Grindstone Cowboy

So back to the Hamster wheel that is my little suburban life. The office, now two thirds populated after the several hundred of us were tipped out by the oil blast on the industrial estate, is like a large version of one of those snow globes, with everybody displaced, popping up in unexpected cubicles. Loads of meerkatting going on.

We’re on the fourth floor and I’m a bit amazed at how breathless people are getting as they struggle to get up to even the second floor. The lifts are out and should be for the next 10 weeks, thereby making a modest contribution to the fulfilment of some resolutions.

From the top floor you get a good view across to the scene of the blast and there lots of once impressive warehouses that look more like squashed or torn tins.

It’s sort of nice to have a desk again. Pianists are musical clerks or maybe clerks are tuneless pianists – take your pick. The month has filled up with this and that – the car is going belly up, so I need to drop J at school and take the car with my bike in the back to the menders, cycle home, pick up the other car, drive to work, come back via J’s school, collect him, drop the car at home, cycle back to the menders, drive back to work and then come home. Not the usual rigmarole, but I have taken charge of car maintenance this year for the first time. It’s going to be minus 2 tonight, so by the time I have cycled home, I will have a face like a board.

Other highlights to come: I have the dentist on Friday the 13th and it is some time since I have been. I have the business equivalent of the UN on Monday as I welcome my European colleagues to the UK for a two day conference. We have annual results the week after. P’s birthday is at the end of the month. We have an Epiphany Piph-up to go to on Sunday. It’s just go, go, go.

Celebrity Big Brother starts tonight and there’s a strong rumour that George Galloway is a contestant – compelling prospect of Gorgeous George gizzarding the others with his tongue.

Happy new year, by the way. We had a very nice new year. P’s oldest friend J came up from Devon with her new husband J (sorry, too many Js) and her boys, C and R. J (my son J) was mesmerised by the trampolining prowess of C. I cooked three gallons of curry and we started to imbibe around 5.30. Made it the whole way – not bad for a codger like me. Pacing myself these days.

Didn’t get the guitar out until 10.30, by which time it was too late, the hands weren’t operating and the kids (16, 13, 13 and 10 respectively) gave me looks of withering incredulity which made my voice go all tense and tight and put paid to any prospect of me trying out my new Bob Dylan impression replete with harmonica with any measure of success. Consider yourself spared my Glen Campbell / Jimmy Webb medley.

I have found Bob Dylan this year. For years I have failed to graft, despite recommendations that stretch back as far as old friend R in Canberra, but this year I have succumbed, largely due to a surfeit of alternatives on holiday in Scotland, the Scorsese film and (P’s stocking filler) Don’t Look Back. I now think he shows promise. Musical find of the year for me was Antony and the Johnsons. Sadly I don’t have the vocal range, but I do, increasingly, have the figure.