a bit confused as to who is who out there in comment land at the moment. [What's with all the anonymity people? It's not like anyone apart from us read this thing anyway.{Although I was at a business meeting this morning and someone told me that someone I used to work with, and may try and work with with again one day, sometimes reads hhn, which was alarming.}])

Speaking of cutting and pasting, I have never been convinced by that whole line from David Bowie about him cutting and pasting lines of lyrics for his songs. (And I also really hate those poems on fridges letter magnets. And I get confused with the tracking options on Word. Maybe I should be getting The Brandon to write hhn?)

On other news...oh there isn't any today

Beyond Goats And Their Cheese

2007-08-20T14:11:00.000Z

Word up on the goat's cheese discussion people. (Incidentally, I've had that Norwegian cheese someone mentioned. It is foul.)

Things - other than goat's cheese - I can't make my mind up about either:

1) scaffolding - safe or just too dangerous?
2) Stevie Wonder - genius or repeater?
3) Simon Cowell - amusing or twat?
4) Hollyoaks - excellent tv or porn?
5) bluetack - saving grace or ugly smelly mess?
6) bees - world savers or stingy nasty pseudo wasps?
7) ipods - great marketing, crap product or crap product, crap product?
8) air conditioning - soooooooo good, but then you have to go outside
9) toffee?
10) celery - healthy crisp or stringy devil's food?
11) hd television - why have one when no-one broadcasts in hd?
12) football - which I guess means I really don't care
13) sleeping?
14) buckets - you'd have thought they would have come up with something else by now, or at least something that was less ugly
15) telescopes - cool stoner tool, or just a gadget for perves?
16) blogging - whatever
17) Madame B - my wife, or The Waunch, or a man, or a genuine stranger?
18) business cards - see 14
19) Easter?
20) birthday presents - I just don't know what I need in my life, and I only have five days to decide....

Thoughts

2007-08-17T12:41:00.000Z

Thanks for you various thoughts: helpful if I actually wrote bloke sometimes; hhn is dead because Madame B is on holiday; recipes etc.

But I don't have a heck of a lot to contribute at the moment. Busy working on a campaign I may have mentioned a while back. Finished writing mrs househusbandnot's website for her. Been to see Prince. Going to see him again thanks to cool birthday present of ticket from one of my sisters. Having a few people over for my birthday next weekend. Started new diet. Going for a drink with some of mrs hhn's mates this evening. Going to see the in laws for the weekend...it is hardly earth shattering stuff people. Just like anyone else's London summer really, with a bit more sweat and a bit more note taking.

I have thoughts. Thoughts about why the hell would the Government Of Venezuela is sponsoring a Mayor of London poster for half price fares for pensioners. Thoughts about learning to play I Believe In Miracles on the guitar. Thoughts about the diet bread aka death bread that mrs hhn is making me eat on the diet. (And cravings - real cravings - for diet coke which I am not allowed on the diet.) Thoughts on my hair. Thoughts on the Indian food which I am planning on cooking for my birthday party. Thoughts on the various websites I am working on. Thoughts about going to a complete stranger's house last night to interview her son for a possible radio broadcast. Thoughts on whether or not I NEED an Xbox in my life. Thoughts about mrs hhn, and how sweet she looked this morning as she left for work. Thoughts about how cold the swimming pool was this morning. Thoughts on my next column for that American website I write for. Thoughts on my great unwritten novel. Thoughts on my two mates in California, and how cool it would be to be going over their place this evening for a couple of bottles of Zin. Thoughts on that new tv show Heroes (which rocks, although it is being a bit Lost-like leaving you a cliff edge at the end of every episode). Thoughts on getting old thanks to that bad leg thing I had in Portugal. Thoughts on whether or not to do an evening class in something in September. Thoughts on goats cheese (can't make up my mind about it though). Thoughts on global warming and the Government and billionaires and house prices and mosquitoes and other websites and electricity and wolves and cashmere and water and on-line medical assistance and ipods and t-shirts and the weather and dreams and non-dreams and skin and whisky and the pretty woman who got off the bus in front of me just now. But I'm not actually really doing anything much, other than thinking at the moment. And thinking is what most bloggers do too much of, because they have no-one to talk to, other than that special friend in their head who is telling them to re-read Catcher In The Rye and figure out who to stalk next. Which is why it has been pretty quiet here at hhn HQ (not because I am planning on stalking anyone, but because I have just been spinning around in my own head. I think it is a pre-birthday thang, or maybe that white port mrs hhn brought back from Portugal).

Thoughts anyone?

Legless

2007-08-14T11:53:00.000Z

Shame none of you wanted to run with the TOFU agenda. I'd have thought a number of you were right in that population and would have stuff to say about it.

Anyway, speaking of TOFU, I pulled or strained or ripped some muscles in my thigh when we were in Portugal this weekend, so am sitting on the sofa back at home like a plum trying to summon up the strength to totter around the corner to my doctor for some advice and hopefully some v strong pain killers. This wound has given my another (like I needed any more) insight into what it is going to be like when we are old and take five minutes to get out of a chair and 10 minutes to get down the road. At the moment I have to lever myself onto the floor from sitting on the sofa or a chair or whatever, and then gradually push myself up onto my feet from the floor. All pretty comical if you are watching it I suspect. And pretty fuckin' humiliating if you are doing it, especially in front of our supper healthy/fit/agile hosts in Portugal.

But mrs househusbandnot and I sat next to a woman on the plane on the way home yesterday who said she was in the first stages of MS, so I guess I should not complain too much (although I am a terrible terrible patient/in pain person [I am not going to deny that mrs hhn has been extremely attentive since I first did myself in, but she did skip off to work pretty sharpish today, eager - no doubt - to get away from my plaintive demands and bear roars every time I get a twinge in my leg.].)

Can't think of any games about Madame B while she is away, which will no doubt annoy her when she gets back from her extremely long vacation. That weekend in Portugal was our summer vacation (for various reasons including my lack of planning or listening to mrs hhn trying to plan nice things), so am a bit jealous of a month away from London and work and buses and the underground and limited lunchtime sandwich choices and those guys trying to give you free papers etc. Assume Madame B is currently trying to concentrate on her second trashy novel of the holiday, but really wondering why her partner has been gone shopping for so long, and wishing she was on line to share her concerns about her partner and the bloke with the cheese stall at the market's underage daughter. Or not. I think she may have gone on holiday with her parents, mostly because she didn't give us any details of her holiday. Bit embarrassing still holidaying with your folks at 30 something.

Right, I am going to drag my weary ass off to the doctor to see what he/she can do to stop me walking like Styx after a heavy night at The Leather Anvil.

T.O.F.U.

2007-08-08T22:49:00.000Z

So......Prince the other night....you know what guys, I'm kinda embarrassed to say this but to be really really honest I think I am genuinely to old/fucked up (TOFU) to do the whole gig thing anymore. I am:

TOFU to deal with the pre-gig excitement
TOFU to accept that I don't have the best seats in the house
TOFU to queue anywhere
TOFU to spend £30 on a tshirt
TOFU to want to spend £30 on a tshirt
TOFU to even pretend that Prince's female dancers would ever be interested in me
TOFU to queue behind Dutch people (of which there where a large number at Prince gig the other night)
TOFU to be bossed around by sad guys with small cocks aka bouncers (they are particularly oppressive and unpleasant at Th O2 Dome - please be warned)
And TOFU to accept from mrs househusbandnot that telling these bouncers that they were being deeply unpleasant was a bad idea.

And (I wish I was making this up people) I was with my brother in law last night having a cigar (old man's smoke) and a glass of scotch (old man's drink) and I was saying "Well to have been up there in the business for almost two decades, he's got to be pretty talented." I was talking about Snoop Dog...what an old git.

I am going to Portugal for the weekend. Will be back in touch early next week.

Madame B games while she is away please btw.

