Conclusive Proof that My Spam Filter Doesn’t Work

I think that my computer is quite broken.  It groans a lot.  It sends me lots of error messages and it wanders about humming and staring into corners while I am trying to get its attention.  It hates me because I don’t know how to make it better again and I am now not only a neglectful mother to my children, but am also a wicked step mother to my hard drive.  Alas.  All I need to do now is kill a plant and stab a kitten and my work here will be done.

 

Part of my belief that my computer hates me is the fact that it is getting progressively sloppier at filtering my spam.  Consequently I am inundated with strange mails to which I have no desire to answer and which I have to remove with a pair of tongs and some oven gloves.  Here are some examples from this week:

 

• An e-mail purporting to be from a man in Lebanon who has a terrible disease and only minutes to live.  Apparently he loves me so much that he wants me to join him in praising the Lord and letting God into my life.  When I’ve done that he would like me to let him into my bank account.  Good luck to you fella say I.  If you want a perpetual four hundred pound overdraft that you’ve had since 1994, and HSBC actively encouraging you to take your debts to another bank, any other bank, you’ve picked the right person. Clearly Cheezus was steering your mouse clicking hand there.
• Someone telling me that they don’t want to be lonely ever again, and if only I will visit their website and watch them fornicating with a pig, all their problems will be over and they will feel whole and replenished.  I may try and hook them up with the Lebanese guy and see if they can console each other.
•  Someone promising me that if I buy my paracetamol from Canadians it will be a whole lot cheaper than if I buy them at home.  Thanks for that lovely tip.  I did in fact stock up on paracetamol while I was over there and saved myself about fifty of your English pence, which for your kindness, if you ever come to the U.K. to visit, I will use to buy you a bar of decent chocolate which isn’t made from earwax and string.  I may start sending e-mails to Canadians about this myself.
•  A plethora of people promising me that if I get a penis extension I will live a long, fruitful and happy life and be hung like a horse forever.  This may be true.  I don’t know.  I’d rather get an overdraft extension and buy some Christian Louboutins thanks.  It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but with a name like Katy, which also features heavily in my e-mail address you might think that I’d be less interested in a penis than say someone called Dave or Mr. Small Penis for example.  What worries me here is the number of e-mails I get about this.  It’s like they know something I don’t and have formed a penis related flash mob to pressure me.  I don’t get mails about having bosom extensions.  Maybe they know I’m already packing more in the bosom line than I can comfortably cope with and they think a penis will balance me out nicely.
•  Some cheery soul telling me that my underarm deodorant is full of arsenic, lead, cyanide and weedkiller and will undoubtedly poison me to death before the week is out.  As I have been using it for about eighteen months I think I must be being protected by a higher being, albeit one which wants me to get a larger penis and some headache tablets.  All I will say is that it’s not slowing down the mass of topiary growing under my arms unless I exfoliate them every morning, so it can’t be all bad, unfortunately.
•  A nice man promising to optimise my website, despite the fact that the last entry on it was two years ago and it is now festooned with cyber dust and intergalactic tinternet spiders, thus proving that I don’t give a monkey’s fart if nobody ever visits it again, and he must be desperate for business if he’s asking me.  The last time I went to a business meeting the button on my maternity trousers popped off under the table and I had to sit hunched all funny for the rest of the day.  It was not good, and prompted my retirement from the world of top level marketing to sit at home going slowly mad while the children torture me with Barbie shoes and the collected works of Hannah Montana.
•  A Lady from an NCT community group wanting to know if I had any posters of monkeys that she could use to decorate a cheeky monkey tea party she was having for small babies and their earth mothers in Market Harborough in a few weeks.  Sadly I do not have any cheeky monkey pictures, and if I did I would keep them all to myself because I have an irrational hatred of earth mothers who are brilliant at bringing up children and who weave their own muffins out of twigs and breastfeed their children until they are twenty five, whilst I keep my children quiet by flinging chicken nuggets into their cage and dropping a blanket over it. Bah!
• An e-mail from a man who lives on a mountain in India and who says he loves me and that he is spiritually in tune with the universe.  This is nice for him, not so nice for a woman who lives in Glenfield and can’t even remember her own phone number.  He does not want anything either.  This perplexes me more than the man who wants me to give him all my money.  It’s a sad indictment of my suspicious and bitter nature, but I want to know where the catch is.  I hope he’s not going to turn up on the doorstep on Sunday because I’ve got birthday tea to cook and there won’t be enough cake to go round.

