Rain on my Parade

God hates me, He really does. Today I received the proud news from the finance department here at work that my wages have been paid up for this month and I will not receive any money for a fortnight. This I could deal with. What is more unsettling is the news that they are no longer content with taking a massive Eur65 out of my wages every week and giving it to the stinking government, no no- Come October, I will be losing Eur150 a week to taxes. Hello?? Does nobody else see a problem here?!

This decrease in income is going to cast a severe chill on my social life. I say social life, but since it is fairly obvious that I am lacking in the essential skills needed to entice friends into my company (otherwise I would not be writing crap in this blog that nobody ever looks at except to debate Mossy's sexuality) I think what I really mean is book-and-CD-buying-habit which, though usually done in public could in no way be construed as a social activity. One advantage to this uncomfortably poor and empty month is that I will be happily released as answering my mother's frequently posed enquiry: 'Are you saving much?'

Another advantage is the incentive this new-found hatred of my job (new-found you say? But shes been bitching about it for months!) offers me to get off my lazy (and now poor) arse and go and find a better job. What I really want of course is to be back in college where the living is easy, the coursework is simple and lets face it, the girls are both easy and simple! Nah, can't slag off students like that, its like shooting fish in a barrel. Or assholes in UCD. Just too easy.

In other news, Lucy revealed her inner sensitivity to the world when she tactfully changed the subject from her own financial and academic woes to another more universally agreeable topic: TV. Specifically, the crap program on Agatha Christie that was on TV last night. Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures (BBC2, 9pm). First of all, the ludicrous WWI hospital scene, with nurses and soldiers alike hacking up blood and phlegm and screaming. Not that they were being bombed mind. The hospital was in Torquay. Just as I was thinking; good grief, I'm lucky they haven't had limbs dropping off people so far, up pops a amputated leg on a operating table upsetting a young nurse who is dutifully comforted by her friend, a young Agatha. Mrs Christie is made of sterner stuff, apparently.

Next, the morbid fascination with the fortnight Christie went missing in 1925. No-body is quite sure whether she was faking it as research for a novel or was mental or just plain naughty but the producers felt the need to devote an hour of the program to this period. Childhood, courtship, marriage, divorce, second marriage and later life are packed, unforgivably I feel, into twee and vaguely forced vignettes, while her books are presented in a quick moment of postmodernism. Switching to jumpy black and white cinema reels of the age, we see Agatha pouring over a notebook, as second husband Max Mallowan stares at the camera and pulls copies of the books from his hat, behind his back, behind his wife's ear. This pointless jape is because the producers have unwisely titled the program 'A LIFE in Pictures' and must now stuff the odds and ends of Christies life in around the hour-long tedium of her disappearance in 1925. Lovely.

The nail in this stinker's coffin is a scene where the actress playing young Agatha gleefully explains the plot of one of her more tricky and deceptive novels- revealing the identity of the murderer in the process. Why oh why would anyone spoil a book for any ignorant audience members?? In an article on Movie twists I read last week the journalist refrained from revealing the fairly obvious 'Bruce Willis is dead!' one in The Sixth Sense yet these fools had managed to spoil the novel for any ignorant audience members. I still remember the angered shout I let off when, aged eleven, I discovered in the last few pages I had been duped by an ingeniously clever author into fingering the wrong crook. (Its The Murder of Roger Ackroyd if youre interested to know.) 'Thats not fair!' I'm sure I ranted, before lending the book to Dee Treacy and sitting around clamping my lips shut until she finished it too. I did keep my gob shut (I think I did anyway, Dee will surely back me up on this) and I waited till she let off her own yell of anger before joining in the rant against the dastardly final twist. Unlike those feckers at the BBC evidently.