Alphabetising my spices and other misadventures

Over the years it's fair to say I haven't done very much cooking.  I have mostly avoided this by sticking to 3 mains food groups.  Frozen, tinned and takeaway.  Some of what I have done might have been loosely termed 'warming things up', but cooking ie mixing different things together to make food. No.

Well, it's come to my attention lately that I make terrible food decisions when I'm hungry.  Also, I keep getting texts and emails from Domino's when I'm at my most vulnerable, and even worse, I keep answering them!

Anyway, two things have happened over the last couple of weeks.  I've been working late and I don't have any money left.  So, instead of having a day out last Sunday Ruth and I went shopping and made all the meals for last week in advance (I did help a bit, I threw peelings in the bin and washed up and stuff).  I can't tell you what a help this was when I was getting in after 7 at night last week.

To try and follow her good example, and as she's on nights this weekend, and also because I'm starting another new job involving late nights this week, I thought I'd do likewise today.

People who know me might think I've been kidnapped by aliens, but no.  I looked up some recipes yesterday, and I went out in the fog and I bought some ingredients to make proper meals.  This week will probably be stressful enough, so I don't want to fall into the Dominos' trap again (you won't get me this week Phil, with your tempting BOGOFs, you see he even uses his first name on the texts, how underhand is that?, it's like he thinks we're friends).

Anyway, I started with a chilli, because I've made that before, and I can do that without looking at a book.  Except, could I find the chilli powder?  No.  I knew it was in there somewhere but it was hidden in amongst about 100 other little jars of powder.

The first thing I took out was Star Anise.  What the hell is that?  Anyway, that was fine because it didn't expire till 2013.  I then took about another 80 jars out of the cupboard, and although I didn't go so far as to enter the dates onto a spreadsheet, at a rough approximation I would say the average expiry date across all the spices was somewhere around mid 2009.  Not only that but some things had four or five duplicates.  I can't remember eating much cinnamon in the last 10 years but I must have intended to at some point because there's five jars of the stuff in there!

Anyway, I started off throwing away everything over 2 years out of date (I figured that the dates are only a guide), but then I had so many duplicates that I had pretty much at least one of everything I might use that was still in date.

After I'd done this, I was momentarily seized by the insane impulse to alphabetise what was left, but then I realised about 20 of the 27 jars that were left were all things beginning with C, so that seemed a step too far.

But the really good news was this.  I found the chilli powder.  And it's still in date!

And now I'm off to do some cooking!

Being 5 years late for work - and other humbling experiences

I'm starting work on Monday, directly opposite the place I got made redundant from 5 years ago.  In fact, it's possible I could have avoided that redundancy by getting a transfer over the road instead at the time.  I'm not sure because I never really explored that possibility.  At the time, I was ready to leave.

As I was eating my farewell meal in Pizza Hut that day I was sure I was going off to get a better job.  Things already looked promising.  In fact I had an interview the week after.  It was to do data entry in the NHS.  I was pretty confident of getting it.  I thought I did pretty well at the interview, although I might have blanched a bit when they explained the part about where I had to empty people's tumours out of buckets and then rinse the buckets out, I'm not sure.

Anyway, I didn't get that job, and I haven't got lots of the other jobs I've gone for since, which seems bad until you consider that some of the jobs I went for, I did get, and many of those it might have been better to get turned down for too.  In fact, with hindsight there's only two of the six jobs I've had since that I'm glad I got.

Sometimes it's easy to look back and say 'What was I thinking?' when I look at the jobs I did get, but hated, but then I didn't have the luxury of sitting around on a pile of money waiting for the perfect job to appear, I had to get what I could get, when I could get it.

Getting anything was at times an achievement, considering the huge number of jobs I applied for, but didn't get a look in with.

It's become a standing joke now, that whenever I go out with Ruth, either to the shops or for leisure, we usually visit somewhere during the trip where I've been turned down for a job.  She must be so weary of hearing that line when we go out, I might need to buy her some of those glasses with the eyeballs painted on the lenses for Christmas, so she can go to sleep behind them, while still looking interested.

