I owe, I owe, so off to work I go

Merry bah humbug to one and all. Well, on the bright side it’s fifty one and a half weeks to xmas. Another one out of the way. Damn this six day working lark. OK, so I’ve not done as much as some, what with the driving test and time off sick, but it’s buggered my days off over this (not so) festive period. I should have been on my long weekend now, so it would have fallen: Thursday off for xmas Friday, Saturday, Sunday days off, then off Thursday for New Year’s day. As it is I had Thursday and Friday off, worked Saturday, off today, working Thursday and all the way through until next Tuesday or Wednesday. Big bum. As it happens I do need the overtime, well the money, to make up for being off sick and the general impoverishment of the season. But at this time of year you can’t help but think ‘ I shouldn’t be in here grafting, I should be at home watching Wallace and Gromit, and The Great Escape’. I’m getting cheesed off in that department already. I have to keep reminding myself I’m not in the freezer therefore I should be smiling. I have a definite feeling that I my face doesn’t fit in de-kit though. Not with the boss, so far he has been fine and dandy with me, but his lads (who think they are bosses because their dad is) are still thinking like the school bullies they so obviously recently were. If you are not a teenager who kisses their arse they don’t like you. One particularly.The other seems to try to make an effort. But they don’t get me at all, and I think they find the fact of my practising martial arts a challenge to their ego’s. Big shrug. Anyway, it doesn’t make for a good working atmosphere. I really am thinking of looking for a driving job as soon as I get my class two license. I was going to go straight in to training for my artic license, keeping a relatively well paid and secure job, but it would not be a bad thing to get some driving experience in a rigid. We’ll see how the American biscuit crumbles. on the one hand, staying where I am I have the luxury of being able to take holidays when I need them (for further training and test -s-) and it is a safe, paying job. On the other hand, nothing would prepare me for a driving job like a driving job! And it has the potential to be better paid. See how it goes. Safer where I am, but if it’s going to become stressful…, well, time will tell. Got to pass the bloody test to have an option! Still, I seem to be over that nasty cold, as is Wendy, we’ve got xmas out of the way and we’ve done all the socialising (not that we are anti-social. Hell, who am I trying to kid? […]

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What doesn’t kill you…(delays the inevitable.)

I think I’m going to live. Not forever you understand, just through this cold. I am thinking of risking going back to work tomorrow even though they have said if I go in, am too ill to work and come home again, that will be counted as two absences. Three absences in six months qualifies you for an investigatory hearing. I really can’t see who that particular rule serves. I dare not go back until I am absolutely sure I am peachy (and this cold seems to be getting better only to return with a vengeance) which means they are going to lose at least one shift when I could have soldiered on through the fag end of the bug. Whatever. I’ll try to go back tomorrow, even if I can’t work very fast and am a bit weakened it’s only for two days, then off for two. Wendy’s got it also (with the cough component, from which I seem to have been spared, so far!) I am also suffering from a creaking tendon/ buggered leg. It’s over my right shin. When I move my foot up it creaks, like tendonitis. It is going better now as I looked the symptoms up on t’interweb and the it was something I can’t remember. However the cure was; rest, ibuprofen and ice packs. Work seems to exacerbate it, but hopefully I’ve been off long enough for the healing to have taken effect. I think I caused it by actually tearing my muscle/ tendon a bit in my stretching exercises! Go me! OK, I’ve not been able to stretch (and barely been able to walk) since, so will actually be a step backwards by the time I’ve healed, but there’s no knocking the commitment. The amount of pain stretching puts you in, it takes a fair degree of determination to actually physically damage yourself. Determination without common sense. A recipe for greatness. I think I’ll make it my motto, something like ‘no brain, no gain’. Anyway time to limp to my snuffly bed Later Buck. 

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If you’ve not got your health…

