Things that have happened, interspersed with a few stray thoughts

Now, it's been a little while since my last 'real' post.  My heaving throng of regular readers must surely be climbing the walls by now, nail-bitingly desperate for updates on my ever-enthralling life.  Yet I understand that to keep you interested, I have to be a little bit aloof.  It's a complex and sophisticated dance, the relationship between a writer and their readership.  You can't give 'em everything at once or they'll just start taking your witty, wonderful, captivatingly simmering words for granted.

Yeah, right.  I've just been a bit busy, that's all.  Back to looking for work and things that give life a bit of meaning. Y'know, just the usual.  When people ask me "so how are you, then?" I tend to shrug and say "yeah, I'm fine thanks" then move the subject onto them pretty quickly.  Because I don't know where to begin half the time; that or I can't be bothered, so it's easier to just listen to others instead.  They like it.  I like it.  Everyone's a winner.

And so I've been thrown into an enforced period of introspection recently, which is threatening to continue for a little while.  Though I guess "introspection in the sun" is rather more cheery than "introspection in the snow/rain/sleet/wind" (delete as applicable to the British seasons); even though it's nigh-on impossible to work properly when it's sunny, let alone introspect, which is the reason I believe Australia is generally so lacking in culture or any kind of depth of thought.  They don't need any of that, do they?  They have proper lovely beaches and health, and stuff.  If Tolstoy had been born in Australia he'd probably have written nothing other than a few advisory parchments about the need to wear a hat in strong sunlight.

(Talking about Australia's "proper beaches" reminds me of a time when I was working in Tilbury and we had a delegate from Sydney travel to our office.  He'd never been to England before and he'd brought his surfboard with him because he'd heard Southend beach was "great for riding the waves".  It was all I could do not to burst into hysterics there and then, but I decided not to disappoint him - that happened by itself when he visited the beach that weekend and returned to work on Monday looking a bit forlorn...as though he'd just learned something deeply valuable about the folly of positive expectation).

So yeah, anyway, things around me have been a bit displaced recently.  That ought to be great for writing, but unfortunately I've found that I need a fair bit of stability before I feel like I can actually write much.  But I do, however, expect convention and therefore depressing normality to return to my life any time soon.  I am such an optimist at heart!

The Forlornness of Garage Forecourt Flowers

I've got a friend who thinks I'm a snob (though still rather endearing, funny, brilliant etc etc etc...of course).  There are many reasons for this, but the main one is my belief that a garage forecourt bouquet makes just about the worst gift you can give to anybody.  Whose idea was it to shove a few buckets of tired-looking blooms in front of every petrol station in the country?  Obviously somebody who had no faith in the appropriate-gift-selecting ability of the general public.  The depressing thing is, though, that this person seemed to have hit upon an ingenious idea.  Because although I've never witnessed anybody actually buying one of these sorry bouquets, the very fact that they're bloody everywhere must mean some people are.  I guess some people must also quite like receiving them.  People who aren't snobs, that is. Which discounts me and everybody I know (yep, if I deign to associate with you in real life, then you are probably a snob too!)

I think people are generally on dodgy ground with the whole flowers-as-a-gift thing anyway.  They represent, to me anyway, the last bastion of the desperate/thoughtless (delete as applicable).  The only caveat is if the flowers were just being bought to cheer somebody up; for no specific reason, or possibly if you're going round someone's house and they're cooking for you.  Those are the only good examples of flowers-as-a-gift.  They must, in my opinion, never be bought to compensate for meaningful sentiments; because you want to say "sorry" for something, or to express your "deepest sympathy", or to repair an irretrievably broken relationship; so that every time the recipient looks at the flowers they're reminded they just lost someone close, or of the deed you had to say "sorry" for in the first place, and then of the general deep crushing futility of life when just a few days later they have to go in the bin, otherwise they go dry and end up stinking the house out.

OK, so maybe I'm over-stating my case there (!), but there's a reason people buy flowers for dead people at funerals; it's partly because they don't have to think about what they're going to get.  Presents for the living should be thoughtful and personalised to mean anything at all.  And while I am definitely a snob for hating garage forecourt flowers, I wouldn't mind a present bought from a garage per se.  Just one with some thought attached, that's all.