I was on strike today, but I didn’t go on the picket line or anything, I just stayed off work. However, I won’t get paid for today, obviously.
This afternoon I went along to have a look in the bookstores. I got the book Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I’ll be back at work tomorrow, it actually feels quite odd being off for one day in the middle of the week, especially when I was off on Monday.
Last night I finished reading the book Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Published in 1999, the novel opens with a young man named Tender Branson who has hijacked a plane at gunpoint, let off the passengers and crew, and is planning to crash the plane into the middle of the Australian Outback, on his way he tells his life story to the plane’s flight recorder. Raised in a repressive religious cult called the Creedish, Branson, like most Creedish members is hired out as a domestic servant in the outside world. However, most of the Creedish commited mass suicide ten years earlier, and the few surviving members of the cult have also been killing themselves, leaving Tender the sole survivor, and pretty soon he becomes a huge media celebrity, and the only person he feels he can rely on is a firl named Fertility Hollis who has dreams which predict the future. The first page in the book is numbered as 289 and the page number decreases as the novel goes along, thesame thing applies to the chapter numbers. The novel is intelligent, suspenseful, bizarre and frequently hilarious.
At work today almost as soon as I had set up, the boss came over and asked for a word. I was pretty nervous, expecting that I was going to get fired or something. Instead he was asking if I wanted to go on a training course that starts next week for two weeks. I was happy enough to agree to it. When I come back off the course I’ll only have two more days of work before going on a three day break for my book festival events. So that works out well. The computer systems crashed this afternoon, so I spent a little time numbering up some deeds with my friend Joe before heading back.
Of course, I’ll be off work tomorrow due to the strike, so that should be good.
Today I was back at work again. The strike is still scheduled for Thursday. Mostly it was a fairly ordinary day. Last night, I uploaded my Neil Gaiman CD pack onto my iPod and so I spent a lot of time listening to that at work. It actually worked pretty well, listening t the stories at work.
Last night I was watching a film on TV called Where the Truth Lies, directed by Atom Egoyan. The film opens in 1957 where a nightclub comedy duo (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon) are at the top of their profession and internationally famous, until the body of a dead girl is discovered in their hotel suite, although they are never officially charged in connection with the death it ends their partnership and effectively ruins their career. Fifteen years later, an ambitious young journalist (Alison Lohman) is writing a book about the duo, and becomes preoccupied with finding out the truth about the girl’s death. Before long her investigation leads her into a dangerous world of sex and deceit. As with most Egoyan films, this one frequently moves back and forth between the past and the present and often features the same events from a variety of different perspectives. I enjoyed it actually I thought it was fun.
I was off work today and so I decided to go out to Glasgow, which is about forty-five miles away. I left my home at around eleven and headed up to the bus station. After waiting in the ticket queue for nearly twenty minutes I managed to get a return ticket to Glasgow and luckily just managed to catch the bus before it left. The journey took about an hour and a quarter, mainly because of people getting on and haggling with the driver about the price. It was cloudy and dull when I left Edinburgh but Glasgow was dry and blazing sunshine. I went along to Borders and had a look around. About an hour later I went up to a Buger King (which, due to a problem with the machinery, wasn’t selling any burgers) and so I had a chicken royale meal with fries and coke. I don’t go to Burger King much, but I do quite like it and I prefer it to MacDonalds. I went back to Borders and bought a complete and unabridged audio CD pack of Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, and read by Gaiman. It’s a collection of short stories and so I thought it would be perfect for my iPod. It’s funny but it’s been about a year and a half since I went to Glasgow, and Borders has not changed at all. I actually quite liked that. I caught the bus back at around half past four and got home at around quarter past six.
On a humorous note, I had been watching an episode of The League of Gentlemen last night and on the way into Glasgow I noticed that someone had painted the words “YOU’LL NEVER LEAVE” onto the welcome sign for a small town.
Yesterday evening my parents, along with my younger brother and his girlfriend who are up from London, came over to pick me up and we went along to a restaurant called the Buffalo Grill. It was like a steak-house place with a Wild West theme. The place was packed when we got there and we had to wait for awhile to get seated. To start I had a shrimp tempura (which was large shrimp in batter and a pot of sweet and sour sauce), for my main course I had a medium cooked chargrilled steak with a thick garlic and jalapeno sauce, salad and a side order of french fries, and for dessert I had a California Suite (which was like orage and mint and chocolate chip ice-cream topped with whipped cream, almonds and chocolate sauce with two wafers). It was a really nice meal. I had a can of Budweiser beer for my drink. The Buffalo Grill doesn’t have a license to sell alcohol and so my brother had to go to the nearest shop and get some beer, mainly because he was the only one that could get out easily. However I was the only one that had any and so my brother said I could just have the rest of the beer to take home with me, so that was nice of him.
Back home I watched the second half of the second of a three part series called Comics Britannia which was about the history of British comic-books. It was quite entertaining and interesting.
