Although it was a cold and completely windless day, yesterday morning, my mother insisted that I hung the washing out.

It took me about half an hour. And thanks to the negative temperature and a pile of damp clothes that made the entire stock of Marks And Spencers look like a wardrobe of an African peasant, my fingers nearly dropped off.

And then what happened? A few hours later, it started raining, and by the time I'd removed the entire flock of sheep and acres of cotton plants from the line, they were wetter than it was to start with.

Remind me to be a nudist when I grow up, ok?

Today wasn't much more successful. I went bowling with Marion and Smill.

First, there was the small matter of finding the bowling alley. Dad had drawn up an intricate map, but it wasn't obvious which turn off I should take, so I missed it. Miraculously, I found myself on the right road anyway, but not wanting to miss the bowling alley car park, I took every turn off there was. Yes, all five, including one that led me on to a one-lane wide dead-end, which required a seven-point turn in order to escape.

Then came the actual bowling. After managing to turn the computer screen a revolting shade of banana, the competition commenced.

Smill hadn't been bowling since she was eight, but while I knew Marion was rather good, I didn't think I was too shabby either. I'd been about seven times before, and usually managed to score between ninety and a hundred, despite the fact the bowling alley is built on a hill. (It doesn't look like it, but it most definitely is.) Ha. Marion scored about 80; Smill and I got 37 each. Yes, that's an average of 1.85 pins per ball.

The second time round, in an attempt to preserve some degree of dignity, I insisted on using the invention with the most cringe-worthy name ever: bowling buddies.

And still, I only scored 47! Even without gutters, there were occasions when I managed to throw the ball and not knock down a single pin.

Then we tried our hands at some arcade games. Foolishly, I selected automatic gears with the driving simulator and spent the entire race spinning round in circles. Then, the motorbike machine ate about £3.50 and I couldn't get going at all. (You had to turn the handle bars. Obviously.)

I did win at air hockey and pool, though. Although we initially attempted to play the former without any Discs. And I think we managed to break the pool table.

Monday 3 April 2000

Best day at work in ages!

Today saw the commencement of my second venture into A Different Department, this time Technical. Most of the day was spent screwing.

Admittedly, the sort of screwing that involves screws, screwdrivers and bits of computers - no, wait, that sounds even more dodgy - but it I suppose it was positively orgasmic. I managed to reassemble a computer without blowing it up! More amazing still I managed to set up a printer / scanner / fax machine / photocopier from scratch! And it worked!

And I got to eat chocolate digestives instead of aevil Rich Teas! And listen to the radio all day. And I got to spend an hour and a half playing Minesweeper! Yes, this was part of the job: one of the customers believes his computer freezes if you use it enough, so I was testing it out. It was a bit of a pain in the neck, since even standing up, the monitor was about a foot above my head, but hey. It beats trying to get round Netscape's inability to handle watermark backgrounds.

Friday 14 April 2000

I am seriously considering a career in gambling now. Two weeks ago, I won ten pounds on the National Lottery. Then, last Friday, I was given the task of organising a sweepstakes at work. Everyone paid for the names of one or two horses running in the Grand National, and the total sum was to go to the sponsor of the winner. And which horse won?

Not one of mine. But no one else had bet on it either. So the money was to go to he or she whose credit lay on the horse that achieved second place. And who was that?

Not me. But it wasn't anyone else either. And so, the proceeds were to be given to the person whose financial future had depended on the horse that finished third. And the identity of the lucky party?

Not me. But not any else either. However, I did have a piece of paper bearing the name of the horse in fourth place sitting in my sizeable stack of empty plastic cups, courtesy of the water machine. And so I found myself twenty-five pounds richer.

Hhow was I to spend my ill-gotten gains? A normal usage would be to go out celebrating, and, for once in my life, I decided to do something normal. So last night, Chris, Will, Roe and (surprisingly enough) myself, met up in Carlisle, with the intention of going back to my house afterwards, à la my eighteenth birthday. When I asked if my parents approved of this plan, they said no, and they were not happy when they realised that I didn't give a monkey's.

Feeling the least need to consume alcohol, I took responsibility for getting us back to my place. Not that any of them had much confidence in my driving skills, but in spite of my disadvantage of being female, I'm possibly the safest road user of the lot. Roe takes his first test on 28 April. Will failed his test on four occasions, can't be bothered indicating most of the time, and thinks traffic lights are merely a device to make the streets look prettier. And Chris has a Mini, whose smallness and subsequent manouevrability he uses to his advantage, if you catch my drift. Why any of the them are still alive, I cannot fathom.

