I find hope to be a weird thing. Mostly we hope for thngs that our rational brain knows are impossible, but to deny that hope would make life a very much harder thing to endure.

Perhaps it is a curse of being quiet and slightly odd, but I have throughout my time at uni and beyond encountered people whom I find very attractive and have a great deal in common with who clearly have no interest in me. Secretly I hope that they will notice that tall person in the corner but they never do.

The hope makes one feel a bit more alive, but it burns a little and makes it that much harder to ever become really close friends.

It is interesting to see how many of the blogs that I read periodically now appeared to have been forgotten by their owners.

Perhaps the fad has passed, or maybe my peers have all just gorwn up and found more productive things to do with their lives than writing down what they are doing with their lives.

In the meantime those of us who read them watch and wait…

Happy New Year to all of my (remaining) readers!

I have decided that as this is a new year I will make some effort to rescusitate this blog so that you can all catch up on my innane ramblings.

Festive period

Christmas was good this year. We had the whole family (and no-one else for a change) at home for three whole days, which is pretty much unheard of. Was good to have a house-full, although there were a few occasions where I had to go and hide in my room for a bit as I wasn’t feeling sociable.

As is traditional in our family, Boxing Day is the day that we all go out into the orchard to tidy the place up and generally work off the christmas excess. By having an early breakfast and late supper (and skipping lunch altogether) we get to make best use of the daylight available and by the end of the day we had cut down and burnt 8 trees (they are willow trees which will sprout again from the base but need to be cut right down every 15-20 years to stop them rotting and falling over).

On Monday I headed up to Manchester for a week to see in the new year with friends. It was good to catch up with so many people and apologies to the people I didn’t manage to catch up with while I was there. I travelled up with Olly (younger brother) and stayed with him in his house in Failsworth. It is a big house but is in urgent need of some updating (and tidying).

My week went something like as follows:
Monday: Train to manc, arrived at 17:30 and straight back to Failsworth.

Tuesday: Had a bad night with the vasculitis and didn’t have enough drugs with me to cover an attack. Spent 3.5 hours in A&E to see a doctor to give me more meds. Then headed down to Withington around 4.30 to catch up with friends who had been out walking before crossing to Chorlton to catch up with Liz at 18.30. Caught the bus back into town to meet up with the record label crowd in Retro Bar for 9.00ish before getting a late bus back to Failsworth.

Wednesday: Had a lie-in and didn’t leave the house till about 13.00. Went with Olly into town for llunch and then went to the cinema. We were due to Boho for their NYE party from 19.30, and found ourselves in town with time to kill before catching the bus, so we wandered down to the arch and finished off a few bits of the set that needed fettling. Got down to Boho about 8.00 and had a good but mostly quiet party (apart from the singing in the kitchen). The highlight of the evening was the firework display including a comedy moment where someone lit a firework and, while retreating to safe distance, laid himself flat by walking straight into the washing line in the dark. Left the party around half midnight and retreated to Failsworth by taxi.

Thursday: Lay in till late and didn’t leave the house.

Friday: Met up with Liz in the evening for dinner. Had a very pleasant meal and a good catch-up. Staggered back to hers around midnight and crashed in the spare room.

Saturday: Got the bus back to Failsworth to change and pack (I had a very early train on Sunday). Then back into town with Olly to catch up with Grahame in the pub. Left there about 16.30 to catch a train to Hale for Hoose’s surprise party. Bumped into Linden, Alsion and Rosy on the platform at Piccadilly. The meal itself was amazing; there were 30 people organised in secret to be there waiting when Hoose arrived. Also good to catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen for a number of months (including Mike, Pam & Mahinda). After the meal I caught the last train back to manc with Rosy and then finding a taxi back out to Failsworth.

Sunday: Got up early to finish my packing and then caught the bus into town to catch the 11.35 train to London. Minor chaos on the train as the 11.15 had been cancelled because of the plane crash in Staffs on Friday. We got down to London without incident (although due to the diversion it took 30mins longer than timetabled). I learned later that we must have missed the subsequent power failure at Watford by only about 30mins, and that was delaying people by up to 3/4 hours.

I haven’t been in here for at least two months, but according to my stats page people are still checking.

