Floating down to Camelot

You know Shepherd Book's thing about the special hell reserved for people who talk in the theatre? Forget talking in the theatre! The special hell needs to be reserved for designers who think that fake pockets are a good idea.

Yes, I know I've ranted about this before, but fake pockets? FAKE POCKETS? WHY? I have been told that garments hang better and travel better if pockets are sewn up, so I can perhaps, and very grudgingly, accept that there might be a slight justification for sewing up pockets in garments destined for a life of stardom as a catwalk or catalogue model. But I'm talking about cheap, functional garments that will never look glamorous. I'm talking about garments that don't have pockets at all, merely useless little flaps - not even decorative ones, but boring, barely visible ones - that look as if they belong to pockets, but don't. WHY? WHY? If there was no pocket at all, perhaps I could learn to live with it; I do, after all, possess pocketless skirts and dresses. But why go to the effort of adding a useless little fake pocket opening unless you're doing it purely to deceive and enrage? Your eyes think there's a pocket there. Experience from other trousers tells you there'll be a pocket there. The useless little flap of fabric draws your fingers into it, only to make them come up short.

I have been told that men's trousers are immune from this plague. However, strangely, I have never yet heard a woman say, "Oh, I am SO overwhelmed today. I've got 4 pockets on my trousers, and it's such a lot to think about. If only two of them were fake!"

Give us trousers without pockets for those who want them. Give us trousers with pockets for those who want them. But don't give us trousers that say, "Hey, look at me! I've got 4 lovely pockets!" only to reveal once you've got them home that two of them are WICKED LIES!

And, yes, I KNOW that the moral of this story is "don't hastily buy trousers without checking the pocket situation," and "don't assume that, just because a pair of trousers appears to be UTTERLY IDENTICAL to the pair you bought from the same shop last year, it really IS utterly identical, and hasn't replaced perfectly functional pockets with fakes."

AND while I'm busy ranting about trousers... I'm five foot five and a bit, which is round about the average height for women in the UK. Something is very wrong in the world of women's trousers if trousers marked as "short" are 2 inches too long for me. Last year's pocket-rich well-nigh-identical-but-not pair were also "short" and exactly right. I suspect them of taking the fabric they saved from the pockets and sticking it on the hems.

Today's entirely-unimportant-in-the-scheme-of-things rant subject is automatic doors. More specifically, it's lazy automatic doors that perform their duty but slowly and too late. So there you are, brisk shopper, striding purposefully towards the door. (I always stride purposefully, even if my brain hasn't yet clarified what the purpose actually is. For example, on Thursday I strode purposely into M&S with the purpose of filling a bag with tomato and basil soup and nothing else. Fifteen minutes later, I strode purposefully out again, with a bag full of two pairs of trousers, two bras, 9 tins of soup and a packet of tomatoes, with the purpose of getting out again quick before I ended up buying a kitchen sink.) So, striding purposefully, you near the automatic door, confident that it will part before you and let you through without any check in your gait.

Then, with a few steps to go, you have this horrible realisation that it is not opening. It's doubtless standing there, idling, cigarette in hand, chatting about the pretty girls who have passed through its embrace. Your step falters, but you don't actually stop outright, because automatic doors always open, don't they, and SURELY this one will do so, too. Glass looms large in your vision, and you know that you're going to have to do a full-on emergency stop to save your nose from being squashed. Then, just at the last minute, the door realises you're there, throws away its cigarette, and sloooowly, idly, drifts the doors open with bored ungraciousness, and you can resume your purposeful striding and hope that nobody has noticed that, A, you have almost walked into a door, or, B, you have almost tripped over your own feet as you fought the conflicting urges of "must stop now!" and "carry on; it's bound to be okay."

I could blame the fact that I stride too fast for door technology to cope with. After all, when out walking, I've had random strangers berate me for walking too fast. (It's quite odd. If I'd been tailgating them on narrow paths, I'd understand, but it's people in cottage gardens that I pass, or people yards away on open hillsides who feel the need to tell me off for daring to having different tastes in country walking than they have.) But then there's the other sort of automatic door: the automatic door who is young, new on the job, and very very keen. Approach within ten paces, and the door will leap open, and stand there quivering with the joy of obedience, waiting for you to pat it on their head and tell it that it's been a very good boy. Stand and dither over tomatoes on the fruit and veg section near the door, and it's goes into a positive frenzy of opening and shutting, causing you to look anxiously around for the security guards in case they think you're trying to do a runner with a basket of veg.

