27 Cheryl Cole’s tattoo Vs my new stapler!

Inspired as I’ve been by stories appearing on my e-mail ‘news’ page about who wore what where and who got a new tattoo and who cried because something they did for publicity got – publicity and who had a new hairdo / partner / dress / tantrum / argument with someone else who just got a new hairdo / partner / dress / new shade of lipstick – I decided that I should share with you the big-massive-huge news story of my week.

I got a new Stapler.

It’s not just any old stapler – it’s a long arm stapler with non-slip rubber bottom. I suspect the stapler story scoop exclusive will appear in OK or HELLO or Woman’s Own some time soon.

Sadly, much as I’d like to give my stapler the word count it deserves, this week’s post will be shorter than usual due to the juxtaposition of a twig and my eyeball over the weekend requiring a quick dash to Newcastle’s eye hospital outpatients. If this week’s blog looks a bit blurry - now you know why.

Anyway – my stapler.

Purchased on line for a mere £5.99 (plus P&P) after searching fruitlessly in the obvious stationary outlets, it arrived while I was out – thus extending the excitement, as deferred gratification tends to. With tingles of anticipation I collected it from my local post depot. Unlike Ms Cole’s tattoo it isn’t covered in roses and is blue and black  not red and black. But it has a tenuous link to my creativity. It is to be used to attach a few pieces of paper containing 13 poems which represent my first independent print of page poems, including Reduced Possibilities (formerly Forget-me-not-blue) which was shortlisted in the Bridport International Poetry Prize 17 months ago. Under the heading Other Stuff, the pamphlet will surreptitiously emerge while I’m gigging my comedy stuff in Bristol next month. I know – it’s very 1980s but if the blokes my age can start sentimentalising about how it’s better to listen to their music on vinyl – I can do a poetry pamphlet.

I don’t wish to boast about my lovely new stapler but can’t help speculating that long after Ms Cole’s tattoo has served its purpose and her fans have grown bored of it or had their cheap copies lazered off, I’ll still be having fun with my long arm, non-slip, rubber bottom stapler.

(And I got a free staple remover)

26. Library Love

No. I don’t mean ‘their eyes met across a crowded book case’ or ‘passion behind the index cards’ (do they even still have index cards?) or 50 shades of ‘keep the noise down please’. I mean I love my actual library. My ideal man would be my neighbourhood library - square, not particularly attractive, created in the 60s/70s, but full of endless wisdom, strong, reliable and reasonably calm. Perhaps not prone to flooding like my local library and not made of concrete and not closed on a Thursday (you should never stretch an analogy too far) but warm, welcoming and always pleased to see me. This may explain – partly – why I am single.

I love my library. I’m pretty sure it loves me back. Certainly the librarians would come looking for me if I failed to attend more than two days and there was no report of an outbreak of bubonic plague. It might even have to be pneumonic plague to keep me away.

As a child I once got stuck in a loop with a Professor Brain Storm book and didn’t understand why the patient librarian tried desperately week after week to get me to take out something else. But now I get it.

Often I’m there to use the computers or read the newspapers or get out a DVD (though I’ve pretty much exhausted the supply of ‘sexy young action-scientist types save the world’ and if I see one more Jane Austen adaptation I’ll have a fit). I use the loo (though not in Ashington where you need to be one of the favoured to get offered the secret loo keys!) bump into friends, research/fact find, check out which bits of my town the local planners are intending to put under tarmac next.

It’s sometimes fun to go into the children’s section to see the toddlers just getting to grips with the joy of books or ‘those’ mums screeching across the expanse “Sophie darling have you finished that Dostoyevsky?” to some three-year-old punch drink on needy parental exhibitionism. There is the guy with Tourette’s (the spelling of which was found for me by the librarian as it did not appear on word Search) who invariably sits next to me at the PC terminal or the old bloke who plonks down heavily heaving and sighing and looking round hoping to catch someone’s eye so he can give his fulsome opinion on the idiocy of technology (we all get very focused on our screens at that point as if someone just e-mailed to say Nick Clegg grew a backbone.)

