Recently in Snippets Category

If I'm very careful, I may succeed in bringing down my rate of posting to one entry per year.

"Is this blog on hiatus?", "Are you dead?", "What's happened to you?", "What, are you too good now to write blog entries?", "Have you grown up and left the rest of us behind?", "Have you been kidnapped by pixies and buggered into a catatonic state?" (note of interest, a pixie would probably have to use its whole body to bugger a person).

No, no, plenty, no, not quite, novel proposal but beyond my present reality (probably).

All I can say is that sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't, and when I don't post, I don't miss it. What I can miss is the people who choose to interact with me exclusively through this medium, and to them I apologise for my prolonged period of silence. I can't promise that the fabulous rate of postage'll change, but I can promise that I plan to stick around. No dramatic farewells followed by pitiful tip-toeing back into the fold when I realise that my life is empty without blog posts; it is a popular formula, but who lusts after convention? I can guarantee occasional verbiage though, but whether it's as entertaining as Bush's attempts at speech, or as dull as (foreign blog name deleted on account of bitchiness, besides, who am I to talk?) is pretty much impossible to predict.

In terms of updates; my arm is much better and can be lifted to within inches of vertical though I still can't comfortably sleep on my front; the viva for my PhD was held on December 5th, took three and a half hours, and went very well, so I was passed that day (sweet relief, but I feel too young to wear the title doctor); Christmas was the quietest ever for our family, reduced from twenty to just four people, but it was perfect since these two chappies were both in the same location:

And the time off from work was nice, as these two chappies got to spend ten whole days together, which is rare but appreciated. Screw the cuteness, Stairs, 'cos did you just say 'time off from work'? My how sharp you are; yes, I think I did. I'm currently working for a local Borough doing web-developer stuff and I am very happy as the environment is good, and the people even better. And I get paid.

At some point between December and January, we ushered in the New Year; I won't go there because there was some major yanking-of-rugs out from under people and the process didn't go smoothly, but there's something to be said for starting a new year on a downer, as probability would have things improve thereafter. As a sickening optimist, this is something that I find encouraging. So "Happy 2006", whether it started in the stinking, festering depths of the Stygian swamps, or in a blinding, orgiastic high of (an orgy?) fabulousness. There's just too much to look forward to, and if you disagree, you're not trying hard enough.

i am writing this entry on morphine and it might prove to be an incoherent ramble, but at least i will have a record of how dull i can be even when dosed up on the good stuff. capitalising and correcting my sentences involves too much effort so apologies for the terminal case of the uglies. seeing me would give a big clue as to why typing is a problem, but for those who didn't know, upon submitting my ph.d. thesis, i went in for some corrective surgery.

So (yes, i know, but 's' and shift are close together), last week I submitted my thesis. done. survived. happy. and yesterday, i was admitted to hospital. i only had to wait five hours before anything was done to me, and when it began, i was, in short order, given some happy drugs, lots of oxygen, and then a big shot of the white stuff. soporific bliss. yay for general anaesthetic.

under the spell of a very cute anaesthesiologist (everyone was cute by this point, but i think he may actually have been as he came to visit me on the ward this morning when i was feeling more dark-haired than i was the night before (i.e. not so blonde, keep up ffs)), my favourite shoulder was opened up, some repair work carried out, and i was stitched up. i came to in a warm daze beneath a hot air blanket and the smiling face of a crazy cantonese woman. i swore at her in cantonese because that's what you do when you're high. we got on famously. she wheeled me up to the ward where i was greeted by mother, partner (sugery was my first anniversary gift to him) and lots of snack food. Nausea kept me from touching any of it till 3am, but when the pungent odour of anaesthetic vanished from my nostrils at around that time, i had a small food orgy on my bed while four older gents snored around me. and snored, and snored.

