Breaking News - the frogs have cum

Spring is sprung, right on time with the arival of british summer time last weekend, the frogs have germinated all over my pond, a tad earlier than last year too, this is indeed evidence of global warming and I'll be on the phone this weekend to the BBC's Bill Oddie to complain and see if he wants to buy any of my frogspawn.

The pond is quite big, it was here when we bought the house and i've since relined it and made it bigger, and added a UV and bio-something filter to it so that the fish don't have to learn how to breathe air instead of water - it works and for the last two years I've kept the same herd of Orfe and fancy tailed goldfish, they are hiding in the bottom of the pond right now and will hopefully appear in about a month or so but the pond also contains a crop of frogs who do thar funky stuff all over the surface every spring, thousands of tadpoles will hatch out in about two weeks time and most of them get eaten by birds and their parent frogs until one or two every year grow into proper big frogs, its a hard life being a frog and I'll be reporting on here over the next few weeks on their progress - I'm a regular Richard Attenborough me.

Dentists, and Wembley, fekkwittery at its best

My dentist has written to us to inform us that he will not be signing the new NHS dentists contract tomorrow and that we will therefore have to pay for the portion of the treatment that we receive from him that was previously covered by the NHS.

Which simply means that our two children will no longer receive free treatment, for many years now he has charged "private" rates for adults (hence my recent £720 bill for a new crown) but he has treated the under 16's and students on the NHS contract - we now have to pay for our daughters treatment too although as a goodwill gesture he is doing their six monthly check-ups free of charge instead of charging £25 each.

Listening to Radio Leeds this morning this seems to be due to local administrators insisting that dentists have to treat all patients on the NHS or non at all, Leeds are insisting on this while Bradford allow "mixed use" of private and NHS patients in the same way that our dentist has been doing up until now.

Its not a huge problem to us, we are not fabulously wealthy but can at least afford the more simple dental treatments for our daughters, although god knows what the proposed dental brace for Jodie is going to cost later this year, but many people simply cannot afford to pay for dental treatment and are struggling to find a dentist at all within the city who will treat them.

The UK is apparently the fourth wealthiest country in the world, we are supposed to receive free medical and dental treatment on the NHS funded by taxation - it doesn't seem to be working.

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and then there is Wembley.

The (supposedly) national stadium of the England football team, the old Wembley was iconic but a shitheap, difficult to get to, difficult to get away from, anyone who never went does not understand that the terracing and stairwells could be rivers of piss by full time at any match due to the lack of and access to any sort of reasonable toilet facilities, the seats that had been hurridly installed sometime in the 1980's were narrow and uncomfortable and the cheapest of the seats were nothing more than parrot perches that you squatted on while obtaining deep vein thrombosis - the old Wembley needed replacing.

And then the politicians got involved. The English Football association asked for public money to help finance a new stadium, the government agreed in principal but insisted that the stadium should be used for other sports as well as football, including athletics, which sort of ballsed-up the plans that had already been approved as there wasn't room for an athletics track and there was a legitimate debate that football fans didn't want to sit in a stadium where you were 40 yards away from the pitch because of a running track.

The debate raged, not for months but for years and while it raged the costs spiralled - its what happens when you involve politicians in any sort of project. If the FA had appointed a design and build contractor right at the start then we would have had our national stadium built on time and within budget several years ago, as it stands now the opening date gets more and more flexible as each week progresses and the progress on site seems to get slower and slower as each week progresses - the main contractor is blaming the massive disruption at the start of the contract for the majority of the delay, mainly because the plans for the build changed on a daily basis as one politician after another put his oar into the works on behalf of his own political agenda.

The completion date of May this year has now been revised to "2007", just sometime in 2007, its OK lads, just hand it over when you think its ready, we'll wait for it. Oh and by the way, it would have been better in Birmingham, the new Wembley is just as inaccessable as the old Wembley, what with it being built ont he same site and all, but thats another story.

Royal Mail fekkwittery

Yesterday we ordered some handsfree kits via the internet, the order was processed within the hour and we received an email to say that they had been dispatched via Royal Mail and that we could check the progress of the order online with the Royal Mail, excellent service.

So this morning, just for fun, I decided to track the progress of the order with Royal Mail, went online, entered the consignment number, hit the "track this order" button.

The answer came back within milliseconds, "Consignments that require proof of delivery cannot be tracked online until after they have been delivered". I didnt read it properly the first time so entered all the details again and got the same response, this time I read it properly.

I can't use the tracking system to track a parcel until after the parcel has been delivered and signed for, when its been delivered to me, and signed for by me, then I can use the online tracking system to see when it will be delivered, presumably it will then tell me that I've recieved it and signed for it, it sounds like a wonderful service for those with dementia but a fucking waste of internet space for anyone else.

While staring at the screen there was a knock at the door and there stood our local postman with the parcel in his hand, I showed him the online answer to my tracking query, he just shook his head and walked away, I think he could probably tell me many more stories of complete fekkwittery at the Royal Mail.

What does god sound like ?

OK, following on from the Norman Kember post, and after various stories in the press, and after reading the Christian Peacemaker Teams web site in order to try and get inside Norman Kember's head, I still have questions ...

I still think that the CPT are a bunch of nutters, thats a statement of opinion of course, not a question, but I needed to say that somewhere.

They are however, nutters who are guided by their faith, undisputed fact.
But just where does their faith come from ?
How does someone like Norman Kember reach the conclusion that it would be a good idea to go into a war zone, a war zone that does not comply to any Geneva Convention rules, with the sole intention of "getting in the way" for a bit ?

George Bush admits freely and without shame that his god told him to invade Iraq.
Tony Blair admits that he has used prayer as guidance in making his decision to accompany George in his quest.


So, my questions are,

1. What does god sound like ?
2. How does he appear to you with all these good ideas ?
3. Why does he tell George and Tony to go to war and then tell Norman to go "get in the way"


Personally I prefer Eddie Izzard's version of what god sounds like, in one of his stand-up routines he describes a conversation between god and jesus where jesus is complaining to his dad about the last time he sent him down to earth, "the bastards nailed me to a fukkin tree for three days, what were you thinking of ?", and for gods voice he uses a James Mason type voice, with.......a...........very........methodical..............and .................precise................syntax.

It fits, James Mason makes a very good god voice, try it next time you watch a James Mason film, preferably not "lolita" because it doesn't really present god in a very good light, lusting after young girls and all that, but something like Salems Lot for example, where he plays the bloke who brings the vampires to....well ok perhaps not that film either, but you get the gist, James Mason has got gods voice sussed.


So did James Masons voice appear inside the heads of George Bush, Tony Blair and Norman Kember ?

Is that how it works ?

Do god-botherers actually hear another voice speaking to them, telling them to do completely crazy things ?

{James Mason voice}
"Hello George, I've got a little job for you, nothing too complicated, are you listening George, yes, good, well its like this George, I need you to invade Iraq, what George, yes I know I told your dad to stop in Kuwait, but I was wrong see, I want you to invade the bastards, and I want you to do it tomorrow George, thank you George, I knew I could rely on you"

and then a short while later...

