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Tuesday 31st December20:10Navel-gazing special editionAh, New Year's Eve, that traditional time for taking stock of your life and making well-meaning resolutions that usually last until about a week after you get back to work. Of course, some of us aren't going back to work, but then again, I'm not making any resolutions so I don't have to worry about not keeping them. All the decisions about my immediate and medium-term future have already been made.Anyway, why waste the chance for some introspective navel-gazing? After all every other blogger in the world is bound to be doing the fecking same. Well, that's the biggest reason of course, plus the fact that I'm not the sort to indulge in public navel-gazing - after all how many members of the public really want to see my navel? So instead here are some Big Ups, some Big Up Yours, and some Big Apologies for stuff that's happened in the last twelve months.
Big Ups to:
Big Up Yours to:
Big Apologies to: Well, that's it for this year. Tomorrow, to get us off on the good foot, baby, the five questions that you should probably have asked yourself before you made your New Year's Resolutions.
Monday 30th December11:30Heyyyy!! I'm back!!Actually I got back from London two days ago, but haven't been bothered about updating the site. Anyway, I had a great time in London. Spent most of it consuming vast quantities of alcohol, of course. Eddy cooked a delicious Christmas dinner, which showed that at least one of us has learnt to cook properly since leaving home. In fact Eddy did all the cooking and a damn fine job he made of it too. He also did a fine job of dragging out all the Xmas tunes you could possibly want to hear, including Easy E's Christmas song from a while back. "And an A to tha muthafuckin' K" indeed. And we spent a lot of time chatting and catching up with stuff, which was nice. I've already invited him to come to mine next year, although I'm not sure where that might be.
Fun with names, Part 739.I was listening to the radio for most of yesterday and was intrigued to hear in the morning that "Wacky Baccy" had apparently won the Kenyan Presidential election with 69% of the vote. Good on them, I thought, I never knew the drug laws were so relaxed. Turns out that really the winner is Mwai Kibaki which is actually pronounced M-way Key-ba-key. Which is kind of a shame as the thought that a nation had voted to have marijuana as a president was quite amusing. Well, it made me laugh for a few minutes anyway.
Monday 23rd December11:30London calling....Woke up to the sad news that Joe Strummer died yesterday. Sad news indeed. Everyone knows of his sterling work with The Clash, of course, but more recently he'd had a bit of resurgence with his band The Mescaleros. They headlined the Saturday night of the Cambridge Folk Festival this year, but by the time I found out he was playing, it was sold out. I wish I'd gone now, of course. It would have been the only time I'd seen him live. Ah, more reflections once the news has sunk in. Or not as the case appears to be.I'm off down to that there London (the big smoky apple) for a couple of days to spend Christmas with my little brother. I'll be meeting up with my recently-married mate John too for a couple of Xmas Eve bevvies. In "The Moon Under Water" on Tottenham Court Road, apparently. I'll be in there around 3pm if anyone fancies popping in to buy me a drink... Merry Christmas to all my readers and hope you all have a grand time. Cheers!
Saturday 21st December19:30Winding down for the festive seasonI went to work for the last time on Wednesday. Well, the last time at Convergys anyway. I certainly hope I get another job. Unless I win the Lottery, of course. It was off out to the pub for a final farewell with my colleagues. It was kind of sad, but very enjoyable too - although I think the half dozen or so pints I had helped with that feeling. Can't say I'll particularly miss the job, to be honest, but I will miss the people, and the regular income. Mind you, it shouldn't take me too long to find something else. So, I'm going to enjoy the holiday period (I'm getting together with my little bro' for a couple of days) and then throw myself back into the job market in the New Year.There's not been much else worth reporting - my favourite non-Premiership team are marching on. A good victory in the FA cup at home to Mansfield followed by a hammering of non-league Doncaster Rovers in the LDV Trophy have been pleasant distractions in the middle of a decent run of league form which has consolidated Crewe's position in the top five of the Second Division. Hopefully they can keep this up and the teams above them will start dropping points, and they can gain an automatic promotion place back to the First Division where they belong. I haven't updated for a couple of days, partly because I haven't had a lot to say and partly because I've been doing other stuff. Mostly mundane stuff too, it must be said. Nothing exciting, sadly. Rest assured, if I do something interesting, it'll be on here ere long.
Tuesday 17th December17:50Not suitable for childrenWell, me old mucker Kev recently had his computer repaired and has been using it to browse the Internet for jobs and stuff. He's also installed some new firewall software and one of them "Net Nanny"-type programs so that he can be sure that his daughter doesn't accidentally turn up some dodgy porn sites whilst looking for Tweenies-related stuff. Amusingly, whilst he was surfing the Net using his daughter's access level, it barred him from looking at this site. My use of the word "hitman" in an earlier post was the root cause. It's "too violent" apparently. Which is strange as I think there are other things on here that should be more of a cause for concern - that attractive picture of me for a start....The job hunting is slowing down a bit, mainly because not many people seem to be advertising any vacancies around the Christmas period. I didn't expect there to be a great deal to be honest, but I thought that after last week's spurt I might at least be getting some feedback already. Still, at least that gives me a chance to concentrate on more creative stuff. I've got one or two "projects" lined up that need to be completed over the festive period. Some of which may get rolled out here first, some of which definitely won't. So there.