And it can't be easy for her, holding her own career together, while I go through one false dawn after another at work.  Anyway, she'll have to do it at least one more time, as another new job awaits on Monday.

I start at 10 am.  I'll try to be on time, even if I'm 5 years late.

I haven't shouted at the telly this much since the Olympics

Last night Ruth and I watched The Holiday with Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in.  And right there you've got the two main problems with the film.  Those two were in it.

The film would have been okay if it was just a romantic comedy starring Jack Black and Kate Winslet. Their relationship and the relationship between them and their elderly neighbour played by Eli Wallach was pretty interesting, and could have carried a film on its own.

But every time I started to get into Kate and Jack, the scene kept changing back to Cameron and Jude and it was like I was watching a TV where the channel kept changing involuntarily every 5 minutes onto a show I didn't want to watch.

The chemistry between Law and Diaz was non-existent.  I've seen trees in the forest that were less wooden.  To be fair to them they weren't helped by dialogue so clunky it could have been written by George Lucas, but at least Black and Winslet managed to work with the garbage that had been written for them.  I think Cameron Diaz must think she's the female Jim Carrey, because a lot of her acting seems to be just pulling funny faces, and Jude Law, well, if it was my house he turned up at uninvited, he wouldn't be getting in.  I'd be chasing him down the path with a shovel, and if that didn't deter him, I'd set the dogs on him.

And he's not the only one that should have got a good chasing.  Winslet's creepy boss played by Rufus Sewell was another reason why the two of us were regularly shouting abuse at the screen.  It's a good job we weren't watching the film in 3D or I might have got up and starting trying to chin some of the cast for being in my living room.

But thank goodness for good old Kate and Jack, who at least made the experience bearable.

Running away - but very slowly

I wrote a blog post this week, but I didn't publish it because I thought it sounded too negative.

It was about how badly my job at HMV was going, compared to the one I had before at SLC, where I felt so much more at home.

Because I was hesitant about publishing the post, I asked Ruth how I would know if it was unduly negative.  She suggested I read it out in a whiney voice to see if it sounded whiney.  I said anything sounds whiney if you read it out in a whiney voice, so she said it was probably too negative then.

Anyway, in the end I decided to scrap that blog post, because I don't like moaning about other people if  there's a chance that it's just a case of me not fitting in with them.  And I'm glad I did scrap it, because it's only been two hours since I left, but already I feel less like whining.  It helped that some of the staff were very nice to me as I left, and even though I'd only been there 2 weeks, they were grateful for the work I'd done, and that I'd seen out the week, even though I could have walked out sooner.

With hindsight I wonder if some of the fault was with my expectations.  I thought HMV would be similar to Waterstone's because they used to be part of the same company but I couldn't have been more wrong.  Apart from a similar computer system, it was worlds apart.

It was noisy and bright and shiny and I didn't understand all the technology and computer games they sell, and they play Radio 1 a lot, and they had Loose Women on the telly in the lunchroom, and it was sensory overload, and I just felt out of place.  Like I was on the wrong channel, or having a connection failure.

I went there with the best of intentions but it was like going on a blind date, that you realise is a mistake the instant you walk in but you have to go through the motions of having a few drinks and a meal.  Secretly you can't wait for it to be over, and you know you're totally unsuited right from the start, but you don't know how to say so without giving offence.

It's a lot easier with hindsight to say that jobs (and blind dates) are horrible blunders, and you can sit at home all you like dreaming of your ideal partner or your dream job, but sometimes you only know things are completely wrong by giving them a try.  And so I did.  And it was bloody horrible, and I felt like running away pretty much all the time I was there, and in the end I did.

Even though I felt like running away a lot, I only ran away very slowly, ie by working a week's notice, and today I even got to meet my replacement.  It was a reassuring way for it to end, because he looked a lot happier to be there than I ever felt.  He was joining in with conversations I had tended to avoid, and he seemed keen to impress and really glad to be on board, whereas I just felt continually lost at sea.  Also, he really needs a job because he's got a baby on the way, and I was kind of glad to have moved aside for him.  I hope things work out for him.