Bummer. I’m coming down with the lurgy. I’ve been dodging that particular bullet for weeks now as all around me people have been dropping like flies. No longer I fear. Sah bum nim was ghastly with it the weekend before last, didn’t catch it, the lads at work have been getting ill and I remained impervious, the boss succumbed and has been off for several days, but I thought I might just hang in there until after xmas, but no. I’m ill and getting iller. Bum, bum bum! Yesterday I came home from 6-2 and had an hour in the afternoon, got up had my tea, then felt too bad to go to, TKD (even though it was the last lesson until about the 6th of January) moped for a bit, then ended up going back to bed for 9pm. Normally I have to force myself into bed before 12. It wasn’t that I was tired, I just wanted the day to be over. I made it through work today by dosing myself up with paracetamol (although I was late for work, even after all that sleep, as I’d forgotten to change the alarm back to my time of 5am, and it was still on Wendy’s time of 7! Bum, again.) but it was hard going, by the end I was weak and sweaty, and just wanted it over. Then I had to attend a family gathering tonight, as my uncle had come up from ‘darn sarf’ for a flying visit to exchange xmas prezzies, and have a quick get-together. It was in a pub (Wendy and I don’t drink) with predominantly omnivorous fare (I’m a veggie) and everything was to the standard of oven chips. I bravely and resignedly plumpled for a veggie lasagne. Dear god, how do these people sleep at night? It was a best edible, at a push tolerable. Obviously whilst there I smiled and said it was not bad, but here in the privacy of my own rantings let me own it was bad. Deeply bad. It didn’t even pretend to be making the effort to be adequate. It was fare aimed at people who had drunk so much they would have rolled up the beer mats and complimented the chef on the tortilla’s. To add insult to injury, they charge about the same as a pub we found in the lake district where every mouthful was a celebration of the culinary art, where epicures could be seen swooning in their rapture, and oven chip salesmen were regularly burnt at the stake. Still we got through it, nobles oblige -ed, and now I just have to worry about the fact that I have until xmas day before I have a day off. If it doesn’t get any worse this is controllably unpleasant. Alas I fear this is just the prelude. Right, enough whinging, time for bed. Later, Buck.

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Kung Fu fighting

Just a quickie, details to follow. I had to go up town today to get a xmas tree, in the market I saw two flyers, one for Liu Gar Kung Fu, the other for Wing Chun. I rang about the Liu Gar, but it’s not as I thought Lau Gar (Gar just being Chinese for "Family") style Kung Fu, but a distinct style. And mainly full of kids. The Wing Chun, on the other hand, is adult only, and the one I was going to start next year anyhow. It is, famously, the style taught to Bruce Lee, and is pretty damn awesome, just not as flashy as the older styles such as Lau Gar. Anyway it is the same guy who is teaching both styles, and he has a class tonight. I’m off to try it in about one minute. Oooooohhhh! More anon. Buck. … Later. (Meanwhile, back at the Buckcave…) Well that was a huge anti-climax. It is all about the punching, blocking and generally hand work. It is a weight-on-back-leg, not flashy, workaday fight- winning martial art. A complete opposite to the weight-on-front-leg, head kicking, competition orientated, so flash and cool (yet real world, fight-losing) style of Taekwondo.  Worse, it’s a class and Sifu (Chinese for instructor. You get to be a polygot in phrases such as instructor/master, training hall, and bitch-slap with martial arts!) where and by whom I have previously trained and been trained. (That last sentence doesn’t really work, but once I’d started it I was determined to finish!) He didn’t recognise me. I only left because of the getting drunk and lack of discipline issues, both of which I have in hand now. It looks to be a fair boring discipline (one of the chaps was saying Bruce Lee was bigging it up for the cameras in his films, the real art is small movements, carried out at lightning fast speed, just designed to win a fight, not to showboat at all. Bum.) but if I combine it with the TKD, the world is my lobster. Control the fight with Wing Chun, look cool with the Taekwondo. So not exciting, but to be confident in a street fight situation, necessary. *Sigh* Bedtime for Bucky. Later.

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Poetry!

Here’s something to illustrate (wrongly) what I alluded to in my last entry, i.e. the glumness of being, the malaise of the mind, (the pretentiousness of) the ennui of existence. My November Guest MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,   Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree;   She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay.   She talks and I am fain to list: She’s glad the birds are gone away, She’s glad her simple worsted gray   Is silver now with clinging mist. The desolate, deserted trees,   The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these,   And vexes me for reason why. Not yesterday I learned to know   The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so,   And they are better for her praise. – Robert Frost This I took to be a reference to depression, and the way it colours your whole perception. Or rather drains of colour. Until all that’s left is  grey, unremitting, interminable and devoid of even the hope of cessation. Turns out it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a tale of the poet going for a walk with his wife (his sorrow? Never heard of divorce?) and her taking pleasure in the season, and berating him for failing to appreciate it, whereas he was enjoying it just as much, but letting her extol it’s virtues to share the frission. Also, while we wax lyrical here is my favourite, and only memorised poem A Last Word by Ernest Dowson Let us go hence: the night is now at hand; The day is overworn, the birds all flown; And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown; Despair and death; deep darkness o’er the land, Broods like an owl; we cannot understand Laughter or tears, for we have only known Surpassing vanity: vain things alone Have driven our perverse and aimless band. Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold, To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust Find end of labour, where’s rest for the old, Freedom to all from love and fear and lust. Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust. Not bad for 1899. Keep smiling! Buck.

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