{James Mason voice}
"Norman, Norman Kember ? Yes you, its you isn't it, Norman. Norman listen to me will you, its god speaking, yes really, no really it is me, what, no jesus is busy, listen to me Norman, Norman are you listening, get up off your knees man, this is important, write this down Norman, I want you to go to Iraq and get in the way for a bit. What Norman, yes Norman I know theres a fucking war on, don't use language like that Norman its not nice, I want you to go there because I can't go back to George and Tony and tell them to stop now, I'd look foolish, I want you to look foolish for me Norman, I want you to go and get yourself kidnapped, yes I know they'll probably kill you Norman, I know that, its a futile gesture is it, yes I know that too Norman, but hey, someone has to go and jesus is a bit pissed off that I used him last time, so its down to you Norman, go on, get yourself off there now, theres a good lad."


Is that it ?
Is that how it happens ?

Jake had a bath today

He's an unwilling volunteer at bathtime but three or four times a year he agrees to be brave and stands in the downstairs shower without trying to escape for just long enough to soap him up and shower him down.

Drying him is impossible though, his top coat and undercoat is so thick and adapted for outdoor life that it has to be left to dry naturally, which will take the rest of the day now, so you have to avoid brushing against him unless you want a wet leg.

At least he smells nice now though.

Solo - No Sir

What a very nice day we've had today, even though it ended in fiasco.

NatWest will have some difficult questions to answer on monday as well.

This morning we set off for the short 30 minutes drive to Skipton, a nice leisurely browse around the saturday market on the High Street and then dinner (or lunch to you southern nancies) in a pub in the Yorkshire Dales somewhere.

Thats the good thing about living to the north of Leeds, you are in the Dales within ten minutes of leaving home and the scenery soon changes to the trademark high-sided flat-bottomed glacially formed valleys, stone walls and small market towns scattered randomly along the valley floors.

Thanks to Yorkshire Water who have set road works every 500 yards or so along the road to Ilkley, we arrived in Skipton after one hours worth of queueing all the way, but nevertheless we spent a pleasant couple of hours browsing the old High Street and buying a few things from the market stall holders.

Time for dinner, and so we left Skipton and headed for Harrogate, passing a few acres of the United States of America at their Menwith Hill base and on to the Nelson pub, a place that we'd used before. Its OK as Brewers Fayre type pubs go, nothing spectacular with the choice of food, or beer, but its big enough to cope and its open all afternoon.

Bought the beer in cash and then sat down to pick from the predictable "steak or chicken" menu - chose our three dishes and I went to the food counter to order. The young lad behind the counter took the order then took my debit card to pay for it, he swiped the card and looked at the till with a puzzled face, fortunately his manager was passing and he asked him to look at the till as, in the young lads words "we don't take NatWest do we ?"

I kept quiet rather than embarrass the kid, his manager swiped the card, the till refused again, the manager looked at the card, "ah, its a Solo card" he declared, "we don't take Solo"

I just stared back at him then very quietly repeated "You don't take Solo ?"

"Well sometimes we do, but this till won't" and he handed my card back to me.

They both stared at me, presumably waiting for me to give them a card that their fekkin till would be happy with, and I could have, I had Mastercards in my wallet, but to be honest I was a bit pissed off with their till not accepting Solo cards, it was lazy on their part, I noticed that they didn't have any PIN equipment fitted yet and as one of the principles of Solo is that all transactions have to be authorised then that was probably the reason why their till was getting a refusal from their online transaction handler - they couldn't provide a PIN number, they couldn't provide it, their equipment couldn't handle it, after two years notice and after most transaction providers have nagged retailers for all of that time (they have with my business), they still haven't got around to updating their tills to handle the new secure technology.

At times like this I don't get mad, I never get mad, not for me is it acceptable to bang table tops and raise voices, no, at times like this I just get stubborn.

"Well you'd better cancel the order then" I told them quietly, and took my Solo card back.

They both stared at me as though I was crazy, they'd seen the mastercards in my wallet and assumed I'd use them instead and for 30 seconds we all stared at each other until the manager muttered "sorry" and went back to the kitchen.

Of course I had to explain to Suzanne and Jodie why, starving as we were, we weren't going to be eating here, and of course they asked why I didn't use a mastercard to pay for the dinner, to which I just shrugged my shoulders and gave them my pissed off look, they understood immediately, its the same look that has made me walk out of hundreds of shops that make me queue for too long.

So we drove a couple of miles to another pub that I know, the Red Lion near Ripley, this pub is famous for its meals, the car park is packed on most dinnertimes and evenings and people drive from miles around to go to this pub.

But when we got there, there was only three cars in the car park and then one of them left. I walked to the pub entrance, it all seemed very quiet inside but it had lights on, and then as I got to the front door I saw the sign "Cash only, no debit or credit cards", turning round with a quiet "fuck you then" I got back in the car and explained to Suzanne and Jodie that we wouldn't be eating here either, it was starting to get farcical and we all had a laugh when Suzanne asked "how do they make a living then" and while looking around the car park realised her answer was right there in front of us, they don't appear to be making a living at all at the moment.

And so it was a drive over Killinghall moor towards Otley and some more pub/restaurants, until we came to a "road closed" sign that had us diverted back into Harrogate with an involuntary "for fucks sake" from me, this was getting funnier and funnier.

We ended up in Harry Ramsdens in Guiseley, the original Harry Ramsdens, the one and only Harry Ramsdens, and we went and sat in the posh restaurant to eat thirty quids worth of fish and chips and very nice they were too but more importantly Harry Ramsdens accept Solo cards, glory fukkin halleluiah, a trader who isn't afraid to embrace technology, one of the oldest fish and chip shops in the world and they've got PIN machines and everything, thank you Harry Ramsden.

Still, on Monday I will be walking around the corner to my NatWest bank and asking them why they have replaced my former Switch card with a Solo card. From what I have read on this here t'interweb about Solo cards, they were introduced to enable people who were previously thought unsuitable to be handling Switch and credit cards to join in the plastic card revolution, basically a Solo transaction has to be authorised every time it is swiped whereas the transaction handler can authorise Switch transactions without such authorisation from the issuing bank - in other words a Solo card is for poor people and those who cannot be trusted to manage their own accounts properly, I've only held my account at NatWest for thirty years now, I only have four personal and business accounts in my name with them, I only have a mortgage on my house with NatWest, I wonder how much more fekking security they need from me before they'll fekkin trust me with a fekkin Switch card again, the bastards.

Rescuing the peace campaigners...

Hes all over the news today, Norman Kember that is, the 74 year old British peace campaigner who felt a strong compulsion to go to Iraq last year in order, presumably, to either assist in whatever way he could (a devout Christian he felt it was his duty to do so), or for publicity purposes to further publicise his anti-war beliefs.

He doesn't seem to have been there on behalf of anyone else, no overall organisation, no outward campaigning, and yet he seems to have linked up with a group of people inside Iraq who have similar beliefs, when he was kidnapped it was from a house in which three other peace activists were taken.

Who are these people ?

Why do they feel an overwhelming need to travel to one of the most lethal countries int he world, a place where as a westerner without your own governments armed forces stood either side of you, you are very likely to be targeted for kidnap, most fools would surely understand that - so why do they do it ?

