Duck wagers and wasted trips

Sometimes I think people don’t realise how complicated this whole shopping routine is getting so let me share my recent attempts.

It would seem that my lock down routine is to overeat on one day and under eat on the next. I have no idea why but that is just how it has turned out. I didn’t eat much yesterday so today there was a plan to actually cook something, at this point I didn’t know what.

Now I know that I don’t keep much at home so this will involve a trip to the store. I have two grocery store options, well physically there are two but I will only use one at the moment. I did attempt to use the larger store during the week and the minefield of arrows and one way systems totally threw me.

Since I am totally incapable of planning a meal I visit the store with a vague idea and rely on the produce to inspire me (well give me a clue at least). One way shopping doesn’t work for me, I can’t cope. The item that I picked up in aisle one is no good to me because its partner product is not in stock in aisle three. The item I like in aisle four would go well with the thing I didn’t pick up in aisle two but it’s too late now unless I throw a double six to start again.

I got so lost by one way and no entry signs this week that I left without what I went in there for and without any memory of what that even was. I felt confused by the system and guilty for not making an ‘essential’ purchase despite that actually being the purpose of the visit.

So today I set off to the smaller store and its discount neighbour. I had an idea of dinner and needed some ingredients and also wanted something nice for lunch since I skipped breakfast. When I got to the grocery store there was a queue of sorts to enter. The queue in itself is just about manageable but it included prams and people talking so I had no idea where the actual queue was. Yes I know I could just ask but that is so not me, off I marched to the discount neighbour.

Now the visit here was intended to purchase some snack type bits for the evening, treats if you will. The flaw in my plan is clearly obvious to you all but somehow I missed it. Of course you cannot buy treats if you haven’t brought food, obvious wasn’t it? I made a valiant attempt to look at some snacks whilst the voice in my head told me that really it was all just junk and no good to me. ‘You don’t need snacks Gav you are not hungry you are bored’ says the voice and then I get angry (well more mardy) .

Now I know that they are selling me junk, which I will eat, which means that they have ‘won’. If they win then by corollary I lose and I am not having that, I am better than that. So I take a rather studious look at the DIY shelf, I don’t need anything but the absence of that thing that I appear to be looking for justifies my presence in the store. Somehow I now feel that I have disguised my tantrum and I leave the store not even looking to see if there is a queue next door.

I return home empty handed and in a bad mood. The ducks, who are used to this routine, find the whole thing comical and laugh at me which doesn’t help my mood. I now proceed to rip into the tasks at hand with no further thoughts of shopping or food.

Somehow over the course of the next few hours my mood softens and once again I realise that I will be sat here later angry with myself for not buying the things that I was angry with myself for looking to buy earlier (that kinda makes sense in my head). Since I have worked hard all day I will give the store another go, the ducks wish me well.

It is already in my head that when I turn the corner if I can see a queue then I will abandon but all looks good. Straight into the shop, no queue, no hassle. Now what did I want, well the last idea has long gone so lets hit inspiration central. How about a nice chilled pizza? well they are thin and crispy and frankly really just a cheese covered biscuit by the time they are cooked so that is a no.

Some nice fresh bread rolls, nope none there just the mass produced rubbish which I won’t enjoy because I want something ‘nice’. I find myself looking at a jar of pickled onions, ‘don’t be an idiot, what you are going to have a jar of onions for dinner’ internal voices can be quite judgemental you know. A quick glance at the fridge, I know I don’t need milk but its a safety, its ‘essential’ and justifies the visit. I walk past the milk though because I know how this is going already.

A look at the freezer, some nice fish in crumb or chicken grills perhaps. ‘Yeah nice factory produced junk go on knock yourself out, hell get a meal for one and an ice cream look like a real sad loner’ see what I mean always judgemental? By now the ducks are all betting on what I return with, clearly I am sometimes successful after all.

I return empty handed to a round of applause from the CB duck who had her money on that result. But it is OK because I remembered that I still had to do that bit of painting so I will get that done and then dinner will resemble yesterday, first course of lager with a dessert of red wine.

