365 – When I played piano for the Queen
Queenie and her husband, today. With their tall mate with a hat on. He had a sword too, don’t you know.
Of course, I didn’t really play piano for the Queen, any more than hundreds of thousands of people have done things for the Queen during her sixty years of being the Queen, or however you’re supposed to describe it.
So, it went like this. I arrived in Preston in time for a coach leaving at 8.30am, with the (award winning) UCLan Chamber Choir, to nip over to Burnley to what would appear to be a very posh sixth form college with a bit of UCLan tagged onto the side of it. No, I don’t get it either. I also don’t quite understand why that was the place the Queen decided to go to on her token visit to the Northwest, but that’s what happened. The big guns from the ‘proper’ campus were shipped in to make it good, obviously.
Before we went, we’d all been apparently security checked, we’d been given a special letter to print out and bring with us (or we wouldn’t be allowed in the building) and when we arrived some people had their bags checked. They decided not to bother checking the enormous flight case which had the piano in it (which may as well have been full of either Semtex or sawn off pump action shotguns. I don’t know whether there’s such a thing as a sawn off pump action shot gun but it sounds like the sort of thing which oughtn’t be allowed to hang out around Queenie).
364 – Rubbish Strike
Well done, strikers. I could barely get through the door…
Well, in the end, nothing really happened. A public sector strike happened yesterday, including some angry ignorant people from the establishment where I work (amongst lots of non-angry, non-ignorant ones, I might add). The picture above tells a story though. And this wasn’t at stupid o’clock in the morning when I usually arrive, but at 10.30am, when even the most lazy of protestors should have been there. I don’t know why they weren’t and don’t care.
Let me explain. I’m not in their union. I won’t be in their union. One of the reasons is that my colleague is blanked by her union rep, who won’t make eye contact with her, because a couple of years ago she didn’t strike, for the same reason I didn’t yesterday. Given he’s her union rep, what is supposed to happen the next time she has a problem and needs to speak to him. Will she go and see him but spend the whole meeting not looking at her? Or will he not help her at all because she displayed some professional integrity towards her students at a time when they really needed it? Or is he just a prick? I’m not sure, I don’t know him. I’m sure he’s a very nice man, but perhaps he’s got things a little wrong. It’s something which happens a lot in this place. All to often people forget why we’re here and the delivery to the students often seems to be way down on the agenda for too many people. Read more 
363 – Don’t worry, I’ve not died…
Brilliant. If you type “I am not a scab” into The Googles, this comes up. It’s my bacon sandwich and my mug. I love The Googles…..
Well, that return to form didn’t last long did it? Precisely one post in a month does not constitute any kind of acceptable blogging, I’m aware of that.
The response has been overwhelming. By that I actually mean I don’t think it’s been mentioned in real life or on the t’interweblogosphere by one single person in all that time, including me. Which is quite funny really.
The reason I write is because yesterday I finished a sizeable chunk of work and I’m not prepared to work on the next sizeable chunk of work for at least a few days, especially considering what else I have to do for the next ten days or so. Conversely that leaves me with some time to think about this nonsense. I literally haven’t had anything like the time to deal with it.
Of course, what’s really happening is a strike and regular readers know how exciting it is on here when I start crowing on about a strike. The strike is tomorrow and, of course, I’m not striking, mostly because I’m not in the striking union, I don’t have a pension and I’ve got a show to do.
This will all become clear tomorrow when I write about said strike. And probably the next day. In the meantime, we ought to revisit the previous action when there was a strike. To do that, first you need to read my initial post:
http://everyonesanidiot.co.uk/2011/11/30/post-249-i-am-not-on-strike/
then the follow up:
http://everyonesanidiot.co.uk/2011/12/02/post-251-i-am-not-a-scab/
then what was suppose to be the final word:
http://everyonesanidiot.co.uk/2011/12/03/post-253-the-final-word/
then a couple of other related posts, which also appear to involve me having a cold:
http://everyonesanidiot.co.uk/2011/12/20/post-270-scabs-and-colds/
http://everyonesanidiot.co.uk/2011/12/21/post-271-scabs-colds-and-friends/
To be honest, the best bits of this aren’t my posts, they’re the comments and the pingbacks and related posts by other people, especially the crazy ones.
