You're having a tin...

Bath that is (cockney rhyming slang, for the uninitiated).

WARNING: jargon-laced poker discussion ahoy. If you don't understand poker then you won't have a scooby what I'm on about (see what I did there?).

It's just not been my evening. I was playing in a monthly game that I've become involved in, which is a tenner buy-in with unlimited re-buys (fiver each) for the first hour and then an opportunity to take a top-up as well after the hour (five or ten quid, your choice). It started well enough with me doubling my stack in the second hand with my rockets standing up against cowboys but that was the high point really. I had pocket pair after pocket pair destroyed by pretty rubbish hands that basically got very lucky having been on a bluff in the first place and I made it to the final table only by re-buying twice and taking a ten pound add on. My 30 quid finally disappeared after I went all in with pocket twos: Not a great hand but I figured I had enough chips to chase off speculative players and take down a reasonable pot. Sadly, I was called by my nemesis of the evening and he had, of course, ace-queen. Technically, I was ahead as my pair was already in the bag, so to speak, but naturally enough the first two cards on the flop were an ace and a queen and there were no twos anywhere to bale me out so I was out in seventh for no cash (although I do score points for the league so all is not lost).

To pass the time, those players out early tend to start a pot-limit cash game so I figured I'd have a fiver in that as it's 10 and 20 pence blinds. Last time we played I made some of my money back and this time seemed to be looking the same as I was soon over a fiver up. Then came pocket sevens and I started raising but I had a guy following me in so I put him on a couple of face cards. The flop came 2-8-2 and the pot by this time was a healthy nine quid or so, so I went all in for just over a fiver figuring the face cards won't bother chasing their hand considering the relatively high amount of cash involved in the hand. Sadly, it turns out I'd been followed into the hand by 8-3 off suit (not even soooted!) so the lucky bastard had made a bigger two pair than me and that was my fiver gone. I gave up then as that's enough wonga to lose in an evening.

By the way, anyone balking at the prospect of losing 35 quid in an evening on cards can stop with the sanctimony right now: I bet you spend much more than that on an evening out. I usually don't drink when playing poker and since I was driving I was definitely not drinking. I had good fun and there was a chance of making a not inconsiderable amount of cash. Plus it is a once-a-month gathering so it's not exactly high roller stuff. People usually forget that for every problem gambler there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamblers who do not have a problem and I'm one of them. We are not all hopeless addicts who gamble away our life savings!

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Nnnnnnnngarhhhhh!!!

'They' say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do in life and I can well believe it. I've moved plenty of times before but mostly of my own volition (with the exception of two previous moves one of which was rather fraught as I was trying to get away from a psychotic landlord who wanted to break my legs but the other time was due to a tenancy not being renewed but I had 3 months to find somewhere else). This time it is again thanks to the non-renewal of tenancy not, I hasten to add, through any fault of our own or indeed anyone elses fault, but this time my housemates and I have just five weeks to find somewhere else. Two of them are sorted because they had alternative arrangements they were able to call into play pretty quickly but myself and my other housemate have decided we quite like sharing as we get on well and are looking for somewhere.

Problem is there aren't too many two bedroom houses out there and those that there are tend to be quite small which is a bit of a nuisance for us. Even worse is the general lack of a garage or shed which is the biggest problem as a garage is good for storing all manner of guff, bikes, golf clubs and so on. Of course the very tight timescales don't help either. So although I don't have the added stress that buying a house entails (solicitors and their exorbitant fees, surveys, mortgages and so on) I still have a hell of a lot to deal with in next to no time.

I am actually viewing a place in the next few days that will do pretty well but I don't think it has a shed and it definitely has no garage. I can get a shed for less than £150 but sadly, the problems don't end there as the house has no white goods either, so a fridge freezer, washing machine and hoover are the bare minimum which, even buying second hand, is going to set us back £75-£100 each.

It's not often I resort to too much swearing (well, OK, regular readers will know I do swear quite a bit from time to time and those who know me in the real world know full well that I swear like a docker with tourrettes) but I just have to say that I really, really fucking HATE moving house.

And no, I am not buying for several reasons:

1) It's bloody expensive and I will not mortgage myself to the eyeballs to be able to buy a poky little flat somewhere where my car is likely to get stolen and I to be stabbed (and I can barely afford a mortgage that will buy anywhere let alone a hovel).

2) I have now 4 1/2 weeks to move somewhere.

Frankly, it's getting to me. I think that in the next couple of years I may have to seriously consider moving abroad because I just don't think I can afford to live in this country any more. And that sucks more than I can tell you.