Then there are those doors that have a very rigid mind and can only cope with one order at a time. Person A approaches it, and the door parts to let them through. The door then slowly drifts shut again, just as Person B is approaching it. However, the door is concentrating on its "Close now!" order with all its might, and needs to complete this order before it raises its head to look out for new customers. This doesn't normally end well for Person B. The door in our local shop sometimes gets like this. I haven't quite got squashed yet, but it's been a close-run thing.

Actually, come to think it is, it all comes down to magic. When approaching doors, I have a habit of putting my hands together and parting them in a magical way while saying "whoosh" under my breath, so I can pretend that I'm commanding them open with my awesome magic power. However, I only do this accompanied by Pellinor, since there's a limit to how silly I'm prepared to appear in public. However, thinking back, all the problems I've had with lazy or stupid or over-reactive doors have happened when I've been alone and have therefore failed to do the magic hand movements... Hmm... I think the clues are all coming together here, and forcing me to come up with only one conclusion...

Surely I can't be the only person who considers a couch (or similar) to be a vital component of a satisfying hotel room? Unless we're only using the hotel as a place to stay after an evening out, chances are we'll have several hours of an evening in that room, and I hate having to sit on the bed for computer use / TV watching / tea drinking / game playing. I also like somewhere to sit in the morning when I get up before Pellinor's awake.

But do hotel websites ever make it easy to find out if their rooms contain such a thing? No! I've looked at lots of sites where every room is listed separately, with a whole gallery of photos, allowing you to choose which room you want. Even then, they tend to show close-ups of ornaments, arty shots of hanging curtains and so on, but leave you entirely in the dark about what furniture is contained in a room. You can't even assume that this means there is no chair or couch. I've taken a chance on such rooms in the past, only to find that they're large and lovely, with both couch and armchair, even though the many many pictures on the website admitted to neither of these things.

Obviously I want to know how many it sleeps, and whether it's an en suite. I'd like the bed to be comfortable, but that's such a subjective matter than no hotel website can help me here. Tea and coffee making facilities are essential, but are taken as read. (However, if a hotel offers real milk instead of UHT cartons, they should shout about it. I've stayed in hotels that did this, and it was great, but they kept entirely silent about this on their website.) I want to know if there's free wifi - and that, too, is sometimes very hard information to extract from the websites of larger hotel chains. Ideally I'd like to know if it's quiet or not: if the hotel is on a busy road and each room is listed separately, it would be nice to know which rooms are quieter. It's not essential, but given the choice, I'd like a nice view: another thing hotel websites can be strangely coy about, even when they boast about their lovely gardens and setting.

I don't care if there are fluffy bathrobes. Why does every hotel website under the sun make such a thing about fluffy bathrobes?

I don't care what colour the decor is. I don't care who makes the soap; chances are I won't have heard of them, anyway. I don't care what colour the cushions are. I'll just chuck the cushion mountain off the bed as soon as I get there, and the cleaner will carefully pile them all back on again, and I'll chuck them off again. Why are hotels so obsessed with piling a million cushions on the bed? And what's with these funny little coloured strips of material they like to lay across the bottom of the duvet?

I just want to know if I'll have somewhere to sit that isn't the bed. Why are hotels so reluctant to tell me this?

Here's something that's annoying. It's when you get a box of chocolates or a selection box of biscuits, and on the back of the packet it lists all the ingredients for the entire selection, and it reads, "stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU!, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff." Inside the box, 20 different chocolates or biscuits stare innocently at you, and you know that at least one of them contains the THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! but you have no idea which one(s), or how many. Sometimes one draws your attention by waving dramatically at you, saying LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I'M COVERED ALL OVER IN NUTS! but maybe it's just a distraction. Maybe it's like all those people in movies who leap out and shout I AM A DIVERSION! FOLLOW ME SO THE HERO WITH THE McGUFFIN WILL GET AWAY! (and the baddies always fall for it! Why? It's always so obviously a diversion, yet they invariably drop everything and chase after these people who so obviously want to be chased. It's almost as if evil minions are invariably stupid, or something. Oh. Wait.)