We shouldn't overlook the fact either that one of his housemates, American Tom Fox, was murdered by the same captors two weeks ago, this was not a cheap publicity stunt, these peace campaigners were captured by genuine terrorists who genuinely cared not one fig about their lives and would have willingly killed all of them without a second thought.

So what on earth would make you put yourself in the same situation ?

Surely Norman Kember didn't think that as "a Christian" he would be immune from terrorist kidnappers, surely he didn't think he'd be able to explain to his kidnappers when they knocked on the door of his house on that day in November that they'd got the wrong person and he was only here to help ?

And yet I think that that is exactly what these people think, I believe that they are misguided, nay brain-washed, by their religion into believing that if they are "good" enough and if they follow their "gods teachings" and use words like "compassion" and "reach out" and "support", then their god will enclose them in some sort of protective bubble in a alien war machine from "War of the Worlds" sort of stylee, and that even if that doesn't work then their faith will protect them through their trials.

The same thing used to happen in the Middle Ages when complete royal families from all across Europe would band together and ride off to what we now know of as "The Middle East" in order to quell the barbarian hordes of Muslims from Turkey and eastwards - King Richard I of England managed to get himself kidnapped and held to ransom in exactly the same way as Norman Kember has and amazingly he was released unharmed too.

And so Norman Kember has to be rescued by Allied Forces from his kidnappers, placing them at considerable risk over a protracted period of time, and even while he is sitting sipping tea in the British Embassy for the press corps to photograph he is quoted as saying that he wants to go back onto the streets of Baghdad and continue his work, and despite the outcry from the British media in a "what sort of a nutter is he" stylee, he finds support from Dr Bruce Kent, the well known peace campaigner and former mouthpiece of the Anglican religion, who thinks that Norman Kember has a right to place himself in such situations, and he goes so far as to say that every Christian has an obligation to place themselves into such situations because Governments and private contractors have done the same.

So there you have it, if you call yourself a Christian then Bruce Kent thinks you should be lying down in front of tanks on an Iraqi road somewhere while also dodging the pickup trucks that seem to be the vehicle of favour for most terrorist kidnappers, watch out allied troops, you're going to be busy in the next few weeks avoiding running them over while at the same time looking out for the ones that have gone for a ride in the back of a Nissan Navarro.

Saving money, me...

Fed up of spiralling living costs and with the latest piss take being from British Gas who merrily informed me that my energy bill would be increased by 50% next year, I finally got around to doing what this bloke has been telling me to do for the last twelve months and shop around for better deals.

So I tried a price comparison service for home insurance first as NatWest had just tried to get me to renew my annual policy, £540 for House and contents insurance. Stuck all the details through the online comparison service and it came up with Budget Insurance at £183, bugger me, that's what I call a saving.

I rang Budget because I deal with them for the car insurances too and we sorted it all out on the phone, even got some free hospital insurance thrown in as well, although why I want to insure a hospital is unclear.

So time to do the gas and electric. I have a dual fuel account with British Gas, never changed it because quite frankly I've never been arsed to do so in the past. Just after christmas though I changed a bank account and when I rang BGas to change the monthly direct debit they tried to set it up for £91 a month instead of £46, and that was just for the gas supply.

I questioned their sanity as to how and why I should ever use that much gas in my lifetime and just before I got to the point where I tell them to piss off and do one, they agreed to set the direct debit to £61 a month for the gas "and see how it goes", after all, they pointed out, we have a price increase imminent.

Stuffed the gas and electric consumption figures into the online price comparison service and the first suprise that it came back with was that my current costs were going to rise by 46% this year with BGas but that if I signed a five year fixed price deal with BGas then this years price would "only" increase by 53%, yes thats right, it would cost me more this year to fix the price for five years, now what sort of idiots do they have as customers ? Idiots like me obviously.

The software informed me in an almost smug-like manner that if I switched to London Energy then I would end up paying £80 less than I currently do, thats a saving of almost £800 a year on what I will be paying if I stick with BGas, are you keeping up with me here ?

I've never heard of London Energy but they are owned by the French national energy company EDF, it all means nothing to me but as long as they send enough electricity and gas down the wires and pipes, and don't get the wires and pipes mixed up, and charge me a third less than BGas were going to do, then they'll do for me, I signed up with them.

I was on a roll now, I have an Egg credit card, theres a zero balance on it and I never use it. I also have a NatWest credit card, theres a balance on it left over from last years holiday at 15%apr, deary me. Egg called me one evening last week and I let them waffle on a bit then hung up the phone, but I remembered somethign about an "anniversary deal" where they would offer 0% on balance transfers, logged onto the Egg account and sure enough, theres a 0% deal until august on balance transfers - so the NatWest card now has the zero balance and Egg are making nothing out of me until august.

There must be more stuff I can save on, I'd already swapped the mortgage in January to a better deal and I've cashed in all the endowment policies that were making naff-all on the stock exchange and invested them in my own company and am paying myself 8%pa, its probably illegal but they'll have to spot it first.

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Which reminds me,

About once a month I get a phone call from a stockbroker in Manhattan, or at least thats where he says he's from, and he tries to sell me stock in various american companies despite the fact that every month I tell him that I'm not interested and every month he asks if I'll be adding to my portfolio in the next few months to which I tell him that I haven't got a fekking portfolio and have no intention of investing any money, if I had any money, in any company that I can't touch, feel and see, especially if the person selling me that stock is a complete stranger who freely admits to being at least one ocean width away from my wallet.

And this week I got another call from another broker, this time in London. For no apparent reason I let him waffle on instead of just putting the phone down and it appears that he works for a large and highly regarded investment company who specialise in metal investments using something called "leverage". I hadn't a fekkin clue what "leverage" was so gave him my email address for him to send me a brochure.

His brochure arrived and very impressive it looks, still haven't a clue what "leverage" is apart from the process by which they manage to "lever" huge sums of money out of my bank account for what seems like incredible risk, basically they buy large globs of tin, copper, aluminium, or whatever other metal takes their fancy this month, using your money, and then sometime later they sell it again - and you have to hope that they buy it cheap and sell it expensive and not the other way around.

Call me simple but I think that that just about sums up the whole of the worlds trading exchanges, you give your money to someone else and hope that he is not a crook or an idiot or worse still and idiot crook, and if he isn't then he might make you some profit, after he's taken his own much larger profit of course, and after he's told you that its fekk-all to do with him if he fails to give you any part of your original investment back.

And don't forget of course that the "stuff" that they are apparently buying with your money is never actually seen or handled by them, it may even not exist for all they care, as long as they can convince someone else that it exists somewhere in the world, and convince them to pay more for it than they did, then the jobs done.

I think I'd rather give my money to Tarzans chimpanzee, Cheetah, and ask him to visit various bookmakers in town and place random bets on random horses throughout the course of the day - I bet Cheetah would come home with more money than I sent him out with and better still, his cut would be three bananas.

Its all just numbers to me...

Gordon Brown announced his budget for the next year at lunchtime today, I watched it on TV in the office.

I haven't a clue what he was talking about.

ITV very kindly summarised the salient points at the bottom of the screen as he waffled on, they needn't have bothered for me as I still didn't understand what on earth this man was saying.

