Bah.

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Worked till 9 pm tonight and have to be back in at 9 am tomorrow. I hate that, it still feels like early evening to me at nearly 2 am. It also means no more than a mere taste of whisky so I was careful not to buy any on the way home. I only have the dregs of a litre bottle of Whyte and MacKay so can’t do any head-harm. The NHS would be proud of me – I made this bottle last three days!

Next week will be a week of late shifts. The extra pennies are useful, of course, but I’d rather be working on books. I suppose the best way would be to work like a demon, hoard the cash and then say ‘sod it all’ for a month then find another job. Thing is, I like this job. There’s nobody I have any issues with, there is nothing about the job that follows me home, it’s just woefully understaffed. I also take enormous delight in people’s assumptions – ‘he’s a janitor, he must be dim’ – and in being utterly ignored. Unlike in previous jobs, nobody now wants mine. There is nobody below me so nobody is trying to move me aside so they can take my place. That is a very liberating feeling.

The week after that should be a week off for me. We are taking holidays now because there is no chance of holidays once Christmas gets fired up. Local Shop has just started putting Christmas tat on the shelves – Tesco had theirs all out months ago. I still refuse to even look at it. Christmas is in December. It’s only October. Christmas shopping starts on Christmas Eve (when everything is discounted).

Anyway, best try and get some sleep. I can buy whisky on the way home tomorrow – Sunday is also an early start but I can manage noon okay. It’s the pre-noon stuff I have trouble with.

Perhaps the Righteous could be conned into banning it.

27 thoughts on “Bah.”

  1. All this workin’ll be the death o’ ya laddie! You’ve got to get enough writing done so you can at LEAST survive for a while out of work while writing full time. You should be submitting your short stuff all over the place: it’s VERY strong and has a unique flavor about it that editors will love AND that they’ll remember when you send them new material. After they’ve swallowed two or three you’ll be able to move up in the price ladder and get more comfy.

    🙂
    Michael

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    • People think I look about 35 not the correct 42, based on real life, not on dodgy “Research”.
      These people are really taking the piss, and should all be done for “hate crimes”,
      it seems to protect everybody else exept smokers!!

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    • Ye Gods, what an utter load of bollocks. That is just so wrong on so many levels I really don’t know where to start. Whoever did that one must have a seriously psychopathic hatred of smokers. I can’t recollect ever seeing anything quite so speciously malignant. Words fail me…

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    • I think it’s wonderful The antis are sending their drones out to hate people we don’t look like. It makes it so much easier to terrify them with conversation because they think we are just like them.

      Always let them win the first round. It never occurs to them that there could be a second. Also, ever played Othello? Let your opponent get the upper hand early on. Then you can wipe them out in the closing stages.

      Often, the tortoise wins the race 😉

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  4. ‘he’s a janitor, he must be dim’
    Yep, just like working as a school caretaker while having a better degree than most of the teaching staff; and being a Jimmy with a better command of written English than the majority oif them. They tended to get a bit uppity when they found the spelling, punctuation and grammar corrections I used to make on whiteboards and documents which were about to be sent out to parents.
    You’ve just got to find fun where you can.

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    • I got into trouble once doing something similar. I received a letter from school, corrected it for punctuation, spelling and grammar, marked it and sent it back. Others in my household did not find that very funny.

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    • Having left school at 16 with two ‘O’ levels (one of which was English language, I must admit, but only because I didn’t need to revise for it), my grammar tends to be instinctive rather than guided by knowledge of the subject. I probably misuse commas all the time; and as for semi-colons and colons, well, I just bung ’em in when it seems like a good idea (see preceding usage of same)! 🙂 I’m pretty au fait with apostrophes, though! 🙂 Ha! No matter, I think most people understand what I write, and in comments threads I think that’s more important than being grammatically flawless.

      Sometime, when I have a bit more spare time, I’ll read up on all this grammar stuff and blind you all with my unrivalled command of the written word!

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    • The shop manager doesn’t know I have better qualifications than his area manager ( i was the honours year tutor for a B. Sc. business management course for a while too). When I finally move on I’ll drop him a full Cv amd see if it can turn his hair white.

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      • Quite. Despite being an almost instinctive editor – OK, compulsive – I easily ignore or even miss small errors when the writer is literate and has something to say.

        Mind you, I would readily hang people who scatter commas and apostrophes like pepper, and the current plague of “that” for “who”, “which” and sometimes “where” sends me to my manual of Mediaeval tortures for comfort.

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        • As to Grammar, and commas, etc.

          O.K. My ENTIRE knowledge of Grammar comes from a Welsh teachger (Mrs Jones…. WHAT a surprise), who, when we were 12 ( ) years old, told us… na TAUGHT us, what nouns, a verbs and an adjectives are.

          The whole lesson was 40 minutes long.

          After that NOTHING!!!

          My WHOLE school time, up until and including University, NOTHING about grammar.

          THEN (!!!), I took Swedish at Uni. What the HEL is a “Supine verb”!!!!!????

          Then…. came the German, which should “officialy” have been my “Mother tongue” (Long story).

          Oh boy.

          THEN add commas, semi colons, colonectemies, etc, and split your reading and writting between five different languages (I read Dutch and Norwegian (Bokmal) as well, although I could in NO way translate. )

          So. When, on the odd occassion someone picks me up on my English grammar, you MAY understand why my first re-action is ; “Awei an’ Biel ye’ fekin HIED Laddie!!!”

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    • My English teacher was one of those women best described as ‘a brick shithouse’. Nobody failed her classes, nobody dared fail. She never hit anyone buit she could cut your balls off with sarcasm. A few words in the right tone with just the right kind iof glare and the hardest kid would melt. I learned a lot from her.

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  6. I passed my “O” Grade English many a moon ago, with an “A”.

    Since then I have managed to forget most of the tenets of grammar, I can just about explain adjectives, nouns and pro-nouns to the young folk denied our comprehensive indoctrination, but a verb? Guess I’ll have to refresh my booze addled brain on Wikipedia!

    I am also of the age where I find I can spell words as I remember them from the my last school days in the early 80’s only to be contradicted by fucking Americanization-ed versions on every fucking website I try to post on.

    “S/Z” oh fuck it,at least I can still type sweary words legibly…

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