Anyway, back to those innocent chocolates. One of them obviously has nuts all over it, and another has no obvious nuts, but is called "hazelnut crunch," which is a bit of a clue. But what about all the others? THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! was quite high on the ingredient list. Are two chocolates likely to account for it, or is there likely to be more lurking in a third chocolate, invisible and unlabelled?

In the end, you have to pass all doubtful chocolates to a tame Pellinor, who has to take a careful bite and report back on the likelihood of nuts. But can you trust such a creature? There is, after all, that incident in Bella Pasta in Oxford in 1993: that never-to-be-forgivenforgotten incident when you were suddenly stuck with Doubt about the white shavings on your pudding, so passed it over to him to take a tiny spoonful and report back. Then you got distracted by conversation with others, and when you turned back, the whole pudding was gone. "So it did have nuts in it?" you say. "No," says the brazen-faced unrepentant villain, quite cheerfully. "It was white chocolate."

Okay, so nuts won't actually kill me (at least, they haven't yet) but an allergic reaction is unpleasant and not nice, and there's always the fear that it will get worse. Others have it far, far worse, of course. So why, if you're going to make the effort of listing all your allergens in bold on the back of your packet, don't you make it clear inside which item contains said allergen, and which ones are free of it?

I've just come across one of those books in which some Opinionated Person rants about the way "people nowadays" use language. You see, after many centuries of evolution, the English language coincidentally reached its pinnacle of perfection on this man's eighteenth birthday, and all change since then is wrong and bad.

The page I opened at random was ranting about tautology. It is nonsensical (and wrong and bad) to say, "I'm currently at my desk," he declared, because the present tense is already implied by the verb. However, to me, there is a definite difference between, "Tim is Lord of All Hamsters," and, "Tim is currently Lord of All Hamsters." The latter suggests that Lord of All Hamsters is a distinctly temporary title, and if you come back in a year, you might find Tim's furry nemesis wielding the bejewelled feeding bottle of power, and Tim reduced to sawdust and memory.

"Delays due to an earlier accident," is also condemned as nonsensical (and wrong and bad.) "Well, it can't be because of a future accident," the author scoffs. To me, though, "delays due to an accident," and, "delays due to an earlier accident," are different. The latter suggests that the worst is past, although the effects of the earlier chaos have not yet fully dissipated.

Worst of all, in the Opiniated Person's view, was, "next year, we intend to make further enhancements to our service." He could not even begin to conceive how it was possible to make further enhancements to something. "Um, perhaps because they want to make clear that they've already improved the service in the past?" I shouted (silently) at him.

At this point, I closed the book, and stepped quietly away. It felt wiser thus.

I've posted before about how children's non-fiction publishing is almost entirely based around the school curriculum. "Leisure interest" books such as Scary Animals With Teeth!, HUGE trucks, Ahhh!they'resocuuuuuteandfurries and football are exempt, but history and science books, in particular, are published entirely with the curriculum in mind. Tudors are done in year 4, where they do Henry VIII and Rich & Poor in Tudor England, so there are no books on Tudors for 5 year olds or 12 year olds, and nothing for anyone at all on Elizabeth I.

Obviously, this is all very unfortunate for the 6 year old child who conceives a mad, burning enthusiasm for Tudors. It is also very unfortunate for schools and libraries when the curriculum goes and changes, and you find yourself staring at 450 books on Tudors for 9 year olds, when Tudors Aren't Done now, and all everyone wants is books on the Stone Age for 6 year olds.

Yes, the Stone Age. Primary School children now start history at the Stone Age, and work through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age until they finally reach Vikings by 11 - although they do depart from this chronology to do certain other themes and projects along the way. Unfortunately, the Stone Age hasn't been done in school for years, and there are literally NO BOOKS on it. Despite the fact that the new curriculum was announced a good while back, and went live in September, there are still NO BOOKS on it. This is causing considerable angst and despair in all quarters.

Personally, I can't really see what They were thinking to start the children off on the Stone Age. The previous curriculum started them off gently by introducing the concept of the past, and the fact that Things Were Sometimes Different Then, focusing on things like toys, houses, clothes etc.

