Life Is A Rollercoaster

Book of the Week: Blindness by Jose Saramago

Only four weeks on the new job, and this one’s been the best so far in rollercoaster experiences and emotions. The last five days, when expressed on paper, would look remarkably like the single-phase FWAC charts we had to produce in one of those double physics classes on magnetism and currents.

Monday: Boo. Continued investigations into death of a woman from town that shall only be known as Two Miles East (from the flat, that is), by calling up various people in the community and hoping the theory of Six Degrees held true. No luck, didn’t get anywhere. Worse, a woman who returned my call (wish she didn’t), got on her high horse. You could hear the self-righteous sneering and spittle spraying through the phone. I never buy your newspaper because it’s done some terrible things in the past, you’ve sunk to a new low, how would you like it if it happened to your mother or grandmother, I am disgusted and I am going to make sure Two Miles East knows about it, blah de blah de blah. Hysterical old bat really had an axe to grind with the paper. Not my problem. Managed to keep my cool and told her sorry you feel that way, but thanks very much all the same, when I really wanted to tell her, I’ll take it you can’t answer the question then? Or better yet, shut up and sod off, you conceited cow. Very proud that I did not.

Tuesday: Yay! My first big press conference. And they don’t come any bigger than the Flash Gordon himself. Official opening of an multinational engineering firm’s plant extension. Obviously a PR trip before June 27. The reporter from Auntie was bugging him about what he thought about Alex Salmond and Scotland having an SNP government, which was quite entertaining to watch, not least for the way the Lord Gord pointedly ignored him. The only downsides were a) having the firm leaving us in the office and forgetting to take us down to the plant floor, and b) my rubbish shorthand, which meant I was killing myself just trying to keep up with Gord’s rapid-fire statements. Thank you, Kingdom FM! And in the afternoon went up the High Street, in the pissing rain, to talk to homeless folk selling the homeless folk mag.

Wednesday: Boo. Woke up early to write El Gordo story – was a bit desperate upon finding out the .wav files didn’t work. Then wrote homeless folk story, but went into work to find that the person at the homeless folk mag who deals with the press was away, and so wouldn’t be able to get their response till next week at the soonest. Double boo because got telt for a totally innocent mistake which was made under duress – typical case of being told the story was urgent, working madly on it, only for it to be held back two weeks. Will take advice, but not outburst, to heart. If I don’t, I’ll just get depressed. I don’t need to do it to myself when there’s Big Brother – launched tonight – to do that to me.

Thursday: Yay! Had chat with Da Big Mon and he said I was doing fine and he was happy with my work. That’s cool, especially coming from him. Then come home and find that my NINO application has been approved. Double yay! As Gareth says, that makes me almost a proper British person. Phew. Almost. I could do without the cruddy teeth and walking about indoors with shoes on. I suspect I have yet to develop the “British” sense of humour, though. There isn’t as much light-hearted easy laughter in the home as there is in the company of other ang moh friends. Thinking about that makes me a bit depressed sometimes. Still, we had a great evening chilling out, eating strawberry white chocolate. Mmmm.

Friday: Boo/Yay. Exasperating day. Didn’t make any headway with interviews – either nobody around or couldn’t take call. But found out that filming has been cancelled and so the flat is still ours for the next two weeks. Which is great because we really need together time. And it’s the first time Number Two has really bothered to talk to me. Quite ironic – I just told Gareth the other night that I’m finding it difficult to make friends because it feels like nobody wants to have a conversation with me, and wondered if it was because I was “different”. Not calling anybody a racist, but it was starting to make me a bit paranoid that there was something about me that repulsed people.

Blindness is interesting, but perhaps because I’m reading it in snatches, I’m finding it hard to truly get totally absorbed and appreciate its brilliance. That may be a good thing, actually, because reading it in fits and starts only heightens the experience of suffering from a temporary blindness of the mind whenever I step into the world of the book – a situation compounded by my losing my bookmark. I can never seem to remember my place in the book, and so like the blind internees, fumble my way through. There’s no real day or night in the book, and so I find it doubly difficult to find my place by “incident”, or remember where I am, and so lose my way, like the afflicted in the book. Because it’s one of those books written without punctuation marks (or rather, punctuation that annoys me), I did at first think, oh bother, another arty-farty book. But the stylistics are really quite clever, in that they turn you into one of the blind, on so many levels. The rush of unpunctuated sentences gives the story a stream-of-consciousness feel and creates the atmosphere of babble, and I find myself having to pay extra attention to what I am reading to make out who is saying what without the visual guides of quotation marks to aid my reading – mimicking the condition of the blind having to rely on hearing as their most important sense. Another thing: it’s been a long time since a book has made me feel physically sick – I think the last one I read contained graphic descriptions of female genital mutilation – but Blindness has pretty awful scenes of squalor and filth, how being humans degenerate into animals. (Though I’m not sure if that’s a good comparison as Dusty and Lucky are always pretty clean.) It may be because I am a self-confessed anal-retentive clean freak, but reading about slime on floors, flooded toilets and the smell of 200 unwashed bodies just makes me want to gag.

Thought of having an overnighter in Glasgow and doing Kelvingrove this weekend since filming is now off. But might just leave museums till Sunday and stay home and make sushi. Whatever we decide to do, I hope it goes well. Last weekend went downhill after we got back from IKEA – no laughing, no conversation, no anything. After that, and the stress of the last five days, I really hope this weekend is stupendous. We shall see.

Factoids of the Week:
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, is building his dream home: 27 floors (the first six of which will be car parks and the next two a health club), on a 4,532 sq m plot, over 170m tall, and employing 600 staff to run it. I’m going to get into hysterical old bat mode and scream: OBSCENE! OSTENTATIOUS!

The UK’s first transgender mayor was sworn in last week. Lib Dem (thought this sort of stuff only happened to the Tories though?) Jenny Bailey, 45, became the leader of Cambridge City Council – and her partner (and former councillor) is also a trannie. Does that mean you were born gay and turned lesbian? I can’t get my head around this guy-turns-into-girl-likes-girls or vice-versa. It’s quite confusing. And Sex Change Hospital just blows my mind.

Therapists from Cal State and Virginia Tech have “discovered” that the secret to happiness is accepting misery. Researchers Dr Diane Gehart and Dr Eric McCollum say it is a “myth that, with enough effort we can achieve a state without suffering.” Hmmm. The question is, who’s going to tell Buddha...