by Deborah Grabien

photo: ‘Massage Therapist’ by Lydia Selk

A few months ago, literally five minutes walk from my home in San Francisco, someone opened a cheap massage place.

For me, as a writer with multiple sclerosis, that’s a gift from the cosmos. I spend long hours at the computer, I have a neurological disease for which massage is a prescribed therapy, and this place – owned and run by a collective of Chinese men and women – is beautifully priced: $25 will get you an hour-long massage off their menu of six or so varieties. Unlike the masseurs, who are too rough, have little rhythm, and one of whom reeks of stale tobacco, the two masseuses are wonderful.

Ten visits in, I’ve glommed on to my favourite masseuse (a middle-aged woman named Lily who, rare in this kind of massage place, understands that a wince is equivalent to an ouch and a request to lighten up). I’ve realised that my favourite off the list is something called a “ginger juice” massage, which incorporates neither ginger nor juice, but which concentrates on nerve endings. I’ve made my appointments. I’ve learned to wear a tank top so that I can shed layers before assuming the fully-clothed position. I make appointments with Lily, expecting that she’ll know what’s aching, what’s too tense, what needs to be concentrated on.

What I wasn’t expecting was a story.

It began percolating about three massages ago, through the noise of pulled muscles and tensed tendons, protesting as Lily’s fingers found sore spots and knots to tease out. A massage parlour should be an oasis: unobtrusively soothing music looping on the sound system, no cell phones, no loud conversations, everything kept to a civilized murmur. I was on my back, eyes closed. Lily was working on my right arm. I could hear the soft steady drip drip drip of the receptionist’s little desktop fountain, water hitting stones and then being sucked through by an electric pump to do it again: a kind of liquid perpetual motion machine, perpetual at least for as long as the power was on. I could hear the grunting of a male customer, being worked on by Tobacco Guy. Behind closed eyes, my brain was drifting off, seeing nothing, just zoning out and away…

And then, out of nowhere, a little voice was giggling in my ear. I felt warm breath, a tickle of air. That jolted me back into reality. Had someone let their kid run around between the reclining massage chairs? Inexcusable. I opened my eyes.

Nothing. No child, not even the other masseuse, just the half-comatose grunting client and me. Tobacco Guy was doing his usual uncoordinated arrhythmic thing three chairs away.

Lily was still working on my arm, finding the carpal in my wrist: you very tense, use too much computer, you need relax yeah?

The ceiling and walls of this place are painted a soft blue. The ceiling has been daubed with some white smudges that are probably supposed to represent clouds, the walls with painted bamboo stalks in a harsh acid brown-green colour. The paint job is vaguely reminiscent of the casino at Paris, Vegas, where an unrealistic stump of Eiffel Tower flattens out as it meets the casino’s sky-ceiling. The blue is calming, mingling with the long deep strokes Lily is using on my forearm, with the cyclical drip of the fountain, with the Chinese flute music…

I closed my eyes again, drifting, letting go. Nothing else happened. Lily finished her massage. Back into sleeves, sweater, socks and boots, back out to the street and home, Another day, another massage.

By last week, we’d gone past Thanksgiving and the weather had turned cold and wet, as Northern California does in December. Lily met me at the door ─ you like ginger juice? Okay! ─ smiled and waved me towards a chair on the aisle. While I shed my heavy coat, my sweater, socks and boots, she fitted the big wooden tub they use for soaking the customer’s feet with a plastic liner, and filled it with hot water and some kind of soaking salts. With me safely laid out, she touched spots on my neck, frowned ─ very tense, I say last time you too much time on computer, you need relax okay, I fix ─ and off we went, a blissful hour of Lily’s relentless manipulating.

A rush of air, the thump of light footsteps just behind my head. Someone light was running. And there it was, unmistakable, the same breathy giggling I’d heard before.

It took a moment before my head, out in pleasurable space while Lily worked on my face and neck, pulled together enough to understand that no one was running or giggling behind my head. There couldn’t be anyone, because it wasn’t possible; there wasn’t room. Directly behind my head was Lily on her stool. And no more than a foot behind her was the wall separating the front of the place from the work area. Anyone running right behind my head would have to be running right through Lily.

