Okay, lemme see . . . stuff has happened.

Lets start with Cutesy, because we were chatting about this earlier. We were talking about ‘Monk’, which is this T.V. show about his ex-cop with OCD. I think it’s great, and she was with me and spent the whole show heckling it, which annoyed me. That’s how we started talking about this. But let me start at the beginning:

See, Cutes likes her computer games, and we had a PS2. Or DVD player, depending on who you asked. Anyway. She likes playing games on it, and like all gamers, she gets a real kick out of beating the game. So she’ll be sitting there, punching away at the keys and telling about the integrated combat menu system, or something, and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘yeah, I’ll give the main character a seven on ‘Ali’s Hotness Scale-o-metre’’. So she’s playing this game, Flames of Colossus, or Maximus, or Albatross, or something Greek. And there’s this bit where she’s got to kill a boss (only it’s not a boss, as we don’t have them in games any more), and she’s got to go through her menu system to use some amulet, and while she’s doing this the boss kills her. Every time. Every. Single. Time. I was with her one time, watching, and she starts shouting at the screen, the way she does. Next thing I know my danger sense in kicking in so I hide behind the sofa. Then there’s this amazing smashing sound and instead of a controller, we now have a mash of wires and plastic. All the shops were shut, so she had to wait until the next day to steal a new controller. Fast forward a couple of days. I’ve stopped watching her play because I’m fearing for my life. All we hear is the sounds of one angry bitch coming from behind the closed door. Then there’s this huge growl, smashing sound, ripping sound, more smashing sounds, more growling . . . After ten minutes of silence, she emerges, covered in a mass of plastic, wires and circuit boards that used to be our PS2, and she’s still fuming. And we look at her, and she looks back at us, and we look back at her because we’re worried what she’s going to do if we take our eyes off her. And then she says, ‘big boys did it’, and stalks off. And, like Comrades in Mother Russia, we’re not questioning the official version of events for fear of what’s going to happen if we do.

So, since then Cutesy has been reduced to watching daytime T.V., because we can’t afford to replace the consol. She spends most of the time sitting there, heckling.

Me? Well, I’ve started smoking, and then quit again. I didn’t particularly want to quit, but Penny made me. She threatened me. Only she didn’t. She said that she didn’t like the fact that I smoked, and that she wished I would quit. And then she looked sad at me. And then when I thought she wasn’t looking and I lit up, it turns out that she was looking and she sighed and looked sad at me again. So now I’m really, really worried what’s going to happen if I don’t quit. Getting of them is quite easy, actually. It’s kicking the actual habit that’s really hard. And you can’t just say, ‘hey, I’ve been good, I deserve one’, because the next day you have five, and then you’re right back on them.

Other than that, I’ve been helping Foxie out. She’s needed a break so I’ve been working for her at KFC. Believe it or not, I’m actually quite enjoying it. I mean, the guys I work with are absolute top, and even the managers are okay. I spend my days covering chicken in the Colonel’s secret blend of eleven herbs and spices. And I get free chicken on my break! Only trouble is, the company that owns our franchise has just been taken over, and the new owners are being absolute arses. They’ve just introduced a whole new bunch of rules that have just about doubled my workload. And we had this training meeting today, and I asked the restaurant boss if we could expect a corresponding rise in our pay, and everyone laughed and said it was the best joke they’d heard all week. Then the boss showed us how it’d taken him five e-mails to get permission to buy a new mop bucket, and in the end he wasn’t even allowed to buy it himself, but he had to wait for the area manager to get it for him. I’m just hunkering down and hoping it all blows over when all the high-up people have stopped trying to save their jobs from their new bosses.

I’ve been learning Welsh, too. I followed Foxie and Gemma along to their first few lessons, and I’ve found it’s actually quite fun being able to speak a second language. So I’ve kept on going to them. Penny’s been coming along, too. Of course, she’s way ahead of us, having already learnt about sixteen dozen different foreign languages. But I’m still proud of myself. I tried asking Cutesy if she wanted something in Welsh and she told me to stop speaking foreign to me. I took the hint.

Foxie herself . . . well, she’s quit smoking, started again, quit again, had a bad day and started again, ran out of money and quit again, got paid and started again . . . Now she’s put her foot down and quit, hell or high water. I’m actually really impressed with her. She just came home from work one day and said, ‘I forgot my tobacco today, and I’ve gone ten hours already, so I thought I’d quit.’ And that was that. Me, I keep trying to ponce smokes off Angel and she has to keep on telling me to get stuffed, but not Foxie. Not even a whisper. Even when she’s between me and Angel on the sofa, watching T.V., and we’re both smoking. She’s just taken to drinking coffee, instead. And I mean really taken, in a serious way. She’s even worse then Cutes when she was working for Lloyds. I’ll pop my head around while she’s at the computer and ask how many cups she’s had, and she’ll just shrug and tell me she stopped counting at the seventh, and this is at two in the afternoon. It’s actually a really bad idea to get in-between her and her coffee right now.

Other than that, and the Welsh, she took part in NaNoWriMo and finished her fifty thousand words. 50,000 words in 30 days! Now, that’s impressive. And she hasn’t even finished her novel yet. It’s about 60k at the moment, and she’s trying to find more time to put into it. I think we’ve been distracting her. She’s enjoying spending time with us, and no one in her novel is going to bash her upside the head if she doesn’t spend time on it. Dog Days, of course, is a different matter :)It’s not really my sort of thing – this novel of hers, ‘Ghosts’, it’s called – not having pictures and all. But I’m told by people who know this sort of thing (Penny, Gemma and Nicie) that it’s very good.

