One Woman Goes To ....

7 Things

7 things I have learnt since not working

My road is on the learner circuit. Cars or motorbikes. They all inch their way slowly along. For me my road is just my road. For a leaner driver is it somewhere they dread ? In turning right from the main road and setting off between the parked cars do they share the same improbable hope ? To make it to the bottom before meeting something coming in the opposite direction. Is my pleasant tree lined road their private shiny steel funnel of fear ?

If I don't have anything in for lunch there is no sandwich shop just to pop out to. I have to rustle up. As I sit down to my plate of fish fingers,baked beans and glass of orange squash I contemplate when last meal comprising one primary colour was.

I find something companionable about having the doors and windows open and hearing my neighbour unload her dishwasher as I am loading my washing machine. It's a more comforting version of hearing keyboard clatter from the next desk.

I need change to feed the coin slot at the library for photocopying. I decide I can recoup my outlay by staying on and reading the newspapers and magazines for free. However I am distracted by wondering about the man at the next table who is digesting world events with his cycle helmet still on and by experimenting with how loudly I need to drum my fingers to wake up the man opposite whose snoring is creating decibel discord. Fairly loudly. I also need to perfect a posture of engrossment that gives no sign that it was me drumming and him snoring.

I suffer dog envy. When I see someone walking their dog I scrutinize them for clues to see if I can work out what it is about them that has enabled them to arrange life so that they can own a dog. I never solve the puzzle but that doesn't stop me from running different dog owning scenarios through my mind.

It annoys me that the post isn't delivered until after 10.30. As when I was working I wouldn't have got the post until the evening when I got home and as that worked just fine I realise that this is not something to get annoyed about but still can't help it. I am then also annoyed that being annoyed about something that doesn't matter is a sign of the early onset of Meldrewism. This gives me something greater to worry about than what time the post arrives. Naturally I find this annoying.

In answer to the quesion 'what have you done today?' , my mind freezes and I can't remember what I have been doing to fill the last 5 minutes let alone the past 8 hours. On reflection I realise that this was the same at work but then you could always say 'in meetings' and that seemed to suffice.

So long...

As a family we have never been good at goodbyes. Even the final ones. As the only other member of my family, along with my father, at my Grandmother's funeral ( she wasn't a woman's woman and in our high female count - pets included - family, her 'hadn't fallen out with' contingent was low) I had taken in his black tie and black arm band but what I wasn't expecting was for him to break into a military slow step as we progressed into the chapel. I felt like a poor show on Strictly. Fiona Phillips to Dad's Brendan Cole and it completely threw me.

That and preparing the tea for afterwards knowing that my Grandmother was a stickler. I have an ornament of hers and when I look at it now I can recall the dilemma of preparing tinned salmon for the sandwich filling and because I was vegetarian, of not being able to check if it tasted ok. And feeling that I had let her down on all fronts.

So when over the past few weeks at work various of us have, as a result of changing structures, taken leave of our jobs and each other it has been reassuring to see that I am not alone in goofing the goodbyes.

Some people are naturals. Their goodbyes seem to promise so much. You mistily imagine future reminiscings and friendships until you recall, that to date, even travelling 2 floors in the lift together, has been a journey of Carthusian silence.

Others I feel much more akin with. A bit of shuffling, loose limb swinging and Ta-Ra Tourettes and I know we are both going to make a hash of it but at least it's a shared effort.

Could this be why we have all taken like canards to water at the kissing game ?

Now we plant our stiff upper lips on each others' cheeks and if we get a bit confused and don't know if it's one kiss or two or if we should touch or air - well that's not actually our fault. It's the fault of those from whom we acquired this practice, for not laying down consistent rules of engagement.

What counts as a cake - Bath, Eccles, Dundee - is fine to be left to regional say so. But with something as potentially rife for an etiquette blunder as physical contact with others, regulations are a must. So although not our oversized tote in general we are now comfortable signing up to it. For precisely the reason that it gives us something we were not responsible for, to be uncomfortable with. A sort of 'I'm doing this even though my P's and Q's handbook didn't cover it'.

Are we all now adept at lip syncing our way through kissing ?

Which having worked it all out allows me to say goodbye for a few weeks as I take a blogging break.

Something Fishy

A long day and a long journey home. 2 tubes, 1 train, 2 buses and none of them counting to my 5 a day. The final bus stops just past the fish and chip shop. One day I will write a smug entry on how it takes less time to make a delicious supper than it takes to wait till the pizza moped has mounted the pavement umpteen times before working out which house to deliver to and decoding helmet speak to work out how much I owe.

But tonight is not that night. Tonight will be a brown bagged meal that will be on a plate, ketchup on the chip side and HP on the sausage and fishcake side, my fork feeling its way to spearing a chip before even the eco bulb has warmed up. I am a fishcake fancier. It doesn't matter whose they are. I've done high end tucking in at Le Caprice and Langans, middle market at a glut of gastro pubs and plenty of entry level eating at the Fish Bar at the very reasonable price point of 80p a pop. I like them all.

However one thing I am firm on. Fishcakes should come in pairs, maybe it's the same principle which dictates that one goldfish in a bowl looks lonely where as two look companionable. And I don't like one large cake - to me that's the deep fat fryer equivalent of one bowl resident gobbling the other. Fishy cannibalisation is not prettier on bone china than in a glass bowl. But when it comes to fishcakes my local fish and chip shop doesn't go in for shoals. One warming cabinet, one cake is their policy. This doesn't stop me from peering,hoping maybe one has gone astray, hightailing unnoticed to network with the saveloy. Unfruitful peering is followed by asking how long another will take. The answer always - 5 to 6 minutes.

At this point I have to wrestle with the dilemma I know will now follow. As surely, as to quote one of the fishier philosophers of modern times, the gulls will follow the trawler. It is at this moment that Gillian Mckeith will appear to me. To be visited by Cantona and Mckeith simultaneously in a surburban chippie is surely only going to lead to being asked wrapped or open by Elvis.

But it's because I now don't want to wait for a fishy twin and I want to substitute a battered sausage as a companion to my lone cake. Gillian appears standing amongst a lot of piggy pieces that she has thrown on the floor, most disturbing of which is one with its eye still intact, complete with very long eyelashes that look as it it spent its last minutes on this earth busy with its Shu Uemura eyelash curlers. If I really wanted to throw the party wide open HFW would appear and talk to me about the cruelty of intensive pig farming but Gillian is too shouty and has by far the better props to allow for this so he will have to wait until I am next shopping in Waitrose and then it will be free range all the way.

I did once make something out of Quinoa and it was inedible so I know the blonde shouty one not always to be right so I stand my ground ignoring the winking pig at my feet and before I know it the sausage is nestling alongside the cake on a bed of big fat chips, being simultaneously annointed with salt and vinegar.

I have often thought of broaching the idea with my fryer of upping his cooked stock to two cakes at a time and so eliminating the invisible queue of Beautiful Mind extras building behind me but I am too fearful that my idea might be greeted with the same incredulity that the rest of us might greet a billionaire type story of eccentric extravagance.

Watch this space for that smug, store cupboard standby supper.