As well as feeling like a fish out of water these last few days, another aspect of this week that was quite strange was walking round Middlesbrough seeing a daily parade of people queuing up in mortar boards and gowns to get their degrees at the Town Hall.  And a couple of times I took family photos for some of them, while they were waiting to go in, and as I said congratulations to them as I passed back their cameras, I wondered why they'd even trusted me with their cameras when some of them seemed to be really valuable, but then I thought either they were very trusting people who see the good in their fellow human beings, or they thought I didn't look like someone who was capable of running away very fast.

It was a bit of a contrast to the people hanging around outside the law courts only a few hundred yards away.  They were also mostly smartly dressed, but they were doing things like going over their witness statements on the benches outside, and saying things to each other like 'All I did was hit him' and 'now we both have to make sure we tell the same story, or we're for the high jump'.  Funny how people celebrating things gone right and people dealing with things gone wrong wound up being so close together.

I actually derived some vicarious enjoyment from seeing people all dressed up, and celebrating the achievement of academic success.  It reminded me of being there with Ruth a few years ago, but it also made me sad that I hadn't made more of my own opportunities.

I sometimes wonder if my own lack of academic success is the reason why I'm still scratching around desperately for a job that fits me, but even if it is, there's no point kicking myself in the ass about it.

No time to dwell on things in any case.  New job starts Monday.

At 44 I'm too old to start falling off horses

Shakespeare used to say that nothing is good or bad, it's just thinking that makes it so (or something like that).  And I've often found this to be true.  Sometimes buried inside a disappointment is the seed of a future success, although the opposite can also be true.  This being the case, it's probably a good idea not to go too bonkers over success, or to get too crushed by disappointment, because one could quite easily be hiding behind the other.

Which also reminds me of this old Taoist parable.

"...an old Chinese farmer lost his best stallion one day and his neighbor came around to  express his regrets, but the farmer just said, "Who knows what is good and what is bad."  The next day the stallion returned bringing with him 3 wild mares. The neighbor rushed  back to celebrate with the farmer, but the old farmer simply said, "Who knows what is good  and what is bad." The following day, the farmer's son fell from one of the wild mares while trying  to break her in and broke his arm and injured his leg. The neighbor came by to check on the son  and give his condolences, but the old farmer just said, "Who knows what is good and what is bad."  The next day the army came to the farm to conscript the farmer's son for the war, but found him  invalid and left him with his father. The neighbor thought to himself, "Who knows what is good  and what is bad."

This year's job search has been a bit like that.  After months of dead ends job-wise I applied for a job at Waterstone's in May but in between me finding out about the job, and me going for an interview, the job had ceased to exist (budget cuts).  And I was really disappointed that day, because I was desperate not to work in the cake factory anymore, and this seemed like a way out.

But indirectly out of that day, came my next job.  This was because the manager at Waterstone's knew someone from Manpower, and the someone from Manpower was recruiting for Student Loans.  And I wasn't going to apply to Student Loans, because I'd already been turned down by them twice, but because she suggested it, I tried again.  And this time I got in.

But even the Manpower job, I didn't really want.  When it was advertised it was to work evenings until 2 am, and I totally didn't want to do that, but because I couldn't find anything else at the time, I applied.  Even after I'd passed all the pre-screening and the interview, I spent the next six weeks (between being offered the job and my projected start date) desperately trying to find something else, because of the unsociable hours.

But I couldn't find anything else, and so I was resigned to working evenings.  Then the week before I was due to start, they rang me and offered me days, which was exactly what I wanted, but which had never been advertised as a possibility.  And so, from the disappointment of having an interview for a job that didn't exist, via applying for a job I didn't want, I ended up in a really good job, working with people I really liked.  It may have only lasted 4 months, but that 4 months was better than nothing, and it got me back into work, and got my confidence up again.

