FAMILY DOS, TIREDNESS TYPOS AND THE ODD GNU

I can't seem to write anything decent at the moment. My fingers are all over the place. I actually wrote 'schedulued' today. I chalked it up as tiredness-typos and vowed to read everything I wrote very carefully indeed.

It's not that nothing interesting has happened. Our annual Family Christmas Do was on Saturday and that could have filled a couple of blog posts all by itself. My Dad still can't believe that the restaurant added a service charge to the bill after their languorous attitude to actual service. And that was after my Aunty Anne had annotated the bill with her neat handwriting, using the menus as reference for her world-class accounting. I don't think he's ever seen anything like it.

"Did you hear about the dyslexic who thought he was being taken hostage by a zookeeper with an antelope?" asked Uncle Arthur, peering inscrutably across the table. I was as wide-eyed as I was when I was five and he would sit me on his knee and tell me stories.

"Apparently he was heard saying, 'Look out! he's got a gnu!'"

Half the table erupted. The other half shook their heads woefully.

"Don't encourage him," said my second-cousin Tim, "It only makes it worse."

Among other interesting things that happened over the weekend were: me getting stressed on the inside and trying very hard not to show it on the outside at a carol service; an awkwardly intense game of Scrabble in which I nearly played a rude word by accident, and leading a choir while still only being able to hear out of one ear. They did really well.

Meanwhile at work this week I discovered that I've been calling someone the wrong name for six months... they never said... and I was unwittingly racist to Louise who graciously taught me that 'having a paddy' is a reinforcement of the stereotyping of the Irish as drunken louts... and not, as I had thought, a phrase that had slipped innocuously into the language. Thankfully she found it funny. When she said, "I can't believe you're being racist, Matt," I must admit, my heart did get stuck in my mouth a little bit.

That, and the house move getting delayed again, just about covers it. I was going to go off on a whimsical exploration of patience being much like a lens, focusing us on the detail of a better plan, but I thought better of it. That kind of thing can wait until I can write about it.