Begin again

So after a week away and a lifetime of changes, I'm sat at my desk with a cup of tea waiting to start work.

Officially I start in 12 minutes. I don't have a thing to do, to design, to write, to email. I could add to my endless documentation of Search Engine Optimisation (it started as a good idea, honest) but I am struggling to process the simplest of information this morning, and self motivated work seems to be dangling just that little bit too far away, an uninviting carrot.

No one will be in work for at least an hour or so. What will they give me then? Who will give me work?

I dreamed about him last night. In a mess of scenarios, all of them just random strings of consciousness. I have woken up feeling uncomfortable, distracted, tired and in need of someone to talk to, or at least something to distract me in a more productive direction, to take my mind of it's vulture-like thoughts, circling and circling around this.

I wonder how everyone else is coping at work, how it has affected everyone. I feel foolish in a way, embarrassed at the way it has affected me. Do I have the right to feel like this? Do I have the right to care so much, to feel so much grief? I feel so, so sad.

Last night the tears came in fits and starts, but I allowed myself to be distracted through conversations and television and endless reams of Dilbert to try and help me sleep. This morning, I am staring at an empty inbox, wondering how everyone coped last week. Were they fine? Did they cope better than my delayed realisation now returning to work?

Before I went on holiday, I noticed a few inflections of loneliness in my work. Long days, where I felt tired and my bones were heavy and my thoughts were heavier. It scared me, because this is what I do. I work from home. I have beautiful, beautiful Newfy by my side. I have the radio. I speak to those same few people over and over again throughout my day at work, on Skype, on MSN, on the phone, via email. The same voices, the same conversations, each of them adding a colour to my day.

I couldn't go back, for so many reasons, I wouldn't want to. Again and again people have asked me if I am lonely working from home. I never have been. I never have been. But these voices that build strands of detail in my day, the accents, the discussions, the diversions into nonsensical conversation or client gossip, they held me from that.

Before I went on holiday, I don't know why they were showing through. I felt like my consciousness was becoming translucent and behind, beneath, ugly thoughts were lurking. I don't know why. There are things I miss, but there are things I couldn't ever part from. It can be so much more deeply lonely working in an office. I have experienced that to such a degree in the past it scares me to remember.

One of those people, one of those intrinsic voices and fabrics in my day isn't going to be there anymore. Perhaps the absence has left a larger void than I understood. My selfishness in my personal loss sickens me, a guilt I have ignored is there, beneath. It is intertwined with this continual sadness, this loss, this aching for his family, his friends, the deep rooted, relentless pain they must be enduring. We were friends of circumstance, colleagues. I hope he would have chosen us.

It is now 8:08. I am torn from my blog by guilt, and am faced with nothing.

The Green Eyed Monster Vs Being Utterly Crap At Anything Involving Physical Exertion

Every week, my sister, her best friend and I strip down to what can only be described as an indecent amount of flesh and attempt to look erotic whilst hanging off poles like inexperienced monkeys (I am speaking from myself in this respect, they don’t end their moves with duck feet, legs splayed open on the floor, with a deeply furrowed brow looking more like a five year old who’s just fallen off a climbing frame from a great height than a pole-dancing goddess bathing in her sexuality).

We dance with a mixture of girls, weight and ability wise. There are those who will never be dancing for crowds of hungry eyes, gyrating their hips, exhaling sex appeal with their every deep, erotic breath, performing acrobatic moves worthy of Olympic gymnastic standard (if you were to strip out the judge-offending raunchiness and the competition was expanded to those who have at least considered puberty as a lifestyle choice) and all in an outfit that leaves so little to the imagination that it would make a gynaecologist blush.

And there are those that will.

I am, comfortably, happily, although perhaps a little frustratingly one of the former.

Not that I want to pole dance in public under any circumstances, let alone actually tear money away from poor misguided punters who should actually be watching someone who at least understands the concept of sexiness. But it would be nice to at least have the option within eyesight if not in reach to at least consider and discard (and return, once more, to making websites).

I don’t know where I was when sexiness was distributed, clearly unevenly. I suspect I was probably having a warm Ribena, which may have been the start of my problems. But I can’t recall, other than my lovely boyfriend after much prepping, ever being called ‘sexy’. Other names, yes. But sexy?
Perhaps it is my uncomfortable compromise of baby features alongside womanly substantial hips and an ever faithful spread of stretch-marked back fat that are first confusing then intriguing to the viewer, and not in an ‘ooh I want to get to know her better’ way, more of the ‘hmm I’d like to submit her genetic makeup for testing’. Perhaps it is my thick, unmanageable volumes of once blonde hair expanding from my frustratingly youthful features that conjure up the words ‘fluffy’ rather than ‘sexy’. Perhaps it is array of unattractive, toddler-borrowed facial expressions or my insistence on wearing the same clothing combinations that I have done since I was 14.

To counteract this noticeable lack of a key part of pole dancing, I attack the lessons with a tremendous amount of dedication and seriousness for one so small, focussing on attempting to perfect the moves, hoping, wishing, praying that one day sexiness will flow through my being and I will be finally transformed into the alter ego that at the moment doesn’t quite want to fit.

This in itself poses one or two not exactly insignificant problems.

The first is that I just cannot remember things. I watch our instructor repeat the moves again and again, trying to absorb every minute detail, but my thoughts are already curled around the defiant fact that I will not remember once I attempt to copy the move. If I do, on the odd occasion, manage to achieve such heady heights as mastering a move, on leaving the class I appear to walk through some sort of invisible sheep dip for brain cells, eradicating anything useful and instead not being able to process thoughts more complex than ‘gin & tonic’.

Luckily I am left handed so at least I have an excuse to ask the instructor to show me a move that I have already watched, probably attempted and possibly even practiced, again because I can’t quite remember what the hell I am supposed to be doing.

Secondly, my limbs have decided that, while my face hints at a bygone age of prepubescent, the rest of my body is heading very much in the opposite direction, seizing up at every opportunity with not even a hint of the suppleness I used to take for granted when dancing. And then there’s the physical strength. Yes I may have a disturbing ability to climb like a monkey (and looking like one gets you no brownie points in the class I might add) but my stomach muscles just laugh in the general direction of the pole when I size it up, and my thighs just don’t appear to be able to crush the metal within them like I really hoped they would considering their size in comparison to the bone that they encase.

Lastly, and certainly not least, I am beginning to notice it isn’t just sexiness you need for pole dancing. You need style as well.

Still, I am aware of all my shortcomings, noting that yes, I may utterly suck but I am only a beginner, and that’s what beginners do. They suck.

That’s what I thought until last night at least.

So there we were, the three of us. I graciously opted to join with a girl who had only so far had her induction and one lesson. I truly believed in some misguided way that I’d be able to help her with what I’d previously learned. I even felt a twinge of smugness at my being so nice.

I should have known by the fact our teacher had told us about her, this miracle girl, in our lesson the previous week. How she had undergone the induction and, not suffering an ounce of pain, had returned the following day, where she had proceeded to bash her foot so badly half way through the class that it spurted blood everywhere, only to continue throughout the rest of the class.

Okay, so she had clearly mastered the first few moves nicely. She had an enviable style, but there is for the most part of our class a real and true feeling of support and good will, and so I was genuinely pleased for her that she’d taken to it so effortlessly.

Then, as the class progressed, this started to get a little out of hand. As she attempted new move after new move, completing them like a pro, and adding a bit of flare in for good measure just to rub salt into my already suffering wounds, I struggled, banging my head against the pole, ending up on the floor, attempting things awkwardly, uncomfortably, inaccurately. And the best bit was that she was telling me how to do it right in a polite but firm manner. No, that wasn’t the best bit, that was the fact that everything she told me was true.

This girl also appeared to have a photographic memory. While I asked repeatedly what a move was, she absorbed every nuance of our instructor’s demonstration, copying to such an extent that I began to feel slightly ridiculous and completely rubbish.

This girl was lovely, helpful, supportive (in the physical sense as well as verbal, as in one instance she encouraged me to attempt a move that involved me ending up with my head on the floor and my legs wrapped for dear life around the pole, leaving me with chaffed thighs all evening) and extremely, extremely naturally talented.

I had already previously established that pole dancing wasn’t what I was natural at. I have already been through many hobbies and activities striving to find what I do in fact have natural aptitude for, what I am gifted at, surely there is one thing, surely I cannot be terrible at all things that involve doing more than just walking (in which I have at least some aptitude but I refuse to believe that counts).

I had hoped that pole dancing might have been the hallowed activity, the one that I took to like a duck to water, the one that I fell into like I had been born to dance around a metal pole (if anyone ever has). But I had quickly realised this was not to be.

I have seen students join since I first began and do exactly what I wanted to achieve. But my sister and I have usually just had a bit of a grumble and moan about how we wish we’d been able to achieve such a natural instinct, and continue. After all, we’d get there in the end, we were chipping away at it, improving gradually, congratulating each other with every achievement, it was all a learning process.

Last night though was beyond a joke. Now I understand how all those other extras must have felt playing second fiddle to Harry Bloody Potter. Most of them weren’t even assigned names. In the pole dancing equivalent (if there is ever to be one, in which case I would like to know about casting details), she would have been the protagonist, while I would have been Girl In Background Looking On #5, which would have most likely ended up on the cutting room floor, perhaps appearing in some hidden DVD extra if they had some free space.

I left last night, aching and not feeling all that motivated.

I adore my classes more than any other exercise I have ever attempted (and believe me that’s a comparison to a severe number of hours of my life) and in no way am I planning to achieve the standard that many dancers I have had the pleasure to watch have reached. Besides, I think I am probably on the wrong age side of twenty to be attempting anything of the sort. Pole dancing classes were my sister’s ingenious answer to our being rejected for a British Sign Language class (because it was full, not because were reprobates) which not only mean that we see each other once a week without fail, but we get to swing around metal poles and remind a few muscles of their assigned much neglected jobs while we’re at it.

