Been texting Mr Expence asking how my cats are and he won't reply. This is upsetting me, because I've had my cats since 1995 and I didn't leave them with him by choice when I moved out, I left them because I thought it was better for them, and I miss them all the time.

So then I texted Mr Expence asking if it was ok if I popped in to see them, and still got no reply.

So because I was passing today, I just went round. Because, after all, I still own half the feckin house, and have a LEGAL RIGHT to be on the premises whether I live there or not, according to the citizens' advice bureau.

Only to discover that he's changed the locks.

Why?????????????????? What was the point of that, apart to cause himself a whole load of pointless expense? I am hardly going to sneak in there when he's out at work and raid his collection of Soya Margarine, am I????

(Fucking vegans!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They wouldn't be so feckin uptight if they got their poncy self-righteous chops round a bacon sarnie once in a while....)

So anyway. I climbed over the fence to get round the back of the house (locks also changed), tried to break in (unsuccessfully), but did manage to coax both cats out of the cat flap to see me.

Was seriously tempted to bundle them both in the car and hot foot it out of there, but they both looked so well I couldn't bring myself to do it. MumCat's coat was the best I've ever seen it and Freda has put on loads of weight, the big fatso.

Tell you what though. I do really wish I'd pissed down his feckin tumble dryer vent.

Secretly being stalked, eh????

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Don't care, 'cos jesus loves me. Apparently.

Na na na na na.

Have today completed my first two days in a 'real' job in a real office for two years.

This means:
(1) I have been getting out of bed a lot earlier.
(2) I have to actually get dressed to go to work. In proper clothes, not trackie bottoms.
(3) I have to try and do something with my hair in the mornings. A considerable challenge, let me tell you.
(4) My journey to work takes 25 minutes instead of 25 seconds.
(5) I have to make conversation with real people, smile and be polite and stuff like that.
(6) I have to watch my swearing. Especially since my desk is intimately squeezed right alongside my new line manager's.
(7) I am going to be spending a lot more money on petrol... and on buying sarnies at lunchtime, instead of staggering to the fridge and eating hummous on ryvitas. (Well you don't seriously expect me to get up on time AND get dressed AND brush my hair AND make a packed lunch, do you???)
(8) I had to spend two hours this morning in a team meeting brainstorming on "service standards". And then another two hours being trained in "financial procedures". That never happened at home.
(9) Not a whiff of Countdown in sight. Although I did ask to be the person who wrote on the flipcharts during the team meeting, so that I could pretend to be Carol.
(10) I've got lost trying to find my car. Twice. Because all the concrete staircases look the same.
(11) I have to wear a card on a chain round my neck all day, with an embarrassing photo of me on it, in order to pass through internal doors.
(12) I can't comfortably retire to the loo with a copy of Glamour magazine when I feel the need.
(13) I had to confirm today what time I want off at Christmas. It's September for chrissake!!!

Anyway. I had to laugh. Received an entry form today from an amateur artist submitting two paintings to the Chairman's Art Show. The titles? 'Marina Sunset' and 'Petal Power'.

Nuff said...

Went to a writing workshop last night using a museum collection of natural history objects. John G, top bloke leading the workshop, did the '12-tone poem' exercise where you write down 12 words and swap them with someone else and then have to create a poem using only the 12 words you've been given. You can repeat them but you can't add any or change them.

The person who gave me my words had written them about a dead bird!!!

Here it is:

crawl over this
heavy cased wing

this pied wing segment
this heavy clawed crawl
this wing hooked over

crawl hard now
crawl heavy

The person who got my list of words (written about lichen) started tutting and sighing and saying they weren't very "promising". I can't imagine why. Personally I can think of loads of uses for the words 'fungus' and 'umbilicus' in the same poem.

...is stretching across every surface, out of the kitchen door, beginning to form a crockery queue down our street...

So I'm going to go and do it, before I've so much as ingested breakfast, and inspite of the fact that I have poorly eczema on my hands. Go on, tell me how brave I am...

Washing up taking over the world on account of me and morelearning spending last night at a friend's book launch instead of being domestic.

Morelearning knows everybody. It seems that half the people there last night were his former colleagues. Do I (a) hide behind the library shelves because they probably don't know he's split up with his ex and if I go over they'll probably just think "Why is that big haired woman hanging around morelearning?" or (b) stride over and say "I'm his new bird, pleased to meet ya"? or (c) edge over sideways, blush when introduced to anyone, and feel eyebrows raising all around when I put my hand on morelearning's leg during the reading?

