Mix tapes

Am I the only person who knows they are absolutely dreadful at making mix tapes? For some reason I always put too many sad songs on. Mine and Becca's bank holiday road-trip to Seahouses started off with a jaunty soundtrack provided by Becca. We bopped (insofar as you can whilst also steering and managing to indicate etc.) and sang along all the way to Warkworth. As we changed the disc to my own offering I immediately started to well up. The first song I had put on was Laura Cantrell's Bees. Listening to it at home on my own would make me feel a little sad in a pleasingly wistful way but trying to explain what the song was about (and hence why I was upset) was quite disastrous 'It's about this old man whose wife and friends had....' I said that sentence about twenty times before accepting that I was never going to get to the end of it without losing a contact lens. It brought back terrible memories of Gabrielle's Rise Again (I defy anyone, no matter how hard they might be, Geoff Capes even, to not have a bit of a snivel at the story behind that one). Warkworth Castle was just a fleeting blur and I skipped songs. Later on I started to have another blub at Hey Hey Helen until Bec reminded me that it wasn't actually about me and I wasn't alone with a kid, trying to put a dreadful marriage behind me.

The Big Smoke

I really can't decide how I feel about London. I was sitting in a pub on the banks of the river Thames on Friday afternoon, having a drink with my mum after looking round the Tate Modern and wondering whether there is something slightly inadequate about me that makes me not want to live in London. Sometimes it feels like everyone seems to go and live there for at least some part of their youth (if I'm still allowed to use that word about myself) and it's probably on my mind recently since four friends are upping sticks simultaneously. Even as a teenager I never really fancied it. In those days, disgusted with the provincial village I lived in, and dreaming of being a film director, I had more of a hankering for New York which seemed so much more exciting. I had probably over-dosed on Woody Allen, but it seemed easier to imagine myself nursing my Oscars in an apartment over looking Central Park than it did feeling at home in London. Perhaps because I felt that, in London, I'd be a Northerner driven there by economics whereas in New York I imagined I'd be oh, you know, just another kid chasing a dream, ahem. So here I am, living twelve miles away from where I started out! Nee oscar either. It's slow work.

At first I enjoyed walking around London and having a good spy around (and above in the case of the Anthony Gormley statues which I found very pleasingly melancholic) but the speed at which others walk seems to detract from walking's enjoyment. I'm more of a stroller or a saunterer than a strider and I felt like I was holding up 600 people behind me by strolling and peering skywards. Not to mention that, at least from where John lives, there seems to be a phenomenal amount of functional walking. It's lovely to walk to and from work and have a muse on the day's activities... but half an hour to the bus and then half an hour after the bus, just to get to the pub?! It takes him longer to get into central London by public transport than it did to get into Newcastle from home on the 684! The 684! the slowest mode of transport in the world! We did loads of fun things (including seeing the Hound of the Baskervilles and eating frogs' legs - though not at the same time) but I think I'd be wrecked if I tried combining doing fun things there with actually living there and going to work. John evidently loves living there and when I marvel at that fact I feel like the same kind of boring tool as when I want to know what the toilet facilities will be like at music festivals.

I must take after my mother. I sensed she was not a metropolitan type when, five minutes after stepping off the train, she started shrieking at the top of the tube escalator. 'Helen! Help!' I hadn't noticed that the tube escalators went so much faster than they do in other places. Apologies to anyone at Kings Cross tube station last Friday. We did not mean to cause alarm.

I am fully induced

Or is it inducted? Anyway, I have spent quite a few days in recent weeks attending induction days for a community bank job. I applied for the bank job (the nurse bank is like a nursing agency but run by an NHS trust, just in case anyone was wondering if I had moved into the financial sector) in the hope of it eventually leading to a permanent community job. This strategy proved successful as last week I was offered a permanent job with the same trust who are still inducting me for the bank job. I will soon be wearing a cape and cycling from house to house.

I hope I get to do the induction process again. I am perhaps the only person in the world who finds it quite enjoyable to watch clip art strewn powerpoint presentations. I also like having chats with strangers acknowledging that we are all work-shy skivers. 'Do you know what time it finishes?' 'Half three apparently, I'm hoping we'll get away early' 'you normally do at these things', cue official person entering: 'a little bit of housekeeping to start the day... does anyone mind if we miss a session, skip lunch and finish at two?' I don't mind staying til three actually, we're doing nothing more straining than sitting there breathing a bit after all. I just enjoy the camaraderie of everyone wanting to get off early.