this is why sleeping on a ward usually leaves light sleepers borderline suicidal. so i got to take a look at the handiwork. very pretty if you have a fondness for gore. to be fair, a med student messed up my i.v., so the spray of blood across my arm and gown made it look =a bit more dramatic than it was, but judging from the yellow mess around the shoulder, there was lots of oozing going on during the night. the sutures look very neat though, and there isn't too much pain. i may change my mind when the local wears off completely. so now my arm is immobliised against my chest so as to preclude excessive movement at the joint. it has to be kept this way for four weeks, which is a bit wank, mais qu'est ce-qu'on peut faire? necessary sufferance. but it went well and i am happy. submittng the thesis and having a first (if uncelebrated) anniversary with the dearest man of my life add to this, and then there's my incipient move back to London. so, things are in the process of changing, as i imparted in the last post, if in a typically obfuscatory manner, and for once in my life i have no idea what i'm going to do. this actually makes me endlesssly happy, as i've always been one to plan to the dollar, so it feels good not to have excessive concerns about where things are headed. hamlet alluded to death as being an 'undiscovered country'; so too, surely, is the process of living, and the days are just packed.

A small creeper clings to the wall, recessed and sheltered in a shady corner around the back of the house. Its leaves are pinnate, dark, and velveteen green, and they are laced in an intricate net of silver. My friends would be surprised to learn that I don't actually know what it is, but I don't, and it's there, with leaves of insubstantial size, little, but no less pretty than those of the exotic things that we import to fill our conservatories and terraria.

And now they're bleeding. Like seeping magma, the firey reds and oranges of the dying time are are stealing out over the surface of reluctant green. They will blaze, for a brief instant, in a bright show of crimson, then fall, and wither. And that is the sign of the times.

I tried to ignore the sheer theatricality of it, but while Karl Rove strategises to save the President's arse, Celine Dion gives a rather impassioned and moving plea for help for the people of New Orleans on Larry King. And she sings. And donates a million dollars.

Dear heartless Sula bassanus,

Don't be silly; I neither expected a response nor read into your lack of acknowledgement in any way, shape or form. I wasn't expecting it to be framed either, so I can't believe that you've gone and hung it above your bathroom sink to look at every morning, but each to his own; my writing does look kind of bizarre. I'm glad that you were happy to receive it, in any case; it's the last letter I've written (job application cover notwithstanding), and it was a nice diversion, so it helped me too, mired as I am in the funk of science writing.

I know what you mean about Katrina; the extent of the damage and the nature of the reaction to it at a city and national level are affecting in very different ways. To top it off, New Orleans is my favourite city in the whole of the United States, and I've seen more of the continent than many of my American friends; shabby, laid back and more European than any other urban centre in the country, she had it all. Now no one is really certain what she has. Other than a colossal abundance of stagnant water. In a few years I intend to return and spend my tourist bucks on her pauperised economy; beignets, voodoo and cemeteries are reason enough, but seeing her back on her feet will be even better.

Enjoy your gin; when I'm done I'm going to go for a swim in pool of Tanqueray and lime. With my eyes shut.
Ciao for now,

Stairs.

I appreciate the enquiring emails and would like to reassure that while some might wish it so, I am not yet deceased. Aside from a tremendous sensation of needing to vomit for the last forty-eight hours, I've been in excellent health, and otherwise heavily preoccupied with my research and thesis writing. It's agonising; don't ask.

The only other novel thing that springs to mind on the blog front has already been noticed by many of my friends here - that I've set up a new gallery using movable type and php, accessible at the top right of the site via the icon of my baby EOS 10D... [not any more - .ed]

...à la:

It's not intended to showcase anything in particular, other than shots I've taken, recently or in the past, that I like for reasons personal or artistic. Let me know if you have any problems with the pages; the About page is the only one which shouldn't be functioning just yet. Unless Gremlins get to it first.

And while I'm here, I'd like to ask one of you people to switch the warm weather back on; 20 ºC is pitiful for any day in June.

Whatever your feelings are for British MP George Galloway, you have to admire his address to the US Senate today. Address? More of a dressing down. It's forty-seven minutes of delicious politicking and affrontery, and half the fun lies in the faces of the reporters sitting behind him; "Oh no he didn't!"

Thank you to the Vatican for doing the world no favours. Our last ray of hope can only be that Ratzinger is a closet homosexual/sexual health expert/liberal who has, for his whole life, pretended to be otherwise just so that he could become Pope and then come out of the closet in a multicoloured explosion of genuine humanity.

Thank you to those readers who have taken the time to observe that my cycling Great Britain logos have been replaced by a big and beautiful cock.