{"id":595,"date":"2005-07-17T21:35:22","date_gmt":"2005-07-17T21:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/in-the-beginning\/"},"modified":"2005-07-17T21:35:22","modified_gmt":"2005-07-17T21:35:22","slug":"in-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/in-the-beginning\/","title":{"rendered":"In the beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently I&#8217;ve had a week off. I know because of the calendar. It feels like I just left work this afternoon and now I have to start a new job tomorrow. Owing to the fact that all <strike>personnel<\/strike> HR departments, in all sectors, appear to suffer from the same level of bollocksness, I have no idea where or what time to start work tomorrow. So I&#8217;m going to turn up at 9am and just hope it all works. To be honest I&#8217;m cool with such lax arrangements at a place of work. And what&#8217;s the worst that can happen &#8211; a sacking ? Hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Last night was great despite being quiet. On second thoughts, perhaps it was great <i>because<\/i> it was quiet. Quality time with Michele, Humph and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nouvellespice.co.uk\" target=_\"top\">top curry<\/a> is just what I needed. Even the TV looked promising; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0265666\/\" target=\"_new\">The Royal Tannenbaums<\/a> was scheduled and I&#8217;ve always wanted to see it. The IMDb reviews are quite peculiar because they are either full-on raves or bile-filled rants with no-one sitting on the fence. I&#8217;m delighted to announce that I&#8217;m firmly in the hate camp. Not loathing, that&#8217;s reserved for Peter Greenaway films, but &#8220;anti&#8221; nonetheless. As my dad observed, &#8221; I kept waiting for it to start&#8221;.<br \/>\nNone of the things we were promised were present, for example &#8220;humour&#8221;, &#8220;darkness&#8221;, &#8220;insight&#8221; or &#8220;being interesting&#8221;. We gave up after about forty-five minutes because we were diverted by watching Michele&#8217;s nail polish dry.<br \/>\nLater, out of desperation rather than insight, I put C4 to watch <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0188453\/\" target=\"_new\">Birthday Girl<\/a>. Despite being obvious Hollywood crap (I mean it&#8217;s got Nicole kidman in it FFS), might provoke some interest. What I got ,after some investment in time, was a well acted, clever little comedy drama that kept me glued (give it half an hour before you turn it off).  And Nicole Kidman turns out to be a really great actress too. Well bugger me.<\/p>\n<p>Afterwards, as I was wallowing in post-movie thought, there was an urgent knock at the front window which nearly caused my heart and rectum to panic. I looked out to see an old, old friend that clearly wasn&#8217;t there because he lives on the other side of the country. As my legs started to crumble beneath me, I looked again, and he was waving! Oh Jesus, is this it ?<\/p>\n<p>Naahh&#8230;.Steve Harper was really there, together with Pete and Bill from down the road. He&#8217;d come up for the weekend and was kipping there the night. So, the least I could do was invite them in for a chat and that&#8217;s what I did. The most I could have done was to offer them some tea\/wine\/etc but, being crap and still stunned I didn&#8217;t. Sorry Guys.<\/p>\n<p>And so, to bed (via an episode of The Sweeney I taped earlier).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently I&#8217;ve had a week off. I know because of the calendar. It feels like I just left work this afternoon and now I have to start a new job tomorrow. Owing to the fact that all personnel HR departments, in all sectors, appear to suffer from the same level of bollocksness, I have no [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}