It began solidifying then, making some sense. Light young footsteps, a giggling child, in this place with its fake sky and its stencilled bamboo growing on the walls, a storefront converted to a massage parlour. Who had she been and where had she come from, that giggling girl? Was the immediate sense I had, that she wore the clothing of San Francisco’s Chinese immigrants a century or more ago, genuine perception? Or was it merely me reacting to the painted bamboo and the music that sounded like pipes and flutes and waterfalls echoing down in the snow-cold mountains of a country a world away? The larger questions – What in hell am I actually hearing? Why am I hearing it? Is anyone else hearing it too? Am I having some sort of acid flashback, or something?─ all took a back burner, waiting to be noticed and acknowledged.

Lily tapped my neck ─ you turn over now please. She held the warm towel over me as I flipped, letting my face settle into the padded hole in the headpiece, closing my eyes, melting into the untangling of the knots in my shoulders. Not completely, though. Part of me was holding my breath, waiting for a light swift patter of feet and a giggle that no one else could hear.

Nothing. Just a great massage; Lily really threw herself into that one.

My most recent massage was yesterday. I came in out of the harsh rain, greeted the receptionist with a murmur, wished her happy holidays with my voice low enough to be drowned out by the desktop fountain. I’d been wondering, thinking, making notes in my head. I wondered about the girl. Was she a child? My sense had been of youth, but that had been because the giggle had been so high-pitched, the footsteps so quick and light. It could just as easily have been a teenaged girl, or a very small woman. Was her name Bai? Why was I thinking her name had been Bai? Was that even a name, in a language I don’t speak? Was she a ghost, a figment, an echo of someone or something who had lived here once, before the sound system had been so much as thought of, before the acid-green pictures of bamboo had gone up on walls painted to look like the mountains and the sky? What had been here, long ago?

Getting ready, smiling at Lily, unzipping my boots and setting them to one side so that she could deal with the foot reflexology part of the ginger juice, I tried to remember what had been here, in this row of stores in an undistinguished little enclave of the Inner Richmond district, out in the northwest corner of San Francisco. My memory wasn’t cooperating. Had it been a bakery? No, I was thinking of the Russian tea room that baked their own pastries, and they were still there, two doors away. Had this been the plumber’s supply, or was that a block to the east, between Third and Fourth Avenues? What had a little kid/young girl/very small woman, whose name was or wasn’t ‘Bai’, been doing in a plumber’s supply shop? And why was she still hanging around?

Same routine: turning off cell phone, hanging clothes on the peg, tucking the purse under the bench. Music that sounded like strings this time, a touch of flute. I heard no footsteps, and heard no giggling.

I didn’t need them. The seed of a ghost story about a girl named Bai, framed at the moment in which childhood becomes adolescence, about a girl who sees her father die of a heart attack in his greengrocery as he struggles to explain to his only daughter why he is choosing to not marry her off the way her friends are being married off, has been planted. This is what writers do, consciously or unconsciously. We find stories, seeds, fragments of rushing feet and faraway laughter, in places like massage parlours. Was there a girl here, a long time ago, with or without a father who treasured his daughter and her freedom, but who died somehow, some way, before he could prove it?

Deborah Grabien is an editor at Plus One Press, and the author of 14 novels, including the celebrated KinKaid Chronicles,The Haunted Ballads series, and more. Visit her website at:  http://www.deborahgrabien.com and the not-to-be-missed cooking blog of one of her most appealing characters, Bree Kinkaid.

by James Hancock

It was on a bright, starry night that the traveling circus rolled into town. From my vantage point on a bar stool across the street, I could see everything, as the tired little caravan straggled into the vacant lot next to City Hall.

I had just left the tattoo parlor after making an important decision. I had decided to get a big tattoo of a naked woman riding on the back of a tiger. The tattoo artist said that it was a good choice because it would show “the real me.”  Although it would cost a couple of month’s wages, I knew the tattoo would be worth it, and it would hide the scars from that freak motorcycle accident last New Years Eve. I’d be the envy of all my friends. I’d already made a down payment, and I had almost enough money at home to pay the rest.

As I sat nursing my third beer, a brilliant idea came to me. So brilliant, I was amazed I had thought of it. Certainly, none of my friends had ever thought of anything this brilliant…

I intended to steal the elephant!

