Brummie Blogs October 2007

A crisis on the domestic front. With The Budgies. I knew something was wrong when I uncovered and opened the cage this morning; they didn’t immediately fly out screaming, ‘Where’s the grub? Feed me feed me feed me!’ Instead, they started fighting. I mean, really fighting and not that gobby wobbly-head stuff they usually indulge in.

It seems that Poo (who’s buddied up with Pea) now wants Pete to be his mate. Pete (who’s buddied up with Puff) wants to be Poo’s mate. Pea, on the other hand, is beside himself with indignation, rage and utter devastation.

The three of them flew round the room all day like bats out of hell, screaming and fighting on the window ledge, on all the picture frames and across the iron shelving, knocking everything over. I tried putting Pete in the hallway so they’d all calm down, but then they got agitated and started screaming for each other, so I put them all together again and they started fighting again.

Pea does not want Poo to buddy up with Pete. If he’s not trying to separate them and kill Pete, he sits watching them and crying. Really, crying. He’s so upset.

And so am I. I know they’re only birds - I’ve not tipped into the Batty Budgie Broad bracket yet - but there’s no doubting how distraught Pea is at this new development.

Puff, on the other hand, really couldn’t give a toss. He keeps getting knocked to the floor and just laboriously climbs back up the rope into the cage.

I’m thinking about therapy (for the birds, not me), some dominatrix Victoria Stillwell character to come in and firmly order my budgies to behave. Hubby would love that!

My next door neighbour is having her kitchen done. She’s been having it done for a Very Long Time. Weeks, in fact. A little man turns up late morning, saws a few things, bangs a few things, then disappears early afternoon. I’ve had a bit of trouble (as Frank Spencer would say) with his electric saw which, standing almost underneath my study window, sounds as if it has no teeth and is tearing the wood apart by sheer velocity and will power alone.

I have, once or twice, been tempted to throw my pint glass of water over his screeching electrics when he wasn’t looking, because I couldn’t hear myself think let alone work (not that I have any work … should I worry? Nah, not yet). I haven’t. Yet. But soon, if he doesn’t pack it in.

This morning when he arrived my neighbour was out at work. All was silent. Then he put the radio on.

In the middle of a tought game of Freecell, I heard this noise. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Cats fighting? Some animal being mutilated?

It was the workman. Singing in the garden. Right below my window. I’ve never heard anything like it. It was worse than any X-Factor audition. I sat in my comfortable Ikea chair absolutely laughing my socks off.

And then I made the mistake of coughing in mid-hysterics, and he suddenly realised he wasn’t as alone as he thought he was. There was an instant of heavy silence, and then he turned the radio off. And turned the screeching saw on.

[Because I have no work (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ... oh bugger it), I felt obliged to tackle the Ironing Mountain. I turned on the tv and it just happened to be on a channel showing Jeremy Kyle. I don’t normally watch this stuff and hate daytime tv, but you can’t stand at an ironing board in silence, you need something to take your mind off the agony. So I watched Jeremy Kyle, with my mouth pretty much open the entire time. I won’t go into the details of how awful this man is (the arrogance is just breathtaking), but you can read what other people think here (no, I didn’t look it up, I just came across it whilst searching for … erm … work, yeah, work).

Half way through the ironing, my neighbour came round. As he walked into the living room I frantically told him, “Oh I wasn’t watching this, it just came on, terrible programme, hate daytime tv, never watch it, never.” I turned it off, thinking Damn, Trisha was on next. I now chant, on the hour, every hour, “I will not watch daytime tv, I will not watch daytime tv … “]

Oooh, a slump on the work front - as in, there isn’t any. None at all. All week! Nothing on Monday, one on Tuesday, nothing again today.

I wore out all my adrenaline and panic reserves when I first gave up the real world, so there’s not a lot left now. Monday I thought, ‘Great, I’ll slob, probably be inundated tomorrow’. Tuesday I thought, ‘Bit bored of slobbing, I’ll do the ironing instead.’

Today, the Panic Monster lifted its little furry head and muttered, ‘Shall we panic?’

So, on my third day of Not Working, I find I’m sitting in my study, not so much perched on the edge of my seat waiting for work to come in, more too idle to move. I’m playing Freecell (my addiction of choice). I’m eating Cadbury’s Mishapes that we bought from the chocolate shop on Sunday, languidly and decadently popping them into my mouth as The Fat Monster laughs wildly and rubs its horrid hands together (I don’t even like chocolate that much, they’re just there, left over from Hubby’s Choc Fest at the computer last night).

‘Nobody will ever know that I’m sitting here playing Freecell and eating chocolates when I should be working,’ I tell myself, repeatedly, whilst popping another chocolate into my mouth.

It will, of course, be more than a little noticeable when the men come banging on the door telling me I no longer own the house.

The budgies still fight, the work still refuses to materialise. Apart from one MEGA dictation which runs for hours. Great, I thought, until I listened to it – think people in a different room to the microphone, all holding pillows over their mouths and talking in a strong foreign accent. Sigh.

