Spot the deliberate mistake
Found earlier, on a freelance job listing website:
The successful candidate must have a minimum of two years experience as either a sub or copy editor, and have a good eye for detail as well as an impeccable demand of the English language.

How to Lose Friends
Not me, Toby Young, at the Soho Theatre last night. Opening night, sold out. Fantastic adaptation of the book, made slightly surreal by Toby sitting behind me and laughing - albeit justifiedly - at his own jokes. I wasn't quite in the mood (as you know), but highly recommended. And Jack Davenport bears an uncanny resemblance to Toby: it's the hair/height thang.

I made this bit up...
So I'm at a client site this afternoon, and I get a call from F on his mobile phone.

- Hey, Sasha, how are you?
- Hey, F, you in London? (I'm guessing he is, because it's a UK cellphone number. He lives in NY)
- Yeah, I'm like here, with W, and wanted to know if you wanted to hang out?
- F, why do you talk like that? You're from Manchester.

I can't help thinking that hanging out sounds so... male, frankly.

This bit's true: got home from work, had the last two of my junk-shop-find chairs delivered, did an aerobics class (which may have been a mistake, as my back has been really hurting), and went to hang out with F, W, their cute little J, and S, another Cheadleonion. That's someone originally from Cheadle, as oposed to an onion from Cheadle. Fun, although we realised that we are the grown-ups our parents were when we were kids. And - personally - I'm only seventeen.

And we worked out that it's cheaper to dial-up AOL in NY on a telco account for 2p a minute, than it is to have a regular UK dial-up account at say 3 or 4p for an 0345 number. It's a crazy, miced-up telco world, I tell you.

Got Those Post Millenial Blues?
Feeling purposeless? Thinking of downsizing? Aren't we all.

Read this piece by Milly Jenkins (who I'm sure must be Milly Molly Mandy's second cousin) in last night's Evening Standard about Common Purpose, a not-for-profit dedicated to inspiring people to do things for their communities. Their website is called JustDoSomething.net. Cool, huh?

In the same vein, there's the Public Appointments Unit, who run this appointments website. And there's a new Office of the Commissioner of Public Appointments, although I'm not sure what the difference is. And, here's the Cabinet Office's agencies and public bodies site. You are verily awash with information.

When I was a kid, a friend of my parents who was Chair of the local NHS Trust, or whatever it was called before regime change, was described by the local paper as having "an outmoded sense of public duty." I may have that, too.

Just heard some bad, sad news.

When I was a headhunter a couple of years ago, I was something of a fish out of water. I made two good friends in that place; S, with whom I'm in regular touch, and Claire, who I would ocassionally email with and meet up for Lebanese food at the bottom of the Edgware Road.

I heard a few weeks ago that Claire had pneumonia and was in hospital. I sent her a get well soon card - pneumonia's not serious, right? This morning, I got a call from S to say that she died on Easter Monday. So - as I'm no longer really in touch with people who knew her, I want to remember her here.

Claire was a someone who helped keep me sane during a tough time in my career. She had a wonderful, down-to-earth sense of humour, and was amazing at her job. There was truly nothing she couldn't find out. She was dedicated to the company, and worked incredibly hard - she really was someone who took pride in a job well done. She shone competence. There are some people you meet who you know, straight away, you're on the same wavelength, and from the moment we met, we had an easy, relaxed working relationship, as well as a fair few evenings putting the world to rights over a bottle of wine. I know Claire had had a tough start in life, and she really made the most of everything she had. She was only 31, and leaves her husband and nine-month old baby.

I hope that she finds peace.

Regular service resumed.

Here's a thought: you're teetering on the edge of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and then you read in any old regular newspaper that the best way to avoid SARS to to continually wash your hands. OCD here you come....

S A S H I N K A
Yep, I know all my images are buggered. There's something wrong with my webhost, and by the time I move the images
somewhere else, it'll probably be fixed. Sorry.

Did I mention that I collect Crown Ducal thirties pottery?

When you want to be in a TV recording audience....

Friends keep teasing me because I took the war and associated impending doom too seriously. I wanted to stock up on bottled water. You never know what's going to happen. Tesco's had a whole empty aisle with stickers on the shelves saying "no water, sudden rush because of the war" or words to that effect. Eventually, I found five-litre bottles of water in a small grocery shop in East Finchley where news of the war clearly hadn't reached them. I bought six. Then I stocked up on other essentials: gaffer tape (no idea why), think plastic dustbin liners, battery-free radio, torches, you know.

One friend, P, kept teasing me. "Sipped your water yet?" The bottles and other stuff are stored behind my bathroom door. I figured in the event of war, my bedroom/ensuite would be my combined sealed room.