The induction process in Gateshead has involved lots of presentations with some particularly inappropriate clipart. Is there really any need to have a slide with a picture of a sinking cartoon ship with the words 'HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE' underneath it in a health and safety lecture for community nurses? Bearing in mind that none of the people in the room will be working on or near passenger ferries. I guess the ferry disaster which killed lots of people acts as a good metaphor for forgetting to wipe up a spillage or incorrectly disposing of sharps. I also enjoyed a man saying 'Now, you'll all know about the triangle of fire...' Bum, now I've looked it up on wikipedia I realise I could have made myself the least popular person in the room by interjecting and wondering whether the tetrahedron of fire mightn't be a more useful model to employ?

One low point was an ice-breaking exercise where we had to get up and stand around the room in alphabetical order and then tell the person standing next to us what the first record we ever bought was. My partner, along with fifty percent of the rest of the room, had no recollection of this historic detail, much to my disgust (how could anyone not remember? have they not been being nostalgic about it since a year after they bought it?!). Anyway, since her part of the conversation was rather brief: 'I can't remember, dunno' I tried to make polite chat by wondering how many people in the room would have novelty records like The Wombles or Star Trekkin'. Or perhaps, I suggested, there would be lots of people who were embarrassed at having bought Shakin' Stevens records. Imagine my embarrassment, then, when this first-record-forgetting fool announced to the whole room that my first record purchase was by Shakin' Stevens! Perhaps the dignified thing to do would have been to simply leave it and walk away knowing inside that I was the better(non Shakin' Stevens buying) person. Sadly, my instincts took over and I shouted 'WHHHATT???!!!! It was NOT Shakin' Stevens!' The person leading the session chuckled and politely asked me who it was. Sadly my mind seemed suddenly empty and everyone was shuffling away in a slightly embarrassed fashion before I shouted 'It was Stevie Wonder!' at their backs.

Glory hole

According to Chambers dictionary a glory hole is ' a room, cupboard, drawer, etc where odds and ends are kept, especially in a disorganized way'. I always thought that a glory hole was a hole for a man to put his doofer through for nefarious sexual purposes. Which is why I was somewhat surprised when I let the electricity meter reading man into my mum's house only to hear her apologise 'I'm afraid you'll have to step into the glory hole'. It is hard to ascertain whether the man's smirk came as a result of being asked to insert himself in a ragged edged hole or a polite smile at my mum's embarrassment over the mess in the cupboard under the stairs. Naturally I couldn't wait for him to leave so I could ask my mum just what the hell she was trying to instigate. A disagreement ensued and the dictionary was brought down from the shelf and closed with a murmur 'what kind of monster have I raised?'

We were actually doing a jigsaw at the time (Shops and Pubs of London, in case you were wondering - a subject close to my heart having visited the great city one and a half times) - a pastime which I confess to finding quite enjoyable, perfect accompanied by a can of lager in the barren period between Countdown and Neighbours. Not long after the electricity man left the lady-who-collects-the-money-for-the-parish-magazine arrived. Up to now she's always been a bit part player without a back story (or at least I have only encountered her as a child and therefore assumed she didn't exist when she wasn't walking past my house looking for money for the parish magazine). While my mum ferreted about looking for money for the parish magazine (have you read it, by the way? It's never been the same since Jean's Jottings got axed) I discovered that she had also been a nurse and had been in charge of Project 2000 at the college. I'm sure the 4 o'clock can of Stella seemed a fitting tribute to the professionalism of nursing today. My mum pointed out later that she might not have realised it was me and not her that was drinking it. I said 'that would be much better, everyone in the village will just think that you're not coping'.

Hilarious hospital joke!

Q: Did you hear labia got in again?

A: Yeah, they got a majora victory!

Is that right? It seemed much funnier this afternoon. Oh well, hang on, did you hear the one about the man with strawberries growing out of his head?