The Prince Fan Formerly Known As hhn

2007-08-06T16:24:00.000Z

Hello people. It is me again - rather than the missus - back from the brink of not seeing Prince the other night. Much of what mrs househusbandnot reported was true, although she did miss out The Waunch muttering "If I hear another song about cat fish I am going to get on the stage and kill him" during the Dr John set at the Prince gig the other night. (The Waunch will from now on be referred to here on hhn as Brandon because a girl at the gig took a shine to him because she said he looked like Brandon Flowers. [This girl was not necessarily the finest of judges of lookalikeys since she did admit she'd had a couple of Es, but hey you never know, maybe the drugs do work. Although her boyfriend was literally incapable of stringing a sentence together.]) (In related news, mrs hhn has been pestering me ever since she wrote hhn over the weekend for how many comments she had had. I feel the blog bug germinating in mrs hhn.)

So, I am here now, wiser but sadder that the world does not really work as it promises - or I thought it might anyway - and resolved that I was forced to watch Dr John rather than Prince, and fully aware that all the complaining that I have done (and I have reported at least one organisation to the ASA today I promise you) will come to nothing because it is all one big fucking stitch up out there, and all they want is your money rather than for you to enjoy what you wanted to enjoy.

The consolation - and therefore ironic thanks to Prince - is that I was reminded what fine company The Waunch...sorry Brandon is. There was not one cross word at me for the entire seven or eight hours of not seeing Prince that I forced him through. Indeed (but for the complete disappointment of not seeing Prince in a tiny venue) it was a great evening with a good friend. I count our river boat journey down to the O2 Arena on a completely empty boat as one of the more enjoyable of my London experiences. And the brief discussion we had about our lives as the sun came up on the boat back as similarly important and honest.

And thanks too to Mr No Show for reminding me what a perfect wife I have, who nursed me back from my despondency through Saturday with sausage bagels, and hearty laughs at my comments about "fucking Dr boogaloo John". Without her I would still be angry, rather than just this current contemplative.

And final thanks to that purple c*&t for making me realise that I am perhaps a little too old to be racing around in the middle of the night to gigs that don't happen. I feel older but wiser (if still a little sadder at the state of all things). And older's gotta be good on a week before your birthday.

(Having said all this, I am actually going to the main Prince gig tomorrow night. If you hear he's been Jarvis Cockered on stage, you will know who to blame.)

We live and learn. P.E.A.C.E. hhn

mrs hhn posts at last

2007-08-04T14:23:00.000Z

In sad news, mrs hhn (me) has been forced to post in place of hhn. hhn is in shock and mourning as his late-night-super-exclusive-Prince-after-show-jam-gig at the O2 last night did not happen. hhn spent most of yesterday in excited mood - he and the waunch braved the boat to east london arriving promptly for the midnight gig. hhn and the waunch waited and waited (hhn was kind enough to text me every hour or so just in case I was trying to sleep) and eventually at 4.30am they took the decision that his purpleness was unlikely to show. (This was after 2 hours of Dr John - personally, I like to think I'd have caved earlier).

They returned on said boat and sat on the embankment 'chatting' until eventually the music obsessed pair went their separate ways. hhn returned to our home at 7am, clumped up the stairs, flung open the bedroom door, and, black as thunder, declared 'He didn't blo*dy play...can you believe it mrs hhn...he was a no-show'. I could believe it, of course, so after patting him sympathetically on his slightly chilled and early-morning damp shoulder I left my beloved hhn to sleep off his distress whilst making him sausage sandwiches and a banana smoothie.

So...hhn recovers slowly, hopefully in time for a blog on Monday. But, all 6 readers that he tells me he has, things are bad. At times like this hhn needs your support. He is so upset that he cannot decide whether it was worse that he-who-shall-not-be-named did not play, that Dr John did play, that the waunch had predicted this n0-show, or that a woman was man-handled out of the gig because she was having a fag in the loos (hhn's sense of fairness and justice has clearly not been affected).

In the meantime, if anyone has a spare husband who isn't depressed because of a pop star or asleep because an all-nighter is tough when you're over 40 do send him my way...

Blokewhosquestions

2007-08-01T18:36:00.000Z

Responding - as I occasionally do to a challenge as long as it does not involve snakes or fancy dress or my mother in law - thanks to blokewhosubmittedthoughtsonwhatishouldtalkabouttoday, and:

Prince vs. Michael Jackson
I love the story about Quincy Jones getting really frustrated with Jackson's lack of output a decade ago, and organising a meeting between Jackson and Prince, and they all got to the restaurant and Prince and Jackson stared at each other for an hour without saying anything and then Prince stood up and said "I'm done here". One of them went on to be the greatest live entertainer of all time. One of them wrote Waterfalls and Sometimes It Snows In April and I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man and Strange Relationship. The other one didn't. Who's bad?

Bowie vs Reed
Despite recent ventures back into trying to 'get' Velvet Underground, I've never gotten Lou Reed. (And I've always been a bit confused about the whole Lou/David/Iggy/Eno/Berlin thing. Who was high, and who saved who, and who was sufficiently un-horsed out to turn on the reel to reel?) I'd go Bowie because I have a full dance routine to Ashes To Ashes, although mrs househusbandnot met him once and apparently he really smells - something to do with refusing to wear animal-based clothes and his rubber shoes or something. [I saw Eno give a very funny talk about Bowie's wedding in Venice a while back. I know. I know...but in the end of the day Eno seems to have much more of a sense of humour than the rest of them. And Here Come The Warm Jets is my favourite album of all time remember.] I don't ever want to hear Perfect Day ever again btw, and I don't like New York.) And I don't really get Iggy Pop. The Idiot is crap, and the guy from Red Hot Chilli Peppers is better looking. And Lou Reed has annoying curly hair. Although blokewho could play him in a movie.

London Pride vs Adnams Broadside
London Pride (I know approx fuck all about bitter).

Updike vs Irving
I am embarrassed to say I have only ever read Irving, and that was approx 20 years ago. The Waunch collects Updike first editions, putting pillows by the letter box on the day they are due to arrive. I guess I should give him a try, but I have a bit of a block about series of novels, and..well isn't it all a bit American? I've read Capote and The Warhol Diaries. (Enter stage right The Waunch with long tirade re Updike as God...)

Kidman vs Bacall
I used to quite fancy Kidman in that movie when she is a weather girl. (Oi Oi Styx and fancying weather girls reminder.) Bacall I read an interview with last week saying she was bored of men because none of them were Bogey. I'd like to get high with Kidman so she could tell us the real deal about Hollywood and her ex husband(s) and being tall and stuff. Bacall I imagine would be a bit dull and want to eat too late or too early, and probably has a lap dog. I imagine Kidman would give better )(*& and conversation, and would be less high maintenance. Although I have never heard of her current husband.

BDSM vs Watersports
It would be BDSM. Watersports always implies that later one of the rowdier in the group will want to shit on you, or get you to shit on them. And I don't do that s**t.

Sauvignon Blanc vs Chenin Blanc
I'm not a monster white wine drinker, although have - arm twisted - over the years managed to pack a few thousand cases under my belt. I'm also on a weird German grape thing at the moment with white wine. It fits in with my Alpine holidays and learning to play the tuba.

'70's Leeds Utd vs 00's Leeds Utd
Pass. (Assume all 22 of them were/are hairy and common.)

Sculling vs Punting
Having been out rowing with Bad last week and in the process discovering that I am the worst rower in the world, I am tempted by punting. But punting is just for OxBridge poofs, no?

Smoked Salmon vs Smoked Trout
Great question blokewho. Smoked Trout every time. Smoked salmon - like champagne - is invariably warm, over-priced, under-tasty, and under prepared. Smoked trout with some dry toast and horseradish and a pint of London Pride? Heaven.

Black Tea vs Green Tea
Is Black Tea just normal tea? I like Green Tea. we have a tin of it sitting next to the container that contains our black tea which is a cookie jar in the shape of a wolf, and when you lift the lid it/he/she howls at you. You did ask.

Acupuncture vs Massage
Acupuncture rocks. Massage sucks. At a different time in my life, when I was stuck on the floor with a slipped disk and basically alternating between pain killers and scotch and then back to thinking I was going to die, someone suggested acupuncture, and that - along with going to see a faith healer in Streatham - made me realise I had the capacity to actually move back off the floor and up back into the real world. I think everyone should have acupuncture just to be amazed at how it works. Massage is just a bit too Oi Oi and personal and quasi-sexual/non-sexual. I hate it. I have had approx three massages in my life. None of them made me the man I am today.

Palm-reading vs Tarot
Gypssssy....