Of course now, it looks like I might have been premature in all this planning.

But I figure, what I could do, is when I start a film production company, in recognition of the hard time I went through, I could call it Thirty Litres and a Wind-up Radio. What d'you reckon?

Haven't got time to tell the whole tale... but suffice it to say that I have a lovely stay in Manchester, and a fascinating train journey which I don't have time to do justice to now. Off to stay with some friends for the end of Yom Tov - pity me having to eat all that matzah. Back soon (real soon). Say hi.

Decoid Sutton
   

 

Remember I went to a meeting in Sutton Coldfield a few weeks back? Here's the deco evidence. Sutton has (had) one of the finest Odeon deco cinemas, so I stopped on the way out of town, bought a disposable camera, and preserved it for digital posterity. When I went inside, I had a rather bizarre conversation with a lovely, older, woman working there, who told me they'd just "ripped out all that old-fashioned stuff. Got to move with the times, love." That's what she said. I, of course, disagree. But then I used to frequent the Tuschinksi Cinema when I lived in Amsterdam.

Pants. Knickers. OK, tights, then.
I didn't buy these, honest, because I'm fairly sure the worthy M&S no longer make them, but when I unpacked my regular tights, they were wrapped around a piece of cardboard that proclaimed:

Slim & Shape

15 denier, soft satin leg and sheer toe

Secret microencapsulation of vitamins and minerals continually released on the the skin, smoothing legs

Graduated compression to massage and energise legs

You know what I'm thinking? My bullshit detector has gone off the scale. I mean, there's even a 6 pair treatment pack". Why go on a diet and exercise regime when you can just wear tights? Day 10 apparently offers you "slimmer and firmer skin with grainy appearance reduced." You can't help asking what happens if you don't have a grainy appearance to start off with. Or, alternatively, if you don't give a shit.

It's the "tights and beauty treatment all in one". Yeah, right, because I'm always getting a beauty treatment for my legs. Reminds me when Boots used to market their tights as "makeup for legs", which makes it sound like some kind of disability aid. I'm guessing that M&S have stopped peddling this quite ridiculous product because the only reference I can find to it is a September 2002 press release, and even then it's a generic phrase, rather than a product name.

See, this is great. I'm still in Cheadle, but I managed to - as Vaughn so witilly pointed out - invoke blogger's pants filter. So I called Mike, and he fixed it from wherever-he-is. I love technology. And also, how it interacts with both people and mobile phones.

I really want a strapless heart-rate monitor. Don't ask me why.

Oh, now something weird's happened to Blogger, just when I had fascinating stuff to say about underwear.

Via Tom - temporarily out in California- great Wired piece on the sociology of google.

Nina Simone died. First generation soul diva.

Technical assistance required
So I'm helping my Dad set up his new PC, and obviously we've got the internet connection working. But there are a couple of problems:

he's running on XP Home, and I can't get it to recognise his hp officejet d135 all-in-one printer. Loaded the software, checked it's all XP/usb compatible, just doesn't happen.

that's the only one, so far. Except printing is pretty important, obviously.

Oh, and when I set up outlook express, put in what I know is the correct password, it keeps asking for the password. No idea what to do next.

Ooh, I could crush a grape
Still in Manchester. Saw Blue Crush last night with my sister - it's kinda Pretty Woman meets a sports (surf) movie, with a comedy overweight black character thrown in. Cool soundtrack.

A little like Adaptation, Blue Crush is also based on an article by Susan Orlean - this article, in fact. (Isn't the internet wondrous? In 1987 I would have had to go to the library for about three weeks to find that out.) Side stuff: apparently, Jason Kottke designed her website, and kept a little weblog for her about Adaptation the movie. Funny how famous people find each other. Maybe they were like in High School together, or something?

The photography is incredible: I've never seen inside a wave. And here's something I didn't know: Saturday Night Fever was based on a piece of journalism by Nik Cohn about how working class kids blow everything on a saturday night out. You live and learn. Except that it later turned out to be a fake - the piece of writing, that is.

The script sucks in a high-school girlie style: Way? No way? Oh, that's cool. You know the kind of thing. And some of the characterisations are completely two dimensional. And no-one wears socks, even with proper shoes. It's not like that in Cheadle, I tell ya. But I'm being negative here: it's a fun chick-flick, and I have to admit I had a tear in my eye at the end. But you could wait for video.

