nothing going on but the rant

So the landlady has finally sent someone to deal with our leaky shower. After all her talk of ‘improvements’ and frequent visits to the house, she has shown a curious reluctance to make an improvement that actually needs doing. It appears that she is that rarest of creatures, the landlady who is simultaneously interfering and negligent.

I waited in the other week for this guy, and waited, and waited… ‘You know what builders are like’, the landlady offered by way of explanation and apology. I thought I did, but when the man finally appeared, past seven o’clock, he had a pained and thoughtful air, not like a builder at all. Perhaps this was because he wasn’t, in fact, a builder: he works with ‘young people’ in Haringey (commuting from Ipswich), presumably a friend of the landlady who owes her a (big) favour. But he was a nice enough guy, and he knew just what to do: absolutely nothing. Because, of course, it was far too late in the day by then.

So he returned on Saturday. By the time I got back from work he’d grouted and gone. It didn’t look pretty, but at least we could shower now… except it seems he hadn’t calculated for any weight being placed in the bath, so we now have a working shower that’s fine as long as nobody gets in it.

But it’s OK. He’s back tomorrow evening. She'll be charging him rent soon.

shopworld

A woman, at the behest of her son, came into the shop and asked: ‘Have you got any autobiographies on business studies or popworld?’ I felt like saying: ‘There are so many things wrong with that sentence that I’m afraid I’m going to have to get someone else to help me deal with your request.’ But of course I knew what she meant and I couldn’t very well pretend otherwise, though I wanted to. She meant did we have any autobiographies by business people or pop stars. And we did, so there it was. She got away with it.

Another woman, bringing back a present purchased by her mother, moaned because we wouldn’t give her a cash refund on a credit card purchase, which - rightly or wrongly - is the policy at Waterstone’s. We couldn’t refund to the card because it was her Mum’s card, so we offered her Waterstone’s vouchers. Then she got very shrill, saying that we were ‘drawing her back into our organisation’, that she ‘couldn’t escape’ from it. It was like she had this whole paranoid conspiracy theory worked out, that Waterstone’s were going to suck her in to their universe and then - no doubt - take over the world by means of these sinister ‘vouchers’.

Of course, far from wanting to suck her in, we actually couldn’t wait to get her out the door. In order to achieve this, Paula granted the cash refund. ‘They do it in Sainsbury’s’, the woman said smugly. ‘No questions asked.’ Yeah, they probably let you run naked down the aisles in Sainsbury’s too. We have standards. However pointless and petty.

in spite of my rage I'm a hamster in a cage

At long last the book I’ve been waiting for turned up at work: Pets With Tourette’s. Essentially, pictures of cute fluffy animals with speech bubbles coming from their mouths saying filthy things. Why didn’t I think of that? It works on so many levels! Already it has polarised opinion within the shop between those who think it’s just too naughty to put on display and those who can’t help but be amused. It’s like The Satanic Verses all over again. If it isn’t the runaway Christmas bestseller, then I’m a goat saying ‘Cock’.

In fact it’s well on its way to the bestseller lists because the shop has already sold a copy - to me. I got it to give to Chad for his birthday. Hasn’t it always been his dearest wish that dogs could talk dirty to him? Well maybe not, but it went down well enough. Hannah bought him a toy hamster that goes round and round on its wheel when its batteries are in. She scrawled on the box in enormous letters: ‘Martin the hamster’, then was strangely reticent when I asked why. I pushed its little wheel round and watched it aspiring to move round with it - never quite making it, always falling back. ‘It’s in hell’, I said, already feeling a sympathetic bond towards my namesake. It would not have Tourette’s, I decided: it would swear voluntarily.

Well apparently it was a joke relating to Hannah’s latest fantasy of everyone moving in together into a big house in Shenfield, in which I, presumably, will be the pet. First she was moving in with Chad, and now everyone is involved: me, Dave, Ross, Kirsten, Mat and Amanda, Girls Aloud (she likes their new single), and anybody else who’s available. Seriously though, she was quite considerate about my little problem of not being able to live with her: my room would be as far as it would be possible to get from hers and still remain within the same house - I wouldn’t even know she was there. ‘But I don’t want to live in Shenfield, it’s too far from work’, I protested. ‘Oh, you can walk’, she said.

