How to make a Sarcastic Customer Dissatisfaction Graph while watching a contextually appropriate episode of Murder She Wrote

Firstly I just want to say that not every blog will be about Murder She Wrote (although if there were enough requests I would happily write one that’s ONLY about MSW) but when I got home from my freaking terrible day and turned on the telly and saw the name of tonight’s episode, “Murder takes the bus” I couldn't believe it because my bad day was all about the bus. Then the opening credits started to roll and I learned that the episode guest starred Linda “The Exorcist” Blair, and I couldn't believe it because at one point today I was so angry my head rotated 360 degrees atop my shoulders, and then the music started which was an almost note-for-note rip off (homage?) of Bernard Herrman’s legendary eerie score for Hitchock’s masterpiece Psycho, and I couldn't believe it because today I almost became a bit of a psycho. So I really had no choice but to make JB Fletcher my muse and inspiration once again. At the moment she’s rifling through the suitcase of the recently deceased man – killed by a screwdriver to the back of the neck while sitting alone on the broken down bus, if you’re interested – while the motley crew of bus passengers are sheltering from the storm in an isolated road side diner. Also, Linda "Exorcist" Blair is now a grown up and seemingly heavily preggers, I’m terrified about what’s going to come out of her.

So, onto the graph. Say you have beef with a certain company, in my instance Arriva buses, and a complaint email doesn't quite seem like enough? Enter the Sarcastic Customer Dissatisfaction Graph. A picture really does say more than a thousand words. It’s pretty easy because there’s not too much science or maths behind it.

All you need to do is come up with different categories pertaining to customer service experiences. Weight each segment proportionally relating to how important it is to your satisfaction with the company. So for instance, while I was more angry  the time I went to the man in the office at the bus station for help because my M-ticket (which is a bus ticket downloaded to your phone and can be bought to last a day, a week, or a month) had disappeared for no reason and I needed to get home and he a) didn’t help me, b) answered his mobile while I was talking to him and c) shouted at me, that segment is smaller than the segment for the M-ticket’s disappearance because that was a lot more important to my daily ambition of not spending all my mother-lovin’ time either on buses, thinking about buses, paying for buses, or thinking I’m going to die on buses when a mad man plants a bomb on it that will explode if they bus driver goes under 80 mph.

Secondly, if some of your experiences are good fill those segments in green, if they are bad fill them in red. Label segments clearly. Lastly, sum up the whole graph effectively by making it either into a big smiley face if it was all really great and you loved it (unlikely to happen with a SCDG) or a big sad face if it was all terrible and you’re considering never going anywhere again because it’s just too difficult.

As a finishing touch, email it to the company in question and strongly imply you work for Father Christmas and that you KNOW they have not been good this year and their likelihood of getting presents is pretty low. (You might have to attach a picture of yourself dressed as an elf)

  Footnote: The bus driver was the murderer. He was avenging his daughter’s death from 15 years ago. Also while Jessica was out of town she missed the drawing of a prize raffle in which she would have won a flat screen TV but she wasn't there so they gave it to someone else. Those sound like dodgy raffle rules to me, she should send them a Sarcastic Customer Dissatisfaction Graph.

Footnote 2: Yes I should learn to drive. If anyone wants to send me £3000 so I can pay for lessons, buy a car, tax and insure that car, then fill it with at least one tank of petrol then please make cheques out to Ms Birdie McElf and send them to:
Number 1, Candy Cane Road,
Stripy Red Woolly Stocking Shire,
The North Pole.
99X MA5

Remodelling the kitchen with £30… without stealing anything from skips

 I’m lucky to have a relaxed landlady who is more than happy for me to continually redecorate the house. Like the Golden Gate Bridge, the painting is never finished. No sooner have I painted the kitchen lilac (there was a reason at the time) I begin thinking that it should have been red all along. But this month I really applied myself to the task of decorating it once and for all, I made a Powerpoint presentation about colour schemes and spent hours combing through hardware websites looking for good paint colours and inspiration. Two weeks on, I have an entirely new kitchen! And the best part is that I spent about £30 doing it, new tiles and all.

This is what our tiles looked like when we moved in:

Someone had been over the original tiles with some tile paint and added some purple patches (ah, that will have been the reason I painted the walls lilac the first time round) which was looking a bit tired and needed brightening up. After one coat of Wilko One Coat Gloss Paint in white (£6.95), the tiles were looking really clean and shiny, at a glance they look like new tiles…

The red walls turned out to be really effective as well (Wilko again, grease and water resistant kitchen paint in “Tinsel Town”, £17.75) and the warm and slightly muted shade has made the warm tones in the laminate floor and counter tops look vibrant and newer. Woohoo! It was worth staying up ‘til 4am with only radio 2 for company. It’s amazing how many people ring or text in to argue with DJs in the middle of the night. What are you all DOING? Painting your kitchens?

