My Navel

I am tired. I am slightly tipsy and I just pulled this from my belly button.

I am a little disappointed to be honest. I have been wearing a brushed cotton top all day. Maybe I lost a big lump of belly button fluff during the day.

If we take a closer look you can see a single red fibre running through it.

I feel the urge to post an update on my experiences at the Tavistock Hotel in London.

I went for some dinner at the Tavistock Hotel only find its restaurant is only for breakfast purposes. It did however have a “wine bar attached”, Jacques Wine Bar no less.

The place looked like a diner rather than a wine bar. It had all the hallmarks: the salt & pepper pots and bowl of sugar cubes on the table, the little bowls containing sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard and the like. Despite all their efforts of trying to make it look nice with abstract beige prints on the walls and orchids in vases on some tables, it still looked like a diner. All in all it was a rather jarring visual experience.

I took a look at their menu and was pleasantly surprised. Big wine list, sophisticated sounding food, three courses to choose from with a range of interesting side dishes. At closer look the wine was all of the distinctly cheaper variety though. I ordered a tomato, avocado, olive and mozzarella salad with balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing. It arrived very swiftly making me think it way just a prefabricated thing from the fridge, but I was rather pleased with what I received. The avocado was perfect and had obviously been freshly cut as there was no browning. The balsamic vinegar was a little on the cheap side and could have been the stuff you get from Lidl. On the whole though, the starter was good.

The main course was supposed to be chicken breast topped with anchovy fillets, capers and marsala sauce. It didn’t look good when the waiter told me the chef had to pop out for cream, then he returned empty-handed. It appeared that he substituted cream for mozzarella so the chicken ended up more like pizza and judging by the slightly crispy edges it was microwaved as well. The veg appeared to have been microwaved in a microwave steamer; they were red-hot, slightly undercooked and tasted of tap water - nice.

I didn’t go for a pudding.

Now, I can’t blame a restaurant for its clientele but there were two groups that really ruined the atmosphere (such as it was) for me.

The first was a group of German academics that spoke incredibly loudly about the tediousness of academia like the finer details of essay writing and citation.

The second group was a middle-aged couple that were obviously having a very emotional domestic. You had to feel for them but the slightly quivering voices that raised far too often with “Why are you behaving like this” and “Just a minute ago, you said…”. Yes these things need working out, but please do it in private. Between these two (one behind and one in front of me) the dining experience was uncomfortable to say the least.

Today has been difficult. Last night I got back from Coventry just in time to put my son to bed, which was really nice; I wasn’t expecting to spend time with him awake until Friday morning. So I went to bed happy.

Then the alarm went off at 6am and things got steadily worse.

Early start, long train journey, client meeting, more trains, London Underground, more client meetings, more underground, you get the picture.

Apart from it being a dreary kind of traveling and client meeting day, all was going well until the underground. I always look forward to journeys that take me through King’s Cross; the announcement never fails to raise a small amount of childish amusement when it says “Alight for the Royal National Institute For The Blind”. Without fail, I think to myself “Why would the blind need a light? They are blind”. This is both predictable and childish at best, but these little things keep us from the edge of sanity (although which side of the edge I am not quite sure).

But today things were different. Today it said “Depart for the Royal National Institute For Blind People”. This crushed the little gem of joy that was building inside me, the light at the end of today’s tunnel. I know the blind probably don’t appreciate the odd snigger that might be audible to people with a heightened sense of hearing, but is this really necessary? I hate to join the “political correctness gone mad” brigade, but this really is one of those moments.

The other joy crusher came when I went to find an hotel. I have had a busy week and managed to book Monday’s hotel in advance, but I just couldn’t find the time for today; this was my first mistake. The training session I am running tomorrow is near King’s Cross so I thought I would just walk into a hotel and grab a room; this was my second mistake.