Not a good day, on the whole. I’d slump into abject misery-mode, only I can’t be bothered as lethargy and worklessness are quite closely linked I’ve discovered. Decided to panic about the Lack of Work thing tomorrow. Procrastination is a wunnerful thang.

Did, however, get a template dictation. 17 minutes. 15 seconds before the end (that’s 15 seconds) my computer froze. I had two paragraphs to insert, and everything came to a shuddering standstill. My thought patterns consisted purely of expletives at that point – split expletives, joined expletives, expletives that weren’t expletives but sounded like expletives. Template now corrupted. Fark.

Whilst beating my laptop with my headphones, the phone rang. My neighbour, saying he was being video-recorded for a charity interview and would I come round. Sigh. So I went round and just made like a spare part, giving what I hoped was moral support, determined not to get involved in front of the camera in any way (I already had my answer all prepared: “No.” Just that, nothing else.).

Whilst I was in my neighbour’s, my dad came over and went into my unlocked house; he said it was like entering the Marie Celeste. As he was walking around shouting out my name, Hubby came home, so now there were two of them wondering where I was.

Hubs eventually located me and rustled noisily in the background whilst they were recording.

Later that night I got an email from one of my outsourcing companies. Could I do a dictation before 9am the following morning? I said yes, then opened a whisky bottle to drown my lethargy and misery.

Up at 5.45am this morning. 5.45. AM. The sun wasn’t even up, and my brain cells (the few that remain) had to be coaxed to life with a Very Strong Coffee.

Got the work done (rather fast, actually; I seem to type better when I’m not fully conscious, head back on the Ikea chair, lightly dreaming while the fingers clatter over the keyboard).

I'm anticipating lots of 'power naps' during the course of the day. Along with a gentle build up of panic about the lack of work. Rather worryingly, started scouring the local paper for local jobs, 'just in case'.

I’ve been saying to Hubs (poor Hubs) all week, “I’ve got no work, I’ve earned practically nothing this week, but I’m not going to panic. Oh no, not I. I’ll panic on Friday.”

Today, Friday. Panic levels are disappointingly low, I think I’m still stocking up after the deluge it suffered when I gave up the city (I could have lit the whole of the West Midlands with the force of my panic then). I did prod the Panic Monster, but it just huffed and told me to bugger right off, it was tired. And anyway, I got some work in, some big work, work I could actually hear. So I’m able to afford the staple necessities of life (Warburtons bread, Heinz beans, whisky, cigarettes) and all is well with the world.

Well, apart from the isolation. Six months I’ve been working at home now, and I’ve loved almost every minute of it … working in the garden, earning as I sit, just merrily typing away. But very occasionally I do miss people. Not a lot, not oh my God I’m so alone and lonely oh woe is me, more Hmmm, quite miss cracking jokes and making people laugh. I do see people – neighbours, friends, family – but I’m not ‘interacting’ on a regular basis. I think its starting to affect me mentally (and lets face it, the edge of that particular drop was never far away).

Take yesterday morning, for instance. Budgie breakfast. “Hello. Whistle. Hello. Whistle. Hello. Whistle.” Nothing. Not a Hi Fastfingers or How you doing today oh great mistress who feeds and cares for us. I was waiting for the kettle to boil for my first coffee (its important to note that it was my first coffee, that I’d only been conscious for mere minutes and the brain hadn’t fully booted up yet). This is what happened.

Me: “Well you lot are a barrel of laughs aren’t you. Haven’t got much to say for yourselves at all, have you. What about you, Puff? Haven’t you got anything to say, eh? Eh?”

And then looking straight at Puff, the disabled budgie, the one who can’t fly, my mouth, completely of its own accord and without any interaction from the brain matter whatsoever, starting singing. Yes, singing in my best Orville voice.

Me: “I wish I could fly, right up to the sky, but I can’t. Pete, your bit! You what? Puff, I can’t!”

As if this ‘talking for the budgies’ bit wasn’t bad enough, I laughed. At myself. At my own joke. And then I caught myself laughing and thought Oh God, I’ve lost it.

Swallowed coffee, threw on clothes, left the house. Went to dad’s, wailed, “I’m losing it!” and he said it was probably a family thing, which didn’t help.

Walked in glorious sunshine to our local shopping centre, bought things I didn’t need and couldn’t really afford and then, to add to the budgie talking crisis and dad’s dire warnings about genetic instability, I sat on the benches where the lonely people sit. And I just watched the world go by, and sat, and watched, and thought, Who says insanity is a bad thing?

Anyway, I got my act together and, refreshed and energised, I went back home, firmly walking passed the budgies saying, “I’m not talking to you, no, I’m not.”

I have recognised (because I’ve had enough time to think about it) that I have a problem (apart from the genetic instability thing). My problem is movement. Or rather, lack of movement. I sit, I type, I run up and down the stairs 20 times a day (well okay, not run up the stairs, but I can go at a fair stride, I’m not hauling myself up the banister like a bag of potatoes, not yet anyway). I’m not so much a couch potatoe as an Ikea blob. If it wasn’t for good family genes (apart from the genetic instability thing) I’d be roughly the size of a barrage balloon by now.

