Saturday 29 October 2011

Changes

I think when I look back on this year, it will probably be a year where everything changed. Big time. I mean, everything tends to change over time, but this year so much has happened and I don't tend to cope well with it at all, so I'm quite surprised at how I've managed to not make a scene or just generally cry at everything.

I won't go into everything, as that's what my end of year blog will be for, as I did last year. These last few months have been the most prominent though.

It all started in September. The first thing that happened at the time I thought was a good change, in that I passed my driving test. After 2 and a half years of pure misery at my failures, the lovely lovely man who examined me was kind enough to pass me - a week before my theory test ran out and I would have had to start all over again. All was going well with my driving provided that you didn't include the parking. I had some nice drives around on my own, particularly to my Mum's new place which was a 15 minute drive from where we were staying, but after I stopped at Asda on the way home, one bitch decided it was necessary to yell at me about my parking and basically took a shit on every ounce of confidence I had built up over the last few days.

I basically ended up dangerously close to her car as I was reversing out (note I said close, not actually touching it) and I pulled back in because she was stood there watching me, which I'm sure many people will agree with me is terribly offputting. She then comes up to the window where I politely apologise and say that I've just passed my test and I'm not very good at parking yet. Instead I get the following:

Bitch: "Did you hit it?"
Me: "No I didn't."
Bitch: "Did you hit my car?"
Me: "I didn't, I swear I didn't hit it. I'm really sorry, I've just passed my test, I'm not so good at parking."
Bitch: "Well you need to look at the way you're fucking parking love, that's crap."

This was followed by a few more "did you hit it?" type quotes, until she eventually drove off. I tried reversing out again and by this point the woman on the other side of me had come back and was watching. Cue her coming up to my window and me bursting into tears about what this absolute cow had just said to me. Then the man sorting the trolleys comes over. I was incredibly lucky in what happened next, this lady offered to reverse out for me, but was worried about hitting her car, so the trolley man very kindly pulled out of the space and straightened the car up for me. When I told them about what this bitch had said they both sympathised and said she shouldn't have done it and that it'll get easier with time.

To the nice lady and the trolley man: thank you very much for being so nice to me and helping me out.
To the bitch who had a go at me: fuck you.

It's just over a month since that happened and my parking has slightly improved, but I wouldn't go as far as saying it's good. Oh, and I got a parking ticket too, but I won't go into that, mainly because it'll set me off on a rant about my university's parking.


Another thing that happened was my mum moved house. Not necessarily a change for me personally, but it was quite daunting at the time, given the fact that the place where she moved to was an absolute shit hole until they decorated it a few weeks ago.

Seriously, I'm talking a stench of marijuana filling the rooms, yellow walls from smoke fumes, dog shit all over the patio etc etc. Still, they've done it all up nice now and you honestly wouldn't think it was previously a shithole if you saw it now.

I felt I had been evicted from my room, as the spare room in this new place is so small it doesn't even fit a proper bed. Well, it would, but nothing else really. We do still stay there when we go home though, just on an air matress which is...nice.

As you can see, Sooty took the move very well.

Speaking of my Mum, she also got married this week. So I now have a step-dad. And a very nice one at that. It did mean having to take a day off of uni and endure 5 hours of travelling within about 36 hours, but it was still worth it to be able to go to the wedding and see them get married.

I also started my second year of uni this month which is...nice. Most of my current modules are all coursework based which is good news, unfortunately, all of my summer modules are not. Which sucks. Another unfortunate thing is the amount of textbooks I've been told to buy. Frankly, I don't have the money and even if I did I don't think I could physically and mentally manage to spend what would probably be about £250 on books that I'm only going to use for one term. I spent £40 on one book last year that I was told would last for the whole 3 years, but on starting this year, I was told not to use it when writing essays as I need to be using a more broad range of sources. Great. So this year is involving lots of trips to the library and spending endless time doing reading so that I have some reasonably okay notes for when I have to write assignmetns. I did that at the beginning of last year. That habit ended after about a month, so we'll see.