Silver vs Gold
Silver. No, gold. No, silver. No, gold. No fuckin' idea, although I have a gold and white gold wedding ring, and Prince wrote an album called Gold one time (in band camp). I'm now distracted by those losers who spray paint themselves gold or sliver and go and stand on the South Bank and want us to give them money for standing still. And there is that whole Goldfinger thang with that bird being sprayed with gold and dying on the hotel bed. Gold. No, silver. No, Gold...

Mondrian vs Miro
I think they are both pretty crap - too much yellow, and hanging out with potters, and wishing they could grow a decent beard. Pushed, I'd go with Mondrian.

Rhododendron vs Camellia
Camellia (I think).

Norfolk vs Suffolk
Difficult. I love both. Norfolk has that great coast, whereas the Suffolk coast is a bit muddy and wet and undecided. But Suffolk is a little less gentile and rough around the edges. But Suffolk is a bit too far away from anywhere, with related crap train services. And/but Norfolk reminds me of university days, which is sometimes nice and sometimes not so nice. Suffolk.

Lobster vs Crayfish
I think crayfish are a waste of time. Too little meat for all the hassle of getting it onto your fork. But I prefer crab to lobster.

Floorboard vs Carpet
Floorboards every time. Carpets are too encompassing and neat and expectant.

Muslin vs Shutters
Shutters. (Does muslin still exist anywhere other than in porn movies?)

Built-in vs Stand-free
Built-in. With stand-free you never know if it is going to fall over or scratch the floorboards. And you can never get it exactly central in the alcove or whatever.

Jack vs Meg
Meg. She reminds me of mrs househusbandnot.

Lithium vs Ketamine
I've never had either of them, although not for any particular good reason. At other times in my life I'm sure I would have partaken had the opportunity been there. But I do find all new drugs quite odd. Why would you take something that is designed to tranquilise a horse?

Roll-ups vs Ready-mades
Neither any more (sadly). In related news, the smoking ban has created a weird vibe (in London anyway). I have visions of all smokers getting together and arming themselves and killing the non smokers.

Persil vs Ariel
Apparently Persil is very difficult to pronounce in Hindi.

Soap-cakes vs Liquid soap
I have a bit of a thing about soap-cakes. I think they are going to crumble in my hands or get into my food or fall apart in the box. So liquid soap, although as I pour it into the little holder in the machine I always worry that it is going to drain away before the wash starts.

Tea towel vs Drying-up cloth
Tea towel, because it sounds so nuts when you think about it for more than a second, which I never have before until just now.

Toilet vs Lavatory
Which is the posh one? I never know. And never know what to ask for in a shop or cafe or wherever. Your bathrooms? Washrooms? The Facilities?

Hooker vs Whore
I think I'd rather be a hooker than a whore. It sounds better, more in control and less manipulative or manipulated. And "I was with a hooker last night" sounds better than "I was with a whore" too. (Although hooking is not such a great word.)

Bookmaker vs Turf Accountant
ubet.com

Length vs Girth
Not going to get involved in this one. I will leave it to Madame B and blokewhoishunglikeahorse to fight it out.

Cut vs Uncut
Uncut I think. Although I have a scar the length of my torso that I got from cycling over a barbed wire fence when I was seven. I was wearing a Speedy Gonzales tshirt at the time that the doctor had to cut away from the wound. Everyone should have a decent scar, not least of all so they can be identified when their body is dragged out of the river after the night with the hooker and the crayfish meal that went so horribly, horribly wrong...

Your Patience...

2007-08-01T11:21:00.001Z

...will one day be rewarded dear readers. Like JK Rowling, I will not let the Hollywood jackals turn hhn The Movie into some American version of the original. I will demand that it be called hhn The Film, and will ensure that each and every one of you is portrayed by a Brit actor. ( Although did Madame B once mention she was French or a New Zealander? Maybe I am making it up in an attempt to make her more exotic.) And Prince will play at the opening night, and you will all get front row seats. And the goodie bag will include play figures of each and every six of you. And you will get stalkers. And be invited onto Celebrity Big Brother and Castaway and that show where you have to learn to dance. And Callum Best will want to &^%$ you. And one of you will do a cook book. And another one could become Patron of The Badger Trust. And another one get God, very publicly. And another go into rehab, equally publicly. And quite a few of you could be the face for those billboard campaigns for anti-balding remedies. And there could be rumours about one of you and Courtenay Love [sp? Can't be arsed to Google her.] And Madame B's gardening partner could sell his story to The News Of The World (for 14 euros). And Styx would finally be able to look Bob Geldof in the eye on equal celeb terms. And The Waunch could finally become the attention of star fuckers rather than the current other way around. And Gervais would regret not having been nicer to Madame B last week. And Bid would pretend that he has been reading hhn all along and try and sue me for not making a play figure of him. And blokewho would become blokewhois. And, and, and...

Back in the real world, pretty excited about going to see Prince this Friday evening. A wing-walker is some bird in a red catsuit that gets strapped to the top of a biplane. Someone - randomly - sent mrs househusbandnot a tiny olive tree in the post yesterday. I saw a fox in the garden below our flat on Monday evening. mrs hhn and I are going to Portugal next weekend. I learned (well the beginning bit anyway) Yellow Leadbetter on the guitar last night. And mrs hhn made a tortilla on Sunday night that made me fall in love with her all over again. (See why I don't write every day at the moment? Any suggestions for hhn content gratefully received.)

Those Summmmer Nyyyyyyties

2007-07-30T18:06:00.000Z

Hmm. blokewhopredictedthatiamgettinglaxatwritinghhnposts' prediction seems to be coming true. One minute I am sitting at the keypad bursting with things to tell you. The next I am preoccupied with a cat saying "hello" on youtube. Where have my priorities got too?

How's everyone's summer?

Styx? Watching the cricket I imagine
Blokewho? Who knows?
Madame B? Hanging out with R Gervais (for which you get no brownie points with this crowd sweetie)
The Waunch? Busy painting his face purple for Friday night when he and I go to a Prince after show show
mrshousehusbandnot? Currently battling with me over her website copy (there is so much, and so little, that needs to be said about this one)
Bid? Oh, sorry dude, you don't read my blog do you
Prince? He's just waiting for me to take him to the bridge...

Yep, that's the six of you, and long may your loyalty be rewarded with...er stuff.

Me? Searching for Mr Right with the YMGs.

In other news, saw someone wing-walking over Herne Bay yesterday. Now that must be a trip. I actually met someone once who was introduced to me as Julie The Wing-Walker. I asked her what she did. "Take a wild guess," she said.

Badger Effect II

2007-07-25T15:51:00.000Z

Just to continue on the whole butterfly/badger effect discussion - hey, I know it's not favourite sandwiches, but stay with me for a minute - I think I get it now thanks to Anon's explanation.

However, Anon also mentioned chaos theory, which has never struck me as anything other than bull, not least of all thanks to a friend who was working for an achingly trendy advertising agency in the USA a while back, and he called me one afternoon and was going on about how he and his colleagues were "really into chaos theory". I asked him how this manifested itself in and around the office, and all he could come up with was that they had scaffolding as banisters in the agency reception and he was allowed to date his researcher (who - unchaotically - eventually became his wife). Anyway, isn't there enough chaos around without having to theorise about it?

Some other proven theories:

The Badger Effect: If I write something about a badger on househusbandnot, mrs househusbandnot will probably be nice to me.
The Bad Effect: If I disappear mid-week to see Bad, I will be punished in some way or other by mrs hhn on my return.
The iPod Axis: Somehow, somewhere Apple have convinced us that fundamental design flaws in ipods should be acceptable, and that having to go to Ipod Lounge or some other site to find out what has gone wrong with my ipod is a cool thing to do. I don't have to do this with anything else I buy. If my new TV flunks out, I don't merrily head for my PC to look up The TV Surgery. If our new telephone isn't working, I don't think it is okay to go to The Phone Phactory to see how to fire it up again. If our fridge breaks down, I don't think Oh I must have a look on The Fridge Farm to see what I have to do to get it going again. I....could go on.
The Taxi At The End Of Our Street Theory: The first free taxi I see when I am waiting for one at the end of out street will always be taken by someone else further up the street. This relates to the Late Gets Later Effect whereby the later I am running the less likely I am to find a taxi or a bus or a horse that will take me to where I need(ed) to be 15 minutes ago. Both also vaguely relate to The Time Thang Theory which is the more time you have to prepare for something, the more likely you are to balls it up. My wedding speech is a good example of this.
The B Plan: However much I ever get to trying to anticipate Madame B's comments on hhn, I never get there. Not even close. (This makes either me or her a genius.)
The Oops: The more often I ask mrs hhn to record something on TV, the less likely she is to remember to do it. Once is best.
The DeDenny Dilemma: A dog or cat (I actually saw this happen to a bloke called DeDenny with a pig) will always head straight for the person least able to deal with its attentions.

