domdavis.com

Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I wear black. Black jeans, black shirts, all black, that’s all I’ve ever worn. They’d be wrong of course. When I first started work I used to wear white shirts (I’m wearing one in my pass photo, although it is 10 years old) and I’ve not worn a black coat to work regularly for quite a while (ironically enough not since I started wearing black shirts).

The whole black shirt thing started when one of my colleagues, who also wore all black, left. I needed to buy a new set of shirts (I was still wearing shirts I’d worn at school and they were getting to be just a little bit on the old side ) and I decided to take up the mantel of The Guy Who Wears All Black. Well, it worked. I’ve had two girlfriends over a number of years try and [to a lesser or greater extent] fail to get me to wear colour plus the obligatory barrage of pisstaking from my friends on the rare occasion that I’ve worn non black (usually weddings and usually because I am in a suite).

I’ve decided to go for a change though. My current crop of black shirts are well past the stage where I should have replaced them and the lack of long sleeved black shirts in M&S coupled with suggestions from a few friends that I might actually attract more women if I wore a bit of colour has lead me to go buy a whole load of coloured shirts (well, OK, 3 actually, and one white linen one). I will probably be throwing out the 3 light weight black (actually so faded they’re brown looking) shirts straight away and keeping the 3 heavier black (actually so faded they’re green looking) shirts for things like painting and crawling around in the mud. I’ll also probably go buy another 4 shirts fairly soon just to make sure I have enough for the week.

Anyway, today I am wearing a purple with white stripes job and I am fully expecting a whole barrage of comments and pisstakes from friends and colleagues (something that will no doubt last a couple of weeks).  I’m also getting my hair cut. I’m just not sure if its going to be a trim, a restyle or something a lot more drastic.

So I’ve spent the past half hour trying to get through to the sorting office at Colchester to work out exactly where my new Amex card has gone, then I noticed something. The confirmation email has the wrong address! My address is along the lines of:

Number, Place
Street
Colchester
Postcode

They just had:

Number
Street
Colchester
Postcode

which is a completely different address (most annoying as this isn’t the first time people have decided to drop the place bit and deliver to the wrong address). Once I realised that I gave up, phoned Amex and asked for them to reissue the card and to send it via normal post (after all you need to activate the card when you get it so if its intercepted its useless) rather than special delivery. It will be with me within 7 days. It’ll be interesting to see if I get the (now canceled) card too

I hate waiting in for things. I need to go out to Asda to pick up some shopping but I can’t because I’m waiting for stuff to be delivered (actually, all I’m waiting for now is my new Amex card which the post office assure me will be arriving today but which requires a signature so I can’t leave the house). Anyway, the new sofa has arrived in all its shinyness and I love it. Unfortunately someone is borrowing my wide angle lens so you’ll have to make do with crappy camera phone shots. The sofa reclines by just leaning back and is seriously comfy. As you can see it also matches my dining room furniture. The table was also delivered today although I still don’t have all the stuff that’s going to go on it (more candles and a bonsai still to come). You can see why I call it the Cinema Room now .

People do random things, it’s what makes us human. If we were totally predictable we’d all be robots and life would be dull. Of course, some things are more random than others. People getting promotions out of the blue, that’s a bit random. Me deciding that its was high time I stopped wearing all black and buying a load of shirts with colour is random (OK, so its purely based on feedback that women prefer to see me in colour but since I’ve been wearing identical black shirts for god knows how many years its going to cause shock to a lot of people I know ands its much less drastic than chopping my locks off). Me buying two chickens is utterly utterly random, especially given I live in a flat with a no pets policy

There is method in my madness however. I have a friend who is doing a barn conversion (thankfully the conversion is better than his website design) and had oodles of land which he is currently filling with a veritable menagerie of fauna. Recently he’s recently managed to kill all his chickens. Anyway, he asked me if I wanted to buy any birds. Given we regularly have bizarre and esoteric conversations I simply asked what type and how much (the whole ‘No, you’re absolutely insane, what would I want with chickens?‘ statement being both implied and easily rolled out later on in the conversation should it be required). He told me it was chickens and they were £10 a bird (possibly less) and I thought ‘why the hell not?‘. We’ve come to an agreement where he’ll look after them and I’ll pay him in eggs

Of course, what I have actually bought is a limited supply of free range fresh eggs from two birds but that sounds much more boring than ‘I’ve bought two chickens’. He’s going to get them at 3 this afternoon so I hope to have photos of Cassandra and Emma (the names I’ve given them, I’ll not be explaining why ) fairly soon (possibly next couple of days). Lets just hope he doesn’t kill these ones.