So today, approaching the issue on a different tack, I have informed my sister that we are getting outfits that look less like we are going to a pyjama party and more like we are pole dancers. Once we have moved (wherever that may be to, which is an incredibly sensitive topic), I will proceed to erect a pole so we can at least pretend to practice. I have even toyed with the idea of purchasing some incredibly high heeled pole dancing shoes, but one step at a time.

I am not by nature a competitive person. I don’t wish to be the best in everything I do. I just don’t want to utterly suck, whether that be comparative to whoever I am paired with or merely in general. Yes of course I was sickeningly jealous. Yes, perhaps I did wish a little that there was at least one move that she didn’t master without even attempting it. But I refuse to, on this instance, believe myself to be a bad person for such thoughts. If perhaps I addressed other deeper, darker half-conceived, not-quite-thoughts I would not be a nice person and so we shall pretend such inklings were never even thought of being felt.

However I’m quite relieved to know that next time we’ll be faithfully back in our Thursday class.

The Devil's in the Money

I am wondering how long this is going to go on.

In the wondering, there are springs of anxiousness, like the daffodils reaching up through the garden outside (only to be eaten by Newfy, something of which I'm yet to break to my parents) - individually nothing to worry about, these tiny exclamations of spring in the mild midwinter, but together prophesising the beginning of some apocalyptic global warming phenomenon, while we mutter within ourselves, not too loud unless it might be true, that these environmental factors may, just may, have had something vaguely to do with our presence (guess who’s just watched An Inconvenient Truth).

Anxiousness displays itself through a muscle contraction around my stomach (not that you’d really notice, I’ve been trying to pretend it is an effective replacement for my gym abandonment), a sickness swooping down my throat into my gut, headaches grabbing my temples and squeezing them so gently yet so firmly that it is difficult to pinpoint.

I have these ideas exploding from my brain like cheap fireworks, often firing at random into someone else’s garden or fizzing un-climatically to the ground. Ways to make money, ways to live my life in the idealistic fashion I thought was granted to you on receiving your degree certificate (which are rarely the same idea). Ways to be the person I want to be.

I have never used the words ‘sell out’, because I never really thought I was making enough money to sell out. That word, I imagined, was reserved for the big boys, the stuff of The City, where Christmas bonuses could buy a small Eastern European country. My Christmas bonus, while much appreciated and meaning that I didn’t have to sell my already overly-mortgaged kidneys to pay my tax bill, would barely have covered the air fare (and perhaps a cheap night’s b&b on arrival if I did a bit of scouring).

I have used the words ‘corporate whore’ many times, probably more because I quite like it. It conjures up images of The WebStress donning a fetching PVC catsuit (well, to me anyway, but you may not want to dwell too much on that thought) to derive and unsettling amount of pleasure out of creating pointless banner ads and re-editing already butchered designs back to how they originally were when you submitted them to the client, after undergoing major surgery by someone clearly on work experience.

What am I? I am good at my job. Or, rather, I am good at every part of my job, other than the actual designing bit, but I reckon I can argue a good case for my CSS, unless someone is actually looking at the actual sloppily written and ill conceived code.

Not only that, I am good at my job, which allows me to have the lifestyle I have become so wonderfully accustomed to.

Still not quite right?

Yorkshire Lass, a very good friend of mine, suffering a similar career crisis, echoed my thoughts even before I really knew I’d had them, “I feel privileged to have a job that many other people would be eternally grateful for: my job is amazing, but I feel someone else would appreciate it more than me.”

That’s it. THAT’S IT.

I don’t appreciate my work, but I never thought I’d have to. All my web design jobs have had flaws so sizeable its almost impossible to claw out of them to get on with something productive.

But with this job, all of those flaws are being slowly irradiated by the wonderful staff that I work with. Don’t like 9 to 6? We don’t either, here’s an 8 hour day, and oh we’ll throw in an hour’s lunch break. And nag you if you don’t use it. Been working overtime? Why not finish early on a Friday. Too much overtime? Okay, no worries, we’ll pay you. So you want to start earlier? Just work the hours you like. You want to take a few hours off? How’s about you just make it up rather than take it as holiday. And we’ll be really lovely about the whole thing. Hate London? Work from home. And you can keep your London salary, and what the hell we’ll throw in a Christmas bonus.

My job is becoming increasingly hard to dislike, certainly from everyone else’s perspective.

I have created such an undercurrent of processes inherent to my actually being in my role that boss #1, soon to arrive in the UK, will find it difficult to gazump my job with some heavily qualified, paid-a-considerable-amount-more-than-me design guru and demote me to being whatever they think I do at the moment. I didn’t do this deliberately, not really, but the cogs are beginning to turn, and I’m one of them (the one that needs a bit of oiling and tends to break down erratically).

I am still here, I am still working, I am still a web designer.

There were empty, hollow promises. I would abandon my job and write. Oh I so wanted to, I ached to. It was now or never, I knew that, my boyfriend in New Zealand, being back home, little rent to pay. Then, okay, I’ll do some casual work to pay the bills and to save up some money. And, oh bugger, now I have a car to pay for. Now my boyfriend is home, thank god, something I hope I will never take for granted, not after 2006, not after that time without him, but we have loans to pay and a house to find.

There are two ways people start their own businesses or break out to follow their creative dreams as far as I have been able to deduce.

#1 – Give up work.

This is of course the favoured option, for a completely immersive experience, to dedicate your very lifeblood to following your dreams, your ambitions. But it comes with oh such a risk. And can only be done realistically either by taking a loan from the bank, only advised for business propositions which will actually make money (The WebStress Writes doesn’t really conjure visions of writhing around in bucket loads of cash), or through being supported financially. And at the moment, I am the one who will be paying the mortgage while my boyfriend battles with fierce loan repayments.

#2 – Start your dream alongside your day job.

Everyone says it. You are creating hollow excuses for yourself, you can start today, now, with a pen and paper. All the excuses in the world, that I feel have such a severe hold on me, don’t wash with The Big Guys.

I was getting there, somewhere at least, with a business plan. But things have halted, through no-one’s fault, and no diving board can be approached while we are agreeing a mortgage, it is my wage we are hanging tentatively off. But in developing ideas I was up at six, finishing late in the evening, squeezing every moment out of the day, barely recognising my boyfriend, barely attending my beautiful Newfy, encased within a smoke of ideas and being cholked on not being able to achieve them, no time, not enough time. And then I collapsed.

Apart from a brief period, ironically when I was running a business with a friend, ever since I left uni I have worked way beyond my typical hours, way beyond what is considered to be a day job. Just with the job itself, or with the freelance work I use as the frills on my financial grouting.

And then, before then, where university work had no boundaries, where it spread like a virus into the mornings and evenings and weekends. And, back, back further, to A-levels, where coursework was molded around part time jobs.

I have become to resent ‘extra curricular’ work in such an unproductive way I am continuously disappointed with myself. And when I do drag my tired eyes and my aching head back to the computer on an evening, there is always something, something that needs attending to that involves a client, some nominal amount of money, something that needs to be completed now, and your dream can just be placed, just there, just out of reach, until tomorrow.

And there are the things I love, my boyfriend, my Newfy, sat within arm's reach, sat so near to me and I wonder what the hell I am doing. Too often I have neglected him, my boyfriend, the person who has come home and attended me with cups of tea, with soothing words, and is often repaid with a shadow of his girlfriend, or harsh words, or tears, from exhaustion, from frustration, from such an aching head.

When I do grab such a few precious, coveted hours and productivity does spurt from my usually cauterized veins, it is never enough, and I reflect my achievement on completion, feeling let down, the words not being quite right, the story feeling half-baked and unloved now, now there’s no time to attend to it.

My impatience and my disappointment in my own achievements burrows so many holes within myself that I am often ashamed of even admitting my flaws, for worry other people will then spot these great gapes of imperfection and not be able to look at me.

I am tired of my own overused, exhausted excuses.

Rejected

Wow, so this is how it feels.

(Not the rejected bit, that has happened often enough in the past in various parts of my life on a variety of different emotional and professional levels and while that sounds extremely self pitying, I am totally understanding of the entire procedure, however much I whimper after each occasion, ensuring myself, each time, that everything can be put down to experience and there’s nothing that can’t be solved by a nice cup of tea).

My boyfriend called, I knew what he was going to say.

Mr Fat, it seems, has returned from being 'at sea', has rejected our offer, and buggered off back to being 'at sea' for yet another week without so much as a window of possible negotiation.

I've never haggled for anything in my life, certainly not to reduce an item in price unless it has been so hideously damaged that it doesn't resemble in any way what it was originally intended to be.

I think the most I've ever haggled for is to beg for my tax to be thrown in for free when I purchased my car. They had £12,500. I got £100 worth of tax. A clear bargain (for whom, I won’t go into, needless to say the bloke who sold me the car now has a promotion and I have a rather large debt). And that was only because I literally couldn't afford it and would have probably cried hysterically had they not.

I am a salesman's dream. I don't barter. Ever.

I actually sell the item for them.

Partly because I can't bear their sales schpiel, partly because I am so inherently terrified of salesmen in general trying to sell me something that I don't want so I try to establish what I do want before they sink their money-hungry teeth into my unsuspecting wallet (occasionally falling foul of their trickery, occasionally duping myself into purchasing something I actively dislike), partly because I cannot bear to be made a fool of by pitching laughably too low, or in the same vein, too high.

So I just usually, quietly, hurriedly, purchase the item at full price and tootle out of whatever establishment I am in before the cackle of the sales assistant has time to echo in my deluded brain that I have not been overcharged and whatever I have purchased really is worth the retail price I just sold a kidney for.

Not so in the case of purchasing the House From Hell. The WebStress was going to stand her ground, fight back, hold strong. All by way of instructing my boyfriend, unconstructively, unhelpfully and most of the time rather repetitively, on how to speak to the estate agent regarding our offer.

