Another festival over*

And I'm slowly emerging from the annual three week rage fiesta. What rage?

• Rage at all the crowds.
• Rage that I spent £££ on events and a lot of them were absolute mince.
• Rage that despite spending a lot of £££ on events I still missed the don't miss.
• Rage that the don't miss turned out to be Bridget Christie who I saw a few years ago in her Charles II phase and thought remarkably unfunny but who now apparently has the funniest feminist set (even though some of it sounds a lot like certain Amazon reviews**).I even thought I'd bought a ticket for her in a gala but instead the person in the gala was a Canadian who looked and clearly thinks like Mel Gibson if his stream of misogynist and racist jokes were anything to go by. I was especially ragey about staying up till after midnight for him.
• Rage at all the happy couples having a lovely timewhen I'm still single.
• Rage at the ugly bloke in shorts who took time out of his fun packed evening to tell me how pathetic I was at being out by myself on a Saturday night at an event and reading while I waited in the queue.
• Rage at myself for having entirely lost my funny so I no longer enjoy anything.

I did however get to live the dream. The dream that one day a comedian would pick on me in the audience, insult me, and then ask me what I do and I'd tell him I'm a journalist and then watch him tie himself in knots out of fear that I'm there to review the show. OK, strictly speaking that was a lie because I'm not a journalist any more but it was still satisfying. I think I may be a horrible person.

*OK, technically there are still International Festival things on but they are sold out. Which enrages me.
** Her act has a lot about Bic for Her. Check out the Amazon reviews of Bic for Her. Of course it's entirely possible she wrote them.

Premonition of a death foretold

I know how I am going to die.

It will be from blunt force trauma to the head.

When I crack my head on the sanitary bin in the loos at Kings Cross after I fall off the bog in shock at a blast of cold water to the privates when the auto flush misfires when I'm checking my email in the loo. Again.

I ought to be used to it by now but it comes as a surprise every damn time I move even a fraction on the pedestal.

That's why they moved platform 9 3/4. So the happy shrieks of the kiddies young and old enough to know better drown the screams from the ladies.

Security questions

My bastarding bank has just 'upgraded' its online banking security.

Now I get a one time code delivered to my mobile to enter when I logon. Thanks a fucking bunch. I wasn't planning on taking my mobile on holiday, now I have to, just in case I need to get on the bank site.

I also have to answer three out of 8 security questions. Most of these questions are irrelevant to me. Does anyone over ten have a favourite food or place that doesn't change regularly? Of course, the end result is that I'll have to write all this down, which you aren't supposed to, because it's hard to remember an answer you've just made up.

#twittersilence

The most remarkable thing about #twittersilence as far as I'm concerned is that discovering that there are people for whom not going on Twitter for a whole day is a big fucking deal.

Suspicious

In an attempt to get over the previous disappointment and egged on by someone at work I signed up for Match again. And then I immediately realised that I wasn't going to have time during July to meet anyone (and I certainly wasn't willing to use the site from my work PC) so I decided to delay paying till August. Now, what happens on Match if you are a non-paying member is that you can look at all the 'pretty' pictures but can do precious little else. In particular, you can't read emails, reply to emails or even see who wrote them. During July I received lots of emails. Since I paid up a couple of days ago I have received none and none of the people who look interesting who emailed in July have bothered replying to me. In fact one of them has blocked me.

I'm not sure if this is just sod's law or evidence of something more dodgy.

In which I fail to live up to expectations

I'd like to think that I'm a better person than I was at 20 - nicer, more interesting and easier on the eye too. However it appears I'm wrong, if two recent meetings were anything to go by.

The first was with someone who was very briefly my best friend at school. She got in touch over Linked In and turned out to live near where I work so we met up one evening for dinner and a catch up. I thought we had a good evening, with plenty to talk about. She said at the time I should come round to dinner next time but she has ignored subsequent attempts to organise next time or indeed get back in contact.

The second was with someone who I barely knew at university. He was older than me, in a different college and hung with the rich kids whereas I only wanted to (see, told you I'm nicer now) and I don't remember talking to him more than once or twice. He snogged me once at a party but nothing came of it. He also got in touch over Linked In and seemed fantastically keen to see me again. He took me out somewhere extremely expensive, spent the whole evening telling me how much he'd adored me at university and had never forgotten me. Given that he had turned into someone incredibly handsome, charming, interesting and attractive I thought that finally all my birthdays had come at once. Admittedly I did get the third degree about why I hadn't felt the same about him at university (maybe I would have if he'd only told me at the time - the one thing that hasn't changed was that then as now I was intensely unhappy about being single) but on balance it swung towards romantic (although weird) rather than creepy. Or I thought so at the time. Things got a bit erm heated and there was a lot of talk about seeing each other again, what we would do together and so on. And I haven't heard from him since (yes I did try contacting him). In retrospect it seems clear that as the evening progressed he seemed less and less keen so it seems that four hours of current day me was enough to destroy 28 years of fantasy me.

The whole thing really unsettled me. Did he get me confused with someone else? Am I really that awful now? I found myself really regretting that nothing had happened at university because my life could be so different if I hadn't ended up with the clown I married.

I could have done without this. I'm really lonely at the moment but I think that was the final straw in the dating sense. I didn't even enjoy the fancy meal because the romantic tension was so high neither of us could eat. And that is a real tragedy.

Sadness is

Scoring a pair of £250 shoes on Ebay in the right size, right colour and right design from a brand that always fits me for £30, having them arrive in good time, well packed and in near perfect condition and being unable to cram my hideous hooves into them because this particular pair are too tight for my plates of meat.

I think maybe 25% of the shoes I buy turn out to be comfortable. Obviously I'm not improving my chances by buying online but even shoes that felt like a glove in the shop hurt or tear gashes in my skin within seconds of wearing them in real life. Even M&S Footglove hurt (and that really was a case of compromising style for comfort).

Am I the only one with this problem? It's such a waste of money, never mind the disappointment.