Christmas is over

And (sort of) thank goodness for that. In recent years I have embraced the ludicrous excitement/ crushing disappointment dichotomy of the Parker Christmas experience - wholeheartedly throwing myself into the anticipatory part knowing that an inevitable episode of tears would follow.

Still, this year's disappointment surpassed itself. When I was making the Christmas cake with my mum I went to put something in the recycling box in the hallway and saw that she had received an early gift of a massive tub of quality street or similar. I said 'Oooh!' (because at that stage I hadn't been exposed to six thousand seasonal chocolate boxes at work) and scrabbled to see who they were from. It turns out that they were my Dad's ashes. The shape of the jar/urn/whatever and the kind of fancy purple bag thing it came in really did look uncannily like chocolates. So that was nice. My mum was a bit baffled as to why recycling an egg box upset me so much.

So, that's sort of one of the reasons I haven't been writing anything on here for a while. Well, in the last couple of months. Prior to that I was doing an Open University creative writing course. Naturally, I can only do one extra curricular activity at once so this blog went out of favour for a few months. The writing course started off well and I seemed to do quite well, rather unexpectedly, at the poetry section. In fact, I did offer to have a poem about my dad read out at his funeral. My mum decided that, although my tutor had praised the poem and said it 'speaks volumes about unhappiness, about emotional repression, about culture, class, patriarchy and setting' maybe it wouldn't be right for the occasion.

Anyway, the point of this post was really just to say that Christmas wasn't all that bad. It was a bit weird: Dad not being there, John being in Australia, Mum filling the 'make your own crackers' (bought accidentally) with plastic novelties she found in my teenage bedroom.

Angela Lansbury, eat your heart out!

I am Jessica Fletcher! By which I mean, gosh, I really must make more effort not to get drunk and accuse complete strangers of kidnapping other complete strangers. At the start of the night I was standing behind an oldish man in a fedora at the cashpoint when a young man approached and I heard this:
Tousled hair: We all sorted?
Fedora: So, tell me, what happens now?
Tousled hair: Well, we go back to the Forth, then, as I mentioned earlier, we will meet up with some friends of mine and then see where we go from there.

It doesn't sound quite so suspicious now, admittedly. If I said that the old man looked vulnerable and the young man looked sly-eyed would it make the scene seem any more sinister? Would it make it seem more natural that, when I saw them in the pub later, I asked the old fellow (who turned out to be a Norwegian Ian Maclellan... sorry! A NorwegIan Maclellan) if everything was alright and outlined my concerns? And if I said that the group of young people had a slightly sneery attitude to the man would it make it seem any more natural that I assumed that he was about to be taken to a house of horrors where he would be used for ritual torture and killed? It made perfect sense to approach Tousled at the bar and start 'Maybe I've been watching too much Miss Marple, but...'

He claimed that he was just being friendly and had offered to put up this Norwegian Author when he'd met him in the pub. Yeah. Likely story.

Long lost pals

When I haven't been in contact with someone for a very long time, getting in contact again is always a bit awkward, starting either with an apology: 'so sorry I haven't been in touch'; or an accusation: 'where have you been hiding?!' How refreshing, then, to hear from Claire Barkel for the first time in a year, with the text message: 'I love Leonard Cohen! Why didn't I believe you?!'

Radgie shop!

Crikey, it's a bit scary leaving the house these days. Well, it is if, like me, you pull your companions to the ground every time a door slams. The main focus of my fear in the mean streets of Arthurs Hill revolves around nipping to the shop for a pint (well, not actually a pint, obviously, but it sounds nicer doesn't it? All sort of post-war, pre-fab, new washing-machiney)of milk. My first encounter with the scary brothers who run the shop was them apparently having an argument, in front of me but not speaking to me, about whether one of them had called me 'sir' and therefore thought I was a man. It started 'that's a friggin lass, man!' and ended with them just shouting at each other along the lines of 'I never!' 'You did!' 'I friggin never!' Since that incident I have rarely entered the shop without hearing them shouting about something, almost invariably at each other or their hapless assistants. On their days off there's a rather camp man who goes for a much more bitchy plan of attack that I find more entertaining. Yesterday I heard him asking a young woman for proof of her age to buy cigarettes. The woman got another shopper to vouch for her: 'Aren't I old enough to buy tabs?!' 'She's old enough to smoke them n all. She's got three kids!' Shop man's response: 'that means nothing round here my love, they're dropping them at ten'.