We had, in my cowardly defence, no option with our offer. There was no way we would get a mortgage for the amount it was valued at (by someone who was clearly blind with no sense of smell, or actually any sense at all). And there was no way any mortgage provider would give us 100% of the money that they were asking for.

My boyfriend and I have had a few ‘heated discussions’ regarding our offer on the House From Hell. He has his heart set on the property, I have my head set on vast mortgage repayments that we cannot afford (that’s if we ever got granted it in the first place) and a vague quality of life that I want to retain.

And the house is in such a dire state that I feel it is totally unjust to reward them with any cash above the bare minimum for a property that clearly hasn’t been cleaned in 12 months and its residents have actively covered themselves in dirt and grime and rolled around its insides in gay abandon, smearing their flaking filthy skin cells across any exposed surface, and for a garden that appears to be an oversized rubbish bin for someone who has a very poor aim and no idea of special awareness.

The house has been on the market for six months. The inhabitants clearly believe they are living in some sort of dirt hovel so relocating them won’t be too much of a difficult task. The owners are suffering some sort of messy divorce and clearly want rid of each other. There is writing all over the walls in the children’s bedroom. There is mould on the ceiling in the bathroom and the kitchen. There are probably rats that have been relocated by the council due to unfit living conditions.

And they’ve turned our offer down.

Now I don’t really know what to do about this. They don’t, apparently, want an awful lot more money. I don’t want to give them any more money. An extra two thousand pounds in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t that much and let’s face it, the market isn’t bending over backwards with the weight of suitable properties in a reasonable price range to accommodate my boyfriend’s grand building plans (which apparently involve using every page in his DIY book which I believe weighs more than a car, after he left it stranded on my lap the other day in bed) and a soon to be fully grown Newfy.

But I feel so…so wrong for paying any more money than we possibly have to for what I would struggle to even let a homeless person live in even on a temporary basis in its current state, for fear of contracting some sort of disease. I have lived in student housing in the filthiest, rat infested, grime ridden areas of Bradford which I recalled fondly when faced with this house. These people have not cared for this house, and as a result it isn’t worth what they want for it.

I do know though that my boyfriend is fiercely passionate about the possibilities for this particular property and that my arguments tend to collapse underneath my lack of ability to hold a constructive discussion, while he eloquently and efficiently usually manages to manipulate me into his way of thinking, effortlessly and, often, without me even noticing.

We are to have ‘discussions’ this evening about the House From Hell. And, whatever our decision, face yet another agonising week waiting to hear Mr Fat’s response.

Well, I guess, everyone said buying a house wasn’t easy. I just wasn’t expecting this process to be so painfully long and drawn out.

I wonder if its too early for gin.

Room 101: The Estate Agent

So we put in an offer on the House From Hell a week ago now.

As the days drained by, we heard the same thing day after day. Apparently Mr Fat is still at sea (which we're beginning to suspect is a euphemism for something truly horrible, suggestions for which include he is beneath the patio or Mrs Fat may have eaten him, or perhaps he is buried beneath the sweaty rolls of excess flab about her person) and has still not responded to the email.

So, taking matters into my own hands, I organised a few appointments to view two other properties on Sunday afternoon, one of which could have been the one, or encouraged us away from the fiery jaws of Hell, or on the other hand assured us that investing thousands of pounds of someone else's money into a property that Sarah Beeny would do one of those omnipotent, condemning and sarcastic voice-overs when reviewing was really the right choice after all.

Unfortunately for those property sellers, both of reasonably priced, modest yet promising houses (although each with their imperfections which meant Hell is still firmly settled in the top spot, regardless of the fact that they don't actually seem to want to sell it to us), the agent who showed us round was so utterly abhorrent that I actually felt the need to physically suppress all manner of Nasty Things To Say, at one stage gripping my boyfriend's hand so tightly I'm sure my fingernails pierced his skin (he was, incidentally, gripping my hand with an equal intensity).

I don't like estate agents. Not that I've ever been involved with one on any level before, but having lived in London, where you can only walk a few hundred yards before being mown down by an erratically driven, heavily branded Foxton's mini, complete with smug, small penised agent casually masturbating inside at his recent reaping of another poor, unfortunate couple's beaten souls, I feel like they have interfered with my daily life to such a degree that I may as well have signed on that dreaded dotted line. In my blood. And, what the hell, that of my nearest and dearest too.

Subsequently, Estate agent car branding, really doesn't go down all that well with me. It says 'this company sucks the very lifeblood out of innocent home buyers and sellers that it can afford to throw endless reams of cash away telling people as such on its motor vehicles'. And it says of the driver 'look at me, I'm a twat'.

I instantly had my back up when our assigned agent arrived in such a heavily branded car. This hadn't started well.

Showing us around the house, the agent, complete with trowel applied foundation and clipboard accessory kit, barely broke those carefully hidden lines, for fear of fracture, in discussing the property. Instead she waxed lyrical about how the property had recently been sold, how it was sure to go by the end of the day, using words like 'delightful' so laden with patronising, sugary tones that I believe she may have been a primary school teacher in a previous life, if she hadn't terrorised small children by the mere mention of her name or the echo of her footsteps.

I don't know exactly what she thought we were after in a property but telling us that the (absolutely hideous) wardrobes were staying in the house to insinuate that leaving behind furniture would influence our purchase positively lead me to believe she just didn't think. At all.

On leaving the first property, after continuing to reel off the list of other potential buyers that were still to view the property that day, she said, pushing me to the dangerous point of doing something that I might have been arrested for, 'I think this would be an ideal property for you'.

Yes, okay, an ideal property. For someone who doesn't have a boyfriend who plays the drums, who doesn't sing loudly and painfully at inhuman times of the day, who doesn't have a boyfriend who thinks its a really good idea to play extremely inappropriate morning music at the volume that it was set to the night before, to someone who doesn't own a Newfy.

Had we not had to endure a second viewing with this agent, I would perhaps have escaped a little ruffled but recovered after a nice cup of tea and a flapjack.

But we followed her, up through estate after estate of properties still adorned with Christmas lights (an immediate concern) to the second property.

The agent new nothing about this property and had never visited it before. But she swept into room after room, exclaiming something wildly inappropriate on entering such as describing the pocket sized bathroom that would have fitted neatly on the back seat of my car as 'spacious' and oozing praise for the admittedly lovely view to the point that it really wasn't all that lovely after all.

On exiting the property, we asked if she had any details for it, knowing we weren't interested, but trying to prise ourselves away from her venomous barbed tongue as swiftly as possible. She exclaimed, loudly enough for the owners to hear, that if we were to wait for the details we'd be far too late and we really would need to put an offer in immediately as (mentioning for possibly the sixth or seventh time about that particular property) she had many more viewings to conduct (all this with the undercurrent of a laugh that would reduce Mumrah the Ever Living to retreating back into his cocoon).

The final nail in her coffin was, on walking back to the car, she asked us if we had the available finances to buy the property, laughing in a manner that made me want to rip out her tongue and post it through her ear canal until it came out the other side, that we'd be surprised how many people didn't organise this side of things before viewing a house.

Now, I may look twelve. But I, unlike her, have several useful brain cells that I have put into good use with this whole purchase process. No, thank you, I do not want to see your Independent Financial Adviser. No I will not be sending you a Christmas card. And no, most certainly, I will not, under any circumstances, ever be buying a house from you.

Before, estate agents were a problem that other people had, like genital warts or hair loss. Now, it appears, that they are under my skin, picking apart the delicate strings that hold together my sanity, poisoning my thoughts with their presence. I haven't said so many nasty things about one person in such a very long time that I shocked myself in being able (with the help of my boyfriend) to discuss each one of her foibles, down to mere (but probably accurate) predictions about her character, and then was able to do the whole thing again once we arrived home with my parents.

Our estate agent, the people who are occasionally calling us to inform us that, no, still nothing has happened, are, I fear, not much better. The fact that they informed my boyfriend, when he mentioned (read: threatened) that we were beginning to look at other houses, that they 'were doing a lot of work for us' (read: calling Mrs Fat to ask for news, then calling us, or not calling us, to inform us that there was none), despite the fact that we are among the only people willing to even consider stepping inside Hell, let alone to put an offer in on such a grotesque building, in 6 months, and that we have waited a week now to hear back. I strongly resent being told by an estate agent that they are doing a lot of work for us, especially over such pitiful claims as a few phone enquiries, when in fact isn't it their job to sell us the house? And, correct me if I'm wrong, don't they actually get paid if they sell the house? So, technically, the work they are doing is THEIR JOB?

The justification of the existence of an estate agent, as far as I am aware, is to make unnecessary paperwork, create reams of unimportant yet totally undecipherable red tape, increase the rate of alcohol abuse and raise stress levels to hospitalisation points.

Yes, okay, it isn't very nice to have to negotiate directly with someone, to tell them that you won't offer that sum of money for their house, because it isn't worth it. And for that reason I am thankful the estate agent does that bit (although even if it was down to us, I'd make my boyfriend do it while I hid behind the sofa, loudly whispering inappropriate comments and writing incomprehensible scribblings on post-it notes during the phone call, then subsequently getting angry when he doesn't address any of my points).

But really, if that's the only reason, that terribly English reason of not wishing to offend anyone directly to their face, instead employing a costly and incompetent middle man purely for the purposes of negotiation to hide behind, if that's the only reason we have our very souls tainted, beaten by their presence, surely there's a better way?

Or perhaps, like the PE teachers, the parking attendants, the insurers of this world, its kind of secretly nice to have professions we can all gang up against and feel suitably smug that we aren’t one.

3 feet under

I said, when I first started going out with my boyfriend, that I wouldn't do it. It wasn't for me, that I wouldn't feel comfortable with it, that it wasn't natural (no this isn't some depraved sexual activity, bear with me). That it was 'his thing'. I had my things: A band I loved dearly, far too much work, my dusty, abandoned but not forgotten writing.

