Sorry to be such a smug git, but...

This isn't a political blog, but political decisions have an impact on people everywhere, and I'm no different. As a result of policy choices made by the UK's Coalition Government, my employer Manchester City Council are making 2000 job cuts, and soon. (check out the BBC, Guardian and Manchester Evening News perspectives at the links)

NB: this post is backdated, see my disclaimer after the jump.

Message from Dan

“Greetings from snowy Glasgow. I’ve got two tickets for Belle and Sebastian at the Apollo on Tuesday if you’d like them?”

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes please!

“This is John Tracy, in Thunderbird Five…”

A phone call at half ten on Saturday morning: Emma Jennings, says caller ID. A gruff man’s voice says hello. That’s not Emma.

“I’ve called because you’re the last person on the call register. I’ve found Emma’s phone. And her purse. And her handbag. All of her stuff.”

“Wow,” I thought, “this guy could have robbed all of her stuff, but he didn’t. How lucky is Emma?”

He was also staying in the camper vans section, so I said I’d try to ring Tracy and get the stuff back to Emma. I thanked him, and got to work. I couldn’t get through to Tracy, so I called Dem and asked Dem to try to get hold of Emma’s dad’s number – he tried to do this by calling Kelly, who didn’t have it – and we tried to get hold of Emma’s boyfriend’s number too. Pulling all the strings from Manchester, I felt like John Tracy in Thunderbird Five.

Tracy texted: “Emma’s gone to get her stuff now. She’s broken her ankle.”

A broken ankle means spending the next two days holed up in the camper van, and not seeing any bands at all. What a shit Glastonbury story.

UPDATE: It gets worse. Emma gave her fella the flick for not looking after her properly. Shit the bed.

Do I feel lucky? Do I?

Am I lucky? Consider this:

31st May - My mock mock exam - I choose two questions from six, answering a question on sampling and a question on evaluating a research proposal.

1st June - My real mock exam - There are six questions on offer, of which I have to choose two. The choice includes a question on sampling and a question on evaluating a research proposal. The same questions that I'd answered the day before came up again. Jackpot!

23rd June - Study Leave - I write essay plans for 30 or 40 essays based on the test papers and model answers that came with my learning materials. The last batch of these includes preparing a plan in response to a question on qualitative vs quantitative individual interviews.

24th June (today) - Exam - I opened the exam paper, and was greeted by three very familiar questions. There was a question on sampling, a question on evaluating a research proposal, and a question on qualitative vs quantitative individual interviews. The question on sampling was a little different to the one I'd answered before, but the question on evaluating a research proposal was exactly the same as the one I'd already answered. Twice. And the qualitative vs quantitative individual interviews was exactly the same as the one I'd planned for yesterday

Am I lucky? If I'd chosen different questions for my mock mock, then I might have answered different questions on my real mock, and then different questions on my real exam. I wouldn't have had the luxury of writing an assessed essay that I'd already practiced twice before. That's pretty lucky, right?

Free things I got from work today

A cycling helmet
A water bottle
A puncture repair kit
A hi-vis vest
A bell
A multi-tool

Bus

I sit on the bus, beside an empty seat. I look towards the door, and when a pretty girl gets on, I look away, out of the window, and hope that she sits by me. It’s like closing my eyes, and hoping to open them to a beautiful surprise. It doesn’t always work, but it did today.

Slow burner

In January I applied for a new job. After what felt like a pretty good interview, I was gutted to be told that I was appointable, but not the best candidate for the job. I was first reserve. I assumed that was the equivalent to going on a date with someone, and for them to say at the end that they liked you but only as friend - an okay outcome, but not the desired one.

Today I got an email from the head of the interview panel asking me if I was still interested in the role. Ten weeks down the line, and out of nowhere an offer of a new job. What a massive surprise, and what a welcome one too. I'm meeting someone from that team tomorrow to have an informal chat about the role, but I'm 95% certain that I'm going to take it.

I feel really excited - especially as the field I'd be moving into is much more closely related to the environmental side of things, which is where I'd like to end up in the near future.

More Padmore

Ed’s birthday party was excellent. Ozzie picked up a curry for the fifteen guests before the game. We all crammed into the lounge and watched the Liverpool Arsenal match, which was an excellent game. Ed opened some celebratory champagne afterwards, and we sat around drinking and talking into the early hours. The very early hours, I got home at 2am. (This post is backdated. Most of them are.) Ed and Thom’s friends are such pleasant people, Lee in particular is a gem.

Thom and his flatmate Owen support different football teams. To ensure that cordial relations between them persist after their teams have played each another, they’ve informally agreed a non-aggression pact. Only the supporter of the losing team can initiate a conversation about the match. It’s a mature and diplomatic arrangement, by which I’m very impressed. Owen didn’t come to the birthday party, a mature and diplomatic decision on his part.

Eureka in three easy steps

I found out last week that my friend Lisa’s sushi bar has had to close down, which is a real shame because it did great food at a reasonable price, and just around the corner from where I work. On Friday, I left a note and some chocolates there to cheer her up. In my note I wrote: I hope this setback doesn’t stop you from taking risks in the future, for our dreams mean nothing unless we dare to chase them. This was the first of three things that combined.