Plus the 1930s railway poster prints I chose to decorate with really benefited from having a strong colour behind them. This large framed collage of prints cut out of a calendar (which I then realised was a calendar for this current year and I probably should have waited a few months before taking scissors to it) was a bit lost against a lilac wall. Set against the red backdrop the colours in it really stand out.

Lastly I wanted to add a little bit of detail and colour to the tiles. I absolutely love Moroccan tiles, the kind that Charlie Sheen had in his house in Two and a Half Men (choose your style gurus diligently, people). So, never to be one to let things like money, or “not knowing how to retile a kitchen” get in my way, I turned (of course) to the internet. A quick image search for Moroccan tiles led me to a blue and white design I liked, I think it was a facsimile of an old tile, which I saved as a PDF cropped to 10cm x 10cm. I lined up several on one sheet to print out and took the sheet to the library, where I got it laminated for about 70p. I cut them out, and hey presto – new tiles! It was easy to attach them with double sided tape, and I’ll see how they hold up.

As a final touch I added my favourite fairy light trick, the glass cookie jar lamp, to sit on top of the fridge next to my big owl (in Modern Family the Dunphy family has an owl cookie jar on their counter top that I am so jealous of, this one is my attempt at a likeness) and give the space some glittery, cosy additional lighting.

It’s a lovely space to cook and eat in now, and feels so cosy when it’s cold outside!

Sore feet but feeling foxy after a hard day’s work…

I’m sitting with my sore feet tucked up on the sofa enjoying a glass of wine, huddled close to the radiator, with the sounds of Angela Lansbury solving some crimes in the background (today Jessica has inherited a football team in an elderly uncle’s will. Chaos has ensued). I’m tired but I feel good, because I feel like I worked hard today; it was my first proper shift working back at Walton Clothing (Mistral) in Berkhamsted, where I last worked more than 2 years ago. Christmas is fast approaching and so today’s tasks involved assembling a five foot cardboard Christmas tree with my boss, Pam (it’s a great tree, I’m considering getting one for my living room instead of a real one. When Christmas is over just slide it behind the fridge, job done) and planning for Sunday’s Festival of Lights in Berkhamsted high street. When the tree lights are lit, carols will be sung and plenty of mulled wine will be imbibed. The last two Decembers haven’t quite been the same for me, because I loved working on a high street in the run up to Christmas in 2011, especially in such an atmospheric town like Berkhamsted with its old buildings and interesting boutique size shops (even their charity shops are treasure troves). I’m so happy to be back there working with the old team and, essentially, playing with pretty clothes all day (little girls who love their dollies grow up into shop assistants who love re-styling the mannequins in the window). A condensed version of this blog is posted on the Mistral website, here.

My mum wants to know if we really do sell jumpers for badgers... I'll call head office in the morning.

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 What’s more it’s so lovely, when the high street is dark and damp, to be inside in the warm surrounded by jewel colours and bright lights, plus a few woodland friends... Our windows in store are adorned with picture book style cut outs of foxes wearing scarves and badgers wearing jumpers, which ties in with the styles in store which are full of animal print (it’s funny how animal print used to mean Bet Lynch in a leopard print boob tube, now it means owl motifs on nice blouses). The fashion for woodland animals on clothing, décor, stationery and so on, is still thriving a couple of years on and I love it. I remember some time ago I thought it was a great idea to experiment with fabric dyes and printing, despite having precisely zero expertise, and faffed around trying to print a motif using a stencil I’d made of a running horse out of a plastic projector sheet. It was very unsuccessful. The paint dripped and blobbed and the end result was not the slick outline of a magnificent beast I’d hoped for, and more closely resembled a hole caused by a donkey falling through a wall. Ah well. We live, we learn, we buy horse print scarves from Primark instead.

