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September 30, 2006
The end of an era.... x2
God I hate funerals.
I am of course not suggesting for one moment that there is one person in the world that leaps out of bed and cheers, ‘Wow, a funeral! I haven’t been to one on aaaaagggges’ but for me, grief and memory are private and I just can’t deal with this thing that somehow whether you are the deceased’s husband, or her daughter’s dinnerlady’s second cousin-twice removed, you’ve all got to feel and behave the same. There does seem to be this unwritten funeral protocol whereby you have to look suitably sad, not too sad, for instance, sniffing to such an extent that no-one can hear the service is wrong, but dabbing the corner of one’s eye with a carefully prepared hanky, is The Right Thing To Do.
I have a little secret. I bypass all that nonsense and spend the funeral thinking about absolutely anything in the world except the deceased. I know this defeats the purpose but it means that I don’t behave incorrectly and bingo, no-one gets offended. I can do all the thinking and grieving in my own way later on when I’m on my own, when I can swear or kick the table or, horror of horrors, even wet myself laughing.
Anyway incase you want to follow my example here are some useful general tips that should apply to any funeral in the future;
1) Who wants to be an undertaker? I realise that this is something that’s usually passed down in families but what if your Dad is expecting you to carry on the business and you just want to be a rock star and grow your hair and pierce your upper eye lid or something. Likewise what if you really want to be an undertaker and your dad’s an accountant? What do you say at the interview? ‘I – like - get on really well with dead people.’
2) Why is it OK in churchy situations, to fail to reference your quotes properly? Why does no-one think to mention that William Blake wrote Jerusalem? And who wrote all that stuff about being in the next room anyway? Yesterday there were two poems quoted in full and no clue as to who wrote them. I would get heavily penalised for that kind of plagiarism where I come from. I have come to the conclusion that the church get away with it because God has the ultimate copyright on everything we say.
Oh and by the way I got my essay in before five. No midnight liasons with the security lodge for me! It’s official my degree is well and truly over. It ended up being a bit of an anticlimax really. I handed it in, was given the recepit and then I asked where the toilets were for my little girl.
Was that it?
Oh and I didn’t get the job, the one I really wanted.
You know some good news, any time now, would be well and truly welcome.
Posted by purple elephant at 12:00 PM |
September 28, 2006
Thank God for Small Print...
I could've posted my half-finished final assignment a couple of days ago to make sure it got there in time.... or....
You may deliver your work by hand ... at the main reception at Walton Hall during normal working hours (9.00 to 5.00 Monday to Friday) Alternatively work can be delivered to the Security Lodge at Walton Hall up to midnight on the cut-off-date. The Security Lodge is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
I've blagged a lift, after the funeral but the question is .... Will I make it to the reception before 5.00 or will I be presenting the geezer in the Security Lodge with a huge bar of chocolate to thank him for sitting in his box all night for idiots* like me who cannot get their work in on time.**
Take your bets and I'll keep you posted.
* I cannot even use the 'sick' excuse anymore as the second set of blood tests have come back normal. It's official I am well, if someone could pass that info onto my glands I'd be much obliged.
** Useful fact - 100 people failed this course last year just because they didn't get this essay in on time. Bah! Some people!
Posted by purple elephant at 07:39 PM |
September 27, 2006
Non paying bidder alert!
In amongst all the ‘did she didn’t she say it’ Labour Party conference trivia and all the other horrific stuff about kids getting mauled by dogs and people dying all over the world. I’ve found the best news story in the world ever.
Boy, three, buys £9,000 car on E-bay.
I think what I love the most about this story is the fact that the seller saw the funny side. I mean if you trail through some of the feedback on e-bay and see some of the stupid little things that people (with obviously too much time on their hands) get their knickers in a twist about, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the family would be getting negative feedback of the most hideous extreme. Can you imagine?!
NEGATIVE - Bid on item and refused to pay. Insisted 3yr old son placed the bid. Yeah right!
Moral of the story? Kiddy locks everybody!
