Category: About Me

*WARNING: this post is quite long, having a goat-slayingly impressive 700 words. This equates to roughly 0.3 londonmarks.*

My desk at work has two drawers. The top one is quite shallow, and the bottom one is deep.

The bottom drawer is not of much use to me, as it is full of boxes that used to contain wireless network access points, PCMCIA network cards and suchlike. At some point I will throw all these out of the window, but in the meantime, I have to fit my stash of flapjacks into the top drawer.

This top drawer can get a little untidy, so today I decided that it was time to take everything out, and put it back in, observing a more refined packing algorithm in order to optimise the usage of the space available.

Gingerly I placed my mobile phone, the fascia for my car stereo, my flapjack stash etc into the drawer, all neat and perpendicular with 1cm padding between them all. And I was reminded, for the first time in years, of the magical mystical astronomical phenomenon that was my bedside cabinet at my parents’ house.

My old bedroom was converted to a study some time ago, but a lot of the furniture remains. The bedside cabinet and wardrobe are still there, albeit with significantly different contents. The desk unit, which formed the third part of the matching set, had been damaged somewhat ((this desk was very fragile, being supported by two hinges at the back and a couple of slender metal arms. I once attempted to detonate a whoopee cushion by placing it on the desk and sitting on it. Unsurprisingly, the whoopee cushion remained unexploded, and the desk bore the brunt of the force. The screws holding the slender metal arms remained securely in the wood, but the bit of the wood that they were connected to parted company with all the rest of the wood.)), so became the source of a wonderful bonding moment between my dad and I. We had realised that carrying it downstairs was going to be a lot of effort, and once we got it outside we were just going to demolish it anyway. So we demolished it there and then, on the upstairs landing, with hammers, screwdrivers and roundhouse kicks, showering the house with flakes of chipboard.

Where was I? Ah, yes, the bedside cabinet.

I used to keep all sorts of interesting things in that bedside cabinet. It held a deck of Top Trumps and a deck of adult playing cards. It held handkerchiefs and a piece of the Berlin Wall. It held a walkie talkie (my sister had the other one in her bedroom) and a filofax with pictures of rally cars pritt-stuck on. It held spare electric plugs and a calculator. It held all this and much, much more. It was the accumulation of items acquired between the ages of 5 and 18, none of them larger than a kitten.

The continual opening and closing of those drawers meant that the items would all slide and slip around, bouncing off of each other and generally causing a helluva mess. Especially before I was a teenager, when I still had boundless energy, and if a drawer wasn’t opened quickly and noisily, then justice hadn’t really been done to the whole global drawer-opening concern.

Every once in a while, I would slide those drawers all the way out, and invert them over my bedroom carpet. This was especially dangerous in the days before I started bringing girls home, as the junk tide mark around the edges of my small bedroom was much higher than in later years. Subsequently some small items would be liable to fall into the sea, and contribute to the gradual rising of the junk levels.

Then I would gently place all the items back into the drawers, maintaining orthogonality, and neat piles with small things on top of larger things, and so forth until Mr Hanoi himself would nod approvingly.

Then I’d put the drawers back in and slam them, in the only way that I knew how. Everything would slide to the back and form an amorphous mass.

Ah, memories.

*Originally posted here*

> These products appeal to the kind of person whose favourite birthday present is a Dymo tape machine. Look into their eyes and witness the insecurity! “How will I know what type of brown liquid this is? Yes, of course – a handy reminder!” Don’t stand still in their kitchen for too long (reading all the words on the objects around you, with increasing incredulity), otherwise they’ll be tattooing “PERSON” onto your forehead before you know it.

…is an excerpt from Stuart’s 700 word rant on labelled kitchenware (you know the sort – “TEA”, “COFFEE”, “SUGAR”, “CYANIDE CAPSULES”).

Now would be a good time to tell you about my kitchen. Mugs are kept in two different cupboards. The cling film is kept separate from the food bags which are kept separate from the bin bags. I keep one bowl in the cupboard with the cereal and all the rest on the other side of the room. Crisps are kept at eye-level and plates near to the ankles. Sharp knives are kept with the spaghetti spoon, and wooden spatulas with the cutlery and pizza wheel. Jam shares a cupboard with salt, and pepper shares a cupboard with bread.

Welcome to my kitchen. If it was a movie, the tagline would be “where the only way to the soup is through the mind of a twisted bastard…” (read in gravelly voice)

I did the washing up tonight.

Naked.

Wooooo.

I’m still naked now.

Wooooo.

When I was a kid, I used to have fuzzy felt.

It consisted of a felt canvas, probably about A4 size, and lots of little felt shapes. Because of the fuzziness of the felt, you could place the felt shapes onto the canvas and it would kinda stick there. Not in a velcro way – it wasn’t that strong – but in a balloon-stuck-to-the-ceiling-by-static kind of way.

At some point the fuzzy felt wasn’t there anymore. I guess my parents got rid of it.

There was no point to this story.

Two things made me stop dead in the street at lunchtime.

The first was walking past a mobile phone shop. My contract is nearly up for renewal, and I am going to attempt to talk my current provider into giving me a new phone and a better deal, by threatening to switch to a different network.

As I walked past this shop, I stopped quite abruptly. My sidekick kept walking, but turned around just in time to see some guy narrowly avoid walking into me. Needless to say, the sugar in our veins, coupled with the elation that arises from being out of the office, raised this simple event to the status of “funniest thing that has ever happened.”

The second thing that made me stop was a sudden recollection, of a toy I had when I was a kid. Does anybody remember these:

This was the Barcode Battler. It was fantastically bad.

The concept was that you would scan in a barcode and it would be converted into some mystical character or powerup or something. Some were provided with the set, but the real beauty came from scanning in your chocolate bar wrappers, upon which point you’d realise that you had, in your possession, the weakest and crappest warrior that ever existed.

The graphics were on a par with half a dozen digital clocks. Who am I kidding, there were no graphics. It was all just a bunch of numbers. All the trouble that the manufacturers went to when making up these characters was sadly wasted, as when it came to battle, all that mattered was the transitive nature of the field of integers.

It was a dreadful toy, and I probably only played on it for a couple of hours before chucking it to one side.

As a final note of interest, Barcode Battler was a lot more popular in Japan, where it led to Barcode World, which actually spawned Pokemon. So now we know who is to blame.