It was a female and she was just standing there, chained to the bumper of a circus truck, with no one around to ask questions. There had to be lots of ways to make money with an elephant. The tattoo would soon be mine.

I started working on a plan as I ordered another beer. I knew it would require some detailed scheming, but I had a few hours to kill. I was still a little hazy about what to do later, but I figured I could just wing it after I had the elephant. I already had a name for her: “Cash.”

Stealing Cash proved to be easier than I expected. Around midnight, I just eased up to her, quietly unhooked the chain and led her away to a vacant lot behind an old gas station a few blocks away. There was all sorts of junk that people had dumped in the lot, and I figured an elephant might not even be noticed. However, to be on the safe side, I put her in an old shed toward the back. I began to execute my plan. I dragged an old bathtub into the shed and carried several buckets of water from the gas station. Next, I made the rounds to the nearby grocery stores, where I pulled all the rotten vegetables out of the dumpsters, and brought them to Cash.  When I came back the next morning, the vegetables and water were gone, replaced by a pile of dung. I hauled the dung to the far side of the lot, and brought in more vegetables and water.

After a few days, I found I had to go to the far side of town to find vegetables. Worse yet, Cash was getting diarrhea from the change to her usual diet of low-grade hay.

At the end of the week, I began to wonder if stealing the elephant might have been a bad idea. I still had no ideas on how to make money with her. Meanwhile, Cash seemed to be enjoying herself. She contentedly ate all the vegetables I could find, and drank a dozen buckets of water every day. She even seemed to be gaining weight, and she generated dung as if that was her only purpose in life. The vacant lot smelled like a sewer.

Around then, the Health Department, and a couple of policemen showed up.  “The circus thanks you for feeding their elephant this week,” the cop said as he put handcuffs on me, “but now they have to take it back. Everyone in the neighborhood is complaining about the smell.  The circus manager has been stalling, but he’s finally agreed to come and get it.”

I’m glad to be rid of the elephant.  Now, I don’t have to haul vegetables and water all day and best of all, my clothes don’t smell like elephant dung. Even so, who would have thought that stealing an elephant would be considered such a serious crime, or involve so much work?

______________________________________

James Hancock is a Texan-turned-Californian by long residence. Since his retirement, he has redirected his energies to writing, and spends days doing just that, as well as dreaming of days gone by.  Many would say he doesn’t have a serious bone in his body, but that may not be true.  Some of what he writes is ‘supposed to’ be serious.

Congratulations to Vicola!

Below is a little bit about her:

I’m Vicola, a proud Northerner from the UK, with very little tolerance and even less patience.

I got started writing an online diary in a rather weird way. My cousin married a conman with a personality disorder, and after wreaking havoc and ‘appropriating’ a chunk of my uncle’s retirement fund, he disappeared, leaving no forwarding address, and no money for his daughter. So, my cousins and I decided to try and find him on the internet – not that hard as he had a fairly distinctive name.

Eventually we found he was keeping an online blog, it was mainly self-indulgent, fantasist crap, but what we did glean from it was that he’d suckered some other poor girl into falling for his dubious charms and she had an online diary too. She used hers more to sort of vent her feelings, which were frankly rather unstable and it got me thinking…maybe instead of shouting at people down the phone or in the office, I could write things down.

So I set up my own little diary, and away I went. Soon I realised that I could write about more than whether I was pissed off because the photocopier wasn’t working and the cash machine had eaten my card, I could also write about stuff in the news, politics, famous people, and anything else that caught that my eye. After a while I decided to move my little online diary to somewhere I could put up photos, and this new place allowed people to leave comments. I was quite surprised to learn that some people seemed to like reading about the car crash that is my life, dissections of the odd behaviour of famous people, and the fact that nothing seems to go quite how I planned it. I’ve made some lovely friends on through my writing, diverse people from all over the globe that I’d never have spoken to or learned about, if I’d not started writing online. Of course you encounter some oddballs as well, but ─ touch wood─ I’ve so far managed to avoid anyone genuinely unpleasant or ‘stalker-like’. (Actually I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or insulted that I’ve not got my own cyber-stalker) But, anyway, I’ve enjoyed my writing so far and hopefully ─ fingers crossed ─ one day I’ll actually get my finger out and write the book that I’ve been threatening to inflict on the world for such a long time. One day….

