Home of the Dutch Gecko

Two days ago I commenced a bold journey into the darkest corners of my room… I hoovered the floor. This doesn’t happen very often for two reasons:

1. I’m lazy as hell
2. Our hoover sucks at sucking

It’s one of these bagless designs, and relies entirely on a series of filters to actually do something useful rather than just spreading dust around (unlike Dysons which use some airflow trickery to keep dust inside the container). Sadly it partially fails, which means that the filters very quickly become clogged and reduce the suction, as well as ejecting fine dust into the air. Some of you may know that I’m a hayfever sufferer, and you can probably imagine that my bedroom becomes very uncomfortable for me after I’ve got my cleaning fix.

I went to bed with the window wide open and a runny nose, and it appears that good ol’ influenza decided to take a shot at me while my immune system was down. So yesterday I woke up with a pounding headache, joint pain, a strong desire to itch all of my skin, and a barbed wire throat.

My natural first response to this is to groan loudly, which I did. This didn’t relieve the situation, so I groaned some more. Satisfied that this was the real deal I made a vague attempt at moving to the vertical position, which simply made me feel the need to groan more.

I stumbled to the sink, grabbed a half-dirty glass from my desk and drank some water. I rooted around in the cupboard and found what I was simultaneously looking for and dreading. Paracetamol tablets. See, I bought these back at the start of my first course in 2005, and at the time the denizens of Costcutter offered me the brand-name tablets or the generic half price selection. I went for the latter of course, totally unaware that they go out of their way to provide value for money and are nearly an inch long. Combine this with the raspy throat and I may as well be swallowing the Eiffel tower.

On the plus side, I needed several of the suckers over the last two days and there is now only one left. On the down side this means having to buy new ones, which involves either walking somewhere or remembering to get some on our next Tesco trip.

I still feel rotten, thanks for asking, and haven’t been able to do anything productive. I don’t even feel like watching a movie or something. I just want the headache and the itch to go away.

New photos:

Here, here and here. Woops: and here too.

Come closer child, for I have many things to talk about.

How not to travel, pt. 2

Last Saturday I was on the wing again heading back here to a surprisingly sunny York. Here was me thinking that since I’d just dodged April the 1st everything would be alright. How wrong I was.

To start with, there weren’t any trains leaving Hengelo. I already knew this because they hadn’t been leaving all week, due to works on the line. However it did mean getting up earlier than I would otherwise have to and this never bodes well on a travel day. But, my loving parents drove me to Deventer, dropped me off and waved my train out to the horizon (which is always far in Holland).

At this point I was excited - my girlfriend who I hadn’t seen for an entire half week would be meeting me at Schiphol, where if everything went well we’d have well over an hour to spend together before parting ways for a further week and a half (only five days left as I type this). Note the if in that sentence.

My train arrived on time. Her train arrived on time. Everything’s ok, right? Not when I went to get my bags checked in. Since my flight had been assigned to the dungeon that is gate D6, I was told that I would have to be there twenty minutes earlier than I was previously told. How they can move times forwards when people still have to arrive for check-in I have no idea, but it was upsetting to me to have our hour eaten into like this.

We made the most of it though, enjoying lunch together, before I passed through passport control as close to the boarding time as I dared (I still had to go through security at the gate). I arrived at D(ungeon)6. There wasn’t a queue. I went through security. The place was empty.

I sauntered up to exit F, sat down in one of the many empty seats, sent a text message to say that leaving early was pointless while displaying my loathing for KLM and my affection for the recipient, then grabbed a book and started reading. A full twenty minutes later (does that number seem familiar?) the small number of passengers that had gathered were informed that the flight was ready for boarding, with two buses waiting outside the revolving door to whisk us away to England. Er, the plane.

We rapidly filled the first bus, myself included, and waited for the driver to start our magical journey across that place where the aircraft roam free. And we waited.

A few minutes later a KLM employee came onto the bus and used the intercom to tell us that there was a “technical problem” and that boarding was temporarily cancelled.

Whoop-dee fucking doo.

Long and uneventful story short, “technical” is a euphemism for clerical, and missing some bits of paper made the flight an hour and a half longer.

Murphy’s law is simple. If it can go wrong, it will. Many people don’t know what the implications of this statement are, however. For example, the law also implies, “If things are already going wrong, they will get worse.” On the upside, the plane didn’t develop a real technical fault and crash into the ground in a ball of flame.

I arrived in Manchester at about five o’ clock, now a little weary. My luggage was all there, always a good thing. I started the long, walkway-assisted stroll to the railway station that’s annexed to the airport, hunted around in my bags for my return ticket, and was mildly surprised to see my train standing ready. I hopped on, stuffed my suitcase in a rack, found an unreserved seat, opened my book again and waited for the train to leave. Fifteen minutes later, spot on the scheduled time, the doors closed and we rolled to Manchester Picadilly.

Which is where we waited for a few minutes. The train filled up. Then came the announcement:

“Hello and a warm welcome on board this service to Middlesbrough. I’m afraid you won’t welcome this news however - due to a fatality on the line there is no connection between Staley Bridge and Garforth. As such we will need to divert via Middlesbrough and this service will be severely delayed. If you do not wish to take this train please leave now.”

And this is how I spent my Saturday afternoon being carted to Staley Bridge, where we picked up a ton of unhappy passengers, then went back to Manchester, then to Middlesbrough, all the way around the track, then to Garforth (all in all about forty miles further on), then backwards again towards York, where I presume the train continued back to Middlesbrough again. The delay was as long as the journey.

Very tired and very hungry I arrived at about half past ten in the evening. I said hello, slammed something into the microwave, ate the contents precisely six-minutes-plus-stirring-time later, then went to bed, and proceeded to procrastinate for four days solid.

The present

So where does four solid days of procrastination leave me? In a relatively clean room, with plentiful food from a relatively clean kitchen, with a little bit of ADA95 done and a body clock thwacked so hard that I can still think clearly (it’s quarter past five. In the morning). I have, in fact, seen sunlight recently, though I did forget what day it was.

The downside to doing nothing is that it does give me plenty of time to miss people. Doesn’t matter, only five days.