Is anyone else here a solipsist...

...or is it just me?

Perhaps...

It wasn't a terribly clever idea to leave it until today to call the "I can't afford to pay my income tax" help-line.

How unusual for me to be leaving something until the last possible minute, though, eh?  It must be nice to have organisational skills, but whenever I try to prioritise developing some, I get distracted by an urge to draw cartoons about my mother taking meth.

Finding My Groove

(Photo taken by my glamorous assistant, Robin)

Meh.  Rather than show you the x-rays of my arm to show you the bit of bone they need to lop off my elbow, here's a photograph in which I'm showing off the ulnar groove on a pterodactyl's arm instead.

Speaking of violent castration with a Stanley knife, I went to see The Choir last night at the new theatre above The Stag pub in Victoria.  Not a bad play, although I just spoiled the ending, so now you don't have to worry about getting the horn watching men in their late twenties pretending to have sadomasochistic sex.  Of course, I'd pay to watch that any time, but the characters were meant to be 11, so it was a little bit odd to be thinking about how brutally you wanted to do one of the actors in it.  Ok, so now you want to see it again, don't you?

For some reason one of my favourite things at the moment is coming up with ideas for rape-themed Venn diagrams.  I'm not entirely sure that this is a healthy project.

I had the pre-operation assessment yesterday, too.  Calling it that kept making me think I was going to wind up with a statutory declaration renouncing and rescinding my previous gender, but alas, all they wanted to do was weigh me, measure me and decide if I was likely to die from anaesthetic.  It wasn't like the time when I overdosed on valium after the murder trial and went to hospital high as a kite and was told I was too fat to die that day.  Instead, he commented that my BMI of 26 was "probaby ok" and this was because BMI's a blunt tool that doesn't account for muscle mass or bone density.

So it's official.  I'm not fat, I'm just big boned.

Which is, apparently, the crux of the matter.  On my elbows, where I need ulnar decompression, my nerves would probably have healed from the RSI by themselves were it not for my having a bit too much bone there, hence the need to slash my arms open (down the road, not across the street, too!) and then get inside with a pair of bolt cutters to trim the bone away.  Sweet.

The United Kingdom of the Dead.

It seems that everyone is declaring this country to be not only in recession but also bankrupt, with unemployment figures set to hit three and a half million by the end of the year and another gazillion pounds to be pumped into the banking system to force them to lend more money when it was the country's addiction to easy credit that drove us off a cliff like this.  On top of that, they now want to part-privatise the Royal Mail, where they're going to have the taxpayers under-writing the bad pension burden and then hand all the profits over to the private companies.  Oh!  And there's plans to give patients a budget to spend on their healthcare which will just mean that the hospitals which struggle now will be truly fucked in a few years while, guess what, private companies can cream off the profits.

It really does sound to me like they're flogging a dead horse.  Obviously, that has nothing to do with a photo of a Tauren Death Knight that I put up here, but there weren't many sadomasochistic images of dead horses I could have posted without winding up with my blog getting shut down.

I just don't get why the solution to a recession based on toxic debt is to give banks our money and force them to lend it back to us.  Surely there's some incredible tomfoolery going on here.  Would it not make more sense to buy the banks and turn them into Post Offices which act as branches for the Bank of England, thereby keeping the profits public, controlling lending to businesses and piling money back into the postal system and protecting a whole heap of jobs in the process?

I don't know, really.  I can't really see much of a way out of this, but surely there has to be something better than punishing people for not getting into debt and bailing out those who lived beyond their means for a decade?  God.  I sound like one of the hippies I knew in Norwich and used to think maybe they had a point about economic reform until I found out about the speed factory in their spare bathroom that paid their rent and realised perhaps everyone's a capitalist the moment they get a chance.

Blue Monday.

Pondering., originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

Apparently today is the day when Sky Travel says we should be depressed enough to contemplate buying their products. Well, today has indeed been challenging - I was having very colourful nightmares about forthcoming surgery, then went for a lacklustre swim and then it took me more than an hour to get from Ladywell to Greenwich. Yes, I could have walked it quicker and not been an hour and a half late to work but there was something interesting on Woman's Hour so I waited it out, not realising the whole world was gridlocked after an accident in the Blackwall Tunnel.

So, I got into work a bit later than planned, then decided I should start to take some of the lieu time I'm owed and came home at lunchtime. I think this was the right thing to do.