My mother has given me a fitness video (which I haven’t watched). My mother phones me every Wednesday morning to see if I want to go swimming (I do, really I do, but I’m just so busy). My sis – who throws herself at a cycle/pulls on walking boots/dashes to the gym at every available opportunity – is appalled at my chronic lack of exercise.

I’ll admit it, inside me - fighting for space alongside the Fat Monster, the Panic Monster and the Motivation Monster – there’s an Idle Git Monster. All my parents fault, of course. Despite the fact that I had a blissful childhood full of joy and wonder and parents who were calm and loving, they insisted that we, as mere children, innocent children, ‘go for walks’.

I can feel, even now, the sense of horror I felt when dad cheerfully said, “Let’s all go out for a walk.” He called it The Seven Park Walk, I called it Purgatory, and it consisted of seven parks all running together across half of Birmingham. Oh the misery. Miles and berluddy miles of mud tracks and grass and more grass and more mud and sometimes a stream to stare at in abject boredom. My siblings (sis, bruvver in pushchair the lucky buggerr) seemed to enjoy it; they’d look at flowers and trees and things and be all oooh and aaaah as dad told them how to identify an Oak leaf. I just didn’t get it. Pointless walking. I had growing pains to consider, penpals to write to, horses to draw, Follyfoot to watch on tv, what was all this stumbling through green stuff all about exactly.

To add to the general horror of being dragged out, when you got to where you were going (the seventh park, somewhere in Bournville), what happened? We’d all turn round and walk back again.

I just never got it. I’d say to mom, “Where’s dad?” and she’d say, “Oh he’s just gone out for a walk,” like it was a natural, enjoyable thing to do. Hmm, feeling a bit bored, I’ll go out for a walk. It’s just wrong on so many levels, but mainly, Why?

It’s not as if we lived in the countryside or anywhere interesting, we lived in Birmingham (pronounced Burmingum), lots of houses, roads, cars, people, shops. Okay, Burmingum just happens to have more parks and greenery than any other European city, but that doesn’t really appeal to a 10 year old forced to walk endless miles along a green belt admiring some stupid yellow flowers (and oh look, a tree!).

So, anyway, it put me off walking for life, this childhood abuse of my legs, my time, my energy. I’m more of an in-house, head-down, booky type of person. Breathing is a form of exercise as far as I’m concerned. Hence the fact that I have now – as a homeworker, sitting comfortably all day in an Ikea chair with a laptop and no incentive to go out there – am becoming …

It’s got to stop, I know it has. Thin bones and good genes cannot hold back the tide of chronic laziness. I’m starting to get breathless just pressing the Delete button.

The exercise regime starts here. She says, sitting here with her laptop typing “The exercise regime starts here” whilst eating toast for breakfast, sipping at her coffee and glancing idly out of the window. Tsk.

I am going to Tear Myself Away from the Ikea chair, my laptop and my room with a view, and I’m going to do something Every Day, oh yes. I’m going to make myself do exercise. The MP3 player is on charge for the walks (sigh), the exercise video is in the playing machine thingy, the swimming costume is on standby. I might even dig the bike out of the shed, who knows.

From this day on, I swear, I’ll never be slobby again. (But I’ll just let this toast land first, can’t exercise on a full stomach, bad for you).

UPDATE: I need a personal trainer, someone big and tough who'll bark orders at me and make me do 50 press ups before, during and after meals, who'll force me into lycra cycling shorts and swimming costumes, who'll ignore my wailing and sobbing and pleas of insanity and make me do exercise. Please send CVs to ...

Curry at a friend’s house last night, which was fun, the bits of it I can remember anyway.

I measure my drinks at home (because after one or two I tend to hold the bottle upsidedown for longer with each additional drink). I have an eye-bulgingly expensive measure that delivers a double shot of spirit into a shiny glass of chinking ice. No such measure tonight though, I think it was a full glass of whisky with just the merest hint of lemonade, but I drank it anyway (well, I didn’t want to appear rude).

At one point during the drunken revelry the friend’s son came into the room, took one look at Hubs (who was having a bit of a ‘power nap’) and gasped, “Is he alright?” in a Really Horrified way.

“Oh yes,” I said, slurring into my glass and burping, “Mr Narcolepsy is fine.”

He does that, does Hubs. Well, anyone who gets up at 5am in the morning is liable to drift off from time to time. I’m used to him lying there in an untidy heap, mouth open, head lying half way down his back, looking like he may have ‘passed over to the other side’, but I suppose it must come as a bit of a shock to other people. We forced him awake and the drinking/yakking/revelry continued.

I was downstairs, eating a sarnie and waiting for the lunchtime news to start on TV. I flicked idly through the channels. Well waddaya know, Jeremy Kyle was on again. Tsk.

