Ouch.

Beth & I have a hangover.

Male cosmetics.

Have you noticed that whilst women have cosmetics or a range of cosmetics, men have 'a system'.

Q

How come 'abbreviation' is such a long word?

Eggs with poo on.

As our craving for all things organic increases we seem to be taking a step back in our visual aesthetic as far as food goes. Back, I should point out, to how it used to be in ‘the good ol’ days’. (I have no idea when these fabled ‘good ol’ days’ were as I quite like ‘these’ days and anyone older than me seems to have existed in ‘the good ol’ days’ making the year range from something like the 1900’s to the ‘90’s.)
I’m talking about the way that now, the more mud a cabbage; tomato or carrot has on it, the better. 10 years ago everyone associated mud on food with it being unclean, (which of course it was but only in an unwashed sense not a leprous one), which, we believed in our heightened health-paranoid state, would lead to e-coli. Food with earth on was avoided in favour of sterile looking, shrink-wrapped food.
Now the dirtier it is the better it must be. The potato’s been grown on a real farm by a real farmer, (who’s not a city boy who’d got bored earning millions, bought a Barber, a cap and a pig-farm), transported ten minutes down the road by the farmer’s wife and lovingly placed in Tesco’s within twelve minutes of being dug up. It alludes to our romantic notions of how we’d like things to be if it weren’t for the fact that we can’t actually be fagged not to go to Tesco so they keep getting bigger and bigger and obliterating the smaller stores that actually do sell stuff from local farms. With free mud.
So, now we have eggs with poo on. We always did when I was a kid. They come out of a chicken’s bum after-all. Then for a brief period they were washed to cater for the squeamish consumer. And now they have poo on again which is great. Because they’re fresh. I like eggs with poo on them.

Decaff...

I've started drinking decaf tea after 4 o'clock in the afternoon in a vain effort to help me sleep better. All that caffeine in my system from the repeated tea breaks can't have been doing me any good now can it. Trouble is, decaff tea tastes everso slightly of wee.

I NEED SOME WORK I NEED SOME WORK I NEED SOME WORK!
NYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!

Oh and...

Yesterday I achieved so little, but today I painted a wall. Good huh?

My freelance life. Part two.

One of the worst things about freelancing is chasing payments. You find yourself in a real quandary if you have to start pestering someone to pay you, which by definition, is irritating for both parties. The problem being that if you're having to make repeated calls and send several e-mails then the payment is probably overdue, that means that the company you're dealing with possibly don't have sufficient funds to pay you. Now that's all well and good but that's of no interest to me. I've done the work for you and now I want my money. You've had plenty of time to sort it out for me and, by rights; you should've factored my costs into yours from the beginning.
However, part of freelancing is building 'relationships' with companies and it's very difficult to start badgering someone if you'd like to get work off them in the future. So you see it's pretty much a lose-lose situation on the side of the little guy. After all they will have no problem finding another designer, especially down here in Brighton.

Q

How deep would the ocean be if sponges didn't live in it?

My freelance life.

Well today I think I hit a new high in freelance-lifing... I've achieved so little today it's scary. My current situation is this: I'm skint, (British word for penniless), I have no paying work coming in and the weather is nice. It's driving me nuts! One of the craziest things about freelancing, and the one thing I never even considered whilst I was permanently employed, is the whole peaks and troughs thing. It doesn't seem to make any sense, how can I have so much to do some days and so little others. It maka noa sensa. Well, actually it makes perfect sense. It's called life. So, freelancing... Hmmmm... How best to deal with it. Not sure I know the answer to that one. Suffice to say it's tricky, especially if, like me, you work from home. You become a kind of unwilling hermit, your work and your situatuion holds you hostage in your own house. The main difference between this hostage situation and a real one is that I can call Marc and meet him in the pub for a shandy. Wonder if Terry Waite ever tried that?

Can't sleep.

It's 3 o'clock in the morning here in Blighty and I'm up. Can't seem to sleep at the moment, what laughably passes for my brain is full of rubbish and convaluted thoughts that it obviously feels the need to deal with when I close my eyes to sleep. During the dya I mostly just think about stuff like work, how the misses is getting on, how many times can I legitimately take a shower, does my hair need cutting, what is that over there?, you know, life-altering stuff. So why the hell can't the ol' grey matter deal with all of it when I'm up. Surely it's better for both of us.

This is supposed to be the future.

Where's my jetpack?