Today's big news is that I am "reserve choice" for the job I interviewed for a few days ago; as I suspected, it's gone to an "internal candidate" – i.e. they knew who they wanted to appoint but just went through the motions of an open application process because they had to. Good feedback though, they liked me and thought I could do a good job, with one or two minor reservations as to the breadth of my experience.

The position was to work with and for our local "sex workers", ensuring that those forced into it were given an escape, that those who'd been trafficked were removed from harm, and that others were at least keeping out of trouble and not annoying anybody, and had a route out if they wanted it.

Long-time readers will know of my close interest in these issues, and I thought that the job would be very challenging – especially for a man, there's very few male sex workers round here – but ultimately also highly rewarding.

Ah well. I'm not unduly disappointed, because I kept myself more in hope than expectation; nor is it the case that I'm disadvantaged, since I'm still in my current night care/supervision work. I'm still keeping my eyes open…

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At about the same time I took the call, a parcel flopped on the doormat -

Thank you, Ang and Rem; your timing, as ever, is immaculate…

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Of course now the World Cup is taking up major parts of the day; although I'm finding the radio coverage much more to my liking than the TV, which is obsessed with instant "action replays" from six different angles each and every time someone kicks the ball ["less is more" is a philosophy that grows in importance all the time, I find].

After the first round of games, my preliminary conclusions are that Germany looked miles ahead of anybody else; adopted favourite team Slovenija will depend on their match against the USA as to what they do in the tournament; my £5 bet on Mexico, based solely on Giovani's eight games on loan to Ipswich, is pretty much wasted; and I wonder what noise it makes if you fart down a vuvuzela?

All complaints about the above image should be sent to atomic@b3ta through the link, and not to…

As I type, it's my 38th Birthday. Nothing bitchenly amazing has happened, since I worked last night and am at work and slacking off whilst I type tonight, I just slept the day off round my Ma's.

She did though have an Amazon box for me;

….though the last one may be a curse as well as a blessing, given its low reputation amongst Who-maniacs. [They certainly aren't infallible though.]

I don't have a hang-up about years or numbers, so I roll my eyes at anyone going "who-ooo, a step closer to the big four-oh". Hey, if we're talking disasters predicted for 2012, neither my 40th birthday nor the end of the Mayan calendar will be anything near as calamitous as Boris Johnson's London Olympics.

I would, though, like to add my annual reflection of how my birthday proves that astrology is bollocks [as if any more proof were needed]; I was born on the same day, at [AFAIK] pretty much the same time, as the Formula 1 driver Rubens Barrichello -

- He's rich. He's famous. He's very talented in what he does. He travels the world, and is surrounded by 'beautiful'* women.

Whereas I… um….

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Weird Coincidence But Not Actually That Weird If You Think About The Probability, #21419:

Some time ago I added a friend from my town's little market, L., on FaceArse. She'd just joined up and was using it to get in touch with her old school mates [from a time several decades before I was at school] and have a few reunions.

One photo which came up in my news feed for some unknown reason grabbed my attention. I clicked on it to see the full version; there was L., alongside one of her old classmates. I peered closer, and clocked the tag underneath; "What the…"

When I next met L on the market on Saturday and talked to her about it, I confirmed what I thought. The woman was Mrs. B……….., and she had been my GCSE English teacher back in Romford over twenty years ago. Still teaching in a different part of East London, and although obviously there was a difference in what twenty-something years had done, still very much looking the same.

It's hard to describe the feelings this brought to me; a kind of mixture of "ooooh…" and "AAAAARGH!!!" – this period of my life was a highly turbulent and volatile one [yes, okay, and quite a lot of the time it was also a drunk and stoned one]. Learning about 'the Scottish play' was not high on my personal agenda then, let's say.

In fact, when I mentioned all the above to my mother today, she said; "Oh yes, Mrs B….., I remember her; at the last Parents' Evening before you left school, she was almost screaming with despair at how you just wouldn't write anything. I told her to get you to write about heavy metal, it was the only thing you were interested in."

I can well understand this. It can't have been easy dealing with the teenage me [gawd knows, I only managed it with chemical assistance] and my eagerness to get myself out of the education system as fast as possible.

Also, time [and therapy] has softened my anger which I had at anything to do with school, and I can see what she was trying to do, even if I didn't agree with the way she did it; and I can appreciate the frustration of her compulsorily having to push Shakespeare onto ungrateful teenagers. I'll even acknowledge the one brilliant thing she did, which was get me to read and understand Orwell's best works.

So once the initial AAAARGH!!! had calmed down, I thought, "well, I've got the link to her FaceArse profile, shall I drop her a message?" And I don't know about that.

Part of me wants to say "hello there, I know I was a right twat then, but I appreciate where you were and what you were doing now, so thank you"; and part of me thinks that's a shit idea, the past should be left as an unvisited foreign country, and although to her there may be the initial curiosity value of "how did he turn into that tranny weirdo social worker?" what else would it achieve?

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas? You know what to do.