Then at the end of October, after working hard for those 4 months to try and earn myself a more permanent job with Student Loans, I was laid off, completely arbitrarily, along with all the other agency staff.  And it was a big disappointment, because I was out of work again, and at first it seemed like all the effort I'd put in to be good, hadn't paid off.

A few days later, newly jobless again, my car broke and then my internet got accidentally cut off, and this is just adding insult to injury I thought.  And having to sort these things out also delayed my planned trip into Middlesbrough to look for temporary shop work at Christmas.

The other thing which had delayed my trip into Middlesbrough, was waiting for the outcome of an interview at Marks and Spencers, which I'd had the week before.  Because I thought I was likely to get that job, I didn't try too hard looking for anything else in the meantime.  Only when it became apparent that I wasn't getting that job, did I get my finger out and get into Middlesbrough.

When I eventually did get myself into Middlesbrough, after being delayed twice by having to organise car and internet repairs, and after wasting time hanging around waiting for the results of an interview for a job I didn't get, I managed to walk into HMV just at the right time to bump into the store manager, who it transpired was looking for someone just like me.  And so, by another series of accidents, I've got another job.

And so tomorrow I'm back to the drawing board again.  I'm 44, and I'm facing another first day at work.  And at the moment that feels like a good thing.

But as I know from what's gone before, only time will tell....


Post Script.  Yep, once again triumph has turned to disaster.  The job I was really pleased to get at HMV turned out within days to be a job I couldn't wait to get out of.  I've got to hope the next one is better, this is driving me nuts!

Job Interviews are easy now - They're like exams I've already revised for

When I was at school I used to do exams.  Proper exams.  3 hours in a room with just a pen and a few pieces of paper (although they had started to bring out answer booklets by the time I finished).

And I was quite swotty at school, so I used to properly revise for exams.  And if you properly revise, there comes a time before the exam, when you need to stop trying to remember stuff and trust in the fact that you've done enough.  I was never one of those people reading notes outside the exam room, or reading notes on the bus on the way to the exam.  I used to mostly give up the night before, sometimes earlier.

And it's quite a nice feeling, knowing that you've done all you can, and now it's just about you and the exam.  I always found it was a good idea to try and remember that feeling during the first 10 minutes of every exam, when I used to have a complete and utter panic attack, and be convinced I couldn't do any of it.  Usually if I was still in there after 11 minutes, I did okay.

Well, job interviews are a bit like exams.  Except the subject is me.  And I used to revise for interviews the same way I used to revise for exams.  I used to look through lots of notes I'd made about different jobs I'd done, and I reflected on things like when I'd faced a challenging situation, or when I'd done well, or when I'd exceeded expectations, and all that telling your life story / competency based crap that you have to go through to get a job.  I used to wonder what they'd ask me, and I used to get ready to answer whatever came at me.

But these days I don't bother so much.  And for two main reasons.

1) I've done this exam so many times now, I know the answers off by heart.  I was crap at O Level Chemistry, but if I'd taken that bloody exam as many times as I've been interviewed for jobs, I'd have been getting 100% by now.

2) Self-confidence.  I'm not a performing monkey (some people might not agree), I'm a person, with a life story, and an employment record, and a history, and it is what it is.  And some of it is crap.  My employment history, like my life, is full of blind alleys, and some things I wish I hadn't done, and some things that didn't work out.  And sometimes what I am, and what I've got is totally not what an employer is looking for.  And that's fine.  It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me, it just means I don't match what they want.

That's not to say I've not done some work things really well over the years.  It's not to say I don't have skills and talents and abilities, and strengths at work.  But being myself, and letting them find that out early is a good thing, not just for them, but for me.  There's nothing worse than doing a really good interview, and then ending up in a job where you want to flick your own eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon after 5 minutes, just so you can get out of there.