So Chris was dropped off by his brother Tim at my beloved workplace. Since the restaurant where we'd arranged to meet Will and Roe was only a short walk away, I left my car parked there, and we wandered in its general direction. (I say general, not through any Monty Pythonic influence, but because Chris refused to leave the car park the normal way: he wanted a short cut. However, none were to be found, excluding those that involved climbing over a fifteen foot high wall.) While we waited for Will and Roe to appear, always a potentially never-ending mission, we watched people trying to parallel park by the roadside (nearly all of them attempted and failed to enter spaces forwards) and counted Tim sightings, as he drove round and round, killing time before The Ultimate Torture That Is The Annual Carlisle Youth Concert Band Concert Where You Play With A Load Of Younger Kids Who Are All Better Than You.

The geenic duo eventually arrived, and we went to la restaurante and The Nearest Pub, then The Woodrow Wilson. On the way, my companions beat me up and stole my wallet, but they gave it back when I offered to buy them drinks.

There, we met Chris N, who, sitting with us in the non-smoking section, filled a whole glass with ash, and proudly announced that he was cutting down on fags. "I used to be on forty a day," he explained. [I meant "fags" in the British sense of the word, but the American one would be equally appropriate in most people's opinions.]

As ten o'clock neared, we decided to get a video, then travel back to Brampton so I could drink before any of the pubs there closed. However, five minutes before closing time, the video shop was shut, and as I led the way back to the car park outside my workplace, Will and Roe groaned loudly in pain. It's about a twenty minute walk: an unprecedented amount of exercise for either of them.

And when we arrived, what did we find? The gates to the car park had been locked!

After quarter of an hour of trying to pick the lock, searching for other entrances, coming up with schemes (lifting car over the gates, breaking into the building and driving it through the warehouse and into the street behind, "If you phone your parents who give you Mark's number, he can give you that of a key bearer and they can come and let us in"), we admitted defeat and headed for the nearest taxi rank.

Which just so happens to be at Carlisle station. Which is about a hundred metres away from The Woodrow Wilson.

Although the taxi driver was truly funchie ("How much is it to Brampton?" Chris asked. "Fifteen pounds, but I'll take you for ten"), gah. Firstly, since I didn't have to drive, I could have drunk in Carlisle after all. Secondly, by the time we got back to Brampton, all the pubs were closed.

Denied of more educational viewing matter, we watched the Young Enterprise video and a recording of Will's bungee jumping expedition. (The porno video from last time hasn't been seen since. They all deny stealing it, so my theory is that Smill [who is currently in France] has got it.)

When Noj got off the Internet, we went to The Spark and took tests. I really can't understand how Roe is 16% less pure than me, Chris is 9% less of a bastard than I am, and they're all going to have between six and eight partners while I get a grand total of one. (Last time, it said I'd be eighteen when I lost my virginity. Now it's hedged its bets and says I'll be twenty one.) Perhaps because it doesn't think that with nineteen spouses I'll need any.

We chatted online to those silly enough to listen to us, watched episodes of "The Young Ones" and looked at Will's mountains of Australia photographs. (Never knew Australia had any moutains, but my encylopaedia says it does.) By then it was 5am and we were all desperately trying not to fall asleep (so as not to have to get up in the morning) but failing miserably. Chris fell asleep on my bed, while I slept with Will and Roe downstairs. (Obviously, in the most technical sense of the word. Weird, because exactly a year earlier, Twi slept with me. Maybe in the early hours of 14 April 2001, I'll have three people.) For an hour and a half. Needless to say, I was not best pleased with the idea of getting up.

As it was, I was half an hour late for work. Lacking any other means of getting back to Carlisle, once again we had to rely on the services of Tim (who didn't arrive at my house until nine).

I arrived a few minutes after a Powerpoint training course I was taking commenced. (I might have been on time, had it not been for extra rotations of roundabouts.) I felt strangely alert, but when asked to select and recolour any of the thousands of pieces of clip art provided with Microsoft Office, I unwittingly chose a woman looking at a computer screen and turned her face a nauseous shade of green.

However, my coworker Rachel's insertion was far more worrying. She chose a picture of a baby, then realised she'd placed it on a slide marked "Future Plans".