OK, so my prediction that I would be blogging about how tired I was in the morning was slightly wrong. I’m actually blogging about how tired and late I am since I should be at my desk in … 7 minutes and I have only just woken up. All I can say is thank god for flexible working hours

I spent Saturday night (and a goodly portion of the wee hours of Sunday morning) round my neighbours house drinking copious  quantities of squash, juice and fizzy grape fake wine stuff and meeting two of his mates (both South Africans who, along with Australians seem to be the best people to know when it comes to meeting lots of new people). I was rather hoping we’d all be going out to the pub so that I might meet (and totally fail to talk to, or even be noticed by) the nice young ladies [pronounced lay-dees] of Colchester but as it was we stayed in and had a rip roaring time. I’ve not laughed so hard in a long long time. Lets hope there are many more nights like that

Actually, I think I’m two generations before the web2.0 generation but given most of those couldn’t actually string a sentence together if their life depended on it I’m stealing their defining attribute and claiming if for my age range.  Anyway, that is beside the point, the point is that I find myself unable to sleep (due to reasons that are far to numerous and dull to go into here) so instead I am cruising my [rather large] list of blogs what I read waiting for new comments to appear so I may pounce on them with some form of witty remark. So far I’ve managed one, although I might try for another…. actually, sod it… [time passed, witty comments are made] … so far I’ve managed two. A sensible person would turn the laptop off and just go to sleep, instead I’ll continue surfing the web, end up going to be seriously late and then blog about how amazingly tired I am tomorrow morning. Welcome to web2.0

So, it’s taken a few days of procrastination but I’ve send out another couple of emails on Match.com. One I fully expect to crash and burn on due there being a slight issue with distance (its a delicious irony that I just moved from the area she lives in) but then given I received a wink from someone nearly 150 miles away from me (either she thinks I’m seriously hot or, much more likely, doesn’t have a clue how far away I live) I figured I’d give it a go (plus she was incredibly cute (the one I emailed, not the one who winked me)). I find it amusing that that email was nice and easy to write (10 minutes) compared to the one I sent to a nice looking girl who lives in a lot more locally to me (2 hours). The instant I get my rejection emails I’ll let you all know

My brother has decided that I should not be messing about with online dating. I think he still sees the social stigma associated with such things (but then he’s probably only web 0.1a and hasn’t even heard of web 2.0). He’s of the firm belief that the way to ‘pull birds’ [his words] is to go to the pub and use A Line. He was even gracious enough to provide me of a line of my very own. It goes like this:

Don’t you get on my train in the morning?

This is a variation on his (supposedly very successful) ‘Didn’t you go to my school?‘ line which is currently his weapon of choice. Personally I’d be mortified if I was in the same pub as him when he used his line so there is no way on the face of this planet I’d be using my custom made variant in public. There is also the slight problem of follow through. Let us consider the following:

Me: “Hi, don’t you get on my train in the morning?”
Her: “No.”
Me: “…”

There would seem to be a small leap of faith from there to ‘So, dinner at my place then?‘ and it would appear to run a large risk of being slapped.

Not only this, but I am supposed to now run everyone I decide I like past him. I’m not sure where this idea came from since I’ve certainly not done so in the past. Let us return, once again to our fictitious pub:

Me: “Hi, I’m going to take a photo of you, send it to my brother and, if he thinks you’re cute enough, I’ll be back to hit you with a killer line…”

I don’t know about you but to me it lacks finesse. There is also plenty of opportunity not only for rejection (the reason why I can’t approach random women in the first place) but for massive putdowns which would crush the spirit and bruise the soul. I know my brothers heart is in the right place but when it comes to dating (and computers) I think I’ll continue to just ignore him

Today I got to find out what rejection, web 2.0 style, feels like. Its not all that bad to be honest The girl I had emailed on match.com replied to my email stating she had recently started seeing someone and wanted to see how that was turning out. Of course the pessimist in me says she was just being nice and that I’ve crashed and burned (my male friends agree with this view). My female friends are more inclined to believe that she’s met someone recently and would like to see how that has turned out. Interesting to see the different point of views