Positive: You can jimmy the little plastic colour-coding rings off replacement toothbrush heads, so although none of the replacement packs in this house have blue rings, I can still be blue. Score!
Negative: Changing the head hasn’t stopped weird grey shit appearing, so it’s either coming from my toothbrush or from my teeth.
Tomorrow I have an assessment day with a London law firm. It’s the third and final hoop of assessment to jump through; although I applied to several firms, this is the only one with which I’ve got this far.
If I get the place, it guarantees me funding for two years of law school, two further years as a trainee at the firm, and, barring screwups, substantial likelihood of a subsequent job in one of the last remaining sectors where “job security” is a legitimate concept rather than a bitter joke. If I don’t, my future is in some doubt; no worse off than most of the rest of my generation, really, but rudderless and with personal debt that invites vice-like metaphors.
I’m already basically resigned to not getting it. To call the odds against me horrific is to powerfully understate the size of the mountain of corpses you need to scale for a training contract.
Wish me luck.
Today we got a letter addressed to “The Gentleman of the Household”, with the subtitle “GENTLEMEN – RESTART YOUR ENGINES”. It was from somewhere named “Nutritech”, but my guess was still Viagra. Close – it was “testosterone replacement therapy”, with a list of “symptoms of testosterone deficiency” vaguer than your average horoscope and even more slimily phrased.
I wish for days when this sort of scam was run by a chap in a shabby hat with a coatful of bottles marked SNAKE OIL. So much more entertaining :(
Clean install on my new solid-state drive. There’s a little frisson of sadness that this computer will never, ever, run quite this quickly again, but it doesn’t last long, because it boots so goddamn fast.
Last week the lovely Cantrix and myself were being INTREPID and ADVENTUROUS by going on a stomp down the country lane near her place. It wasn’t originally intended to be particularly intrepid or adventurous, but owing to the torrential rain that characterises British summers, the path occasionally turned into Passchendaele-esque mudpits or, at one point, a river. Between this and the way the path narrowed to be about six inches across through foliage taller than her, we were feeling pretty intrepid by the end of it.
On the return walk, we discovered a grizzled chap hauling a bike up the path, and he found a decent enough place in the matted nettles and brambles to stand aside for us. I thanked him for his courtesy as we passed, and he offered up friendly comments about how nice it was to see young people out and about being all healthy and stuff.
Which segued seamlessly and cheerfully cheerfully into a tirade about how much he hated fat people who remained at home. And ugly people. Also people with tattoos. And piercings. Fat ugly tattooed pierced people who didn’t go on country walks. Peppered with praise for our clearly upstanding morals and superior physical forms, based on the fact that we’d gone on a one-kilometre stroll during a break in the rain.
This Kraft durch Freude-themed lunacy continued with him deciding we were going to have good children, and bring them up right with hill walks. Tall (there’s a 13” height difference between us) attractive children! He expressed pity for our parents, because we wouldn’t visit them in hospital (I think he was implying they were in hospital for being fat and ugly) once the cars and oil ran out; these vague apocalyptic meanderings quickly gained a religious component, though fortunately, he was chilled when I said I didn’t believe in God (“he believes in you”) and I was in turn chilled when he announced that he was a prophet sent by God (he had a black eye; being a prophet isn’t easy.)
After introducing himself (John), and wishing us long and happy lives, he admonished us a final time to ignore the blandishments of people tempting us to get rings in our eyebrows by telling us they’d improve our vision, and not get roses tattooed on our cheeks.
Cheshire is weirder than I was expecting.
underneath the open sky 