And particularly as someone recently mentioned how cunnngly guarded we are here at Casa Uborka, this seems like a good one to do; via Pix. It’s a bit of a stretch for the old memory cells, though.
Ten years ago I lived in Plymouth and worked for a company called Milk Marque. I was a few months away from getting married, and deeply involved in lots of lovely, lovely planning. We had found a really nice house with views of Plymouth Sound, but our moving date kept getting put back for random reasons like the vendor’s wife committing suicide by setting herself on fire.
Five years ago I lived in Worcester and worked for a chemical company that paid me an impressive amount of money to do very little; I found it boring but it hadn’t yet occurred to us to move to Hungary. I was a few months away from getting married, but certainly hadn’t started planning it by that point. Life was built on a solid foundation of routine, two cats, and a great deal of alcohol.
One year ago I had been living with Pete for three months, and was doing what I considered to be a dream job as an ISO 9000 consultant [yes I’m a bit strange]. Pete and I had just got back from a week in the Lake District; we had not had any serious conversations about getting married.
Yesterday was a busy day at work, now that I’m past my 60-day probation period with the factory monitoring company and my boss seems to trust me to get things done. Around this time, we had just put the phone down from our weekly conference call with the NJ and LA offices, during which the americans had been louder than usual, and I had only made two remarks about tea. I haven’t broken it to them yet that I’ve given up tea; how would they classify me, then?
Today I have the day off, but Pete wouldn’t let me enjoy my lie in and made me get up at the same time as him. I wasted the morning on the computer (but managed not to check my work email), then went out for lunch with a friend and former colleague (from the dream job). When I got back I cleaned the oven and slept off the glass of wine. Shame Wimbledon’s been rained off and it’s too drizzly to spend the evening outside a nice pub somewhere.
Next week I’m going to China.

31. Here’s what I thought about The Hours, by Michael Cunningham:
Really, it was fairly dull. I found it hard work for the first few chapters, but as you all know, I never ever give up [unless it’s some awful book set in Aberystwyth], because there’s always a chance that the story will somehow redeem itself. Frankly, The Hours never does pay its debt to the persistent reader.
The reviewer is probably supposed to refer to the profound and wistful atmosphere, but who cares? I mean, really, what about it? Sometimes books that are supposed to be deep and clever are just too damn contrived to work, and this is one of them. Meh. Intellectual blah. If this book was a person, it would be reclining on a sofa with a pale hand to its brow, and I would be wishing it would take a paracetamol and stop whining.
It ends in what might be intended to be a twist, but was in fact an unremarkable effort to tie up some ends that weren’t particularly loose anyway.
There you go: Karen reads the books so that you don’t have to.
3/5