The thing I've learned from all the interviews I've done, past and present, good and bad, is this.  There's no point telling them that you're who you think they want you to be, unless you are in fact that person.  If you're not, they'll soon find out, and they'll probably be really annoyed that you wasted their time, because now they've got to do the whole thing all over again.

And so job interviews for me now are easy.  They're like exams that I've revised for.  I don't overprepare, I go in, I show them who I am, and then I leave.  If they ask me questions, I answer them, if I want to ask questions, I do.  If they ask me why I only worked in a call centre for 3 months, I tell them it's because the job was totally wrong for me, and I found that out by working in a call centre.

I maybe wouldn't elaborate and say I knew the job was wrong for me about an hour in, but it took another 3 months less one hour to get out of there.  And I maybe wouldn't mention that if I'd only figured that out about myself before I went for an interview for a job in a call centre, I never would have gone to the interview, and in doing so wasted the time of the people who interviewed me.

But whatever I tell them, they will know that it's me talking.  They won't be fooled into thinking they're talking to Orville when they are in fact talking to Keith Harris.  And it will then be up to them what they do with that information.  And after getting to know me, if they think I'm not right for the job, they might be right.  But if they think I am right for the job, then they also might be right.

Life's too short for pretending (well it's okay if you're an actor, or at primary school), but when you're a grown up, just be a grown up.  When you take exams, you can't pretend to have revised, you either have or you haven't and it shows through.  And the same goes for interviews.  If you don't show them who you are, they'll probably notice anyway.



Postscript to this blog entry.  The interview I went for this morning, I got the job.

The Five Year Engagement - A stupid title but a good film

My favourite author Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying that all his arguments with his wife boiled down to her being 'Not Enough People'.  All couples could do with some backup in the form of friends and extended families, but we're not all lucky enough to have it.  The ones that don't are likely to spend a lot longer kicking each other in the arse during the course of their relationship than the ones that do.

And like couples in real life, couples in films need backup too, especially ones that are in romantic comedies.  If ever a type of film needed a supporting cast, the romantic comedy is it.  And that's because it's pretty boring to spend an hour and a half watching someone else's relationship implode before being slowly put back together again.  It's nearly always the same.  First they fall in love, then they have a load of problems due to their total incompatibility, then they gradually find a way of living together without punching each other really hard in the face, blah blah blah, the end.  It's dull.  Films are supposed to be escapism.  If I wanted to watch two people arguing for an hour and a half about nothing in particular I could just set up a webcam in my own house.

So anyway, I'm writing this because last night Ruth and I watched the Five Year Engagement, which had Emily Blunt and some bloke in.  The title is stupid and misleading, because the whole film hinges on a couple's decision not to get married because they have to move to Michigan.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  People move around all the time these days.  Half the people I know don't live near where they grew up, and where their families are.  Some of them don't even live in the same country as where they grew up.

But that's the thing about weddings.  Usually you get time off work to go to them, especially when they're your own, and you can go home to get married, or your family can come to you.  There's about a billion internal flights a day in the US, I'd be amazed if it's impossible to fly from San Francisco to Michigan relatively easily.  So why didn't they just take a couple of weeks off, and get married anyway?  He gave up his job and moved to Michigan with her, and they were living together, so they were virtually married anyway.  And she was a student with 8 weeks off every summer, that would have been the perfect opportunity to fit a wedding in.  All her family were English anyway, so she would probably have wanted to get married in England anyway.  Where they lived in the US was irrelevant.

Leaving aside this stupid fact, the film was a lot of fun to watch.  And that was largely because of the supporting cast.  There were some sick and twisted psychology students, a Welsh professor played by Rhys Ifans who was involved in a particularly funny chase, there was a heated argument between Elmo and the Cookie Monster, a bit of mime, somebody getting shot with a crossbow, some blokes going hunting, growing beards, knitting woolly jumpers, and drinking out of a woolly mammoth's hollowed out foot.  In fact, many of the best bits of the film had nothing to do with the central relationship at all.