Note: Whilst I am clearly a bit odd I am a functioning healthy person, who does eat and is capable of looking after myself, no interventions are needed. 

Secrets, snacks, bedsits and orbits

Today’s post is brought to you by two unconnected items both of which were incidental conversations. The first conversation was around the complexities of working away from home and the fact that corporate governance limited this to 5 years. Apparently those of us that work away, it is not for all, should be limited to 5 years in order to minimise the risk to home life. The second was a conversation with a friend that alluded to the ‘secret’ life that I lead when working away, this friend had concluded that I had some second life that was kept isolated from home.

Before I embark on this post I would like to make it clear that I do not suffer from any conditions, neuroses or incapacities, well no more than is normal anyway. I am 40 years old and have worked all of my life, the majority of it working away from home. I have had some brief spells of returning home every day but they have been coupled with a minimum of 4 hours commuting just to take the edge off it.

Lets hit the ground running, there is no secret life. Rarely are two weeks the same and even if they were the ability to operate a Monday to Friday life is far beyond my talents. I am sure that there are cases of super lotharios who have kept a weekday partner secret but it really can’t be easy. Imagine a partner that never sees you at weekends? who only experiences the ‘school nights’ of late evenings and early rises, I can’t see that as a seller to be honest. So weekdays are filled with work, the ‘advantage’ of a hotel is that one can work late, work from ‘home’ and start early in the morning, this isn’t just work its immersion.

Hotel living, as I have explained before, is not like a holiday there is no luxury to it. With rare exceptions I don’t dine in hotels, the menu is something that would result in an athlete gaining weight and I am no athlete to start with. I always depart hotels before breakfast and am no fan of that particular meal anyway, evening meals are never more than a snack. A hotel room is, in reality, little more than a badly equipped bedsit; a bed and a bathroom is not the largest environment to live in. You know when you leave your house like a tip on the way to work? I don’t, that is simply not an option. I tidy the room because one thing you don’t want is an annoyed housekeeper. Those mornings when you can’t find your wallet and just leave it to hunt down later, not for me I am on my hands and knees looking for it. In short after I leave my ‘home’ in the morning several strangers will visit before I return, there is no privacy.

When you come home and get that eerie feeling that something has moved? I don’t get that because stuff moves all the time, it moves to where the housekeeping staff thinks it looks best. A change in housekeeper midweek is given away by a new location for my toothbrush or a different arrangement of shampoo bottles. In some hotels I get a fridge but in most every meal has to be a single shot and hot food doesn’t happen, well if you exclude powdered soup that is. I enter the hotel at night and say good evening to reception, the next human interaction I get is when I say good morning to the receptionist on the way to work.

Even when I was driving the risk of a sudden flight meant that my entire life was packed into a small rucksack, I don’t do hold luggage, everything. I am not a sportsman but hobbies, clubs and associations do not suit working away from home. I actually find it very difficult to fill my time when I am not working and am always grateful when the occasional quiet periods at work come to an end. If there is not enough work to fill the day and the evening then it all becomes a bit of a struggle, there is only so long you can spend in the shower after all. Currently I have Rachel’s story and a sketch pad full of the next tattoo to keep me entertained in the evening and fill in the gaps between work.

I don’t keep up with birthdays or other occasions and rarely attend leaving parties and the like. For me the whole world is a series of transient events, if you are not in front of me or involved with me today I wont chase and nurture that relationship why would I. We are all moving in different orbits and when they coincide we interact, when they don’t that doesn’t end it simply gets paused until the next time.

There is of course one major benefit to being a single man working away from home, yes that’s right I can’t have pets and so wont suffer from mad old lady syndrome that is apparently brought on by cats!

It’s not odd but it is mean

I had a conversation, well message exchange, this week that reminded me that my life is not quite normal. I guess that when you spend enough time doing something you forget that everybody else is not doing the same. This particular example was dietary habits but there are many more.