Halfway through my sarnie, a knock at the door (Daytime TV Police?) It was the local newspaper photographer looking for my neighbour (the one who runs the charity). He wasn’t in, so she came in for a coffee.

“Oh no!” I cried dramatically, waving my hands in the air as I raced across the living room to the TV set, “Jeremy Kyle, tsk. Horrible show, never watch it. Awful man.”

“Isn’t he,” she said, and suddenly we were both talking about ‘Vile Kyle’ (like one addict confessing all to another, you feel so much better once its all ‘out in the open’).

But that’s it, no more, it has to stop. Having no work is no excuse for watching midday chat shows.

On the other hand, most of my visitors seem to turn up when there’s bird seed on the floor, washing up in the sink and Jeremy Kyle on TV. So maybe, whenever I’m feeling the need for a bit of company, I’ll put it on, toss seed all over the carpet, and just wait.

Hubs and I looked at each other the other night (not that we don’t normally look at each other, Hubs happens to be rather nice to look at, but we looked at each other in a weary oh-my-God kind of way). Talking like Michael Cain, he said, “Those Berluddy Budgies Are Driving Me Mad.”

I had to agree. Pea is still attacking Pete and trying to reclaim Poo for himself, and the noise is obscene. They’re out of control.

“Right,” said I, resisting the urge to rush upstairs and get changed into something Victoria “Dominatrix” Stillwell might wear, “I’m putting my foot down. I’m breaking them up.”

We got the small cage out of the shed, put Pea and Poo into it (they looked a bit stunned), and moved them into the hallway. We left Puff and Pete in the big cage and moved them out the back (they looked a bit stunned too). There were two whole rooms between them. They screeched for a little while and then, blissfully, we experienced a silence like we haven’t had for months (people ring us up and say, ‘What’s that terrible noise in the background?’)

They’ve clearly been given too much freedom to fly around and fight and screech, but the Big People have had enough. I’m being firm – just call me Fastfingers Stillwell. An hour’s exercise in the morning, an hour at night, in their cage the rest of the time.

Astonishingly, it seems to be working, that constant background noise of budgie bickering has stopped, just the normal odd tweet every now and again.

Hubs is still quite interested in me wearing Ms Stillwell-type cloths and red lipstick though, which is slightly worrying. I might surprise him one of these days!

October is obviously a quiet month for transcribers. Had a bit more this week than last, but not really enough. This morning was the first time I got up and had Nothing To Do. My ‘motivation’ is a bit of an idle git and does a runner at the slightest provocation, and the thought of having no work to do sent it running off into them thar hills whooping with delight.

So I thought, as I often do, bugger this for a game of soldiers. I emailed a company I occasionally do work for but haven’t committed myself to because I normally have enough from the other two. “Need any help?” I asked casually. “Yes,” came the reply, “But we need it back by 11am.” “No probs,” I told them confidently.

They sent me something at 9.30am. A 50 minutes dictation. Bearing in mind it normally takes three times the length of a dictation to type, 50 spoken minutes equated to around 150 typing minutes (two and a half hours), so I wasn’t under any pressure at all!

Got started. Phone rang. “What?” I hissed, and the caller immediately put the phone down. Minutes later it rang again, I ignored it. Then it rang Yet-A-Berluddy-Gain and I snatched it up - someone wanting an email address like urgent because they had a deadline (and why the hell didn’t I answer last time they called). Hunted down address whilst hissing into the receiver.

Glanced at emails. The other two companies had sent me work as well, so I’d gone from being bereft, just me in the study with tumbleweeds drifting idly across the laminate flooring, to being Absolutely Berluddy Bombed with the stuff.

I now, apparently, work for three outsourcing companies, and considering I’ve been pretty busy working for two the last six months, I suspect the future is going to be very busy indeed!

I wasn’t wrong. The transcribing world has obviously got its act together and deluged me with work. So had to get up at the ungodly hour of 5.30 am this morning. Will repeat that for full effect, 5.30AM. Why? Because I was going out at lunchtime.

1.15, finished the deluge. Just as my neighbour was walking down my driveway mouthing, ‘You ready?’

Went to an outdoor shop that was giving my neighbour’s charity loads of camping equipment. Another of the Gambia drivers came with us, primarily because I’d said to him the day before, “If you don’t start showing your face, I’m going to hunt you down and cause you pain.” Apparently he took me seriously because I’m apparently quite intimidating sometimes – who knew!

Got there, took pics, loaded up, sped back just in time for a ‘representative’ from a local football club to have his photo taken by the Mail because they’d donated loads of kits to my neighbour’s charity. The ‘representative’ was a footballer who honestly looked about 12, and he couldn’t been more bored if he’d tried, apathy just oozed out of him. I’ve seen dead fish with more enthusiasm.

* ‘Zonked’ – pronounced Zzzzz-on-ktt: A state of semi-consciousness, often accompanied by dribbling, incoherent muttering and a general sprawling of limp body parts across furniture.

There's nothing for Friday. I was clearly abducted by aliens today, who stole 24 hours of my life (the buggers, I wish they'd stop doing that, its really annoying).