There are many more. If mrs hhn says she is going to call me back in "one minute", she will call in an hour. If she says "five minutes" it will be five. If she says "later", she doesn't call at all. No big deal. Just mildly interesting in its inevitability. If I have lunch with Styx, I get wasted. Ditto Bad and The Waunch. If I share a taxi with my boss, I never have any cash, which makes me look like a ligger. The more important the reader, the more glaringly obvious the typos will be in what you are askign them to read. The pool at the hotel will probably be closed when you get there. If a bear attacks you, you're screwed.* Toasters don't work. Because I am scared of snakes, I see them regularly. (This includes an encounter with a python on a street in Moscow, and cycling straight into a man with a snake around his shoulders in Balham.) If you are in a real hurry, the printer will jam or stop working. The woman in the queue for the loo at the wedding that you try to have a joke with about the bride's previous choice in men will be her mother. And the smaller the lie, the more likely you are to be found out.

In entirely unrelated news, I read this morning that in a survey of skills they wanted to learn, 55% of Girl Guides said they needed to learn more about flat-pack furniture. How depressing.

* Or not http://www.kaniut.com/abtsam.htm (Thanks to The Waunch for this research. Must be busy at his office again today.)

The Badger Effect

2007-07-24T10:49:00.000Z

In one of the other things I do of a day, I have just been editing someone who was writing about the butterfly effect and how a flap of a butterfly's wings in Uruguay can cause a tornado in Utah?

I don't get this. I get responsibility (although mrs househusbandnot may disagree). I get cause and effect. I get how having a maniac in The White House* and a troubled preacher's son in Whitehall can affect many millions of peoples' lives. I get that me not recycling will affect other people before it affects me. I get that Steve Earle can move me with his music without even knowing who I am. But I don't get the butterfly thing.

How does it really work? A badger farts in Buckinghamshire, and a Mexican decides not to raid the local petrol station? A wolf howls in Italy, and somehow that affects Tiger Wood's stroke at the golf in Scotland? Can someone explain this butterfly thing to me? Hey, I'm down with my yang, but it just doesn't make any sense to me. A bit like that arrow being shot into Berkeley Square.

In not unrelated news, ended up really depressed last night, because I felt I had failed mrs hhn on some writing I was doing for her. Being me, this sense of failure looked around for someone to blame other than me, and lighted on mrs hhn, who is quite stressed enough at work at the moment without the added bonus of me being on her case at the end of the evening. Result was I sulked off to the sofa and watched crap tv all night, resulting in me with stiff neck and feeling tired this morning, just when I need to be sparky on a few work projects today. An hhn didn't deliver on some work for his wife, and he ended up sleeping on the sofa. See. I do get responsibility, if sometimes a little too late for any remedial action.

*Really interesting interview with Steve Earle in one of the Sunday papers btw, and how Earle says we must always treat and watch Bush as the addict that he is. (I read this article on Sunday and said to mrs hhn "Did you read this article?" and she said "Yes" and I said "It was really interesting about addiction didn't you think?" and mrs hhn said "I didn't read it. I was lying". I will never understand women, least of all the one I understand most.)

Piracy And Pig Eyes

2007-07-23T12:01:00.000Z

Apologies for the delay in reporting back from the lobster potting last week…which rocked.

Much fun was had with Bad, stealing other people’s boats, puttering around the river, hauling heavy pots from the water, being bitten by crabs, and eventually finding two fine lobsters in the second last pot we checked. (I’m still not clear on whether or not the pots we checked actually belonged to Bad, but hey we’d already stolen a boat so why curb the piracy.) The only down-side to this adventure was the baiting of the pots, which Bad had not told me involved stuffing half pig heads into the pots. I spent a good quarter of an hour on the boat with a half pig head staring at me with its piggy eye.

Anyway, after further bolloxing around, we eventually made it back to shore with our catch, and we headed back to Bad’s via the oyster shop – a quite normal day in the life of Bad – a lovely watery evening in Suffolk for me – and lobsters and oysters for tea. All very mellow, and a far cry from all things Londony and the usual urban routine. And Suffolk is so nuts too. No-one seems to actually do any work there. No-one ever knows when trains come and go. Everything smells vaguely of oil and water and fish and herbs. Everyone is related to the Bads. And everyone – well the men anyway - just arses around with lobsters and oysters and bread and cider.

On return to London, I was informed by mrs househusbandnot that I was in the doghouse for not bringing a lobster back for her, an idea helpfully lodged in her mind by the girls she works with (thanks, ladies). My ‘punishment’ (and please don’t try and deny this mrs hhn because you used that very word) was salmon in filo pastry for supper on Friday night.

In badger-related news, was rather pleased with myself that I got the badgers in Iraq story to you before Pop Bitch. In this lonely blogging world, there are small victories.

In boat-related news, have just been discussing the lack of information about how to get a boat in London with *&^. He and I are looking into getting a boat up to the O2 Arena for our Prince gigs in the coming weeks. But where do you get information on boats in London? Where do they go from? Where do they go? What does it all mean?

In hhn news, just noticed I have written 223 hhn posts since last year. What does it all mean?

It's In A

2007-07-19T07:56:00.000Z

blokewho is right you know. All the feedback I got from anyone about yesterday's blog- and it was mrs househusbandnot - was a "Well you had time to write your blog" when I was complaining that I had had a busy day.

blokwho is wrong though about hhn falling into disarray with tumble weed drifting across the space bar because I am going to Suffolk for 24 hours. I only ever stop writing hhn when I have nothing to say, and I will be very surprised if there are no stories from four or five hours on a boat with Bad this evening.

In other news, had great BBQ with mrs hhn on the roof last night. We talked about everything and nothing, and I had a dream about Mick Jagger coming to me and saying that Keef just couldn't nail down the solo at the end of Sympathy For The Devil and would I like to have a go. This was after I had sat down to a banquet, and a half French half Indian woman had complained about how I had served myself the crab salad. It was at Richard Branson's house. Somewhere along the way, I had played a game of rugby, and a computer game on a screen the size of a wall.

On the lobster killing btw, I leave that to Bad who is versed in these things. Last time we had one, I think he went for the nail in the head option though.

Check List

2007-07-18T13:42:00.000Z

Secure a day pass from mrs househusbandnot to go lobster potting with Bad in Suffolk tomorrow - check
Find someone to come with me to the Prince after show party the week after next - check
Don't fall asleep during Nancy Griffith gig last night - check (kinda)
Buy Young Marble Giants album - check
Eat healthy lunch after egg and chips last night as reward for going to Nancy Griffith's gig - check
Download further billion tracks onto ipod for journey down to Suffolk - check
Fire fight rebellion in office about my edits to the company website - check (kinda)
Shave off beard for summer bald look - check
Write website for mrs hhn for mates' rate fee aka four pence - check (half done anyway)
Swim a mile - check (well shortly, or longly actually because I have not been swimming much lately, and it will take a while to crawl up and down the pool this afternoon)
Fend off middle aged crisis-related desire to buy lots of band t-shirts - check
Enjoy sister's gift of rainbow maker mobile making rainbows on sitting room wall - check
Be rude to a chugger - check ("It is for charity you know." Bollox.)
Curb desire to write jokes in mrs hhn's website copy - check
Do anything vaguely useful to man or beast or the common good- er...
Wonder what has happened to Madame B for three seconds - check
Decide I am too old - or odd - for Facebook - check
Entirely unprompted, be asked my opinion about badgers in office - check
Look at feet - check
Fail to buy any artwork from new Unkle album - check
Think I saw blokewhowasn'tatnancygriffithgiglastnight at Nancy Griffith's gig last night for a second - check
Decide it is the neighbours rather than me that are odd - check
Hate the summer - check
Inspect my mint plant - check

What a dum-ass day today.