As you know I work away from home, at the least I am away Monday to Friday and sometimes longer. I have worked this way since before I had children, it’s my normal way of working and what I am used to. Living out of a bag is how the majority of my life is spent, not just odd weekends away, it’s just what o do. The thing is that the apartment which I call home is also a transient location in my head. I may have lived there for eight years but I rent it and don’t consider it to be permanent.

The apartment has no freezer and, even if I chose to add one, insufficient space for one. Whilst I am free to waste food you will appreciate that in reality my domestic environment restricts my diet. Now the conversation started around dinner, forgive me for forgetting why, which is a health shake. For those that think hotel residency revolves around the restaurant let me assure you that is only for visitors. For those of us that live in hotels restaurants are the places we go to entertain, if we have to.

Even the healthiest restaurant menu is not something that you want to be eating from 4 nights a week. Apart from not being healthy it is disconcerting when you know the full menu verbatim in a number of establishments. So for me dinner is a health shake and probably 6-8 cups of tea throughout the evening. But of course I have a cooked breakfast don’t I? Well no actually I don’t, I am not a breakfast person and always leave the hotel before breakfast.

I rarely have time to eat lunch and to be honest if I did I certainly don’t have the inclination. Occasionally I will add a packet of crisps to my weekday diet but, in the main, it consists of chocolate shake. The shake itself only originates from the accident and I consider it my nod to nutrition.

So I get home and eat for England right? Well no it’s actually not that simple. Grocery shopping on Friday is performed at a small local convenience store so choice is not huge. Anything fresh that is purchased on Friday must be consumed or discarded by end of sunday. My weekend diet will rotate around common carb themes. Arrabbiata and rice/pasta is good and mushroom risotto is a staple, meat and fish are oddly uncommon. I have no intention of being vegetarian it’s just that meat and fish are not often offered in packages that suit my lifestyle.

Part of this is efficiency, I love cooking but I hate inefficiency. Why would I use an oven to cook a roast that only I will eat? The inefficiency alone is enough to ruin the meal. Take away menus are banned from my apartment because they only get called into play when I’ve had a beer and always result in mornings full of regret. One unintentional consequence of this lifestyle is that I struggle to eat large portions of food nowadays. So if I go out to dinner with friends I am uncomfortable for days afterwards. The other consequence, also unintended, is that I have reverted to the new parent vacuum technique.

I struggle to keep food in the apartment which I guess is my subconscious telling me it all has to be gone by Sunday. Multi-pack snacks are a disaster and rarely get past the weekend but of course this takes the place of dinner and so I end up ‘grazing’ rather than eating. Of course, I know I’m not strange really and that there are many people that follow the ‘gav diet’ so I thought I would speak out so the other know that they are not alone.

One other point that I would like to cover today is children. Whilst I know that this subject will be contentious I believe that I am sufficiently qualified. Much is made of the gift of life that a mother gives a child and it is indeed a wondrous thing to see but I challenge the concept that it is always a gift. At the local level when mum is on welfare with no prospects then I am sorry that is not the gift of life, it’s selfish and mean to bring children into the world if you can’t support them.

Life takes many twists and turns and nobody can see the future but if your life is a mess and supported purely by welfare having never worked then getting pregnant is not wondrous. What you are doing is condemning your children to a tough start that no parent should want for their child. Often we hear of examples of children that ‘rise above it’ and of course they happen but go to any of the thousands of sink estates in the UK and you will see they are the exception and not the rule. If you cannot offer your child the best start in life, better than your own or at least as good then let’s be clear this is not the miracle of conception but simple laziness in contraception.

I would extend this further, since I am not against offending nations, to the so called developing world. I don’t care if you think condoms are from the devil and babies come from the stork if you cannot feed your mouth then shut your legs. You are not a developing country or a civilised one if you are breeding mouths that you cannot feed. The only difference between welfare Sharon in the UK and the christian aid poster girl in Africa is that charity is legally enforced in the UK (we call it welfare). This is why I don’t give to foreign charity, to do so is a crime against those poor children because their ‘parents’ won’t learn.