So for me, it was a bit like Four Weddings and a Funeral, in that it was the interaction of the wider cast of characters that made the movie.  Imagine if Four Weddings had only had the vacuous Andie Macdowell character prancing around fancying herself and Hugh Grant bumbling and stumbling over his words for 90 minutes.  It would have been death.

Similarly, I was once chained to a chair and made to watch 'Failure to Launch' with Matthew McConnohee (I can't spell it properly, I give up) and Sarah Jessica Parker.  What a terrible film!  I probably would have had more fun reading a paint chart for 90 minutes.  But it was worth watching this particular dung heap for an hour and a half purely because of Zooey Deschanel, who played Sarah Jessica Parker's quirky room-mate.  She saved the movie.

And I've found myself, that it's not just in the movies, but in real life, when it's a good idea to have a good group of friends in the picture.  Because even the biggest stars sometimes need a bit of help.

Skyfall - Even James Bond is being affected by the austerity measures

I went to see Skyfall yesterday.  The new James Bond film.  Wow, things aren't what they used to be.

The film was 2 hours 20 long, but it could have been over in the first 3 minutes.  James Bond fell off a train and went headfirst into a river at about a hundred miles an hour.  Do that in real life and you die.  Added to that he'd been shot, so he definitely shouldn't have made it.  It wasn't the only implausible bit of the storyline either.  He also had a punch up underwater in a frozen lake, which went on for about 10 minutes longer than the world underwater holding your breath record, added to which, as I know from watching Bear Grylls, if you fall into a frozen lake, you can't move after about the first 10 seconds because your body completely shuts down.  Apart from these glaring factual inaccuracies, I really enjoyed the film.

It started off like they usually do with lots of people getting punched in the head, and stuff getting wrecked and blown up, but then it all went a bit low tech and old-fashioned.  It was almost like they used up all the budget in the first half, and the last hour was seriously affected by austerity measures.    James Bond used to routinely get helicopters and underwater cars, all he got in this one was a gun and a radio, and he even had to go back to his own house in an old car towards the end and raid the cupboards for something to fight with.

Without giving the end of the film away, it was a lot like watching the 80s TV series the A-Team where BA Baracus has to disable a posse of heavily armed men with a wheelbarrow full of cabbages and a potato gun.  Judi Dench bless her was making bombs out of leftover curry paste and staples and even Daniel Craig was struggling to find something deadly to massacre the helicopters full of ninjas with that arrived on his doorstep.

One thing I really liked about the film was that there was quite a lot of talking in it, especially between James Bond and the bad guy, played by Javier Bardem.  I can't be doing with films when it's a non-stop Transformer-a-thon of special effects, where there's not even a gap long enough between explosions to check whether you've got tinnitus or not.  I especially liked the bad guy's entrance where he started talking at James Bond while he was still absolutely miles away, and I was even thinking he probably should have used a megaphone, or got closer before he started, but I'm sure he had some sort of microphone near him, what with it being a film and all.  I really liked Javier Bardem as the villain.  He managed to convey just the right air of menace and was just crazy enough, without going completely over the top.  He was a lot more like Dennis Hopper in Speed than Heath Ledger in Batman.

Another good thing about the film was that it was very old person friendly.  I've written before about poor old Roger Moore in Octopussy, running around at age 57 chinning circus performers whilst wearing big cloppy shoes and gorilla outfits, but this one was even kinder to old folk.  The last 20 minutes saw the positively ancient pairing of Judi Dench and Albert Finney, trying to run around but being barely able to move, yet still managing to dodge bullets and explosions.  At one point Albert Finney does a brilliant impersonation of a statue, when someone shoots a gun at him and he doesn't even move.  He just waits there while the bullet blows the doorframe he's standing in apart.  At his age, he wouldn't have seen it coming till about 10 minutes after he'd been shot.