He seems like a half decent bloke though does Gordon, for a politician, always seems like the sort of bloke you could take to the pub and have a half with, it wouldn't be long before he started waffling on about economics of course and you'd have to leave him in the best room on an excuse that you needed to visit the toilet while you sneaked into the tap room for the rest of the night, but he seems like a half decent bloke.

Politicians are such wankers though, the House of Commons was full of course as they all knew it would be live on TV and wanted to be seen, Tony (Blair) and John (Prescott) were sat either side of Gordon and occasionally seemed to be laughing and chatting to someone across the room to them, even while Gordon was on his feet talking, and his speech was constantly interrupted by loud guffaws and shouts from both sides of the house, ignorant bastards all of them, can't even wait for ten minutes while the bloke finishes his speech, if I was Gordo I'd have let the first few interruptions go then told them to shut the fuck up or I wouldn't tell them what was in the speech and they'd only find out when they went to the post office next week to tax their large cars.

Which reminds me, something I saw on screen during Gordo's speech seemed to suggest to me that both my car and Suzannes car wouldnt be quite so expensive to tax this year - I couldn't care less about my car because the contract hire company pay for the tax, but would you believe that I just taxed Suzannes car online last fekkin night, I'll not be best pleased if I find that I've paid over the odds just because she was so bloody impatient to get it done.

All this accountancy stuff is way, way beyond my powers of patience, accountants just bore the pants off me and their work nullifies any energy source I have every time I have to read a balance sheet. It will soon be time to trip down to our own accountants and sit their while he drones on about our fiscal year, our profit and loss sheet, the incredibly boring balance sheet and the tax commitments for next year, after ten minutes or so I am just an empty shell that is simply hearing the words but making no sense, my brain slowly closes down in order to avoid stupification and my head nods or shakes at random in response to various questions until he stops talking and I figure it must be time to leave.

We usually drive away from our annual meeting with the accountant in silence while our three brains reboot in the fresh air, then someone will say "so did we make a profit then" or "did he say how much the tax bill is this year" or "what day is it", no doubt accountnats all over the country will be orgasmic in excitement today and positively leaping from the rooftops with glee in Canary Wharf, but here in the rest of the real world it all boils down to "how much on cigs, how much on beer, did you see Alistair Darlings smug fukkin face on the front row ?"

A strange visitor called today...

Wow, he was scary.

The man who has just been to repair our credit card machine-thingy, I didn't even know it was broken but Suzanne reported it yesterday because the PIN input pad was recording an error message, big deal, we only take telephone transactions so we don't use the PIN number thingy.

Anyway, I'm sat in the office ten minutes ago and theres a knock at the door, I open it and there is the strangest looking man I've ever seen standing there, he introduces himself and I just continue to stare at him.

I've only just realised since he left who he reminded me of - remember Pink Floyds video for their chart single "Another brick in the wall", remember the teacher who danced around on puppet strings ? This bloke was just like the teacher.

He was so flippin (I'm not using swear words today, got told off after my blog yesterday, got told I was "foul mouthed"), so flippin tall that I could hardly see his face and he had to bend almost double to get through the door. despite being at least 8 foot tall he could only have weighed about 6 stone, he was the tallest yet skinniest person I have ever seen.

And he was white, when I say he was white I don't mean he had pink skin, I mean he had white skin, bleached white skin, and he had white hair to match, no wonder I could hardly see his face as it was all sort of blended in somewhere up there.

His arms were incredibly long and hung forward, but never relaxed, which is why he reminded me of the puppet teacher from the Pink Floyd video, he looked as if he had strings attached to holes in his hands and someone was pulling them slightly. His fingers were at least ten inches long - each although he only ever used one of them to tap out on the credit card terminal keyboard.

He crouched in the corner of the room, head bowed beneath the ceiling, playing about with the terminal and I just sat down and stared, he was speaking but it was flowing way over the top of my head and it took several rebounds off the walls before the sound came down to ear level.

What a weird experience, he said something and I signed his sheet and he's gone now and I'm left with a headache and wondering if there were drugs of some description in that biscuit I had with my coffee an hour ago.


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Oh yes, one more thing - Amanda failed her driving test today - awwwwww

And she is so pissed off.

She is so competitive and was convinced that she would pass today but cutting in front of a truck on a roundabout is not the sort of thing to go unnoticed on a driving test and she is soooooo upset because we practiced and practiced her multi-lane roundabout technique on Lawnswood roundabout last night in the rush hour, five times we approached it and five times the night before until i was sure she understood what the different lanes were for.

I've been called home now to take her out driving again tonight, more roundabout drills and another £45 for a test rebook - I remember (just) what it was like to be 17 and desperate to get out on your own in a car.

Politicians and the strange world they live in...

OK, a disclaimer to start with...

This is not a personal attack on Alistair Darling ok ?

Well, it is really, but its only because he's come onto the radar today, like some sort of brainless twat he's popped up in Leeds to try and pacify the city for the most outrageous decision making process that strung along our local council for half a lifetime with no intention of ......

Oh what the hell, you need the whole story.

Heres the Readers Digest Condensed Version...

Leeds is a large city (by UK standards), lets say about 750,000 citizens and is formed almost into a series of concentric circles around a central area, its unusual in that respect as most old UK towns and cities developed along rivers, but Leeds spread outwards from the central point in an almost uniform manner - imagine a cartwheel with a hub and the spokes are the roads leading in and out of the city.

This inherited design of course makes it ideal for fast links into the city centre, there aren't many places to live within the Leeds boundary where you are not more than 20 minutes out of the centre in any direction - it also makes it an ideal candidate for a rapid public transit system of the light rail type.

But we haven't got one, we've got old fekkin deisel buses instead.

We used to have electric trams but they went in the 1950's and we got filthy deisel buses instead.

But not to worry, when the Labour government were elected to power in 1997 they asked for local authorities to step forward with schemes for rapid transit systems as this brave new Labour government were very keen to get the public out of their cars and into the new "supertrams", high speed electric, clean, green tramways that would whisk its citizens up from their homes and whoosh them into the city centre to work - assuming that they worked in the city centre of course, which many didn't, but thats only a slight distraction.

The brave new Labour government promised all local authorities who produced such plans that funds would be made available from public and private funding initiatives, and even better, authorities with rapid transit systems in place would then be able to levy charges for dirty old motorists who insisted on taking their cars into the city centres instead of using the smashing new rapid transit systems, look why don't I just call them trams from now on OK, or better still, supertrams, that sounds good doesn't it, John Prescott thought it sounded good back in 1997 anyway, it was all his idea originally as he was Minister for Transport, one of several Minister jobs that he seems to have done/still does/possibly.

So Leeds stepped forward, no they didn't step forward, they fekkin ran forward with open arms, we already had such a scheme on the planning boards you see, been planning it for fekkin years by now, just couldn't get the Conservatives to fund it, but now, wow, Labour were going to pay for it with new finance, it was like the bank manager had just become your best friend again, yippee, Leeds was getting a supertram !

It was impressive - 21km of tracks linked NorthWest, NorthEast and South of the city into the city centre...

What ?