But now children have to launch straight in to what is, in my opinion, a very hard period to understand. I still remember the shock of going from 19th century history for A-level (which is not at all my favourite, but it's what I was landed with, since apparently only Bad Boys did my preferred choice of the Renaissance) to the Anglo-Saxon invasions in my first term at Oxford. It was so hard to go from a period where documentary evidence abounds, to a period when we know so very little, and have to piece it together from archaeological finds and dubious documentary sources. Each new archaeological find could potentially overturn everything we thought we knew. How on earth do you teach this to 5 year olds?

Today's rant is about automatic taps in public toilets. I do understand that these have been put in to protect our newly-washed hands from having to touch the tap to turn it off, thus contaminating ourselves with the assorted nasties that were on the hands of the hundreds of people who have turned it on before us. However, the magical touch-free sensor approach is REALLY ANNOYING because it HARDLY EVER WORKS!

You approach the line of sinks, and wave your hands under one of the taps. Nothing happens. You move them nearer and wave them again, then further away. Still nothing. You wave fast, then slow. You do the hokey-cokey and you turn around. Still nothing. You intone magical incantations. You speak "friend." Still nothing, so you move to the next tap, and repeat the process, and continue down the line.

Sometimes you never find the way to persuade the mute and merciless tap to dispense its bounty. But sometimes - how, you do not know and never will - you accidentally hit on precisely the right method to summon the water. Did you put your hands at the precise 3.57 inch distance that is demanded? Was it something to do with the speed you danced the hokey-cokey? Either way, you suddenly have a huge gush of water... all over your cuffs, nowhere near your hands. It cannot be replicated.

Or sometimes, you get presented with a single hole in the wall, that dispenses soap, water and air in a pre-arranged sequence that cannot be interrupted. There will inevitably be far fewer of these things than there are toilet cubicles. The ones I queued (im)patiently for today were branded as "Wallgate," which sounds like some terrible wall-related scandal. This is apt. The machines insisted on dispensing what felt like two hours supply of air. Even customers who wanted to erase every last hint of dampness from their hands ended up walking away while the air was still blasting out, causing the next person to stand there, twitchy with impatience, waiting for the chance to wave their hands wildly in the void, mutter magical words, and be rewarded with a jet of soap on their cuffs.

Grump! I've been using the MapMyWalk app on my phone since January, and have used it to track over 200 walks, ranging from less than a mile to over 30 miles. Barring a few issues with battery use, I've had no problems with it.

Last week, I installed a big upgrade...

After a week of fighting with it, I have had to conclude that the upgrade has made the app unusable on my phone. I don't know if this is because my phone, although less than a year old, is at the budget end of the Smartphone spectrum? I've only managed one successful walk, and that was a simple A to B walk in Southampton, only 2 miles, with no pauses. Otherwise, it refuses to start again when paused. It shouts about not being able to connect to their website - something it never previously moaned about, which is just as well, given the lack of network coverage one tends to encounter on country walks. It sometimes freezes up completely, forcing me to restart my phone. It devours battery life at least twice as fast as the old one, if not more, even when paused.

Yes, I am using the free version of the app, rather than paying to get the more advanced version. I accept that this gives me very limited right to complain. I am not a paying customer, and they owe me nothing. But I'm still grumped about it. I'm 88% of the way through my "walk 1000 miles" target on MapMyWalk, so I don't want to move away from it until I've completed that. I can map walks manually - easy when you walk on roads; rather more challenging when you go cross country - but it's so much easier to have a magic device in your pocket doing all the counting for you.

Grump!

Has anyone else found that modern bags have mastered the art of being far, far bigger on the outside than the inside? I've noticed it with new suitcases and a new handbag, but it's particularly noticeable with our new small rucksack.

The old one had a single compartment, with two outer pockets on the side for drink bottles. It worked well enough, but I wanted to get one with a chest strap - I was often reduced to walking along with my thumbs hooked into the straps, trying to replicate a chest strap, but I did generally feel that I ought to be singing cowboy songs while doing it. I also wanted some sort of contraption that would keep the bag off my back, thus avoiding the unpleasantness of the sodden back scenario. Most annoyingly, the zips on the side pockets gradually work open, and more than once I stopped for lunch, only to find that my water bottle had made a successful escape bid miles back along the track.

