Cairo-ing on

I temporarily closed down this blog while moving house and sorting my life out. Suddenly I'm starting 2013 in Egypt, with a brand new Master's degree and a whole new life. A rather cushty ex-pat life to be exact. This is the seventh year I have kept this blog, but the number of posts has always been affected by several variables:

• how many jobs I'm working
• how interesting my life is
• how much time I have to think and write

This means over the last two years, while I've been studying, working, or drinking cans of Red Stripe with my Hackney Wick neighbours pretty much every hour of the day, posting has suffered.

Best 3... bartender songs

You know that song that describes exactly how you're feeling? It's quite difficult to write one about how you feel when you work behind the bar at Wetherspoons, because there are only three feelings:
1. I want to kill myself

Do fuck off... a rare grammar-based rant

I have recently come into contact with a party unnamed who has a nasty little habit. Scattered liberally through their communiqués I find this grammatical construction:

Do please drop into my office this week.

This event is going to be really useful – so do go along!

Originally I, sunny soul that I am, assumed that this meant I had a choice- perhaps I would ‘drop in’, perhaps I wouldn’t. I might go to the talk, but then again I might just watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead. This led, inevitably, to problems. The next step was to challenge the orders- ‘I won’t be coming to your office because I am not available that day.’ Of course, the person in question responded with a cheeky little ‘That’s completely up to you.’ Well, it wasn’t, because as you can probably imagine, they had all the power in our relationship. And I let it go so far that eventually I was penalised for choosing not to do what I had been told. And then it hit me. 

The attempted tempering of the imperative with the use of the auxiliary verb 'do' is fundamentally passive-aggressive in nature.