My World This Week - Randomness 1 and My TV Top 5s

Hello again


So I thought it might be fun, from time to time, to give you a glimpse into my world.  It's a life where randomness prevails, where I laugh a lot, and to be honest, where people laugh at me.  But I'm fine with that.  I believe mockery is a sign of great love lol, so here we go.


In the Twittersphere, this week I discovered @MarianKeyes.  She's a famous Irish author and her tweets are hiLARious.  She writes them with an Irish lilt and they just bubble and burst with life.  I smile, everytime she's in my feed.

At work, one of the things I've been doing is sifting CVs for a recruitment drive.  I am never less than staggered by the CVs we receive, and this week's highlight was the young lady who proudly proclaimed on her CV "I don't read or write well but I don't let that stop me". Well honey, bravo, I am actually quite proud of you for ploughing on and not letting it hold you back, but unfortunately applying for a role where reading and writing are required is not optimal.   Biggest smile though?  The person who described themselves as a "bubble person".  I'm pretty sure they meant bubbly, but I much prefer the image of a totally spherical person bouncing down the corridors, being careful not to pop.



I think you know my obsession with chinese food.  There's pretty much nothing I won't do for noodles and starters, and this week I managed to go to my favourite chinese restaurant after bullying a friend.  Yes.  We had agree to go to an Indian, and I was actually quite excited about this, but then someone mentioned the C-word and I was a goner.  Sorry, not sorry.



Bluebelle has driven me a little bonkers this week.  With the weather getting colder she'd more up for cuddles, and is perfecting that cat requirement of walking EXACTLY where you are about to walk and thus tripping you up.  On Monday she dropped a turd that could quite literally have gassed a nation.  Meaty is an understatement. And today she is running round like a thing possessed thinking there is roast chicken in the house.  No fluffy, I put a chicken STOCK CUBE in my noodles. FFS.



The lowlight of my week was Beth's theatre trip to somewhere to see something.  I totally get why theatre trips are part of an education, but I resent it when they interfere with my sleep.  So her school planned a trip where they would get back at MIDNIGHT.   MIDNIGHT !!!!!! That means I would have to go to bed, wake up, collect the daughter and then go back to bed. MIDNIGHT !!!!   Why couldn't they go to a fucking matinee?


So there I am, pre-midnight, in the car park, in pj's (obviously).  Gradually, more parents arrive, and then there is the distinctive sound of a collective of teenage girls.  Car doors slam, the car park empties, and I am the only parent left there.


Hhhhmmmm.   Dressed in PJs, I can't quite go and check where the bus parked.  So I ring the daughter.  No answer. Text her.  Messenger her.  Snapchat her.  No answer. Ring her another 12 times.  NO ANSWER.  The evolving part of my brain tries to tell me "maybe there were 2 coaches" but my anger and my anxiety rises.  


Then a couple more cars arrive in the car park, like late night deja vu.  Hhhmm, maybe there IS another bus.   20minutes later, more cars, raised teenage voices, and finally my daughter bounces into the car.  "Sorry, I fell asleep" ..........

Snapchat is my new favourite thing, purely for the map feature.  It's great for an anxious parent, not so great when the child doesn't answer gggrrrr.  It's crazy how powerless we feel when, despite all these communication methods, there is no answer.  In social-media-space no one can hear you scream if no one's listening.

TV is awesome at the moment.   Autumn is always the season where the Big Guns come out - here are the Top 5 shows I am watching at the moment (that are going out weekly) - 

911 - fabulous, dynamic, high energy about the emergency services in LA.   Great cast, wit and Ryan Murphy

For The People - from Shondaland but not BY Shonda, I love this lawyerfest, especially the spikey Kate Littlejohn.



A Discovery of Witches - I feel like I've waited my whole life for this - a grown up show about witches, vampires and magic AND it's got Matthew Goode in it !!

Bodyguard - the show everyone was talking about!   I do think the hype made it under-deliver slightly, but this had great tension, great plotting and the masterful Jed Mercurio.



Dr Pimple Popper - oh god I love this show and this woman.  I love pus exploding out of people's bodies (I'm less keen on the lumps of fat she removes).  I think it's because it's an allegory for depression, and I imagine all the poison and toxicity is being squeezed out, leaving me pure again.  Ha ha.

And then here are the Top 5 other stuff I've watched and loved in September - 

The Sinner - Netflix - a fabulous thriller, a WHYdunnit rather than a whodunnit.  Beautifully unravelled over 8 episodes.

Ozark.  I LOVE Ozark. It seems to get no publicity but it's fabulous.  Great acting, the great Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, and a fabulous standoff between a Mexican drug cartel and Missouri rednecks



Killing Eve.   Me and Beth LOVE Sandra Oh.   Her time as Cristina Yang on Grey's Anatomy is one of the highlights of our televisual life, and we WISH we were her.  Killing Eve was just fucking awesome, and not just because of Sandra.  Jodie Comer was amazing as the assassin with a million accents, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge's script added sarcasm and spike to an already crazy plot.  Pure joy.