 

I really need a tinternet wizard to wave his magic wand and make this stuff go away.  There’s too much random information in my head as it is, without all this penis envy and spiritual enlightenment muddying the waters.  Still, I suppose it’s better than a letter from save the Whales with a picture of a dead mammal and a cheap plastic pen in it.

 

Tuesday June 3rd – Drink, Feck, Drink and Drink

It’s nine o’clock at night, I’m drinking a glass of wine that a friend poured me to celebrate the fact that she just got a new job and trying to write the next bit of my Leonardo assignment.  This is not a good combination.  In the olden days when I was a hip, young swinger about town I could hold my beer like a good ‘un due to a considerable amount of practice.  Then I had kids and everything changed.

I’ve always had monster hangovers.  I’m one of those people who spews, and spews, and spews until their guts are lying on the pavement.  I’ve always had the ability to vomit under any kind of trying circumstance ( I am the Violet Elizabeth of the vomiting world), so in some ways this is a good thing, because I’m never likely to die of alcohol poisoning.  In other ways it means that I have ruined many a good pair of shoes and that my friends don’t like me much after a while, because they don’t like clearing up other people’s sick.  Who does? I once disgraced myself utterly at uni when instead of going to a Jools Holland gig as paid for, my friends had to carry me back to our flat and nurse me, because they found me in a heap of purple rice and Pernod sitting outside the union bar and felt responsible.  Poor buggers.  They should have left me there.  Much as we abandoned our friend on her twenty first when she insisted that she hadn’t had too much to drink and then fell off the bar stool, except with the bar stool and didn’t fall off really.  It was very weird.  I’ve never seen anyone do that before.  One minute she was propping up the bar sitting on her bar stool, the next minute there was an almighty crash and she was propping up the floor, still sitting on her bar stool.  She refused to be parted from her bar stool, so the best we could do was push her back into the upright position and dust her down before scarpering.  She had no recollection of the event the following day, although she did have a spectacular bruise on her hip and sore knees.

My friend Kate nearly murdered me when we lived in Germany due to me and my alcohol and vomiting ways.  We were going to a ball at the university.  We thought it would be much like an English ball where nothing would really start happening until at least two hours into the proceedings and then we would trip the light fantastic until the wee small hours.  We stayed at home and drank red wine first to avoid the boring bits of the ball, lots of red wine, very cheap red wine that had four inches of sediment in the bottom of the glass.  We did this on empty stomachs because we were going to have dinner at the ball.

I seem to recall that it was exceedingly hot and we took a very long taxi ride to the ball room place thingy.  By the time we got there I was feeling rather unwell.  I thought all would be good because I could then eat shed loads of food and soak up the brew.  No such luck.  We had failed to take into account ruthless German efficiency.  They had eaten everything and were now dancing away merrily in teutonic fashion shortly before going home to bed on the dot of midnight.  Kate and I broke into the kitchens where I have a very hazy recollection of filling my skirt with bread rolls and being pursued by an irate German chef. 

Unfortunately the bread rolls weren’t enough to stop the fact that I knew I was about to heave my guts up mightily.  I muttered something about excusing myself and went and found a playing field where I honked my guts up in a miserable, alcohol fuelled daze for what seemed like about a week.  By then I didn’t feel much like dancing and had completely forgotten about the others.  I gathered my sicky, crumby skirts and somehow walked the forty five minutes home without being killed, getting lost or dying in the gutter.  I passed out on my air mattress and didn’t regain consciousness until the next morning.

In the meantime, poor Kate was at her wits end and not remembering the German for police or ambulance service, had called the fire brigade.  They turned up, everyone looked for me.  Nobody found me.  Kate thought I had been murdered in my bed and came home sobbing her heart out to find me snoring sickily on the floor.  Then she wanted to murder me in my bed.  The two day lethal hangover afterwards sort of made up for my bad behaviour but I really don’t think she has ever forgiven me for giving her white hairs before her time.