Posted by purple elephant at 10:28 AM |
September 25, 2006
Jamie Oliver - Genius!
I wonder if school dinner ladies look into the children’s lunch boxes and play ‘Guess who was watching Jamie Oliver with mummy at the weekend.’
I don’t know, I don’t care. All I know is that I’ve spent five years trying to get my daughter to eat couscous and it didn’t matter how many times I would insist that ‘it’s just like lots of tiny dots of pasta really’ she would still look at me as if I was trying to poison her.
All Jamie Oliver has to do is to ride onto my TV screen, use the word ‘pukka’ a couple of times, throw some couscous in a bowl with a load of green things that my daughter would never have touched if I’d put it on a plate and bingo! One child saying…
‘Why can’t I have that in my packed lunch?!’
And you know the best thing about couscous? It swells, and so there’s enough left for me too.
It sure as hell beats jam sandwiches any day.
Posted by purple elephant at 09:30 AM |
September 23, 2006
How to interview...
When I’m all grown up and stuff and when I’m big and have The Power, I am going to store the memory of yesterday in my subconscious to remind myself HOW to interview. It doesn’t take much, and really at the end of the day it’s like any social conversation really, you respond to the person who speaks. You look them in the eye, you smile encouragingly when they say something good and even, horror of horrors, there is nothing in the world to stop you chuckling a bit if the interviewee says something half witty. Ok so Jo Brand I am not, but I tried and thank you - it was acknowledged.
You see I am a veteran of the interview now, I’ve been to the grand total of three in the past couple of weeks and I’ve seen how to do it and how NOT to do it. By no means must you sit there with a Jesus-Christ-It’s-5pm-And-I’ve-Been-Asking-The-Same-Questions-All-Day-I-Want-To-Be-At-Home-With-My-Feet-Up-In-Front-Of-Eastenders look on your face, there is no excuse because, get this, you don’t HAVE to ask the same questions. You could have the interviewee’s CV in front of you and you could tailor the questions as to their experience. Yes that’s right, two birds with one stone, it keeps you on your feet and the person the other side of the table feels like an individual human being rather than a machine. Then the interviewee relaxes and you get to see the real person, rather than one who is trying to contend with the voices in her head saying ‘Oh my God! There was not so much as a twitch in the corner of his eye. You said the wrong thing. He hates you and now you are going to continue to say the wrong thing and he is going to continue to hate you forever. Walk out the door. Walk out the door. Walk out the goddamn door!’
The thing is, it was my number one choice anyway but now I want the job even more. The people who interviewed me (all THREE of them!) were lovely, the people on the front desk were lovely and I had a wander round after the interview and …. did I mention that I want that job?
I have a whole week to wait and find out, but even if I don’t get the job, I have at least learned HOW to interview.
Posted by purple elephant at 08:59 AM |
September 21, 2006
And then there were comments
Thanks to Michelle and Haloscan I seem to have fixed the comments. So for the first time in months you can actually talk to me. So come on, bombard me!
I haven’t had nearly as much time/energy to research for the job interview as I would have liked, so I’m having to make do with the good old Internet and hoping I can bluff the rest with my enthusiasm. Get this I’m so busy/ preserving my energy that I had to send Mr. PE out to buy ‘interview shoes’ for me …. Yes that’s how much I want this job.
In other news the family friend has sadly passed away. At the moment I’m stuck for anything to say that doesn’t come out sounding clichéd, so I’m just going around quoting Christina Rossetti to myself.
To end on a happier note Mr PE has been offered a place on a History (by independent study) MA at De Montfort University. Yes and that would be why I'm searching for a full time job.
Up? Down? Jealous? Nervous? Enthusiastic? High on Painkillers? Who knows… All I know is that times are a changing ....