Kinda disturbed by the looting in Bahgdad: especially the Iraqi National Museum. Iraq is situated on the "cradle of civilization", Mesopotamia. Niniveh is at risk. Nineveh! It's a biblical land (Jonah went there), and home to the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I don't know how history still exists if the artefacts are gone.

Chag kasher ve same'ach
That's the (frum - orthodox) greeting for Passover, meaning literally "have a happy and kosher festival". I won't bore you with the details now, but basically it's a bit like the wheat-free diet a did a couple of months back: no bread or leavened food for eight days. So it's matzah (flat bread, tasteless and gives you constipation and bad skin, frankly), and cakes made from potatoe flour. It's crazy the amount of effort people go to for eight days: you have to change your pots and pans for another set that have never had any chametz (leavened food) on them. And frankly, there are no nice cakes without flour, so everything you eat is a bit poor-man's-relative-stylee.

My sister has made coconut pyramids with her specialist Coconut Pyramid Maker she bought from the Lakeland catalogue. It's a short season for Coconut Pyramid Makers, as they are seriously paschal sweetmeats, and I'm going to try and not eat four squillion of them (I have already heard on the Cheadle grapevine that they are a superlative batch).

So, it's a late night tonight remembering the exile from Egypt (yeah, that's what it's all about), and I'll be trying to keep of the matzah and crap cakes and stick to fruit and vegetables. Not that you need to know my eating plan.

Chag same'ach, and in this, the festival of freedom, may all the peoples of the world experience peace and freedom in the coming year. God, I'm turning into a hippy.

So I've been dashing around running errands all day, and have nothing interesting to report. My three year old nephew is not entirely sure who I am, because I suspect he thinks I live in the phone. I've made the tableplan for our shul's communal seder tonight: it's an epiphany in pink and purple with seventies style flowers. I quite enjoyed the craft element of it - it's not something I get to do very often.

Quill (sorry, not at home, don't have your link to hand) sent me this piece from The Washington Post about Mimouna, a sefardi (Jews of eastern/african orgin, rather than my ashkenazi, eastern european origins), which is a fascinating post-paschal feast, that, sadly, I've never participated in. When I get home I might post my new-improved recipe for Moroccan couscous. But until then, you'll have to wait.

I'm in Cheadle! Home of the brave/well-co-ordinated. I hardly every/never use exclamation marks, but I think my return to the land of my birth merits it. And, I'm typing this on my Mum and Dad's new computer. Flat screen, noch.

I can kinda Charleston, but I'd like to do this weekend thing at Burgh Island.

I say fabulous too much. Sorry. Any suggestions on a new word?

My (not so lost) Weekend
... was fun. Friday night dinner at L&S's, where we were all pretty zonked. But their eight year old son kept saying my conversation (with his mother - house prices, the underground, friends' weddings) was boring. And it might be: not often the truth is told to me by one so young. Saturday it was a toss up between shul and the gym, so I walked to the gym and did a pilates class (on the ball - my abs still ache), and then went to lunch at F&M's in their new, shiny house.

Saturday night, went out for noodles at Wagamama with S and then onto a party in Camden. Wagamama was especially fun: the waiting staff are sexually ambiguous, and we got chatting to the people next to us, who were rather "Camden": one guy had a spiky black mohican with bleached ends, which matched his black jeans with yellow edging. One of the other guys, when he got up, was wearing fabulous red velvet court shoes with his regular male-style clothes (portobello market, if you're interested, large sizes), and we had a long chat about cross dressing. Then onto the party, where people were not so avante-garde, but was upstairs in a very cool bar, with little nibletty-type food (our hostess is a very serious party-giver) and we danced till dawn. OK, 1230.

Sunday, I got up early, because - surreally, see previous post - on Saturday at lunch, some friends had said "we've got our whole family coming to stay, we've got a mattress, does anyone have a 4'6" bed base?" And I said, "yes, I've had my old one under my bed for about four years." So he came round to collect it. What are the chances of that happening? Then I ran around like a headless chicken, packing and running errands, and went to J's birthday in the Landsdowne in Primrose Hill, where I bumped into all my flatmate's friends.

A nation of shopkeepers?
You can't have a nation of shopkeepers, because some people have to be wholesalers, and some people are customers. You can have a nation broadly interested in retail, though.

So I've been calling my friends to say hi and good yomtov and stuff, and one friend said to me "last time you rang, Jason Donavan was in Joseph", which I suspect isn't a compliment. Caught up with J, in Israel, and we had a long chat - we were in the same class at school, and did similar A levels and the same degree - about how the strangest thing with the war is that we regard the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates as biblical place names, and now they're like the Theatre of War. We studied something on the theology-philosophy-comparative religion continuum, by the way.