Have a look at this instead - its an unofficial diary, so don't tell anyone about it.

Oh, and grab yerself an original oil painting done by a very talented Yorkshireman (aka Hubs the Handsome One) right here.

After this (snigger), Hubs and I drove to our local shops for (argh!) the weekly shop, we passed two little boys playing outside a house. They were about 8 years old and they were wearing children's police uniforms.

[This is a weird site. I can understand children wanting to dress up as firemen and astronauts, but a chain gang prisoner?]

I was in the living room vacuuming when Hubs shouted something through from the kitchen. I didn’t hear what he said, and carried on vaccing. Moments later, I saw a ladder wobbling passed the kitchen window. There was a moment of tum-te-tum-te-tum, and then I actually screamed out loud and let the vacuum drop to the carpet.

“You’ll kill yourself,” I cried (because I’m a wife now and, like parental paranoia, I’m obliged to say these kind of things).

He started throwing the apples down to me one at a time – I was leaping sideways for them like a professional goal keeper. Then Hubs decided it would be quicker to shake the tree whilst he was still in it. He survived, but I was clobbered by cooking apples the size of melons. Felt like I’d been mugged with a baseball bat.

So we now have loads of apples for an unbruised Hubs to make lots of apple pies for his multiply-bruised wife (I’m a battered wife!).

Which almost makes up for the dreadfully poor crop from our ravaged garden this year.

I’ve done it. Yay! I’m chronically allergic to form filling, as I suspect most people are. I’ve had one lying accusing round the study for weeks. Even worse, it was a tax form. I felt comatosed just looking at it.

Today I decided I had to fill it in before I’m imprisoned for non-payment (any tax people reading this, I’m claiming insanity for the delay and I have lots of people willing to testify to this).

Put pen to paper. “Oh my God,” I wailed, “This is sooooooo boring. Which name shall I put? [All my documents are still in my old name because I haven’t got around to filling out those forms yet either]. National insurance number, how the hell do I know?”

Spent 30 minutes searching in cupboard and drawers, of which there are many, looking for my NI number. Oh the boredom. Then I needed my P60, whatever the hell that is, so spent another 45 minutes looking for that in the same cupboards and drawers whilst muttering, “For fark’s sake!” over and over again.

Copy of passport. Oh for crying out loud! Looked in the place where the passports should be, only it wasn’t (of course it wasn’t), just my old passport with a photo of me from 20 years ago (sat and sobbed at it for a while, wailing, “Where does the time go?”).

Finally, a copy of my marriage certificate to prove there was a reason for changing my name and it wasn’t just a whim. Couldn’t find that either, and the “For fark’s sake!” got quite loud after that.

The study is now awash with scattered papers and documents. My hair is in disarray from all the pulling, my garments are rented and torn, and my eyes are all bulgy and bloodshot.

Apparently the housing market had stalled, which is why I’ve not been getting much work from my building surveyor company. Luckily, the two other companies I work for have different sources and, after the arid, tumbleweed period of the last few weeks (I’d even started looking at job vacancies in the local paper sharp intake of breath), I’m now inundated with the stuff. Which is good.

There’s obviously a knack in juggling workloads from three different sources which I clearly haven’t mastered yet, but I will, or at least I’ll go down trying (like the captain of a ship, I’ll valiantly cling on to my red-hot laptop until either its PC chip explodes or my sanity does).

Because of the housing slump, I’ve had quite a few emails from other home-based typists who are short of work, asking if I need any help. Well yes, as it happens, but not on the typing front, more on the (as House would say) neurological front, but that’s a whole other story. There’s clearly a lot of us home-workers out there. More and more people are choosing to work at home for a variety of reasons.

One of the reasons, I read in an article recently (which I can't find now), is that home-workers are home-workers because they 'couldn’t hack it in the real world'. What tosh. I left the rat race because, having climbed the ‘secretarial’ ladder up to executive PA level, I found myself surrounded by ferociously ambitious, scheming and aggressive colleagues (most of them unmarried and without children). I wasn’t intimidated by them, I was bored.

I couldn’t take all the back stabbing seriously, it was almost amusing in a dark kind of way. It wasn’t that I couldn’t ‘hack it’, I just couldn’t be bothered, it all seemed incredibly tedious and an enormous waste of energy, and also a bit childish. It’s difficult to become paranoid about other people’s salaries or job titles when you have a rather handsome husband at home promising to cook you something fabulous for dinner, or offspring coming for the weekend, or friends to gossip with about interesting stuff (like men, and men, and ... men). Bit difficult to think up ways to make other people look bad so that you’ll look good when you’re perfectly content with what you’ve got.

Office politics is just too dull for words. There’s no fun in it. I couldn’t see the point (apart from making every working day like an episode of some awful soap opera, spare me).

And there was also the whole daily commute nightmare, which pretty much swung it.

