213: codenames and wheelbarrows

Most of this weekend passed, I spent at my friends’ house eating their delicious food and playing with their 9 month old son, my godson.  My fiancée was away in Belfast planning the wedding; trying on dresses, worrying about money, and visiting hotels and wedding fairs.  Rather than sit at home playing computer games and procrastinating, I hightailed it to the friends’ where we could talk about music, politics, parenting, family, weddings (!), and the like.  It’s seemed like it had been a while since I saw my godson, but in reality it was only a few days.  Usually my fiancée takes over and I don’t get a chance to play with him.  So this was a good opportunity to teach him how to wave bye-bye and help him practice walking by holding his hands while he toddles and stumbles bravely around the living room.

I think it’s important to not start naming names and discussing other people’s lives and stuff in this blog, which is why I keep having to use phrases like ‘my fiancée’.  I’m not repeating this over and over just to show off in some pathetic little way.  Maybe I should come up with code names for all the people I mention.  ‘My fiancée’ could be replaced with ‘Codename F’, and the wedding could be renamed ‘Operation: Bankruptcy’.  That might get complicated for everyone if I have to start remembering codes, and I might become obsessed and start using them in real life.  That way madness lies, I think.  Best if I stay away.

Our wedding

Now it is a fact that I seem to have got behind with my blogging, and missed a day out in the last week.  I’m not sure how this has happened but off the top of my head I think I missed Sunday out.  Maybe more; I’ll have to double check.  But I am definitely playing catch-up, so this post is standing in for Monday’s, and then I’ll have to rattle out something for today (Tuesday).  I’ll try and make it about something.  I’m applying for copywriter jobs (I’d be brilliant at that!) so maybe something related; I don’t know. 

I’ve been struggling with Richard Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype, which I had high hopes for but am finding quiet tedious.  The Ancestors Tale, The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker were all brilliant; fascinating and lucid.  But Extended Phenotype just seems like a tedious essay or paper with thousands of references to other writers and their work in every sentence.  This is disappointing because I have read somewhere that Dawkins considers it his most important contribution to the field.  Once I get my head around it, or break through the crap to get to the good stuff. I may be able to write a bit about it.

The workmen from the council are at this moment unloading a load of scaffold poles in the garden and beginning the process of building platforms up the side of the house so they can look in our windows, and use our toilet by peeing in through the window.  The council are re-cladding the exteriors of all the houses on the estate, and I think they’ll be on the roof messing with the tiles and chimney stack.  My flat is the tops storey of a two storey semi-detached, and any minute now I will glance over my shoulder to see a big bloke in high-vis’ jacket and hard hat staring in at me through the window.  The next six weeks will be spent being woken up by hammering on the walls at 8am and keeping the curtains closed so I can scratch my arse and pick my nose in private.

I hope they are going to tarmac the driveway, because this morning I woke up to see the paving slabs being ripped up and thrown willy-nilly on the lawn.  Then for good luck the gates were smashed up a bit and a little mobile digger was brought along to mangle the gateposts into crushed concrete and twisted re-bars.  Any day now I’m expecting to be cut in two length ways by a falling roof slate, or to be disrupted from my evening meal by a wheelbarrow crashing through the ceiling.  At the moment there is soil were the drive should be.  I might run out and plant rows of onions and potatoes before they make it back with the tarmac.