And, lord love ’em, the genealogy army. They tend to storm the computer floor armed with dreadnought voices and prima donna attitudes that would shame Lawrence Olivier.  In the guise of asking for help from the librarian on duty, they announce that they need to access – whatever – to confirm that great aunty Maud was the bastard offspring of the duke of Barking’s great niece’s illegitimate great, great grandson’s neighbour. And isn’t it fascinating that great grandpa Fred was a farm hand (in Northumberland!) and used to be allowed to clear up the steaming dung heaps in Cow’s Gate upon Nowhere in 1803? Tempting as it is to roll out the family tree that my dad’s cousin did, reaching back to the Norman invasion – I don’t -I’m too modest.

The library at Berwick-upon-Tweed is a fantastic example of what libraries really are all about. Set in the most uninspiring surroundings on the upper floor of some concrete monstrosity – once inside you are in a wonderland of words and imagination, energy and intellectual light. The atmosphere sparks with creative vigour and opportunity. I once did a book launch there and have to say that it stood out head and shoulders as a positive experience – over other much more glamorous locations.

For my real idea of heaven – give me a library van. A few years ago I applied to be a library van driver. I did not get the job. They claimed it was because I lacked mechanical skills (yeah right) but I suspect they realised that, put behind the wheel of a library bus, they may not see me again for several months and I would be found somewhere in North Northumberland holed up in a lay-by with a very large flask of tea, a ‘keep-out’ sign on the door and a big smile on my face.

Libraries are the best most highly rateable ROI places provided by tax payers’ money (and yes I include hospitals – you don’t get MRSA in a library). They are one of the few institutions that are invaluable to ordinary people and provide a counterweight to – well just about everything else that consumes human energy and time in this mad, mad world.

Go to yours.

If your local council threaten to close it, stamp your feet. If you haven’t got one, stamp your feet harder. If you live in Newcastle upon Tyne or anywhere else that is threatening to close lots of libraries at a time when the have-nots are being screwed over by the haves and need more than ever, exactly the kind of access to resources and support that libraries have always given – start the revolution.

Blog 25. Currys/PC World Customer Care Ride – better than bungee jumping off the fridge!

Forget abusing your body with chemicals or the fickle quick fix of stand-up comedy, or thrill seeking on the Blackpool Pepsi Max (is it still there?). For that authentic surreal sensation or the biggest laugh of your life (albeit in a manic losing-your-sanity kinda way) or just a general mind altering experience, get down to Currys/PC World. I guarantee you’ll be off your head one way or another by the end.

Over two and a half months, I spent many strange hours in Newcastle’s Northumberland Street Currys/PC World (Dixons as was) attempting to commune with the humanoids. I don’t speak Click Click and they don’t speak Tired Parent but once it was agreed that a refund was needed, they behaved as if the notion of dealing with a customer was as alien to them as E.T’s arse.

The fiasco began with the purchase of a laptop for my daughter at Currys/PC World in Warwickshire and ended with me arriving in this particular Newcastle branch on Friday 8^th February at about 9.30a.m. to collect the agreed refund (after they admitted miss-selling the equipment). I finally got the refund at around 2.30pm. The intervening five hours - yes let me just repeat that -

F.I.V.E  H.O.U.R.S

were spent wandering round Newcastle waiting for a manager to arrive because the minions couldn’t deal with the situation even though the ‘situation’ was supposed to have been finalised days before. There always seem to be lots of managers in the shop apart, that is, from one who will sort a problem. There were some older humanoids programmed to smirk and say ‘it’s nothing to do with me’. You stand there mutely while in your head an image of them disemboweled on a bed of bleeping laptops starts to form. They are managers, yes, but not as you know them, not the sort of managers who deal with customers, at least not you.

I went to the library, had a coffee, rang them because they didn’t ring me within the hour they said they would (in fact it was over two hours when I rang them). I wandered some more. I missed the train I was meant to be catching home. By 1pm I was convinced that I was in some terrible Zombie movie and the in habitants of the shiny noisy den called Currys/PC World were eating the staff in nearby Superdrug while I steamed in Prêt-a-manger. Why did I persevere? Because it was about my tenth trip to the outlet with the same problem and I wanted above all things never to return.

One of a multitude of inexplicable hurdles seemed to be that no employee understood the concept of corporate identity; they could not cope with the idea that the equipment was purchased at a branch in Leamington and the problem had to be dealt with at a branch in Newcastle. It was as if a goat had been purchased from a plumber in Burundi and I was trying to get a refund from a dentist in Kazakhstan.