I’m still being offered jobs in the city for eye-watering salaries, but I’ve been there, done that, and it bored me to tears. I work at home not because I couldn’t ‘hack it’ in the real world, but because it wasn't the real world, it was a tediously insular and self replicating environment created by people who didn't actually have a life outside the office. I work at home because contentment is infinitely more important than salary, making someone laugh is much more satisfying than making someone cry, and because I like my life and have no desire to change it or myself.

Up at 6am this morning to get through my workload because I was off galavanting again at 10. This time to the NEC (which is always further away than I remember, I mean, is it even part of Birmingham?). With my neighbour. To pick up a satellite communications box a company are lending us for the Gambia Drive.

Got there, walked miles from the car park, stood outside the halls where they were having a show, and rang the bloke. No answer. Again. No answer. Again, left a message for him to call me, and just hung around (me thinking, ‘What if he’s changed his mind?’ in a really panic stricken way while my neighbour looked at me wondering if he’d changed his mind in a really panic stricken way).

Eventually he rang back. There was a moment of huge relief, immediately followed by excruciating embarrassment of the hole-open-up-and-swallow-me kind. I don’t have my own mobile phone any more – don’t need one – so Hubs had loaned me his.

Unknown to me, Hubs has a ringtone on his phone that, to the very loud sound of a siren, screams, “WARNING! IT’S THE WIFE! IT’S THE WIFE!” over and over again at about 137 decibels.

And, because the phone was unfamiliar, I couldn’t figure out where the ‘answer’ button was to make it stop. So I just stood there, in a hall full of people all staring wide-eyed at me, randomly pressing buttons and hissing, “Shut! Up!”

I hit the right button, eventually. The man asked where we were so we could meet up and ‘hand over the package’. I said, “Did you hear that horrible ring tone that everyone was laughing at?” He did. “That was me.”

My neighbour had persuaded a local store to give us a discount on a load of stuff for Africa. Today, we went to the store to choose what we wanted (pens, pads, etc.). I was quite looking forward to it, imagining it to be a kind of supermarket trolley dash. I wore my trainers and was ready to throw out an arm along shelves whilst skidding down aisles.

It was actually quite boring (as most shopping is). Deprived of a trolley, we strolled around making a list of what we wanted. “Just make a note of the item code,” the store manager (with a handshake like a marshmallow) told us.

Seemed simple enough. Except the codes were this big. Me and my neighbour stood in front of things, squinting and tilting our heads from side to side saying, “Does that look like a 7 or a 4 to you?” When blindness threatened to overcome us, I just wrote down the item description with handy pointers like ‘The one with the red cover.’

We went to The Pound Shop afterwards, just so I could run my arm along the medical shelves (very satisfying, although it took ages to pick up everything off the floor afterwards so might strategically position a basket underneath next time).

I did a terrible dictation today. It was clear, but every other word in it was a medical phrase: cutaneous, Xenograft, multiple hematologic malignancies, miloid metaphasia. I had to scroll up and down huge Powerpoint presentations looking for word spellings, it was like transcribing a foreign language and it took flipping ages.

Hacked off by the time I finished, I emailed it back to the outsourcing company saying, “Well this was not fun! Can I charge extra?’

I replied: “I don't know, what do you normally pay to someone who is now chanting 'cutaneous miloid metaphasia' and dribbling a great deal after wading through medical presentations about tumours, cancers and Xenograft models?!”

They replied: “To be honest, you’re the only one who has ever asked for extra.” Which had me laughing my socks off, that I’d dared to ask for more (please, miss, can I have some more?) But they offered me an extra 4p per minute.

I replied: “I'm merely seeking compensation for the loss of sanity incurred. 4p is fine, I can treat what remains of my sanity to a bit of bubble-bath and maybe a telephone consultation with a therapist.”

Hubs and I have both been busy the last few weeks, work-wise and charity-wise. We needed a night to just veg and yak without interruption (not that we mind interruption, but sometimes you just want to shut out the world and recuperate).

So I tested out my visitor theory. I vacced up the bird seed, dusted, made sure the sink was empty of dirty plates, did a general tidy of the weeks accumulated debris, and put on smart clothing.

On Monday I’ll be researching the same theory that, when the house looks like its been ransacked, I get an almost constant stream of visitors. And on Monday that’ll be fine.

I have a difficult decision to make. My birthday is fast approaching (its been approaching with increasing speed for the last few years, which is really annoying). The decision I have to make is: what age shall I be this year?

No of course I never admit to my real age, I’m a laydee, it’s in my genes to compulsively lie about the number of years I’ve been on the planet. But I’ve been 37 since I was, well, 37. I think its time I upped the stakes a bit in order to remain in the realms of reality. True, I don’t get many people raising eyebrows, widening their eyes and gasping, “You’ve got to be berluddy joking! 37?” But then I don’t tell many people how old my children are (because I can’t, myself, believe how old they are, or how impossibly young I was when I started having them).

We were watching some diabolical programme last night (because it was veg night, and because we couldn’t be bothered to search for the remote controls to change channel, or indeed move ourselves to get up and do it manually, not that we even know how to do it manually). Pete Burn’s PA (which is utter bollocks) A potential candidate was introduced as being 23. Hubs and I, even in our lethargic slob-fest, fell about laughing. “23!” Hubs cried, tears running down his face, “She’s 40 if she’s a day!”