I’ve heard people say they will only support birth control charity but I don’t believe that works. We have proved categorically in the UK that unprotected sex is the preserve of the feckless and hopeless and only the hard working consider consequences. I know some wonderful parents, both fathers and mothers, that struggle to bring their children up. But for me one of the saddest things about so called civilised society is that we have lost the ability to criticise those that bring children into the world without a thought to their future.

I might not want it but it’s free

This morning there was a coach load of Chinese leaving the hotel early. Travelling parties of Chinese rarely fail to entertain, especially at 5.30! The hotel had arranged ‘take away breakfasts’ for them, stacked on a trolley in brown paper bags. There was no need for the night porter to point them at these bags after the first person. Person one stands as a beacon calling his friends to the gift, soon replaced by a friend and eventually by a sort of crowd knowledge.

The breakfast contains a carton of juice, a cereal pot and a yoghurt. When they glance inside their paper bag the sound of disappointment is clear. But the Chinese are nothing if not ingenious so they leave the women with the spoils before marching out to smoke in the car park. It’s a great image as they turn their nose up at the healthy breakfast and march out to chain smoke. Something about horses and water comes to mind. . .

But the Chinese are no more immune to the lure of hotel freebies than the rest of us. Having secured what they viewed as an unsavoury breakfast they had to keep it. So it was that the foyer was awash with men growling directions at the women whilst they repacked their belongings. Transatlantic trips with families generate a lot of luggage and we all know that you take back more than you left with. Clothes, toiletries, gifts and the obligatory electronics were stacked and restacked to allow the addition of the free breakfast. I saw bags repacked three times to no avail but when I left they were still trying.

The army often say that no man is left behind, in hotels the same is true of freebies. One interesting observation is that whilst the Chinese appear disorganised and chaotic they are actually well ordered. Whether it was due to their communist roots or some sense of morality they didn’t try and push the gift. Nobody looked in a bag and rejected it in favour of another choice and nobody took more than a bag per person. I have to wonder is it a result of such a huge population drawing on limited resources that somehow curtails the development of greed.

Note to all using Heathrow today, the fruit juice cartons exceed the stazi fluid limits for flying. Expect to be delayed while 50 Chinese repack their luggage again!

Moving crowds and odd breakfasts

Hotels, especially large ones, are oddly transitional in the evening. Unlike a pub, where people drift through, hotel bars have distinct waves. This is never more noticeable than on a nice summers day, hence the post today. For those of us that return in the afternoon there is the afternoon tea crowd to greet us after work. They will be nursing a careful half, keeping their mind on business although occasionally there will be a partner swallowing in volume. Your afternoon crowd you see are using the space for meetings or, occasionally, ladies that lunch. There is a purpose to afternoons in a hotel.

These people get slowly displaced by the ‘couple on the way home’ crowd that inhabit the late afternoon. These are the people that meet up on route home, the hotel a convenient motorway junction. The late afternoon crowd have to tread carefully, timing is key, if they stay too late they get drawn into the later evening crowd and all is lost. There is the meet up for dinner crowd, a couple of drinks with dinner invariably preceded by a soda water. The early diners are the meeting delegates or casual acquaintances, watching the rounds and scoring each drink brought.

Then there is the residents, the beer poured before you ask crowd. Make no mistake this is our bar, it is us that knows who to ask for what and when. The bad day crowd that stride from entrance straight into the arms of stella. We are the industrial drivers, the powerhouse driving the economy. Oh and we know there is no hot water in room 282. We survive all others, this is our pub not just a bar, we know the people, the rules and the story of the bar because this is our home.

Honourable mention to one other, unique, representative of our culture. To the man in the red top I say, you sir are a legend. Want to know why? At 06:00 he was smoking outside with a glass of champagne. That boy knows how to party, peanuts and a bottle of bubbly, is there any better way to start the day