No one apologised until I pointed out that ‘maybe someone should apologise’. The poor baby triffids on the floor often looked very hurt when I suggested that none of the things they said would happen ever happened. And to be fair, the tech guys who did their best over the hours and days and weeks and months we spent together, to solve the unsolvable, were very nice.

On one sparkling occasion (after only three attempts, two cut-offs and a nervous breakdown) I got through to the magic phone number to ascertain the current state of play. I was told, in a mystified wots-ya-problem tone that the laptop had only been ‘logged in’ once. So that’s alright then. If they cook their system so that you can take an item in on multiple occasions but it isn’t ‘logged’ that’s fine. Is it their version of time warp or parallel dimension? What is to the customer a bloody waste of time, effort and frustration is one little blip to Currys /PC (Permanently Crap) World.

Sometime during the middle of month two, I was offered the chance to hand over £100 for the privilege of upgrading to a laptop that did what the first laptop was supposed to do and on which basis it had been sold. It’s a canny little ruse you have to admit and from the point of comedy it has its merits – the company benefit financially for sloppy selling.

And so I whiled away hours of my life and bus and train fare and will pay, no doubt, in reduced time on this planet because of the stress which I am sure could have been alleviated if I had screamed, sworn, hit someone or just rampaged around with a sledgehammer but hey ho – the constraints of civility.

