That was the week that wasn't

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting stuff up on the Missives like a frantic attention seeking jackass. There is one simple reason for his; I’ve had no work this past fortnight and have developed Attention Deficit Disorder.

This free time is not a holiday, you understand, but a vast wasteland of waiting for a client to get back to me so that I can continue with the mountain of work I have for him. I can’t do anything until then, hence I am rudderless and every second I exist I am effectively sliding further towards financial destitution. And the thing is with clients you can’t pick up the phone and sob at them til they feel bad or threaten to take their kids hostage. They don’t like that, and it rarely gets results.

Instead of enjoying this hiatus, any of you who are freelance will understand that making the most of my temporary situation is impossibility. You can’t enjoy free time, you must use that time to worriedly pace about the house muttering, “But who will feed the chillllldren” and “I must make an egg last three days” .

Within days of your temporary unemployed state you are looking out the wartime recipes of Marguerite Patton, buying some powdered egg and putting all of your kids' birthday presents on Ebay.

You know the situation is serious when you say, “You not wanting that?” as you reach to snatch the dog’s uneaten Butcher’s Choice from under his snout, whilst polishing off the dusty bits at the bottom of a packet of Go Cat Munchies.

After a week of no action you start to think of other things to occupy your time that don’t involve doing any housework. Maybe to fill these regular workless voids I need a project, I think to myself. Or an alternative earning opportunity. Here are some of the ideas that I’ve thought of in the middle of the night , got excited about and then dismissed by morning:

I shall write a novel! Yet, I will not complete any of the four that have currently stalled at Chapter 5, are buried deep in the folders of my laptop and I now think are utter shit. But I will write a new one that is better.

My problem here, is that I keep on reading David Mitchell novels and then I think, “I can never be as good as that, even though he must be on acid to come up with that crazy shit. Why even bother?” and then I scrap what I’ve been doing and go in the huff for a few days. I need to start reading Jackie Collins to make myself feel better. And my genius plan of eating Brie just before bedtime isn’t giving me good enough surreal ideas, just loose poops.

I will become an internet phenomenon, blog about stuff millions of people want to read about, sell ads on my site and live off the revenue! Then I realise that there is a surprisingly small readership for stories about snails ( Breaking news; a yellow painted one came back by the way), I’m not maternal (or nice), (or desperate) enough to tap into the lucrative Mummy blog market, I don’t want to talk about my sex life or make a more exciting one up, have no whistleblowing stories that will bring down corporations, I have no information on what celebrities are doing unless you count the fact that my sister lives next door to the former anchor of the now defunct Grampian Television’s flagship news programme and have no technical advice for people other than “hitting something that doesn’t work with a short sharp knock can often give results”.

So that’s that then. The Misssives will stay as they are; random and cheap.

I will proofread documents from home! Being a bit of grammar Nazi who has actually gone into shops where their doorfront sign has a rogue apostrophe to tell them the bad news, I feel I am well qualified.

On seeing Apprentice candidate, Lee MCQueen’s, spelling errors pointed out in his CV this week’s show, you would have thought I’d just seen video evidence of him having been involved in war crimes.

“Fire him! Yer Fiyerred! Get him out! Arse! Arse! Lee McQueen is out of a job! Get him out, now!” I shouted at the screen like a Tourettes sufferer, veins straining at my temple and froth gathering in the corners of my mouth.

Five minutes into researching the proofreading business,however, I realise that the whole world has already had this idea and have fantastic adverts offering their services that are hard to say no to. I find myself actually signing up to be proofread by someone else and have my colons corrected. Eagle eyed readers will notice she hasn't started her contract yet.

So given that I have dismissed all these things out of hand within mere hours of thinking about them what have I actually done this week?

1. Rifled about in my loft for an afternoon. Holy grail not found.

2. Exfoliated my entire body, even the inside of my mouth.

3. Grouted my kitchen floor. Discovered new medical ailment: Grouter's Knuckle.

4. Pruned a thorny bush with inadequate tools and no protective gloves, resulting in further shredding of hands and a septic finger as a result of a 1cm thorn being lodged in my pinky overnight. Extracting the thorn is the highlight of my week. Wish I'd videoed it.

5. Taught Sonny the Dog to lie down in the grass verge when cars pass, rather than sticking his thumb out and trying to get a lift with a more lucrative family with steady jobs and human food in the fridge.

6. Blogged too much because if I can’t write scripts about the electrical safety rules on seagoing vessels I must write about starting bitch fights in cinemas and David Bowie in implausible situations.

Pray I am employed next week or else I’m blogging about a rash that I have developed on my toe through running, or Meeester blocking the sink after shaving off his beard, and then lying about it.

Or worse, the most disgraceful story of Misssy puking into an umbrella. When you see that, it's time for an intervention.

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In other news, I've finally started my film blog, Spontaneous Production. It's somewhere for me to talk exclusively about films and put my podcasts but may feature some homegrown movies in the future. That's what else I've been doing. It's a work in progress...


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