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* The F1 version of beautiful, anyway: an identikit tall, slender, blonde, white, holding a pole on the grid and appearing to have the brain of a lobotomised frog. I have other definitions.

Snow Day.

[Well, snow nights if you want to be pedantic, given that it was yesterday evening I was due to work, but told not to bother trying to drive in.]

I haz new shoes, courtesy of my good friends S & C, thus -

- so it's unlikely I'll be venturing out for the rest of the day…

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Also in the post the other day, courtesy of the ubergorgeous Zo;

The art of the euphemism, along with that of the innuendo, are the parts of my language I've always most enjoyed – particularly, of course, if one can combine the two for scatological effect.

Much of this love for the coarser end of the language comes from childhood heroes like Kenneth Williams, himself a master at the loaded phrase.

It's also part of a reaction against the London culture I grew up with, which eschewed euphemism in favour of direct – usually over-direct – speech, loaded with terms the late Mrs Whitehouse would have had a heart attack over.

In my teenage years, it soon became apparent that in this context swearing lost its meaning through mindless repetition [kind of like that famous version of an Alexei Sayle song [warning: serious swearing on this link]] and that the best way to make an impact was to invent a suitable euphemism instead; the best contribution I made to my peers' language was how going for a shit became having an Ivana [rhyming slang, trump -> dump].

I doubt that one appears in this volume – and its publication date of 2000 means it'll miss some of the euphemisms that are part of the zeitgeist as I type – but at least, unlike Viz's Profanisaurus, it won't be filled with circular references that euphemise the euphemisms.

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The earliest euphemism I can remember using, as a playground taunt at an early age, was "your mother wears army boots".

This choice phrase, whose origin is probably in black US culture from the 1930s, long long before "yo'mamma" was a childish Internet forum stipend, I think may also have been an example of homophobia – coming from the same direction as "she wears 'comfortable shoes'."

Certainly we were unaware, at least consciously, of any such meanings at the time – in the late 1970s these things were still very much taboo – but at least, unlike the casual mindless use of gay for "bad" now, showed a little creative thinking in whoever coined it.

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As taboos change, so do the euphemisms. Not all of them are fun. One nasty one that's crept into the language, warping a perfectly useful word, over the past few years is any reference to the "indigenous British" – used by white supremacists to try to claim some form of entitlement to their ludicrous ideas.

Despite that, it's still a dynamic and inventive area of language – and there's always room for more. So for today's big question what I want y'all to do is try and invent a new euphemism, which may well sweep the nation [just like the Mudshark did].

You don't have to say what it's for – part of the fun will be guessing. I'm going to suggest "the giraffe wants to go for the highest leaves", "he often says 'ooh, she's about my size'", and "he's got shares in Flora margarine".

Over to you!

Sometime on Friday night, the ice broke and I surfaced.

It's not predictable as such, but it's about twice a year that suddenly I find my mood dropping faster than a Gillette sponsorship of a prominent golfer*.

Last Tuesday lunchtime I was, as is my wont, on my little town's market sinking coffee and enjoying my friends there, happy as Larry** – and then, six hours later, I was panicky, shivering, wanting to vomit, paranoid, filled with obsessive catastrophic thinking, and generally utterly unable to look after myself.

This Saturday lunchtime found me back on the market and just about back to normal – well, not quite, but certainly running at 90% rather than about 0.0001%.

The causes, such as they are, are unknown, although there are factors; a bad meal and a bad sleep on Monday, a December lack of sunlight and encroachment of "Ve Haff Vays Of Making You Haff Fun" season, and – I'm told – I should have expected something of a "rebound" from the food poisoning of a couple of weeks ago, an aftershock as my system finally returns to normal, a lurch back to average following the slight high one gets from not being stuck on the bog all night.

Anyway. No serious damage done. And hopefully having the dip now means that I'll stay stable for the rest of the cold, dark season.

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An early Xmas present from the gorgeously-employed Max always helps;

The man with the most-misspelt name in British comedy [just ahead of David Bladdiebub***]

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The other event of the past week, slightly before I hit into my low, was that after months of wavering inbetween active participation and blatantly ignoring it, I finally closed my account on [websitebeginswithO].

The final straw, in this case, was being told I was both "fascist" and "communist" [surely some mishtake?] because I agree with our Government testing all cars here over a certain age to make sure they're not a deadly-dangerous high-speed bullet likely to run over your kid thereby saving several thousand lives per year.

The subject itself is stupid. But for some time now I've not wanted to post much on there because anything at all "controversial" [ie anything not pictures of fluffy bunnies] attracts the attention not only of my friends on there, but also of idiots, nutcases and Libertarians****.

Frog that shit. I'm not interested in what they say, and not interested in any site which allows them to say it at me in any way they like. If I wanted to spend my life arguing with Interwebz tosspots, I'd set up a climate change, evolution or multiculturalism blog.