Safe.  Harlan Coben has long been one of my favourite authors and the TV world has suddenly realised what a master of deception he is.  This is just supreme in every way.  A show so good, it made me wish for my memory to be wiped of all knowledge of it, just so that I could have the pleasure of watching it again.  Great acting, and the best British accent by an American EVERRRRR.



Sharp Objects.  Oh wow.  Sharp Objects.  I feel this deserves a holy silence.  Again, another fabulous book BRILLIANTLY adapted, and Amy Adams (playing against type) is just amazing.   The ending of the book took my breath away, and I LOVED seeing the shock on the daughter's face when that moment arrived.  You will not find anything better on TV at the moment.

Right, I'm off to paint my nails something dark and dramatic.  Have a great week and see you soon!

Twitter, Twits and Tremendousness

Hi Everyone



So a few weeks ago, I decided to give Twitter another bash.  I'd first tried it maaaaany years ago, and the banality of it bored me.  However, recently a lot of good things seemed to be happening on Twitter, plus it appeals to the voyeur in me, so ..... jumped back in I did.


The first hilarious thing was how many nail related things I'd followed.  Companies I'd never worked with, bloggers I didn't even know ... the list was endless and took quite some deleting!   Worse was finding a once very close friend, who disappeared without trace, happily tweeting again under another name.  We'd been worried when she retreated from the world, and she never once bothered to tell us she was ok .. or back.   I'm glad she's ok, but also hurt that she couldn't find a way - however awkwardly - to let us know she was still here.


The biggest thing I love about Twitter is that you can build your own world.  You can choose what news you follow, who influences and infiltrates your world, and to what extent you interact.   You can deny entry to the Kardashians and the ignorance of other reality-TV imbeciles.  You don't have to consume the news the institutions want to serve you - you can find your own.   And quite often, that's a very different world. 



So who did I decide to follow and why?  Here's a sample -

Mr Trump himself.  I was sick of hearing things spun and secondhand so I thought I'd hear it all from the horse's mouth.  Turns out the horse IS an ass, and his tweets are as infuriating as everything else about him.  I could literally feel my blood pressure coming to the boil whenever I read his delusions so .... short-lived but he had to go.



So too did an ex-blogger friend who couldn't stop herself rising to his bait.  I deleted him because I didn't want to see his shit, and now I was still seeing him through her, and worse, seeing him through her anger (however justified).   One thing about our mental health - you just HAVE to get rid of everything that doesn't have a positive impact on you.  So, despite cute cat videos, she had to go too.


Talking of mental health - Mr Matt Haig.  @MattHaig1 is literally my new hero.  He has written an amazing book called Notes on a Nervous Planet (more on which in a further post) but he speaks daily - and with SENSE and humanity - on the realities of depression and how our culture feeds our anxiety and then belittles it.   There is SO much wisdom in his book, many things that resonated profoundly with me, but I love that he keeps the dialogue alive every day, as it needs to be.



I like sport - well, watching, not doing - so I have a lot of @5livesport in my feed, including their awesome presenters (same applies for @bbc5live too).   Amidst all this, there is probably nothing as good at capturing the emotion of sport as Test Match Special - @bbctms - and its coverage of the last week has been nothing short of outstanding.



Sport isn't the only thing that brings us together, as Twitter proves every day.  Recently, the important and lovely Rachael Bland lost her fight with cancer.  Her positivity, her love for her son, and her legacy, all will live on, along with her brilliant podcast, You, Me and the Big C.   If you ever think Twitter is soulless, you weren't around the week she died.


Because life needs to have some smiles, my new favourite Twitterer is @emrgencyKittens (yes, this is how it's spelt) which delivers a much needed dose of kitty silliness every day.  Even better, there are all sorts of other emergency feeds to brighten your day.



Heroes.  We all have our idols.  I think it's ridiculously cool how Twitter enables you to interact with them, and GASP, be acknowledged by them.  I'm a big fan of the Gratitude Attitude and try to compliment people in my every day life.  It's been great to let some of those idols know how much I've enjoyed their latest TV series, book or whatever.  Tres cool.


Twitter also has some fascinating and endless debates - ergo Dawn French and the cream scone.  Every day, semi-humorous battles abound about whether the jam or the cream should come first.  Love it.   When the world is full of darkness and danger, my life NEEDS this.



Speaking of darkness and danger, there is nothing so weird at the moment as the story of 2 Russian spies in Salisbury.  More than anything, Twitter helps spotlight the absurdity of life in a way that "real" news can't.  My favourite tweet this week?  A comedian (I can't remember who) tweeted - asking for a friend who has 2 days to spend in this country, where should he visit?   London and Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester, Oxford and Cambridge or Salisbury and Salisbury?


It's tempting to say "you can't make this shit up" but weirdly, this IS our reality.  We can't control the events of the world, but we CAN control whether we consume them and how we consume them.  Personally, I don't want to read about the economic crisis, Brexit, gang warfare and all the other doom and gloom in the world.  My anxiety can't take it.  I can only survive if I create a world I can breathe in, and thankfully, Twitter lets me do that.


If you want to follow me or Tweet me or delete me, I'm @TheCrumpet1