Well my sister’s comment reminded me that I do have it easier than her with the wedding preparations. She was all alone, in Australia, thousands of miles away from her family, dealing with a man whose unctuousness only became apparent once we’d all met him.
Within minutes of Gerhardt the planner/photographer arriving at the house, my family and I had constructed a rather amusing fictional life-story, which grew in detail over the following days, and which hinged on a vague suspicion that he probably wasn’t allowed to take pictures of children as a condition of his parole.
To illustrate why he deserves this opprobrium: there was a point in the proceedings when the bride and bridesmaids (me!) were being photographed with the bouquets, which came in a largish...
Well, I’ve been brimming with updates recently, but unfortunately Wordpress decided it didn’t like me any more, and for several days now I’ve been unable to get access to the blog. But it’s back now, thankfully (although looking a little odd),......
Well, that was a brief spell of blogging busyness. Apologies (to anyone still reading) for failing to answer comments - I normally would but for some reason, I think my blogging mojo was not fully recharged.
Not much has been happening, generally, except for the following little bits and bobs:
1. Wedding planning. All going well, except for extremely rude woman in bridal shop who seems to think I wear steel galvanised lederhosen which can be seen at armpit level under a corset. I think not.
2. Bird watching. Not going well. Grandly extravagant ‘bird-feeding station’ purchased, and yet no birds. However, the food is disappearing, so I’m thinking that we have discovered a new species of feathered garden friend - the stealth-bird. I even set up my new camera to...
Well, I’m back, if there’s anyone still out there. I missed disco. No other blog site I opened seemed to be quite the same. So I’ve finally given in to temptation, and returned to boogie on down.
Shake shake. Yeah.
Thanks also for all the lovely comments everyone left. You’re all fab, darlings. Fab I......
I have been a bit quiet these last few days because my head has been like one of those bingo ball machines. I have been all a-flutter, and haven’t known what’s going to be spewing out next. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I won’t go into in case crazy ladies start spitting up bile all over the comments box again, and you know how I hate having to go and get the bucket of sand from my special blog cleaning cupboard.
However, one reason is that yesterday I had a job interview. It’s for a job that sounds absolutely brilliant, and which I would very much like to get. The interview was over the phone, and so I found it difficult to gauge how I’d done, but it seems that they want me to go in and meet them, so I’m flying home for a...
God, I fucking hate writing my CV. For some reason, I lost my original one, but it was probably crap anyway. I’m applying for a job for which the closing date is tomorrow, and which I only discovered yesterday, so I’m frantically trying to make myself sound fab from scratch.
It’s physically painful, not unlike pulling teeth (see last post).
It’s also excrutiatingly boring. And completely necessary.
Ugh. Anyone else hate doing......
My sister has just had one of her wisdom teeth out. She wrote about it on her blog, and my response (Just one? One wee wisdom tooth out? Pah, you know nothing of pain…) reminded me of my own torturous experience of dental extraction.
I hate going to the dentist. I think this comes from having a lifetime’s worth of bitter, emotionally shrivelled dental witches jab ruthlessly at my gums with instruments of torture and then tell me to stop being such a baby, while blood dribbles down my chin, and tears dribble down my cheeks. I was convinced that they had no empathy, sympathy, or other human feelings. Until a few years ago, dentists would be considered by me to be living definitions of a sociopaths.
Then I met the dentist who removed all my wisdom teeth. He was lovely -...
Julia, our receptionist, walks into my office, and says the same thing she always says - pointlessly, because the answer does not matter one jot.
“Rachael, are you busy?”
“Er…”, I look at my screen, which is probably showing my email, or a blog, or occasionally the google home page, for when I am struck with an urgent need to know something obscure, like “contents tartare sauce”, or “dream of corpses significance”.
“Can you help me?” she asks.
“I don’t know. What’s up?”
“My friend had a dream last night when she had shit all over her hands”. She extends her hands to me as if to demonstrate where the shit was. “What does it mean?”
I’m stumped. “I have...
I don’t usually do memes, as I have said before. However, this one is in aid of Clare, who is stuck in the Big Blogger house, and needs votes. Mind you, so does my other incarcerated friend Papersurfer. So, go vote. For someone.