Nicie has been continuing to learn to play the guitar, with tuition from Death and a book we got him. He was so pleased the other day. He runs into my bedroom with his guitar in his mouth and says, ‘hey! Hey Ali! Check this out dude!’, and plays ‘House of the Rising Sun’. After hearing him working through chords and changes and progressions and all that theory stuff, it was a bit of a shock to hear an actual song coming out of him. I was so impressed with him. I’m trying to push him in the direction of Aerosmith’s ‘Seasons of Wither’. He can already play the opening riff, and it doesn’t sound too hard. But he looked at the tab, and says, ‘F?! Ha!’, so I’m guessing I’m going to have to wait a bit.

He’s also been off ‘exploring’ with Serendipity. I’m not sure just what it is they’re exploring, or why they’re exploring there, but they seem to enjoy it. They’ll just turn up randomly, like in the fridge or something, tell me that they’ve gotten lost and are really glad that I opened the door, because it was very cold in there, and then hop through the door to the living room, and disappear. Actually, I lie. It was Serendipity who did that. Nicie hasn’t turned up in any random places in the house, as far as I know.

Penny’s been stealing herself for the grim promenade that is Crufts. By which I mean she’s been looking forward to watching all the ‘silly dogs’ (as she calls them) in the show and heckling them with vicious and violent intent. She actually judged a show of her own a while back, but was too modest to give out the award they named in her honour. She just sat there looking politely embarrassed but humbly grateful for the honour. I don’t think about these things too much. I find it’s always just so much easier to just roll with the waves and deal with the rocks as and when you hit them. She’s also redecorated her room. It’s . . . it suits her perfectly. I feel guilty being her boyfriend in it, if you get what I mean. It’s that kind of room. It doesn’t stop me, it just leaves me with a lingering feeling that karma’s going to kick my arse and wishing that there was some sort of confessional that I could go to so I could get absolution.

Death and Kea took a holiday together. All I know is that they went to a beech somewhere (the sandy one, not the woody one – I’m not sure which spelling I’ve used and I can’t find our dictionary). I gather they had a good time, though. I can just see Death sunning herself in her swimming costume while Kea chases crabs around the beach. And then they’d probably walk around town for a bit, go for a promenade along the beech front with ice-creams or chip-cones. Or maybe those fried mashed potato things you get in some places. And then they’d go back to their B&B and, well . . . do boyfriend/girlfriend things.

Of course, Death comes back and the house has degenerated somewhat so she starts to crack heads. Suddenly she goes from relaxed post-holiday woman to angered Governess and everyone starts running around with vacuums and anti-bacterial spray and j-cloths, and she’s stalking around using one of those tones of voice to tell you that you’ve missed a bit. You know, the sort of voice that knows the fault is going to be rectified, because if it isn’t there’s going to be merry hell to pay. Kea must have had a good time because he even cleaned his room and everything. I don’t think it’s ever been cleaned in there. Even his curl-up bed got tossed in the washing machine.

And lastly, I must mention Belle. See, it was my birthday back on the 14th Jan, and of course we had a party. We had cake, and presents, and hats, and party poppers, and a wonderful meal cooked by Death and Cutes (no, seriously, she did and it tasted divine), and of course lots of drink. The alcoholic type of drink. I had my beer, Cutesy had my beer too, Foxie had her red wine and Bloody Mary’s, Death had her white wine, Nicie and Serendipity had there . . . whatever the hell it was they were drinking, and after a while it sort of stopped mattering who had what. Then, the next morning, we all wake up and are suffering and Foxie wanders in with someone that we vaguely recall from the night before. They’d just fallen asleep in the same bed, thoroughly plastered. And this new girl – a quite shy, but non-the-less cute cat girl (in the same way Death’s a dog girl) – asks if she can use our shower and Fox says sure, so she heads off and we have this conversation. Angel asks where Foxie picked her up from, and Fox says she thought she was one of my friends, but I say no, I thought she was with Nicie . . . So it turns out that she just kind of . . . turned up, and everyone assumed that she was with someone else. So Foxie spent some time with her and they got to know each other a bit, and Angel drags her (Foxie) to one side after a while and asks what the score is, and Foxie says that Belle’s staying. So that was that.

Belle’s a nice enough girl. A bit shy, like I say, and I think we all scare her a bit, but she gets on with everyone. Excepting, of course, she and I don’t talk about music. See, Foxie’s decided to put all our CDs on the computer, and we’ve all been putting together our own playlists so when we’re working with her, we can bully her into playing our music. Death has her Dylan on there, Anne has a whole bunch of Byrds and Syd Barrett, Angel has Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, and I have my Aerosmith, Led Zep and Joe Perry. I like my hard rock. Specifically, I like the stuff from the 70’s, ‘cause the stuff before that wasn’t hard enough, and the stuff from the 80’s was too electronic (stuff like Iron Maiden) and stuff in the 90’s was all heavy distortion and screaming, and I love a decent riff ripped out of a Gibson or a Gretsch. What I really hate is those poxy frikking ‘rock ballads’. You know, like Aeromsith’s ‘Angel’ (boy, I hate Steve for that). Anyway, Foxie’s sitting there, working away, putting together a playlist for Belle from all the stuff she’s ripped to the hard drive already. And what does it have on there? ‘Stairway’. Fair play. ‘Dream On.’ ‘Ramble On.’ ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. ‘I Know a Little’. You can see where I’m going with this, right? I think, basically, if was to get all my hard rock stuff together and trim out the bits I didn’t like, she’d pick them up and put them in her list.

Anyway, I think that’s actually it for now. I’m sure some more will come to me. And then I can bore you with that, too.

But I’ve enjoyed myself.

- Alice