I went for (c).

It was a great event and Pam read her "not seismic but subtle" poem just for me and I saw Arthur who is fab. And I thought KF might cause a scene because he's not too happy about the whole me/morelearning situation. But he didn't. So that was a relief.

WASHING UP.......

Have just had a phone conversation which ran thus:

Sixpence: Hello. I've got a copy of your Arts Strategy 2003-2006 and I need to know whether that is the most current document or if you have produced a new one for 2006 onwards.
Highly Rural Borough Council: The what?
Sixpence: The Arts Strategy.
Highly Rural Borough Council: Is it a magazine?
Sixpence: No, it's a strategy.
Highly Rural Borough Council: Oh. Well. They're probably still working on it. I expect if they'd done a new one it would have been delivered to you by now.
Sixpence: I don't think Arts Strategies get delivered door to door. Although think of the cultural enlightenment if they were.... And anyway, I live 100 miles outside your Borough, so probably not.
Highly Rural Borough Council: It might be on our website.
Sixpence: Nope, tried that.
Highly Rural Borough Council: Well, I expect you've got the right one.
Sixpence: Could I perhaps speak to the person who deals with Arts just to make sure?
Highly Rural Borough Council: Hold on. [sound of flicking through council staff list] I don't know who deals with this. Is it the Community Strategy?
Sixpence: No. It's the ARTS STRATEGY.
Highly Rural Borough Council: I'll put you through to someone.
[ring, ring]
Completely irrelevant staff member: Can I help?
Sixpence: Arts Strategy, blah blah, 2003-2006, blah blah....
Completely irrelevant staff member: That's got absolutely nothing to do with me........................

This, dear readers, is the world of local government, which I am imminently re-entering.

Pass the valium.

take it down the freeway like a bullet to the ocean
(that last bit's not mine, it's d harry)
playin show me the way to the next whisky bar (j morrison)
when i was about 23 my nan said to me
times ticking away you know dear
but now i'm 35
TICK TOCK OH FUCK OFF AND TICK IN SOMEONE ELSE'S FECKIN EAR I CAN'T BE BOVVERED
what shall i do with fifty eight grand?
try and get back on the property ladder sez voice of reason
scared of getting to seventy and there's
~nothing there~
if the stress don't kill me off first
hope you die before you get too old (g chadwick)
yeah thassa way to go
see ima poet and i'm just quoting other people
struggling to do that writing thing just now
was thinking last night (couldn't sleep)
about resurrecting my novel
characters are good, plot's crap
can i take the characters and put them in a different story?
i like the emily character she's cool she says the things i want to say but can't
because my mouth fills up with the Right Thing instead
apart from at work where I'm a Big Troublemaker
and i'm already causing problems in my new job
by refusing to spend 7 days of my life manning the Chairman's Art Show
frankly if someone wants to steal amateur watercolours
i might put my feet up and say "help yourself"
for the good of the district's cultural heritage
take 'em away
i say i say i say
what do you call an irishman who sits in your backyard?
paddy o'furniture
(you have to say it out loud)
that's from Sportswriter which i'm still reading
a book never took me so feckin long
headline divorce is killing my braincells shock
soon to be divorced poet ms sixpence said
"I have focused all my energies into desecrating my former life and crying and trying to build my new life
and now when i read a book the words go all wobbly
although i did read making divorce work by keith barret
that was quite funny"
now then
i gotta wash my big hair
so piss off
and stop distracting me

So yesterday I had my first day back in a 'proper' job for exactly 2 years. It wasn't really like a proper day at work though, it was an 'away day' and I knew nearly all of the people present already. They welcomed me back into the fold and made it not too traumatic for me, bless their lovely arty socks.

Quite a mind shift though - having to put clothes on and get in the car to go to work instead of rolling downstairs in my fluffy slippers and making regular trips to the kitchen for sustenance.

Our 'away day' was at the local Records Office, which has a special place in my heart since it was there that morelearning and I first met on 9th March (although we didn't start doing any naughty things for aaaaaaaaaaaaages after that, as we were both ensconced with other partners at the time).

I was having a good hair day that day (and believe me, that doesn't happen often); just think how different things might have been now if I wasn't...

He gave me girly butterflies by gazing into my eyes and I kept getting my words wrong - e.g. "George Best tribunal game" (I meant 'testimonial')....

