Get up to much this weekend?

I haven’t written a great deal lately. I think it’s because it’s dry January and perhaps the odd tipple lends me an edge of grumpiness that sobriety simple can’t muster up. Or it could be because I’m lazy. Or it could be because I haven’t had many moments of inspiration so far this year. By moments I mean a sudden thought that urges me to sit down and vent spleen for 2 hours, largely for my own benefit since this blog has a readership of 3. And there lies another problem. In the long haul I’d actually quite like to make a bit of a living from writing but I’m one of those people who hasn’t quite got the chutzpah to throw himself out there and take a risk. Just reading that back makes it look like this is going to be a one-sided group therapy session which is not my intention, so I will revert back to my original idea for today, which is to just go on the BBC News site and find a few stories of people being stupid. Maybe this will get me going again and then by the time I hit February I’ll be on fire and before you know it I’ll still be doing the same old job I’ve being doing since the start of the millennium – an ageing rent boy to the board members of Glaxo Smithkline.

To set the scene I am sitting at the dining table with my computer perched on the edge as we are using most of the space for a big 1000 piece puzzle, a new hobby to keep us sharp and occupied during this darkest of months. Next to me is a little pile of music which we (mainly me) indulged in last night; Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris, The Herbie Hancock Box from my brief hoovering stint, Humble Pie Live at the Fillmore, a compilation of 70’s German electronic music called ‘Deutsche Elektronische Musik (my German is quite rusty so I don’t know what that means), Station to Station by David Bowie (have you tried it yet?) and Sticky Fingers by the Stones. On the stereo now is Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young live in 1974. I think you’d agree my music taste is both fresh and cutting edge. Mind you I bought everyone’s favourite album of 2015 – To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar last week and I have to say I’m struggling with it. This may be because I’m about as ‘from the ghetto’ as Mark Ronson but I just don’t feel the need to lick rappers arseholes as much as he does to give himself credibility. Chris Evans rather carelessly claimed Uptown Funk to be one of the best songs EVER yesterday. He is very wrong of course; it’s non biodegradable, turtle choking plastic un-funk for white people who only know one James Brown song because it’s been used in a popular advert. For viagra. I don’t know much about much but I do know a fair bit about good music and whatever Uptown Funk is, good music it is not. Mind you I wish I was getting the royalties but still, don’t be conned into liking something just because it gets played a lot. Otherwise the song from the Filippo Berio adverts would go to number one. Filippo Berio, Filippo Berio, Filippo Berio, Filippo Berio and so on.

Bugger, that’s over 500 hundred words and I haven’t even looked at the BBC News website. Coffee has been poured and my ‘the wife’ has joined me at the table to distract me with observations and questions about things I have scant or no interest in, though I’ll still nod and smile at the right time. That’s love for you. For lunch I have had a couple of spoons of Haggen Daz and a big dose of squirty cream and mini marshmallows on my coffee. I must book myself in for an artery scrape. In the kitchen ‘the wife’ has been grilling red peppers to make chutney, another cooking stealth mission that I knew nothing about until it started and handily commenced just after I had finished the washing up and made the place tidy. It is these gracefully, balletic interactions that make our marriage beautiful yet perpetually balanced on the edge of quarrelsome distraction but today I don’t think anything will spoil our domestic bliss, provided we go to Pizza Express before we watch The Revenant, with Leonardo DiCaprio portraying someone in a soup kitchen queue on the outskirts of Inverness.

The cat has been doing her rounds today, looking for love and attention and being given, respectively, too little and too much by nasty me and ‘the wife’. She tends to avoid me as much as possible unless I’m in a hurry to get to work, in which case she spreads herself on the second to top stair thus giving me a moral choice, which, when it eventually goes the wrong way may have serious repercussions on the livelihood of her big fluffy and very inviting tail. I realise I said hurry to get to work but that has never been the case, I just hurry to beat the traffic, to get to work as early as possible so I don’t feel bad when I hurry to leave work as early as possible. It’s not that I hate my job or anything, it’s a job that I’m perfectly competent at and which, on a good day, I’d like to think I’m actually actively good at, plus I’m blessed by having a lot of chums that come with it, which is the best you can say for being an in demand rent boy I guess.

‘The wife’ has returned from a red pepper reconnaissance update and is now cheekily ploughing through the puzzle at an alarming rate, all the while claiming that she’s ‘just doing a couple of bits’. Of course this leaves me with three options; ignore it, cruelly rip up the work in progress in a tantrum of puzzle jealousy or park this bit of writing and join her in a competitive frenzy and kick her arse, in a jigsaw sense of course. Frankly she needs putting in her place (that’s an unintended but rather good jigsaw pun, don’t you think?) for the red pepper infringement, the large cook book that has just been delivered to our door and for bringing into my life a cat so hairy and evil that our hoover actually scuttles into the shadows when she scowls past it. I’ve made my choice, sorry I didn’t get to look at the news, but there’s always another time and I reckon by the time the weekend is over someone else will have said something else really worthless about black people not being represented by the Oscars. To my calculation the Oscars haven’t make a good or original or worthy choice since about 2007 at best, so if I were a black actor of either gender I’d be quite pleased to not be nominated for an award which means nothing, voted for by people with no taste. Just remember that Forest Gump won an Oscar for being ‘the best film’. Very funny indeed, you nearly had me there.

G B Hewitt. 23.01.2016.

PS, Sorry last night’s post was so ropey, grammar-wise. I just couldn’t be bothered, Celebrity Big Brother was appallingly crap yet utterly gripping. Oscar worthy probably.