Sunday 15th December22:00Still getting over the Christmas partyI went in to work on Friday, for the penultimate time, to hand over a load of work and print out a couple of covering letters and a dozen copies of my CV. It was a bit strange. Obviously people felt a bit awkward about the fact that I was still there, and I behaved like a twat on Tuesday night, apparently, which didn't help. Still, we had a last Friday visit to the Portland Arms, as a sort of farewell. Which was nice. I was also pleased to at least make sure that everything I was working on was properly covered for whoever has to pick it all up, although obviously I'd rather have been doing the work myself. Not that there was much chance of that, as the company have shut down my access to any of the sensitive sytems. Which is fair enough, I suppose - they don't want to run the risk of people sabotaging things - but still feels like a insult to my professional pride. I don't get the chance to complete the one major piece of documentation I was working on for the last couple of months because the company don't trust me. Hey, thanks a lot.Anyway, if they aren't going to keep on paying me, which they're not, I did at least get one last free booze-up out of the company at the Christmas Party on Friday night. I wasn't going to go, but my colleagues persuaded me otherwise and Tim and his darling wife Julie picked me up and looked after me for the evening. Not that I needed much looking after once I'd got a few glasses of wine and champagne down me. Due to constraints of space we ended up on a table with Janice and a few other people from the Cambourne office, who were fine company, although it was a bit awkward as they don't yet know which of them might be getting the bullet in the New Year. I have to admit I was slightly "demob happy". Anyway, I got to chat to a lot of people, gambled and lost a large amount of pretend money, drank a large amount of wine (and there was a beer in there somewhere, I vaguely recall), danced (badly) to some crazy-ass disco tunes and found myself a rugby club to join should I stay in Cambridge. Yeah, it was that sort of night. Tim was strangely still willing to give me a lift home at the end of it and I found I'd managed to acquire a couple of bottles of wine. How did that happen? I don't really like the stuff, to be honest. I fell asleep in a chair when I got home on Friday night/Saturday morning and felt very rough when I woke up at about 7.30 in the morning. I spent most of the day crashed out on the sofa, catching up with the films I'd video-ed the night before, trying to slowly rehydrate myself and catching up with the lost hours of sleep. I obviously didn't do that good a job as I've spent most of today doing the same. So the weekend has been pretty much a wipeout. Still, there's not a lot of job-hunting that can be done at the weekend, so I haven't wasted any "work-finding" hours. It's back to the grindstone for me tomorrow, trawling through the Internet sites, e-mailing and ringing agencies and drafting more covering letters. Hurrah!
Thursday 12th December15:00Not so much lost a job as gained an opportunityWhat fun-packed couple of days I've been having. I'd forgotten how much hard work it can be to find another job. It's not just updating the CV and posting it on a few recruitment websites, there's the drafting covering letters, researching companies and generally making sure all the bases are covered to give yourself the best chance of getting a new job. Still, things are in hand already and for no apparent reason I'm quite confident that it won't take too long to find another job.In amongst all that, I went out on Tuesday night for a few "farewell" drinks with some of my ex-colleagues in the Fort St George. I got drunker than I have been for some time, so I hope I wasn't abusive to anyone. Apologies if I was. Mind you, I was drinking for two, as midway through the evening, my mate, Kevin rang to tell me that he's been made redundant too. Obviously, it's a bit more worrying for him as he's got a wife and two kids to support. I hope it doesn't take him too long to find another job. I was also so drunk that I went to Tesco on the way home and bought more washing powder and kitchen rolls than I could possibly ever use, and a Christmas pudding. Well, at least I've got a gift to take to Eddy's for Christmas... I spent yesterday not doing too much in the way of job-seeking as I had a bit of a poorly head. Instead, I crashed out on the sofa and watched Tomorrow La Scala, starring Jessica Stevenson. This drama about an operatic company staging a production of Sweeney Todd in a prison, with some of the lifers in the chorus, received a standing ovation when it played at the Cannes film festival earlier this year, and it's easy to understand why. It's fantastic. Best new thing I've seen on TV for a long while. I followed that up with ultra-violent French crime film Dobermann. Another great film, with a particularly nasty scene towards the end when one of the cops gets his face rubbed against the road at high speed. Nice. If you like your films gritty and your body counts high, this is for you. And I've finally got round to adding the (rather) short piece of prose that came to me one night in a dream. It's called Widow's Pens and even though I channelled it, I've absolutely no idea if it's any good or not, so read it and judge for yourselves. Feel free to comment.
