How many mondays have you felt saddened when people ask you “how was your weekend ?”. Well this weekend I can reply totally positively.
To be honest I wasn’t relishing the though of going out with Michele’s friends, the Callaghans, on saturday – I like them and all but wasn’t feeling too sociable – but I’m so glad I went.
In the theatre bar I bumped into an old Goldsmiths student, Phillipa, and remembered her name! 10 cool points to me. She didn’t remember mine (-10) but she remembered me (+2). I then went on to explain to Michele that despite her sounding dreary she was cool and really nice….without realising she was sitting directly behind me at the time (-100).
Oh well. Anyway it was lovely to see the Callaghans, especially Mary. The play was superb – “Iron” by Rona Munro. The only other things she’d written that I’d seen was “Butterfly Butterfly” which was grim as fuck. This was just as good, but not quite so grim.
Afterwards Loch, Mary and Chris took us out for a really good meal in a restaurant called “Oriels”. We ate nice food, talked and laughed, and after all that’s what life should be all about. Ok it wasn’t quite as good as gastro Gastro but as someone who enjoys eating anything, I loved it. A great night.
Today was great as well. Michele and I went down to the ironically named “Good View” noodle bar in Lewisham and ate way too much yummy food. Later in the day we went to my mum and dad’s and ate way too much yummy food. And we laughed a lot. That’s what a good weekend should be about. Work tomorrow doesn’t seem like a drag at all. ENVY ME!

Dreaming is when your mind goes off from reality, usually because not much is going on there apart from snoring, and creates a fantasy world where anything can happen. Our bland, drab, routine lives are left behind as we are free to explore the limitless possibilities the world has to offer without tedious real-life considerations such as wealth, work and phone bills. So, why then are my dreams so utterly crap ?

Rather than dream about going into space to relax in an intergalactic pleasure dome with its own vinyard I dream about forgetting appointements, arguing with people I like and being slightly late for something important.
The worse thing about such crap dreams is when you don’t properly remember them, but the experiences lurk in the dull recesses of your mind and eventually become memories. That’s such a cruel trick. I once had a really paranoid dream about a group of friends telling me to fuck off. I forgot all about the dream, but the next time I met one of them, there was a slight feeling of discomfort in the back of my head.
Then there are the ones where you dream something really cool and wake up to find it’s not true. I used to get those a lot as a kid, like the one where I had a Merlin. Upon waking I excitedly opened my bedisde cabinet to play with it only to find that it wasn’t there – instead there was a marketing pamphlet for Merlin explaining how much fun it is when you’ve got one.
Michele’s dad had a smiliar dream as a child. He came down the next day, obviously very unhappy and asked his mum “where are all the puppies ?”.

So here are a list of some of the crappest dream scanarios I’ve had recently:

• Aries (a UNIX box at work) going down and needed to bee rebooted from CD. This was in real-time.
• Being wrongly imprisoned for tax evasion and being told by another con about the state of the place inside, and how the floor was covered in KY jelly, blood and shit
• Being late for work
• Writing a program in C to do something really unexciting
• Describing, in extreme detail, something to do with cryptography that in reality makes no sense at all
• Getting caught skiving by the boss
• Michele leaving me for a right wanker

Not that I’ve got anything to write or anything interesting to say…
Today was another pub experience. Geoff, Paul the pick, Brodie, Benners and I ate and laughed about stuff. Michele came up after work and we had a quick drink with Claire, Liz, Alan, Zap (whose voice now sounds much less like a 10-year-old dalek), Geoff and Lynn.
Michele and Claire, both being girls, spent ages discussing small glass bottles of coloured liquid. Bless their little female hearts.
Then Michele and I went to Gastro Gastro – a really nice (although fucking expensive) restaurant, in deptford. The chef came out to accept compliments, although I have to say they were deserved. The food is great. I’ve no idea what sort of style you could say it was, but it’s good. At a guess I’d say it was a sort of anglo-italian-carribean-spanish sort of thing. The chef is a really nice bloke anyway.
To round the evening off we caught a cab and had a typicallly unimaginative argument on the way home. Pity, it was going really well until then.
Ah but a brief soujourn in the local Spar got us both Laughing. If anyone is interested in nominating someone for an MBE, I suggest Jay from the Tyrwhitt Rd Spar. How he keeps up his level of humour and sarcasm is anyone’s guess. Such a good shop that.