Dizzy London

2007-07-16T15:06:00.000Z

For reasons I will not go into, I found myself wandering around The Cabinet War Rooms Museum in Whitehall on Sunday morning. (Well, I will go into it. My in laws were coming to London, and they'd said that they had wanted to visit this museum. When this plan was proposed last week, I saw it as an opportunity for me to slope off to the gym while mrs househusbandnot and her folks went to the museum. After a long talking to from mrs hhn re me never doing anything that I don't want to do, me not being prepared to go to places that I don't want to go to, my in laws wanting to see me, me being general scum-bag of the earth etc etc etc, I...er...went to the Cabinet War Rooms Museum with my in laws and my wife on Sunday. Not the sort of thing I would normally elect to do of a Sunday, but there was not much of an election process about it. More of a three line whip.)

Actually, the museum was pretty interesting in a WW II, bunkery way. There was quite a good Winston Churchill Museum within the War Rooms Museum, which had a load of stuff about the houses Churchill lived in during his life, stuff on his poodle Rufus, a movie of his state funeral etc., which kept us entertained, before coming back home and having a BBQ in the threatening rain on our roof terrace. As is always the case, the more time I spend with my in laws the less I understand them. But I take solace in the fact that I know the feeling is entirely the same for them. We are getting by, although my suggestion that mrs hhn and I go and live by a loch in Scotland didn't go down to well. My father in law said he had only just worked out where South London was, and had no intention of letting his daughter further off his radar.

Not a lot else to report today. It was really hot and close in London today. Everyone in my office went uncharacteristically quiet around 11 am, and didn't come out of their/our respective fugs until about 4 pm - which meant we got a lot of work done, rather than the usual nattering and bolloxing around with which we are quite capable of wasting a whole day's 'work'.

Happy to report that - thanks to *&^ again - I have secured two more tickets to see Prince while he is over, this time for one of his after show gigs the week before we actually go and see him do a normal pre-after show gig. So I get to see him twice while he is over here, which is fitting because I am possibly the biggest Prince fan of all time, except for maybe Prince himself.

In unrelated news, bought a new dvd player last week, got bored on the bus on the way home, and left remote for same dvd player on same bus having opened up the box to take a look at my new purchase. mrs hhn has awarded me the Honourable Order Of Biggest Tit On Planet Class III for this behaviour. (If only she knew about the fuck ups I don't tell her about. I'd be a Field Marshall by now.)

That's it I think, on this sticky London evening. mrs hhn has gone to a networking event - whatever that may be. Me? I'm going for the cold bath, cold drink option, and an idle hour or so listening to The Young Marble Giants. (blokewhowasrightaboutbuyingoldmusic, they sound as sweet and dumb and great as they did when I listened to them a couple of decades ago. Good tip. Thanks.)

On Bass...

2007-07-13T08:25:00.000Z

Visits to hhn have monstered quite a bit since I admitted defeat and went back to talking about animals and sandwiches and my favourite guitar solos.

Somewhere, there is a bit of scientific research to be done on what people really want to read about in blogs and on the rest of the net. The theory is that it is about finding a cure for cancer or finding long lost friends or something else nice and useful. In reality, it is just a bunch of goons surfing around for discussions on Jerry Garcia's favourite ice cream flavour, why the moon is really made of cheese, and comedy animals. God, you must be very proud. Satan, you appear to be winning. (Not that anything I write about here on hhn is particularly Satanic, other than my hatred of Jimmy Carr.)

I guess - indeed have been told - that there are people out there who set up sites and write articles based only on the most searched words and terms on the web in order to attract traffic and advertising revenue. This is - I have also been told - all part of the on-going Google versus The Rest Of The World battle whereby Google create search rules and people try and figure them out. It is a bit like tennis, with Google usually played by Roger Federer and The Rest Of The World played by a nippy, naughty Mexican who came into the game on a wild card, and is happy to slap away at Federer's rockets in the hopes that it might generate a bit of sponsorship from Sprite Lite or Toys R Us or Ask Jeeves or some other quirky untapped source of revenue. (Fundamentally, the giants will win, but maybe our beaner pal will make a few dollars. Chance still exists - a fact my next door neighbour would agree with having glanced across into our kitchen on Wednesday evening to see me naked except for a mud face pack.)

Re weekend: am off to buy a DVD player that will do our new TV justice, and a new telephone, and maybe The Young Marble Giants album, and a book about writing well ("At last" they all sigh in relief.) The first two will involve me being condescended to by children aka the staff in Currys. (mrs househusbandnot was funny about this last night. She suggested that I buy more stuff on line so that I could avoid the hhn in shop freak outs. I feel this part of the trial which is my life.) The third will involve a pretty heavy dose of angst about why I am dwelling on the past rather than trying to learn about and listen to new music. And the the fourth will involve me staggering around the self-help section (which is always placed next to the gay section for some reason [are they trying to tell us something we need to know about?] of Waterstone's being distracted by the nutter woman in dark glasses buying The Bluffers Guide To Alimony and the guy I noticed at the entrance who looked like a real loser and who ends up in the same aisle as me looking at the same books as me. Maybe I should be doing all this on line. It might be safer, or at least less revelatory.

And mrs hhn and I are going to take a look at buying some bikes so that we can couple around on them this summer. (mrs hhn's BIG joke about me is that I have very short arms and legs, so expect much hilarity when I end up buying a child's bike despite being over six foot tall.)

Have a good weekend people, and keep it coming. We are getting there.
Regards The Bass Player.

Styx-Censorship Overruled Shocker

2007-07-12T10:20:00.000Z

Having mentioned earlier this week that I had been Styx-censored (Pistol-whipped. Bitch-slapped. Styx-censored. I like it.) about discussing music on hhn, I will mention that mrs househusbandnot and I went to see a band called Buffalo Tom last night. They are a sort of sub J Mascis (he plays guitar for them sometimes), sub Pavement, grown up Green Day. It was fun in a not been to a gig for a while way. The band were exactly what they are. They've been around for a couple of decades, pumping out workable, pretty derivative, not particularly thought through, tuneful grunge trio rock. Watching them at The Scala last night, I got the impression that they were exactly where they should be: in a smallish venue, thrashing away to maybe three or four hundred white middle aged former stoners. And I got to wondering if they were happy with their place in the world, partly within the context of mrs hhn's query the night before of what I would like to be if there were no limits to what I could be...

...this is the sort of deeply innocent/deeply loaded question that mrs hhn lobs out there pretty often, usually just as I have plonked my weary ass on the sofa with a drink and a packet of onion rings and a complaint that there is no cricket to watch on TV. After my initial bristling, defensive responses to these mrs hhn queries, I have come to learn that she is not actually judging me, but does genuinely want to know the answer to the question. Which is part of the rest of the game I guess. To be Buffalo Tom, or reach a little higher and practise a little more, and let the bass player do more of the singing. (Having neatly boxed myself into pseuds corner with my Buffalo Tom versus reaching for the stars discussion, I am seeing why music should be a no no on hhn.)

Anyway, I've mentioned animal ambitions. Other more general ones include:

never wearing socks again (and if I have to, only ever wearing a brand new pair)
never flying coach again
always being within easy access of an uncrowded swimming pool
having a house by a loch in Scotland
being able to tell mrs hhn to stuff the job and come and hang out by the loch and watch otters (oops, animals again)
never having to go to another meeting, unless it is with my architect to discuss the installation of a water slide from our bedroom to our pool, or with those guys who come and wire up a massive sound system in all the rooms in your house
being Prince's bezzy mate when he is in London
and being able to anticipate what mrs hhn wants as she wants it, not later

All a little serious today. I blame Buffalo Tom. Maybe they are better than I thought they were.

Finally, in news in from Waunch News Feed (WNF): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2059824.ece I always think that when they start to blame the animals, it is the beginning of the end.

Me? Still An Unreliable Animal Witness?