So a swift update:

Life is treating me well. I can’t quite believe that it’s been 9 months since I started my job down here. I now have my first qualification under my belt and more or less adjusted to life here (much quieter and can’t meet friends in the pub round the corner with 15 mins notice but I get away to meet people often enough).

I am happy with my decision to come down here. I feel that, while life isn’t moving just yet, I am laying a foundation that will allow me to progress in future, and I have been able to break out of the student mentality that I was stuck in in Manchester.

For those of you who don’t know about it, I also blog on livejournal as toad2000, which I’m using more regularly at the moment than this blog.

I am having a bad day today.

A significant number of dark thoughts are circling my brain and work isn’t busy enough to distract me from them.

I’m not sleeping and it’s not helping.

I don’t feel like I can talk to anyone about it because everyone has enough to worry about already without someone whining about how terrible their life is when they have a job and free accommodation and food.

Someone whom I care about deeply appears to have stopped talking to me. Granted I can entirely see why and I can’t argue with the reasoning but it still hurts.

I will survive and push through, have no doubt about that.

But I’m having a bad day today.

As those of you who still turn up here (are there any now?) will have noticed that the updates to this site are getting fewer and further between.

Having found myself in a place where things are happening and life is progressing I have found that I have less and less inclination to sit at my computer whining about how things are not going my way. Indeed the more that has happened the less I feel motivated at the end of it to sit down and describe it.

As such I think it is time for my alterego Thetallone to be put into mothballs and put away until such time as I am either in a position where his petulant observations are needed for stress relief or he grows up and learns to write flowing erudite prose like those around him.

I ain’t dead yet…

I have suddenly discovered that I am really missing having friends nearby. While it has been great fun going into London to visit people over the last couple of months, it isn’t quite the same thing as spending a greater portion of you evening in the compnay of your peers (or housemates).

There are two people particularly for whom I feel a particular desire to catch up with, both infact having been a significant part of my life for a period and both currently overseas.
One of them it is reasonably obvious why I’m missing them, the other less so, and I’m not even sure she even gives me a second thought these days. I just want to be in a position where we can spend time together again doing nothing in particular. We never had a great deal to say to one another but that never seemed to matter, it was just nice* spending time together on our own**. Even more recently when we’ve caught up with one another there has still been a sense of understanding there without words needing to be spoken.

Hmm - I also need to work out what it is that keeps my brain racing at night and is preventing me from sleeping as I think I’m going quietly insane from it…

*Where “nice” means relaxing, comfortable, joy inspiring, right.

**By “together on our own” I of course mean time spent where it was just the two of us.

Do you ever have those days where it seems the entire world is trying to get a message across.

This wasn’t one of those days.

However I opened the paper at random and lo and behold there was my horoscope for the day:

“Someone’s pushing all your buttons at the moment - the wrong ones that is. You might feel that you’re sparing their feelings by not telling them how wrong they’ve got you - but can you really afford to let things continue like this? If the answer is no, then don’t put off that conversation any longer”

While in general I don’t believe in horoscopes I also don’t believe in co-incidence so I’m taking this as a cosmic boot up the back side to get myself sorted out for better or better

Stolen reading thing:

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.2) Italicise those you intend to read.3) Underline the books you LOVE, or strikeout the books you read but didn’t like.4) Reprint this list with your take so we can try and track down these people who’ve read only 6 or less and make them read.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen*
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams**
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith.
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

*We did the Mayor of Casterbridge for English GCSE rather than this but it has put me off reading the “Great Litereature” ever since because it was so dull. To my mind it was a second rate story told in about 50% more words than was necessary and then picked to death my a vulture of an English teacher trying to extract additional meaning where there was none to be found.

**I listened to the radio show and have read most of the other books but not this one.

So: 21 read and 7 that I would like to read. Not too bad then.

My mood has taken a crash again. Is odd that, despite having had a good week away, the second I returned from camping it felt like I had never been away and that the week had happened to a different me in a dream or distant memory.

I slept disastrously last night with lots of vivid dreaming involving my being injured or dying. My entire head feels like it’s on back to front, I can’t concentrate on anything and I feel so damn tired. It was an enormous effort to get out of bed this morning and I can’t get enthused about anything.

I think the time may have come to be honest with myself that this isn’t “just going to go away once I sort my life out a bit” as I’ve been telling myself for the last five years or so.

Right now I could really use a hug and some downtime.