She did look 40. Definitely not 23. Hadn’t been anywhere near 23 for a long time. And that’s what got me thinking. I don’t want people rolling about on the floor with tears running down their face when I say, as I’ve said for years, that I’m 37.

Should I venture into 40s territory or adamantly refuse to leave the 30s period?

As some of you know, my sense of dress (along with my sense of smell) is almost non-existent. Well, not almost, it doesn’t exist at all. I’m bereft, completely devoid. I either missed out on that particular lesson at school, or the molecules that make up the olfactory area are closely linked with the fashion molecules, neither of which I have.

Yes, I’ve been smart at work. Smartish, anyway (I’m sure the fuzzy pin-stripe suit look will be very ‘in’ at some point). Wearing suits is like wearing a uniform, you don’t have to think about it (or maybe that was my problem), you just put it on, hope for the best, and leave the house. If anybody points and laughs, you just go back and change; repeat until you look like a member of the human race.

I don’t wear suits now that I work at home. I wear ‘comfortable’ clothes (no, not jogging outfits, God forbid). I just put my hand in the wardrobe and wear whatever comes out. My wardrobe could be described as eclectic. Or insane. Nothing matches.

Consequently, when I went downstairs for a coffee a while ago, I caught myself in the hallway mirror, and I actually stopped dead in my tracks and grimaced. A woman with zero dress sense actually stared at herself in the mirror and said (out loud, in horror), “What the hell are you wearing?”

My favourite long, brown-check, cotton skirt. Red and white striped shirt underneath an aqua coloured v-neck jumper. And just to complete the whole ensemble (and because it was cold in the study this morning), knee-length, purple socks with black spots.

Yes, this really is my hallway. Yes, that's really me. Yes, those are really my everyday clothes.
I'm can't decide if 'the look' is fabulously quirky, or just desperately sad, but suspect the latter.

I’m putting it off. I’m procrastinating like crazy. I’m turning a blind eye and pretending its not happening because I know what the consequences are if I acknowledge it in any way.

Picture this. I get up in the morning and go straight into the study to turn on the laptop. Then I go downstairs, whistle a bit (because I can’t sing and because I like to let the neighbours know I’m up that this ungodly hour), fill the kettle, whip blanket off budgie cage (that wakes them up fast I can tell you), feed them, water them, encourage them to whistle/talk/sit on my finger (no response), make coffee, haul carcass back upstairs into study just in time to find it loading up the desktop.

I click on Explorer, then go and get dressed, make bed, look in mirror and think, ‘How old do I look?’, stare in mirror more closely, step back and view from every angle possible, then go back into study, just in time to see Explorer loading up.

Click on My Folders and drink coffee, stare out of window, light a cigarette (I know, I know), stare out window some more, view bookcase to see what book I might want to read next, drag laptop onto lap just as My Folder opens.

Honestly, I could carve transcripts into granite using a blunt chisel faster than this laptop works. I primp and coddle it, keep it company all day, fed it RAM, defrag, delete, run scandisc, download updates, get rid of unwanted programmes, set memory to argh!-size, clean it, love it, swear at it, and still its like a slug on Valium. I can feel myself aging (not that I’d ever admit to my actual age) as I wait for a Word document to open.

I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get it over and done with. I don’t want to tempt fate and type what I must do on this laptop in case it takes the huff and spits out its PC chip just to spite me, but it involves (typing slow and quiet now) PC World and a credit card (shhhhh).

The shop where we wrote down all our requirements last Thursday have rung twice to say they have everything in stock and it’s ready for collection. So me, my neighbour and the son of the Vice President of Gambia (who flew over yesterday and hasn’t stopped shivering since) went to collect it.

Except it wasn’t ready at all. There was some stuff in a carrier bag and some stuff in a box, most of which wasn’t the stuff we’d written on the list (I mean, who needs 124 metal pencil sharpeners?). The girl behind the counter said she’d go and look for the rest of the stuff ‘upstairs’. I think she actually went home, had a good cry, nipped into the hairdressers and did a bit of shopping before she returned.

The girl did eventually return, clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown (so I held back on the, “Good God, woman, we’ve been here nearly an hour! Give us our stuff so we can continue with our lives!”).

The stuff wasn’t ready at all. The girl said she’d go round the store and collect everything for us. I held back on the, “Why couldn’t we do that in the first place!”

Clearly on a sadistic roll, neighbour took us to a warehouse that was nowhere near Birmingham to buy more African supplies. The place was huge. My facility for shopping was running on empty at this point (like my laptop battery, it only has a lifespan of less than an hour). They sold beds at this warehouse and I threw myself down onto it, groaning heavily, which at least cheered up the other shoppers (“Oh look, a bored woman making a fool of herself and not caring.”). They also, because it’s nearly Halloween, sold five foot tool rubber mummies. Yes, mummies of the Egyptian kind, all squishy and wubbewy. Bored beyond description, I hauled one into my arms and asked it if it wanted to dance. The other shoppers skirted round me nervously.

