Journal Entries
Can anyone help with my latest hare-brained idea?
Posted Jun 21, 2004
I've had a brainwave for sorting out decorating my room and storing my vinyl... one of those hanging pvc display things that holds, say, 6x6 or 12x12 albums that you see in record shops. Thought it'd look quite cool and help with the storage space... and I don't listen to my records very often these days so I might as well get some use out of them.
I've been looking for one on the internet. Trouble is, I've got no idea what they're actually called. I've tried all sorts of searches, but the only thing I've found is this:
http://www.covers33.biz/uk2shop-4.htm
which is right at the bottom of said page, but it's only a strip 1 wide rather than a grid which is what I'm after.
I also just had a tremendous sense of deja vu as I typed this, which I take as a sign that I'm somewhere in life that I'm supposed to be...
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Latest reply: Jun 21, 2004
A Real-life Post-Modern Phenomenon
Posted Jun 13, 2004
I just bumped into Luther Blissett. 
The real original one, that is, not the internet-based group of anarchists, pranksters and situationalists that use his name.
Being as he'd just been a studio guest on BBC World's sports section, I suppose it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility, but it cheered me up no end.
I feel RAF this morning. If the nation knew what state those who are paid to broadcast to it are in right now, it'd probably demand a refund... 
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Latest reply: Jun 13, 2004
The return of Number Six's Word of the Week
Posted Jun 7, 2004
Smorgasbord.
A brilliant way to describe a huge choice of anything...
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Latest reply: Jun 7, 2004
Blowout
Posted Jun 2, 2004
It's been an interesting week, by and large.
Steve, one of my housemates, is 30 today and is in the middle of a week of celebrating that fact. Lots of stuff going on, we're all going out tonight, having a party and all-in housewarming on Saturday and had a huge barbecue last Sunday.
Yesterday the four of us went on a jolly boys outing to France. A bit of an adventure, really. I was doing all the driving, and we left at half five - somehow, I'd only had about three hours sleep what with being excited about the trip and certain other things in my life...
Got to Calais realising we lacked a GB sticker and the headlamp deflectors required by French law, and headed to the nearest local supermarket. Unfortunately they didn't have a 'daft British motorists' section, and stocked neither. There was a sort of French Halfords nearby, and they couldn't help either.
So we bought a roll of electrical tape and a marker pen. Made a home-made GB sign on a piece of paper and stuck it in the back window, and roughly followed the markings on the headlamps to improvise beam deflectors with the electrical tape. Veronique, my Citroen estate, was promptly re-christened 'The Pikeymobile'.
Headed down the coast to a huge Carrefour hypermarket, and we all ransacked the place for cheap booze as you'd expect and I ended up going slightly manic in the red wine aisle - being a bit sleep-deprived and all. I'd found some wine that had been awarded a medal at some recent tasting or other, and experience has shown that these are very much the ones to go for. But one bottle of wine looks very much like another, and in between finding that one, going back to the trolley and then back to the shelves, I'd lost my bearings - and ended up running up and down the aisle flapping my arms like a penguin.
Eventually got out of there about a hundred quid lighter, and also just for a laugh having bought an orange vest (like Bruce Willis saves the Universe in in the Fifth Element - has anyone else noticed there's a whole genre of Bruce Willis films where has saves the world and/or universe while wearing a vest?) to go to the gym in, and we decided to head to the beach for a picnic. Calais beach was surprisingly nice despite the rain, there are lots of beach huts there much like in the beginning of Betty Blue, and it was very atmospheric. There's something I love about beaches out of season, and beach huts.
So we scoffed the picnic in the car and then went out on the beach for a quick kickabout with the plastic football we'd bought, rain notwithstanding, and had a whale of a time making fools of ourselves falling over in the sand and that. This was followed by a quick trip to the local Tabac, where I managed to buy a packet of 30 Gauloises (still can't quite work that one out) and we reconvened on the porch of a beach hut for refreshments - the others got stuck into the first tranche of beers and Steve smoked a cigar he'd just bought in the style of Hannibal Smith off of the A-Team.
I love it when a plan comes together.
Nipped into Calais town centre before the ferry home, made a quick trip to a creperie, and made the ferry home with one minute to spare.
And then the fun bit - as you can expect, Veronique was loaded up to the gunwales with four blokes and all their booze. So while we were doing 90 mph in the middle lane of the M20, the back rear having a blowout was probably the last thing we needed. Luckily I worked out what was going on in time, and got us on to the hard shoulder before anything bad happened.
Then came phoning Green Flag, and even though we were on a mobile, we had no idea where on the M20 we were, so had to walk to the nearest SOS phone to get a bearing for them, which it turned out wasn't particularly near. That was fun in the dark, with an endless stream of 38-tonners thundering past ten feet away. Guy came along to keep me company, and on the way back we decided to get our spirits up by singing first My Generation and then Come on Eileen as loud as we could - Dan and Steve said they could actually hear us above the traffic when we got within two hundred yards of them
The breakdown bloke turned up eventually and we had fun and games unloading the boot and dealing with a broken bottle of Captain Morgan, and he changed the wheel for us with the aforementioned juggernauts rumbling past about three feet away. Whatever he's paid, it's not enough.
So what with all that, we got back to London at about half past one. Not a bad day all-in, considering I'd done it all on three hours sleep. Fortunately I have the day off today - I suppose I'm going to have to go and do something about that tyre...
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Latest reply: Jun 2, 2004
Hanging on the telephone
Posted Jun 1, 2004
To borrow a simile from Monty Python, my moods have been up and down like the Assyrian Empire this weekend. For the first time in 12 years of trying, I met a girl in a club (I've always met them other places before) on Saturday night *and* got her phone number.
She came and talked to me, which frankly was bloody necessary 'cos I'm a bit of a shy boy... 
But I didn't give her up as a lost cause when other blokes were dancing with her and that, and got enough nerve up to go and talk to her again towards the end of the night, and somehow it worked 
So I spent most of Sunday with a ridiculous grin on my face and came in for a rude shock on Monday lunchtime when I tried to ring her. The phone number I had didn't work.
*Normally* I'd just taken this as a brush-off, but what happened was that upstairs at the club I asked her if she wanted to meet up some time, and she said yes. The only way I had of getting her number was to programme it into my mobile, which was downstairs in my coat in the cloakroom. So we all trooped down to the cloakroom and I got my jacket out, put her number in my phone, and she even looked at it and checked it, and told me I had one number wrong (I'd got an '0' at the end rather than an '8').
My housemates and I concluded that Thing is, surely she wouldn't have gone through all that just to get rid of me - wouldn't she just have said no thanks when I suggested meeting up?
All I knew was her first name, where she came from (but not where she lives in London), and where she said she works - but I think she was having a laugh on that one... so, what to do? 
It's fortunate I've spent some time as a researcher and am used to phone bashing...what I actually did was this:
I worked out that I probably had the code right and assumed that I had the last number 'cos she'd told me that one.
So that meant one of five digits was the wrong one, which meant 45 possibilities. I figured I had nothing to lose, and decided to ring the lot. I only spoke to about eight actual human beings, and got a few answerphone messages and lots of 'number out of use'. That left five possibilities that just went to the standard Orange answerphone message. So I thought "Well, that's it then - at least I tried"
But on Monday evening, one of those last five numbers rang me back and it was her!
I suppose she would have been expecting a call from a strange phone, so... We're meeting up a week on Thursday 
Fortunately I was out in the garden at the time and didn't get to my phone in time, so she got my answerphone message (which fortunately *does* have my name on it) and then tried again.
All's well that ends well, I suppose.
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Latest reply: Jun 1, 2004
Number Six
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