 I think we can thank Julian Fellowes and K-Mo (as the Duchess of Cambridge is known to her friends, like me) in equal part for the current love for all things countryside. Royal weddings, royal babies and Downton as our main export have led to England becoming chic again in the last few years, although obviously Madonna knew was coming long before the rest of us. That period where she went everywhere wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket saying things like “’Ellow there, Geldof me old China!” (or something) seemed really weird at the time. Makes so much sense now. Naturally she’s gone back to wearing black bondage gear though and the rest of us have yet to catch up. I do look forward to the transition fashions, I predict bambi print spandex cat suits this time next year – you heard it here first. Bird xxx

 Footnote: Murder She Wrote is long finished and as usual I don’t understand who did it, or why. But it ended with a freeze frame of Jessica Fletcher chuckling gaily like the whole football-manager-drowned-in-a-hot-tub thing never happened, and all is right with the world.



Night night.

So, my boyfriend is on tour. Home alone and working part time... it's arty time!

My boyfriend’s brilliant. He texts me pictures of his breakfast and will watch one full episode of Murder She Wrote with me every day, without complaining (he does complain if it turns out to be a double bill). In short – he just gets me. He is also a musician and is currently on his third UK tour in the course of our almost-2-year-long relationship. This tour leg is 4 weeks (following 10 days in Europe then one day off) zigzagging around the UK to spread the gospel of “djent” (yes, djent. It’s pronounced “gent” by the way, and has something to do with time signatures, heavy metal, and frisbees) far and wide, like some sort of drum kit-wielding missionary.

 I wouldn’t want him to do anything else with his life because if ever anyone had “a calling”, music is his. I really think there is nothing in this life that makes me feel the way that he feels about drumming. I’m a (not very good) musician too, but there’s no deep desire in me to forge a career from it. I have gigged, and recorded and enjoyed a little taster of what life might have been like as a professional violinist but it awakened no fire inside me to give up everything and dedicate my life to it (and that’s not just because the violin is much less cool than the drums). I haven’t got the patience, or what it takes to get up day after day and practise music, because in reality that is what life as a muso comes down to – hours upon hours of practice, hard work, hoarding receipts for tax returns and, of course, travelling – all for mere minutes on stage. But it’s minutes of doing what you love for a crowd of people who love you for doing it. That is true passion.

 So where does that leave me; boyfriendless and climbing the walls while he’s away? Last time he toured I became extremely adept at a game on my phone where you smash bricks with a little ball. Maybe it helped to be distracted, maybe it helped to smash things – who knows. At any rate I reached a rather mammoth score of 9,000 and while that is a victory I will be regaling delighted peers with until the day I die, I thought that this time round I ought to do something more productive. So welcome to Seeya Sweetie, a diary of keeping the homefires burning and enjoying having the house to myself so I can redecorate it, spread art materials all over the floor and stay up til 4am painting the kitchen (true story) with no one to tell me that's a silly thing to do, all while my boyfriend shows the world how you pummel a double bass pedal in style.

Bird. Xxx

 Footnote: I started out with a little market research and typed “boyfriend on tour” into Google, and here’s a few little snippets I found, from women in similar situations to mine. Not all were negative but... well, a lot were. Thanks to anyone I quoted here.

 “Good luck, girls. It doesn't get any better. My boyfriend of 11 years is in Europe right now…”
“The veteran wives I know have been in this for 25 and 40 years, and they are bitter and resentful. Just to let you know, we all have college degrees and traveled when we were younger! We are not jealous, insecure people, but they keep doing things to make us feel second fiddle.”
 “If you want a guy who loves you more than he loves his job, DO NOT MARRY A MUSICIAN! Sitting with my cats at 5 a.m. and I haven't heard his voice in 10 days.”
 “I don't think I can handle it anymore-I can't stand the clubs and the drunk chicks. True I could be called insecure and all the things that are my issues, but really I would just rather not need to "try".”
“i know he misses me too but i just feel so far away from him and lonely...im also afraid that he isnt thinking of me as much because hes out having fun and im at home...”

 Also, praise be, just as I was about to commit myself fully to a whining, clingy, inconvenient, complaining, embarrassing existence as a pregnancy-entrapment plotting "band girlfriend" who is apparently also a stripper, I thankfully found cavemancircus.com and their delightful list to help me avoid all of the above ideas, entitled "Pay attention ladies! Here are the 23 rules for dating a musician". Most of what you need to know about this website is that it has a search-and-replace function set to turn the word "ass" to "booty." This means that words like "embarrass", "assume" and "passion" actually, genuinely, truly in the course of the article become "embarrbooty", "bootyume" and "pbootyion". But, as with most insane rants, there was one solitary pearl of wisdom in number 23: "Keep the band separate from your everyday life. That’s your boyfriend’s pbootyion, find your own". So while this blog might have been indirectly caused by my boyfriend's pbootyion, the pbootyion for design is all my own.