It has been a year exactly since I threw myself down the rapidly depeleating snow covered mountains of northern Italy. I'd budge on that. Yes, snowboarding and The Webstress, it had a nice ring to it (or maybe that's just the tinnitus). I'd become a snowboarder, that could be 'our thing'.

I had a week to learn how to become A Snowboarder. I had previously attacked the indoor snows of Milton Keynes Xscape for a few taster lessons so I'd, in theory, be top of the class when it came to the real thing. I'd effortlessly glide through my morning classes and I'd be carving up virgin snow before the week was over, racing my boyfriend off piste, absorbing breathtaking views and generally feeling rather smug.

It didn't quite work out like that.

For a start, the snow was receding fast. Where there was wonderous, glorious, heavenly patches of snow it was unfriendly, severely compacted and unforgiving. Where there wasn't snow there was ice or, even worse, grass. I had never felt such a strong hatred to something organic before, least of all bloody grass. But there it was, struggling upwards, onwards, through the remnants of a sorrowful winter, bravely facing the harsh winds and triumphantly challenging the bitter chill. Only, after all that, to be faced with the acid tongued WebStress.

Had there been snow, soft, fresh, snow I may now be able to say I am, indeed, a snowboarder. But perhaps global warming saved me from otherwise harsh and painful jibes about my uselessness in this activity.

I did snowboard on snow, don’t get me wrong. There were pistes laden with dirty, abused flakes that my boyfriend tried to gently coax his tearful, aching, broken girlfriend down. But beneath those treacherous flakes, just inches away, lay bare rock and hard ground that my seemingly not cushioned enough arse fell on again and again. Xscape had been like falling onto a beautifully sprung mattress in comparison.

I returned from that holiday, an expert in long, lazy afternoon naps, in drinking buried in cozy corners of Italian pubs, in eating, in whining about the lack of snow. But not, sadly, in snowboarding.

This year I will try again, this time on the Dendex covered slopes of Plymouth’s ski centre. My sister, her boyfriend and I will take to the hills and begin the race to be hospitalised with the most exciting injury.

But as for ‘our thing’, so far the only activity my boyfriend and I have in common is dog walking, where he is usually striding ahead and I am left bringing up the rear, distracting Newfy from eating an array of distasteful objects, usually carrying a bag full of her faeces.

Now, as I said, I wasn’t ever going to do this. But, in the drunken confession that yes he might learn to salsa dance with me (that’s what I derived from it anyway, what he interpreted from exactly the same conversation was that he may consider at some stage in the distant future attend one class with me, possibly. But he’d have to check his diary. And he was booked up for years in advance.) I thought, what the hell.

In 2007 I was going to abandon my previously gladly accepted shackles of middleagedom and act my age, not my worryingly apparent wrinkles.

In 2007 I was going to be a cool girlfriend.

Not that my activity of choice, his passion, my terror, is cool, or attractive, or sexy, or alluring. In any way. Certainly not in UK climates anyhow.

Last night, yes I finally succumbed, I spent an hour in a swimming pool attempting to scuba dive with a wonderfully patient instructor, several hundred pubic hairs and at least seven plasters.

And I absolutely loved it.

Production:nil, Webstress:nil

There is nothing more unproductive than sitting by your computer staring at the pathetic attempt of a flow chart, hysterical sobs escaping in fits and starts, like hiccups, hammering my hands on the desk, and then letting the hiccups join to just be a continual stream of body shaking squeaks and shakes.

I have tried everything today. All my usual tricks, even beans on toast for lunch, even a warm ribena to inspire my sugar deprived tongue. I want to scream and shout. I want to do work. I want to not feel this uncontrollable guilt that wraps itself effortlessly around my throat squeezing, squeezing, so it hurts to get the sobs out.

On days like today I don't know how to salvage myself. I almost feel like telling my work not to pay me. What have I achieved? What have I got to show? What have I proved, or completed, or resolved, or even started?

Yesterday I was inspired. There were conversations, ideas, bursts of energy and productivity. I told my boyfriend that I would stay in my job until the summer, maybe even longer, the money would help us so much, it would all be alright, I was okay, I was so lucky in my position and with my colleagues.

Today, oh today, I woke up intending on carrying that same enthusiasm, that energy, that excitement and dedication through, and onwards through the coming days.

I feel deflated, I am a waste of time and money today. I would be good at anything but this today, lethargy strangling what is left of my persistence in search of those last fragments of productivity. I don't understand. I don't understand why it isn't coming today, why it isn't there. I want to work, just someone help me, point me in the right direction, coax me forward, ease me gently, I'll work hard, I am worthwhile.

I can achieve, I will achieve, I must achieve.

But if I can't, why must I persecute myself so?

And, of course, on a day like today, I think of the possibilities that seem so very far away and just a resignation away. But no, no, not now, not yet. There are commitments, there are problems. The grass isn't always greener Ms forever figety, forever discontented, forever impatient and oh so desperate to know what she should be doing, whether she should put-up-and-shut-up, whether this is what she is good at, whether this is what she enjoys.

Surely I shouldn't have to tell myself this is what I enjoy? But then, I seem so exhausted with tripping over my thoughts that perhaps I do need a little help.

An hour and ten minutes to go and a production of nothing.

The first step on the ladder

(written 7:45pm, Monday 8th)

On Saturday night, after a lengthy day’s house hunting, myself and my boyfriend began to wind down our evening at a time when most people in their mid twenties may be squeezing into their glad rags (or whatever the youths wear these days), pouring another alcoholic beverage of their choice and ordering a taxi to begin theirs.

These were our first tentative steps into the treacherous, emotional, tormenting world of the housing market. Saturday morning we had set off eagerly through torrential rain into the realms of suburban Plymouth to view an eclectic mix of properties chosen by my boyfriend and myself.

Our criteria aren’t all that easy to fill, if I’m honest. We need a three bedroomed, substantial property with a garden, walks easily accessible, all for about the cost of a postage stamp. Oh, and car parking would be useful seeing as my idea of parallel parking is abandoning the car a substantial walk away from a perfectly good, well located roadside spot that I had already attempted, and failed spectacularly, to back the car into and driven off, at best a little grouchy, at worst sobbing hysterically to find somewhere where I could park with relative ease.

The first property, adorned with a variety of interesting wall and ceiling textures, was abandoned for being too small. The agent, who it transpired had only been in the job since November, wasn’t exactly offering the hard sell, strongly advising us to consider the second property on our list over this one, and while showing us around kept saying ‘oooh that’s a bit dodgy’ about elements we were pointing out. A lovely but heavily ditsy Plymothian lass, although I can’t imagine she’s raking in the commission.

The second, equally featuring interesting ceiling textures, appeared to be inhabited, along with an aging owner and her worryingly youthful husband, with a large amount of china dolls. The house was violently sprayed with an array of pinks, and was uncomfortably similar to the dolls house that sat in one of the bedrooms. Another room was covered with fairies of all varieties, on the walls, on the bedclothes, on just about anything that remained stationary for too long. It looked like it had been vomited from the imagination of a severely disturbed Victorian children’s writer, the physical manifestation of gentle but can’t-put-your-finger-on-why-but-a-little-uncomfortable stories, the result of the consumption of a large amount of opium that in the cold light of day just didn’t seem to go away.

The third, embedded deeply within suburbia although with a nice view over, unsurprisingly, suburbia itself, wasn’t thankfully pink. However it did feature a disturbing amount of pine on the walls and deep furry carpet throughout that looked like several great bears had been skinned to produce, or at least were lying very still.

The latter two houses, despite their décor, had been loved, attended, cared for. I almost wanted to buy them just for those reasons. In the third house the elderly couple were so lovely I would have bought them too, although I think that might be illegal. I felt guilty as the estate agent told them we were looking for our first house, as they were downsizing.

We headed off for our fourth and final viewing. My boyfriend’s trump card. He’d had his heart set on it since he’d seen it, although the picture displayed it as a concrete monstrosity and only when we’d driven passed it last week was I more receptive to a viewing.

The estate agent, quiet, wispy, nervous, lead us in to the house, passed the garden, bin liners of rubbish garnishing the overgrown grass, a broken trike here and there to add colour.

I have tried to think how to describe this house. As we entered, cat food littered the floor, scattered around a scratching tower that had seen better days. The agent lead us through to the lounge where an overweight woman sat in a spaghetti strapped top, breasts confused with fat trying to gain an exit route from the confines of the limited amount of material, playing poker on her PC.

A cat was roaming the dining room table, staring at us suspiciously. I tried to make limp conversation which involved one of our questions on the list. Why was she moving? Her partner and her were splitting up. And she didn’t want to talk about it.

The ceiling shuddered under the weight of about a hundred children running across the landing upstairs. The picture frames, all so wonky I can hardly imagine how anyone couldn’t have done that deliberately, did nothing but draw our attention to the mould and dirt that was laden on the window sills.

The lady informed us that next door had finally got around to tidying his garden. This sounded like a positive sign so we stepped tentatively through the kitchen, sides adorned with food, cupboards open lazily, outside. Next door looked like the fallout of a nuclear war. Branches carpeted what may have been grass beneath. But at least it was all flat and progress had clearly been made (heaven only knows what it must have looked like before).

The garden belonging to the house we were viewing, however, wasn’t exactly looking all that peachy and seemed to have the same distinct black bin bag garnish that the front garden featured.

Upstairs, curtains displayed dirt almost proudly, windows collected mould as if they were saving it for a school science project. We waded through clothes, and a cat that we thought was a stuffed animal, to view the final bedroom, in which the uncalculated number of kids were behind.