But I did have the pleasure of a real piece of high farce, which my friend, who accompanied me for moral support and to prevent me being vaporised, was able to share. When I finally left Currys /PC (Pissed-off Consumer) World, having missed another train and wasted another day of my life, the ‘manager’ called after me. Now that the refund was done, he said, he could sort me out with a new laptop ‘if I wanted’. Bless.

~~~

Can I say a big thanks to everyone who reads my blog. I know there are supposed to be all sorts of links and gizmos on a blog but I’m sure you know where you want to go next without tips from me. I hope that by keeping the posts concise you’ll have plenty of time left to go to other less grumpy stuff you like in your perhaps-I-should-read-a-blog slot!

Thanks

Amanda J

Blog 24. Cut Foreign Aid – What a spiffing idea Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Overhearing Jacob Rees-Mogg on Radio 4 Friday Feb 1^st I wondered if someone had FF my life and it was, in reality, April 1^st.

Let aid to the poor and destitute be left to the whim of random private givers - was the thrust of Smoggy’s smug slaver.

Refraining from defenestrating my innocent radio I hesitated. What ho, this chappy Smug-Mogg has – I realised – a smattering of the grey matter mixed in with the mush mash in his privileged bonce. Where his little bit of a tired sounding spite falls off a cliff is that it doesn’t go far enough. Come on Mr. Mogg; let us go the whole hog.

Don’t reduce aid or even schmooze around the rich trying to get them to divert their precious ill-gotten pennies from off-shore accounts to dying infants, just bloody well cut aid entirely. THEN get rid of the hidden subsidies that keep down the prices of almost everything Westerners buy on a daily basis – food especially. We can afford to throw away more than 30% of the food we buy BECAUSE farmers in Africa are living on dirt. Expensive as food seems, it reaches us at a hugely reduced price. This cost gap is paid for by the exploitation of the very folk we chuck a bit of charity at every time red nose day snouts round.  

Granted the average price of people’s basic weekly shop could rise by 80 -100% depending on which figures you use. But at least those who have successfully been fed the lie that WE subsidise THEM through aid would finally GET IT in a very real way. Or rather they would get a bit less of it and those who at the moment don’t get enough will get some. Ta da!

It’s a win, win situation. More food for them, less obesity, cancer and diabetes for us.

Well done Moggy

And I apologise – I keep suggesting topics one week that will follow the next only to get hijacked by another idea. I have a bit of a backlog now and will stop flagging up potential ‘next week’ subjects. Also thanks for the big love response to the Wile-e-Coyote article last week – you crazers!

Blog 23. What is Love?

 (A lesson from the philosophical revelations contained in Wile-e-Coyote expositions)

Never mind Keats and his arrested lovers on that Grecian Urn. Forget Romeo & Juliet and their immature rebellious love, Verona’s Bella & Edward with about the same amount of blood. As for Anthony & Cleopatra, anything that ends in clasping asps to bosoms is surely not to be held up as an example to the impressionable young. No – almost every essential element of the madness and obsession of love, the unrequited pent up passion is exposed in the timeless, beautiful, lyrical interaction between Wile-e-Coyote &Roadrunner.

In philosophical explorations of the deep, spiritually complex wisdoms to be learnt from Wile-e, I do not claim (I am not that foolish) that a full appreciation of all of life’s intricate conundrums can be unravelled by this genius. Clearly Wile-e-Coyote seems never to have studied Zeno (490 – 425BC) and The Paradoxes of Motion. Nor even Ockham (1288 – 1358) who stated what now seems to be the plainly obvious – i.e. the simplest route or explanation to resolving any problem is most likely to be the truest and best. Simplicity is anathema to Wile-e’s over-reliance on Acme products. Some might argue that Acme is Trotsky to Wile-e’s Lenin, and we all know how that ended!

At some point, but not here and not today, we might wish to pin down whether Wile-e is a Hedonist or a Nihilist but I digress. It is nearly February so let us focus on Love.

Despite being a poet I make no claims for understanding love. I’ve sadly failed in that particular poetic duty to write drearily and often on the subject. My only offerings in that direction take the form of one apparently obsessive piece about language and punctuation (even though the latter is often sadly lacking in my everyday writing.) A second concerns how much I love my washing machine and a third focuses on the erotic lives of snails and appears in The Iron Anthology of Humorous Verse (2010)

But Wile-e-Coyote, week after week, episode after episode wants one thing and one thing only. Unlike the aforementioned Romeo & Juliet, Ant & Cleo or even Ant & Dec, there is no hint ever of another object of passion. While-e wants Roady and if ever there is any doubt as to Roady’s real feelings, if ever the coyote looks to be flagging or loosing heart, Roady pops up to taunt him with such an obvious chase-me, chase-me come-on it’s nothing short of blatant. Some would say cruel. Wile-e dreams and schemes, risks his health and wellbeing in the face of almost certain failure. He is solitary and lacking in anything remotely approaching pride or self esteem. He is in the clutches of, at the mercy of the deep all-consuming desire we know as love.

Wile-e is so in the zone he even channels Descartes -I think therefore I am. Undoubtedly this forms the basis for the tenuous alternative reality created by Wile-e every time he paints a false road or tunnel that Roady then actually manages to run along or pass through. Wile-e then plummets to his inevitable temporary doom as the limitations of that surrealism, which he supports for the object of his desire, collapses in on his lovelorn desire-depleted self. It is his version of love poetry showing itself mere ephemera once the target of his yearning is past.  The chase, although moving before our eyes unlike Keats’s Urn-bound lovers, is nevertheless seemingly everlasting.

We must conclude that the masters of literature have little to tell us that we could not learn in 3 minutes from a Wile-e-Coyote theatre piece.

In summary – love is an anvil on the head and going back for more!

