Sunday

Early morning dog walk - there is a strange, malevolent air - it's due to rain later for the best part of the day - it has already rained once and it feels strange and oppressive, The seagulls are behaving oddly - a bit like that part at the start of 'The Birds' when you can never be too sure what's going to happen next. I saw one Herring Gull on a doorstep - tapping on a front door panel - waiting to be let in, and another made an intentionally heavy landing on a car to set off the alarm, and flew off, probably snickering. I Had to stand and whistle while Alfie Greyhound vomited bright green bile in the gutter, and deal with his 'not in the mood to walk that way today' attitude. There is a vogue amongst the nicer houses of Clive Vale to erect Gazebo type constructions in their front gardens and have drinks parties at night - despite having large gardens at the rear, rather showy. Several had simple abandoned the party and gone to bed - leaving half filled glasses of wine and trays of salty nibbles. This probably explains the seagull behaviour - all slightly pissed and suffering from high blood pressure.

As a result of eating chips 3 times this week - I have tangibly put on weight. All this week I've had it in my head that I'm going to have scrambled eggs for breakfast today - something I've avoided in months, as I no longer eat bread. I managed to buy a very small sliced loaf yesterday and I'm just getting myself mentally prepared.

I had to deal with someone last week who I KNEW was trying to pull the wool over my eyes - in the past I'd have reacted differently - but this time I was happy enough to let them think they were clever and laughed inwardly while the constructed ever more elaborate lies. Some people think they are so much smarter than they really are.

May possibly be booked up until the end of the year - have some reservations about this, it means working with one client and turning down all other work - which kind of edits you out of the industry - dangerous, but I have bills to pay. In fact, that's all I ever do. Pay bills. Was lucky enough to get a lift to Lidl on Friday so I was able to stock up on cheap dog food muesli, have to write an invoice today or I'll be eating shoe leather next week.

In other news,  I had intended to watch a decent film last night and read a book but ended up watching a drama-doc reconstruction of a plane crash on youtube and some crappy sci-fi - I needed a bit of brain-dead. The Journalist Suzanne Moore has left Twitter AGAIN - third time this year. I know it seems like I'm obsessed with these people, I don't actually follow them or anything - but they get re-tweeted constantly by everyone, it's like white noise. SM used to be quite interesting and I saw some real intelligence in her writing - but like most journalists who write 'opinion' for a living - her work is just self important babble - and rather than asking questions to encourage debate, she just throws coals on every fashionable fire and rams her opinion down everyone's throat as if it were fact, in the certain knowledge that she is right about everything. There are a group of journalists who cannot understand why they provoke so much aggression - I think it probably has something to do with being smug, educated, middle class, highly paid, high profile and very visible - with an absolute belief in everything they say and do, drowning in a bubble of self love - trying very hard to 'own' a medium like twitter which has nothing to do with communication (140 characters?). They can't understand that most people really don't have what they have and are really sick of being preached to. Mary Beard - who I really have nothing against and has been silly to let herself get dragged into this, re tweeted a series of communications from a Young man in Scotland who made a point of giving his real name and saying he wasn't going to hide, he just wanted to say - for Christ's sake, stop bloody moaning, some of us have real problems. Of course, there was  a chorus of 'oh my god, Mary, that's terrible - have you called the police?" I think people are addicted to outrage, that probably explains the Daily Mail

Twitter really doesn't matter - it's not important, you can live without it - it's handy for linking news articles and posting pictures of kittens (yesterday - I had a chuckle at '10 puppies that look like Ryan Gosling). It can also be quite abstract - as I have found myself in conversation more than once with Richard Lister from the superb Scarfolk blog and have been able to guide him towards an obscure reference resource. But please - don't expect it to be as clever 'as you are' - you are bound to be disappointed.

I've just checked the weather forecast -in the last hour - they have decided it's not going to rain all day after all. This is a real challenge - I had planned something very specific, and now I'm all up in the air.

I've also solved the conundrum of the freak blips in viewers on here. It seems to be a google thing, random groups of words within a blog post can create a thread that google might pick up on - this is why I had literally thousands of views about my post last week on Aiden Moffat from Arab Strap and a bookseller I have been politely asked not to mention again. It linked to a popular news story and we went right to the top of the daily search results. Sinister and fascinating at the same time. That, and I always get more hits when I post pictures.