Opening the door we were greeted with three sulky, sullen and vicious looking boys, possibly somewhere between the age of 8 and 12, although I tried not to make eye contact for worry that they’d hunt me down and kill me if they recognised me in the street, just to kill boredom. They continued to stare at their computer game, and we, briefly, surveyed the damp on the ceiling and the astonishing amount of writing all over every inch of the wallpaper, the wording of which I didn’t look too closely at but imagined it wasn’t poetry or Shakespeare quotations.

We left the house feeling a little bit shell shocked and somewhat unclean. The estate agent asked us, tentatively, nervously, what we thought of the property. She told us that they had sold the house to the current owners and the house had previously looked like a show home. I think I almost saw a tear.

And so today my boyfriend put an offer in for this house. Don’t try joining the dots, there aren’t any.

A day in London, an argument and the distinct lack of a sandwich

(written 7pm, Monday 8th)

Oh and things were going so well. A smooth journey to work, arriving only looking mildly dishevelled and perspire trickled. A productive, lively and inspiring internal meeting. A productive, lively and almost exciting client meeting. A productive discussion with a new member of staff which was only marred by him suggesting something that was going to cause my team a mild issue that he refused to acknowledge and I refused to rationalise, which we eventually smoothed over, me with words of praise for his other achievements and apologies at my misunderstanding (that wasn’t actually a misunderstanding, but he was new and naturally I felt shamed and in the wrong for my slightly irrational outburst, in front of the entire development team no less, luckily who were buried in lines of code and hopefully didn’t pick up on the conversation).

An exit from work with a spring in my step, thinking of my boyfriend and Newfy and home.

As I walked towards the tube station, trying not to acknowledge the disturbing warmth and my ill-chosen overly warm attire, I could see clearly me a year ago, not so different, a lot more miserable, a lot more insecure, but me still, making my way home to our flat in London. Passed the welcoming pubs, the comforting odour of beer floating lazily into the evening, fond memories of fragments of that life. I could feel the steps up to my flat beneath my feet, my hand on the door, the warm air that greeted me, switching the lights on, sweat from the hike clinging to my every pore in desperation, the run of the bath, the turning on of the TV.

All so clear, if I just give a moment to it, I’m almost there.

Then, an arrival at the tube entrance as those dreaded iron gates were being pulled across and a frustrated crowd hung around them in confusion.

I turned then, I knew. I ran across roads, the anticipation of perspiration bubbling beneath my suffocated skin, through to the other tube station. Onto a tube that would take me to the Circle line in a few agonising stops. Time speeding, ticking along, buffering against the train.

At my destination I waited for the Circle line patiently. For all of approximately 30 seconds. In those seconds I felt empowered, I forced calmness through my veins. I would get there, only a few stops, I wouldn’t miss my train, I wouldn’t be stranded in Paddington for an hour, it was okay.

The thirty seconds expired along with my patience. As did the following ten minutes, eating through my sanity and munching hungrily on the dams holding my tears behind them. This wasn’t going to happen. But it was. I was going to miss my train.

This train, as if sensing my despair, fell along the tracks like a drunken man, one step forward, two steps back. Inching along, and then not at all. Sweat, from the heat, from the running, from the weight on my back as my laptop nestled its way uncomfortably into my skin. Crawling around my neck and over my forehead droplets drew lines across worried grooves.

I tried to force myself to relax. It was just one time. I had been lucky, all these times, getting my train, heading home. It was my turn for a poor journey. I was to accept it, and then next time things would be better. I needed to get this out of the way, to have my turn. It wasn’t so bad. I could get a sandwich, a Starbucks, blog the whole sorry event, and by the time I had expelled all of my grumpiness the hour would be passed and my train would be there.

But no no no no no. That wasn’t how I wanted it to work. I wanted to be home on time this time. Like always, though, like always.

After an ice age, after the thawing, after the evolution of man, the train arrived, the doors opened and I sprinted as fast as physically possible, my backpack providing a rhythm accompaniment through its repeated attempt at breaking my pelvic bone. I could see the platform. I was so close…

And then my ticket was rejected.

The train stood impatiently, huffing and puffing at my incompetence.

I addressed the nearest representative to me. The machine hadn’t recognised my ticket, could he please let me through.

He informed me, in no uncertain terms, that my ticket was not valid for that train and as such I would not be allowed through the barriers.

I informed him, in no uncertain terms, politely but forcefully and with the production of seat reservations to fight my corner, that it was, and my reservation was on that train. And I would be getting on that train.

No, he said. No, that ticket reservation wasn’t for that ticket and I would not be allowed on the train.

I then informed him, heatedly, frustration and anger seeping through my porous strength, that I regularly got on that train and that all the tickets were bought together, and were even numbered as such (1 of 4, for which I produced all 4 parts).

I was arguing with a member of staff about a train that was minutes away from pulling out of the station, and I was minutes away from being arrested for assault.

I rarely get confrontational with people. They are doing the job and I, I generally assume, if not directly in the wrong are probably to at least accept a proportion of the blame. As I am never sure how much that proportion may be, I usually assume the worst and that I’m not entirely sure what I’m talking about, and shut up.

Not on this occasion. I had not run and worried and sweated to be told I was not getting on my train.

The member of staff finally asked another colleague who told him that the ticket was indeed valid. The first bloke finally grudgingly unlocked the gate for me, I barged through angrily and ungratefully and, as I exited the gate to the platform, I turned around.

I can’t really remember how our subsequent argument started. I think it may have been an ill advised facial expression or comment from me. In hindsight, I am heavily tinged with a worry and remorse that only the inexperienced in such argumentative affairs suffer. But suddenly I was involved in an argument with two substantially proportioned black men. And I had little woman syndrome.

The first bloke, who by now was deeply out of favour with me, told me he would let me through this time. This fucking time. This fucking time for a ticket that was actually permitted for the train that I had boarded many times before. No, I don’t think so, no no no, you don’t get away with that. I told him (I am not sure of the order but as noone was really listening to anyone else it doesn’t really matter what order they ensued) that he should have apologised for accusing me of having an invalid ticket and not permitting me to board the train. Bloke #2, much bigger, with a much better grasp of the English language and a much more ‘I am just about to not let you board that train if you say one more word’ look about him than bloke #1 stepped in to assume the role of chief arguer. He told me to ‘come here’, beckoning me ferociously with his finger.

That made me lose it. I cannot abide people pointing to me or generally instructing me with their fingers. It is completely irrational but completely uncontrollable. He had flicked a switch. He had told me bloke #1 had not been sure so consulted #2 regarding the ticket and that I should not be so rude. I, rage bubbling inside me like moulten lava, desperately suppressing the sort of comment that would see me arrested or in a bloody mess on the platform watching with a sideways glance as my train pulled out of the station, argued and argued and argued, angrily, viciously, and with an amazingly posh voice I seemed to have developed.

I don’t know what made me pull away. I felt their eyes shoot daggers, their tongues spit venom behind me. I ran to my train, wanting to leave the sour words behind me on the platform, wanting to run out of the adrenalin induced anger and into my carriage.

I got to my seat, shaking, angry, once again sweating (or perhaps just re-heating and re-cycling), reading my ticket and my seat reservation over and over, justifying, convincing, I was right, I was right, ha, look, my seat, that’s my seat, my ticket.

An hour eased by in the conversation of yet another mid-fifties male commuter, another life story that I feed from, his family, his job, his history. Burying myself in another life, like an easy going audio book, the occasional question, they like to talk, they usually talk, about everything and nothing.

Then at Reading he departed and I was left to wallow in the bitter aftertaste of an argument. I decided to write it out, to get it out from beneath my skin, like the gentle coaxing of a splinter, leaving no scar. I don’t really understand why it spreads so deep and leaves such a lasting reminder for such a length of time. My SP, for one, would tell me I was an idiot for such prolonged worry and thought, and in the most part I believe I probably am. But arguments are an unpicking of the delicate seam holding together what my irrational mind has assumed makes a good person.

And then what if they are there next week, when I return? What if they won’t let me on then? What if they recognise me? What if my ticket causes the same problems? What if I am forced to remain on the platform forever? Perhaps the latter is a little ridiculous, but worry wriggles and niggles and my lack of sandwich, my train-home-treat, has left me feeling particularly grumpy with the sugar I have managed to derive from the food I have has set a rather overactive imagination to work.

Hopefully my brain exhalation has meant that when my boyfriend collects me I won’t be stress, grumpiness and anger personified and he will actually want to take me home rather than abandoning me in Exeter.

How the other half designs

Last night I announced that I was going to buy a copy of Computer Arts at the train station.

This was a brave step into the world of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’. After my general whitterings the other day on being a generally crap designer, I thought it was about time I injected my tired fingers and staid ideas with the collagen of fresh talent leached from those with real creative genius flowing effortlessly through their veins. Jealousy is unbecoming, self depreciation even more so, both of which I harbour in abundance yet so rarely do anything about.

Yesterday, I began to design for a new freelance client. I sat, searching aimlessly for competitor websites that may give me an insight, a taste, an idea, an element, something, just something, to inspire the cells in my brain to start quivering excitedly. Unfortunately the area in which I am currently developing a website for, the competitors are non existent or appear to have been designed by someone facing the opposite way to the computer screen. Nevertheless I pursued and eventually created the basis for three passable design ideas. They weren’t going to set the world on fire, but then I imagine in the area I am designing for that is probably the least of their priorities.

I left the designs to rest and settle, to be attacked later in the week, to tweak and butcher, to pull apart, to ridicule and adjust and felt moderately content with progress. Such bland words, such middle of the road design, the Dido approach web design. Inoffensive, passive and unproblematic. Functional and practical.
There is, of course, a time and a place for such design, and this project is typically one of those areas. I am a big champion for designing for content, for real life scenarios, for users, for readers, for people, for the conveying of information, the supporting of understanding, allowing the subject matter to express itself without being constricted and suffocated by egotistical melodramatic web design.