Monday 9th December11:59T, E, K, Technology, was demolition of DaddyWell, another of my colleagues was made redundant today, so I'm not the only one from the department. Again, not a total shock and, given that they had other plans in hand, not too bad a deal for them either. Still, that's two out of twelve, which I suppose isn't too bad a body count considering the carnage that's going on elsewhere.I have to say that my friends have been excellent and rallied round. There's been both the emotional support (Cheers, Tim, Richard) and the practical. I've got more sources of information than I know what to do with, including some very useful stuff on contract work abroad. To be honest, I'm probably suffering a bit from information overload. There seem to be almost too many options. So I'd better get started before my erstwhile colleagues decide that it's time they looked for something else and I have to compete with them too...Mind you, just because I've been a technical author doesn't mean I have to remain one.
Friday 6th December18:00Is it Giro Day, Tom?Exactly two years to the day since I was made redundant from my last job, I shall be made redundant from the current one. I was kind of expecting it, but it's still not particularly pleasant. Mind you, it does help me maintain a fine tradition - I've still only ever left one job voluntarily. It's frustrating that I won't get to finish some of the stuff I was working on, particularly as it's pretty close to completion, but that's football, Brian. There's a load of things at work that probably need to be sorted out but they can wait. Tonight Matthew, I'm going to get exceedingly drunk.On an altogether un-related subject - it's not often that I can think of something good to say about Cambridge City Council but this morning there were a few workmen around clearing all the fallen leaves off the pathways round the estate. True, the leaves had been there a couple of months and in one regularly-walked spot had turned into damp mush, but clear them they did. So there's now no danger of me slipping on frozen leaf mulch at any point during the winter. Of course, I might not actually be stepping outside my front door that much anymore.....
Thursday 5th December22:30A more orthodox approach to managing the head countWell, in a move that surprised me only by it's pre-Christmas timing, the company have announced that there's going to be another wave of redundancies. As part of a cull of 950 jobs worldwide, 19 jobs will be going in the Cambridge office I work in. I don't know yet if I'll be affected as they only made the official announcement at lunchtime, but one way or another I hope they let people know sooner rather than later. At least a lot of people will still have a job, unlike the people at the Bristol office, which will be closed. They also announced that there will be a salary freeze for the majority of employees next year too. So all in all, things aren't looking too good.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the bride and groom...."'Lady In Red' is apparently one of the most popular tunes for newly-weds to lead the evening disco off with. All I can say is that if you're at a wedding where they play the V/VM version, you'll either be having the greatest time of your life or surrounded by brain-eating zombies. Ah, my night out at the Bad Timing Xmas party had it all - pathos, bathos, doubt, laughter and Albert the fifth musketeer. Not quite, but close. It was more electronica, and featuring some familiar faces, but this time there were tunes and stuff. Proper music, at least till V/VM started. Any act that can take the stage wearing pig masks and open their set with a crazy, electronically-manipulated version of 'Here I Go Again' by Whitesnake are gods in my book. They basically mimed to their own recordings, but with their inflatable guitars, roses for the "lay-deez" and vinyl-smashing antics they were very entertaining. Check out their website, now perma-linked on your right, for a flavour of their sound and if they're appearing in a town near you, make sure you go to see them. Geniuses, the pair of them.
Tuesday 3rd December22:30He's no David BaileyWell, I went up to Birmingham at the weekend, to see my older siblings and their families/partners, so took advantage of that to try out my new digital camera. And I can definitely say that it's slightly disappointing. The viewfinder is slightly off and doesn't show you quite what ends up in the picture, which is a bit frustrating. Also the pictures are all distorted round the edges in a kind of fish-eye effect, which isn't too bad if your subject is in the middle of the frame and you can crop the picture, but does rather ruin shots of large groups of people. Ally that to my un-photographer-ly eye and half the shots I took are unusable. But that's about normal for me. When I've tarted up the usable shots I'll stick them up on here. Probably.Anyway, I had a really enjoyable weekend - I don't get to see the family often enough really, especially my older brother. Mind you, I have to book to see him in advance, and I'm not usually that organised. Oh, and a big "Thanks" to Young Chris, who gave me a lift there and back saving me a few quid and innumerable hours on the train. I'll get you a pint on Friday. Envy me. For tomorrow night I shall be further expanding my newly-rediscovered love of electronica by taking in another night of "electro-pop" at The Portland Arms, this time at the Bad Timing christmas party which will be headlined by V/VM who excel at cutting up and reworking other people's tunes, but not in any way that the original artists might approve of. Download a few tunes off their website to see what I mean. Don't be surprised if everyone at work thinks you're a nutcase when they hear what you're listening to though. Expect a full NME-style review on the site on Thursday. If I don't get distracted by watching Witchfinder General on video, that is.
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