Like the massive fangirl I am, I was on the sofa in front of the tv at 7pm for the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who. I had a video in the machine to record the programme in case of interruptions like the phone (which I was in half a mind to ignore anyway), and was all settled.

All was going well until about halfway through the episode, when there was a knock at the door. I checked the video was still recording, and went to answer it. Standing outside were two girls with a tortoiseshell and white cat in their arms. Deja vu.

“I can’t take in another cat,” I told them.
“But she’s a stray,” they said. “The lady down the road said she didn’t want the cat.”
I sighed.
“Let me get my shoes on,” I said.

I took the cat off them, and we went up the road to speak to the lady in question. It turned out that the cat was a stray, and had been round the houses to be fed over the last few days. The woman’s son had taken it in, but as her daughter had asthma, they weren’t keeping it. The girls had brought the cat straight to me, knowing that I’d taken in Dorrie.

“I can’t keep her,” I said. “But I’ll take her to the cat shelter. Don’t bring me any more cats!”

Back in the house, I turned off the tv. I’d missed too much of Doctor Who to get back into it. I put down the cat, and she and Dorrie had a hissing and growling match, although no fisticuffs. Deciding it was better safe than sorry, I put the tortie in the cat carrier, and went to phone the PDSA. Answering machine. I tried the vets, with the same result, and the cat shelter, ditto. Whilst I was trying to think of where to try next, there was another knock at the door. I went to answer it, and there were five boys there.

“That cat the girls brought you?” one of them said.
“Yes?” I sighed.
“It’s mine,” he replied. “Her name is Sasha, she ran away.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Describe her.”

He did, accurately.
“Why doesn’t she have a collar?” I asked.
He shrugged.

I fished out one of Dorrie’s old collars, and fastened it around the tortie’s neck before giving her back to the boy.

“Now get her an ID tag!” I said.

The lads walked back up the path, and as they did, the cat jumped free and ran off into some bushes and over a fence. I closed the door and left them to it.

Waiting 5 minutes until I was sure they weren’t coming back, I settled back down on the sofa to watch my recorded Doctor Who. I rewound the tape, pressed play… and got sound, but no visuals. Nothing, just a blank screen!

I have to wait till it’s repeated tomorrow on BBC3. I’m gutted!

In the queue at McDonalds (yes, I know, junk food - hush), three men stood in front of me. They looked to be in their mid to late 30s. One of them looked like your typical stocky, beer-bellied, football-watching bloke, dressed in a pink striped polo shirt and jeans. The second man was thinner, with a sort of young Johnny Depp hollow-cheeked look. He wore black, a baseball cap, and had a barbell piercing in his left eyebrow.

The third guy was by far the most interesting. He had sandy hair and a beard, and looked to be the same type of guy as Pink Polo Shirt, with less weight on him. His eyebrow was pierced with a 3/4 hoop. What I first took to be a cut on each side of the bridge of his nose turned out on closer inspection to be another piercing, with tiny little red clam shells instead of the silver barbells commonly associated with facial piercings. On his left and right hand knuckles, the words ‘TRUE’ and ‘LOVE’ were tattooed in blue ink. Finally, and most bizarrely, he wore pristine false nails, painted black with a silver shooting star motif on each of them.

I was fascinated.
When they took their meal away and sat down, I sat down at a table in sight of them. I watched as they ate, trying to pluck up the courage to go and ask him about them, running through what I would possibly say in my mind.

“Hi, ’scuse me, what’s with the nails?”
“It’s gonna kill me if I don’t ask about the nails..”
“Mind if I bother you for a sec?”
“You can tell me to piss off if you want, but I had to ask..”
“That’s so unusual… I’m trying to figure out if you’re gay, or straight, or lost a bet, or a transvestite..”

I thought about the camera in my bag, and wondered how it would go down if I asked to photograph his hands.

Alas, in the end, my courage failed me. I finished eating, and headed out to the tram stop. A minute or two later, I saw them come out of McDonalds. False Nail Guy pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one, putting it to his lips with manicured fingers. I watched them walk up Fargate, and out of sight.

Back in summer 1999, I moved into a flat in the centre of Cardiff with a friend of mine, Graham. We’d decided on the flat around a month before moving in, and the landlord told us that the living room, kitchen, bathroom and entrance hallway were going to be completely renovated for the start of July. We said we had no problem working around the renovations, if he was happy to let us move in a month early instead. At the start of June, we packed up our stuff at our previous addresses, and moved in.

Sure enough, renovations were underway. The bathroom was the first room to be refitted, and for the first week or so, my bedroom had a bath sitting in it. I dealt with it.

At the time, I worked shifts, and so I would often be around when the builders turned up. The kind of work they did was very unusual, however. They would generally arrive at around 9.30am, make some noise for an hour, then sit down and have a cup of tea. After that, they’d work for another half an hour or so, then pack up their tools and disappear.

