There is a dog a few gardens away from ours that spends all day howling. Not just a bit of howling but really howling, like a werewolf would as it was about to eat your face. It both irritates and worries me. I’m quite a sucker for feeling sad about an animal in distress and I keep contemplating calling the RSPCA. Thing is, I have no idea which garden the dog is in and so they would have to spend hours knocking on houses looking for it. Then what if they were to turn up to the house where the dog is and discover it just likes howling like a little whiney attention seeking mutt? Or perhaps sitting there looking smug while it plays a howling noise on a stereo or from its laptop? Then I’d be made to look like a dick and a liar. The boy who howled howling dog. So I have refrained from calling the animal police yet. Which means that until I give in, or someone else does, or the dog dies of neglect, I have to sit in my living room trying to work while all I can hear is a stupid dog howling. After an hour or so any empathy towards the dog has gone and I just consider leaping over the garden fences myself till I find it and put sellotape over its gob. Although if I did that then people would call the RSPCA and they’d come and hit me with sticks and the dog would be given a medal by Esther Ranzten or someone.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t have enough distractions yesterday either. I had set aside the day to do further work on my Edinburgh show, but instead other things got in the way like gig bookings, sorting my taxes and getting my card frauded by people in the fucking Philippines. I hadn’t put the last one on my little list of things to do, but there it popped up anyway just to ruin 30 minutes of my day talking on the phone to some idiot in a call centre going through each and every payment on my card. ‘Yes I did buy a coffee in Starbucks, yes I did use the cash machine right near my house, no I didn’t fly all the way to Philippines inbetween buying the coffee and using the cash machine just to draw out £200.’ You’d think that when cash withdrawals go against all possibilities of time and distance that it would be obvious I hadnt done it. But no, the stuffy headed twats at Barclays had to check just incase I had some sort of super jet and a willingness to fly halfway around the globe to draw some dosh out rather than walk down Seven Sisters Road again. I mean Seven Sisters Road isn’t nice, but its not that bad. Even if it was my laziness overrides my snobbiness. And you’d think that if I did have the ability to do such incredible journeying in such short amounts of time that my missing £200 would be the last thing to be concerned about. There would be other questions about how I obtained such alien technology, the plans for such a machine and why I didn’t tell my bank I was about to travel.
I haven’t yet found out what the £200+ was spent on either. I hope they frauded my card for good reasons. I’ve had my card frauded several times before and previously it has been to buy boring things like car parts by some arsehole in Winchmore Hill, a phone call from America to Japan by some American and then internet purchases by some Ukrainians. I don’t know what those internet purchases are but I bet they’ll be for something crap like books on Amazon about card fraud or self help. I would like to think that if someone has spent the time stealing my card details they would at least use them for crack or whores or crack whores. Or to build a dangerous missile or something what they do in fillums. Surely fraudsters would realise by now that my account is not a clever place to be thieving from? I have nothing in it, except debt. I’m not sure what use anyone around the world has for high interest charges and overdraft fees. I’d like to know where they took the details from too. I tried explaining to Barclays that Layla had had her card frauded by someone in the Philippines just a few weeks before, but they shrugged it off like it wasn’t important. I will endeavor to search our house for any Filipino’s hiding in the cupboards or under the sink who might be stealing our cards and sending the details abroad. Failing that I will now just be suspicious of all people from that part of the world and will use actual metal medieval shields to cover my pin if there are any of them around. I may come across racist for a while but that’s what happens when people mess with my dough. I cut up my card and then spent ages trying to put it back together again as a jigsaw. It was harder than I thought and considering I already knew what the picture was I gave up after ten minutes.
Off to Bristol in a bit for another gig in cinema. Word on the street is LOOK LEFT. The other word on the street is that this gig is rather tough as its actual cinema seating and the audience are bastards. Lets hope they are not bastards with pig flu. I’ve had quite enough of that this week. I might take a face mask and my medieval shield just in case.