2007-07-10T16:51:00.000Z

Following on (or up) from today's comments about my lack of accurate knowledge about hedgehogs, I can assure that if I knew what I was talking about I would not be blogging. If I had specialist - or indeed any in depth - knowledge about anything, I would be using it to write for specialist publications. So you may not get depth here at hhn, but you do get breadth - although a quick review of recent in-depth hhn topics does reveal that the My Favourite Sandwich Debate was a winner with everyone. (At the cricket the other day, Styx languidly informed me that he would have quite happily continued this particular debate for many many more days.)

(Incidentally, Eel Man's recent* observation that I was "an unreliable animal witness" still hurts - like hell.)

Which - as always - does beg the question about what we should really be discussing here at hhn? Politics? Nah. Tried that last summer. Music? Styx-vetoed. Women? hhn has a strict gender sensitive editorial line. Drugs? No. My mother in law reads this site (when she is not admiring her new facebook account). mrs househusbandnot? Absolutely off limits, since - as I have mentioned before - the fact that I am happy to bollox on about myself does not make it open season on mrs hhn who is fundamentally a more considering and considerate and polite and private person than I am. My work? Too worried about getting fired just as my portfolio of work is getting back into a decent stride. Madame B? She just won't tell us the details we really want, or send us a photo. My mother in law? See above. The excellent rumour I heard at the weekend about two very, very famous black sportsmen having an affair? Too worried about getting sued. Which kinda leaves me and the wormery.

So quite a lot is off limits, especially for a blog which is supposed to be the super levelling unedited honest medium du jour. You can see why I go for the cheap laughs with the hedgehog stuff, no?

In other news, a stuffy little blond volunteer at the office today was talking about my (male) colleague and saying he was no oil painting. And then she turned to me and said "And neither are you". Am considering how to get her fired, which may prove tricky since she is closely related to my boss. Offices. Dontchaluvthemsomuchitmakesyouwanttoweeyourself.

*Well, last year, almost to the day.

Hedgehogs And Tshirts

2007-07-09T16:38:00.000Z

Thanks for your various comments re hedgehogs and hhn tshirts. Who's the prick in the tshirt? Boom boom. (Madame B, who is the person who could do these tshirts for me/us? Pray tell. I'm thinking manga with hhn in Japanese. [Am quite into Madame B at the moment btw because her prediction about my mint being stringy was 100% accurate, as I just discovered urban warrior-like standing on my balcony munching my mint straight from the pot.])

Elsewhere in England, managed to avoid the Tour De France in Kent yesterday despite being v close - approx 1,000 metres - to it. Instead, slumped on a sofa at my sister's farm and read The Sunday Telegraph and HedgeGrowers Weekly and watched Wimbledon while others were trudging across fields for four seconds of bike-related spectatoring. (Actually, I was stuck trying to sort out my sister's and her daughter's itunes for most of the morning, requiring some serious rnr post lunch.)

What else? Had long - well quite brief as far as I am concerned because she was wrong - debate with mrs househusbandnot the other night about whether or not Al Green was just a one song pony. Have been considering buying bikes so that mrs hhn and I can do a bike thang at weekends. (Health And Safety Executive that she is, mrs hhn is demanding that we wear helmets if we get bikes, which to me rather defeats the whole point of wind in hair freedom jag that cycling can provide in this stuffy windless city. If you see large potato with helmet crammed on equally potato-like head sweating his way across London on bike, you will have successfully done an hhn spot. Prize is hhn tshirt - subject to availability and usual rules and regulations requiring you to promise to read hhn for rest of your life.)

Speaking of Sunday newspapers, is it just me*or have they all become uniformly crap? I read four, no five, Sunday newspapers cover to cover and supplement through supplement yesterday, and I feel actually less informed than I did before I read them. I now know the name of the next best British hope in Formula One, and that's it. Oh, and where to buy wellington boots and what Bob Geldof's kid made of Glastonbury, and the fact that the new Smashing Pumpkins album is not as good as Siamese Dreams, and how much The Spice Girls are getting paid and hate each other, and how much a sea kayak costs, and the fact that Tony Blair got stressed out when he was Prime Minister, and that if I burn tyres in my sitting room I am probably not going to get an invite round to Al Gore's ranch, and the fact that governments remain corrupt and dull and dirty and in power, and that I should be wearing yellow this season...I knew all this already...

...one thing I didn't know until last week was that hedgehogs can climb trees. I can feel a tshirt coming on.

*Copyright The Daily Mail

Pincefiends 2

2007-07-04T17:03:00.000Z

I agree with Anonymous's incredulity about me having never seen a hedgehog. Badgers, stoats, foxes, voles, ferrets a plenty. But not even a glimpse of hedgehogs, which incidentally are called pincefiends in Denmark. There are many other animal-related things I have never done, and want to do, although am glad to report that the list is getting shorter rather than longer.

I haven't:

Been on a safari (amazing I know, but looking to redress it at Xmas)
Seen a wild African elephant (well I have, but it was out of the back of a car window and we were late for a meeting so we didn't have time to stop)
Heard wolves howling in the wild, or seen then dancing (which they do, according to David Bellamy with whom had to spend a - very long - day with once [ he is really dull and really really right wing])
Hung out with cheetahs
Seen mountain gorillas in the wild (which apparently is a complete head-fuck, because the male silverbacks weigh in at about 63 tons and can blow your arm off by just glancing at you)
Bred ducks or geese or pigs or goats...or anything
Stared down a bear
Been on a huskie-powered sledge
Or made sausages

I have however:

Stroked a rhino
Touched a dolphin (physically rather than emotionally)
Eaten fish that I have caught (a truly important primeval experience)
Scratched a pig
Been offered horse tartare
Been bitten on the back by a horse (not on the same night as the tartare offer btw)
And snorted vodka with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Horses for courses I guess (baroomba).

Re Booooo

2007-07-03T15:31:00.000Z

In response to Madame B's comment - well jibe - yesterday, I know. I couldn't agree more. I just have so little of any interest to say about anything at the moment. The details of my life (and my thoughts about life) are deeply dull at the moment:

1) Wow, is that all a cat costs to buy for medical research? (approx two squid btw)
2) Betcha By Golly Wow, I still have Prince tickets.
3) I wonder why I've never had hay fever.
4) Nut allergies - true or lie.
5) Why do the first two people you talk to in John Lewis have no idea about anything on sale in the store?
6) When will my mint grow? (this is sadly not a euphemism)
70 Where's blokewhoseemstohavedisappeared?
8) Ah, so that's what razor clams taste like.
9) Internet dating by my brother in law - a practical instruction (since he is staying with us at the moment).
10) What's the real deal with 'remastered' cds?
11) How come mrs househusbandnot has lost more weight than I have? (Exhibit A: large number of empty crisp packets on my end of the sofa)
12) Website architecture
13) How come I've never seen a hedgehog?
14) North to South development funding.
15) And about to being 42.

See what I mean? And I have always tried to maintain some sort of standards here at hhn, although others may disagree.

Actually we are taking delivery of a new TV this Thursday, which is pretty exciting (although it did involve me thinking about 5 having been deeply ruded to by John Lewis staff. We [mrs hhn and I] voted with our feet and bought our new TV from Currys.) And...no, I've died of boredom.

Henmaniaphobia

2007-06-26T18:31:00.000Z

The rain coming at your from three directions. Andrew Castle - aka the most pointless of pointless people - on the television. Strawberries up a pound a punit in Tescos. Lots of photos of young Eastern European girls in short white dresses. Union Jacks fluttering from newspaper stalls. Lots of photos of Boris Becker coming out of cupboards in restaurants..sorry restaurants....oh bollocks. It's Wimbledon again.

And, as predictable and inevitable as the annual return of the tournament, Tim Henwoman dragged out his first match with the tenacity and determination and vile wig hairdo that we have come to expect of this particular national treasure. The four times Wimbledon semi-finalist - do I really need to go on? - has been all over the media talking about his 'epic' first round match against some beaner. And he (Henwoman) will go on to beat some French bloke in on a wild card, struggle to win another five set 'epic' against a butch Spanish woman who accidentally got put in the men's tournament, keep us all baying for Britain like Billy Bragg as he flounders and flukes his way past some Dutch dude who is better known for his doubles, and then finally get drummed by a real tennis player despite the protesting whistles and screams from Henman Hill. (I can think of nothing worse than being on Henman Hill when Henwoman is playing, apart from maybe having to listen to Cliff Richard sing the crowd through the rain with a few of his 60s hits - or both together...I'm moving to Poland.)