Saturday 22 April 2000

I am renouncing friends: namely Smill, Will, Marion and Alice.

First I phoned Smill. We agreed that we had to do something in the next week or so, but before we could make any plans, she started babbling about Uganda and France. Which was ok, but suddenly it was, "I have to go, I'll call you tomorrow."

Will, who had promised to call me tonight, turned out not to be in.

I spoke to Marion for about thirty seconds before she said, "I have to go, I'll phone you tomorrow."

And as for (a town like) Alice (well, she is in Australia), all she wants me for is the power I wield over future plot twists in Verbal Voodoo. She has requested that Alice, Queen Of Everything, inherits a small island and a large successful international company, gets rid of Sir Christopher Bagot of Cricket, and goes to live on the island with a gorgeous and dashing Italian named Man Friday who'll serve her every whim. [By the way, we're planning to make a film of it. Will, Chris and self are all muchly excited about Roe having to marry Smill, but I can't think of any way of convincing them to do so unless I let them smash real Acorns. Dilemma! Which do I value more, the sight of Smill and Roe pretending to get along or my beloved computers?]

Sunday 23 April 2000

Maybe I won't renounce friends after all. It turned out Will was home last night, but in bed, so his mother told me he was out in order to protect the family name. (One assumes he was in bed alone; still, going to bed at 9pm is Incredibly Sad.) However, we got to have a half-decent conversation tonight. (A conversation with Will is never fully decent.)

Apparently, he's auditioned for a part in the latest Britfilm, but he's very doubtful as to whether he'll get it. Applicants were told to tell the camera something interesting about themselves. The bloke who went before him said, "I fell off a car park". "Probably suicide," he explained, when asked for further details. Will then reasoned saying, "I don't think I can top that" would be a bit tasteless, and the next thing he thought of was, "I like the Spice Girls".

However, when Marion phoned me, we managed to speak long enough for her to ask me to do her homework for her. !!!!! Her reasoning was, "I can never get on the Internet at college, and you're probably really bored." "Not that bored!" I argued. But before we could come to an understanding, she yelled, "Oh, s***! I've just spilt glue all over myself!"

Coming from Marion, this is perfectly believable. Not that she's a glue addict, but she has a history of substance conflict. In fourth year, one morning before she went to school managed to drench herself in Vicks. If such a thing had happened two years later, she'd have just taken time off in order to have a shower, but she had some sense of morals in those days. As a result, we got a half-hour lecture from our English teacher over mal-use of deodorant. Then, a few months later during a Religion lesson, she was eating a red biro, when it exploded all over her white blouse.

So, appreciating that she was in a rather sticky situation, we had to say a hurried goodbye, and now I have to find out about the history of the marketting of Coca Cola. Fun.

Tuesday 25 April 2000

Will and myself went to the cinema yesterday. Between a hair-raising drive (Will claimed to feel no fear, just left twenty-second gaps between his sentences, his attention entirely focussed on having to grab the wheel from my hands if necessary) and his dog trying to eat my shoelaces and look up my shirt (his dog is a bitch [no offence or anything!]), we saw "Toy Story 2".

Which, in itself, was fairly embarrassing, given that everyone else there was under the age of ten, or had borrowed someone under the age of ten to go with. It was v. good, though. But outside the cinema, who should we encounter, but a member of the former 2X!

Yes, that contingent of psychopaths we had the misfortune to spend a year supervising. To be strictly accurate, we each had to register them twice a week, look after them for thirty five minutes once a fortnight and prevent them from killing each other with hymn books during assembly, but it felt like a lot more. We always left them muttering, "Little gits" and "Surely we weren't this bad when we were twelve?"

As you may recall, after making assault courses out of their school bags, assaulting each other with hockey sticks and tennis racquets, talking at extremely loud volumes and bringing tape decks into school to listen to during supposedly silent study periods, their favourite activity was deciding who I fancied. After much speculation over my potential involvement with Roe (I used to bring him with me to help control them [in return for assistance with his Maths homework] because he wasn't afraid to tie kids up with their own woodwork aprons), they decided my interests lay with William. (Or, knowing their fondness for dodginess, that I did.)

And what happens? One of them sees us leaving the cinema together. Admittedly, elbowing each other senseless probably didn't look especially romantic, but I felt very glad I wouldn't have to face them all the following morning.