The weekend's been a giggle; we've been getting quotes for the new place to be done up and they vary from tiny (but with much sucking of teeth at possible complications) to comical, so we're still sorting all that out but decided to go and get a bit of pampering on Saturday, so we went to a grooming salon in Chiswick. It was lovely, dark wood panelling, nice big mirrors, comfy sofa where you could watch only slightly de-tuned tv news while you waited. I got my hair cut, which went something like this:

"Do you know what you want done?
"Not really, I just want a haircut."
"Should I give it a bit of texture so you can style it?"
"Not really, I don't ever bother to do anything with my hair."
"Oh, right. What product do you use on your hair?"
"Erm. Water and my fingers, usually."
"No, I mean which wax or gel?"
"..."
"Right. I see. Short back and sides?"
"Thank you."
"Would you like a shave?"
"No, I look like a little old lady if I don't have a beard."
"Short back and sides!"

I guess I'm not really the kind of customer they want - I don't like people touching my hair, I don't like putting product in my hair and it's so thick half the time it breaks the clippers they use to cut it. At least that's one measure where I can say they surpassed Mister Toppers - he didn't plough into my hair with the clippers until they jam or slice off the mole the size of a raisin I have behind my right ear.

Jonathan, however, was a delight for them. As well as a haircut that involved lots of discussion about how to look after it and help it grow, he had a straight razor shave and had his eyebrows tidied up by a woman with some wax. The haircut was good, even if the man cutting it styled it as though all his clients wanted Princess Diana bouffe and the shave almost as good as Jonathan could manage at home, assuming Jonathan wasn't allowed to use his hands and I switched the light off in the bathroom. The eyebrow shaping wasn't bad, either, but I guess I'm really not as much of a pampergrooming person as I thought.

Every time they said Grooming Salon, I kept expecting to find Maddie in the piles of hair on the floor and heard "Baby P!" in my head in the kind of Scottish Accent that's not been heard enough since Absolutely ended and there was no more Stoneybridge.

Anyway, with hair on my forehead and just-waxes pink patches looking like eighties eye-shadow on Jonathan, we went shoe shopping in Westfield as soon as we'd nipped back to the new flat to sort out the bouffe. We could have done with one of those carpet bashing things, would have made the job easier!

When I say we went directly to Westfield, what I mean is that we stopped at Maison Blanc for pastries and a pot of Earl Grey while chatting to a local friend about electric cars, but that's about as quickly as I expect anything to happen once we've moved into an area full of such delightfully pretentious distractions.

Westfield was incredible. I hated it at first, but that was because I had forgotten to bring painkillers with me so my arm seized up, then my shoulder and my hand, so I was stumbling around looking for a pharmacy and then begging them for anything with codeine in it. Oddly enough, after necking half a pack of Paramol, the experience became a lot more enjoyable. Habitat focus on the final syllable in their name more and more, so we gave up on looking at home furnishings and instead went shoe crazy. After being told that Converse boots do not come in a 12 by a snippy woman in one shop, we then spent about an hour in Schuh giggling with the assistants and trying on a series of increasingly ridiculous shoes. I got the size 12 Converse boots I was after and these lovely beauties and Jonathan also left with two pairs of trainers. I've got total shoe envy at his blue adidas shoes so I'm not showing you a link in case they make me cry.

New shoes and then new jeans from UniQlo and then up to meet a bunch of mates for a booze up in Shoreditch. We went to a couple of pubs, got rained on very heavily so my lovely shoes now look properly in need of some TLC and then wound up back at the Joiner's Arms, which was fun after about four pints, which was enough to mask the smell in there. Lots of fun people and good music, so I might have to overlook my natural dislike of the Hoxton Fin to go back there some time when it's not pissing down.

We got offered Khat by a strange man who was selling it for Fifty quid then offered it for eight when we said no. If only bathroom bartering were so easy. I grabbed a taxi and went to join Jonotron at a party in Bromley-by-Bow which was a lot of fun, but I'm slightly baffled at why you'd need an ever-flowing supply of cocaine and ketamine and vodka when all you want to do is stay up late and chat about Madonna. Nice guys, but I'm not sure I was in quite the same zone as them so fell asleep on the sofa after the taxi had driven the wrong people home and snuck out in the morning to forage for hangover food.

Wound up back in Shoreditch for cramped Sunday lunch that failed to magically undo the damage done by the pints at the Joiners' Arms and then went for a strange wander into the twilight zone of gay London on a Sunday, watching a very drug-fucked man on G slobbering over an old man who kept whistling through his dentures while saying dirty things to him, had a tennis player en route to a tournament in LA tell me he thought I must work out a lot because I'm so firm to the touch, which I didn't mind as he showed me his hairy six-pack and let me poke it until I couldn't stop giggling and then I figured that I'd managed an appropriate amount of crazy fun for a weekend that would otherwise have been spent thumbing the Ikea catalogue and playing the new content for Fable 2.