My mother also has terrible hangovers. When I was very little I remember going into the bathroom one morning to find my mum sobbing in the bath while my gran knelt beside her, scrubbing her all over with a flannel and shouting at her because she should have known better and it was disgraceful at her age with two small children to think about.  I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed very interesting and I hadn’t seen my mum being told off before.  We had a long bench in our bathroom, so I sat on it and waited to see what would happen next.  Much more crying and a lot more telling off as I recall.  I still had no idea what was going on.  It turns out that as my grandparents were visiting my dad had taken my mum to the pub in our village for a drink and a break and she had gotten slaughtered on dry sherry (I think, or it may have been Bloody Mary’s). Anyway, she wasn’t very popular because she couldn’t walk, and the pub was at the bottom of a very steep hill and our house was at the top.  It took my dad about two hours to carry her home and then she spent all next day roaring and being scrubbed.  At the time I thought it was very funny.  Now I feel sorry for the poor woman.  It was probably the first time she’d been out in twelve months and it is the one and only time I’ve ever seen her drunk, so it hardly seems fair that my gran was giving her such a hard time.  It was a bit brutal, especially because my gran used to be able to drink everyone under several tables way back when.  She apparently vomited down the side of the house when she leaned out the window because the bathroom was too far away, and her dad had to spend the day scrubbing sick off the pebble dash with a broom and a bucket of soapy water, which is much worse than drinking too many sherry’s and losing your legs I think.

On the one occasion since Jason and I were together that I have had the great misfortune to have a hangover he has been as unimpressed as Kate and my gran, particularly because he had to spend the day mopping my fevered brow, emptying bowls of vomit and looking after two small children.  I only went out for a few drinks with my friend Caron, but it all went horribly wrong when after sticking with champagne I moved on to Cosmopolitans and the rest of the evening went downhill from there.  My tolerance is now practically nil, and half a glass will have me winking in a leerish manner at people and galloping around the kitchen neighing, shortly before I fall asleep in the dinner. 

God knows what a glass of wine is going to do to my ability to assess the impact of Italian power politics on Leonardo’s artistic endeavours.  I have a feeling it will go one of two ways.  I will either discover my inner genius or we will all go to hell in a hand cart.  I’ll let you know when the results are in.  I’m a bit worried actually.  I had a glass of wine last week at mum’s house with my dinner and the week before that I had several drinks.  I believe I may have had two or three, in a week.  That’s more than I had in the whole of last year, and I got married last year!  I may be on the path to perdition.  If I can stay awake that long.

My favourite drinks are champagne and raspberry Stoli.  I love raspberry Bellinis best of all, but only with good champagne.  I hate cheap champagne, which is probably why I don’t drink very often as I have very expensive tastes. Raspberry stoli isn’t cheap either.  I like it with lots of soda water, cracked ice and a slice of lime for preference.  Occasionally I like a glass of red wine, but again, it has to be good, and I’m not keen on Rioja.  Sometimes a frozen margarita is quite nice if I’m in a Mexican kind of mood.  I can’t drink lager.  It makes me pee like a horse, meaning I miss all the good gossip through spending half the night in the loo.  It also makes me rather feisty and I end up fighting people who look at me in a funny way, which is not good because after a lager everyone looks at me in a funny wya.

My favourite drink now is a large Americano with room for milk with a chaser of chocolate cornflake square.  It doesn’t give me hangovers, and it helps me to function properly, particularly the cornflake squares which are full of vitamin b and terribly good for me.  Without them I’d be a mere shadow of my former self, which given the fact that I can’t get into that Ted Baker slip dress any more is probably no bad thing.  But, as much as I like Ted Baker, it has to be said that I like chocolate cornflake squares rather more.  Sorry Ted.

Today the children have gone to Jamie’s, which is good, considering they were as hideous at breakfast this morning as they were at tea last night.  They came home after school briefly, fought a lot, burst into tears and then left.  I didn’t mind the fighting bit too much due to the fact that the leaving bit followed swiftly on its heels.  I spent the day with my friend Caron and instead of going out boozing as we probably would have in the olden days, we went to the Boden sale and spent a lot of money on our children.  I also bought a pair of knee length chocolate brown leather boots with three inch heels which delighted my heart, despite being a size too small.  I’m breaking them in.  All will be well.  Caron bought shoes too, a size too big.  She’s growing into them.  A girl has to suffer for fashion.

Then we went and indulged ourselves with coffee and cake in Borders and gossiped the afternoon away while the babies slept.  Oscar was very tired by the Boden sale.  He has a good eye for fashion but it wears him out.  I was delighted.  He slept for two and a half hours, during which time I drank copious amounts of tea and lounged about thinking how different a day it has been and surely that must be a good thing because if we’d had another day like yesterday I would have been gibbering in a strait jacket by now.