Celebrating success and an unexpected visitor

Fingers worn to bloodied stumps? Check
Eyeballs tinted with permanent pink glaze? Check
Typing inaccurately at speed with resultant copy full of favourite finger slip misspellings? Check (‘thnaks’ anyone, or is that just me??)
Surreptitiously eating chocolate covered raisins whilst on the phone? Check
Perfecting the art of silent cigarette lighting? Check

In that case, it must be assessment time again. I’m one of a number of freelance assessors for a grant-making organisation, a role that I took on when I was self-employed and have continued with now that I’m not. Part of the assessment process is an interview by telephone with every applicant, following which I write up and submit a report. The work’s enjoyable and I’m endlessly delighted to learn more about some of the wonderful projects that organisations up and down the country provide for disadvantaged children and young people.

But there is one downside. As I’m currently in a normal job (if such a thing exists), I have to fit the whole thing – preparation, interviews, report writing etc – around and about the day job. Which means an awful lot of frantic typing and general eye-propping and late-night oil burning for me in order to meet the deadlines.

Although I did grant myself the evening off to go over to my scuba diving club’s regular Tuesday night pub meeting. Super time (and away from the computer too), two health-giving glasses of beardy ale, some great conversation, a bag of chips on the way home and… It’s official! I am now a BSAC qualified Ocean Diver. Couldn’t resist taking a photo of my certificate (that's it ^^up there^^).

And then when I arrived home this evening and carried out my essential pre-assessment-interview ‘comfort stop’, I found a cat in the bathroom. Light ginger and sitting quite happily on top of a posh purple silk box of bubble bath that my mother gave me for Christmas. He must have snuck in somehow past Kaos, who was lying in a dog-day coma on the living room floor. One can only hope the dog might be a little more of a deterrent to real cat burglars…

Right, that’s my half hour tea break over so back to writing the assessments. If you see a plume of smoke hanging over my little house at midnight, please don’t worry – it’ll just be my smouldering finger stumps fusing to the melting keyboard.

Clothes maketh the mood

As non atmospheric barometers go, clothes are a pretty reliable gauge of a whole spectrum of stuff from the weather to mood to the economic climate.

Whilst it might not take an effort of staggering genius to work out that a crowd wearing Wellingtons and holding umbrellas means rain is forecast, who would have thought that the colour of one’s clothing relates directly to the financial health of one’s nation? Apparently – and somewhat counter-intuitively I think – the more prosperous the times that we live in, the more likely we are to dress in sombre colours. When things are looking particularly good on the pocket, we wear black. But when we go about our business dressed in the bright springtime colours of the spectrum, beware – for the economic cloth is indeed wearing thinner than a socialite’s waist line.

Of course it’s not just what we wear that makes a difference, but how we wear it. Some people – my little sister, my good friend David, for instance – have an affinity for style that is woven into the very same warp and weft of their DNA as their eye colour and the distribution of moles upon their person. It’s true that both have correspondingly bulging wardrobes, but to write their stylistic talents off as an accidental by-product simply of volume is to make the same error as to subscribe the works of Shakespeare to a typing pool full of monkeys; a reassuringly equitable comforter to the rest of us that is actually complete nonsense.

No, people like my sister and David have a genius gene for fashion. They will always select the right outfit for the right occasion; will co-ordinate colours and fabrics with military precision; will have spotless matching un-scuffed and mud-free shoes; will arrive shining and immaculate in spite of journey trauma; and will artfully accessorise with a seemingly throw-away casualness that belies the real skill behind it. As a consequence, it doesn’t matter how much my sister might protest that she’s feeling fine when she’s laid up with a virus; if she’s still wearing toning satin nightwear in her sick bed I know she’s ok. But better reach for that telephone in double quick time if she’s got her husband’s football club pyjama bottoms and a pair of holey socks on.

Although my sister and I are close and share many similarities, this passion for fashion is not one of them. It’s not exactly that I don’t like clothes; more that I can’t usually be bothered with all the faffing around that goes with it all and would much rather spend an extra hour in bed in the mornings ignoring the alarm clock than wrestle with straighteners and the ironing board. That my sister’s immaculate and magnificently groomed appearance makes me look like a bag lady on a bad day is neither here nor there.

However, I do seem to have accidentally boarded the zeitgeist of the current gloomy economic fashion barometer by purchasing four hooded sweatshirts in a dazzlingly colourful array from daffodil yellow to emerald green. I wonder if my sister’s noticed how stylishly on the money I am?

Drear Sir…

There’s something about filling in job application forms that encourages a kind of word blindness to settle on your shoulders and cling like an itchy vile-coloured scarf. Even those whose fingers are accustomed to gliding swan-like and decisive across the keyboard become stuttering cack-handed semi-literate blunt stumps when it comes to the “why do you want this job?” section. Or mine do at least.

To be fair, it feels a little harsh to blame this completely on the malfunctioning of one’s digits. No, in truth the fingers are as usual only carrying out the instructions of the brain (or the brian as I’d probably have written it this afternoon). Except for some reason those instructions have been put through one of the gobbledegook typewriters of the eternal monkeys who are otherwise busily occupied coming up with random versions of Shakespeare or whatever.

Of course the accidental juxtaposition or substitution of letters can have some unintentionally amusing consequences. From and form, thanks and thnaks, are perennial personal favourites, but ago and ego offers much more entertainment value in the recruitment context.

And so on an so fifth until you come to that point where your document is so littered with those ‘helpful’ little red and green squiggly lines that you just have to print the whole damn lot out. At which stage, any reasonably sane person (or me) curses out loud to no-one in particular, puts on the kettle, lights a fag and throws a crunchy chocolate snowball for the dog (which of course bounces off his head and disappears under a heap of washing).

Anyway, just a small aside by way of procrastination.

Now bach to the drawering bored. Thnaks for dearing.