A nice few days really. On saturday we went on the biggest anti-war demo in british history. Possibly the biggest demo about anything in british history. “We” was me, Alex, Mod, Ben and Michele. Yes Michele came! Her first demo and what a demo it was. Everything you could ask for drummers, banners, whistles and 2 million people! Fantastic. We got to Hyde Park and spent long enough there to take a picture and then fucked off to find an empty pub. Obviously we failed and ended up sitting outside in the freezing fucking cold. However we did meet up with Toby, Petra, and Mod’s friend Justine. After following some shit advice from Ben (sorry Ben 🙂 we walked about 200 miles to find a pub that had closed down and ended up in a very poncy wine/cocktail bar in Kensington. It wasn’t all bad tho because apart from being reasonably priced they gave away plates of Nachos and we got a seat. Cool.

Since then we’ve had Tony “The right cunt” Blair changing tack and trying to convince us that the war is going to be after a humanitarian cause, and the U.S. chucking their toys out of the pram and organising sactions against Germany because of their recluctance to kill thousands of brown people in order to build a new world fascists order… Funny old world….

On tuesday I went to an Apple seminar with Dave Riddle. An interesting day, but a bit Mosley: they all wear black with small white logos on the breast and start by telling you how cool and empowering their software is. They smile and talk about how mellow macos X is..until you ask them a question….then their faces turn stony as they announce “we can’t tell you about that”. Yeah.
Here is my list of question that are guarenteed to reveal the corproate fascist lurking behind the facade of a friendly Apple salesman

• How much is the upgrade from MacOS X server 10.1 to 10.2
• Will MacOS X ever support smb (Windows Networking) for home folders ?
• I bought 10.1 and it doesn’t work, where can I download the upgrade to 10.2 where the bugs have been fixed
• I’ve been a hardcore mac supporter for 15 years but for some reason you won’t let me upgrade to your latest system…why not ?
• Your open source policy is great and I’ve spent many hours developing chunks of your lucrative system for you for free, but I can’t seem to find the source to aqua/quartz/etc – where can I download it ?
• Are there any seminars planned that don’t involve making us, your already loyal supporters, sit through your latest diabolical advertising propaganda ?

Well yes, it is a bit crap that I haven’t written since Jan 23rd. The problem is that the longer I leave writing something the more difficult it becomes to write because I know it’s going to have be quite long. This why I’m so crap at keeping on touch with people. For example, Marla. Marla is someone who I really miss, but only write to once a year. By the power of e-mail we could talk daily but we don’t. After a week of no contact with someone you realise that the next time you write it’s going to be a long, long letter and take ages to write. So you better wait until you have time to write it properly, and of course that time never comes. The longer you wait for a “suitable time” the more difficult it becomes to write. Then people think you just don’t write back because you’re an arrogant wanker. Oh dear… Sorry to Marla, Alex, Tony, Dave, Andy, Tina, Nicola (not necessarily in that order of course) and all of the other people I love but never write to. I’m just crap.
Anyway, since Jan 23rd my life has consisted of

• Being really bloody ill for a week
• Completing my Tax Return Yay!. Even though it turns out I owe the cunts a grand because of the incompetence of an account at a previous job it’s a weight off my mind
• Being depressed by the state of the world
• Being brought out of depression by crap thinks like AC/DC
• Working
• Sleeping
• Drinking and Laughing
• Being angry with Connex

Saturday will be very interesting. Never, in my entire life, have I heard the Police estimate the number of people at a forthcoming demo to be 500,000. Coupled with the fact that just about everyone I know is going makes me think that there will be millions of people there! Even Michele is coming!

And how amusing to watch the yanks and the government struggle to scare the population into agreeing with the War on Iraq (previously the war on terror). They even put a Tank at Heathrow…you sad wankers. Some poor bastard had to go on “Today” this morning and explain to Jim Naughtie what it was for. Eventually he had to admit it was totally pointless and was just there because “if Al-Quaeda were planning to drive a van full of explosives into the airport, they’d think again if they saw a tank”. Laugh I nearly shat….which would have been very bad, because I was in the bath.