Two weeks after moving in, the plumbing malfunctioned. For some reason, cold water wasn’t being pumped through; either to the shower or the taps. As a result, taking a shower or bath was impossible unless your preferred temperature was ’scalding’. I worked around the problem by taking a towel and shower gel to work, and used the showers there. I phoned the landlord the same night that the shower malfunctioned. He owned a hotel out in Penarth, and was a pretty busy man. Nevertheless, he promised he would get the builders to sort out the plumbing. A week and a half of work showers and a second call to the landlord later, the plumbing was finally fixed.

Six weeks after moving in, the builders were still doing renovation work. Graham and I were understandably pissed off about this. I’d made one or two phone calls to the landlord over that time, and he’d assured me that the builders were working hard.

Eventually, I’d had enough. I phoned the landlord at his hotel, ready with a mental list of complaints. I ran through them on the phone - the builders were lazy, the shower wasn’t fixed for a week and a half, the renovations were still going on after five weeks, and we still had bare floorboards in the communal areas. The landlord got increasingly annoyed, and reminded me that the original move in date was 1st July, and had we waited, the building work would have been complete by the time we moved in. I pointed out that it was now mid-July, and there was considerable work still to be done.

“You and I are going to fall out, young lady!” he told me down the phone.
“Oh, I think we already have, Mr J***,” I replied.

Finally, he told me he would talk to the builders - again, he stressed, despite the fact he was ‘an extremely busy man’. It took another two weeks, but we finally got our liveable flat.

As it happened, I didn’t live there for the full contracted year. In March 2000, I got a job in Sheffield, and moved. The landlord wasn’t too pleased with me about that, either.

It’s been a good long time since I played with any memes or online quizzes, but this one amused me.

What will your obituary say?

On the tram this evening, I sat next to a teenager who was busy texting on his mobile phone. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him type the following message:

lo gorjes wot u up 2? fort u wor cummin sat?

Honestly, I could weep.

So I went to see 300 last night, the day after it was released. Verdict - I liked it. Not as fantastically brilliant as some would have had me believe, but still pretty cool.
Alas, I think the credibility was spoilt slightly when Xerxes (Persian god-king) and Leonidas (Spartan king) had a menacing conversation in Latin American and Scottish accents respectively. Bit of an oversight there, no?

I was up at 7.20am as usual when my alarm went off. Three minutes later, the phone rang. It was Mum.

Mum: Are you ok?
Me: Uh….yes.
Mum: I’ll tell you why I was asking. A new imaging drum was put in my printer, and it printed out a picture of you. I hadn’t asked it to or anything. So I thought, oh my God, what if it’s a sign or something? So I decided to give you a call and see if you were ok.
Me: Yes, I’m fine.
Mum: I suppose it was left over from before the imaging drum ran out, and it was still in the memory or something.
Me: Yep, I guess so.
Mum: Oh good. If you hadn’t answered I’d be on the phone to your Dad and the police.
Me: Well, I’m here, and I’m fine. Good thing I was up though, I don’t always hear my phone when I’m in bed asleep.
Mum: Alright, so long as you’re okay, I’ll carry on getting ready for university.
Me: Ok, talk to you later.

My Dad commented on my previous post, reminding me about a time when I wouldn’t let him into my room when he visited whilst I was at University.

There’s been two occasions when I wouldn’t let him into my room. That first one, I didn’t remember. The second time, I was living in Cardiff after University, and the flat was a mess, which was the reason I didn’t let him in. Dad told me tonight that he’d always assumed that the first time was for the same reason. His jogging my memory reminded me of the real reason for it.

That year, my second at University, Mum had bought me a video recorder to go with my portable TV. She’d made me promise not to let Dad know that she’d spent the money on it. When he visited, I’d completely forgotten about it until he asked to see the room. Not having had time to hide the evidence, I refused to let him in.
Twelve years on, the secret is out.

Not all my housemates have been horrible. It’s only the small minority that have provided fodder for my horrible housemate stories (of which, no doubt more later). Everyone has their little quirks, and some can be liveable, some a bit annoying, and some downright horrible. A few examples of the ‘bit annoying’ category:

• the housemate who burnt my brand new saucepan
• the unidentified housemate/s who stole rolls of toilet paper out of the bathroom for their own personal use
• the housemate who insisted he didn’t smoke in the house, even when the bathroom stank of it

All rented accommodation of course comes with landlords, and whilst horrible housemates are pretty bad to live with, the lazy landlord can be infinitely worse. Stay posted..

…is when you come downstairs in the morning to find the cat has been sick on the carpet. ONE inch from the kitchen and a wipe-clean surface. Cleaning up half-digested cat food at 7.30am is not a fun task. On the bright side, however, at least it wasn’t in my bedroom.