I need hardly worry. I’ll be too busy going round and round on my little wheel and swearing my head off.

Everything is true. Nothing is permitted.

After a week off I was thrust back into the hurly burly of work. The promotions were changing, which meant a lot of time on the shop floor stickering, destickering, restickering. Listening to the gnomic utterances of people passing by outside. ‘That’s a good one. You penis.’ I’ll never know what that was about.

Then trouble out the back with the Polish Parceline guy, who’d blocked some (illegally parked) guy’s exit. Much honking of horns and shouting. ‘I gotta take a woman to hospital!’

‘Oh yeah? Given her the clap have you?’

Sadly, one never thinks of these things at the time.

The loyalty card was launched but I managed to avoid wearing the T-shirt that says: ‘Ask me about the Waterstone's card’. I’m waiting for one that says: ‘Ask someone who cares’. The idea seemed to be that you pitched it to anyone who approached the counter, but everyone I asked said no, and after a while I gave up, unable to cope with the rejection. It really does make the rest of the transaction go awkwardly. Of course it may have been my pitch that was at fault (‘Want a big company to spy on you and send you junk e-mails? Sign here!’)

On Sunday I accompanied Dave and his friend Helen on one of their expeditions into Essex. We went to Frinton and walked along the front past endless rows of beach huts, desperately searching for a café. But Frinton is strictly bring your own. Everything is forbidden: dogs, arcades, some mysterious activity represented by the silhouette of a man pleasuring himself arsewise on a large misshapen rock. We aimed for the pier, which never seemed to get any closer, until we turned a corner and suddenly there it was. By this time, however, we’d left Frinton and were in Walton-on-the-Naze. Tackiness was permitted again. The pier was dominated by a long, low industrial-looking building in which - you might imagine - cattle would be slaughtered. In fact it was a dim, echoing warehouse of fun. Limp claws hovered over the mass graves of teddy bears. Everything looked like an installation by Jake and Dinos Chapman.

We walked back along the beach, Helen picking up a brightly-colored shell. ‘Where’s me whelk?’, she said later, having temporarily mislaid it. If we lived in gentler times, she could have based a music hall career on that.

Eviction

While I was away in Suffolk, the landlady came. She had expressed a wish to meet us, then wanted to come at a time when no-one would be in. This being rearranged, she never turned up, but arrived the next evening instead, along with a guy who did a lot of measuring of things. Yes, she does want to sell up, but not quite yet, because she won’t make enough money (my heart bleeds for her) and in the meantime she wants to make a lot of ‘improvements’. How sinister that word now sounds!

Apparently she moaned about the state of the garden. I actually did attempt to mow the lawn a few weeks ago, and it seems to have destroyed the entire ecosystem, since grass no longer grows on it, just some sort of weed.

Oh well.

I went to Chelmsford with Dave and Mat. It was a journey fraught with terror. A spider of considerable dimensions was crawling over the edge of the open window next to me before we set off, and my attempts to flick it away with a CD by the hateful Fratellis backfired disastrously, landing it on the floor at my sandal-clad feet. Simultaneously, Dave was playing Queen - another pet hate of mine - on the car stereo. ‘Queen and a spider’, commented Mat when we picked him up, clearly relishing this nightmare (for me) scenario. The spider is still in the car, as far as anyone can tell.

Brian, a man with a face like some strange wood-carving and the mind of a child, won Big Brother. There are those who say he’s not as thick as he seems, that he is only pretending not to know who Shakespeare is. You can’t blame him: I’m sure Shakespeare, were he around, would pretend not to know who Brian is. Towards the end of his time in the house Brian was to be found staring at the moon, and getting embroiled in a discussion about the nature of the universe. What is the universe?: it sounds like heavyweight philosophical stuff but no, that was just it - he really didn’t know. ‘We live on Earth, don’t we?’, he asked, displaying a grasp of the basics at least. Eventually he managed to work it out with reference not to Galileo or Stephen Hawking, but to that intellectual giant of our time Noel Edmonds, whose belief in ‘cosmic ordering’ he shares.

So there it was: the universe is what you order things from. Clearly he is confusing it with the internet, but, hey, it was a step in the right direction.