Why no East or West links ?

Because thats where the poor people live and they'd have expected subsidies to use the supertram but don't shout that from the rooftops, we're talking serious politics here.

£350million it would cost, but hey, the governments new public/private funding initiative was in place and the work had actually started in the south of the city, traffic junctions were being altered and everything.

Fast forward to last summer and its been nearly ten years since some of the original planning and compulsory purchase options were issued and if they weren't acted on by last september then the whole project was in danger of having its pants pulled down, and the council had already spent £40million of its own cash, sorry, our own cash, thats us local rate payers cash that is, my fekkin money to be precise.

And so on that fateful day last september and after dithering for the last two years and placing as many obstacles in his own path as he could so as not to have to announce a decision at all, the current Transport Minister Alistair Darling finally admitted that although the private funding part of the public/private funding initiative had been found, the government couldnt actually stump up the public funding part of its own public/private funding initiative - in other words for the last ten years we thought we were going for a massive and most enjoyable big shit in the woods, and we'd only managed to fart, not even fart, we'd had a little parp and nothing else.

What a twat.

So today Alistair Darling came to Leeds to announce that the M606/M62 motorway junction is to benefit from a £2.5million junction improvement scheme, and he gets his face on all the local TV stations and local newspapers describing what a great boost to the regions economy this will be.

Fuck off Alistair, two and a half million pounds is fuck all in the grand scheme of motorway maintenance and nothing at all, not even a drop in the ocean in the scheme of motorway improvement schemes, two and a half million will not even repaint the white lines on the Leeds urban motorway, and yet his smarmy face pops up on my fekking TV while I'm eating my fekkin pizza and I'm supposed to think that this great car-share lane scheme that hes proposing for this extremely congested motorway junction is a huge investment for the region and that we should all be so-fekkin grateful to him and his government for them thinking of us when they were spending our tax money.

Well thanks for nothing Alistair, £300million on a supertram scheme would have been a huge investment for the region, taking 19 million bodies out of their personal cars each and every year - £2.5million on repainting a motorway junction instead is taking the piss, big style, you smarmy jerk.

I don't know whether to applause his absolute cheek at actually appearing in the region or gasp at his absolute stupidity that we would swallow his drop of piss in the ocean that is transport initiatives, on the other hand he is one of the common breed of career politicians in parliament now who study politics and business at universities, then go straight into parliament believing that they have all the answers from the books they've read - a little real life experience wouldn't go amiss first - Mr Darling spent a maximum of nine years in a proper job as a lawyer before being elected to parliament and for five of those years was a local politician - I probably got more real life experience at my inner city school before I was ten years of age.

And they actually wonder why we don't trust or respect any of them...


(I feel better for that now, I can do funny posts tomorrow again)

Return once more to the pink lozenge

Eight fifteen this morning and I struggle into the dentist coping manfully with my awful dosage of man-flu, nose and eyes running, chest aching with the exertion of coughing and sneezing so much, I should be in bed not making the final installation visit for my new tooth.

Its a new crown, a complete new porcelain tooth, upper left incisor, the old one fell out when the root broke last year and I've been making fortnightly visits to my dentist since christmas while he fills the old root, then finds a new root that was infected, clears the infection then fills that root too and now today, finally, after three months, I am ready for the fitting of the new tooth.

If I can stop coughing long enough.

Its a two hour appointment because he makes the carbon fibre post and porcelain tooth there on the premises as you wait, the clever bugger, and he drills around for a bit and carves some of my gum away to make a nice base for the new tooth and then send me to wait in his ultra modern waiting room to watch Fawlty Towers while he gets the Chad Valley Porcelain Tooth Makers kit out and does his funky stuff with his little kiln and all.

I'll say this about him - he's a bloody good dentist, not cheap, but bloody good, and in my book you can't have a dentist who is bloody good and cheap as well.

I've got his surgery all to myself for the whole two hours so I put my feet up and watch a whole episode of John Cleese's masterpiece which isn't as funny as I remember it being twenty years ago, and I'm invited back to the big pink lozenge of a chair while he fits the new incisor and takes photos on a very snazzy video screen, probably to show off to his dentist mates down their dentists pub tonight.

£520 is the bill and £275 in other appointments before it, £795 for my new tooth, like I said, not bloody cheap but it could have been more than that, he started quoting £3500 for an implant and other silly numbers, I'm not sure at which point we got down to £525 plus fitting for a new crown but we did and I suppose someone has to pay for the refit he had six months ago and the exclusivity of having a dentist and two assistants to yourself for two hours on a Monday morning.

But what did happen to the NHS dental scheme ?

OK, lets be contentious...

This could get dirty...

Whilst in a haze of delerium suffering from my attack of the man-flu, the worst virus known to mankind even though women brush it off as "a mere sniffle", I have found myself watching the Sunday re-run of American Idol.

Its the first bit of this series that I have watched this year as the genre is sort of wearing a bit thin now, but this week the contenders were invited to meet Stevie Wonder and had to sing one of his songs on the show.

Now I am old enough to have known about Stevie Wonder since he was "Little Stevie Wonder" and in my book he has never, ever, not once, not ever, ever, ever produced or sung a bad song - the absolute best album in my large collection of music is head and shoulders above the rest, without peer, "Songs in the Key of Life" my 1976 christmas present from my parents, I didn't stop playing that album until it was worn smooth and it was the first one that I downloaded (legally of course) on MP3.

So maybe I'm a little biased here.

The kids on American Idol, with a couple of exceptions, made a complete bears arse out of the tracks that were chosen for them.

And the interesting, and at the same time contentious issue about this is that the two "artists" who had a good crack at their tracks were both black females.

Why should that matter ?

I don't think it does, but it does beg the question, is there such a thing as "black music" and can only black people feel it enough to be able to sing it properly ?

The two girls in question sang "dont you worry 'bout a thing" and "signed sealed delivered", both of them put something of themselves into the song and added to it, they both moved comfortably with the song and most importantly made you the veiwer feel comfortable watching them singing a song that you inextricably link with the incomparable Mr Steveland Morris.

The rest ranged from ordinary to just plain bloody awful, some of the white males looked like me trying to dance at my wedding 23 years ago - and let me tell you, that was the first and last time I have ever danced in public, but I'm not stupid enough to think I can dance, let alone do justice to a Stevie Wonder song.

Its not enough to move jerkily around a stage and recite the words to a Wonder song, its not kareoke material and if you treat it like its a job you have to do, then it will come across as kareoke, Wonder songs are written with heart, the words are not there just to fill up the gaps, they are chosen carefully with meaning and you have to understand the meaning first before you can even start to read the lyrics - none of the kids (exceptions excluded) understood this, they were going through the motions and trying to present an image which they believed the producers wanted to see on national TV, and because they know no better they'll do the same next week and the week after with whatever other artist is picked as a topic.

And there is the problem with such programming.

They are not looking for unique talent, they are looking for a talent that can be easily moulded into an image which is already defined by the current popular music charts.

The producers do not want another Stevie Wonder, they do not want a stable full of individual artists each with their own individual sound that can nevertheless still present a corporate sound at the same time, like Tamla Motown once did, no that would be too difficult, they are simply looking for a kid who has the right look to record and mime in public to the dozen or so songs that are already waiting for the winner to record, so that the producer and his record company can make some more money out of the series.