Go on, have a read of them and we’ll reconvene tomorrow (hangover dependant) to discuss why this time, specifically, I won’t be striking and why my colleague (who struck* last time) won’t be either. I suspect all the nut jobs will come crawling out of the militant woodwork in time for a scathing comment.
Remember folks, I am not a scab.
* I know the word isn’t “struck”, I’m just messing about, right?
361 – Why I don’t care
Ain't that the truth...
I appreciate the paradoxical nature of what I’m writing, but as I’ve said many times, it’s my blog so I’ll write whatever the damn well heck I like. Many of my recent posts have postulated on the relevance or otherwise of what we call social media, specifically for me and for most people, either Twitter, or Facebook, or both. Both sites (and other less fashionable sites which cling on for dear life) have changed the world to some extent and certainly within the media it would appear that the very fabric of society has changed as a consequence, especially Twitter, with it’s immediacy and it’s ‘public forum’ type of construction.
I remember when I first got into Twitter and was trying to explain it to my Luddite friends. I had to concede even then that it was pointless and potentially time consuming but some three and a half thousand tweets later, I’m beginning to really tire of it all. It, and Facebook, seem to me to be nothing more than a banal trawl through peoples banal goings on. Most of those people I don’t care about. It’s interesting that when I meet up with people I like, there’s less and less talk of these things, and certainly very little talk of the things which have been mutually posted, which lends one to suggest that the things which are being posted as statuses or whatever are so banal that they don’t even warrant discussion after weeks or months of not seeing that person.
What I certainly don’t care for is what someone I know a little bit has been watching on YouTube this week. I’ve watched masses of stuff on YouTube in the last twenty four hours, but I’m not going to tell you about any of it. There’s no point. It doesn’t matter. It won’t interest you anyway. I don’t want to tell you how many points I scored in Scrabble, how many miles I’ve run today (it’s none, by the way) or what I’ve been listening to on Spotify or reading in an app which I don’t want to have to install. Not only do I not want to tell you those things about me, but I don’t really want to know those things about you either. I think I’d rather meet up with you and chat about stuff (which won’t include those things) and if I don’t want to meet up with you (or vice versa) then perhaps I shouldn’t be wasting my time reading about it. Read more
360 – I’m back!
Me, looking pensive, in a holiday kind of way.
Oh, how you’ve missed me. You’ve missed me, right? Please tell me you’ve missed me. OK, I know by the stats that you haven’t. I know because exactly two people told me they missed this. One was my Dad. One was someone I don’t know. Actually, it’s been quite a relief and had quite a big impact on how I feel about all sorts of things. But I think I’ll put those words down properly, maybe tomorrow, maybe another day a long time from here.
I have no idea how often I’ll write here, but I’ll try and make it worth a read, if nothing else, despite the fact that the general tone may well be apathy, or something so insipid and lacking anger that you’ll all switch off anyway. But in the meantime, what’s happened since I’ve been gone?
Well, I’ve done a show, I’ve been on holiday, my beautiful wife has ‘enjoyed’ a birthday and we’ve celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Oh, and it’s been Easter too. In fact it is today, but being an atheist, Easter is a bit of a funny one. I’m not eating any chocolate eggs (or any other, analogue eggs, either) but I did indulge in some “holiday non-egg chocolate” whilst on my holidays. The fact that someone died, then the myth that he came back to life aren’t of much consequence to me, but there’s not much else going for it as a pagan festival, at least not in the 21st century, so I’ll just let it go, let the telly stop being weird, and wait for the endless bank holidays to finish, then carry on about my business.
There’s been petrol based drama whilst I’ve been away, but I suspect I’ve missed the boat for a rant about that. I have a nagging feeling that it’ll all come round again soon, so I can write about it then. There’s a hint of teachers striking again, which could be interesting for regular readers, if it affects me, but other than that, things just carry on as normal.
The only slight worry is that not only am I consciously trying to be a calmer individual, which doesn’t help a blog of this nature, but essentially I can’t be arsed with anything online at the moment. By that I mean anything where I have to show anything of myself. I’ve neither tweeted or statused since my holiday started and I really have no desperate inclination to either, other than the promotion of this very post, but I’m aware of the hypocrisy of saying that, then writing this. But that’s just it. I really don’t want to spend time telling people what I’m doing, because I don’t want them to know, yet at the same time, I’m writing hundreds of words about that very same thing. I’m afraid I haven’t got an answer to that, so don’t ask, but there’s a slight chance that I might begin to disassociate myself from the online nonsense and start to try to live my life again. If there’s a balance to be had, then maybe I’ll come quietly crawling back, but I’m not so sure. In fact I’m not so sure about anything much I’ve just written, but I suppose writing it down helps. This, of course, is what people say in favour of these silly social networking things, so maybe I should just start writing a secret diary that nobody will read. At least that way I don’t have to worry about whether it’s interesting or not, which clearly it isn’t.