So clearly, now it's Monday I'm going to play Fable 2.

Enjoy!

Cute But Sad Comics Mailing List

Rather than continually spam my blogs with Badger stuff forever, I'm setting up a mailing list for a monthly newsletter thing about Cute But Sad stuff so I can get back to blogging about adventures and stuff like bathroom tiling. As such, if you want in, can you email cutebutsad at gmail.com to let me know and then you'll get something cute but sad in your inbox every month. Otherwise, I'm going to start doing weekly updates on cutebutsad.co.uk too!

Weekend.

Well, last week was spent busily beavering away with Annie and Robin working to have some kind of marketing plan for my comics. It was very funny; it almost felt like a job for a moment there, with Annie coming up with lots of ideas, me looking a bit blank and then hiding and doodling and Robin taking notes like a good support worker should. Whether or not I'll make any money out of it all remains to be seen, but my suspicion is that I won't, but it's worth doing anyway.

Jonathan and I spent Saturday mooching around Chiswick and bouncing around in sofa showrooms and spending far longer than is healthy pretending to give two hoots about which light fittings we get for the flat when we move. Saturday night was a boat party in Chelsea at a friend's house boat, which was wonderful. A few of the men there kept disappearing into the bathroom to furtively do drugs (at a house party? Silly orange people.) whereas I snuck off into the bathroom to get changed out of my long johns because the coal fire was making me sweat like I was going class A crazy. This precaution was purely practical rather than sartorial, as the party didn't descend nearly as far as I'd hoped, so no danger of committing the fashion faux pas of turning up to an orgy in thermals.

Jonathan also complained that I've been terribly well behaved lately - not that he was desperate for me to initiate some kind of crazy meth binge orgy at a friend's housewarming, but perhaps he has a point. We spent Sunday morning talking to a bathroom fitter who thought it would cost us ten thousand pounds to get a new bathroom. I just thought I should be given money to endure another moment of pondering which kind of chrome taps I'd want. So, Jonathan might have had a point that I've become a little domesticated lately. In any case, I figure that's a gauntlet being thrown down and he might just regret it!

New year, old me. There might be tears before bedtime.

All Change.

It rather looks as though Jonathan and I will be leaving Brockley in a couple of months as he's inherited a flat in Chiswick. It seems like it would be folly to try to sell it now, no matter how well it translates to a flat in Brockley, it's not a good time to sell, so we're going to do it up and move in there at least temporarily so we can save on rent and put the money into doing the flat up instead.

I'll certainly be very sad to leave, but eek, this will be a marital home!

How Badger Spent New Year.

Poor little badger should have joined us up on Telegraph Hill.

New Year, Peg's Ear

All in all, it was a brilliant end to a less than great year that was also awesome in so many ways.

Low moments of 2008 included when my eardrum burst, when I found out I have quite serious nerve damage to both arms, when I had to spend six months off work and can't return to a job I used to quite often enjoy, so have seen a lot less of the people I love most because I don't work with them any more.

However, sometimes to take a leap of faith, you need a little push from despair and some wonderful things came from the rubbish stuff.  Most notably, in 2008 I got engaged and have had phenomenal levels of support from friends so I've never really felt alone when I've been in pain.

Badger has been a real highlight for the last year.  Obviously he started out as a sort of autobiographical reference to my fears and the sadness I felt at the fitness and health I was so proud of coming unravelled so quickly, but soon he took on a life of his own and I've been so delighted that people connected with him and that he's done so well.  I mean, thanks to the seemingly endless support of Robin and Dan, Badger wound up in one of Forbidden Planet International's top five best books of 2008.

What's in store for 2009?  It's looking packed already!  I've started work on Pterodactyl's story, but you'll have to wait for me to get an a3 scanner before I can show you too much of that. Jonathan and I are getting married (assuming we can sort it out in time!) and he's buying a flat for us with his inheritance (eep!).  I'm going to have two rounds of surgery on my arms to try to fix the damage done to my elbows.  I've got to look for a publisher and start booking myself in for the comics events coming up in the year ahead.  I've missed the boat with the UK Web Comix Thing (oh, the shame!)  but I should pull my finger out with that.

Oh, and I applied for the residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which I suspect every comic book maker in the world has done so I've very little chance of getting!  Wish me luck!