To read Vicola’s musings, go to her Harlots’ Sauce site page, or visit her personal blog

Last 5 posts by Patricia Volonakis Davis

• A Girl, a Boy, and a Fountain - July 1st, 2010
• Podcast Interview with James Redford: “I Ask Myself ─ Even if Nothing Comes of It, Will it Enrich My Life by My Having Spent Time on It?’” - June 24th, 2010
• Podcast Interview with author Scott James: “People Don’t Want the Government in their Bedrooms” - March 4th, 2010
• Catching Up with Some of Our Previous Podcast Interviewees - March 3rd, 2010
• Podcast Interview with Michael Larsen & Elizabeth Pomada - February 3rd, 2010

Look, I write the way I speak. I am no grammar nazi, by any stretch of the imagination, but this stuff really bugs me. I don’t know why, it just DOES:

1. supposebly

It’s “SUPPOSEDLY.” That’s a “D,” not a “B.”

2. I could care less

If you COULD care less, then please, by all means, DO. It’s “I COULDN’T CARE LESS”

3. irregardless

What’s with the “ir” as a prefix? The word is just “REGARDLESS.”

4. “Respectfully,” used instead of “respectively.”

If English is your first language, you have no excuse for this. I respectfully request you use a dictionary before you open your mouth and sound like an uneducated moron. And speaking of “respectively…”

5. When people confuse “leery” with “weary,” and vice versa.

What’s that about? Respectively, they’re two very different words.  Again, use a DICTIONARY. That’s why they print ‘em.

6. And in a children’s book about a manta ray, I was reading to my daughter, Mia, they used the word “sleek,” but they spelled it “sleak.”

And that was really annoying.

There are a LOT more I’ve heard and it continues to bug me. It just surprises me to no end how someone who is relatively intelligent could use, or rather, MISuse, these words.

I know when I’m blogging, I type the way I talk, so I type “gonna,” “woulda,” “shoulda,” or “wanna,” but at least I know that they are really “going to,” “would have,” “should have,” or “want to.” And I also know the difference between “there,” “their” and “they’re,” or “to,” “too” and “two.” And I NEVER use “would of” instead of “WOULD HAVE.“

Why is this so difficult for people? Are they just lazy?

My ‘stupid psycho ex’ was such a moron that he thought that these were actually words: “natrocious” and “debligerated.”

What words are those, you might ask? They’re supposed to be “atrocious” and “obliterated.” For the longest time I didn’t correct him, but when he told me that my behavior was “natrocious,” I HAD to “obliterate” him.

That’s right… I “obliterated” him. So, you’d better watch your language in front of me.

And don’t call me a ‘grammar nazi,’ either.

Image “Sometimes” by Michelle Shannon

Last 5 posts by Grace Bon

• "The Mommy Trenches" Why Don’t Some Moms Know Their Kids are Jerks? - October 7th, 2011
• Things They Never Tell You About Your Partner’s Pregnancy - March 15th, 2011
• ‘Fat’ Mommy - December 17th, 2010
• Poopy-Pants - Just Another Day in The Mommy Trenches - June 29th, 2010
• The Mommy Trenches: God Smote My Child’s Personality to Punish Me (At Least, I Think So) - March 3rd, 2010

What makes a writer undoubtedly good? Is it creativity? Is it imagination? Or, is it personal experience? When is it easier for a writer to put thoughts, emotions, and ideas smoothly and effortlessly into valid sentences? Are there any periods in a writer’s life when the act of writing seems like the easiest thing in the world? And what does talent have to do with all of these? Can the urge to write disappear completely, or hibernate for a period longer than the average winter, under a thick layer of ice that blocks it from blossoming?

In my attempt to respond to the concerns above, I began to believe that I was going through a professional existential crisis. I asked myself, “Is writing my true calling?” Fortunately, the crisis was averted after a long, late-night conversation I had with a family friend I respect a lot, but something even worse was just around the corner.