But I had what I felt might be the inkling of a hunger, the need for input, the desire to learn, to feed, to know how they do it, those designers, those great Photoshop and Flash gurus, those people who slip into applications and flourish, rather than spend ages trying to remember how to change a certain setting and then losing all their work by trying to action too many commands at once and causing the application to take charge and decide the best thing to do in this scenario is produce white space where panels once were as a warning and a lesson.

After paying the heart-stoppingly costly price of six pounds for a depressingly thin 114 pages (the price is hidden on the back, ashamed of the money it is bleeding from its customer), I sat down on the train, deciding to read the whole thing cover to cover to ensure I gained my money’s worth, or at least something vaguely near.

Things did not start off well. On the very first page describing the cover artist, within the first paragraph no less, I read the words “At the ripe old age of 25…”. This, obviously, may have been sarcasm. However, the damage had already been done. 25. The same age as me. Needless to say, reading his credentials and experience, I felt my own already fragile design ego shrivelling to resemble an unappetising and unsubstantial prune that’s only use would have been to help the elderly move their bowels.

Computer Arts is a beautiful magazine. There isn’t, to be honest, an awful lot in it. A substantial amount is tutorials, or adverts, or information on what is contained on the attached CD. But what it does is sell an ideal, a lifestyle, a dream. How the other half lives. Computer Arts to me is much like the Hello of the design world. Instead of being able to walk around the overblown homes of the disgustingly rich and surprisingly un-famous celebrities, it allows you to see into the beautiful minds of the young and inspired. One featured artist was 17 years old and fitting in freelancing around his studies. Others, my age, have a worryingly extensive back catalogue of experience, portfolios dripping with style and elegance, breathing beauty in whatever way they perceive it. One quote from such a 25 year old designer read “I am very confident with my sense of style”. And so he had a right to be. Does confidence breed beautiful design, or does it emerge from creative talent? I’m not sure.

There are companies, or, even better, ‘collectives’, within the pages of Computer Arts that encompass the very essence of what I assumed was the norm, who breathe creativity, who use such beautiful words as “coherent space” when talking about their office environment instead of sweaty, noisy and overcrowded as my London office may be described.

The dream, you can’t help it, seeps in there. Computer Arts offers you a delicious taster of an alternative reality, a bite of the apple, a taste of inspiration, of creativity.

My boss, to his credit, is forever trying to generate such a creative energy within our design team. His main argument for the lack of flowering in this area is my remote position (although he rarely addresses the issue of our other designer who works abroad). He is, to a certain extent, right. If I were there perhaps myself and my junior would have long lingering lunches, debating design, brainstorming ideas and the like. But I doubt it. I was there for nearly a year before I abandoned my office location. We worked, we worked hard, and then we went home. Some days we might have a little music, or we’d keep our audio choices personal through headphones. We’d share a minimal amount of banter due to hefty workloads and sharing an office with people who were making seemingly important phone calls. But it wasn’t the epicentre of creative flow. It shared more of a likeness with a banner ad factory at times.

I can’t help but feel that my expensive purchase this morning has at least made me feel like I am a designer. I stood on the platform, inelegantly balancing a cup of coffee, a hefty rucksack and my magazine wedged within my armpit feeling like a designer. I will garnish my knees with it on the tube on my arrival into London. I may casually discard it on the desk when I arrive in work, and effortlessly drop in a few comments on this month’s issue in our meeting this afternoon. It is a terrible shame that I can’t remember names, otherwise I might be incredibly empowered to actually sound like someone who really does know what they’re talking about.

I’d better make the best of it. At £6, I think I might just linger in the shop a little longer next time and read the best bits.

The StyleStress

In a concerted effort to keep at least one of my New Year’s resolutions, I am on the way to London and have not yet uttered a word of complaint about the ordeal*ahem*pleasant experience.

Sure I can smell an overwhelming odour of dry sweat (not me, I hope, I’m clean, presentable and mitchumed). I think it’s wafting through from behind me somewhere but I don’t think I’ll go into any lengthy investigation.

But other than that, I had the welcome news that my train, at least for this month, is leaving a total of twenty wonderful minutes later and arriving at the same time into Paddington. Plus no fare increase as of yet, however things do always take a little longer to reach the South West, where information appears to still arrive by a rather bedraggled and confused carrier pigeon once a week, so I’m not holding my breath.

I have a coffee, I have a seat, the train is warm and I have so far only spilled a small amount of coffee onto my jeans, slightly tainting an otherwise almost presentable persona. I announced last night that as I was lacking in any smart clothes other than a beautiful but heavily impractical cream suit that I have only worn once and then managed to cover the bottoms of in what looks suspiciously like oil (luckily I had to have them taken up, being too long for my stunted legs, so most of the offensive black smears are now hidden beneath the fold) and a series of tired New Look items, I was going to go with a funky look for our client meeting today. Completely overlooking the fact that I don’t do funky, unless strictly instructed by my sister, usually in items of clothing she has given me for various birthdays and Christmasses.

My sister doesn’t just do style. She has an ability to make an item of clothing stylish just by wearing it. She has a knack with clothes that abandoned me shortly after I was released from the confines of nappies (to be honest, I’m not sure I even had it before then, but as I was dressed by my mum I’m not going to speculate). She, typically, is the sort of person that will usually be standing beside me admiring an item debating on purchase, or, even better, wearing said item, while I am screwing up my face in an unattractive contorted fashion discussing loudly with no one in particular how hideous it looks. But while the offended co-purchaser is usually, I imagine, deeply offended by my comments, or takes one look at my ill chosen attire and is confident in the fact that I appear to have inherited my style from a jumble sale and therefore can rest assured that my comments can be discarded, my sister, well, can just wear it.

I have tried to figure out how she does it. One particular note is that she accessorises. While I have not removed the necklace currently around my neck (bits of hair and material intertwined into the chain attractively), incidentally which she bought me, for more than 24 hours in the last year, she has an array of bangles and jingly things to illustrate any material creation from her wardrobe. I, on the other hand, folded up a pair of heavily mud splattered jeans last night so that I could wear them for the rest of the week during the day to save on washing.

My going out attire is so sadly neglected that for Christmas Eve this year, an occasion in which I try to make myself look reasonably attractive in the hope that I will see child and fat laden ex schoolmates in the local pub and feel suitably smug, I had to team up two previously disregarded items together (one from TK Maxx) so as to not have to put on the same thing that I wore 12 months ago.

I asked my sister at Christmas to take me shopping in the New Year. The clearly underlying message in this was to drag my tired limp wardrobe from a disturbingly similar state to that of when I was fifteen to something representing the person I would so dearly love to be. As we have yet to fix a date, this morning I have managed to piece together an outfit (if it can be adorned with such a title, rather than just a selection of clothing) that I have a strong suspicion I wore to the last client meeting I had in November.

My sister sweeps through shops in an astonishingly focused, calculated and passionate fashion. She is probably the only person I know who has the patience to stand watching me frowning frumpily in numerous outfits in changing rooms, tugging, slouching, pulling, fidgeting and generally being obnoxious and difficult. She has a continual battle that not only do I detest shopping, I am incredibly bad at buying items that I don’t think will get substantial wear, queuing to pay, even more so queuing to try the damn thing on and, possibly most frustrating, paying any money at all.

Despite all this, I have noticed that her enthusiasm, persistence and determination can override even my most grumpy and stroppy days. She is the only one I will entrust my credit card and soul to on a shopping expedition, on the condition that there will be numerous refreshment stops.

She also has conquered the holy grail of makeup application that so heavily passed me by my idea of putting my face on involves applying congealed mascara to my squeamish eyelashes to produce three large unattractive lashes protruding from each eye, and then to wipe any unruly black stuff from beneath my eyelid with a bit of saliva and a bit of tissue and, if that doesn’t work, slapping on a vaguely skin tone matching concealer beneath and blending it in with whatever’s left to produce even heavier shadows beneath my tired eyes.
The other night at dinner with my SP (equally as stylish, and with a reasonable amount of patience shopping with me as long as it is in no more than one shop and she can go off on her own and can just be the brutal but welcome judge as to whether I look appalling or satisfactory in an outfit of choice) my boyfriend voiced, from a reasonable amount of nowhere, that he would like it if I looked more feminine and wore shoes (which, as a result, she kindly donated me the pair that I had borrowed from her for the evening).

This was news to me. I knew perhaps that wellies and a pack-a-mac weren’t going to be the most alluring way to dress and at least salvaged clean (if un-ironed) items if we were to venture out of the house anywhere that wasn’t a field with a muddy Newfy, but shoes?
I have had a rather uncomfortable history with shoes. Boots, of any length, of any heel height, I can manage (if I can override the sweating on my overheating calves on warmer days). But shoes make me look like I have fat feet.

This may be because I have fat feet, I am not entirely sure.

The unwanted skin cascades over the tops of the shoe, my toes unattractively dividing at the bottom in unsightly gaps. And, best of all, there always appears to be an inch gap where my heel should nestle comfortably into the back of the shoe, to look as if I am playing at dressing up in my mum’s oversized shoes. That is, unless I buy a pair that actually is supposedly my shoe size, but seems to be for those with feet no narrower than a very narrow thing.

I have wide feet. Wide enough that when I briefly attacked point work in ballet, my custom point shoes were branded with a sizing of three x’s. Which is, I was informed, let’s just say a ‘substantial width’.

I have promised myself that this year, this year I will come into myself. I will find my style, my comfort, my physical personality. And that will not involve buying everything TK Maxx (unless, by chance, that is my style. Oh my god. What if it is?). I will purchase makeup not from Rimmel but from companies that give you attractive little gift bags to in some way justify the hefty increase on your credit card, but are of quality (I am told anyway). And apparently this doesn’t mean No. 7 in Boots. 2007 the WebStress puts aside her easily adopted Cornish attire and welcomes an effortless mix of style, sophistication, sexiness and (look, I can’t avoid this, I have a Newfy) practicality and comfort (those last two words, dripping with connotations of Country Casuals and the like, send a shiver down even my spine but I can’t walk a 31kg puppy in heels).

