You know when you've been NGO'd

Visited a new NGO today. Small outfit, interns dilligently pecking away at their keyboards, good sign. Certainly no sign of the lassitude which characterized the last place - absolutely no moonwalking, flicking elastic bands up at the ceiling and catching them ('it's a skill you have to develop over time') and the boss actually seemed to give a shit what they were doing. Fair enough. This was one of those interviews where you actually get the post before you turn up. Better than the other kind, where you can actually screw it up, or the other other kind, where they have already given someone else the job. But without that sort of challenge, I find it difficult to concentrate. I just watched her lips move and laughed when she did, taking about 60% of it in. She had a sort of morose assistant (girl, 20s) who kind of creeped me out a bit, sitting there and sulking like she had been passed over for a part in the Omen or something. 'What's biting her?' I thought, vaguely thinking I'd seen that defeated, 'what's the use?' look before, on my ex-girlfriends. From the point of view of the interviewer, I must have been getting more and more morose myself, although I was actually a million miles away, thinking about how much hassle it would be having to move flats over Christmas. I realised that I was zoning out and made an effort to perk up, perhaps at the wrong time, because she was going through a litany of human rights abuses. Ah well, got the posting, at least. Off to watch crappy Hollywood blockbuster now.

Christmas Shopping

Spent the day wandering around Spitalfields market, looking for Christmas presents for the family. Books, food, alpaca hats and scarves, cds, t-shirts and jewellery. Seems to be a brisk trade in fine art stills from cult movies, though I haven't seen these hanging in the houses/flats of anyone I know. Mixing with the wrong crowd. Thought about getting pate de fois gras for John (mother's chappie), but someone gave me an effectively vivid description recently of a duck being force-fed at gunpoint which has put me off pate for a bit. Remember, now I think about it, staying in France and local farmer (Monsieur Duleau) describing the whole pate process in glowing terms whilst pouring out absinthe (then illegal) into glasses. He watered it down by pouring eau minerale over a sugar lump balanced on a fork, the required amount of water being enough to melt the sugar into the glass. Tasted of aniseed. The next (and last) time I had absinthe was as part of a three-glass science-fiction cocktail in a downstairs bar on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg. The process was very convoluted, like an alchemical experiment, involving flames and tubes, but I did get drunk about forty times faster than usual, so, after all, it was quite efficient.