It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't quite so achingly inevitable. Tim Henman is never ever ever going to win Wimbledon. He was never going to either. Am I making it up, or did Boris Becker say this last year? Maybe it was a dream? You know, the one where me and mrs househusbandnot win the lottery and Neil Young asks me to play lead guitar live with him and then Beatrice Dalle whispers to me that she really fancies mrs househusbandnot and I can talk to animals and Daniel Craig gets turned down for the lead role in hhn The Movie because he is not buff enough in his swimming cossie and I feel in my jacket pocket and it is full of magic beans and Andy Warhol turns to me and says "I just have so many of these Mao portraits. Why don't you take a few of them hhn?"

Thankfully - or interestingly - our TV stopped working last night, so we can't actually watch any Wimbledon until we get a new one. (mrs hhn thinks that either she or I have some sort of weird electrical energy that fuses electrical appliances. Few too many gins there me thinks.) So hopefully by the time we do get a new TV little Timmy's valiant struggle will be over, and we can watch some real men (and women) play some decent tennis rather than the rather half-arsed effort that Henperson makes of every point and game and set and match. Talk about laboured.

Anyway, in other sporting news off to the 20 20 cricket at The Oval with Styx this afternoon. Will report back.

Slap That Bass Whitey

2007-06-25T16:33:00.000Z

Returned home last night after a long day of househusbandnotnoting aka being at work to a seemingly innocent pencil written note on a pad on the kitchen table from mrs househusbandnot asking me to 'feed the wormies if you have time darling'.

Now, to you (and the other five of you who read this blog), this note may have seemed innocent, polite, sweet even. But I knew, and mrs hhn knew, that I have been ignoring the wormery for a week or so because last time I looked in there I was attacked by a swarm of insects straight out of the early parts of The Old Testament, an assault I responded to by throwing half a loaf of bread and a bowl of rice into the cavernous hell that is the worm-inhabited bit of the wormery, and running for cover into the sitting room hoping that the whole wormery/Hades thing would just disappear. (And here mrs hhn's colleague who I have often judged for leaving a live wormery when you left your last house, I applaud you for your sense and courage.)

But, being the trooper/sucker that I am, I responded to mrs hhn's leadened note, and ventured out onto the balcony clutching my worm stick (don't ask) in one hand and a large glass of scotch in the other. I took off one layer (imagine three or four large perforated hat boxes each stacked on top of each other, the idea being that as the worms breed you encourage them to move further up the boxes until you start over by putting the top layer back into the bottom [the sort of thing people used to get burned at the stake for in the middle ages]) to reveal not only an appalling Parfume Du Somme but also a whole layer of rotting food that the worms had not ventured up into. So I had to empty that layer of food out into a bin liner, drain three full buckets of worm juice aka Satan's Death Oil into buckets, and then rake out the layer that the worms were still in and then feed the fuckers. hhn + wormery - attention to wormery + this experience = a need to die. I spent most of the rest of the evening lying in the bath trying to rid myself of the Parfume Du Somme and the thought of those worms just a few feet away on the balcony, and that oh so innocent note from mrs hhn.

I know in the end of the day the chores do get divied up within a relationship, but why do my chores always involve dirt and shit and decaying things? And I should have known something was up when mrs hhn called me during the day, before I'd got home to the note/order, and sweetly told me she had taken a steak out of the freezer for my supper since she was going out for supper. I should have cut my losses and fed the worms the steak, drained the scotch into my mouth via the bucket, written mrs hhn a similarly pencilled note asking her to 're tile the roofey-oofey if you have time when you get back from supper darling', and spent the evening with my new chums on facebook.

In other news, off to a breakfast meeting this morning. Can't fuckin' wait. Like people wearing trainers with their suits to work, I refuse to embrace this American idea. The theory is that we are all so busy and keen that we are happy to get up at a berzillion o'clock and tramp off to some crowded coffee house to juggle our note pads over the milky coffees and stale pastries. The practice is tired people looking tiredly at each other trying to work out why we could not have met later for lunch.

Incidentally, watched The Departed this weekend. Can someone explain to me why Marky Markkk had to shoot the bloke at the end? (Great live version of Comfortably Numb by Van The Man on the soundtrack btw.) And loving Sons And Daughters too, if a little distracted by the memory of that terrible Level 42 song of the same name.

Theme Tunes

2007-06-25T08:18:00.000Z

A predictably entertaining evening with The Waunch and mrs househusbandnot on Friday night, including discussion of what three songs we would have played at our respective funerals. As The Waunch was muttering darkly into his scotch about an Otis Redding song that summed up his life, mrs hhn - who, unknown to me or her, was about to spend a good part of the weekend nursing me with bad man flu - came up with Strange Relationship by Prince. Good choice. Quirky, ironic - what a funeral needs really. All I could think of was Discreet Music because it lasts 30 odd minutes, and I thought that would be long enough for you all to have a big old weep about me.

Mind you, last time mrs hhn and I discussed tunes was the closest we ever got to leaving each other, well her leaving me. We foolishly decided to do our own music at our wedding, and we got all the songs together and mixed them up which took weeks, and then the night before the future mrs hhn went off to prepare becoming the future mrs hhn I pressed the wrong button on itunes and rearranged all our chosen songs by length rather than as the groovy mix that we had put together. (We don't really talk about that evening very often round hhn HQ. It was a dark one, saved - only just - by the love of a good woman.)

Anyway, all sounds a bit serious for a Monday morning. In other news, was sitting having my morning coffee in Russell Square this morning when a really respectable middle aged woman walked past me and went into a trot into a flock of pigeons. She must hate or love those nasty birds. Very entertaining. She looked very happy with the bird chaos she had created.

I notice btw no suggestions for how to do a campaign without a budget. Come on people.

In final snore-worthy news, Wimbledon starts today. As someone was just saying here in the office, this event epitomises the really snobby side of England, and also that vain hope/fantasy that a Brit will ever win this event ever again. Is Andy Murray fit to play? Who cares? He is just the latest in a long long (looooooong) list of fairly pointless British men who feel they have some right to the Wimbledon title despite being about as competitive and aggressive enough to actually win it as a lazy Koi Carp.

Free Launches

2007-06-22T09:30:00.000Z

Topping and tailing the week with posts. Sorry that the daily posts regime has gone quite so far out of the window, but have been rather busy with various attempts at getting work, doing work, working, being at work, going to work, boring mrs househusbandnot about work, dreaming about work, working out (well swimming), working out how to work, and other work-related stuff.

Am launching a web-based campaign (at work) next week, which is proving interesting, not least of all because I have a budget of approx four pence to run the campaign. So am off to take photos of the Anthony Gormley statues wearing a campaign tshirt early Sunday morning. Any other £ lite suggestions for publicity welcome. To date have failed to secure interest of celebrities (A-E list anyway) about the campaign, and have not yet written the campaign site which needs to be launched next week. But will get there, with or without the Cheeky Girls. Who said there was no such thing as a free launch? (To those of you who know about this campaign, please don't share it with other hhn readers. The campaign website has an open discussion area, much to the consternation of my (work) colleagues who were telling me about some woman who has had an injunction taken out on her because she called The Samaritans something like 170,000 times last year - and I don't want Madame B getting any similar stalky ideas.)

Actually, the campaign involves interviewing a bunch of people to include their case studies on the site. I may - or may not - have mentioned in the past an odd reaction that some people have to me which is the need for them to tell me everything about themselves. I sat for an hour yesterday morning listening to the most intimate of details about one interviewee's life. Unusable on the site, but fascinating none the less. I misses a trick somewhere along the line by not becoming an investigative journalist. ( "Well hhn, I've not told anyone else, but I was on the grassy knoll, and I wasn't alone...")

In other news, am on a diet, so have been spending long minutes day dreaming about cheese and onion crisps and chocolate biscuits and mini baby bells and pints of soothing lager. So far have managed to loose approx nil weight, probably because I ate a cheese and coleslaw sandwich yesterday when I thought no-one was looking. (My partner in diet is mrs househusbandnot, and here I confess to her about said sandwich. Sorry babe, but it just looked so good. Just could not face another round of tired sushi.)