Anyway this started off being a post about going back to REAL WORK and now I've gone all soft and started talking about ROMANCE and lost my thread completely. I blame morelearning; it's clearly his fault. All of it.... It started when he kept going outside to look for someone he didn't know from Adam who was lost trying to find the Records Office ("it bothers me, people being lost" he said) and then escalated when he smiled at me over a recipe book handwritten by someone long dead.

I didn't realise quite how close he was standing to me until I looked up over that recipe book, but when I did I couldn't help but notice that he had a very lovely mouth.

And that, as they say, was that.

[OK so I KNOW all that was unbearably soppy but if anyone wishes to vomit please don't do it on my blog; I have a vomit phobia. Ta.]

...that easily spreadable after all.

They had squirty Tip Top on special offer in the 'dented & past sell by date/so bizarre no one will buy it' shelf in Sainsbury's today, and morelearning wouldn't buy it.

The spoilsport...

Drove to Chapel en le Frith on Friday for a business meeting with a new client. Left home half an hour late, arrived 3 quarters of an hour late. (Well, I do have a reputation to maintain, for chrissake!!! Although on reflection, perhaps stopping at Trowell Services for a cheese sandwich was a bit of a luxury...)

Anyway I FUCKIN LOVE the peak district which is my favourite part of our green&pleasant land (although I am hoping to get better acquainted with the Rossendale valley...)

My meeting with a bloke who creates amazing huge sculptures out of electrical bits went well (I'm helping him find funding), then it was off to a very nice B&B in the Hope Valley where I had arranged to rendezvous with morelearning.

Had about 40 minutes before his train got in, so time to shave my legs (what can I say? we've only been together 4 months, these things are still important!) and put a skirt on (no time for pants - oops!!) and hotfoot it in my Honda Civic to Hope station where morelearning is just arriving all fresh and excited from his train journey (no really - he liked it!!) ready to give me a big hug (my feet dangled - he's a foot taller...)

The next hour and a half is CENSORED but by the time we got out to eat all the pubs had stopped serving food so we ended up at the Chinese restaurant in Hope where we ambitiously ordered Banquet B. Now morelearning may be sylphlike but he does have a proper man's appetite on him, whereas I have a reputation for leaving half of everything. So after the first 2 courses (of 5) I was already suffering, and even morelearning had to admit defeat half way through the 3rd course, although we did both have a stab at course 4 just to get our money's worth. I then asked for a glass of water but wish I hadn't, because when morelearning came to pay the bill (an officer and a gentleman) we discovered that they had charged us... wait for it...

£1.40. For a glass of STILL WATER.

morelearning's a lancashire lad and this did give his pocket some cause for concern, but I did manage to dry his tears eventually and we retired to our B&B.

After a slow, leisurely, pleasurable sha start to the day on Saturday we went down one of the local caverns (that's caverns, not taverns, jd) with a very chirpy tour guide although I honestly don't know how morelearning's neck survived given that even I was having to duck as the boat chugged through the old lead mine workings and I'm not 6ft4 plus height of hard helment.

Morelearning found a stalagmite and earned the respect of his peers and my feet got cold and my hard hat fell off when he kissed me. But luckily we did manage to find out the name of the barmaid off Coronation Street in 1964 which would otherwise have troubled morelearning for hours to come.

Then we came out into the blissful sunshine and went for lunch in a crap pub with a silly name (my version of the local history was better. There was this sparrow, right, and it lived in a pit...)

Then we drove the scenic route to Eyam, the plague village, but it was Shut (not another outbreak surely?) so we ate cake instead.

And then we came home and watched a very bizarre film and feel asleep on the sofa in front of the footie.

Cool.

There are some people around who are doing their damnedest to destroy morelearning and me. Which means that our life recently has consisted of doing things like clearing a heap of his belongings off the drive of his former abode at 4.30am in the midst of a bout of drinking too much brandy and crying (and shagging, needless to say).

And I would just like to tell the people in question that IT'S NOT WORKING.

*Morelearning is now going to work in matching shoes.
*We have an IKEA chair which I bought 2nd hand today off a very nice man. AND a matching footstool.
*We are borrowing a van tomorrow and picking up a sofa that you can actually enjoy sitting on.
*We are going to stay in a B&B on Friday night and get away from it all just for a few hours.

We are being put through some ALMIGHTY CRAP by the people that wish us dead.

But we're still here, and we're not going anywhere.

So now.

Bloody feckin insomnia again. Probably caused by having a very full day yesterday.