It turns out that hotels in London are pretty well booked out during the week, and after walking around the King’s Cross and Euston Station area for over an hour and popping into no less then seven hotels, the reply of “I am sorry, we are fully booked” was wearing a little thin. I eventually found a rather dreary little place (well, it ain’t that little actually) that on the surface looked okay, decked out as it was in the Art Deco style. Unfortunately it doesn’t look to have been decorated in the last 20 years. The Tavistock Hotel is cheap, but not overly cheerful.

At first I though my room was nice and quiet being on the seventh floor, but the walls are thin and noise from other rooms is beginning to encroach.

In more belly button related news, even though today was a shirt-wearing day, I have managed to accumulate a tiny morsel of navel lint. I might not get a picture of this one as it will get lost among (or more likely attached to) the other specimens of belly button fluff in my jar. I knew I should have bought my camera.

For posterity, today’s lint is approximately 4mm in length and painfully thin. As a departure from the usual blue/grey this is an odd beige colour which might indicate that the fluff mostly came from the light brown cords I was wearing today rather then the blue shirt (yes, I was dressed like a geography teacher).

Today was dull. I woke in a hotel and did a 10am ’til 3pm training course, then drove home; the drive was 3.5 hours. It mostly rained.

Predictably, no belly button fluff this evening. Damn shirts.

I was slightly annoyed to find that Debenhams doesn’t close at 7pm as I thought, so I couldn’t even buy my son the dinosaurs I promised.

Now my email isn’t working.

Sucky day.

As expected, I am wearing a shirt today, so the predictable lack of belly button fluff that goes with this state of affairs was no great surprise. Five hours on a train and three behind the wheel is somewhat taxing and I am writing this in a slightly punch-drunk stupor.

However, what did surprise me was the comment spam I received today…

Pasty Muncher Says:
January 14th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Imagine my delight when I found these results on my favourite price comparison site:
http://www.savebuckets.co.uk/search/long-boring-URL

What sort of ridiculous heresy is this? You have to admire the balls of the person that drops a link for a belly button brush on blog about collecting the stuff. I mean, a device for eradicating the exact same navel lint that we all love and admire is purest, bare-faced cheek!

I don’t want to see you around these parts again Pasty Muncher. How would you like it if I came around to your blog touting some contraption for ferreting-out and destroying pasties? Incidentally, this is the ideal place to use an interrobang, that delightful combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark. Consider yourself “interrobanged” Pasty Muncher.

Grrr.

Ack! I just realised I didn’t do Belly Button of the Week this week. Here is this week’s top navel…

Remember, if you want to submit an image of your belly button to reader’s navels please do. You might even be the next Belly Button of the Week.

Friday saw a disappointing volume of belly button fluff. I was wearing a new top (brushed cotton) and thought that the new fabric might yield a nice crop of lint. Maybe it fell out when I wasn’t looking, I had a busy day on Friday and I wasn’t really checking my navel’s progress through the day. The sample I extracted at bedtime was miniscule. I was so annoyed I didn’t even take a photo of it, I just popped it in the jar.

Saturday and Sunday saw me wearing a fleece top. It is fairly new and I thought that it might shed fibres which would work their merry way to my belly button. Again I am wrong though. With two days wear, all I got was this…

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate 10mm of multi-hued belly button fluff, but this specimen is a little flat. Not at all what I was hoping for.

This picture was taken with my +10 close-up lens. I have got the hang of getting a greater depth of focus but I have to crank the aperture as small as it will go; inevitably this needs a lot of light to give a reasonable image.

I have been looking online for extension tubes with a Pentax KA mount so that I can keep the automatic functions of my camera when taking macro shots. I don’t mind the manual focus bit, but my main lens doesn’t have manual aperture settings, so I would be a little stuck.

I have been tidying the kitchen a lot today (it was in a bit of a state) and have been interspersing the boredom with taking pictures of things in the kitchen. Most of it was quite crap and has subsequently been deleted. Here are a few of the better ones…

I have been quite getting into my photography stuff of late. I even ordered a cheap tripod and a couple of lens filters (polarising and UV).

Anyway, I need to sleep, I have to catch an early train tomorrow.

Following the complete lack of fluff on Monday, I was looking forward to harvesting the buildup I had going on when it came time to disrobe on Tuesday night.  Unfortunately my wife had other ideas.