As well as watching old people failing to run around on the screen, the audience at the screening we went to were ancient as well.  It was the middle of the afternoon on Orange Wednesday but it looked like a reunion of all the people who'd been at the original Dr No screening 50 years ago.  I haven't seen so many sticks and wheelchairs since I went past the motability store in Stockton the other day.  I was almost getting comfortable in my seat when the old lady with the two sticks who was trying to get to her seat behind me started rocking my seat backwards and forwards like I was on a see saw, just before she fell over and had to be helped up by some other crumblies.

After spending so much time lately working with people who look about 12, I felt like I'd accidentally stumbled on to the set of Last of the Summer Wine.

The old ladies in particular wouldn't have been disappointed, as Daniel Craig in particular looked chiselled and rugged throughout, so chiselled and rugged in fact, he looked almost pixalated.  He did gratuitously get his kit off a couple of times for the benefit of the grandmas in the audience, although it didn't do much for me.  And it wasn't the best Bond film I've seen for Bond girls either, the ones that were in it were either disappointing, or dead.

But as for storyline, and excitement, it was one of the best, and I'd definitely recommend it.  Even if there was no hollowed out volcano with hundreds of people in coloured jumpsuits and a megalomaniac with a massive laser and a plan to takeover the world in it, it was still a really good film.

And much as I still enjoy watching the old slapstick Roger Moore doing his one liners after he's thrown someone out of a window, I'm warming to Daniel Craig.  I wasn't a big fan of his after Casino Royale, and I've never seen Quantum of Solace, but I enjoyed him in this, and I feel like he's lightening up a bit now he's got into his stride.

Looking forward to the next one....

Is this a restaurant? For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into a toy shop

Tonight I had my second leaving do in the last 3 days.

Tonight's meal had twice the number of people in attendance but it was also twice as much money for half as much food, which is a big consideration when you're unemployed.  That Copper Beech place we went to on Wednesday, the dinners were huge, and even with drinks you still got change out of a tenner.  The mince and dumplings I had could have fed a village, and the parmos were so big you could have used them as liferafts in the event of a flood.

But for all the cheapness on Wednesday, the food was still excellent.  Also, I understood the menu.  I knew what every dish was.  Parmo, check.  Mince and Dumplings, check, Fish and Chips, check.  I had a pretty good idea in my head what each of those things might look like, and when they got delivered to the table, I had no trouble telling them apart.  And neither did the waiter.

The restaurant tonight was a lot posher than the Copper Beech, but it was one of those places where they build stuff out of your food.  Dan Footy's dessert looked like a scale model of the Black Pearl out of Pirates of the Caribbean, and as for me, I got served a stack of something that looked like a replica of the paperwork I used to batch.  It even had orange case separators made out of carrot.  The veg was advertised as being hot pot potato, but it looked more like potato that had been hit with a hammer, mixed with some carrot and then assembled into a square in one of those car crushers.

I didn't have chips, and I was glad I didn't, but some other people did and they were those big chips that you got about ten of and that you could have started a game of Jenga with.  If I'm going to order chips, I want them to look like chips, not building blocks.  I'm not a child, I haven't played with blocks and bricks and that type of shit since I was about 9.  I just don't get what the appeal of this kind of food is.

The choice of food on offer played havoc with poor old Deano.  He'll only eat traditional British meals, so he ordered sausage and mash which you would think would be a safe bet, but they'd even tried to cut the sausages in half and build something out of that.  And instead of good old Bisto on it, it had some sort of black sauce, and they couldn't just slip him a wadge of mash, they had to mix it with some green stuff so it ended up being the colour of mint chocolate chip ice cream.  For God's sake, just give us food we understand!

Not only could we not tell what the meals were, neither could the staff.  Nothing looked like you thought it would, and it took about 10 minutes of swapsies before we got the right dinners.

Also, the gap between the courses was really long, and I think at least some of this was probably because of all the time it took to assemble the stuff out the back.  I've put IKEA bookcases together in less time than it took to fetch our desserts.

It was £13.95 for two courses tonight, plus drinks, so £15 each near enough whereas on Wednesday I was almost embarrassed to walk away after only paying £8.40 for what I had.  Not only embarrassed, I could only just get out of there under my own steam.  I nearly had to put my stomach in a wheelbarrow to get it out to the car, it was so full.