So, anyway, we bought a new small rucksack that had all those things I wanted, including pockets that could keep even the most determined water bottle from escaping. All well and good, thus far. However, when came to use it, we found that it doesn't actually hold anything! The contraption that keeps it off the back seriously reduces its expansion possibilities, but that's fair enough. However, it's divided into so many mini compartments and pockets that you can't really fit anything into any of them. The biggest compartment can't quite hold our insulated sandwich bag when it holds sandwiches for two, plus an ice pack. It can just hold said bag when it has sandwiches for one, but only with a bit of squashing and squeezing and heaving at the zip. The second biggest compartment can just hold one folded up lightweight waterproof. I've found 9 separate compartments thus far, and we spent quite a bit of our round-the-island walk desperately zipping and unzipping, trying to track down the compartment that held the cereal bars/external battery/map.

How can something billed as having a 20 litre capacity struggle with holding lunch for two and two lightweight waterproofs?

(Dried) Egg pappardelle, "bySainsbury's" (ingredients: durum wheat semolina, free range egg (16%)): kcal per 100g: 372

(Dried) "Pappardelle made with free range eggs," Sainsbury's Taste the Difference (ingredients: durum wheat semolina, free range egg (24%)): kcal per 100g: 141

Something does not compute here! One would expect a slightly higher egg content to make some difference to the calorie content, but not this much.

But the plot thickens. Version 1 claims that a serving is 100g. Version 2 claims that a serving is 200g. Presumably, in version 1, 100g refers to dry weight, whereas in version 2, is refers to cooked weight, with the weight doubled by water. Nowhere is this made clear. And, in this case, version 2 is particularly unhelpful to me as I stand there with my weighing scales, measuring out a sensible portion size, since if I do it without measuring, it always balloons into enough to feed a hungry army. I don't often cook dried pasta, so can never remember what's a sensible portion size, so I could very easily have measured out 200g of dried pasta per person today, were it not for the fact that I still had a tiny bit left of the old packet left, and could compare.

I do appreciate nutritional information on food, but sometimes they seem to go out of their way to obscure what they really mean. Grump!

Curse you, internet, for making information so easy to find! It's quite killing conversation! I often find myself wondering about the answer to something, and mentally composing an LJ post about it, thinking that it might prompt a bit of conversation. Then I Google it, and find loads of other conversations about it, and all my questions and debates are answered, and never get around to making the post.

A few minutes ago, I was chasing a childhood memory. "Does anyone else remember...?" I was going to post, before describing the half-remembered item. "Oh! I remember those, too!" people might have said. "Now what were they called...?" And there would have been nostalgia and memories and brain-racking, and then someone would have supplied the name, and there would have been gratitude and praise.

But Google has told me. They were Wade Whimsies. And I never really liked them much, anyway.

I know it is hardly news that train ticket pricing is an arcane mystery understood only by a faceless, red-eyed cabal OF EVIL!, but I found a particularly egregious example the other day. I was trying to book my train ticket to Summerfest, in which both directions of my journey will be on trains departing at about 9.45 - i.e. counting as off-peak journeys. In previous years, I've booked the train separately online, and have bought the ferry ticket on the day, but this time I remembered that it's possible to buy both together, by putting West Cowes in as the starting point of the train journey, rather than Southampton Central. I've done this before, and the total price quoted is the same as the price quoted if you buy each separately.

This time, they quoted me £115 for a single ticket, with a variety of returns starting at £215.* Since I've done this journey a couple of times before, I knew that this was badly wrong. Last year, the train cost me £90-something return, and the ferry is around £20 return. I redid the search, this time starting at Southampton. Single was £49.50, and the cheapest return was £102.

So because the non-train leg of the journey took place in peak time, the entire journey was charged at peak prices.

* When I went to check the prices just now, I was still quoted £115 for a single, but this time they'd decided that I was allowed to get a super off-peak return for £143. The other day, this was only offered as an option on the later train, not the one I wanted. At least, I'm almost certain this was the case, since I remember saying, "Look! Look!" and jabbing an angry finger at the omission, though I do of course have to entertain the possibility that I'm wrong. *sigh* I'm really not good at this ranting business, am I. "Grr! Grr! Outrageous! Shocking!... but of course I could be wrong." Although £143 for an off-peak return including the ferry is still £20 more than it should be, so I can still do a mild, limp rant. A sort of... grutter, or grumple, or something.

