Coastalblog

Roe has moved in now, I am now officially part of a co-habiting couple, which is a strange sensation.

I have, I'm afraid, always been a bit of a recluse. I have friends whom I love dearly, but I prefer to keep the numbver small and select. I am very fond of my own company, and working in the business that I do leaves me generally all our of bonhomie and goodwill come the end of a shift.

And now, into my loosely ordered and vaguely sordid bachelory lifestyle a force for control and change has impacted like a meteor. I rather like it, as it happens. Only time will tell whether or not it'll work this time (we've attempted it before, and it all went very, very wrong). I suspect it will. I hope so.

I am not by nature a lazy man. I am not by nature a man inclined to let his life slide out of control, either. However I am a man who simply hates dealing with certain things, namely banking employees at the other end of a phone line. It's just the entire rigmarole of being shuffled from one bored and harrassed school-leaver to another until my simple request is granted. I get round this problem by avoiding it.

Now, I am relatively prudent, I have credit cards, but the sums on them are dealable with (though moderately hefty when totalled up), one of my credit cards dates from my student days, and still bears the scars of a slightly more carefree me, the other is a recent acquisition. I decided to do something adult and sensible, and get a credt card with a low rate to tranfer ruinously high interest rate store cards onto (and I'm boring myself). I steeled myself to the task, completed the necessary forms, made the necessary phone calls through gritted teeth (why the hell did I get a payment protection thing in the first place? I've missed two days off sick in my entire life! What's that cost me? Grr etc) and it was done. Two outstanding balances to deal with. Nice. I felt quite the grown up. The lurking danger being that that's two credit cards still lurking in my wallet, waiting for the day when I simply have to have new trainers and there's no cash extant.

No problem. the new card is chip and PIN, that spectacular collision of protection methods which leads to rapidly accumulating bad-tempered queues at checkouts nationwide. I dutifully memorised the PIN and consumed the paper before setting fire to myself as instructed. Then I forgot the PIN. Card unusable save for repayments, unless I make one of those phone calls I described up-post, which is not going to happen. One down.

Ah, but what about card number two? The trusty warhorse which bought the vast majority of my CD collection? I know the PIN, there's no real excuse. Except it's a replacement card, which won't be activated until I call the bank. The account remains active, I can still make repayments, but I can't use the card. Perfect! Laziness kids, it'll help you in the long run.

In other news my birthday was enormous fun, not that I can remember a great deal, with far more people turning up than I'd envisaged. Huge thanks to all, especially Porl for making the trip. I was equally surprised to see that I had a birthday thread on ILE, which I really wasn't expecting at all. That itself put me in a good mood for most of the day due to it's unexpectedness. I really must thank Archel (how on earth did she know?) for that. Week's highlights have included a trip to the Warehoouse in Preston where, oddly, there was very little drinking but a lot of dancing, haven't done that for a while, and last night's fairly hilarious trip to the pub where a stone cold sober Alex and Sam had to deal with a ferociously battered me and Jim. They were stoical. We were in hysterics.

Oh, and the plot for this year's NaNoWriMo is sorted. So I've done something constructive. Well done me.

Is today. Tomorrow the troops will be rallied (our numbers somewhat depleted these days)and pints will be drunk, but today...today I shall be concentrating mostly on feeling as twenty six as humanly possible. Though the big two seven isn't too irksome, as birthdays go. The Shiel turns thirty on friday, which is cheering. Not just yet...

Holiday soon, good job. I'm getting a little too oblique with customers.

"Excuse me, you've forgotten our chips"

"Yes sir, I've also forgotten about Dre"

Puzzling.

So I've had my first couple of kitchen shifts, and have to say that I found them very enjoyable. Obviously it's way, way too early to be making any decisions, but I am convinced that the decision to give it a go was the right one, so that's okay.

I think the satisfaction in part derives from the sensation of actually making something rather than serving it. This is in no way to devalue my job, I derive a great deal of joy from sending customers home happy; but conversely I have recently started losing patience with the sort of customers who in the past I would just have laughed off.

You see the thing is, I'm just doing a job to the best of my ability, and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I simply don't need a lot of our customers in my life. I don't know if this is a peculiarly English thing (when I was working in cornwall, and a far higher proportion of the customers were foreign) but we've had a lot of people in recently who have caused me to question my faith in humanity. People who ask me suspiciously how much everything costs, who try to get a couple of quid shaved off their bill with spurious complaints (my favourite of recent weeks being "Your waitress banged the plates down in a meaningful manner" - what the hell are you talking about?) , parties who ignore you when you bring their food out, then complain that they don't have their food even though you've been walking up and down the table for fives minutes shouting "King Prawns! Who ordered the King Prawns please?" - and then, of course, complain that it's cold.