Oh, in other news, I have a flickr. Have a look and see what happens when you try to do close-ups without an SLR. See: half a dead crab, half some dead crab's legs, half a ... you get the picture.

Football is everywhere

Am I old?

I already know the answer, I don't know why I'm asking. Nice reminders of impending agedness and death: peers reproducing. Unpleasant reminders: too numerous to mention.

Last night, while waiting for an as-it-happened-not-actually-that-interesting documentary about Lawrences Marks' dad dying in the Moorgate train crash, I caught some of a new sit-com starring Doogie Howser. That Doogie Howser was very much a grown-up could have been a little reminder of my advancing years in itself. However, I chose to ignore that hint. One of the sub-plots of the really rather poor comedy was that a couple (the girl of whom was Buffy the Vampire Slayer's best friend, Willow) were attenpting to act with greater maturity by turning down dancing in night-clubs in favour of wine-tasting parties and the like. At the denouement of this particularly tension-filled plot one of their friends had a word with Willow and said to her 'I mean, what's next? Scrabble nights?' I was stunned. Since when has Scrabble been synonymous with being a fuddy duddy? Was not lovely Mark from dictionary corner once world Scrabble champion? I'm sure he was, because I saw a photo in the paper - he had a natty board with yellow letters. Later on, the couple abandoned their wine-tasting and ran off to the club leaving their guests to show their true, ancient colours by playing Trivial Pursuits. Oh no, not TP too.

Still, not to worry John, the Scrabble night is still on on Tuesday. Bring some bottles of Hooch or something. Just so we know we've still got it.

Congratulations!

Lynsey and Chris have had their baby. And I have heroically managed to avoid buying them the most astonishing baby-gro in the world:

Maybe Fiona and Carl will buy it for the baby since they're hippies. Well, they both have long hair which is the same thing as being a hippy. Well, almost.

Anyway congratulations on the 'lush little lass'.

This country's going to hell in a bisciut barrel

To my shame, my mum said, 'Look at that!' and I replied, 'Wow, yeah, a whole shop just for biscuits... oh, I see.'

Some useful advice I picked up in the street

Smoked paprika and marinated anchovies

I really wish the bags that the Sainsburys delivery man had left in his van, after leaving my house, had been the ones containing the smoked paprika and marinated anchovies. It would have been nicer to have said that they were missing, when ringing the helpline, rather than 'Er, I seem to be missing some sanitary towels and corned beef'.

I haven't updated for about two weeks and in that time I have had several moments of 'ooh, I might put that on my blog' including: feeling like crying at the Bonnie Prince Billy concert; feeling like crying, for entirely different reasons, at Mordern Tower; feeling like crying seeing an old man with shaky hands; feeling like crying when I saw some sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm in the street (a token of love so callously discarded!); and, giggling, hearing a young man and his mother arguing in a restaurant - you could hear his eyes rolling from the other side of the room as he hissed 'I'll have a pint of vodka please' at the waiter.

Naturally I waited until something involving the word 'sanitary towels' cropped up.

Happy Birthday Grandma

That was cheaper than a card.

Cultural highlights of the past week:

1. Brick memories. While listening to Nev Clay performing in the Head of Steam, an enormously enthusiastic fan so irritated somebody that they muttered 'anyone got a brick?' This brought a flush of pride to my face because it reminded me that I was declared the queen of lateral thinking (unofficial title) at school for being able to come up with the most uses for a brick. I had not had 'stove somebody's head in to stop them shouting out excitedly' on my list but I still won. The activity was posed in careers week. I am still looking for a job finding alternative uses for the brick so if anyone knows of any openings...

2. Seven Stories. I visited this children's literature centre where I was delighted to see genuine manuscripts of genuine books I genuinely read when I was a genuine child. Danny Champion of the World! Yippee! Etc. There was a quite touching exhibition about Allan and Janet Ahlberg. I particularly enjoyed a video of Allan doing keepie ups in his back garden. Of all the children's authors alive today, he is surely the best at keepie ups. I was also excited to see a bit of Harry Potter manuscript. It featured lots of crossings out and some kind of greeny smudge which was either a snot or some kind of terribly sophisticated, exotic, spilt foodstuff. Like avocado.