Will Young - I'll give you Will Young - the only unique talent to come out of the UK series of "Idol" programmes, and only because he had the balls to immediately identify himself as gay, thus scuppering the producers attempt to market him to pre-teen girls, and at the same time tell the producers that he wanted to take a year out to write and produce his own album - I've got a lot of respect for Will Young, the rest of them are, as I type, packing their suitcases and touring the working mens clubs of this country at £40 a night, and its all they deserve.

Random painting...

Time for a random painting for no reason at all other than I like it and it happened completely by accident while doodling with some ink and paint one saturday morning.

And could I do it again ?

Could I hell-as-like, thats the difference between professionals and us amateurs - the pros could do one of those every hour on the hour, I have to wait several months for things to come together like that.

Basketball - its not fair is it ?

I'm sitting in the office this afternoon suffering from indescribable man-flu like symptoms, I shouldnt be here I should be at home but because the wife kicked me out of the house this morning with instructions to earn some money, I'm sitting here watching TV.

The Commonwealth Games are on from Australia, and in particular, basketball.

Australia are apparently stuffing Scotland.

But it all strikes me as being slightly unfair, the commentator has just mentioned that the australians are getting their big men under the basket and scoring at will, and indeed they are.

But the only reason that they can do this is that their team is full of 8 foot 6 inch freaks who barely have to lift their arms up to gently place the ball in the basket.

This can't be fair surely ?

Whats the point of making the baskets so high off the ground if you can make you players grow tall enough to be at eye level with them ?

Surely the authorities should make the australian basket fifteen or even twenty feet off the floor whereas the scots (who are not known for being a particularly tall race, given their childhood diet of fried food that makes them grow sideways rather than upwards) should have a basket which barely leaves the floor.


Its just a thought - I actually know nothing of this basketball of which they speak.




Its bird flu.

You're just getting old...

Its true, I'm 50 this year, September actually, 17th to be precise, make a note.
And I'm turning into a right miserable bugger.
Its an age thing.

Its little things like I don't do queues anymore
I'm not as tolorant towards shit music, thats not to say "I don't like modern music" whatever "modern music" is
But I don't like lazy music productions
I just heard a song today that typifies that description, a remake of a (I think) Roxette song, "Listen to your heart", its been given a dance or trance or some other shite mix and a nameless tuneless bird sings the refrain, its shit, but worse than that its lazy music, some production company has spent maybe up to 20 minutes remixing it and then bunged it out around the radio stations, wankers can't write lyrics and music of their own so they fuck up old, and not so old, originals and pretend to the under 12's that its new.

See what I've done there ?
I've gone off on one again, its what happens when you're nearly 50.

It happened yesterday too.
Went to see a customer that was a 90 minute drive away, nice casual drive over the penines, took the moorland route, twas a very nice drive.
When I got to this customers premises I walked into the reception, but it wasn't really a reception area at all, it was a sales counter where they retail to their trade clients.
Five women sat behind desks with computer monitors in front of them, five printers clattering away behind them preparing bills of sale and dispatch notes and about a dozen other people sat on my side of the desks all waiting to be called to the women behind the desks to collect their orders.
Everyone ignored me

I stood there like a friggin spare part waiting for someone to look up from their desk and ask if they could help me
No-one did.
And that fucking annoys me when that happens

I gave them three minutes to acknowledge me, they didn't, so I walked out.
Walked to the car where I'd left my phone, called the person I was supposed to be visiting, couldn't hear them on the mobile then realised I'd left the bluetooth headset switched on.
Hung up, switched the headset off, rang them back, I was not in a pleasant mood by now.
Told the person that if they wanted to see me then they'd better come down to reception now or I'd leave, fortunately they needed to see me more than I needed to see them.

But its growing old that does that, years ago I'd have waited patiently, now I don't do queues at all, not even when the customer is paying me to wait in their ignorant reception area.

I'll stick £50 on the bill for annoying me.

and on the seventh day he returned

...back from France
.
Le Sud to be exact.

Perpignan, close to the Spanish border in that unbordered, undefined area known as Catalan which, whether the inhabitants speak French, Spanish or more likely Catalan French or Catalan Spanish, leaves you in no doubt that you are in a province with its own very unique identity.

And how nice it was to spend five days in the company of some good friends and lots of good beer, wine, cognac and food, especially the food.

Oh yes, there was a rugby match of some sorts in there as well, saturday night, but thats not important.

Heres the Reader Digest Condensed Diary format...

Thursday - Picked up by Rob and an uneventful drive down to Stansted and check into the Hilton at the airport, take taxi into Bishop Storford that evening and visit a Thai restaurant for a very good meal.

Friday - mid morning flight to Perpignan, used Ryanair who regularly get slagged off for their no frills budget airline approach, we paid £19.95 for our flight and it was fekkin superb. A new Boeing 737-800, very clean, very punctual, very efficient use of staff. Its a low cost, no fekkin-about airline, it doesn't do food, it doesn't do films or audio, it doesn't even have a pocket on the back of the seats for you to stuff your magazines, or more likely, rubbish into, but it picks you up where it says it will and it drops you off where it says it will and it does it all cheaply, what more do you want for £20 ?

Check into the Hotel de la Loge in the centre of Perpignan, its basic, its got beds and toilets and its cheap - is there a theme developing here ?

Drop bags and straight downstairs to a bar around the corner which tends to be a meeting point for all of the various people we socialise with, spend a nice hour or two sat out in the afternoon sun with beer and sandwiches until the sun drops behind the Loge (city hall in medievil times) and it gets cold enough to sit inside the bar.

Friday evening we are collected by bus and taken to a small coastal town called St Esteve where the local rugby club have put on a barbeque and a live showing of the Bradford v Hull game from back home. Evening is spoiled somewhat by the presence on the bus of what is becoming annoyingly prevelant at Leeds games - the knucklehead supporter.

A bunch of neanderthall drunks had boarded the bus in Leeds colours and had sung some rather distastefully racist songs about our rival club Bradford on the way to St Esteve, one of our party had objected and was threatened with violence by a single brain celled, beer saturated yob - we decided that keeping some distance from these cretins would be the best sort of action to take but all through the night they made a bloody nuisance of themselves causing everyone else on the bus to apologise to the French hosts all night long - they took it in good heart by assuring us that beer fuelled fuckwittedness was not only confined to the UK, a nice thing to say to us but we all know that is not strictly true.

Fortunately the bar staff had sufficient skill to handle fuckwitted racist drunks and indeed worked a wonderful scam on their meagre brains - when the knobheads complained that they were paying 5 euros for a half litre (plastic) glass of beer the bar staff "negotiated" a deal with them to supply a half litre glass for 7 euros with a quarter litre glass thrown in for free, the fuckwits thought this was a wonderful piece of negotiation on their part and boasted of it all night - what they didn't realise was that everyone else in the room was drinking litres of beer at just 6 euros. Its the best way to handle drunken doylums, take advantage of them but convince them that they are the clever ones.