Re tumble weeding, thanks for the interest, and am deeply trying to fit in hhn where I can. Will try harder next week.

Anyway, have The Waunch over for supper this evening so must get my ass out to the shops to purchase relevant supplies.

Office Life Not

2007-06-20T12:59:00.000Z

Ahh, the busy office life. Trying to decide what to have for lunch, wearing matching socks, wondering if I can do a quick fart while the office is empty, snooping around the office for a hole punch (why do hole punches still exist in this day and age?), trying to think of something to go and talk to my boss about so she knows I am in, sitting in meetings (wondering when the world will end they are so boring), fart-arsing around with our head of finance about my tax status, trying to avoid going to get any water from the water cooler thing because I know it is empty and can't be arsed to put a new bottle on it, googling stuff, facebooking other stuff, checking my office mobile to see if I have missed any important calls, chewing gum, sending emails to everyone around the office about a meeting I have organised for tomorrow so they know I am in, tidying my desk tidy, trying (and failing) to have knowing IT chats with the head of IT, getting annoyed with my squeaking chair, wondering what time it is, getting a cold call about a lobbying service for the European Parliament, being told off by the girl on reception for using the wrong loo, eating sushi, picking my teeth, emailing mrs househusbandnot, waiting for mrs hhn to respond, taking completely random notes when talking to colleagues to try and freak them into thinking I am thinking in a better/more strategic/cleaner/fitter way than they are about the organisation we work for, listening to my boss talking about the difficulties of buying swimwear, trying to impress the younger members of staff by telling them I have a facebook account, emailing anyone...anything...that emails me (have bought four bottles of viagra this morning already), and wondering WHAT does it all mean.

I went to a meeting at the House Of Commons this morning. In theory - in my what does it all mean state - I should have been impressed with the seat of Government and all those important parliamentarians and policy brokers and lobbyists doing their thang. But they are just the same as us, just trying to get through the day having impressed their bosses and not been caught out picking their noses or searching for the six month birthday photos of that polar bear in the German zoo.

I went out to get my sushi just now, and it is all like a slowed down version of 28 Days/Weeks Later. We are all wandering around like zombies from home to office to water cooler to desk to boss's office to Pret A Manger to office to desk to water cooler to head of IT's desk to desk to stationery cupboard to desk to bus stop to home...

What does it all mean?

Networking (Social Or Otherwise)

2007-06-15T09:12:00.000Z

Off to see some people today about a prospective piece of writing. I sent them all the usual stuff, and then they asked if I had a blog and could I send that to them too. I was not sure about this. Would anyone really want to employ someone called househusbandnot who spends most of his time talking about sandwiches and animals? But I sent hhn anyway. But thinking about it, I am now off to meet three strangers who know more about me than some of my best friends (many of whom don't bother reading hhn). Could be an interesting meeting ("How do you feel your recurring dreams about talking to wolves will help us in our campaign?" "Does Madame B come with the package, or do we have to pay her separately?" "Actually, we don't want you. You can't spell. Do you have a contact for The Waunch?" "You are obviously nuts. We bought you this Easter Egg." etc.)

On other news, mrs househusbandnot set me up a facebook account last night. Seems most of the people in her office are into this new social networking site, and mrs hhn thought I should get in on the act too. I checked it out this morning. What is it actually for? Is this really socialising? Isn't it just about finding pictures of strangers to look at? (Mind you, mrs hhn did admit that it is fun if you are nosey.) Is it just a dating site for nice people? Do people really get work through it? Too many questions, and one too many photos of me on it if you ask me.

Although the people I am seeing today are very much into the whole Web 2.0 thang, and looking to find people who can reflect the whole inclusion/involvement/networking agenda on their various websites. So maybe mrs hhn wsa right to try and drag me someway into this century with a facebook account. (I actually just went into facebook and tried to change my page/space or whatever it is called from my real name to hhhn, but it wouldn't let me do it. And anyway there was all that stuff about Madame B and photos a while back which got a little weird, so maybe it is better to keep the two separate [which kinda defeats - and certainly duplicates - some of the the purpose of networking or socialising or talking or writing on the net, but what the *&^^].)

In other other news, off to the in laws again this weekend. They are having a big party for their 40th anniversary. Being eager planners, my in laws have allocated me tasks, including doing the BBQ - well one of them. They did own a BBQ which was about the size a large sofa, but they decided that this was not enough and have bought a second even bigger one. So if you are driving around the New Forest this weekend, and see flames licking the tops of buildings and trees, it could be me at work with one of these weapons of mass destruction. (I know about as much about cooking on a BBQ as I do braille.)

In other x 3 news, I went to this scruffy off licence last night - the sort of place you go to when you can't be arsed to find an Oddbins because you are late for your friends' supper party and it is just there and you think there is bound to be some someway decent wine in there and you go in and think you are going to be killed by the gang of kids hanging around trying to get the owner to sell them a bottle of Thunderbird and you do find some okay wine and but it costs 14 squid - and I was buying a couple of bottles of wine hoping the manager would not kill me, and he said "You have been blessed" looking at my groin. Very fuckin' weird. (And I now have to work out if those people I am seeing today will have read this in the next hour before our meeting, and consider whether or not to stuff a pair of socks down my pants for the interview. Sometimes there is just too much information out there.)

Incidentally, apologies to The Waunch for calling him a star fucker. If in any way I was implying that he is prepared to drop anything in order to go and hang out with unfunny comedians and moderate Canadian rockers, I apologise.

Hv a gd w'end...

The Thing Is...Over There

2007-06-14T08:01:00.000Z

I've written before about rules of engagement with famous people, but was amused what a pickle I got into the other day when I found myself standing next to that American actor Michael Chiklis who plays The Thing in The Fantastic Four. (He was also in that fine American cop show The Shield.)

The trouble is that Londoners - or maybe it is just me - are just too urbane and polite and rude and clumsy and British and world-weary to really understand what they are supposed to do when put face to face with an famous person. I imagine in Hollywood there are some very clear rules of engagement, since the fame thing is the only show in town (unless I am doing LA a disservice as the world's largest producer of tomatoes or box files or something). But here, we don't know what to do, because we (well I) get to thinking "Oh there's so and so, he/she's famous, oh fuck I'm walking towards them, it is him/her isn't it, and I liked that film they were in, but I don't want to look like a freak or a stalker, and - shit, still moving towards them: feet stop it, they are looking at me, they look freaked out, is that their wife/husband, she/he must get so fed up with people going up to their husband/wife, and I am now technically a stalker because I have no control of what I am doing in the presence of fame, and I'm breathing, should I say hello, seems churlish not to, and I could write about it on hhn I guess, do people still ask for autographs, or is that really old fashioned, and trying not to look too mad, and....oh, they've gone..."

So I didn't get The Thing's autograph, and I felt bad about it because The Shield was a really excellent show, and I think Chris (for he is my new best friend now that I've seen him across a hotel lobby) never got to find out that I (me) thought he was a great actor way before he got into big Hollywood super-heroing.

All the above was much trumped by my mate Dezzo on Tuesday night when he punched Ian Wright in the face in a pub. It was accidental. Dezzo was putting his jacket on in a crowded bar, and Wrighty had slipped in to the seat next to us right behind Dezzo's elbow. For a split second I did think Wrighty was going to retaliate when Dezzo caught him on the head with his fist. But Dezzo was deeply apologetic, although he did come out of the bar saying "Bit of an attitude that bloke. It wasn't exactly pleasant for me having to touch his bald head." He was deeply, sweetly oblivious to Wrighty's fame. As far as he was concerned, Wrighty was just another bloke in the pub. Which - in the end of the day - I guess he was. (Although in deeply embarrassing hhn star fuck mode, when Wrighty saw me (I'm a bit taller than Dezzo) and said "Well, I'm glad it wasn't you", I batted my eyelids, said "Not my style dude", and magnanimously shook his hand. What a tosser. Me, not Wrighty.)

This hhn versus celebrities remains an occasional series, since you can't really get around London any more without having to decide what to do when faced with the famous. The Waunch, who is perhaps the biggest star fucker that we know (known as he is to travel the length of the land in order to be seen having a drink with D list celebs) may have further tales to report? Me? Fame means nothing to me, although I remain hopeful that somehow, somewhere in August, I will become Prince's new best friend.