Today's rant is about books that are part of a series, but refuse to reveal what number volume they are. It must be a deliberate choice by the publishers, presumably done to boost sales by conning people into buying whatever volume is in their hand, without putting it back because they can't find book one.

I'm reading the Dresden Files at the moment, and the first six volumes say "book X of the Dresden Files" nice and clearly on the cover, but from then on, the books - same edition, same cover design - just say "the Dresden Files." Granted, it's clearly a series that's been written on the assumption that people might be reading out of order - there are paragraphs of new reader exposition dotted throughout all the later volumes - but there is a lot of ongoing story arc that runs from volume to volume, so reading out of order would give you a lot of spoilers for earlier books.

In some series, the reading order really doesn't matter. My impression - not supported by any attempt to gather evidence - is that these books do indeed go out better in the library when they don't have prominent numbers of the spine. People can start with whatever book happens to be to hand, without being deterred by the absence of book one.

But I've also read trilogies that are really just one long story split over three volumes, and even then sometimes they refuse to admit even that they're part of a series at all, let alone what volume they are. I've picked up books that look exactly like a self-contained novel, and have scoured them all over in every possible place to find any evidence of a series, and found nothing. Then I to turn to the blurb and read, "After the shocking and unexpected SPOILER!, all the characters are doing INCREDIBLY SPOILERY THINGS! in an INCREDIBLY SPOILERY PLACE!" which sometimes makes me sigh sadly, and say, "That sounds like a book I would have really liked... were it not for the fact that you've just gone and spoiled it all for me! Grr!"

Here are some overdue rants, which I was seething madly over on Friday, without the internet access necessary to inflict them on anyone else.

1. The ferry gangway is wide enough for two people if they both tuck themselves in fairly close to the side. However, if someone walks slap-bang in the middle of the gangway, nobody can get past them. Why is it that very slow walkers invariably do this? They usually shoulder their way to near the front of the queue, so they can ensure that they delay the maximum number of people. An enormous gap opens up in front of them, so they must know that they're walking much slower than everyone else, but still they plod along, while hundreds of seething commuters are banked up behind them like water behind a dam. Grr! Rant! Rant! Rant!

2. How can anyone actually enjoy shopping? I had to visit John Lewis in the big shopping arcade in Southampton. The arcade is a sea of noise and blundering crowds, who cut in front of you, and stop at the top of escalators to dither, and meander around oblivious to their surroundings. Outside the arcade there is currently a market with children's fairground rides, all blaring out loud conflicting music. To get into John Lewis, you have to brave the hideous stench of a million perfumes. The whole place is set up like a labyrinth to try to trick you, and there isn't even a nice simple Coats department, but about a hundred million separate places where coats lurk, most of them colonised by inconsiderate browsers who have surrounded themselves with an enormous pool of shopping bags, and make no attempt to shift to the side to allow someone else to browse beside them. I am normally quite willing to accept that other people might love things that I detest, like raw carrots, but a busy shopping centre is so beyond enjoyable to me that I really can't comprehend how anyone might derive pleasure from being there.

I think I've ranted about the milky part of this post before, but what's the use of a good rant if you can't repeat yourself?

Driving home just now, I heard that the Radio 2 lunch time phone-in is yet again going to lambast some politician for admitting that he doesn't know the price of a pint of milk. Apparently this is proof that he doesn't live in the real world, but presumably lives on a pink cloud and gets silver unicorns to buy his milk from the friendly neighbourhood grocery dragon.

It always annoys me when the ability to quote the price of a pint of milk (specifically milk, as opposed to bread, potatoes or whatever) is taken as proof as being part of the "real world." For one thing, politicians can just learn it by rote. But I don't know the price of a pint of milk, either. We have an old-fashioned milkman who leaves milk on the doorstep, for which we pay by direct debit, which is budgeted for but on a monthly basis. When we need to top it up - which is very seldom - we almost always buy other items alongside the the price at the time, and I notice the price when shopping and add it up mentally, but I don't bother to remember it afterwards. It changes from shop to shop, anyway - and, besides, I'm more likely to buy 2 pint cartons, rather than single pints, anyway, since they're cheaper.