Assumingly you are still wondering why I asked all the above questions, I have only one answer for you: writer’s block! For weeks now I couldn’t complete a single sentence of a professional article, or a personal blog post, either in Greek or English. And speaking of language, let me share with you a part of my life’s story:

English is a second language for me, which I was taught at a small private afternoon school near my home, here in Athens, Greece. Even though my English verbal skills were quite advanced even in childhood as a result of visits to family members who live overseas, English writing skills have always been more of a challenge for me. Despite the fact that I try to read English books, newspapers, and magazines daily to enhance my style and enrich my vocabulary, writing articles and other journalistic pieces are a whole different story. Therefore, you can grasp my trepidation when I knew that I had to overcome a double-layered obstacle: writer’s block and language shortcomings. It’s no Mount Everest, perhaps, but still, it’s a hard work.

I could easily win this fight by taking on the assignment our editor-in-chef proposed to me, but I chose not to. Since the day I came to terms with my current creative condition, I have embarked on an online “treasure hunt” to find the proper remedy. During the course of my journey, I visited numerous websites that delved into the issue of the “writer’s block”. Google the term and you will stumble onto millions of search results! In most websites ‘writer’s block’ is described as “a temporary loss of the ability to write or continue writing due to anxiety or depression.” It sounds disturbing, doesn’t it? And as I gathered more information on this subject, my anxiety grew.

Then, one day, I stopped hunting for the “proper remedy”. Because I suddenly realized the solution had nothing to do with anxiety or my depressive mood. I’d simply stopped having new experiences. In other words, I stopped living my life. Throughout this short-term interlude, I didn’t meet any new people nor learn anything new. As a result, I slowly lost my thirst for knowledge, and began detaching from my emotions and personal thoughts. Without my impulse to write, I was left without a voice. Then I reached the “breaking point”. I had to do something for myself, and for all the writers I have met online with the same problem.

Therefore, I declined my editor-in-chief’s proposal, and decided to write the piece you’re reading right now. Writer’s block was my new experience, and I was all at once passionate to write about it. I saw an opportunity to make something delicious out of limited choices, as my time at Harlots’ Sauce Radio has taught me. So, writers in agony, before you jump into a downward spiral of self-destruction due to lack of inspiration, think twice, take a breather, suit up and go live! Meet new people, taste new things, visit new places, get out of your comfort zone. You can’t even imagine the amount of stories you will come up afterwards.

Last 5 posts by Ilias Kountoupis

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See, I don’t hate animals, but I am not an animal lover. As it turns out, I married a woman who does love them and at least two of my children inherited the same peculiarity. This opposing viewpoint has created a lot of memorable events for all of us in our family.

I’ve helped birth goats, pigs, horses, dogs, cats and rabbits, cleaning them cutting their umbilical cords, bottle-feeding them. I’ve performed pet castrations and wiped pet butts.  I’ve trimmed goat hooves until I thought my back would break from bending over and I’ve carried around more baby pigs than I ever could have imagined I would. And once, while I was trying to hold a pig for my wife so she could give it a shot of wormer, she accidentally poked me instead. I guess I didn’t have to worry about having worms that year.

But what really sticks out in my memory is the first year that my daughter raised a baby sheep for the youth fair. We were told to show up at the livestock pavilion and pick up our lamb there. Upon arrival, I saw 80 lambs all running around crazily in the same pen.  One by one, the children were allowed to go in and “catch” their lamb.  Our daughter was too small to go into the pen, so being her dad, I was given the nod.

I stepped inside and my daughter showed me the one she wanted. I took off after it with great determination. A few minutes later, after having been thrown to the ground a number of times, I realized that it wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d thought.

I could hear my wife’s cries of laughter above the constant bleats, baas and thundering hoof beats. I finally somehow managed to grab hold of one, and was doing my best to get it to the gate, when my daughter called out that I had the wrong one! I guess the expression of disbelief on my face was what made my wife laugh even harder. I now reluctantly let go of the lamb I’d caught, and made a bead for the one that my daughter was pointing out. Try as I might, I just couldn’t catch that one. I was soon injured and desperate. But I gave it one more heroic try (I thought it was heroic, anyway,) and dove into the scattering flock. I finally latched on to another one and with sweat pouring down my face and clothing covered in sheep droppings, I yelled out to my daughter, “Sorry, this is the one you’re getting,” and then I wrestled the unwilling lamb to the gate.

Yes, indeed, it was a memorable experience, but not just for me. I was actually on my lunch break, so I had to go back to work after handing my hard-won ‘prize’ over to my daughter and (still chuckling) wife. Let’s just say that everyone was happy to let me work by myself that night.