I went to Sheffield on Friday to catch up with the good friend the Colonel, who I haven’t seen since Christmas. I’ve known him for four or five years, and I really value his friendship. He’s armed with razor sharp wit, tempered with no small amount of humility, and I admire his confidence to do what he wants to do regardless of the opinions of other people. Over a beer or two, he told me that he’d recently taken a week off work and trained in industrial abseil techniques. He said that he’d wanted to do it for ages, so he pulled out his finger and got on with it. This was the second of three things that combined.

Until today, I haven’t been in work since 18th March because of a variety of factors. I’d been away for my first aid course, off for the early Easter Bank Holiday weekend and using up the last of my annual leave before the end of March. As you’ll see from the ‘jobmoan’ tagged posts, I’ve not been much enjoying my work of late. On Saturday I started to get anxious about having to go back to work after a blissful period of absence. This was the third of three things that combined.

I dislike my job. Dreams mean nothing unless we pursue them. Re-training is a realistic and achievable goal. So I’m going to follow my heart and re-train so that I can change the direction of my career. It feels exciting and liberating, and at the same time scary. I feel hopeful.

Party plan 6.50 - 8.00 8.05

When I was at Caroline's house on Sunday, I found this party plan which belongs to my neice, Ashleigh (that's her in the picture). She's in the Brownies, and this is for her 'Hostess' badge. It's tightly regimented, as all parties should be.







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Party plan 6.50 – 8.00 8.05


6.50: Arrive, take off jackets, dance to music until everybody is here

7.00: Say a speech, and everybody is thanked and told to have fun then dance again

7.15: Play pass the parcel and under and over pass the parcel

7.30: Have some food and talk with friends whilst eating food

7.40: Play musical statues and prize is mobile phone charm

7.50: Dancing competition, prize is medal certificate

8.00: Say goodbye, another speech for coming

8.05: Go home!

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That's a lot of dancing and competing. Check out this bar chart.



She's eleven years old.

It was a heart attack.

After the away day at work, I met Pip for a drink before she started work and my Christmas party kicked off. In Sam’s Chop House, mum called and said that dad had been moved from Kettering to Glenfield hospital in Leicester because he’d had a heart attack. It turned out that he’d had a heart attack before when he’d had chest pains on Thursday, but it wasn’t as severe as Friday. Everybody was flustered, not least me, and so the facts aren’t clear: was it two or three attacks by Friday night? Anyhow, I ditched the work party and went for a quick pint at Trof, then headed home to sleep, via the best part of a bottle of Jack.

Saturday was bitterly cold. Taking out my headphones to talk to mum on the phone meant putting two ice-cubes back into my ears afterwards. The announcer at Leicester station said, “First Class is reported to be at the back of the train,” as if he didn’t trust the information he was getting. Neither did mum, it seemed. She's seen a lot of death, having worked in so many old people's homes. She'd emphasise the "...they say he's..." in a way that - weirdly - wasn't distressing, as if she knew all the tricks in the book, so things weren't so bad. The platform announcer wouldn’t refer to St Pancras by its new name either, preferring ‘London St Pancras,’ to the shiny new ‘St Pancras International.’ Out with the new and in with the old, I thought. The sun danced on my notebook as we passed through Market Harborough. My dad, at 54, is exactly twice my age.

I saw him around six. He told me that he’d had an operation to re-inflate a collapsed artery involving a balloon. They entered the artery through his groin, and fed the balloon up with a tiny camera. He pulled his pants to one side and showed me the cut. He had black and purple inner elbows where he’d been on a drip, and holes in the tops of his hands where some monitoring device or other had been attached, but otherwise he just looked like dad in pyjamas. He was shaken, but looked well otherwise. I’d worried about seeing him looking ill, but he didn’t. The man in the bed next to him had grey skin. I was glad dad looked so normal. He said he’d be out on Tuesday.

Today I found out that he had another heart attack last night, and that he’d be in hospital for another couple of days. He’s diabetic too, my sister told me. One lager a day hereafter will be quite a downshift for him. He seems willing to make a lifestyle change, she said. He’ll have to, she said.

Everybody around me has been wonderful. Pippa, Louise, Clare, Paul, Woody, Sam, Robbie, Lewis, Julie, Tracy, Vince – my phone’s text inbox has never been crammed with good wishes. I'm still shaken though, and can barely grasp what's happening.

Brown tape

Pippa is moving house. I moved house recently, so I still have lots of broken-down boxes in a cupboard in my flat. I offered them to Pippa earlier in the week, and she said she'd nip round this evening and collect a few.

Whilst shopping for ingredients for the fish pie I'm making on Thursday night, I thought I could also buy some brown tape so that Pippa could re-build the boxes I was giving to her. She's a painter, so I supposed that she'd have art supplies coming out of her ears. But you can't ever have enough tape, as my friend Gandhi would say. I picked some up.

RING! RING!

"Dave, do you have any brown tape?"

"I think I've got some around here somewhere..."