False Gods

I've always been vaguely aware that the slavish lurching from one purchase to the next was more than just a little vacuous. The recent 'global financial crisis', 'credit crunch' and resultant 'financial stimulus', though, has shone the gloomy light of a cloudy day into the crevices of my mind and wreaked epistemic violence upon my ostensibly capitalist outlook.

What's the alternative though? I loathe socialism with its controlling, interfering, patronising tendencies and fear its logical conclusion: communism. And yet consumerism surely must be abandoned in light of the recent crisis, the effect it has on the environment and the total lack of moral purpose which it provides.

Maybe we are in need of the next 'ism...

Twice the ice

After work I had the special treat of having to scrape ice from the inside of my car, in addition to the outside. I heart the Winter.

Christmas Bash

Last night was my work Christmas party where I spent lots of money, drank too much and had a miserable time. We ended up in an awful place called Chicago Rock Cafe. We had to queue for an hour to get in, pay five pounds for the pleasure and then were treated to cheesy dance music played at a volume designed to elide conversation. The bar had some lovely brightly lit pumps advertising Boddintons, Staropramen, Guinness... none of which they actually sold. After waiting for about 20 minutes to be served I inquired about the beers on tap to be told that they only sold bottles of Becks and the only kind of whiskey they stocked was Bells. Later on I managed to step in some sick near the dance floor, shortly before getting involved in separating two blokes intent on punching each others lights out by the bar. Sometime between 2 and 3am I'd had enough; I headed out to find a taxi and realised that, despite spending the best part of seven hours out with my work colleagues, we'd barely said a word to each other. The experience of clubbing in Tamworth can be best summed up by a comment I overheard in the queue: "It's wicked when you throw up, man, cos you can just carry on drinking."

I did make good use of my hangover time today, however, and finished my short story. Just four essays to go...

I was faced with a rather unpalatable choice this week upon reading that Gordon Brown has written to the winner of X-Factor in order to congratulate her. Either our sinister, deceitful wielder of the clunking fist and his army of Spin Monkeys have decided to try to hoodwink the public yet again, this time into thinking that the dour Scottish intellectual shares our low brow passions or, and possibly worse, the Prime Minister of Great Britain - the man in charge of our future - actually enjoys the puerile tripe that is X-Factor. Oh dear.

Crack-head Cowboy

I'm struggling for inspiration, trying to come up with a good short story about a character we met in New Orleans for an assignment due in in January. As part of the assignment we have to review the work of a fellow student; and I have several people waiting on my story. I'd promised them a draft for tomorrow but I'm sitting here with 200 of 2500 words written just not able to squeeze the words out. And this is just one part of one of the five assignments I have due in between the 6th and the 12th of January. At this rate I will be writing (or endlessly prevaricating) on Christmas day!

On a happier note: I put the Christmas tree up yesterday. Last year we were feeling conscious of space and bought a teeny little potted tree that sat on our dining table; this year we decided that a big tree was in order and plumped for a 6 and a half ft. one which now dominates our living room. Yesterday evening we put some music on, drank some wine and decorated our tree which really got us in the Christmas spirit.