Month: June 2005

Dear Estate Agents: if you are supposed to be carrying out a valuation on a property, and you make an appointment with the current tenants to come and do this, and then don’t turn up for the appointment without calling to apologise or explain, then it is possible, just possible, that waiting A WEEK to bother to phone the tenant to make another arrangement/apologise, might result in the tenant (who probably went out of his way to be available at the time of the original appointment) not being terribly happy about it.

I’m just saying, is all.

[Note to anyone I know: the flat that hasn’t been recently valued is due to be overrun tomorrow with women performing some bizarre American ritual they’re calling “a baby shower”. As such, I will be spending most of the afternoon in our local pub with a copy of the Independent and one or more pints of bitter. Please come and join me/rescue me from the dark unpleasantness of an afternoon in my own company. Thanks.]

Sal’s a big fan of medical themed television drama, and as such, I’ve been finding myself watching a lot of the likes of ER (and it’s shabbier British equivalent Holby City) recently. I’ve always found this a bit odd, frankly, what with her being a healthcare professional and all. After all, I can’t imagine I’d ever get home in the evening eager to watch a gritty drama about IT consultants dealing with difficult situations (“we’ve got a network failure on level four! I’ve lost the exchange server…”), or perhaps a three hour Sunday night special on channel 4 presented by Jimmy Carr: 100 Greatest Typos.

Of course a large factor in my not watching television related to my profession is the fact that there generally isn’t any (well, there was the film The Technical Writer a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it ever got a theatrical release in the UK), but this is probably a good thing, at least based on my experience of the few occasions when IT appears in popular dramas or films, when I find myself unable to watch without throwing things at the television because they have just got everything so very, very wrong. I’ve often suspected that if lazy scriptwriters can utterly mangle the technicalities of something I know about, they probably do the same with things I don’t know about. Nevertheless, I’ve found myself increasingly amused by the random medical jargon that is spouted by the actors in these rubbish medical shows, and I’ve begun playing what I’d like to call Casualty Bingo: ticking off those phrases that crop up with worrying regularity: systolic and tacky-cardic are my favourites (although last week on Holby I think I heard that someone was brevi-cardic: presumably the writers learnt a new word and wanted the chance to use it). Of course, I have no idea what these words mean, and since there’s absolutely no way I can ever find out, I guess we’ll never know. Lets just say that there must just be a lot of this sort of thing about on the mean streets of Bristol and Chicago.

In the beginning, I like to think that Sal was moderately amused by my small cheer every time that scouse doctor used one of these terms in relation to a new arrival on the wards (who was about to discover that his or her mother/father/partner/son/daughter is having an affair with his or her mother/father/partner/son/daughter [delete as applicable], in an oddly coincidental situation that happens to reflect recent events in the lives of the doctors treating said patient). Now, I think it’s flipped from endearing to slightly annoying. Oh well.

[These phrases were conspicuously absent from the excellent Hugh (Sometimes credited as Stephen Fry) Laurie drama House MD, which arrived on Channel 5 last night. The Casualty meets Six Feet Under “which one of them is going to get it” opening is a particularly nice touch.]

Er, hello, if there’s anybody left still reading. Sorry, I’m not entirely sure what happened to the last two weeks, and how I haven’t found the time to write anything here. I mean, jesus, I’m not Rob.

It’s not as if we haven’t been busy doing bloggable things: we have. If I hadn’t been so lazy busy with work, I might have told you about our lovely day trip to Brighton a couple of weekends ago, which contained just enough sunshine to leave us lightly toasted, and which was topped off with some excellent fish and chips. Maybe, if I had been bothered, I might have mentioned our highly successful bank holiday barbecue, during which we finally christened the February purchase that had up till that point spent most of its young life slowly rusting on the patio. I could even have told you about our multiple trips to Brick Lane, our attendance at yet another excellent First Friday (a particular highlight of which was watching one of my teenage heroes, the former Evening Session presenter Steve “good face for radio” Lamacq performing Babylon’s Burning in Punk Rock Karaoke), or our excursion to a rainy New Forest.

Sadly, I can’t tell you about any of those things, or describe any of the highly amusing japes we got up to and situations we found ourselves it. Too much time has passed, alas. You’ll just to make something up for yourselves.

Let us never speak of this again.