Add to that people who complain because they don't like anything on a set menu, but who still want the fixed price, people who seem to think that it's your fault that they don't like anything on the menu (because obviously you are trying to outwit them and make them feel small by serving fancy foreign muck they don't understand), people who, when you have an armful of plates grab your arm to get your attention and demand drinks, people who wave frantically to get your attention when it is patently obvious that you are in the middle of serving somebody else, people who get drunk and lecherous, people who get drunk and argumentative, people who argue over who's going to pay the bill and then get angry with you if you take someone else's payment ("But I wanted to pay!" You see, I don't really care that you've lost this childish pissing contest of yours, and no, I'm not going to give him his money back so you can pay it) and, worst of all, the terminally miserable; those who, once they've sat down don't crack a smile all night and you wonder what on earth posessed them to go out for a meal in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of my customers are lovely, entertaining, generous people. People who understand what going out to eat entails, who understand that it's something to enjoy, who approach the meal in the right frame of mind, who don't mind paying a couple of quid more for a better bottle of wine. Above all people who understand that just because you are serving them, it doesn't make you subservient to them, that you are a human being too. Sadly recently these have been in the minority, swimming against an overwhelming tide of petty, ill-mannered, cheap bastards who seem to think that they own you. so to be honest, the idea of hiding in the kitchen looks pretty good to me. We shall see.

Ah well, this is the logical apotheosis of coastalblog. Inspired largely by Cel and Porl's air-clearing post on Porl's blog, and tapping into things I may have alluded to in other posts.

There's no other way to say it, I am deeply unhappy. I'm unhappy about being unhappy, I am unhappy about people perceiving me as being unhappy. I'm just plain fucked off about pretty much everything.

So I'm seriously considering retraining as a chef, as alluded to below. In order to take it up professionally would require a wage cut of about fifteeen grand, which I can't afford, to be honest, but I'm doing the training on my days off, if it looks like I might be good at it then it's cheerio comfy wage, cheerio meandering, hello again to the greatest feeling on earth; the feeling where it's you, on your arse facing the world down. I fear I may be addicted to pulling myself out of the gutter but I just LOVE planning day to day, shifting the odd quid to where it's most needed. I love the minutiae of just getting by.

So, Coastalblog readers, am I fool to myself? Or am I doing the right thing?

God I love Autumn when it's like this. It's something to do with the taste of the air, I think, that freh crispness which one forgets about over summer and which, when it catches your nostris for the first time makes you think oh yeah jumpers! Walks! Drifts of leaves!.

it also heralds the incipient arrival of the hell on stilts that is Christmas, but more of such things later.

So what am I doing at the mo? Weeeeell, there's one thing occurring which may prove to be of pivotal importance in my life, but I'm reluctant to blog about it just yet, from some strange puritan hangover about not tempting fate. Also I'm having fun editing last year's Nanowrimo piece, having left it for nearly a year, in the hope that I'll rustle up a few ideas for this year's piece. I'm getting lots of reading and writing done, largely as a result of having knackered my knee (again) which kind of precludes any exercise except swimming, and I get VERY bored swimming after more than half an hour or so.

So in a nutshell, autumn is here, the season of rebirth for me (I know, my internal calendar's all to cock). In fact, not only is it autumn but it's ROCKTOBER! MY birthday! Porl's! birthday! The Shiel's birthday! (gulp). I'm sure there will be drinking, which is why I'm trying to stick out this sobriety as long as I possibly can.

Is the short answer to the question "So what've you been up to?" I've been on an extended binge of which this is my first night of sobriety. Water is so lovely, isn't it? Highlights included me and the manager, in an outraged drunken state pulling the ovens apart one night and then leaving them out to demonstrate how mucky they were. The chefs were not happy. Also a wine tasting last monday which ended with me and The Shiel getting blind drunk in Chorley by about two o clock in the afternoon, trying to get home and the next thing we knew we were drinking Guinness in The Temple. We'd got lost (on a train for fuck's sake), ended up in Manchester, and promptly decided to go out on the lash, obviously, but neither of us can recall this occurring. Ruin (he wrote off his car the next day, I learned this evening). The best bit, however, was visiting Paul and Cel at their stately pile in the country. It was nice to see with my own two eyes that Stalybridge looks a pretty nice place to live, and contains at least one rock solid winner of a pub (with the added bonus that it's a good sobriety inducing fifteen minute walk away), more, clearly, must be investigated in future weeks. It was also the most fun I've had in ages, to be honest, I was starting to forget what simple old "fun" was, climaxing in a lot of shouting at the screen during the Kerry / Bush debate. Matt's capsule review: Kerry bitched him. My personal favourite bit was when Kerry stated that Iraq had never attacked America, 41-Q43d4 had attacked America. Bush's spluttered "I know that! Don't you think I know that?" was touching comic buffoonery. Silly man.

So yeah, booze. I'm having a bit of a break from it at the moment. I do like tea, though.