Rather than take the bus home we were offered a lift by one of the French web site co-ordinators and taken to the bar that he uses for the after-match receptions, it was fine as concrete rooms go but we were tired and only had the one beer with him before walking the short distance home where we were accosted (not for the first time) by a group of friendly youths who wanted to talk about the game the next day - its something that we noticed for the whole weekend, the town of Perpignan is certainly getting behind rugby league in a big way, maybe its the commercial advantage of having between one and two thousand beer and food hungry overseas supporters in your town every second weekend or maybe they are enjoying the game of rugby league itself.

Saturday - Met up with a crowd of ten good friends, hale and hearty chaps (and chapesses), and ajourned to the Cafe Vienna, a very nice and slightly upmarket restaurant in the centre of Perp, very classy sort of place in a very French Parissienne sort of way although they wouldn't thank you for calling them Parissienne. Had two gorgeous courses washed down with some nice red wineand spent a couple of very pleasant hours exchanging all sorts of chat and stories in that way that only a group of old friends can do, the sort of thing where most of you are talking all at once and there are four or five conversations going on at the table and you just jump from one to the other, very convivial and its what I enjoy most about the French weekends away.

The game was held at 6pm and it was fekkin freezing, not much else to say about that part except that Leeds won by a large margin. Later on that evening we found ourselves back in the centre with Ricky and his girlfriend and spent the rest of the evening in a small Spanish tapas bar eating an unusual meal. Started with your own choice of anything or everything from the tapas counter which mainly consisted of seafood and roast vegetables, had a nice plateful from there washed down with red wine and then came the main course - a sword onto which had been stabbed meat from every mammal known to man and then roasted on a barbeque, brought to your table and dumped on the plate with a potato to provide alternative experience to the tastebuds. I ate the mountain of meat but confess to not knowing which mammal each piece had come from and caring even less, more red wine and then coffee and I believe a cognac, not bad value for 20 euros each.

Sunday - Caught the train to a small coastal village called Collieure, very cute, very picturesque, very artistic with lots of galleries, it will be gorgeous in the summer but on sunday it was cold so we retired to a Spanish restaurant in a side street where I had a huge plateful of prawns for starters, so many prawns that I got tired of shelling them and my arms were aching from the effort, more red wine and then a beef main course, I had already eaten more than a weeks worth of food on this short vacation but if you visit catalonia and don't enjoy the food then you must be mentally deficient of any sort of pleasure genes at all.

Spent late afternoon and early evening back in Perp in our "local" bar with eight friends, beer, wine, coffee and cognac and hot chocolate, yes I drank all of those. The conversation again was eclectic and so relaxed that we were all slipping into the mood that made us stay in the same place last year until we had run up a 240 euro bar tab, but sunday evening was early closing and at 9pm the bar staff were ready for us to leave but took Rob around the corner to show him a small restaurant up an alleyway that was open and so we all decamped there. It turned out to be a bar run by USAP supporters who are the wrong code of rugby for us and after a bit of gentle jibbing from the bar staff we were shepherded into a seperate room where wine was produced and food ordered. I'd had enough of fancy food by then and just ordered a pizza but we had a lot of fun in that room and made a lot of noise, probably why they didn't want us in the main part of the restaurant. Finished in an Irish bar with a big glass of Bushmills where Rob was dragge dinto drinking large shots of rum with two other lads that we knew while I tried to chat above the noise with Carolyn, who's husband had wimped out and gone back to their room, ended up walking back to the hotel with Carolyn while Rob stayed and tried to out-rum the other two, he failed and regreted his decision the following day.

Monday - Flew back on a brand new Ryanair 737-800 on one of their 5p flights, yes thats just five pence for the 1000 mile two hour flight, on time, clean etc etc etc, why Ryanair get such a bad press I'll never know.

Back at Stansted Robs car wouldn't start so he called for the AA and we retired to the Hilton for coffee while we waited for them, five minutes later the AA turned up and we never got to finish the coffee and danish that I'd paid eight fekkin quid for. Stopped at the Ram Jam Inn on the A1 for a meal, met up there with John and Carolyn and had an hour in the restaurant eating proper food that was out of place in what was supposedly a motorway service area - the Ram Jam is a proper restaurant which just happens to be on the side of the A1 and is good value in nice surroundings serving good freshly cooked food, an anethma on a British motorway I know, but there you are.

So, thats the weekend then, reading all of that again it appears to give the impression that we spent all of the time eating and drinking, and to be honest we did, and bloody enjoyed every minute of it.

I'm stepping out, I may be gone for some time...

Tomorrow I leave for France :)

Its time for the great Leeds Rhinos exodus again, time to board our cheap budget flights and zip off to Perpignan or whatever cheap budget airfield our cheap budget airline fly us into, time to check into our cheap and cheerful "basic" accomodation and partake of some fine Catalan food and beer with just a little wine thrown in to appear more sophisticated than we actually are.

5 pence each way the flights, outrageously expensive.

Well actually if we'd flown tomorrow they'd have been 5p each way, but I wanted to go friday so its £19.95 outbound, 5p inbound, such extravagance, its disgraceful when there are africans out there starving.

I doubt whether I'll post over the long weekend, in fact I can tell you right now, I won't be sitting in a sad little fekkin cyber cafe posting over the weekend ok, so will post with piccies on Tuesday.

If anyone wants booze and ciggies bringing back then just make a list before 10am tomorrow, if anyone from HM Customs is reading then I'm the small slim one with the beard at the back and its all for personal use.

Au revoir mes amis...

We're not having one of those on the side of our house

This is a rich vein...

Number four in a series of "I was there when it was invented", today - satellite TV.

1989, we were living in a nice little 2 bedroomed house on a brand new development which had been built in the style of TV's Brookside Close, in fact our development was built by the same builders who had done the real life Brookside, we had our own little cul-de-sac and everything, I loved that house.

It sounds corny to say it but the dozen young couples who lived in that cul-de-sac were all on good terms, we actually used to speak to our neighbours - imagine that !

I'd come out of the house in a morning to get in my car and someone would wave and bid me a good morning, incredible to think that it was less than 20 years ago that we spoke to neighbours, just incredible.

Two doors down at the end of the cul-de-sac lived Maxine and Michael, we'd been invited to several of their barbeques in the past but one weekend we were invited to an all-night boxing party, that is we weren't going to engage in pugilism all night long (well that wasn't the original intention anyway) but were having a party on the feeble excuse that Frank Bruno was fighting Mike Tyson in America.

Frank Bruno was the nearest thing that the UK had to a heavyweight boxer in the 1980's, fundimentally a pantomime actor and TV comedian Frank had bluffed his way through the fight game in a series of staged two and three round "fights" in the UK until someone in America became convinced that he could actually do a job against Tyson and offered him an impressive amount of money to be beaten to pulp in a ring at the end of a nice holiday, its the sort of work that I could do with right now.

I was a bit uncertain about whether I wanted to stay up half the night to listen to a live fight on the radio - the fight was timed to happen around 3am in the morning UK time and everyone knew that it would only last a matter of seconds, it really did seem like a feeble excuse for a piss up.

But then Michael mentioned that we would be watching the fight live on TV using his newly ordered satellite dish, Sky News were showing the fight live (Sky Sports as yet uninvented) and his dish would be fitted on the Friday, one day before the big fight.

