A quick round the houses catch up:
Work
In a rare display of forward planning I managed to wangle my way to having a free diary on Monday, expressly so I could take the computer up into the attic and work from home. It was brilliant and I must try to do it more often. For a start I got a lot more work done, or at least a lot more of what Looby quite correctly calls 'the Metacrap that passes for work nowadays'. But completing the 3000 word report that I have been trying to get done for the past month, only to be scuppered by constant interruptions (the usual- emails, the tyranny of the 'brew round', having small change demanded from me with menaces on a daily basis by women brandishing oversized leaving cards addressed to people I may have met in the lift sometime in 2008) wasn't the best thing. The best thing was avoiding the weekly ordeal of walking into the office on a Monday morning and facing my work colleagues. Not that theyr'e a bad lot as work colleagues go, you understand. It's just that offices, I am coming to understand, are not only hotbeds of unproductivity but also breeding grounds for crippling attacks of status anxiety and all-round existential malaise. Or I don't know, maybe I've just been reading too much Alain de Botton and should get a grip immediately. Anyway like I say I had the most low-level-stress free Monday I can remember since the days of the flange desk, and I even found time in between crafting lengthy paragraphs about community cohesion to venture out of the stifling heat of the attic and into the streets and various post offices of Levenshulme and Burnage, in order to embark on the most inept and ultimately vain attempt to carry out a road tax renewal in the history of private motorised transportation.
Rest
Me and Frankie, along with a mate of mine and his 5 year old girl went camping for a Saturday night in the wilds of Derbyshire. Things got off to an unpromising start when we arrived in the village of Hope to be greeted by a man in a fluourescent coat brandishing a loudhailer, who warned us to drive slowly through the village as it was the Wakes Festival and there was a brass band due any minute. Not only that but the normally sleepy High Street was festooned with multicoloured bunting and every square inch of pavement was taken up either with rucksack-toting daytrippers or twelve-foot tall papier mache models of stars of stage and screen (Elvis, Mary Poppins, the shark out of Jaws). Needless to say visitors to this grotsque mini-Glastonbury had filled the village campsite to capacity, and I briefly thought we were going to have to head back home in a saloon car full of tears and recriminations (and that would have been just the grown ups). Thankfully my mate Dom is made of sterner stuff and 10 minutes later we were pulling up at a farmer's field which may have lacked facilities of any kind (there was a perfunctory toilet block in one corner and, er, that's it) but which turned out to be bordered down one side by the main Manchester-Sheffield train line. Frankie heaven in other words, and I rather suspect we may have difficulty persuading him to go on holiday anywhere else for the foreseeable future, which means we will have to bring Dom with us everywhere, as the only way I could stand a chance of finding the place again would be by actually catching a train from Manchester to Sheffield and jumping out at a likely-looking point, and I think that is probably against the campsite rules and also with my luck I'd land on a papier mache re-enactment of Elvis's Final Las Vegas Residency and be carted off by the men in fluorescent jackets for a night in the stocks at Edale.
Play
We were visited, by me mam and Abby and Frankie's cousin Oscar. Just for the afternoon, but it was enough time for Oscar and Frankie to renew their acquaintance by sprinting headlong into the fountains at Piccadilly gardens in their underwear (which is about the most singularly Mancunian thing that it is possible for a child of this city to do, I think he can probably call himself a native now, in fact really the act should have been witnessed by a civic official of some kind and we should get a letter from the Town Hall). There was also a visit to the allotment, featuring the cousins 'helping with the digging' AKA making a mudbath where the non-functioning parsley used to be (which on reflection may have been an activity best planned for before the open-air shower, but then where's the fun in that?)
.....
There you are. Caught up. Now. Advance notice of a foolhardy undertaking. I've not been writing on here enough- one post in thirty days, it's not good enough (or good for me; not writing actually makes me anxious, Monday-morning anxious even). So for the next two weeks here's the thing. One post a day is what we're aiming for. A post a day! On weekdays anyway (see I'm backtracking already). They won't be any good of course, these posts. And they won't be very long (in fact they may be very short- I reserve the right for some of them to be two sentences long). But they will be there, and it may be that the momentum gets us up and running, and we can get to something more regular, like in the halcyon days of the flangedesk, when three times a week was nothing to write home about, and once a month frankly unthinkable.
What do you give it, three days? We'll see...
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