EDIT: I realise now that the above paragraph could read as if I'm sitting in some ivory tower of affluence, failing to understand what it's like to have to make every penny count. For this I apologise. However, even when we were living on a very tight budget, I had no idea what milk cost, because Pellinor was unemployed so did all the shopping. The last time this issue came up, I asked a lot of people if they knew the cost of a pint of milk. These included several people who really really struggle to get through the month financially. None of these people knew, either - one because they never used milk, one because their partner did all the shopping, and one because they always bought 4-pint packs since they were more cost effective, or else looked out for special offers and "reduced to clear" offers. None of them could quote off by heart the price of very much at all, even though the cost of their shopping was very important to them.

I also have no idea what stamps cost. This is probably indefensible.

What is this "real world" that people are lambasted for not living in? What is this "real life" that people are attacked for being out of touch with? Doesn't everyone live lives that are real to them. Everyone has their own fears and worries and tensions, no matter what their outward circumstances. Why are some lifestyles more "real" than others? And why does the ability to quote the price of a pint of milk (as opposed to a pound of potatoes or a loaf of bread) have anything to do with any of it?

- "Unless you've been living under a rock..." This phrase normally precedes some statement of "common knowledge" that proves to be something not particularly universal at all, but confined to one subject area or country (e.g. American football or UK reality TV shows or whatever). It annoys me very much, with its implied sneering at anyone who doesn't happen to share the interests of the writer.

- "Oh, but of course I'm a woman, so I can multitask." Every woman I've heard say this has been demonstrably very bad at multitasking, even as they trumpet how good they are. Interestingly, they invariably stop whatever they're doing in order to give their full attention to their announcement of how good they are at doing two things at once.

- Vilification of men who leave the toilet seat up. Yes, I do think that things should generally be left the way you found them (unless the way you found them is broken and bleeding in the gutter, gasping "Take me to a hospital!") and I suspect that over 50% of toilet visits require the seat to be down, which means that the seat down position is a fair default, but I really don't see why it's such an unforgiveable sin to leave it up. If someone wants the seat up and finds it down, they put it up. Why is it such a crime to expect those who want it down and find it up to put it down themselves?

I very much dislike pointy ears. No, I'll qualify that. Pointy ears are perfectly acceptable when in their proper place, which is on cats and hounds and fennec foxes and rabbits and hares and all the many other species of animal that have the decency to clothe their pointy ears in fur. I'll even allow Vulcans to exist in all their pointy glory without snarling at them for their ears, since those ears are subtle and their points are delicate in flavour. However, I have spent far too many hours of my life encountering computer generated elves whose ears are a good nine inches tall, culminating in pencil-sharp points that stick out from their hair like horns. They never wear ear-armour, either, not even the most warlike of pointy-ear-possessors, which piles bother upon bother, since these ears seem such an obvious weakness in battle. (Much like Buffy's huge and dangly hoopy ear-rings, which make me cringe whenever I see her fighting in them.) I refuse point blank to play an elf in any computer game, because the ears annoy me so much. No doubt I'd get loads of lovely racial bonuses, but... urgh! Ears! No!

Yeah, I know it's a kind of trivial thing to be ranting about, but it's something that's been annoying me in my ridiculously petty way for years, and sometimes petty bothers have to spill out.

I was supposed to be getting a new mobile phone today. Actually - and I know that many people will find this quite amazing - it's my first mobile phone. I've had a work phone for some years, and since I'm allowed to make personal phone calls if I mark them on an itemised bill and pay the cost back, I haven't seen the need for a personal one. However, the hassle of having to do this means that I very seldom do use it to make personal calls, and because it's a work phone, if often ends up on silent, or languishing in a bag, so I miss the very few calls on I get on it. I'm not a very phone-y person, really, preferring email and the like, but I've come to realise that I do really need a phone of my own.

So I've chosen a new phone, which is about the cheapest I could find that allows internet access. And it was supposed to arrive today, but I got home to find a note through the door saying they'd tried to deliver it, but I was out. Not a problem, I thought, picking up the note and preparing to head back out again to pick it up from the depot ten minutes away. Then I noticed that they'd ticked the "we will try again tomorrow" option, and provided no way for me to change this. I know that some people work part time, and some people make trips out but are at home most days, but I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who are out on a Tuesday are also out on a Wednesday, so automatically trying to redeliver sounds as if it will be waste of the driver's time more often than not.

