Category Archives: Life

Londinium

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A rather frenetic three days in London have come to an end.  I have skirted around the city on various work visits or on the occasional get-together with friends, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to soak in the atmosphere and visit the top tourist attractions.  My mother, keen to reinforce the maternal / filial bonds, saw this as an opportunity for us to spend some quality time together. So, with a little bit of planning an a lot of luck we left the quiet solitude of our respective houses in the ‘north of England’ and in the Jura Mountains (France) to tussle and jostle with some of the millions of tourists that visit London annually.

Every hour of our three day tour was packed with interest, culture, art, music, heritage, gastronomic delights and shopping.  So much so that I need a few days holiday to recover.  We visited the Houses of Parliament (a real highlight); the London Eye where mum was reunited with her fear of heights; Harrods, where for the first time I felt my bank account was completely inadequate; we took in two shows, Jumpy and Singing in the Rain (ponchos are requirement); we were perplexed by contemporary performance art at the Haywood Gallery; intrigued by the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, ‘Bronze‘; enlightened by the Royal Ballet’s performance of Swan Lake; moved by the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition; felt patriotic watching the changing of the Horse Guards and were calmed by our saunter through St James’ Park.

If you felt tired reading that, imagine how we felt at the end of our stay?!  Enjoyable and draining in equal measures, there has been talk of making this an annual event…

On my return home, I doodled on the train:

 

Performing monkeys and job interviews

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I’ve done it!  I have found myself a new job and gleefully handed in my resignation! I leaped through rings of fire at my job interview, presenting the biggest, boldest, most articulate and inspiring side of myself – I was a true performing monkey for 2 whole hours!

So now, after three long years of working from home, I will bathe myself in colleagues and office gossip.  I will go to the office parties and invite people for drinks after work. I will speak to an IT person if my computer is broken and talk to people about my workload before making a coffee for the person sitting opposite me.  I will commute with a solemn look on my face and groan when I miss the bus.  I will clock watch on a Monday then kick my heels up with that Friday feeling at the end of the week.  I will clear my bedroom of mountains of paperwork and liberate my shelf space to join the millions of you out there who call yourself an OFFICE WORKER!

Oh to have an office

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I know I have been somewhat tiresome with my recent rants about work, but it is one of my biggest irritations, no, hates at the moment.  I’ve reached my absolute fill, the homeworking quota has been exceeded, my own company is becoming tedious and I have to escape.  I daydream about the good old days (with rose tinted glasses of course) when I worked in an office. Oh how I miss the daily commute, the people watching, the office gossip, the office politics, the impromptu drinks after work and the regular, face to face contact with other human beings.  As the years tick by, I feel I’m slowly losing the ability to communicate, I’m becoming introverted and find it difficult to make idle chit chat with people who ask ‘how has your week been?’.  For the most part, my working weeks are quiet, monotonous, uneventful, uninteresting, uninspiring…you get the drift. 

As my other half comes home each evening, eager to plonk on the sofa and relax in the peace and quiet,  I’m looking to escape the confines of the apartment which seems to be getting smaller by the day.    That’s the problem you see, if you don’t go to work, then you don’t come home from work – it all just blurs into one.  There’s no shaking off the day when you walk out of the office building. I just turn from my work computer to my home computer – I’m in the same chair, at the same desk, in the same box room. I eat dinner, I go to bed, I get up, eat breakfast and sit at my desk ready to do it all over again.  *Sigh*  I think the ideal balance would be to work in an office three days a week and have two very focused days at home.  That way I could have the best of both worlds because no matter how much I whinge, there are definitely some upsides to working at home.

Anyway, before you start playing your mini violins, here is today’s cartoon on the subject:

Image

Mind melt

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Recently I have had a series of what can only be described as premature senior  moments.   These range from the usual, I’ve-walked-into-the-kitchen-to-get-something-but-now-I-haven’t-a-clue-what-that-something-is or putting-boiled-water-on-my-cereal-instead-of-milk moments, to more the irritating organisational failures.  Last week:

  • I double booked a couple of meetings.
  • I bought a non-refundable/non-moveable train ticket to Brussels only to discover afterwards that I’m scheduled to deliver a training course in England on the date I’m away.
  • I drove 50 miles up the motorway when my petrol light came on.  After another few miles, I pulled into the petrol station and reached for my purse only to find I hadn’t brought it with me. Unsure whether I’d make it home on the red light, I had to humbly scrounge some money from one of the delegates at my training course.  I’m thankful for small mercies – at least I hadn’t filled the tank BEFORE I realised I had no money. That could have made for an interesting cartoon!