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Must check the diary properly

Apparently the most miserable day of the year was in fact today. Well, all Mondays in January are pretty shit to be honest, especially when you're up at the crack of dawn in the dark to go to work, it's windy, wet and grey and you haven't had enough sleep. Roll on, err, February? No, no that's not a lot better as it contains that day of the year to which I have a particular aversion, St Valentines. How about March? Yeah that'll do - there's St Patricks day on the 17th and there's a long weekend off work thanks to Easter and of course Easter eggs which always seem to taste better than normal chocolate. Plus the daffodils and maybe even early tulips will be out and I will, by hook or by crook, have moved house (unwillingly but I have no choice in the matter).

Yeah, roll on March.

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Strewth mate

It's late on Saturday night (or early Sunday morning) and I'm watching a repeat of this years Jools Annual Hootenanny which features, amongst others, Kylie. I've always fancied her, most blokes do, but on this show, in that dress, singing that song (Two Hearts) she was utterly, utterly captivating. If there is such a thing as the perfect woman then for me, she is it.

Hot diggity damn, schwing and indeed quite literally, oh moma!.

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It was all someone elses fault

I was just wolfing down my dinner, an excellent takeaway curry (big up my local curry house The Panahar in Bath for not only a fine and reasonably priced curry but for chucking in loads of freebies too and extra onion bhajis. Gwan the rood) and I had the gogglebox* on in the background which was showing some sort of program on ITV about consumer debt, a popular subject these days. At first I assumed this might be interesting in that it might investigate and explore the factors that have driving the rising tide of personal debt in the UK but it quickly became apparent that it was interesting for an entirely different reason, namely that it was highlighting the 'plight' of a few people who had some pretty large debts.

Now folks get into debt all the time through no real fault of their own - circumstances can and do change overnight, but this wasn't what had happened to these people. They were simply too stupid to understand that all the money they were spending on tick wasn't really theirs to spend and that they would actually have to pay it back at some point. In one instance a woman owed about £104,000 (roughly $208,000 US) on credit and store cards, which are notorious for their scandalously high interest rates (close to 30% APR is pretty common). She started with one at age 18 and would transfer her debt from one card to another following the 0% APR for balance transfers introductory deals that were prevalent for some years but instead of getting rid of the old card she would simply keep spending on it. She claims that eventually she would get new cards just for the different pictures on them. She also said, in a tone that suggested this excused the whole sorry affair, that most of the money went on her kids (3 and I think about 5).

The spending included for her son: clothes, laptop, digital camera, LCD telly, Playstation 2, PSP, Nintendo DS, DVD player, DVDs, games and more besides. She claimed that her 3 year old daughter had a "shoe fetish" (if so then it was brought on entirely by her) and she had some 20-30 pairs of shoes including those idiotic rubbery crocs so favoured by trendies and other cretins. This for a kiddie who will have grown out of them in five minutes time. So with £104,000 of debt, the minimum payment per month she and her husband must make is £2,000 from a joint income of £3,000. I'm seeing a problem here.

So, what was her line of argument in her defence? "The credit card companies should have stopped me". Now hang on a minute, much as I agree that credit card companies are base, venal and notoriously cycnical in their dealings with the public and that they need to be much more heavily regulated (seeing as they seem to be utterly incapable of getting their house in order on their own), you simply cannot pass the mantle of blame off like that. How can these fucking idiots not take responsibility for their own actions? You didn't have to spend the money you know. But the reporter just nods gravely and sympathetically doing nothing but reinforcing the idea that this gormless woman was the victim in this fiasco (even if he was privately thinking "Christ, what a bloody moron" and I know that this particular reporter is not exactly a thicko). But, sneer as we might at these dopes (and for sure they are deserving of some ridicule), the credit card companies have a huge role in all of this too.

Cue some mouthpiece representing the credit card companies harping on about how the companies are taking their social responsibilities very seriously and how they've signed up to the banking code. Sounds impressive, huh? Well sadly she then went and ruined it by giving the following (paraphrased, as I can't quote it word for word) response:

“This means that, for example, instead of just sending out a letter saying that your credit limit has been increased, we now also say that you don't have to take it which is very important”

Oh well done, that'll really do the trick. In one pithy sentence, this drone has managed to sum up the attitude of the lenders: We really don't give a crap who we lend to because we can make huge sums lending unsuitable amounts to unsuitable people and encouraging them to spend it like water. And the truth is that they can do this with impunity because they are allowed to take advantage of the rank stupidity of a not inconsiderable proportion of the population by a system of regulation so weak it might as well not exist. Why is there no proof of income required? Why is there not a system of cross-checks between lenders to find out who owes what to whom? This woman had a wedge of credit and store cards almost as thick as a good quality deck of playing cards from different lenders (including multiple Barclaycards - how did they not check their own damn systems?). Without heavy regulation there is no way we can protect these idiots from themselves and protect them we must because unchecked spending might look good for the economy in the short term but mounting personal debts along with increasing fuel and housing costs can only lead to bad times somewhere down the road.