I just wish there was some consistency. Sometimes they leave them with neighbours, sometimes they take them to the depot, sometimes they redeliver, and sometimes I get packages left under plants or behind pots in the back garden, usually with a note through the door telling me where to look, though once with no note at all, meaning that I only found it days later by chance.

As I librarian, I am, of course, very aware of the problems of classification, and I know there is no way on earth that a supermarket can arrange all its items so that everything is in exactly the place that every individual user would expect it to be, grouped next to the items they want it to be next to. I just above forgave them when I trawled up and down the aisles for twenty minutes searching for cream, only to find it on an end-of-aisle display not all that far from the milk. (I only went up and down. When I search and search for an item and fail to find it, it's always always on and end-of-aisle display facing the back of the shop.) I forgave them their hard-to-find tomato puree and dried onions, since I wasn't all that sure where I'd have put them myself.

However, I can not imagine any classification system in which stock cubes should be shelved on the end of an aisle of ice cream, just opposite the section devoted to pet food. I wouldn't have found them at all, had I not suddenly remembered that stuffing - a thing I'm inordinately fond of and therefore buy in great amounts - was shelved on the end of one of the frozen food aisles, miles away from all the rest of the room temperature food. (Pellinor's Catalogue Of The Thousand Pies tells me that the correct term for these products is "ambient.") Following this hunch, I charged off towards the stuffing, and found stock cubes on the end of the adjacent aisle, but I would have given up and gone out without them were not for this knowledge obtained as a result of my stuffing addiction.

Oh, and the other thing shelved on this end-of-aisle display between the ice cream and the cat food? Chewing gum. Analyse that, Mr Dewey.

Actually, I suppose the true moral of this story is that I really ought to ask for help, rather than trudge endlessly up and down the aisles in fruitless quests, but asking for directions is something that I don't do. And, yes, I do come out as categorically male in all those silly internet tests.

I was walking past a hairdressers' the other day, and saw their prices prominently displayed in the window. The cheapest women's haircut was three times the price of the cheapest men's cut. Even the most expensive men's cut was more cheaper than the cheapest women's cut. I realise, of course, that most women have hairstyles that are more complicated and time consuming to produce than most men's hairstyles. However, some men have very fancy hairstyles, and some women have very simple ones. When I was a child, the hairdresser used to cut my hair dry. Then I became a teenager, and suddenly the hairdressers swore blind that it was impossible to cut hair without washing it first, then blowdrying it afterwards. My hair was the same, and the style was the same, but suddenly the hairdressers insisted on all these extra expensive stages. It all seems like a bit of a con.

It was especially annoying since the whole washing thing was riddled with awfulness. I hated the feel of all the extra horrid things they insisted on putting in my hair so much that I had to wash my hair as soon as I got home, to get rid of them. They always used shampoo that I was allergic to - despite me warning them - and then sneered in a disapproving fashion when they noticed that my scalp was all red and irritated. ("Do you use a cheap shampoo?" they'd say, dripping with disdain.) I was paying extra money to get a dose of superior sneering, a dash of allergic reaction, and a whole lot of annoyance.

Which is why I did something rather rash and drastic with scissors.

In other news, I've often chuckled at those lists that reveal how many people each year were hospitalised because of clothing-related accidents, and the like - injured by killer socks etc. Today I was almost one of them. I forgot to pack any skirts or trousers when going to a folk festival last year, so borrowed a skirt from someone else, and rushed out and bought the first trousers I found, which were three-quarter length, with a decorative cord around the hem of each leg, held there by being threaded through a series of little loops. It's always looked a bit traily and messy, but today it almost killed me. I was going downstairs, when the big toe of one foot got caught in the cord of the other leg. I would definitely have fallen headfirst downstairs were it not for the fact that I've got cats. I never used to grip the bannister when going downstairs at home, but too many near-misses involving thundering cats have taught me always to grip onto it for dear life.

The cords have now been removed. The cats have ritually killed them.

Apart from that, I've spent most of the weekend playing Assassin's Creed 2. I killed the pope today, but he was evil, so that's okay.