Day 707

Aka Monday 7^th January 2019

Today I got confirmation that my Universal Credit application has been accepted and that I will get £317 this month. Which does raise some questions for me about practicalities of working and Universal Credit. 

As part of being on Universal Credit I’ve agreed that I am prepared to travel for, at most, an hour and half for work, which basically means commuting into London. Which is fine, and I had done it for nearly seventeen years before taking redundancy. 

But a weekly London All Zones Travelcard from my train station is £123.10 and a monthly is £472.80. So if I start a job in London at the beginning of the month I’ll need too find an extra £155.80 to make up the shortfall, so that I could travel to work (that assumes that I’d be paid at the end of the month, but even if I was paid after three weeks, I’d still need to spend £369.30 for three weeks travel and need to find an extra £52.30 to make up the shortfall) and that leaves me with £0 for food. Which kinda makes it impossible to travel for an hour and a half for work, because I would soon be dead from lack of food!

...my copy of ‘Heavy Metal’ #287 arrived and plugged the gap in my run of ‘Heavy Metal’ with Grant Morrison as editor. How I’ve just got to read them 😊…

…watched ‘Spilt’, which was okay, it was well acted, with James McAvoy doing a great job playing multiple personalities. But the story felt slight and incomplete, more like an episode in a tv series, rather than a story on its own, although this does give the actors space to make their characters breathe. And the cameo at the end tying ‘Split’ into a wider cinematic universe felt tacked on. Almost as if someone said that the film doesn’t feel complete and needs something to give a sense of payoff. All of which, for me, makes for an okay film, worth watching on a streaming service, but not worth buying for multiple viewings. 6/10.

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

…which gets the week off to a pretty good start as I only needed to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 24), would have gone better if my mind hadn’t blanked on ‘precursor’ as the answer for nine across, ‘forerunner’, and if I hadn’t thought that that ‘non de plume’ had two m’s I might have gotten that eight down was ‘non de guerre’, but at least I learnt that ‘pibroch’ means ‘bagpipe music’.

Day 706

Aka Sunday 6^th January 2019

No exercise walk or weights today, as it’s Sunday, the day of rest!...but I did work on, complete and submitted an application for a HEO Policy Advisor post…

…I then finished reading ‘How To Be Right…’, which is a distillation of Mr O’Brien’s LBC radio show or like a director’s commentary on some of the phone calls to his show. And a very good primer/reminder that you should (a) base your views on evidence and be ready to re-evaluate your view when new evidence becomes available and (b) you should never take anything on face value, always question why someone promotes a certain viewpoint.

…I also read ‘The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion’ #3 – 4 (which has the action ramping up, but somehow also feels like we’re still at the start of the story with situations being set up) and I tried to watch ‘Escape Room’, but the beginning was so boring, there’s a sub-Saw death and then it’s basically shots of a city/urban environment overlaid with a conversation where someone is trapped and forced to answer riddles, but if he doesn’t answer within the time limit he gets an electric shock, but it goes on and on and doesn’t draw you in to the film, so after eight minutes I decided to re-watched ‘The Mechanic’, which is a dumb, but fun action film, which gets straight not the action and then gets into the back story/plot. 7/10 (for ‘The Mechanic’).

Day 705

Aka Saturday 5^th January 2019

Back to my morning exercise walk (I walked a total of 9.87km (or 6.13miles) in 1hour 56minutes and 5seconds, which took 12,789 steps and burnt 1,100 calories), during which I did some prep work for my interview about the Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust job - running through possible questions and answers, thinking of new examples to use in the interview and what questions to ask them) and weights…

…I then accepted interview for the Food Standards Agency job and did a bit of initial prep for it and then started work on two new job applications…

…I also read some comics:

‘Savage Dragon’ #241: which was slightly confusing as I couldn’t remember all of the past events that were referred to (I later realised that although I’d brought the previous issue, I hadn’t read it yet!!!), but it’s a good issue which deals with some tough issues around relationships and how society judges men and women in regards to sex/sexuality. All alongside the usual Savage Dragon jokes and super-heroics. 8/10. (Creative team: Erik Larsen, with Nikos Koutsis and Mike Toris on colours and Ferran Delgado on letters)

‘Giant Days’ #46: focuses on Susan as she puts on her hard-boiled private dick persona and deduces who is stealing from the comic shop. The team maintain the excellence of the previous issues and somehow manage to pack in jokes, emotions and a done-in-one-issue storyline. With a nice artistic touch of Susan’s detective scenes being set out in black and white, either as a tribute to Film Noir in general or maybe to Frank Miller’s ‘Sin City’ series or both. 10/10. (Creative team: John Allison, writer, Max Sarin, artist, Jeremy Lawson, colours, and Jim Campbell, letters)

‘Rick and Morty’ #45: is a nice almost Rick and Morty-less story about what happened to Morty’s family after Rick Cronenberged the world and they left for another dimension. And the public domain story climaxes in typical Rick and Morty messy fashion. 7/10. (Creative team: Writers - Kyle Starks and Tini Howard, artists - Marc Ellerby and Jarrett Williams, colours -Sarah Stern and letters - Crank!)

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

… which pulls it out of the hat and reverses the dip as I only needed to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 24), would have been a clean sweep if I’d gotten ‘conscientious’ from ‘painstaking’ and if I’d known that a ‘coho’ is a ‘small north Pacific salmon’, but you live and learn.