There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2005-01-08

Counting the days.

Well, the crappy gift-giving holidays are over for another year. Relief. Now I can walk down the street without major injuries occurring, except for those that I give myself (once I fell down a big Scarlett O'Hara staircase at a gay bar on Halloween night and broke a bone in my foot, but no one else does Halloween quite like drag queens, so it was worth it). No more tackling or having to head-fake people to get into a store. No more pretend holidays that cause stores to be closed for days on end (Boxing Day? Whatever...).

So. Where to begin... I spent a lovely (if occasionally a bit hazy) two and a half weeks with the Greggers. It was fabulous except that it made me more homesick than ever now that he's gone off on his Bataan death-plane 18-hour flight home.

When I picked him up at Heathrow, he sort of wandered through the doors from the secure area and looked very confused. I had seen him coming and tried to get through the crush of people who were also waiting for loved ones. There were basically two types of these people: Normal people and assholes. The assholes are shown on the diagram with an A. These people were lined up three deep in the only exit path from the arrivals area. These people were morons. They had essentially trapped all of the smelly, tired arriving people in a pen where they were milling about, trying to get out.

"Excuse me, pardon me, I need to get through here, you're standing in everyone's way, no one can get out, you morons," is what I should have said, but I only said the first three in the list as I tried to bust into the Pen of Weary Travelers. I got to the Bitch from Hell, Greggers was 15 feet in front of me and hadn't seen me yet, and I said, "I need to get through here," and she turned to me and replied "I can't move. I have bags by my feet."

So I just shoved past her and heard her yell "Jesus H. Christ!" but luckily she was American, so I didn't feel bad at all.

It turns out that he was confused because he thought he was in the Customs area and that all of those people were in line, waiting to be custom-ated. It turns out that no one from Customs was even there, so he could have brought me the two kilos of blow I've been promised forever and no one would have cared.

There are many other highlights from this visit:

-Sitting next to the loudest, most obnoxious, insanely snotty and conceited woman in Oxford and her dining companion on New Year's Eve. Dirty looks were exchanged. More to come.

-Discovering the fabulousness that is Black Books.

-Ireland. It almost killed me (twice, if you count the Irishman we found in London), but Ireland may be the best place I've ever been. I plan to do some sort of home-detoxification process that involves tinctures and salves, but it was worth it. Details later.

-Harrod's. Never been there before. Was boggled. Said the dumbest thing I've ever said, and that's saying something.

-I made friends with the sweetest pit bull I've ever met on the tube. He tried to get into my purse and gave me nose nibbles.

-Pete McCarthy. If you like Bill Bryson's writing, you'll love Pete.

-The Reduced Shakespeare Company.

Anyhoo, details of the above to come. I'm expecting 7 weeks of interesting crap at work, namely them being weasels and wankers even more than usual. Six weeks, if I can get time off for good behavior.

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