While I was in New York, I was trend-spotting with my friends. One TV show made the top of the list: Gossip Girl, the must-see teen drama on television today. Suddenly, shows like the O.C. and One Tree Hill seem so ‘last century’. Gossip Girl has taken television two steps ahead and after watching last night’s episode, I can tell you that Gossip Girl is going ‘extreme.’ How often do we see a 15 year-old boy being “outed” or hear a 17 year-old girl confess to her best friend that she’d killed someone in her past? For some, the plot lines may be too much, but Gossip Girl, being a successful book series which was transferred to television has to be edgy and steamy in order to keep its fans.

By conventional standards, Gossip Girl is not a successful TV show. But when you add up iTunes downloads and multiple websites that host the episodes for the rest of the world, there are many who consider Gossip Girl a cultural phenomenon. The program has had a great impact on music, fashion and society. Just taking a walk on the Upper East Side of New York, you will see teenagers, dressed in their school uniforms, talking and behaving like their heroes from their favourite series. What started as just an idea for a book series and a TV show, has now become deeply embedded into teenage subculture.

Another telling aspect of the series is its use of technology. These stars are really tech-literate in a way never seen before in a teen drama. With a ‘blog’ being the core value of the show, our heroes use high-end cell phones, computers and gadgetry in every episode as part of their daily routine.  Keep your eye out for another daring aspect of the series: product placement. The Humphreys, the creative family group on the show, use Apple computers, while the families on the Upper East end use Windows-based Dell laptops. Just last month, there was a report online which classified people who use Mac products as “more creative.” (Ha! I am a Mac user!)

But, the real juice of the show is in its characters and cliques. In every educational institution you’ll find the stereotypes depicted here: the Queen Bee, the socialites, the ‘wannabes,’ the good guys, the bad girls, the party boys, the sports guys, the popular crowd, and the outcasts. Most of us experience school society as trying, and our school years can often define what we will become in the future. Kids who were unpopular become successful, happy adults, because their bad school experiences provide them with strength of character and therefore, the ammunition, to fight back. Even taking poetic license, Gossip Girl characterized these events and the people we all meet during our high school careers in a real way.

Gossip Girl has become successful because – let’s face it- deep down, we all love to hear gossip. Perez Hilton’s website (www.perezhilton.com) gets millions of visitors daily, while publications like People, Star and InTouch battle each other for that exclusive expose every week. In the meantime, the cast experiences a taste of its own medicine when people roam New York City just to spot them and report the sightings to their blog or favourite gossip column. But Gossip Girl, still in its first season, will have a tough time maintaining its buzz. Each week it will have to raise the bar higher, as its viewers crave sensation and become quickly spoiled. Without enough stimulation from their favourite show, they’ll move on to something else.

Omigod! – I have to leave you. I spotted someone.

I have found my own personal white whale in life and it is vegan French toast. A few weeks ago, I began my quest to make the perfect non-animal French toast. It quickly became a quest to make edible non-animal French toast. Now I’d be happy if I could actually make it without having to chew through grease-proof paper.

It all started when I found some recipes for vegan French toast online. It required egg replacer mixed with soy milk as the batter. So I made it and it was great! … As glue. The bloody toast stuck to my allegedly non-stick fry-pan. I even tried it in another fry-pan with heaps of oil. I had to tear the bread to get it unstuck. Attempt 1: utter failure.

The next weekend (French toast being a weekend thing, after all) I thought I’d try blending tofu with soy milk and using that as the batter. Who knew that tofu could make almost as good a glue as egg replacer? So I spent the morning scraping tofu-ey bread off fry-pans again. Attempt 2: more failure.

This week I figured I’d try the tofu-soy milk concoction again, but bake them on greaseproof paper in the oven, instead. I even coated the greaseproof paper with spray oil just to make sure nothing could possibly stick to it. Nothing except tofu/soy milk French toast, of course. Attempt 3: this is getting beyond a bloody joke.

How could there be so many vegan French toast recipes out there and not a single one creates French toast that you can actually eat? Is it a huge online conspiracy? People are responding to these recipes saying “I made this and it was great!” What the fuck magic cookware are these people using? Why has no one else replied with, “Might be fine if I could ever scrape it off the Teflon to find out. I am seriously considering using this recipe to fix shattered porcelain instead.”