(1) Tell your readers three things about you that would make you the Ideal Housemate if you were imprisoned in a house with ten random strangers for weeks on end. Then three things that’d make you the Housemate From Hell.
(2) Think very hard about whether you would like Clare, the creator of this wonderful meme, to win Big Blogger 2007. And then vote for her anyway. Because, well, she’s ace, and… ah what the hell. Just vote for her. She’s ace.
(3) Tag as many people as possible with this meme. Quickly! The voting ends at midday...
There is a big party going on in my head. The glitterati of the planet Blah have got all dressed up in their finery and are having a riot. When they have calmed down and gone away, I will be back. Until then, I’m off to find some......
A few things are making me a bit cross today. One of them I will write about tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d like to give this article a bit of a skewering. I don’t know why I’m bothering really, because he skewers himself quite nicely, with what is an outpouring of overblown, fantastically generalised, badly argued rhetoric, but I’m cross, so I will.
Apparently, according to Theo Hobson, ‘Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming…to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is’. In addition to this all atheists fundamentally object to religion, and are on a mission to eradicate it from the face of the earth. He is taking as his example Christpher Hitchens, who has just publisehd a...
I spell my name with an extra ‘a’, as in Michael. Most people, however, spell it the standard way - Rachel. This annoys me, particularly in emails, because my name is my email address. How hard can it be just to raise your eyes a few millimetres and check? You typed the goddamn thing in after all. I know I’m being pedantic, but it’s my name, and I like it just fine the way it is.
However, what really annoys me, and it happens ALOT, believe me, is when I spell my name out and people still don’t get it.
The conversation usually goes something very similar to this:
“Can I email it to you?”
“Of course. My email address is rachael, that’s spelt r, a, c, h, a, e, l at [my organisation] .org.”
“OK, I will do that.”...
God, blogging gets tough when nothing is happening on a daily basis. What to write about? Well, it’s cold. Been there done that – so 2006. Um, I could write about the depression I have not been feeling for the last few months , but you know, it’s a bit of a non-event. I could write about the fact that I have a date (ooh!), which I’m quite excited about. A blind(ish) date, in fact, in a couple of weeks. But I won’t. I’ll write instead about the last blind date I went on. Oh, it was a lark.
It was last year some time, and I think my friends were feeling a bit sorry for me at that stage, as it had been some months since the departure of the ex and they were concerned that I was not showing any inclination to get back in the saddle, so to speak.
So, one of them...
Well, it seems I have been nominated for a prize in a competition! How exciting! Last time I won anything it was a My Little Pony when I was 11. I never, ever got the point of My Little Pony. Vile things.
Anyway, I don’t know what the prize is, but if you want to vote for me, go visit Moobs. Actually, you don’t have to vote for me, as there are some other tenuous connections that are pretty good....
It’s getting cold here, and I need closed shoes, as I remember from last year how frostbite feels. I decide to buy trainers. They are warm; they are practical; they look funky with jeans.
I go trainer shopping. Shop after shop offers me a dreary selection of running shoes with absolutely no funk at all. I do find one pair that I quite like, but they cost N$900, which constitutes a third of my monthly wage, and they really aren’t that exciting. Also, they make my ankles look weird.
I am starting to despair, and the shop assistants give my ancient and grubby N$10 plastic flip flops the hairy eyeball every time I ask try on a pair of shoes, as if it’s insufferable presumption to present myself in inferior footwear when shopping for N$900 trainers.
Feeling disgruntled, I decide...
Right, continuing with the questions… Today I will be answering Uncle Did, who asked “Is your life and work like what you expected when you were still in London, if you expected anything. And are you thrilled to bits or disapointed, or both ?“, and Ann, who said “My big question for you is: Do you “believe” in the work (ie development) that you have been doing for the past couple of years? And can you see yourself staying in this line of work?”
To answer the first question – no. Not in the slightest. In London I had hazy ideas of a healthful and serene existence, in which I would float about in a gauzy haze, probably doing yoga under the plam tree in my yard on a daily basis while children ran about shrieking with mirth, and neighbours popped round...
A couple of days ago, Heather A asked me whether insects have muscles like we do. I like a challenge, especially when I get to show off about how clever I am at the end of it, so I looked it up on the internet, which is the source of truth and light, as we all know.