Posted by purple elephant at 07:15 PM |
September 20, 2006
Scraaaaaaping the barrel for a blog post once again but…
Does anyone else do that thing where you watch everyone else in the doctor’s waiting room and try and guess what they are in for. It works best when there’s a couple, or a mother and child because then you have a double whammy where you have to guess which one is sick. (eg It’s not necessarily the limping husband with a walking stick, even better perhaps he’s NOT her husband maybe they are having a wild illicit affair…)
Well it beats picking up a copy of Hello or OK and reading about what Mr and Mrs Whothefuckareyouanyway were doing about three months ago.
Other than that nothing to report except that more of my blood is making its way to the hospital for more testing which will be back ooooh about the day before my essay has got to be posted.
Talking of which, did you know that Manuel Puig was born on December 28th just like me, a couple of decades before me but even so… I am not worthy. Yes that is the most exciting thing that happened to me today.
Posted by purple elephant at 07:30 PM |
September 19, 2006
It never rains…..
A couple of weeks ago the glands in my neck popped up to the size of golf balls, the doctor sent all sorts of blood tests off but they came back normal, by the time she’d considered it some more they were on their way back down and she decided to put it down to a ‘freak virus’. I lost nearly a week’s worth of study because it also left me drained and exhausted.
Now I’m left with a major essay that is worth 50% of the year’s mark due in at the beginning of next week and guess what’s happened? The glands have popped back up again. The fact that last time they took over a week to get back to normal is … well freaking me out a bit.
I also have a job interview today at lunch time and another one on Friday, if by some miracle I have a choice I would prefer the one on Friday but you know beggars can’t be choosers now can we?
Just found out that my daughter is in year one assembly Friday morning and the parents have been invited along. If the busses run every ten minutes like they are supposed to then I should be able to go to the assembly AND make the interview on time, but I’ve written enough blog posts about Cambridgeshire busses for us to know that the likelihood is that they probably will NOT pull through for me, just this once.
And then there is the family friend of ours who in the past two months has been taken seriously ill and wasn’t expected to last the night.
We await news …..
Can we go back to 1st September and try this month again?
Posted by purple elephant at 08:09 AM |
September 14, 2006
Dear Prospective Employer,
Thank you for taking the time to advertise your position on the internet. Please find enclosed a bog standard CV that has been sent out to everyone. I regret that owing to the colossal number of employers searching for someone with my skills it is not practical for me to respond to every advertisement individually.
Please note your advertisement is receiving attention and unless your offer of employment has been successful, you will not be contacted again. I am a busy mum with a degree to finish and you have time to sit around twiddling your thumbs while you wonder if you are ever going to hear from me, obviously.
I wish you every success in finding an employee in the future.
Yours sincerely
Purple Elephant
P.S. Yes that was a photocopied signature. Please don’t thank me.
Posted by purple elephant at 05:49 PM |
September 11, 2006
The night Dale Winton saved my life....
Of course there I was coming over all smug because I know when Jane Austen lived and aren’t I all clever and hi-brow and everything. Today, because I either a) have too much time on my hands or b) I have so little time on my hands that Saturday night TV is such a novelty to me, I have been thinking of the question I actually got wrong.
DALE ‘What is Bakelite? Is it …. a) Wood b) Plastic or c) Aluminium?’
Now I thought to myself I know this one, Bakelite must be the non-stick cousin of Bacofoil (please humour me and agree that you at least know where I’m going with this) perhaps when you use Bakelite you don’t have to grease the pan quite so much, hence you don’t pile on the pounds, hence Bakelite.
After what was, with hindsight, probably too much thought I guessed the answer was aluminium.
The answer was indeed plastic and if you don’t believe me here’s the Wikipedia article to prove it.
Getting the Jane Austen question wrong, or the Harper Lee question or whatever you want to call it, is probably not going to kill you. However if I perhaps cared to lose some weight and lined my cookie sheets with Bakelite rather than Diet Bacofoil and happily slid them in the over at gas mark 6, then there is little chance that I’d be around to say, ‘Oh well, got that wrong! Try again!’
Therefore I shall now eat humble pie and bow down to their superiority.
The winners also went home with just over 17 grand and I’m scraping the pennies.