I was laying on my son’s bedroom floor after putting him to bed; I was dozing myself and my wife decided to revive me by tickling my exposed belly button with her long-nailed fingers. After a few sleepy swats at her intruding digit, I fully realised the threat she was posing to my navel lint. I leapt into action but alas, it was too late; her interfering pinky had dislodged my fluff and sent it tumbling to the dark bedroom floor. Try as I might, I could not find it; I was not best pleased.

The following day, Thursday, saw me on the road again (or rather train); another shirt, another lint-free day. I hate work sometimes.

Next week is shaping up to be a complete monster with me on the road to see clients for four days on the trot. Shirts aplenty but little fluff to show for it I would imagine.

I hope tomorrow brings better success.

No fluff yesterday. I was wearing a shirt all day and it obviously didn’t want to give up its very fabric of existence.

My close-up lenses arrived though. I have to experiment with them somewhat but combining all four for real close up images tends to produce a little blue and yellow colour separation around the edges of the image. I will mess around with different lens combinations to see if there is a main culprit or whether they all do it to a degree.

I did the fruitless Good Samaritan thing today. I was driving up the A38 on the way to work and spotted a lady whose car had broken down; she was on her phone, presumably summoning help, but the thing that made give her a second though was that she had a small baby in a car seat out in the rain. I was a few hundred yards down the road when I made up my mind to stop and see if she needed aid, so I turned off at the next junction and doubled back to the last junction so that I could pass again and stop to offer assistance.

A police car followed me around the first junction and took off down the road at top speed; at this point I wondered if they had the same idea I had. I drove back a junction, and headed back in the direction of work again and found that they were indeed stopping for her. Oh well, at least she got assistance - all I got was arriving at work even later than I would have otherwise. Our little one had a bad night and I slept on the floor of his room - he got my spot in our bed.

Today has been a rather amazing day.

I had to drive to London for an hour-long meeting. Seven hours of driving for one hour’s work seems a little over the top but the drive was well worth it.

On the M4, just west of Reading and on the north-side of the road, is a fake tree. It is a mobile phone mast disguised as a tree; it is relatively easy to spot as it seems to only be half a tree, the top half appearing to have fallen off. Upon close examination the ‘tree’ has three antennae mounted axially along its trunk and the bark isn’t bark, but a smooth sheath printed with bark print. I am usually quite pleased to see this little act of environmental conservation but today I had a big surprise, I saw another. The second fake tree is a little further west and is on the south-side of the road. This new fake tree is of a slightly different design with the antennae standing from the top of the ’severed trunk’ like the part opened weapon of mass-destruction in a Bond movie.

Unfortunately, being at the wheel and without a camera, I have nothing to show for my most wondrous discovery.

The other brilliant sight was of no less than nine tanks.

At first we (I was driving with a colleague, but more of him in a moment) drove past a truck carrying two small tanks; now I don’t know a great deal about tanks so I will classify it as a ‘rather small tank with a thin, short gun on it’. This caused some great excitement and we passed four such vehicles, each carrying two tanks each. I pressed my work colleague (Dave) into tanking a few pictures on his camera, which quite frankly, was a dismal failure. His picture taking skills are second only to the rubbishness of his phone.

This only makes eight tanks though - the other was coming in the other direction and was of a much larger variety, I shall call it a ‘rather large tank with a chuffing great gun’ as is was quite large and had a fair-old weapon to brandish.

This really made my day, nine tanks and two fake trees - what more could I ask for? Oh, some belly button fluff would be good I suppose.

Well, yesterday, I wore the same black acrylic jumper as Saturday - I have no shame. While not as impressive as the first-day’s wear, I did extract a whopping 14mm fluff deposit. While not s substantial as the day before’s offering, being a little wispy and thin at one end, this lint did not disappoint.

Here she is…

Dave also mentioned that the Futurama movie was out on DVD. This really topped my day off with Strawberry jam - I love Futurama and have been waiting for this film for some time. To Play.com tomorrow methinks.