In a future blog post we may get round to examining one of Wile-e-Coyote’s other major contributions to philosophical thinking,

Shit Happens!

For further reading on the subject of odd couples and extreme but unusual love try -

Eating the Vinyl
or

The Companion Contract

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Companion-Contract-Amanda-Baker/dp/1434320839/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344976318&sr=1-1

avail on amazon in hard copy or e-book :)

Next week – possibly

‘Thanks for holding - our agents know you are waiting!’

Blog 22. Drink Driving with my Dad (& other happy memories)

While contemplating surviving another Christmas, an evocative memory unexpectedly erupted from the depths. It was so forceful, it caused that wobbly, panicked sensation you get when you put your weight on a stepping stone which isn't as stable as you’d thought.

I close my eyes and just about smell the tobacco, plastic, damp, petrol-fumy interior of the Triumph Herald. It’s noisy inside the car and I can sense the bumps in the road through the sub frame. Outside in the night, there are smudges of sulphurous yellow from the streetlights. Otherwise it’s dark with a density made more intense by being inside this square tin can on Christmas Eve in about 1971. I’m with my Dad. Just me. My brother and sister usually don’t get to do this. I don’t know if they don’t want to (my older brother) or maybe they aren't allowed (my younger sister) but this is precious, middle child, eldest daughter Dad time.

We have just started out and it’s cold - so cold. I have that electric zing in the pit of my stomach that only a child who really believes in absolutely everything about Christmas can have. I feel I may go off like popcorn.

Mum has parcelled everything up and Dad has been dispatched with labelled bags, orders and me (a time chaperone). As if my presence will get him home quicker. Once in the car and away from the house we may as well have driven through enchanted gates to wonderland. A wonderland made of darkness, expectation and the illicit joy of an apparently purposeful journey that is bound to end in nothing but delight.

There’s no need to speak. I don’t get the ‘how to behave at other folk’s houses’ speech I would get from mum. Dad knows I know. Maybe that’s why I am allowed. I’m no better than a kid should be but I know that politeness can result in sweets and rich dark cake in the black households, mince pies, maybe a special thing off the tree in the white abodes. Quietness means you can listen in on the adults’ chat or sneak off with any other children that may be there and not be checked.

And my dad is one of those people who others are always pleased to see so arriving with him is, in itself, a treat. They invite him in. For form’s sake he initially refuses as he has other houses to visit. Sometimes I am left to wait in the car to reinforce the fiction that we do not expect to linger. Then we go in. Dad is pressed to take a drink. Again he refuses. And before I know it he is on the sofa with (if it is one of his relations or work colleagues) a canned beverage which is always poured into a tumbler before drinking or (if it is a maternal relation) subtler, heavier liquid in a small patterned glass with a pungent smell that reminds me of Christmas pudding then dominoes may appear. I have a drink and something sweet to eat or some treat that says ‘Christmas Eve food’. In the white houses the TV is usually on and in the black its music.

A while later – time that as a child I cannot possibly guess at - we return to the car. Although the cold in the car is fierce I have residual warmth inside me emanating outwards. It will keep me going until the next house.

We drive.

In the car dad will have a cigarette. I love the smell. The windows are open just a crack because of the temperature. This is different to the summer when dad drives with his right arm resting on the fully open window blowing the smoke out like – he tells me – James Dean. But I doubt James Dean’s arm turned a cruel red and blistered. Although I am brown – unlike my brother and sister but like my dad – I also burn in too much sun.

We visit house after house. Uncles and aunts, some work contacts, friends, and neighbours. No one seems to mind what time it is and towards the end I have to force myself to stay awake. My excitement is dulled a little by a slight belly ache and fatigue but the night has become no less magical.

It’s only as an adult that it occurred to me that my Dad must, on these wonderful, wonder-filled blissful nights, have been as pissed as a newt.

In case anyone misconstrues this little blog – it is not homage to drink driving and other dangerous habits. My father died an unpleasant death from lung cancer five months to the day after he retired. No. This is about magic and love and innocence. When I recalled these memories I got a tiny echo of the gut wrenching thrill of a Christmas that was special partly because of those trips in the Triumph Herald. That time was also wonderful because as kids we were not constantly bombarded with acquisition. Christmas didn't’ start in July.  We weren't surrounded all year by possessions we didn't want and hadn't asked for or stuff we did want and had asked for but got too easily.

I also had no idea how lucky I was to experience the dual tastes, smells, sounds of both a white and black Christmas. It was just different types of bliss to me.

Curmudgeon that I am (I stringently avoid most of the commercialism now), I still like Christmas in essence. There is something intrinsically pleasing about a festival that centres on joy whether you take the Christian view or the pagan one of celebrating the survival of the darkest part of the year.  I’m not unusual in resenting the commercial excess of Christmas. Back in that Triumph Herald, Christmas and the annual celebration of the rejection of darkness still had a beating heart. We were consumers then but not quite to destructive excess. Now we are devoured by Consumerism in the same way my dad was overwhelmed by cancer.

21.5 Thanks & Sorry!

A great big THANK YOU to all those who hit my blog launch last week.

Sorry to those who came to the blog this week after the press picked it up expecting to find dragons and instead got a satirical article about world woes. Just a little time lag problem!

So to be clear - if you were in search of dragony stuff and all that jazz, that was last Tuesday's blog. Just scroll down to Tuesday 8th January.

My 'brown girl' blog is posted every Tuesday.

Kind regards
Amanda Baker