Maybe there are some people out there who want to pay extra to have their dinners made to look like stuff you might find in a 3 year old's bedroom, but I'm not one of them.  Just give me a proper dinner, that looks like a dinner please, and not one that looks like a Lego house.

Thank you.  Rant over.  Now I'm off to make some toast.

Getting fired and laughing at stuff - 20 years on

The last time I worked in a big office was in the early 90s.  Gazza was bawling his eyes out and the internet hadn't been thought of.  It was all faxes and post then.  I think mobile phones were just getting off the ground, but only just off the ground because they were as heavy as a log.

Even though that was half my life ago, I still remember that time like it was yesterday.  I can't remember the work very well, but I remember the laughs.  I remember going out to the pub for lunch all the time, and I remember being off my bonce on whisky at the Christmas party because there was no other booze left, and I'm told while I was out of it I won a competition for moving an elastic band from my forehead to my neck without touching it, just by wiggling my face, but that part I don't remember.

I remember getting absolutely bollocked for bouncing hundreds of direct debits that I wasn't supposed to, and I remember having trouble getting to work because of the snow, and I remember being late in and having to take it out of our lunch breaks.  And I remember arguments about parking charges and I remember being in a very minor car crash with Alison Rhodes and I remember her falling on her arse in her wellies on the ice, and it was funny even though her bum really hurt.  And I remember Andrew Spink being annoyed that Leeds had sold Vinnie Jones, and I remember the two of them dressed up for Yorkshire Day (Alison and Andrew, not Andrew and Vinnie Jones).

And I remember Mandy Mason dressed as Andy Pandy and I remember her going on maternity leave to have her daughter who is now all grown up.  And I remember Anne Smith and her stories of horrible car crashes and the worst broken arm anyone had ever seen.

And I remember that the manager's office doorframe was coming away from the wall, because of all the times it got slammed behind one of us, when we'd got absolutely hammered for making a mistake, and I remember the long walks across the office we had to do when our badge card numbers got read out.  And I remember how they used to draw the blinds before they used to shout at you.  And I remember Liz Thompson always wore trainers and she was always chasing and tackling things in them, or so she said.

And I remember that they brought Total Quality Management or TQM in, and part of it was that there was supposed to be a no-blame culture, but I still remember getting the blame for a lot of stuff.

And I remember Angela Richardson used to hang around for hours out the back looking through boxes and I remember that we used to make each other giggle, just by saying the word 'smashed'.

But the thing I remember the most is the laughing.

Anyway, since then I haven't worked in a big office, with lots of people.  It's all been small offices with only a few.  Until the last 4 months.

I'm 20 years older now but it's been like going round again.  Working with a new bunch of young people, all in their twenties or younger.  They've all got smart phones now, and they're all on Twitter, and they like to Facetime each other, and music's all gone digital and now there's more different colours of drink to get hammered on.  And nobody uses faxes anymore.

But some things have stayed the same.  Sometimes you still get called into meetings to get bollocked, and sometimes you even get called into meetings to get fired.

But the thing I'll remember the most has been the laughter.  And if I can still remember the people I was laughing with in the early 90s now, I'm sure in twenty years time I'll remember the class of 2012 just as well.

I may forget what a PFF2 is, and I might forget that it goes 'cover letter, then financial' (although I doubt it) but I'm sure I won't forget the people.  I didn't forget the ones I went to Germany with in 1983, I didn't forget the ones I worked with in 1990, and I won't forget Gibbo and Rob and Vicky and Footy and Rookesy and Deano and Joss and Lucy and Sophie and Cozza and Kirstywho'snotaGeordie and Steve and Phil and Edd and Rebecca and all the rest.

Because whatever differences we may have had, whether we were older or younger, or came from different places, or had different backgrounds, or had different life experiences, we all had one thing in common.

We all knew how to laugh at stuff.