Oh and this:

As you know I sent a birthday present to the daughter of the former best man and his wife who no longer communicate with me due to me being an adulterous harlot.

These are people I've spent nearly every Friday night of my life with for the past 5 years, and seen fairly regularly during the 7 years before that.

I put a letter in with the parcel. I said I missed them. I said I understood they had loyalties to Mr Expence but I didn't think that necessarily required me being excluded from their lives and the little girl's. I said I knew they would have heard all about the divorce from Mr Expence but I would ask them to remember that there are two sides to everything and it does take two people to make a marriage work.

I got a card back yesterday.

The little girl had written "Thank you very much, love from K---" but no 'dear Sixpence', so I don't know whether they actually told her the parcel was from me or if they just got her to write a whole load of random thank you cards.

Her parents had written, "Dear Sixpence. Thank you for remembering K---. It was very kind and generous. We wish you well. T & S."

Spot the unspoken message.

It hurts.

Battling with my integrity not to blog here, in capital letters, some of the things Mr Expence did to make me feel like I didn't matter for the past 12 years.

No, he didn't beat me or get drunk every night or have affairs. He looked after me. His mum wrote a letter to my mum and said she thought I'd find it difficult now because Mr Expence "did spoil me".

But I can't tell you how good it is now to actually feel that I have a role in my household.

My family likes to make out that I am this dippy sod who needs looking after and can't get anything right. Oh, the evenings we have spent enjoying the hilarity of my various fuck ups.

But I do have other stuff to offer, and it's nice to have the (metaphorical) space in my home to be able to offer it. I'm a deeply nurturing person, and because I've not been able to have kids, and because of the way Mr Expence was, that nurturing aspect has been absent from my life.

Also, I did have other needs beside practical ones. I was well fed and watered and cuddled and cleaned up after. But I needed to be believed in.

I also needed someone to tell me it was ok to be sad. I've hit rockbottom so many times over the past 8 years with my infertility, and whenever I hit rock bottom I did it alone.

There are other things that made me what I am today (yeah - exactly), and I needed those to be acknowledged and to know that he knew how hard that made things for me sometimes.

He said he didn't want me blogging about him, but I haven't; this is a post about me, and what I needed. And see? I've resisted the temptation to give proven examples in capital letters.

I'm going to go back to bed now.

ps. I have just captured a spider the size of a small dog under a plastic pot. Since I'm sitting on the bottom of the stairs (the only place our Broadband will work at the moment) with no pants on I really didn't want a repeat of the Daddy Long Legs experience.
Now trying to work out how to get the spider outside without waking up morelearning by opening our doors (none of which fit, and all of which make a horrendous noise) or windows (none within easy reach). I can't squash it because my mother's voice saying "If you want to live and thrive, let a spider run alive" will ring in my ears for the next fortnight...

A Daddy Long Legs just flew up my skirt and tried to get in my pants!

(white cotton, low rise, Top Shop)

The litte bastard won't be trying that again.

Because, as The Who once said of Boris the Spider, "Never more will he crawl round/He's embedded in the ground."

morelearning and me (I?) need to find a way of getting our secondhand and being discarded by folks who can afford a decent one new sofa to our house, because if we are forced to sit on the sofabed I managed to extract from Mr Expence in the Big Carve Up for another week I fear permanent damage to our posture - especially morelearning who is a strapping figure of a man at 6 foot 3 and a half (very slim, size 12 feet, and I fancy the pants off him, despite having spent most of my adulthood indulging a partiality for short fellers).

This sofa bed. I'd forgotten that when me and Mr Expence lived in our my first house, one of the reasons we couldn't wait to move was that this thing was so damn uncomfortable that we were desperate to get a bigger living room so that we could buy a new one.

No wonder Mr Expence grudgingly conceded it to me in the Carve Up (I do seem to remember that he gave a hollow laugh at the time). Along with the tumble dryer which mysteriously developed a fault immediately afterwards, and the DVR (PVR, whatever they're called) which is now dubbed "Mr Expence's Revenge" in our house since the feckin thing gets a strop on every time you switch it on. Current strop involving not being able to get rid of the menu, which is a disadvantage when you're trying to watch Countdown and the menu is right in front of Carol's letters board.

So anyway, we've found a new 2nd hand sofa, which is not going to cause a stir in the pages of Home & Garden but is at least the right sort of colour, long enough for morelearning to stretch out on (mmmmmmmmmmmmm........ sorry where was I??) and you can (hopefully) sit on it (the sofa!!) for longer than 10 minutes without finding yourself being pitched gradually forwards towards the laminate floor of our living room.

