July 10th - July 16th 2006
Sunday Getting shirty
Saturday Lambeth County Show
Friday B&B'd for Brighton
Thursday Deathtolls: Mumbai
Wednesday Postman's Park
Tuesday Koon Beauty
Monday Deathtolls: Irkutsk
Sunday 16th July
Hot, or what?
Not that I've had the chance to experience it: with cruel irony, management have chosen this month - our one traditionally relaxed period of the year - to throw us into a bubbling maelstrom of new designs.
Meaning that I rarely get to get home before 3am. Meaning I spend most of the hours of daylight sweatily prone beneath the duvet. Meaning I am not a happy bunny.
But look on the bright side: at least the savage air-conditioning to which we are subjected, designed with vicious logic to compensate for the body-heat of several hundred daytime workers who, hello?, tend not to work at night, has given up the battle to freeze our blood, and it is at last possible to wear just a t-shirt into work without freezing one's tits off.
Not that that stops me carrying in a thick crumpled shirt, just to be on the safe side. And not that that didn't come in handy when a colleague, having forgotten to pack her pashmina, sat shivering miserably at her desk, pleading for the loan of an extra layer of clothing.
Last time that happened, my shirt was returned smelling very faintly of some ultra-feminine perfume, which I rather liked.
This time she forgot to take it off at the end of the evening. When I asked about it, she swore (in a most unladylike manner) and admitted she'd left it at home.
I expressed the hope that it would return smelling even more strongly of Woman; she said, fat chance, her entire room was already beginning to exude the faint aroma of beer and cigarettes.
Think of it as a free visit to The White Swan, I told her, omitting to add that if she woke up to find a 19-year-old rent boy fighting with a twelve stone lesbian at the end of her bed, that would be her problem.
Saturday 15th July
Lambeth County Show, Summer 2006
Friday 14th July
Brighton Pride every year: fabulous.
Getting to Brighton Pride every year, rising early, trying to establish contact with friends in vain attempt to travel down together, standing up, on a hot crowded train: not-so-fabulous.
Getting back from Brighton Pride every year, tired, drunk, sun-struck, on a ridiculously early last train out of town, crammed to the gunwales with whistle-blowing drug-rambling queens and dykes, like a gay evacuation of Saigon, stopping at every station on the way, which is just as well because that's the only chance you'll get to move closer to a much needed toilet, but still getting into town late enough to miss the last tube: not fabulous at all.
Which is why, after not inconsiderable difficulties, I have this year booked myself into bed-and-breakfast accommodation for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.
Friday, so that I can cruise down the night before Pride in relative serenity. Saturday, so that I get a chance to experience the much-praised street party the day after Pride. And Sunday, because..it seemed like a good idea at the time.
But there's got to be lots of stuff to see and do over 72 hours in Brighton, right? (Besides which, it may well be the only holiday I get this year!)
Thursday 13th July
Deathtolls page updated to include the deaths of at least 200 people in the Mumbai train bombings.
Wednesday 12th July
Postman's Park, Summer 2006
Tuesday 11th July
When I'm not busy shouting "Hold the front page!" or "Get me 500 words on the Moldavian oil industry. Now, godammit!" or otherwise throwing my weight about, I like to keep in touch with the little people by helping out on some of the further-flung reaches of our website.
Which is how I came to be slapping this week's paperback reviews into shape.
Now the paperback reviews have a simple format: Name of book and name of author, couple of pars of review, initials of reviewer. Name of book and name of author, couple of pars.. You get the idea.
And, technology being what it is, these reviews inevitably reach me with inappropriate line
breaks, or missing line breaks, unEven capitalisation and all sorts of shit like that.
Which explains, when you also know that we have a reviewer called Kevin Osgood, how it was that I found myself staring in bemusement at a title somehow familiar, but also somehow fundamentally not right:
Monday 10th July
Deathtolls page updated to include the loss of at least 124 people following the plane crash in Irkutsk.
......previous week