The nightmare season has arrived. I know this because I’ve been waking up every morning for the past week (a) anxious because of the insane thoughts going round in my head, and (b) absolutely knackered.

I toss and turn all night, waking up at almost hourly intervals and drifting in and out of consciousness, hence the proliferation of the weirdest dreams. A psychiatrist would have a field day interpreting the stuff going on in my head and would no doubt have me committed: sis (who’s a midwife) coming to visit with a black baby in a mug (yes, a mug), standing naked in the middle of the city centre (have that one a lot), climbing up the skeletal remains of a high building (looking for the loo), meticulous dreams about all the things I’ve got to do for the charity drive, meticulous dreams about all the things I’ve got to do in order to earn some dosh (yes, I dream about typing), and ex-hubby saying he’s moving in and present-hubby has to move out (scariest of the lot!).

I tell ya, I’m a nervous wreck by the time I crank open the eyelids (revealing horrified and bloodshot eyes).

Worked 12 straight hours today trying to clear up my worload. That's 12 straight hours, from 7am until 7pm, with no break.

Took our Gambian friend to the Birmingham Mail offices in the city centre for a quick interview. Hubs managed to find a parking space right outside the building, and then nearly had a coronary when he bought a parking ticket. All we heard for the rest of the day was, “£3 for an hour? £3 for an hour!”

Then, because we were 'looking after him' for the day while our neighbour was at work, we took our Gambian friend for a bit of English history … Warwick Castle.

Got there and drove miles through car parks, which consequently meant we had to walk miles to the Castle entrance. I’d forgotten it was the school holidays, so there were millions of screaming, yelling, stropping children all over the place, and the queues were massive – cue for tickets, cue for coffee (and then the wait for the coffee was like waiting for the end of the world to arrive), queue to get in, queue for food (as it was lunchtime). Everything was in slow motion. A demonstration of the English longbow started late (but was good), then we took our Gambian friend up the tower bit, listening first to a dire warning about the 530 triangular shaped steps we’d have to climb and not to attempt it unless we were at the peak of human fitness. A doddle.

I first climbed the tower thingy 23 years ago when Middle Son was a baby. I’m still not sure quite why I was carrying the baby instead of ex-hubby, but we won't go into that. Up steps I couldn’t see because I was carrying a baby and, worse, coming down steps still unable to see because I was carrying a baby. I think that was one of the first times I ever experienced real fear (that, and the time Middle Son nearly threw himself off a turret at Dudley Castle … we’re clearly not very good with castles).

This time, up we go. And up. And up. And up. How tall was this tower thingy exactly? It reminded me of a story from an Astounding Stories comic I’d read as a child, of a Baddie man in a trilby hat running up steps and then, deciding he’d never get to the top, stared to run down again, only there was no end, up or down. Yep, felt like that. But I could hardly show myself up in front of our Gambian friend by screaming, “I can’t do it! I’m going to die! I think I’m having a heart attack!”

They say the tower is haunted. Probably by the ghosts of tourists who have perished on the staircase.

With my legs burning, my heart pounding and my lungs on fire, I reached the top, throwing out both my arms to haul myself out into daylight gasping “Oh my God!” I was puce, I was sweating, I was so getting myself a personal trainer the minute we got home.

Yep, view, view, view, and down again, Hubs putting on the light on his mobile phone to stop me whingeing about not being able to see a bloody thing and we were all going to die.

Queue for the state rooms, being startled by waxwork models who weren’t actually models but real people (“And this is how they dyed wool.” “Jesus Christ woman! You scared the living daylights out of me!”), pushing our way through screaming, yelling, stropping children.

Apart from the walk back to the car afterwards. “I’ll wait here,” I kept saying, throwing myself down on a log or a bench, “You come and find me in the car. If you can’t find me, just leave, save yourselves.”

Hubs hauled me ever onwards, with our Gambian friend laughing because he thought I was joking (I wasn’t, I was ready to throw a strop right there on the ground my feet hurt that much).

Personal trainers who can tolerate vast amounts of whingeing and crying, get in touch.

Have not had a chance to post the last few days. It’s all been rather frantic! Work has picked up, and then there was the Gambian arrangements which completely went into overdrive (no pun intended). Rushing here, there and everywhere, trying to find time to go to the loo or actually eat something in between the phone ringing, the emails arriving, and five men coming to the house at various times. It’s been manic, it’s been tense, it’s been jolly good fun.

But mostly it’s just been exhausting.

I am, to put in bluntly, berluddy knackered. But as I sit here, hastily stuffing food in my mouth and ignoring all the emails and the phonecalls (argh, the phonecalls!), I finally have time to ‘go over’ the events of the last few frantic, hectic days.

Today, the men-types started packing the cars. It was all very random until I got hold of some bright yellow labels and a marker pen so they’d at least know where to find food or plasters if they need them.