Got email from my cousin to wish me good yomtov, and he asked if I'd seen Adapatation - it reminded me of this article in the Guardian (of course) - an interview with Susan Orlean, where she talks about the confusion between her real self and her onscreen self.

At the weekend, I talked to my friend T, who is a surrealist, I am sure.

He told me that he had a dream, and Joan Bakewell was in it (he's about 25, so I doubt if it was one of those dreams), and said to him "he leaned so far back he banged his head on the twentieth century."

Like I said, it's yomtov tomorrow night (Passover), and everyone's cleaning like crazy and hassled. Well, the people I know who keep Pesach are, anyway. My house is cleaner than it's been for a long time, and as I mentioned before, the clutter fairies tidied under my bed. Serious deja vu: I just wrote - almost verbaitm - the exact post I wrote on Sunday, and then realised I had. It's like Groundhog Day, but without a resolution.

Living life in the bus lane....
Wish I'd thought of that, Des.

So I get a £100 ticket for being in the bus lane. And guess what - when I check out the camden website to see the pictures? It's my bus lane. The one I live in. Imagine if they caught me every time I was in it. That bus shelter'll come to no good....

I had all these really interesting things to say at the crack of dawn this morning, and blogger was buggered. Oh well. I've been doing my pesach cleaning this morning (which is good of me, as I'll be away for most of it) - I just cleaned under my bed, and let's just say it was: dusty. I am spiritually uplifted. Also, I raised my heartrate to 140.

And sorry I've been out of action, here, yeah? Combination of jugglings lots of work/personal things, and not being sure I've got anything interesting to say, anymore. I know it's not OK to ask for comments, but I don't know who's out there anymore, and while I might say I do this for myself (which I 63% do), the rest of it is the thrill of people reading, so say hi, yeah?

I had a really disturbing dream on Wednesday night, where - bizarrely, you might say - a gang of about twenty teenagers moved into my house. Except it wasn't exactly my house, it was more loft-like and tidier. To start off with they were cool, but then they started looting the place, and nicked my laptop. The ringleader was a girl with blonde hair and she wouldn't return it to me, and I was desperate because I'd done loads of work but no backup for about a month. I got up yesterday morning and did a complete data backup, as well as my diary/contacts. I feel clean/purged: three CDs of data, though.

I think it's connected to the looting in Baghdad, but I can't be sure.

I'm probably going to think more about this, but a friend pointed out today that the planet is running out of oil: apparently some academics think we only have till 2008. Get on a plane quick and see all the places you wanna see. We could be back to three weeks to get to New York stylee life. Good for those who think the modern world moves too fast.

Life Update
I realise that I haven't posted much of interest recently - life seems to have taken over. I'm really busy with work, which is good, but doesn't leave me time for other stuff. Like next week, I had planned a week with me and my laptop somewhere (cheap, probably), and to finish the book, but then a client wanted something in a hurry and I didn't like to let them down. So I'm here. But I'm promising myself (you) that I'll write 1,000 words a day, minimum next week. 5k words by next Friday, do-able, right?

What've I been doing?

• Working out can you believe? I've been running twice a week, and doing two aerobics classes (Friday morning and Tuesday night). I've become such a regular that I'm no longer the worse person in the class by a long shot, and I try and keep my heart rate above 150.
  
• Crossing Jerusalem, not in person, mind. At the Tricycle, last night. Got there a little early to meet S, S, and J, and as I walked in, saw a familiar looking face, so I smiled. Then, I realised it was Lenny Henry. The play's miserable: badly written (four people say "stop f***king with my head" in two hours - that never happens in real life), badly characterised, and can only skim over a bunch of complex issues in the time. Best bit was the betting who was going to end up in the hospital in the last act.
  
• failed Lao rolls
  
• Rules of Attraction
  
• Daredevil
  
• New dining room table
  
• Day to trip to Sutton Coldfield - for a meeting, but managed to visit the best example of Deco Odeon architecture en route
  
• Having a deco-oriented life in general
  
• Interviewing for a job I had five years ago - really just because I was curious
  

Hello Dutch Speakers
Can anyone translate this for me?
"Een diplomaat is iemand die de verjaardag van een vrouw weet, maar haar leeftijd vergeten is."
My Dutch is a little rusty. Thanks.

Just reading the class timetable for the gym, and I was very sure that I saw
Marital Arts Dervied Fitness
That sounds good.

I have a sudden, irrational desire to get hold of Me Without You on DVD. Here's the trailer, here's the Guardian's review. I can't help feeling it's partially based on Sandra Goldbacher's presumably North London life. But what do I know.