I can't claim that I've always been financially prudent, far from it, but spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds on high interest cards with nary a thought about how I can pay it back? No, because I engaged my brain enough to realise that I would eventually need to pay it all off, and pay it off I did. But even so it astonishes me how people can be so cavalier about debt like this.

I'll leave you with this thought. During the programme, the reporter stated that according to some source or other, personal debt in the UK is currently increasing at the rate of £15,000,000 an hour. That's £360,000,000 every single day, although of course that figure does not nescesarily take into account how much is disposed of each hour, how much is merely a re-organisation of lending arrangements and so on, so the net new debt figure per hour may be lower, but still. That's a fuck load of cash.


* Television

Currently listening to: The Curse by Atreyu

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The most miserable day of the year

At least, it is acccording to some university mathematics boffins with nothing better to do (although the actual date seems to vary according to where you look, it's always a Monday in January. Apparently divorce lawyers always expect to do well on said day though). Thing is, I can believe it. Today, I have been miserable as sin. I shouldn't be really - I got away from a job that bored me, I'm young (ish), healthy (I hope) and I'm not constrained by a family or mortgage. But I'm not happy.

It's only been a few weeks in this job and already I hate the journey there and back, but worse than that is the growing feeling that I shouldn't have taken this job. Not because it's a bad place to work or anything but increasingly I don't want to work in IT any more. It doesn't excite me now, it just bores me and the prospect of carrying on with it scares me as I look down the barrel of an existence that is deeply unfulfilled.

Trouble is that I have no idea what I want to do with my life and never have. Sure, like any one else, I've been through phases of wanting to do this or that but all I know now is that I wish I didn't work in an office. I don't want to sit in traffic twice a day and then sit in a dark, stuffy office staring at a screen while the inactivity makes me fat and lazy and the darkness makes me pasty. Worse still, I get home and I have to do more work because when you work in IT everyone else seems to think you're a kind of personal helpdesk resource so my free time is eroded and tarnished too (not that I begrudge helping people out a bit but sometimes, the level of request is just too big but I don't feel I can say no). I think I'd like to work outside again, maybe something to do with the land (although damned if I know what - game keeper? Forrester? Estate manager? Smallholder or farmer? How the hell do you get such jobs anyway?). I know full well nothing will pay me as well as IT does now (not that I earn a huge amount but it's comfortable) but every time I have to try and learn some new bit of technology my mind just rebels and I find myself desperate to get away. I don't really want to leave Bath either although I'm sure that on the wages of a rural job I'd probably have to.

It's frustrating because all around me everyone I know seems to know just what they want to do and are focussed on their careers and pursuing their goals and I can't even focus on a relatively low level job because I'm bored out of my mind. Perhaps I've been watching too much River Cottage and I'm hankering for some stylised and impossible idyll but I find the idea of growing fruit and veg for a living quite an attractive idea (so long as the surroundings are nice and pretty - not really turned on by the idea of growing them in an urban setting!).

Sadly though in order to do this sort of thing you need something I don't have: money. Something I've noticed is that an awful lot of these people who down-size to smallholdings and what not are rather well-to-do and have sold massive houses in London or the home counties and therefore they can afford to do it. Not me though. I guess I'll have to go on grinding out my days working jobs I don't care about in dingy offices unless I get very lucky indeed.

Sorry if you were having a good day up until now and my misery has infected you like the insidious cold that sneaks up out of nowhere. Maybe I'll get over it, maybe not. Either way, right now I am bored, miserable and I've had enough.

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Happy new year

Although it doesn't feel it thanks to a lot of beer and a 5am finish. Time for a beer break I thnk - I usually last about 2 weeks. Will this year be any different?

Edit: Amusingly, I've just noticed the post I did at 5am and forgot about. Ah, you've got to love drunken internet usage.


Currently feeling: Utterly rancid

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Happy New year

Sod a fucking dog but it's 2008. Right now I'm more drunk than a random group of Ausies but nonetheless, happy new year and I wish and happy and prosperous new year to all readers.


P.S. And I really am fucked off my tits - it's nearly 5AM and I've been drinking for about 9 hours. Bloody brilliant.

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