I bow again.
Posted by purple elephant at 07:31 PM |
September 10, 2006
How do you solve a problem like Ignorance?
Yeah I know, two posts in one day, it’s just like the good old days and everything.
But something’s been bothering me all day. It started last night when watching the National Lottery In It To Win It thing on TV.
OK so perhaps I had better take you a little further back, for I am sure you are wondering why I chose to watch such utter drivel above anything else I could have been doing at the time, like yanking my eyeballs out with a pair of blunt pliers for instance. The truth is my daughter has taken to watching How To Solve a Problem Like Maria, she likes singing along to all the songs from the musicals and happens to think that Andrew Lloyd Webber has found the formula for the perfect pop song, if only her mother could find it and adapt it to the novel or the short story then maybe we would all be rich and her mummy would not have to go through the humiliation of being turned down for hundreds and hundreds of jobs. Oh and now that Abi has gone, she really thinks that Connie should be Maria. That’s what she says anyway and I’m sticking to it.
Anyway this Lottery thing fell between the two (yes TWO) indulgences of ....Maria and well what the hell we thought that we might as well leave it on. That is until I the following exchange graced my screen;
DALE WINTON Boo Radley is a character in which novel, published in 1960?CONTESTANT 1 Oooh I don’t know (Confers with CONTESTANT 2)
CONTESTANT 2 I think it’s Pride and Prejudice
CONTESTANT 1 Oh yes that’s right (To Dale) Pride and Prejudice
DALE WINTON (To give him his credit) Are you sure?
BOTH CONTESTANTS Oh yes we are sure.
DALE WINTON Am I taking Pride and Prejudice as your answer?
BOTH CONTESTANTS Oh yes!
I know what you’re thinking, you probably think that I sat there and smugly laughed at the fact that there are not one but TWO people in the world who think that Jane Austen was still alive in 1960. Nope dear reader I cried, because I didn’t need them to get it right as such, a vague answer from roughly the same era; Of Mice and Men perhaps or Catcher in the Rye. It would’ve done. It’s a bit like the guy who thought that Robert Graves wrote ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ Now that’s just fine by me. Robert Graves was a war poet and a bonus point all round for getting the right war but Jane Austen? 1960? My God I feel another tear coming on.
I couldn’t help it but I really wanted to banish these people from my country (oh yes it is mine now) and even today whilst wandering about our green and pleasant land (well feeding the ducks at Cherry Hinton Hall) I couldn’t stop having evil thoughts about these people. And then it came to me, perhaps the residency test is not such a bad idea. I don’t mean for immigrants but for everybody. Perhaps you should not be allowed to leave school until you can tell Dale Winton which century Jane Austen lived in (I’ll take 18th or I’ll take 19th because I’m warm and generous like that) and of course you should be able to belt out 'Any Dream Will Do' and 'Jerusalem' from beginning to end to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s satisfaction. I’ll even give you three shots. Yes that’s right but if you still get it wrong after three takes then you get banished to fester on some really dirty island where the world should then dump its nuclear waste. Wait I’m anti nuclear, maybe I’ll have to rethink that one… Maybe the BBC could dump its waste there, just imagine all those failed Davina McCall chat shows……
NOW I’m getting carried away….
Posted by purple elephant at 09:37 PM |
This blog will NOT die.....
It is my back to school resolution to post here every day even if it’s just a word or two. I have slipped out of the habit a bit over the past couple of months but trust me it has been a hectic summer holiday for the three of us. Now at least Mr. PE’s dissertation is in, he has applied for his MA and I have less that three weeks until that final piece of work is due and (unless I mess up big time) my degree will be over for ever and of course there’s all the mixed feelings that go with that …. Happy? …. Sad? … That’s another post that I’ll save until the end of the month when it’s all over.
*Sob* Oh whoops did that slip out?
That’ll do for now …. I wouldn’t want to tire myself out with all these words now would I and commas, remind me what are they for?
Posted by purple elephant at 10:27 AM |