Zero Days and Zero Hours
Last weekend, through poor planning and a lack of foresight, I found myself at Asda in Shipley of a mid morning on a Saturday. It was horrendously busy and full of people ambling along with trolleys they periodically abandoned on the aisles as they browsed and couldn’t find what they wanted. “Never again” I said to myself, and promptly forgot about it. This morning I found myself in an identical situation some 10 minutes later than the week previous. I really have to keep the promises I make myself, or at least remember them.
Bradford Town Hall Clock has now been corrected. The morning it was telling the right time for the first time I sauntered, knowing I was very early and was in fact merely on time as a result. However, if I need that blast of incorrect time keeping in my life there is always the clock on Bradford Cathedral, which runs about five minutes fast and caused some concern having been around Forster Square.
It’s been a week of little sleep as well as incorrect clocks. One night I went to bed at about ten thirty only to get a call at ten to eleven. a text at half eleven and then three phone calls from a drunk with the wrong number at around two. The following night one of the neighbours decided to set off a whole battery of loud and bright fireworks between about one and one thirty. I spent the following morning with the idea of reporting them for child abuse, drugs offences and benefit fraud they almost certainly not commited keeping me warm and awake. I also toyed with the idea of using a window trembler alarm through their letterbox as a more directed way of letting them know how not fun being woken in the middle of the night is. They’re late risers, I could do it on my way to work.
One of the few TV shows I watch, and the only one I watch as it airs rather than using BBC iplayer (or other means) is The Apprentice. It was the first week I picked both the losing team and the person who would be fired. I don’t know if that means it was more obvious this week (it did seem singularly obvious, but I have been wrong on that before) or I am just getting better at working out what is fair representation and what is a swerve to make the boardroom scenes more dramatic at the end. It’s well orchestrated television, but I don’t think it represents anything like business reality, especially in the current climate.
I also saw the new The Inbetweeners, South Park and Stewart Lee. The Inbetweeners suffers only in that it came off the back of a truly excellent episode and doesn’t compare. By any normal standards it is brilliant. South Park is amusing but rarely laugh out loud funny and feels oddly slack, I expected more ferocity and a greater density of jokes. I don’t know if Stewart Lee suffers in the editing, but his timing seems off and he sometimes comes across as bitter without being venomous. He’s funny, but sometimes he’s too deconstructionist and he wants you to intellectually appreciate the artificiality of it all, the construction and craft, rather than the humour.
I am slowly reverting back to the sleep pattern I had when I worked at the bakery, short hours during the week and catching up at the weekend. Three and four hours a night Sunday to Thursday and Friday as a decadent excess, burrowing into my mattress and getting eight or more hours.