Monday 31 December 2018

Fortnite

Dear neglected diary (yes, I know it's a blog, I just felt like being all Bridget Jones about it)
I've just looked back and it's been months, nay, seasons, since I posted. Life has been bonkers busy recently and with every www waking moment, I've been writing for work not for pleasure, although they are one-and-the-same as I do love my job but writing for withdewrespect does not a mortgage pay.
But now sinus infection has rendered me a few rare moments of inactivity, I have chance to catch up with the world of withdewrespect.
I've just read back to 4th November 2017 (a particularly fun one if you'd care to scroll) and seen that Daniel was then on PS3 playing Minecraft. Fast-forward a year and he's now on PS4 and, like everyone between the ages of 10 and 16, on Fortnite, cue sigh and eye-rolling from every parent of an aforementioned 10 to 16-year-old.
And, as of today, not just playing, but live streaming, bless his little cotton socks (although I'm not sure you can get a skin with cotton socks, that clearly wouldn't be cool, although having a burger for a head apparently is!). It's great actually, I'm laid up in bed but can log on to Twitch and see what Daniel is up to in the room next door, it's like having a baby monitor again!
It's amazing what we can do on the www now (said the old lady blogger); I can turn the heating up or down without getting out of bed. In fact I can go to the other side of the world and turn my heating up or down, get me! In fact, I have never ever wanted to go to Australia (you know, my spider thing) but now I want to go just so I can turn my heating up or down while I'm there. Of course, my husband would have to stay at home to check that it is actually going up or down or what would be the point!?
This remote / artificial / cyber intelligence thing is the future apparently. I want to be like the girl in Matrix who asks her brain implant chip thing to source instantaneous knowledge to fly a helicopter. Of course, I'd use it for something much more useful than flying a helicopter to escape certain death, like to summon up a nice recipe for lasagne, set a reminder to buy cat litter or order some printer ink on Amazon. Like Alexa, only actually in my head.
In fact, there may soon be very little reason to leave bed, let alone leave the house. I sometimes wonder why we bother anyway. I took the boys to Munich last year and later asked them what they had learnt about the city and Bavarian culture. Daniel: "They eat sausages", Teddy: "....and ride bikes".
Another recent trip had me chuckling at the banality of the road 'warnings' when you get north of Carlisle. Life in the northern most parts of our beautiful country is certainly not spent in the proverbial fast lane. In fact, I don't think anyone has ever used the outside lane on the A74(M), it still has its wrapper on.
Road signs up there can hardly be bothered lighting up at all and when they do they literally yawn out messages like 'drive efficiently', 'fasten your safety belt', 'soft tyres waste fuel', 'blah, blah', 'yadder, yadder'. On the M62 round our way, the incessantly flashing signage is much more shouty; 'slow down, debris on the road', 'incident ahead', 'hours and hours of delay ahead', 'have you brought a flask, you could be here a while?'
On the same trip, while touring round the Lake District, I was highly amused when we came across Loch Lochy.
It's as if the Lakes Naming Committee had had a long day. Catering had gone home, the tea urn had been turned off and the caretaker was peering through the door and looking at his watch, so somebody piped up; "look guys, there's just one more lake to name, fuck it, let's just call it Loch Lochy so we can all go home! All in favour....."



Friday 8 June 2018

The C-C Syndrome

Is Mother Nature having a laugh?

I mean really, is she sat in her ivory tower somewhere in the clouds, having a cuppa and sniggering behind her hand, Horrid Henry-fashion (Dennis the Menace-fashion for more mature readers), saying to herself: "Let's see how they handle this one!"

I refer to the approximate, yet highly likely, timing of a woman's menopause years to, frighteningly, coincide with her children being teenagers.

C-C Syndrome appears to have arrived in my life of recent months and, guess what, I have one pre-teen and one full-blown one, thank you Ms N!!!!

I'm in denial of course, so refuse to use the M word by name and am affectionately referring to it as Cardi on-Cardi off Syndrome, or C-C for short. (In winter, my acronym will still work as I'm darn sure it will become Coat on-Coat off)

Anyways, before the C-C central heating fires up once again and I strip off and lay naked on the lino (or before my boss comes in), back to those boys and their unwittingly funny banter.

Just a normal day having tea with the pair and Teddy, the older one, is telling Daniel, the younger one, about the fingerprint scanning system which they use in his high school canteen to take payment for dinner. 
A quick aside; I genuinely wonder if Teddy thinks he stores money under his skin. I'm not sure he realises it links to an account where I regularly, oh so regularly, deposit wads of money to fund his relentless diet of crap followed by more crap.  I thought Jamie Oliver had some sort of say over what they eat in schools these days, nothing resembling healthy seems to be on the menu at my son's school.

Well, back to the tea table at home, and Daniel, who is heading to high school next year, asks his brother how the fingerprint scanner works: "How do you pay for your dinner at school Teddy?"

Teddy: "They use a thumb-scanning machine."

Daniel nearly chokes on his sausage sandwich (yes, looks like Jamie isn't in charge of the menu in our house either), and, clearly horrified, blurts out: "What!?!? A bum-scanning machine???????"

He then asks me politely if he can please go to a different high school to Teddy, to allow him to preserve his dignity at dinnertime.

And speaking of dinner. In Yorkshire, we famously call a spade a spade but in London it seems they're intent on calling it anything but.

On a recent trip, I discovered that in London, menu items such as salmon or chicken are generically referred to as 'protein'.  I selected a salad in the British Library cafĂ©, only for the long-suffering counter assistant to spot a northerner a mile off and pretentiously sigh, 'do you want protein with that?', barely disguising her eye roll when I politely asked what the fuck she was on about!

I then proceeded to order a side plate of complex-carbohydrates, a dollop of polyunsaturated fat, a smidge of starch, a slurp of dairy, a soupcon of caffeine and some refined sugars for good measure.  I asked her to go easy on the pesto which, never mind belonging to its own food group, in my opinion needs a Government health warning, along with Apium graveolens (or celery as it's known up north).

After my yummy protein, I asked the chap on the Library's information desk whether I should walk or take the tube to the National Gallery.  He assured me it was far too far to walk, proclaiming: "And I'm a keen walker, look, I have a FitBit and everything."

I took his advice and set off to the underground station only to find it surrounded by the flashing blue lights of police cars and ambulances. I asked a man in a news kiosk what was going on and got more information than I had bargained for: "Somebody has jumped in front of a train," he said, and then added: "I once worked in a hotel and found a man hung in a wardrobe."

I walked to the National Gallery, it took me less than an hour.  We're made of stern stuff us northern lasses.