This morning I went along to my parent’s house as usual for my lunch, which today was salmon, peas and mashed potato witha kind of fruit dessert. It was really nice. My brother and his girlfriend had left before I arrived. The DVD of Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which I ordered a couple of weeks ago had arrived, so that was good. The film was made in 1972 and based on a science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. It’s about a planet called Solaris which is almost entirely covered by a strange ocean, which is in fact a vast living “liquid brain”. The story concerns a psychologist who arrives on a spacestation orbiting the planet and finds the place wrecked, one of the crew dead and the remaining three completely demoralised. It turns out that the planet has been sending them “visions” of people from their deepest dreams and memories, however the visions are entirely real and physical. The first night the psycholocgist is visited by his dead wife who comitted suicide several years earlier. It was remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh with George Clooney in the main role. The film is very good, if slow (it’s about twice the length of the 2002 film).
I’m off work tomorrow as well, so that should be good.
Last night I was watching the film Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan, on DVD. It is a really good film, it was the one that really started the new cycle of Batman films.
I got up fairly late today and went into the centre of the city. I went and had a look at the comics and science-fiction store but I didn’t buy anything. I walked around for awhile and had a look in a few other places at posters and tee-shirts, but I didn’t buy anything. On my way home I stopped off and bought my groceries for the week. It was surprisingly hot today.
This evening I am going out to a restaurant with my parents along with my brother and his girlfried, who are up from London.
Last night was fairly quiet again. I made a late night snack of strawberry jam on white bread with a chunk of cheese and a packet of crisps which I ate while watching a repeat of Dragon’s Den (which is a show where would-be entreprenears and inventors have a chance to pitch their creations and business ideas to a panel of multi-millionaire potential investors). It can actually be really funny at times with some of the more ridiculous ideas that people come up with.
I had a day off today so I got up pretty late and headed up to the Cineworld cinema in order to see The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan. The showing I went to was at 12:30PM but there was already a long queue and the cinema was more full than I can ever remember seeing it for a day-time week-day performance. A lot of the other showings today were completely sold out. I won’t say too much about the film (because I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it) but I thought it was really great. I think it was possibly the best superhero movie I’ve seen.
After the film I went out and had a drink at the bar next to the cinema. I sat there with my beer and read some of the book that I had brought with me (Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk) and wrote a bit in my notebook.
On the way home I stopped off and bought a bottle of Coke and a copy of Radio Times.
Last night was another pretty quiet evening. I stayed in and watched TV, which is pretty much what I usually do.
It was another pretty dull day at work. There was a union meeting about the pay dispute this morning. So we all trooped alongto a nearby sports stadium and sat there for over an hour. The meeting was pretty pointless, they didn’t say anything that we didn’t already know and the PA system was so bad that I could barely make out what they were saying. The seats were also extremely uncomfortable, I spent most of the time writing in my notebook. I suppose it was a break from the office and we get a time claim for it. The strike is still scheduled for next Thursday.
It was really hot and muggy and I was pretty tired anyway so I was feeling quite irritable by the end of the day, and relieved to be heading home.
That is me off work until Tuesday, so that’s good.
Last night was fairly quiet. I was reading a bunch of stories from the Smoke and Mirrors collection by Neil Gaiman, including a very funny story called “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” which was like an H.P. Lovecraft ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ story but done in the style of comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
Today was a very quiet day at work, but relatively busy. Apparently we are officially going on strike for one day next Thursday and apparently the following day the Union are organising “discontinuous action short of a strike” (whatever that means). The whole thing is due to the pay dispute yet again. It will be an interesting schedule for me, because I’m off work on Friday until Tuesday, in work for two days, on strike on the Thursday and then in work for one day on the Friday. I seriously considered taking that Friday off but I didn’t want to use up too much my annual leave before I’ve even had a chance to take a proper holiday this year. There is a Union meeting tomorrow morning as well.
I got home from work today at about six o’clock.
It’s interesting actually, following on from what I was saying yesterday, I always find it extrmemly difficult to write about personal thoughts and feeling and opinions and so on. I don’t really know why, even in my paper journal, and I suppose posting on here because it is out for other people to read as well, I often feel like I should post about things that are more interesting and entertaining than myself and my life, but also because I do get really embarrassed writing about personal feelings and so on (aside from that I get nervous as to what people would think). However, I do often feel like I would like to express myself more, although I do think that if it was put to the vote of what most people would prefer to read: stuff about me and my life and thoughts and feelings or stuff about obscure three hour long Russian sci-fi movies and Doctor Who the answer would be pretty unanimous. This has been a perfectly pointless paragraph.
Last night was fairly quiet. I spent most of the time watching repeats of old comedy shows on TV and reading my books.
Today was pretty quiet as well, and I went straight on home after work, although I did stop to get a loaf of bread. I found a notebook of mine at the bottom of my bag this morning. It was full of a lot of random thoughts, because I used to carry it about with me and write on the spur of the moment. Actually, however boring this internet diary might be, my paper diaries would be an exercise in total tedium for any reader, as I write about my breakfast porridge, what I’m watching on TV, what is on my daily calendar and my thoughts and opinions about stuff (including some thoughts that may be slightly edging towards X-rated). I don’t think they would make for a particularly entertaining or interesting read.
There is a Union meeting this Thursday to discuss possible strike action over the pay dispute.