I wonder if clothing sizes are just as erratic at online e-tailors?

Friday Morning part II: The WebStress takes on web design and designers in general in a fairly random, ill thought out and totally unresearched fashion

The things I love about the web now, in my eyes, are wonderfully the antithesis of traditional web design, of what I tentatively partially qualified in and didn't actually really like.

Blogs, these wonderful time wasting, thought dumping spaces, holes in the internet plugged with reams of ideas and mind mumbles. I doubt very few blogs have been designed for anything other than to look quite nice (although instruct me if I am wrong as this is a Friday morning thought bubble and as such I have conducted absolutely zero research).

Multiplied and spawned from stylesheets, an organic production of interlinking thought strands. Pick a stylesheet, any stylesheet. Your blog will instantly look anything from readable to sugar dripping eye candy in a heartbeat. And, this is the best bit, highly optimised for search engines. Brilliant.

There are the MySpaces, the YouTubes (and, of course, wonderful Blogger). Design itself becomes organic and mutated, through hungry fingers accessing exposed stylesheets, image and video fragments, pieced together like an ever changing mood board.

A client the other day, noticing such sites were getting an *ahem* awful lot of exposure suggested we get on the user generated bandwagon and do something ‘in that vein’. Genius. I am as such today conducting research (oh how I love web design research, which, as its alter ego may appear as aimless surfing, could get many an employee in any other line of work ungraciously sacked) for such a content site, although we can't let the general public say too much, they must be engineered to say things that suit the client, that suit the site, no paragraph too long, no picture too unsightly, no unanswerable question or angry rant.

Many web designers, myself sadly included, will often wince when we look at a badly constructed site, a poorly designed monstrosity. But with user generated content I can’t help but feel that younger users are getting something that I, and my colleagues, are not, because they experiment, because they try, because they push themselves, they sit at their computers, tap, tap, tapping away, changing a colour here, a font style here, sure it ain’t pretty but see what I can do mum, why join the dots, why paint by numbers.

A rawness that budgets forbid, an excitement that a payroll quashes, those late nights tinkering, tapping, trying that having a Newfy just doesn’t allow. They have an unharnessed energy that I can about muster for a weekly pole dancing class. It flows through them, the tinkering, the tapping, the scroll-wheeling. The anticipation that they don't know exactly what they are going or want to achieve but they're going to get there, or if not, never mind, they'll start looking at porn instead.

That’s what I want (minus the porn). That’s what I want to be involved with. Maybe that is the reserve of the youth, maybe it is a state of mind that maturity or mortgages suffocate, maybe it is not my place, that I should be simply an observer, a monitorer of such bursting creativity and exploration.

I had the chance to be immersed in academia and I often regret the research I could have done, the exploration, the findings, the information, the words I could have expressed. A need to tell the world, to write, to not only know what I know but make others know it too.

I was too young to be a lecturer, but it is a regret that I can never reclaim. All I have still to my name is a BSc in something that sounds vaguely like I might have something to do with multimedia, or perhaps just media in general.

These so-called dynamic sites, these content management systems that allow clueless and impatient clients to tinker with, adding a hideous image breaking the designer’s flow, adding a bloody buggering underline on some text which isn’t a bloody buggering link, these people not wanting to learn, just counting down until they leave work to tend to their pint/child, burst frustration within me.

We are a strange mix, the web designer and the client. The web designer designs for their work to be used, yes, to be abused (which often loosely translated as to be used), no. The client wants the website to do everything it has not previously requested. The web designer grumbles, the client grumbles. Rarely, one party is moderately happy.

I recently created a MySpace page for my sister’s project. In the little time that I had, I made it as beautiful as I could figure out how to with MySpace’s crazy styles. And I thought: This is great. A designer, qualified with some vague degree in something somehow related to Web Designer, creating pages alongside everyone else. Not being driven by the need for something beautiful for your portfolio can be quite a liberating experience for a designer.

My dad told me last night of a friend at work who managed to start her own website for £30. I grumbled, saying it was probably crap. I have just won a commission for a website for around £3,000 (to do in my spare time, yes, yes, yes, I know, don’t say it). My work regularly commissions projects of upwards of £30k, and that is for something by my standards reasonably basic. Money, I have quickly learned, and how much you pay for a website isn't always in direct ratio to how good the product is. There is money for the web, not as much as there used to be, but its there, and not being harnessed altogether in the right way, all of the time.

I am trying to find something here, something that I don’t feel is all that quite right with the ethos of (and this is general) the old style web designer, or maybe just with me, something that needs to shift, something that needs to bend, or break, or crumble, or remould.

There is opportunity there, perhaps there is even something to keep me from wanting to deny all knowledge of anything to do with the web altogether and return to cleaning old people once and for all, but perhaps it isn’t in quite the way I thought.

These are just thought fragments, and noticing it is 9:20 and I have spent an hour and twenty minutes wittering, I need to get on with something productive, in the eyes of my employers at least.

Friday Morning part I: Snuffles and Sniffles

And as the last coughs are being dragged from my shrivelled lungs like porcupines through my throat, and the veil of mucus that hung heavily over my head, and the last of the sweat droplets begin to dry (I really should have a shower) against my skin in places that I can’t even Mitchum, and as the well of thick saliva begins to dissipate from its previously established home at the back of my mouth, I am almost, almost, well again.

Over the last week I have expelled more unsightly products from every pore in my body than I thought previously possible. Sweat, mucus, dry throaty coughs attacking like daggers and then the odd cough laden with all sorts of fun stuff, saliva, and generally illness has radiated from every cell.

I had not been well prior to Christmas. I had taken a few days off to get myself right although, in true WebStress fashion, these rest days were harnessed to work my arse off producing Christmas materials for a company that were never used for a stream of highly ridiculous reasons that if I go into I might induce a cardiac arrest*.

*If you can’t see the bitter undertones I’ve added them in here.

Then Christmas came and I opened my arms to the much anticipated lie-ins and warmth and comfort and cosiness and general pampering that such festive period usually induces.

So, the day after Boxing day I packed up the car and headed oop North, feeling refreshed but a little off colour, presumably down to various things that weren’t WebStress friendly that I munched under the guise of it being Christmas and all that, or one glass of wine too many the night before.

By the time I reached the M60 on the South West side of Manchester, things weren’t looking at all pretty. I had nearly had to phone my boyfriend to come and rescue me but I managed, feeding Newfy in the back any food that I couldn’t stomach (she seems to be a Marmite girl which has thrilled me and disgusted my boyfriend, although she does like eating a variety of excrement but I won’t try and draw any parallels).

I arrived at my boyfriend’s sister’s house feeling slightly like the undead and crawled grumpily into bed to try and sleep off what I assumed was just exhaustion and a sore throat from trying to sing the high notes that Fiona Apple can get and I can only dream of.

Over the next few days, through visits to see my SP and her fiancée, through nights out, through dog walks, I was not well. I was really not very well at all.

New Year came and, while the house was a flurry of activity, my boyfriend’s sister (for want of a better name, as it really is a bit of a textual mouthful to write every time) tucked me into the electronic-relaxing-thingy-chair with a blanket and I wallowed in my own self pity as productivity exploded around me.

I made it. I made it not just to Big Ben, but to 2am.

This there began my downfall in earnest.

I had been fighting off what I assumed to be a nasty cold. I had dosed myself up with drugs, I had fought, I had succumbed to sleep when I could, I had fought the pain in the night, the grasping for air and the needles in my throat.

We drove home from the north and all was not how it should have been deep within the WebStress. All was not so well in fact that I spent the subsequent days in bed, feeling rather sorry for myself.

So now, after my first day back at work being so unproductive yesterday that it took me 3 hours to produce some, lets face it, damn near appalling banner ads, with a feeling that if I look at them in the cold light of day, like a drunken genius observing their catastrophic production the sober morning after, I would not like what I saw very much. I passed them over to my junior before I collapsed yesterday afternoon, and haven’t heard back since.

This morning I woke exhausted but with the absence of the headache that has nearly reduced me to tears on previous mornings. I am sat here, still hacking occasionally, still sweating (although this might not actually be down to being ill now…), still not quite right, in the first day of what I believe may be wellness.

This was not how I wanted to start 2007. I had delusions of grandeur. This was going to be my year. I was going to grab January by the horns and shake it until its innards collapsed and I was able to walk across the defeated beast that is the first month of the year triumphant in my achievements.

One laughable resolution was that I was going to look less like a tramp and more like someone my boyfriend wanted to have a relationship with when he came home from work on an evening. Yes I work from home but scutter is not an alternative word for attractive and alluring partner. I was going to brush my hair on a morning, have a shower to invigorate me (and take away that morning smell which at least Newfy seems to not abide), perhaps put on some makeup, choose items of clothing that didn’t make me look like a small, overweight, pregnant 12 year old (I’ve seen them. I know).

Another was that I was going to not complain about clients and client related work to people in work. So far I have achieved this bar one small incident when I said something wholly not very nice about a client idea yesterday and then back peddled so dramatically that I ended up being a little bit patronising. My achievement may be largely to do with the fact that it wasn’t very easy for me to speak yesterday and so far I have only endured 8 hours of work in January.

Another was my journeys to London that I was going to at least accept, if not rejoice about. Again and again, in pubs with old friends, in conversations with those old friend’s parents over Christmas, people asked me about my job. I work from home. Yes, yes, on a London weighting. Hours? I work 8 til 4. Yes it does suit me rather well really. I can look after Newfy and my commute is all of 30 seconds. Visits to London? Oh twice a month. Yes, yes, only twice a month. And the people I work with? Lovely, yes lovely. I suppose that is rather a good deal really isn’t it.