OK, look here, right. I’ve done a blog and will do another one soon, but as for the long term future of this or anything to do with me online, I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see won’t we. Fingers crossed that if I do write here again, it’ll be more interesting than this tosh. Happy Easter!
359 – Time for a break
My messy garden. Not really talking about that today though.
Ah, great. The classic three hundred and fifty ninth blog. What a milestone! To be honest, I was going to write a post every day until we got to three hundred and sixty six, just to have one per day for a (leap) year, but I realised that was just as pointless as what we talked about yesterday.
To be honest, I even made a list and plotted out how I’d do it and what I’d say, but that was stupid. So, what would I have talked about? Let’s save us all some reading and reduce each one down to one sentence. If you want, you can revisit this page every day for the next week, check which post you haven’t had delivered, and ponder it yourself. Perhaps you should write it, and start your own blog.
359 – That’s today. I’m having my good friend Jeff visit me today with all his gardening shiz. He’s a gardener. He’s going to fix my garden. Hence the picture. That essentially, is all I was going to talk about.
360 – Of course a post like that means I would have spent tomorrow morning writing about how the garden had changed (if at all) and how pleased I was and how much I love Jeff. You’ll just have to pop round and see it for yourself.
361 – I’m away very, very early on Monday morning for a day’s vocal coaching with celebrities, so I would have spend tomorrow evening writing about the other list I have, of stuff I never got round to writing about on this blog. Yeah, scraping the barrel so early in the week. I’m actually going to either save those things for a few weeks time, or just not bother. Some of them have been on the list for ages, so they’re obviously not that good to talk about.
362 – What Have We Learnt? Yes, a little tongue in cheek post about what we’ve all read in the last couple of years on here. Nothing is the answer, let’s save you the epic way I would have described that.
363 – Top five posts. The most viewed posts on here are pretty random and I was going to give you a rundown of what they were. So what? There doesn’t seem to be much sense to it. So they are,
1. 93% of you won’t copy and paste this
2. Like, like
3. We Buy And Car
4. The worst pains of all (part four)
5. Snow hysteria
Weird that those should be the top ones, in amongst what I think is some nice bits of writing, but there we go. It’s Google’s fault, but I won’t bore you with why.
364 – The quest for inner peace. Amazingly, I really mean that. To be honest, most of the reason that I can’t be angry anymore is that I don’t want to be, and I’m actively trying not to be. I know, it sounds preposterous. I will write about this in the future, but try and avoid hippy self-help psycho babble rubbish and deal with it from the realistic point of view of a busy normal person. We’ll see…
365 – This post, which won’t be posted on Friday, was essentially going to be something like I’m writing now. Yeah, really scraping the barrel after what would have happened through the week.
366 – I was just going to have an empty post, because I thought it would be a funny thing to leave at the top of the site for several weeks. Yes, I am an idiot and yes, I’ve thought all this through way, way too much. But that’s exactly the point.
I won’t be writing again until I get back from my holiday, so it’ll be some time during the second week of April. Feel free to pop back and read some old posts if you’re missing it. You won’t. Not one single bit, unless it actually makes your bowels move of a morning. I recommend Lactulose.
That’s all for a while. I’m relieved. Thanks for reading.
362 – Why I don’t want babies
Well, the last blog was really interesting to write and I had one of those rare occasions where it started a conversation which I joined in with, albeit rather briefly. There was a comment on the post which sparked a reaction from me to the point where I read it out to the friends I was with. In fact it’s such an extraordinary comment I thought I ought to share it:
If it’s of any consequence, it’s from my old drama teacher at high school, a man who had considerably impact on my future career, due to the way he worked with me, and whilst he didn’t influence me greatly as a person, his influence on my life is almost immeasurable. I’ve not seen him or spoken to him in a long time, but I occasionally have the social network contact that many of us experience, which ironically plays against the tone of the previous post. But there we go. Read more
Share this:
Like this: