Bligh, blight, blogs and Barry of course.

Like Ellen Ripley, wresting optimism from the champing maws of disheartenment, Karen is back on top, stronger than ever and dragging me, the implausibly oversized newt in this analogy, joyously along with her. Her unintentional blight on potatoes, which is laid bare here, can already be consigned to the extremely practical three-tier plastic stacking vegetable storage system of history, what a relief to brush that under the carpet. We were idly chatting, passing the time of night on old sandwiches, namely the cheese and marmalade, a life-long favourite, and the medium to high-risk cheese and tomato, with it's inherent danger of bogginess, when she rather self-consciously and completely adorably admitted to cutting her tomatoes in a zigzag fashion, even though they‘re just for herself. She went on to say something about mozzarella cubes but I was only half listening, half wondering about the skill, aestheticism, and heroic impracticality involved in her impressive solo salad-sculpting. In fact I was deeply moved by how dedicated she really is, and looking back, how cruelly admonishing I had been over potatogate.

I have also been looking at some blogs, and I’ve been hearing the wet slap of the ‘next blog’ button too frequently, it’s hard to feel engrossed in even the ‘two lines and a picture of a raindrop’ minimalist’s damp-dream entries, though I did try. I’m quite tolerant and interested in stranger’s lives, but it was tough and I couldn’t do it for long, which tells me that if even interesting snappy blogs are easy to leave, then it’s just the three of us here, Dan, Benoit and myself, and at least two-thirds of us aren’t finding it a completely rewarding experience. But I’m going to put in more effort, I’m thinking along the lines of those raindrops mostly.

You can’t say I don’t, when the need arises, go the extra mile, on the very first weekend of last winter’s snow, with unusual foresight, I bought a Landrover and then ferried two of the guys to and from work when conditions demanded a more forthright approach. They of course, complained constantly about the ride-quality, dismal heaters and that we were going too fast, little realising that they were just there as ballast, they were merely pig-iron to the Indies and not, as they thought, valuable and delicate breadfruit plants from Tahiti. Barry, possibly the most whinging man I’ve ever met, after myself, actually hugged himself and closed his eyes for most of the journeys, but he was still there the next night, outside his house, shivering, waiting and whining. I don’t know why he didn’t understand, it was fun, we had empty roads and we had traction baby, real traction.

Another thing that struck me while looking in other people’s diaries when they weren’t there, was how unashamedly cheerful and positive most of them were, one that I can remember from about 7 minutes ago was Tim and his wife Rebecca and they had a sweetly chatty dual-blog, where they inhabited ‘Timbecca-world’, for what looked like about five months, then suddenly a redirection to the new blog, ‘Tim-alone‘, oh no, she’d left. Though he struggled on manfully, faithfully recording the everyday details of his life-alone, I also had to abandon him right after the photo he’d taken of a scratch he’d sustained while insulating his loft, it was too poignant and I felt too intrusive, he was in his bathroom actually photographing the top of his own head, alone at the time of course. Tim didn’t come across as a deliberately disingenuous diarist, but even if it’s not altogether true, it should be. And there might have been kittens, I saw a lot of kittens on blogs, and that really was genuinely lovely.

On an even lovelier and even more uplifting note if it’s possible, I have seen a lot of Karen up-close lately, the training in our particular vitally important IT work continues at the pace of a W reg Fiat Seicento in a head-wind, but we get side-tracked. She likes books by Carson McCullers and Faulkner to mention just three and has perfect teeth shining in a perfect smile, so there lies, along with sandwiches we have known, a few big distractions from the excruciating, nails digging into palms thrills of reflected cross-site scripting, possibly even less interesting than it sounds.

However, she does seem to be very interested in, and knowledgeable about, cooking (I’m trying to forget the p word), hydroponics, literature and probably loads more. I am tentatively beginning to ask myself if it is too soon, really too soon, to dream that if there is quite a big disaster, could we as a group that somehow, probably through nerd instinct, lived on and surviving in this office, be the start of a new post-apocalypse civilisation? I could take charge of making the tea and foraging for chocolate digestives amongst the nearby ruins, and Karen may well be, and I’m now certain she is, more or less perfect at everything else.