Dom Davis (The Blog)

So yesterday’s galavanting around the country meant my evening was rather a right off. I pretty much returned home to go straight to bed, followed by 6am happening some 4 hours too early and the need to get up and go to work staring me in the face.

That said, it’s been a short week and what with all the bank holidays and being ill I’ve had rather a lot of time off recently. Assuming tomorrows procedure happens as planned I’ll be having even more. By this time tomorrow I should be sat in a waiting room waiting my turn to answer the barrage of questions regarding allergies, crowns and the like before changing into the fetching hospital gown, heading to the next waiting room before being prodded somewhere…er… intimate. Deep joy. There will then follow a period of convalescing done from home. Expect many blog entries the follow the lines of “ow”.

So once again the country is gripped in the maw of an ice age. Weather forecasters have started talking about feet of snow. Various organisations and government officials are telling us not to travel. Airports are closed. Trains aren’t running. The country is impassible.

This does not hold true for the entire country though. Guess which part had only a few mm of snow last night, most of which melted? Go on, guess! NXEA, a train company who has problems running trains if a cockroach so much as farts at the wrong time seem annoyingly able to keep my train running, and running on time.

To make matters worse The Zozo has a day off today. I could have so easily fired off an email claiming inability to get into the office and that I would “work from home” before rolling over and going back to sleep again. But no, I have a train. And a cold one at that. If I may borrow a turn of phrase from Goron: arsebiscuits.

The shoes I wear to the gym (and the occasional game of squash) are now over 2 years old. Probably nearer 3. They are, to put it mildly, falling to bits. Since I’m now regularly back at the gym I figured it was time to treat myself to some new shoes. As I do intend to play squash again I decided court shoes were in order (I never wear my gym shoes outside) so it was off to the Internet to the best purveyor of sporting goods I know: John Lewis. I very quickly found a pair of snazzy looking Nike Air which I made a note of and took with me to the actual shop, my track record with shoe shopping online not being great. There I was served by a maths genius who told me they were 10% off in the sale so were now £40 not £50. Not one to pass up an extra £5 off I grabbed them and ran.

Today is the first day I’ve worn them to the gym and I’m pleased to announce my performance with my jazzy new shoes is… worse! 22 minutes into my normal 30 minute cross trainer workout I had to bail and hit the cooldown button. I’m also only attempting 20 minutes on the bike. To be fair last week I dialled the strength down on the machines a bit to ease myself back into it but I hadn’t realised I was that out of shape. I’m also a bit worried about the pins and needles I get on the bike after 10 minutes or so.

The good news is that, despite last weeks diet of lard, I lost a lb… or my shoes are a lb lighter.

So the good news is I can still make it out, club all night and get back to Colchester without passing out.

The bad news is I no loner live in Colchester, I live a further 2 hours down the track.

The worse news is that there are engineering works (sorry, “Route Improvement Works”) today and I had to get a bus from Ingatestone to here.

But the absolute best news, and this is a doozy, is that the buses haven’t been given enough time to get from one station to the next so I watched my train to Norwich pull out without me and a whole bus load of other people. So I get to spend an hour sitting at Colchester station. Somewhere that I thought I was done with in terms of waiting for trains.

It’s unfortunate for the customer service guys that their office is right by where our train was 30 seconds before. Some ire may have been vented by some passengers. I stuck with resigned dejectedness. It’s not their fault, there’s bugger all they can do and they’re probably going to have a day of this.

Funnily enough a combination of 8 hours of thumping music and the slight auditory hallucinations I get when very tired means that the rumble of the rail replacement bus engines is hitting my brain as a banging, if a little monotonous, tune. That, blogging and incessant Facebook updates are passing the time and stopping me from falling asleep on this bench.

Having been awake for some stupidly large number of hours due to me deciding I wanted to go clubbing on a night with an extra hour in it (self inflicted, no sympathy) I need to keep myself occupied and my brain active so I don’t fall asleep and miss my county (never mind my stop). To this end I shall list a number of lessons that people should have learned last night:

1) In a club with a strict no photography policy, while you might get away with mobile phone pics, you’re not going to be left unchallenged when you pull out a ruddy great big SLR with huge flash gun. One assumes you’ll be picking that up at the end of the night now.

2) Men who are overweight should not take their tops of and expose their chests. Ever. No matter how hot it gets. End of discussion.

3) Men who think they are trim and in shape should not take off their tops and expose their chests. You’re not quite as trim as you think.

4) Men who are trim and in shape should not take off their tops and expose abs and 6 packs. Bastards!

5) Covering your friends in beer on the train on the way to your Halloween party greatly reduces the number of friends you have.

6) Banging on my window at Witham station while I snooze on my way to London is not big, nor is it clever.

7) Ripping the signs that say “out of order” from the cash machines won’t suddenly magically make them work. Not even if you remove all of them.
Brave though it was to wear a g-string and fishnet top with those trousers (male, and not dissimilar build to me, which is something you want to hide rather than flaunt) you might want to check for labels. They glow under the UV light and the visible label on the thong was very disconcerting.