What I found out from the internet is that this is a very difficult question, particularly for someone who didn’t even do GCSE biology.
I did a bit of reading, and then I realized that I don’t actually know much about human musculature, so I looked that up. Did you know that the tongue is actually sixteen different muscles? And that the uterus is the strongest muscle in the human body?
Anyway, I digress. There are basically three types of muscles in humans (excuse me if you already know this): skeletal or...
I almost forgot. Steve at Our Man in Granada is covering the Great Turtle Race.
I picked Stephanie Colburtle, and what do you know? She’s winning. Hurrah. Go Steph. However, knowing my luck in these kind of things, she will probably be eaten halfway to the Galapagos, and I will be plagued with terrible guilt for the rest of my life. I should never have got involved. I’ve practically sealed her doom.
Right, I’m off home to eat some cheap......
As is usual during the onset of winter, this morning I found it extremely difficult to get out of bed. The routine goes like this:
6.30: Alarm
6.39: Alarm
…. repeat until 7.20.
7.20: Swing legs out of bed and shuffle into living room.
7.21: Realise wearing only pants and Mrs Uncle Janni has returned from her month long sojourn in Pretoria, and is doing her Amazing Morning Constitutional outside on the driveway, wearing a housecoat and a showercap.
7.22: Return to living room wearing jumper and socks.
7.23: Drink a cup of Tetley.
7.25 - 7.58: - Faff
7.59: Panic, as now very late for work. Look for keys. Find keys. Look for ipod. Find Ipod. Try to relocate keys. Can’t find keys anywhere. Find keys mysteriously placed on bathroom windowsill. Lock up the million...
Steve at Our Man in Granada, gawd love him, has given me a great suggestion for reviving my blogging inspiration (and therefore stopping the great exodus of readers from these shores). It great because it means you have to do all the hard work.
So, ask me anything. You can ask me about me, or Namibia, or about something not at all related to me - if I don’t know the answer, I can always try and make up something entertaining yet plausible.
I realise that I have been promising a review of Windhoek’s nightlife for some time, but that is still in the sidelines - that should give you some idea of how kickin’ it is here. Yeah baby - so much goes on, I don’t have the energy to detail it all.
Please ask me something. I’ll just feel unloved if the comments...
Right, well, I didn’t expect so many questions! I’m delighted, obviously, because it gives me much to work with. I thank you.
Kathleen has two questions (the more the merrier, I say).
Are you going back to England this year? Aren’t you near the end of your two year commitment?
The answer to both is yes. I haven’t been home in almost two years, and I’m starting to wonder what it will be like. Will people be wearing strange clothes, and talking into mobile phones the size of postage stamps? Will they even be speaking the same language, or will it have mutated out of existence? This is how long I feel I have been away. So I’m planning on finishing up in September, popping up to Victoria Falls and Malawi/Zambia with my cousin before being spat...
I went back to my meditation class on Saturday. I was a bit concerned, as we had been told that we would learn how to commune with God.
I was brought up in a household where organised religion was viewed as particularly unsavoury. My father used to keep Jehovah’s Witnesses standing on the doorstep while he tried to convert them to atheism. When my sister, at the age of ten, expressed an interest in attending the local Sunday school, my father was so upset that my mother had to calm him down by telling him it was just a phase she was going through.
I know that I’m clearly a product of my upbringing, but I am in my thirties now, and I think I have been old enough for some considerable time to mull the matter over, and decide for myself what I believe, and I simply don’t believe...
Our new receptionist just came into my office, where I am playing the contents of my ipod on shuffle, to say:
“Rachael, don’t you have any music by Kenny G?”
I can think of a number of interesting and informative answers to this question, but I decided to opt for the only safe one and shook my head.
“Are you sure?”
I said that I am very sure. Just to make sure she doesn’t ask me again, I told her that I don’t really like Kenny G all that much. It reminds me of faded shopping centres, lifts full of pushchairs in Debenhams, litter, cherry flavoured bubble gum, and mullets.
“But why not? He doesn’t sing. It’s just…” She did a passable warbling impression of a saxophone, her fingers waggling around a bit. She...
