Technical Glitches and Secret Crushes

This last week my computer, or rather my internet connection, has been down. I say down, a tiny thread of snail paced connection has in fact stayed up and running but everything has been taking sooooo long to load - indeed if it will load at all - that attempting to do the simplest thing on line has turned into more of an exercise in hair tearing frustration than anything else.

I say frustration, actually what I mean is white hot raging fury. It's always the little things that get to me. I'm pretty patient with the children, I manage to co-exist perfectly peacefully alongside all manner of idiots with whom I am expected to share the planet, and although injustice and inequality can sometimes make me angry, it is for the most part in a sad, slow head shaking sort of a way. For some reason (I know not which) it is the lost sellotape, the lids that won't screw open, the radios that won't tune in, and the damn computers that decide it is a good time to stage a go-slow that make me really hopping mad. I think it's called transference, or projection, or something. Anyway, in the end I had to just walk away. It wasn't worth it. I knew during a protracted phone call to the Orange broadband support team when I began to have lurid fantasies about taking a large mallet to the monitor, that it would be better that way.

So in the past week or so, instead of blogging I have been doing other things. I have blitzed the house; it hasn't been this clean since December 2009 - the approximate fateful date on which I first plugged myself into the virtual ether. The children have clearly been set slightly off balance by their newly ordered surroundings and as a result have felt compelled to render things familiar once more by doing their very best to mess it all up again in the quickest time possible. I found a great trail of printer paper all over the house this morning, the Youngest had been making "stepping stones" apparently. Of course - silly me. It's not as if we could use the bloody stuff for anything else after all.

I have also been spending more time with other people. A few days ago I went out to dinner with a small group of friends that I don't see nearly often enough. You know that warm relaxed feeling you get when in the company of people whom you know like and accept you totally? Who know that you can sometimes mess things up royally, but who don't care and don't judge because they love you anyway, warts and all? I can state with absolute conviction that an evening of belly laughs with friends like that really does a woman good. I am current living proof.

This week has also seen me managing to read a book, sort out my front garden, survive one childs birthday and anothers last day at primary school (they have now all broken up for the summer holidays) and last but not least spend a curious and slightly worrying amount of time amusing myself thinking about who it might be fun to go out on a date with. In the end it was a toss up between Captain Jack Sparrow, Jim Morrison and Charlie Brooker. After some serious consideration I plumped for Charlie. Obvious reasons such as him being a) real, and b) not dead, aside - he is for me the ideal combination of cynical, angry and scathing, yet witty, clever and likeable, not to mention a master of the one slightly raised ironic eyebrow expression - so hard to pull off without looking smarmy, wouldn't you agree?

I have decided (I've worked it all out you see) that Charlie and I would meet at some soul suckingly awful corporate 'do' somewhere and bond instantly over how appalling it all was and how much we hated the sort of people who liked these things. We'd sit there being cynical together - Charlie of course also being devilishly handsome and impossibly funny - and then we'd sneak off on our own having realised that really we could think of a million different and better things to do. We'd go on the London Eye and eat really lovely food on a verandah overlooking the river. Then at night we'd break into the natural history museum and marvel at having it all to ourselves. It would be eerie and silent in the dim light and we'd have to try not to touch anything in case we set all the alarms off. Later we'd go and watch some fireworks fizzing around the moon from the top of a huge climbing frame, and then we'd find a really seedy pub somewhere and shoot pool untill the early hours. I would win. You can tell a lot about a man by how he responds to being beaten at pool by a woman. Charlie of course would be suitably impressed and gracious yet doggedly competitive, whilst still remaining - at all times - unfailingly and impossibly funny. No pressure there then.

Now. This isn't going to be a post about how I've had a taste of my real life back and as a result am going to lay off the blogging for a while. Blogging is a part of my real life (oh the joy when my broadband, for no blasted reason whatsoever, suddenly started working again) and besides I'm far too narcissistic to want to stop. In fact this post actually began life as a 'why I haven't been posting post' (I know, I know, yawn yawn) but then took on a life of its own and morphed unbidden into a post detailing my secret fantasy of breaking into the natural history museum in the dead of night with Charlie Brooker.

Deeply Freudian I'm sure. My mother will be so proud.

It's good to be back.