Once removed

Wow. I started this on Oct 14th, 2012. Might as well publish it now. Guess I planned to write a bit more but never found the time. Whoops. Story of my life.

The clock strikes 16:59, I start gathering my stuff and shuffle off towards the door bang on 17:00.

I charge down the street to Bank tube station, so far so good, Metro newspaper tucked under my arm. I board the 17:08 for Waterloo. What should happen next is, I get on the Waterloo-Surbiton train, the 17:23. That sees me back to my door at 17:45. Lovely.

However, the Waterloo concourse is a sea of misery in pinstripes, skirts, long black coats and shiny shoes. Plus the occasional fold-up Transformer bike. Commuters love 'em. Everyone is reading the departure boards. "We apologise for the delay..." Oh God, here we go.

Power cuts, signal failures and possibly a tsunami of shit has hit the tracks. I head for the next Surbiton-bound mechanical toboggan of woe, only to find it's rammed with people, like a 20 pack of cigarettes with 28 fags in, plus a couple of lighters. I'm not getting on that... As I wander away I'm sure the front of the train said Belsen... Back out to the concourse, the dark angry cloud of commuters is growing by the second. I plan my escape, I can take the Jubilee line to Westminster, handbrake turn around Big Ben, then hurtle along the District Line to Wimbledon. Maybe I can get to Surbiton from there? Nope. I end up taking a train from Wimbledon to Kingston, which isn't tooooooo far from Surbiton. All in all, only an hour longer than normal. Rush hour.

When delays like this eat into my precious hours, I'm always pleased when I make dinner which takes very little time, not just to make but also the clean up after. Introducing my healthy "One Pot Wonder." Brown rice, fish and veg. One pot of boiling water, one 40g serving of brown rice, fish in parsley sauce, straight from the freezer, plus some frozen veg. I miss having a dishwasher. Our flat is too small for one and they need to be plumbed in. What a giant pain in the arse, why can't the be more portable, like toasters? Why hasn't one of these techno geeks invented a USB dishwasher, so I can plug it into my laptop wherever I go? Lazy geeks.

Recently a distant family relative asked if we were "cousins, twice removed", then we both agreed that neither of us know what the hell that means, so here goes today's 5 minute Google.

Hmm, so Wikipedia have a table layout to explain it all, but my I've-just-Googled-it-for-5-minutes definition is:

If you have a cousin and that cousin has a kid, someone should remove it. That's the cousin, once removed. What a stupid naming system. First cousin, once removed. Er, no, it should be, first cousin's kid. Done. No need for this once removed crap.