You'd think given the fact that I can now drive, and that most of my rants were based on having to endure a bus journey most days would lessen the amount of complaints I have, but lets just say, I can only drive to uni 2 days a week due to the fact that these are both 9am starts, and you are only able to get a parking space before 9am. 14 car parks. I have access to one of them. Super.

Looking at them in writing, it doesn't actually seem that much has changed to be honest. Still, it killed half an hour while I wrote this. Unfortunately you may have lost however long it took you to read it and probably won't get that back. My apologies. I will try and make sure my next blog is worth reading. Still, if you did read it, I thank you.

Saturday 15 October 2011

Steps are back. My 8 year old self cries with joy.


Growing up I was obsessed with Steps. I don't mean that lightly. I'm talking posters everywhere, owning every album, every single, learning the dance moves, knowing all the song lyrics, crush on H, over-playing their Wembley tour VHS kind of obsessed. Which is why on Boxing Day 2001, poor little 9 year old me, along with countless others, was crushed when upon learning that they had split.

Obviously that didn't stop me from still playing their music. And I'm not talking a few years after they split, I'm talking up until now. Even now Steps still have pride of place in my iTunes library.

But lucky me and countless other Steps-fans, they've reuinted after 10 years. I don't know about anyone else, but I've been watching the show about it on Sky Living, and for me, it was a huge shock to see so much bitching and rivalry between them all. They started out in 1997, so I would have only been 5 when they first came about and wouldn't have known what bitching and rivalry was, but for the 5 years that they were together, I remember watching their tours, and their Greatest Hits VHS (even mentioning VHS makes me feel old and I'm not even 20 yet) and thinking "wow, they're the best of friends. That's just AWESOME."

Embarassing as this was even to type, I remember me and my friend down the road would pretend to 'be' them, I was Claire, she was Lisa, and we'd put on shows for our Mums in each others' living rooms singing their songs and that was a pretty huge chunk of my childhood. H was also my first crush, as I'm sure he was to many fans back then, and I had a poster of him in my bedroom that I'd love to gaze at.

Unfortunately, unlike the lucky fans that got to see them live, I never did. Yes, yes, get your violins out. So my only experience of their concerts were on my over played VHS's of their Wembley concert and their Gold: Greatest Hits concert. However, I managed to get the experience of seeing the latter live on TV as an early Christmas present - my mum paid for it for me to watch live on Sky Box Office and I remember it was the best thing I'd gotten that year. Whilst my Mum couldn't believe she'd spent £9.99 on pay-per-view, I was in my absolute element. I do remember Lisa, Faye and Claire crying at the end of it though, and I remember thinking "why are they crying?!" Little did I know that they'd actually split an hour before they went on stage for that show - in fact, I found that out about 2 weeks ago while watching the Sky documentary.

The documentary pretty much spoiled my naive child's view of Steps that I had about them all being BFFs and it being all super-amazingly awesome, but I guess that's growing up for you. Never again will I watch one of their music videos and think "Aww they're such good friends!" which is a shame, but those videos still provided me of hours of enjoyment when I was bored because I wasn't the kid of child to go outside and ride my bike. Because I couldn't ride a bike. But that's a different story.

Anyway, I'm secretly thrilled (alright, publically thrilled once I publish this blog) that Steps are back together. I don't know if it'll work, but by the sounds of things, people seem to be excited about it, and I really hope it goes down well. For one, I can now start listening to their albums on the bus again without feeling like I never stepped out of the 90s era. Steps were a huge part of my childhood and like I said, I was obsessed with them. I don't see myself being obsessed again, as I don't tend to have obsessions anymore (other than collecting DVDs, a fear of germs and keeping my DVD's alphabetised), but I can safely say there will still be a place for them in my 90s-music-loving heart. Aww.