Archive for April, 2009

Spotted

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Walking through the park today I spotted a middle aged bloke messing around with a rather shitty looking, orange, unbranded freestyle wheel, attempting to free-mount really really badly and seriously failing to impress his friend.

At one point he stopped his flailings to pull a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his sweaty brow. His friend took the opportunity to say “You’re doing very well.”

It’s not that I enjoy feeling superior to people, you understand. It’s just that they all make it so exceedingly easy.

My first emergency

Monday, April 6th, 2009

I finish work at 4.45. Which generally means that I’m out of the door by 4.40 at the latest.

Not on Friday.

At 4.35 a girl came racing down to the service desk asking for a first aider because there was a lad upstairs having a fit. *Sigh* And as all eyes turned to me I had to bite my tongue to stop myself saying “Does he realise what time it is?” Instead I asked what floor he was on.

Top floor. Of course.

And, of course, by the time I got up there and said ‘Yes, he’s having a fit’ and had sent someone to phone for an ambulance he’d pretty much finished. And right at the second that he started to come round in rushed a proper trained first aider to leap to the lad’s side and talk patronisingly to him until the paramedics arrived.

Not that that meant I could go. I had to stay there, standing around gimpily, until they’d wheeled him out so that I could fill in the terribly dramatic accident report form, the first question on which is ‘Has anyone died?’ 

I managed to escape at about 5pm, at any rate. And the lad was perfectly fine.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

That’ll be me then.

We decided on a trip to the cinema, with popcorn and icecream and everything. It was so retro.

It also made me feel ridiculously old. Pete forked out extra for the premium seats to stop the arthritis flaring up and make sure our bums didn’t go to sleep. And we balked at paying out twice as much again for nibbly bits so I brought a tupperware box full of popcorn in with me and surrepticiously munched my way through the film whilst Pete ate his way through a tub of Ben and Jerry’s we got on spesh from the supermarket next door. We even went so far as to kick a couple of kids out of our seats despite the fact that there were probably only about 20 people in the cinema.

Oh, and it was far too loud. And the young people down the front could have been a bit more reserved during the adverts, but other than that it was really good.

There was an adequate amount of big average-sized blue willy. And quite a lot of gory violence. Other than the ending (which was fine) the plot was exactly the same as the book, down to big chunks of dialogue and placement of ornaments on tables and the like. And the casting was very well done. We both left the cinema feeling like we’d seen most of the actors in other films, but the next day when I checked IMDB I realised we hadn’t. It was just that they looked so much like the characters in the book that they felt familiar.

Which I’d say was rather a compliment.

It got me out of the house, anyway.