So next week, I’m going to try another method. I’m going to coat my bread one side at a time and grill it. That way it couldn’t possibly stick to anything. Could it?

Anyone with a good recipe, please contact the writer:  charlottesteggs@harlotssauce.com

The PMT monster has arrived and once again people are avoiding me. This week has been simply brimming over with help and cooperation from the site management at work. (And again the sarcasm rears its ugly head.) Requests for information have been ignored, stupid requirements have been sent in and the word ‘please’ seems to have been lost from the English language. I am now giving serious thought to fucking it all off and going home for the afternoon to do something less frustrating and annoying like trying to work out how to achieve world peace or cheese-grating my forehead.

And the week rumbles on with the usual petty annoyances that include:

Passports

You’d think that changing the name on your passport to your married one would be a simple thing wouldn’t you? You send them a copy of your marriage certificate, then they’d reissue your passport, with the same date of expiry as your previous one, for a nominal fee of £20 or so. Well, you would be so wrong. In the happy days of state-induced fear of foreigners and terrorism, getting a passport is more difficult than finding the Philosopher’s Stone and the key for turning base metals into gold. You have to have a completely new passport, at a cost of no fewer than seventy two of your English pounds, plus you have to send in your original marriage certificate, so, naturally it has to go registered post. Then you have to send a prepaid registered post envelope for the penny pinching misers to send the certificate back to you. As they’ve just charged seventy-two bastard quid for the passport, you’d think that the postage would be free. This is all before you even get to the issue of ‘the passport photograph’.

The passport photograph has long been an ordeal dreaded by the average person. You go into one of those little booths in the post office or the supermarket and emerge 10 minutes later with a handful of photos that made you look mentally deficient and drunk all at the same time. You then send one off with your application. I assumed that things were still the same. So I sent off my application with my mentally deficient photo and a cheque for half of my remaining overdraft. A week or so later, it wings its merry way back to me. I had had the audacity to smile in my photo. This was not acceptable and I’d have to redo the photo, but this time sending in one with a blank expression. Yes, well, that should make me easier to recognise, as I often walk around an airport wearing no expression at all.

Anyway, I did some more photos and sent my new, surly pic off with my application. And again it returns to me, this time because the background was not the correct shade of white. What the fuck? Are you serious? I rang the helpdesk (there’s a misnomer, if ever I heard one) to see if someone was pulling my leg. According to the girl I spoke to,” no,” they were not, the passport office takes identification very seriously and would not joke about such matters. Right then. So I have now been to a professional photographer to have some photos taken and am waiting for them to arrive so I can try again.

Pedantic wankers.

Stupid Subaru – Whoever it was that thought it was a good idea to design Subaru cars so that they sound like an elephant with wind was a tosser. And whichever pillock sold one to the fool next door was an even bigger tosser.  Recently the fool next door acquired a Subaru estate car, and since then his principle source of pleasure has been to sit on the driveway next to our front window and ‘rev’ the engine. All bloody evening. It’s driving me nuts.  What is even more annoying is that last night, at 10 p.m., he decided that the revving didn’t sound like it should, so he called the RAC. He and the RAC man (who arrived at 10.45 p.m.) then spent an hour and a half fannying about, revving the engine, driving around the estate and generally interrupting my sleep. After a while, I moved into the spare room at the back of the house.

You could still hear the bloody thing, so I put in a pair of earplugs that I pinched from work. Even then you could still hear the noise and it took me ages to get to sleep, I was still swearing and thinking malevolent thoughts as I dropped off. I swear if this doesn’t stop soon I’m going to fill his petrol tank with sugar and shove a galia melon right up his exhaust pipe. See him rev his sodding engine then.

Colds – I knew it had to happen. I have got the Fridge Witches cold. Or the beginnings of it anyway. This time I refuse to go down without a fight – I have been to Boots and am now armed with First Defence (to try and stop the cold taking hold in the first place), Beecham’s Cold and Flu Tablets to try and stave it off, vitamin C tablets, Strepsils and echinacea. I may still end up with the cold, or worse, this vile flu that is going round, but at least if I do there’s every change I’ll be in a decongestant-induced coma throughout the entire thing.

Happy Days.