Coincidentally, I'm told that the only open message boards / forums that don't suffer from Shitcock Syndrome are the ones that contain lots of links to free naughty photography and video materials. Presumably the visitors there are too distracted to spend time in crappy arguments…

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* I apologize for this reference, but it's the best one which came to mind right now.
** If anyone knows who Larry actually is, please send him my regards.
*** This is an ancient Mary Whitehouse Experience reference which nobody else will remember, but wtf.
**** I leave it as a reader exercise to decide how much the Venn diagram of these three groups overlaps.

A week of two halves. First up it was recovery week, with the cold mentioned in last Sunday's post breaking out into that kind of "bad enough to stay home, not quite bad enough to completely wallow" middle-ground; so I got through a lot of media instead, including Spider, Stiff, The Mitchell & Webb Sound Series 1-3, Dr Strangelove, Sorry I've Got No Head, and far too much early-hours and daytime TV whilst my sleep pattern has coalesced around emptying my nose.

Me Too! – "Balamory" without any of the redeeming features.

"Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers" has been the best of the above, an eye-opening look into the alternatives to burial for the body, especially in what happens when they're "donated to science".

Despite any paranoia that one could end up on the dining table of a medical student with a low tolerance for alcohol and a high curiosity into sexual experimentation, or that bits of you will be left on the number 66 bus on the last day of semester, it's actually a pretty low chance that you'll be used by budding doctors. Other alternatives, for example being used in car-crash safety research or new surgery practice are available too.

There's also chapters exploring alternatives to the two "normal" disposal routes; composting and, well, "rendering", though in a non-invasive and a non-toxin-releasing way. There's also some lovely side-issues addressed drolly in footnotes: an account of a sheep necropsy is footnoted [paraphrase] "it's a necropsy because technically humans can only perform an autopsy on other humans. To get a sheep autopsy, it'd have to be a very different world – one in which a sheep was cutting another open."

Perhaps the best feature of the book was that it made me want to leave my body for "further use". My instructions to my family so far have been for organ donation followed by cremation, but if my body can be of benefit to people, I'm all for that.

You'll still all have to sit through the Undertaker Sketch at the memorial service though…

"Fred! Get some parsnips!"

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The last two days, feeling better but not at work, I've spent sitting in my little town's supermarket selling prize draw tickets: a little local girl is in Great Ormond Street hospital with a kidney tumour, and a few people have got together to raise money so the parents can survive and go back and forth whilst the treatment happens. I reckon we got through about five hundred tickets at a pound each.

Part of the success is that I'm lucky enough to live in a fairly well-off area – the supermarket's catchment area covers quite a sweep of rural Suffolk including some very "desirable" areas – and partly that the localness, the immediacy of the cause insantly resounds with people in a way that overseas causes maybe sometimes don't.

I think also, in these days of "third sector" corporate monoliths, there's still some advantage that the "charity" is three local mums in their kitchen rather than a "brand", with a whole raft of sales executives and middle management to pay off before the 'cause' sees a penny of benefit. [Yes, I mean you, MajorIllnessCharity Which May Or May Not Involve The Initials C.R. Which Butterfly Used To Work For Before They Chucked Her Out For Not Pushing Volunteers Hard Enough On Sales Targets.]

What's been interesting, in a socio-anthropological way, is the reaction of people to me and S. sitting in the foyer; how many of them are immediately interested in us even before they know we're fundraising, how many people utterly refuse eye contact and stride past as if they're in a speed-walking race, and how many people feel compelled to give an excuse ["I've got no money", said the ageing executive in the suit on his way in, only to be spotted coming out again with a bagful of Special Brew].

And of course that makes me realize how much I've done this myself, like telling Big Issue sellers I've already got this week's and how I "select" which ones to be a customer of by my own personal criteria [some of which are completely illogical and unsophisticated, as the cute Roma girl seller in [nearbymiddleclasstown] could tell you].

Or, as I put it to S. – "all these housewives coming in during the daytime – you need a bit of eye candy like me to sell tickets"

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Today's Big Questions [select either or both, depending on which you want to answer]:

- What "method" do you want for your funeral? Why? Have you chosen anything special for a service or memorial?

- What charity or cause do you support? What makes you give or withhold from people collecting for charity or selling The Big Issue? What illogical undefensible criteria do you have?

What this post isn't:

I meant to do a post on the successful trialling of "shooting galleries" for heroin addicts, but I can't be arsed to eke out all of the relevant arguments, since the vast majority of people who come here already know and understand them, and you're probably already nodding your head along to "why wait for more trials?"

I meant to do a post on this season's silly political conference story, but I can sum up my feelings in the sentence "compulsory for none; optional for all".

I meant to do a post on the local news that my MP is to retire, then decided that nobody cares.

I meant to do a post on Jonathan Meades' very entertaining trashing of things cultural in Scotland, which continues tonight on BBCFour at 9pm, but it wouldn't be as much fun as watching the show.

Arse.

Instead, what you get is the results of twenty quid having gone Oxfam's way this morning;

[this, this, this, this, this]

…the last of those being an old friend that I'm going to re-read before I pass it onto Paula, who expressed an interest.

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin."

…he must've had some of that dodgy batch of Pernod that I tried once in my teenagehood…

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Today's Big Question: Add a comment that isn't.