9) The clocks went back an hour last night. It happened after 01:59. After this time some, older time pieces may need manual intervention. Asking “are you sure” after enquiring about the time and canvassing a large number of people (presumably so you can take an average, or go with the majority vote, or something) really isn’t needed.

10) And last, but by no means least, this is Slimelight. The fact you’re not peeing into a trough after wading across a floor covered in piss, beer and puke while women (and men) check their makeup is a small miracle. You’ve got your own, men only toilet, it’s relatively clean and there’s even a thing of hand soap by the sinks. Accept that hand towels or a working hand drier is too much to ask. I take my own little towel. It Comes in very handy.

Todays best phrase was overheard in the gents toilets: ” Dude! How is your makeup not running?”. Given it’s Halloween you would be forgiven in thinking that it’s not a completely off the wall question. Let me take it completely off the wall, therefore, and tell you they weren’t in costume. At least not a Halloween one. They weren’t in drag either

And now I must leave you and change onto my bus replacement rail service

I don’t know about you, but if I get woken in the night one of two things is going to happen. I’m either going to roll over and go to sleep straight away (sometimes not even remembering that I woke up at all according to The Zozo) or I’m awake for hours. There is no middle ground, it’s seconds or hours.

The tipping point seems to be how far my brain gets woken up. Occasionally my computer, which is in the bedroom, decides to wake up from sleep mode for no apparent reason. There is a click as the power supply goes from low power mode to fully on, the fans spin up to full speed for a few seconds before settling down and both monster screens turn on. You know how much light a 30″ TV throws out when you’re watching it? Double that. It ranks pretty low on my all time favourite ways to be woken up at random times but I can get up, put it to sleep and head back to bed and put myself back to sleep without really thinking.

Compare that with being woken by a machine that’s pulled your telephone number randomly out of a hat and forces your brain to actually do something. Still being woken, still having to get out of bed to do something but this time your brain has woken up too. You head back to bead and it suddenly decides were going to go over the points that need to be raised in my next meeting, the fix to my current coding problem…

…and no matter what you try it doesn’t let up until about 5am where it goes “phew, long night, let’s get some really deep sleep”. 90 minutes later and the alarm is letting you know that the extra 7 hours of that deep sleep you really need to face the day isn’t happening.

And it’s the time you need to wake up that dictates when your brain let’s up, not how long it’s been awake for. Don’t need to be up till 8? Fine, I’ll sit here and spin, keeping you awake until 6:30 instead.

As you can guess I didn’t get much sleep last night.

For the past 4 years I’ve used my mobile as my primary telephone number. The land line is really just for broadband, although the mobile reception in Little Cottage is a bit crap so we have started encouraging people to call the landline if there’s no answer on the mobile. Even so I couldn’t really tell you what the ring on the home phone sounds like, I hear it so infrequently. Which is why, when it rings at 00:40 it’s causes such confusion.

Here’s the scene. The Zozo and I sound asleep with that serenity being shattered by a noise. A few seconds confusion while we try and work out what’s going on followed by me getting out if bed to pick up the phone. It’s dark and the handset doesn’t light up when you pick it up. I can’t find the answer button. The phone goes to voicemail. Now we’re both awake and wondering what’s wrong and who’s calling.

I turn my mobile on in case someone is trying to get hold if me. The Zozo does 1471. Number withheld. She checks the message. Nothing. It’s a fucking automated dialler. Some bastard machine has called our number so that, on the off chance that we answer and there is an ‘agent’ free, some Indian sat in a call centre half way round the world can try to sell me something I have no interest in buying.

Does it matter that were on the TPS scheme? Does it fuck! To report the company you need to get some details from them which the ‘agents’ have been trained not to give. It’s not “Hello this is Mahindra from Annoying Corp.”, it’s “Hello sir, let me feed you some shit about why you need to buy something from me”. With a withheld number you can’t report them.

I’ve even had them phone up claiming my computer has returned diagnostic information that it’s booting up too slowly. Utter shite, especially when the ‘agent’ couldn’t tell me the make or model of my computer. They wanted me to ‘click start’ and pass that info to them. Firstly, if it’s calling some remote helpdesk to say it’s got problems then you have that information and secondly it’s a Mac. There is no start button, so kindly fuck off! I did get him to admit that he couldn’t help me because I didn’t have a Windows machine and that my computer didn’t cause them to call but I never got the company name to complain about them.

So here we are. An hour later. It’s nearly two in the sodding morning and I can’t get back to sleep, all thanks to some stupid fucking sales company and their bloody auto dialler. I want to hurt someone¹!

¹Given the state of this country on how the authorities can blow the simplest figure of speech way out of proportion I should probably point out that this is just a statement of frustration and not a threat, implied or otherwise, against any person or persons, living or dead. Anyone taking it as such is hereby admitting that they are a moron of the highest caliber and unfit to make judgement against me.