I was supposed to go to London today but due to my illness this has been postponed until Monday. Resolution pending.

The Joe Typical resolutions include being more organised, keeping tax money in an account for tax and not a new car, filing my return in April not a year later when I can’t remember anything, reducing the amount of freelance work I do, starting a business, buying a house and being less stressed.

Yep, notice how I slipped that one in there.

I am wondering what my name would be if I was no longer stressed. Just Web? WebJoy? WebJubilation? WebFunAndFrolics? Hmm.

As my mother would (and frequently does) say about me: I stress because I care, I stress because I worry too much – about what other people think, about how other people feel, I want to achieve too much, because I don’t think I’m very good.

My last and probably toughest one to sort out would essentially irradiate the latter, for at least the most part. My mother usually accompanies the stress related lines with a comment or two about how I’m taking too much on, or I’m overdoing it.

I think essentially I will probably always struggle with a balance of not ‘overdoing it’. But at least I could stop overdoing it about bloody web design.

A WebStress of all trades, a master of making a nice cup of tea.

Before Christmas, I was working what can only be described as stupid hours.

I was badly juggling several freelance projects, the development of a business idea for myself and my boyfriend’s sister and, hopefully, future business partner, Newfy care and, oh yes, my actual job.

I was juggling these so badly that, once Christmas came, I allowed them to collapse on top of me, and I in turn collapsed beneath them.

This isn’t unusual of the WebStress. It is a cyclical process that I fall into again and again, unwittingly or consciously, I’m never all that sure.

It goes a little something like this (if someone wishes to provide some sort of accompaniment of a musical nature, perhaps a shaky egg):

- WebStress is working normally (with the now permanent addition of Newfy care)
- WebStress acquires a small, seemingly inoffensive freelance project which she thinks may be useful to pay off a holiday/Christmas presents/debts etc. depending on the time of year and personal situation. She accepts said freelance project and waits for further details.
- WebStress by this point already has a sick feeling in her stomach. Like a Star Trek episode, there is something lurking behind that seemingly innocent polystyrene boulder and those scantily clad half naked nubile beauties aren’t all what they seem. In a word (or two), nothing’s exactly what it seems.
- Before the WebStress has a chance to do much about anything, she a. becomes ill, b. realises the project is way beyond its original specification, c. is given a deadline of last Tuesday, d. will achieve a very poor ratio of stress/workload : cash, e. have another promised project also thrust upon her ever-southward-bound bosom, or, as was the case before Christmas, the ever faithful f. all of the above.

I promised myself when my boyfriend came home that I wouldn’t take on any more freelance work. This is a promise I have made, in earnest, many times before. This time, though, this time it was for real. (Like the time before, but let’s gloss over that one and concentrate on the present).

Then, well, then my tax bill happened. And, like the breaking of a damn, I accepted project after project, all small and inoffensive in their own right, but each with their own individual, let’s say ‘niggles’ for want but wise suppression of a more aggressive word.

The problem with freelance projects and me is that they seem to most of the time just find me. And they seem to always be in the assumption that I want to do them. The problem with me and freelance projects is, I, in the most part, say yes, not because I want to do them, more that I don’t really have an excuse not to do them.

I am a poor freelancer. I have been told this on many occasions. I became involved in the downwards spiral of charging too little for my endeavours way back when I left University because, in the understanding (misguided or not) that I couldn’t really actually design, let alone design a website, I charged under the going rate. Therefore clients (and, bless, this took a long while for the WebStress to understand) didn’t necessarily come to me because I was good (and therefore raising my otherwise fragile self esteem) but because I was cheap.

Therefore I never make any money, and am never able to really say ‘wow that project was shit but hey it took me half a day guess who’s flashing the cash now’ (or words to that effect). At the end of every project instead I feel a little deflated when I receive my cheque.

Because the sort of clientele I have accumulated in the past are the sort of people who have chosen me because I am cheap, the work I get is therefore likely to be uninspiring and need to be done in a fraction of the time it can feasibly accomplished within.

I have these words, that I try desperately to chase away from, but that catch my ankles, that curl through the hollow passage ways of my head, that cling to the quiet breaths that I am left with on an evening. Words I loathe, that aren’t what I stand for, that aren’t who I am. I want to be a person of quality. I want those who come to me, as friends, as family, as co-workers, and know I produce quality, in my words, in my feelings, in my work. But it echoes throughout my keystrokes, it sits there in the whirring of my overheating laptop.

I spread myself too thin.

There is work, and I take it on, and on, and on. What is achieved? What is done well? To start a project aching to be finished, to open a Photoshop document watching seconds, minutes, hours drain away and ill thought out designs appear on the canvas, dragged from my conscious, incomplete, half conceived.

It isn’t for the money I do these things. Well, in the most part. I can’t believe in my heart it is. The money trickles in and drains away without a moment at the lips. What I achieve isn’t money. This time it has been, for my tax return, and maybe other times, oh the excuses, maybe it is.

But I am more than money. Time is more than money. My Newfy, asleep snoring heavily by my side is more than money. My boyfriend, my family, my friends. My life is more than these projects, these infections that drain my energy and my strength like a seeping wound.

Then what? I’m guessing experience, in the most part. An ever swelling need to be better than I am. To be a better designer, a better coder, just…better. You want me to make you a form, a catalogue, a blog, a shop, a message board, a game, something beautiful, yes, yes, yes I’ll do it, pick me pick me.

This project will make me, this string to my ever changing bow, never playing one type of music, never achieving something well. An increasing need to grasp the future, to say I will be better than this, I will be more than my job, I will be recognised, I will achieve.

But really, WebStress, as a web designer?

A WebStress of all Internet skills, a master of none.

Burn, Baby, Burn

From a promising flourish of blogs regarding my dead cat, now another lengthy delay, so much so that my browser no longer even recognises my blog’s URL.

I am sat at my desk for the first time this year, my laptop whirring nosily (and, my boyfriend tells me, worryingly) as it exhales hot puffs of exhausted air onto my thankfully ventilated desktop. A near disastrous situation occurred over Christmas when, after already being told once that if I left my laptop on the bed it would catch fire, he then found it (after, in my defence, I had done some – in his eyes, lame – propping up of said laptop) nearly burning a hole to the centre of the Earth, for what purposes I didn’t ask.

No one else’s laptops do this, I have been informed. I guess its nice to feel special. Maybe I will forever be choosing suitable settings for the laptop, as with myself and well ventilated clothing so as not to produce unsightly sweat marks. I wonder if there is some sort of Mitchum equivalent for the technological world. Or, more effectively, I wish I knew what the problem was.

My boyfriend has uttered the words ‘blow it away’ more than once. This is all very well but while there is something incredibly satisfying about typing the words Format C: into the DOS command prompt, reminiscent of late 80’s and early 90’s movies (although sadly the type isn’t a dramatic, something-is-just-about-to-happen fluorescent green but a rather uninspiring off white) it never, with me, oh it is always with me, ever quite as simple as that.

When I started blogging, just under a year ago, my old computer was the subject of such frustrated flurries of text. I felt bad for it, I really did, but what could I do? It was either break down, again, into a pool of my own snot ridden tears, or write. I thought buying one of the most expensive laptops on the open market at the time would perhaps ensure that such incidences didn’t occur again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Aces (for that is my inspired, but perhaps in hindsight ill thought out, naming of my laptop) is good to me. I am a terrible PC user. I have a hideous habit of multitasking to the point that I have no idea what I am doing or what I am hoping to achieve with an array of programs and browser windows open, scattered in disarray over my dual monitors. My laptop does well to keep up, switching its resources frantically as I tab between memory hungry applications. There are occasions when it does get a little confused and all the tabs at the bottom start flashing as if in alarm to force me to leave it be and go and make a cup of tea so that it can carry out a damage assessment and resume some sort of normality while it attempts to soothe its WebStress abused interior. There are other occasions when programs will terminate when I am doing something that isn’t particularly favourable, although I think that may be an issue to take up with Adobe rather than lay the blame with the trusty innards of my overworked and under appreciated laptop.

I have never genderised my PC. When I learnt French we were informed that Ordinateur could be either masculine or feminine and we had a lengthy debate, as best all 14 year olds can do, about which it should be. Females in my class naturally said male – stubborn, irrational, refusing to do what you tell it to even when you have given it explicit instructions, cannot multitask without having a hissy fit etc. Males said female for pretty much the same reasons.

Aces is without gender. I wonder if it is because of my high turnover of computers (I am typing this softly so it remains unaware of its fate) that I refuse to develop an emotional connection with them like I have with my car and my guitars. It hasn’t displayed any real gender traits to warrant being labelled as such though.

It is more, I guess, a stroppy teenager than of a specific gender. It takes an age to finally get motivated to display anything other than a vague ‘yes okay I’ve noted that you’ve turned the power button on’ message (something that my boyfriend has also voiced numerous concerns about, and to prove a point has in the past booted his up, run various tasks and shut it down, before mine has even thought about getting further than the ‘hang on so you want me to actually be productive’ stages of the boot process). And, as I have previously mentioned, it gets more than a little warm (although I’m not entirely sure how the latter is connected to being a stroppy teenager, unless said teenager is perhaps running a temperature at the time or, like its owner, is suffering from an unsightly overheating problem, a result of which it is all being channelled through a tiny series of the PC equivalent of sweat glands).

I shouldn’t complain. If I do, Aces might hear me and voluntarily offer itself up for a transfer next time I’m in London by way of a mugging. Or decide to be particularly susceptible to the next thunderstorm that’s coming our way. It is, by all accounts, a fantastic computer. But why, as I write, do I feel that perhaps I am writing that so nothing bad happens to it? Am I really so fickle? Do I really believe a PC with several more brain cells than I have managed to club together this morning to operate something in the way of a functioning WebStress would succumb to flattery, in the same way that its owner might?

I think I might just check the insurance documents. Just in case.