“Do you know who you are?” asks our guru, his soft voice seeming to drift into our minds without effort; the smell of incense permeates everything with a sense of calm.
“This body is just a costume. It is not who you are. You are a soul – whatever it is that looks out of your eyes, and hears with your ears, this is who you are. You must learn, through meditation, to harness the healing power of your energy, your soul.”
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry! We are late! Sorry!” says a voice that sounds as if it has been stretched and sandpapered almost out of existence. A man appears, his eyes bright and interested, dragging two girls in his wake. We all begin again, at the beginning. Throughout the introduction, he shuffles a collection of plastic bags around in his pocket,...
I’ve been nominated for post of the week! It’s very exciting. The winner will be announced on Sunday. Like the oscars. I am preparing a speech.
Thank you Adrian, for nominating......
I haven’t got much of anything to say at the moment. I’ve tried to write, but everything I write right now is crap(per than usual). You wouldn’t want to read it. Trust me.
At first I thought that I’m writing crap because there is nothing to write about. My head is empty of words, like a lake without fish. Or a lake where all the fish are floating stinkily on the surface. However, there is always something to write about. For example:
1. I saw a sign on a lorry yesterday that said “Frozen bodies”. What did it really mean? Is there a serial killer on the loose in Windhoek who is sneakily getting away by boldly advertising his foul misdeeds in the hope that no-one would believe it? Should I inform the police?
2. Why are there two evangelical...
1. I am so tired that my face feels like a mask, behind which is only fog. My boss just came into the room to find me staring blankly at my computer.
2. I got in a taxi this morning, to go and collect my bike from a friend’s house, to find that my taxi driver had Bryan Adams singing ‘Have you ever really loved a woman’ on repeat. Every time, it stuck at 4 minutes and 29 seconds, and the car was filled with Bryan singing ‘really-eally-eally-eally-eally ev-ev-ev-ev-ev-ever love-ov-ov-ov-ov’, until the driver switched it back to the beginning. I was convinced that I was in a specially designed version of hell, from which escape was impossible. I nearly clawed my own ears off.
3. As I was riding my bike to work this morning, I got leered at and...
And today, on the front page of the Namibian, Namibia’s main daily English newspaper, appears an article, complete with photo, about the fire brigade rescuing a seven month old cat named Jessy from a very tall tree. The article is extraordinarily detailed, listing all the heroic firemen by name, and describing three attempts to remove Jessy from the tree, all of which involved spraying the cat with water from a hosepipe.
Fortunately, I know you will all be relieved to hear, “Jessy was exhausted and a bit stressed but generally doing well after her ordeal”. We can all breath a sigh of relief.
Is it any wonder I’ve got bloody cabin fever? IS THERE NOTHING ELSE TO WRITE ABOUT?
Oh, no, it’s ok. There’s also an article about Brad and Angelina Jolie-Pitt, and...
So, here we are again. Gosh, the years just seem to whizz by these days. Last year, I was woken with a breakfast of coffee and fresh mango, and a truly magnificent shag. This year, my lovely friend, who is staying with me, made me a breakfast, complete with flowers, and Buck’s Fizz with mango juice, and my other lovely friend made me the Best Birthday Card in the Worldtm. Here it is…
All in all, seeing as my lovely friends aren’t about to drag me through the mire of broken-hearted misery, I think this birthday bodes well for the year ahead. I know I said that last year, but who was paying attention? No-one? Good.
Also, I have fab shoes.
Right, now I’m going to skip off and drink champagne. I expect I will be writing about my hangover tomorrow. What...
Since my phone and house keys were stolen on Friday night (I meet a fuckwit AND someone steals my bag, all in one night!) I haven’t been able to lock my bike up, so this morning, I leave it under the guardianship of the Herero lady who sells the Big Issue outside the supermarket. Because she swelters in this heat, dressed as she is in vast Victorian skirts and petticoats, I pay her for her services in Namibia’s universal currency – a cool drink.
I go in to see the doctor, who flirts with me every time I go in there; this makes me feel weirdly bashful. She comes into the room, all gung-ho, bearing a thermos flask of liquid nitrogen in one hand, and a fistful of q-tips in the other, sits me down, and with no further ado stabs me in the armpit with a cotton-bud that has a surface...