But it is rather large (the sofa!!), and having measured up my friend Jools' van when she made us thai chicken last night (not in the van, she let us come indoors to eat) we have concluded that it will not fit. So now we are stuck, and stuck with the sofabed, until we can find an alternative means of transporting it that isn't going to cost us much, since we're broke.

Going to view the sofa was quite entertaining too, since nearly every yoof morelearning's ever taught seemed to be out and about on the streets of Nearbyvillage On The Hill that night and we were greeted at every turn with "Hello Sir!" "Alright Mr Morelearning?" etc etc.

Enough for now. I have to do some WORK. Cos no, I still ain't bleedin well finished it...

Big Hair Report: Haven't looked, and don't care really. I'll sort it out later.
Pants Colour & Style: Can't remember. Hold on [looks down trousers] Oh yeah. Translucent black shorties.
Bizarre Ailments: Slight nick in bikini line area due to careless trimming incident. Hence the shorties.

I have a brief reprieve on the deadline until tomorrow. Which is just as well because I have to spend today working on another project, which I should have finished 2 weeks ago, but I put back because I was feeling a bit overwhelmed at the time, what with all the major life crises. Ha!!!! I never bloody learn.

I feel all unsettled and I had a really crap night. Couldn't get to sleep and when I did was woken up again almost immediately by crippling lady pains and spent the next 2 hours snacking on co-codamol and whimpering.

Well it's now 8.30am and I have to go and listen to an hour's worth of audiio files and make evaluation notes against the 5 Generic Learning Outcomes of the museums service. This is not my 8.30am activity of choice. In fact I can think of many other activities that would probably sneak in ahead in the ratings. But I shall be indulging in none of those this morning.

Big Hair Report: Washed it last night and slept on it a bit damp, so it's kind of... fluffy.
Pants Colour & Style: Blue lacy ones yesterday. Today's pants not yet selected, cos I dunno what I'm gonna wear. My thin jeans are in the wash and all my normal ones are too big due to the Divorce Diet. Gonna have to dust down my office girl clothes when I start the proper job, since I doubt that my dressing gown and slippers will cut it in the sphere of local government.
Bizarre Ailments: I'm fecking knackered and my eyes are all puffed up. My ears itch. I have a weird blotch under my left big toenail. It's been there ages. Oh and did I mention I'm fecking knackered? Good.

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

(in case you're wondering why I haven't blogged)

I have just flattened the 15 cardboard packing boxes that were stacked in the corner of our living room.

WITH MY BARE HANDS!!

And I have to say it was very helpful in resolving any unexplored aggression.

I would recommend it to the Currently Divorcing everywhere.

Don't thank me, boys and girls; I consider it part of my social duty.

Now I've just got to find somewhere to put the feckers.

just lost my ENTIRE post, and can't be arsed to write it again. It went something like this: domestic chores. windy weather. Bigfoot & the Hendersons. ambulances on socks. brown sofas. blue pants. That'll have to do. sorry. the original was better.

Fresh from acupuncture session, dropped in at my former abode to pick up a few bits and see the cats. Gave them both a BIG cuddle and sobbed hysterically into their fur, which they tolerated admirably. Mumcat even seemed to quite enjoy it, but she's always been a bit weird.

Yesterday I suddenly sussed out that the reason I've had extortionate mobile phone bills for the past 4 months is that the '250 free texts' I'm supposed to receive as part of my contract had suddenly disappeared and now I'm paying for the feckers. (Ok, so it was a bit slack of me to take 4 months to notice, but I've had other things on my mind, ok????)

So I phoned Orange to complain and after the first "customer service" (ha!) "advisor" (ha!) had failed to appease me (he just kept repeating "I can't help you") they put me on to the Stroppy Customer Advisor who told me that the 250 free texts had been a special promotional deal for the first 18 months only.

Sixpence: So where did you put that in writing to me then?
Orange: We don't issue written contracts.
Sixpence: So how would I have known then?
Orange: It would have been stated in the Terms and Conditions.
Sixpence: And where are those written down?
Orange: On our website.

Tosspots!!

Big Hair Report: Quite presentable really.
Pants Colour & Style: Cream lacy shorties, slightly see through. (So get a WiFi signal booster, dennypoos!! )
Bizarre Ailments: Cat fur up nose due to sobbing incident. Various puncture wounds due to acupuncture. Squeezed spot on left buttock. It hasn't helped.