Hair egg!

Oh! I nearly forgot! I saw a massive egg made out of human hair (well, it looked very much like human hair and, after all, who would make a massive egg out of dog hair?) in the street this week. It was huge! The sort of size I imagine a huge goose egg would be, or an easter egg (but just a cheap, Cadburys Buttons one, not a £24 Lindt one - the Lindt one would also be a bad example because it would be in the shape of a massive bunny - and the hair was definitely ovoid). I tried to take a picture of it, but every time I got near someone came out of the house it was sitting outside and sort of lingered about in a way that made me unsure about whether it was Granny's sacred hair-egg or something. I didn't want to commit a grave hair-egg faux pas so I was unable to capture it for your astonishment. I was doubly upset about that because someone had been kind enough to leave an empty can of Carling next to it, offering a perfect illustration of its scale.

Fame!

It's been a few days since I've written anything. I've been really busy with the band and my vigourous new exercise programme. Phew! Most of the band work has revolved around drinking tea and wondering if we can all play jangly percussion intsruments or if that's going 'a bit too far'. I'm still trying hard with the guitar so maybe we'll have a conventional instrument involved too. We'll just have to write songs with no f's in them. One nice result of our exciting debut on myspace is that I just accidentally found a nice girl band called The Pipettes. Pipette is a lovely word, isn't it? Almost lovely enough to make a career in science seem attractive. Or to make being in an all-girl, polka-dot-shod pop band attractive. Sadly, it has stymied our 'yeah, let's all wear polka dot dresses' plan.

Other music I have 'discovered' recently includes Mogwai. I put the word discovered in inverted commas to indicate my awareness that the rest of the world has been listening to Mogwai since they were in the womb. I first heard them last Wednesday when they played at Northumbria University.

When my giving-up-buying-stuff for Lent ends - next Sunday, it will be hard to choose between buying a Mogwai LP or the Pipettes debut album. I suspect that the Pipettes might win - simply because they've only got one album so they wouldn't present me with further dilemmas. Actually, considering I didn't buy the delight pictured below (as spotted in Windows of Newcastle, priced at £179.99, only yesterday) I think I might treat myself and buy two records.



Wow. she's a beauty, eh?

Olympics here I come!

Today sees the first day of my campaign to become an olympian. I thought it might be nice to do something for being thirty and, inspired by the snowboarders on the telly, have plumped for becoming an international sports star. There are four years to go so I think I'll take one year to get myself in shape while also researching potential sports. Apparently there's a sport that involves cross-country skiing and shooting, which sounds like fun. Then I'll have a couple of years to become brilliant at the sport and get the shell suits and stuff. Ace.

While thinking about how I am now a future olympian I realised what a lovely name for a band that would be. We had been thinking about calling it 'My So Called Wife' but audience surveys have suggested that is a 'rubbish' name. So, anyway, how about 'Future Olympians'? We've got a myspace so all we need to do now is learn to play some instruments, write some songs, that kind of stuff. It's great being in a band. Yesterday when I walked to the shops I was just plain old Helen Parker. Today I held my head up high, knowing that I was Helen Parker of the Future Olympians. Brilliant.

Night shift

My partner on night shift was a chap who takes his career (as opposed to his job, if you see what I mean) terribly seriously. I imagine that he has a Dad's Army style map, with advancing pins and arrows and what-not, up in his garage where he plans his assault on the nursing world. 'Stage four: chief nursing officer, stage five: world domination!' He always asks me what my plans are and is disappointed that I don't have any. 'To become rich and famous through a talent I haven't yet discovered' is not a good career plan, apparently. Last night, as usual, he was asking me searching questions. 'Do you not worry that you're stagnating here?' I considered pointing out to him that I had spent the afternoon talking to a stranger on the internet, pretending to be a middle-aged American school teacher, largely because Monk had finished and I didn't want to get up off the sofa. 'Does that seem like the actions of a person with a career plan? No? Leave me alone, I'm trying to stagnate.'

Then he went for his break and I wrote a story about a piece of oddly placed dog pooh that I have been keeping an eye on for a few weeks.