So, either I’m showing early signs of Alzheimer’s (God forbid) or my brain just has far too much information to process.   I hope it’s the latter and suspect this is what happens…

Triathletes have been known to chillax!

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A friend of mine who owns a sports marketing company, is fiendishly fit and who retains a number of British and World Records in swimming (yes, I so know a person like that – yay me!), recently asked me to draw a cartoon to advertise a BBQ celebrating the end of the triathlon season.  I’m tired just thinking about a whole season of triathlons.

Anyway, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to sketch some athletes relaxing around a campfire, sipping their energy drinks and toasting marshmallows.  This is my sort of relaxation (without the triathlon before hand of course).  I wonder if Jess Ennis, Mo Farah and GB’s other gold medalists can be found, eating hamburgers and swaying to bit of Bob Marley post-Olympics?

Olympic mayhem

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7.30: We set off to watch Japan play The Republic of Korea for the Olympic bronze medal in the women’s volleyball.   Destination: London.

7.50: L notices that our train is not displayed on the information board. Manic ticket checking and re-checking ensues.

8.00: Eight minutes before expected departure, harried discussions between ticket operator and other half reveals our train is due to leave from Nottingham, not Sheffield i.e. the city where we used to live, not the city we currently live in.   Remain calm,  all is not lost, let’s consider our options:

A) don’t go
B) pay for new tickets
C) cry

8.27: We board the train with newly purchased tickets. Still time to make the match but it will be a squeeze.

8.35: The realisation that we’ve made a fatal error when choosing where to sit for the journey. We are now opposite a family of 5, including three children under 5yrs, but we can’t find new seats because the train is packed! The smallest of the three children starts to cry. The middle child takes umbridge at the fact that she is being ignored by her mother whose focused on the baby and starts to nag in a whiney voice.

9.50: All attempts at catching up on sleep are thwarted by screaming children. One child has excitedly dismembered a bread roll and scattered the crumbs along the corridor – presumably in a vain attempt to feed the ducks.  Other passengers exchange looks of dissapproval.

9.55: The train has come to an unexpected standstill, no one is quite sure why.

9.57: A train operator announces over the tannoy:
‘We have come to a stop’. This is obvious. She adds,
‘The emergency alarm has been activated,’  this is also apparent as her voice is barely audible over the high pitched, siren wailing in the background.
‘The driver is investigating the problem, sorry for any inconvenience’.
The screeching children next to us are momentarily drowned out by the collective groan of the passengers.

10.20: Another tannoy announcement informs us that ‘train…forward…patience…fixed’, the information is incomprehensible due to the fizzing and crackling of the speakers, however the alarm is still audible.  Our hopes of watching the Olympic game are ebbing away…

10.40. The train creeps forward to a round of applause and cheers from the passengers.

10.41: An announcement: ‘ladies and gentlemen, we have been unable to fix the problem and you will be required to disembark at the next station’.  This time the groan from the passengers is of Olympic proportions.

10.45: All passengers disembark and wonder around the platform looking dazed and confused with no instruction from the train operators. It’s a bit like a scene from Zombies without the blood and guts.

10.56: Like sheep we follow a group of people who seem to know something. In turn, other people follow us and before you know it, we have all started to board another train with no evidence that it will take us to our destination.

The passengers who were already on the alternative train look aghast as 200+ disgruntled travellers squeeze in and jostle for space.

Now we stand like sardines, nose to nose, kept upright by the sheer number of people in the corridors and vestibules. We still have had no formal confirmation that the train is going to London. Thankfully, moments later we hear someone with a cockney accent utter the words St Pancras followed by ‘…in 40 minutes!’ which means we will certainly miss the start of the game.

11.45. We arrive in London and make haste to the underground.

12.30: Having reached our final station, we find that the venue is still a 15 minute walk away. By now tempers are frayed. The game, according to our iPhone app, is already nearly over.

We debate whether it’s worth it, having paid a considerable sum of money for the tickets and the train fare, and the other train fare…

12.45: We enter the venue after being searched and scanned by a number of bored looking soldiers.

12.50 with a sigh, we sit in our allocated seats amid chants of Nipon, Nipon, NIPON. The scoreboard shows Japan are in the lead.

13.00:  No sooner had I unpacked my camera, taken the obligatory photo, updated my Facebook status and clapped at a point, the game ended. Probably the most expensive ten minutes of any sport I have ever had the privilege of watching.