I was stunned, for this was technology that had slipped past under my radar, I asked Michael to explain what he meant by this "satellite dish", what was that and what did you do with it ? He explained the whole thing very carefully, with a Sky dish you could get three extra channels to the four on offer to us mere mortals with TV aerials. Michael was convinced that it was the future of TV in the UK and that in a few years time there could be as many as 10 new channels and perhaps a dedicated sports channel too.

"Fuck off", I jested, "Ten new channels ? Fuck off" and I laughed like the dumb innocent fool I was.

He shook his head in pity and told me to come around on the Friday night to watch the fledgling Sky TV, and so I did, and when I arrived found him sitting there looking very glum as the Sky installers hadn't turned up, but they had promised, absolutely promised to come out on saturday morning to fit it, he had threatened them with some impressive threats that they had better do so as his boxing party sort of depended on the presence of a boxing match on TV.

Saturday morning came and went and I spent almost as much time as Michael did out ont he street peering up the cul-de-sac for any sign of a Sky TV van, he phoned them at dinnertime and they gave him the bad news, they wouldn't be coming at any time on the Saturday.

I thought he was going to cry and he slumped down onto the stack of crates of beer that he'd bought in for the party, but suddenly the spark of an idea flashed across his eyes, he rang the installers again and they confirmed that yes they had his stuff in stock but that they had no installers, Michael told them he was coming down for the dish and receiver, they tried to talk him out of it but he was back within the hour with two big boxes.

They'd tried to explain to him that you can't find the satellite in the sky by pointing the dish at random clouds, it wasn't like a normal TV signal where you can get an aerial somewhere near and it will pick up a signal, in there words "you are pointing the dish at something the size of a small car that is three hundred miles away" as succinct an explanation as I've heard really, but we ignored the men at the satellite dish depot and set about installing it ourselves.

There wasn't enough time to start climbing up ladders and fixing the dish to the side of the house, and besides, neither of us wanted to climb up the ladder, so we ran the cable up to the top of his garden and rammed the pole that the dish fitted to into his lawn, clamped the dish to the pole and then he ran inside to look at the TV.

Of course there was no reception, I moved the dish around to the left by one degree, still no picture, I moved it again to the left by another one degree, still no picture, each time that I moved it he had to run back in the house to check the TV then run back out and tell me "no picture" and I'd move it another degree and he'd run back in then run back out, "no picture".

An hour later and we'd done all 360 degrees of the compass and so decided to tilt it upwards a bit more.

Just a few years ago I fitted an identical non-digital satellite dish for my father-in-law and we got a picture almost straight away, but that was easy as almost every house in his street already had one fitted, we only had to point his dish in approximately the same direction as his neighbours and then tweak it to get the perfect picture, although I was suprised then at just how little you need to tweak the thing to make such a big difference.

In 1989 in Michaels garden we were the only people that I knew that knew that satellite dishes even existed, so we had no-one to copy from, we were pioneers and we were fucking useless at locating something the size of a small car that was three hundred miles away.

We tried for two hours to find the satellite and never got so much as a flicker from the TV set, despondant, fed up and dismissive of any encouragement from Maxine that we could still have the party anyway, we cancelled the evening and Michael had to wait until the following tuesday for the installer to come and fit the dish, then locate the satellite with the aid of an extremely complicated compass and signal tracker - he pissed himself laughing when we told him of our attempts on the back garden.

"Do you know you were trying to find something the size of a small car fro..." he tried to explain
"yes, yes, yes" said Michael, "where do I sign"

I got my dish two weeks later.

Why would you want to record television ?

Number three in a series of "I was there when it was invented", today ; The Video Recorder.

For most of my young life my father had been (as we say in Yorkshire) "carefull" with his money, carefull not to have to spend it where spending wasn't necessary and so me and my brother grew used to patched up school trousers and jeans, in fact I cannot remember ever wearing a pair of jeans that were not ripped across both knees, its fashionable now to wear ripped jeans, when we were kids it was just normal, in fact you were a bit of a wuss if your jeans weren't ripped across the knees.

We were the last family that I know of to still have a black and white television when everyone had finally upgraded to colour, we were the last family that I know of to purchase a record player, all the furntiture in our house had been purchased before I was born except for the setee and we only had one of those during my first fifteen years - and it was secondhand when we got it.

Thats not to say that we were poor, we weren't poor, my dad had a management job and he also had loads of what he loosely described as "fiddles" going on, cash jobs and stuff that he flogged in pubs and clubs, so it wasn't poverty that made us lag so far behind the rest of the civilised world, it was just that he was "carefull" with his money.

And so we were somewhat suprised when one day he walked in the house with a large colour television, he'd signed the rental forms at DER and they'd given him one out of the showroom, simple as that, we now had colour TV and sat mesmerised at the sight of Barry Chambers off Look North in full glaring colour, probably too much colour as the lack of colour TV over the years meant that you were tempted to compromise during the first few months of ownership of a colour set by turning up the colour knob too far, folk would walk into our house and say "you've not had that TV long have you ?", they knew because Barry Chambers had a normal pink face on their TV instead of bright orange on ours.

Our dad made sure that we knew how much he was paying for the colour TV though, even though we were still at school he threatened to deduct some money from our pocket money to pay for the rental and the huge increase in the TV licence, instead we were forced into washing his car once a week to pay our share, a saving of five bob at the do-it-yourself car wash for him.

A couple of years later and my brother and I were working youths, earning income for the household at our apprentice jobs, it would have been sometime around the summer of 1978 that the most amazing thing happened in our house - he came home one saturday afternoon with a huge video recorder under his arm and the DER rental papers in the other. He'd been to pay the monthly rental that morning and they'd talked him into renting the wonder of the age - a Ferguson Videostar video recorder.

It was massive and weighed several hundred pounds but with a lot of luck and several re-reads of the manual we managed to get it to work with the free 30 minute video tape that DER packaged with it. As if by magic we watched Frank Bough on Grandstand introduce horse racing from some godforsaken pace and then by swift manipulation of some huge levers on the front of the videostar we managed to play back the same piece of broadcasting history - our first minutes of household video.

By now it was late afternoon and we were desperate for more and longer video tape to record that evenings light entertainment fiesta that was saturday night viewing in the 1970's. Video tape was an unknown commodity in the world at that time and the only place that sold the cassettes was Comet Electrical and they only sold two hour tapes, and they were rationed. We dashed down to Horsforth to the small Comet shop there and proudly told the young spotty kid behind the counter that we wanted a two hour video tape.

He brought out a C120 audio tape, we patiently explained that we wanted video tape, he asked what "video" was, we explained that it enabled you to record both sound and vision straight off you television set and then replay it later, "no" he exclaimed, "yes" we confirmed, "we don't do them" he told us, "yes you do" we confirmed "you're the only place that do".

He disappeared out the back and then returned with an older man who had a look of astonishment on his face, "you have a video recorder ?" he gasped "whats it like"

He'd heard of the unbelievable new technology and seen the small stock of video tapes that his head office had sent him but as yet the new wonder of the age was still witchcraft to him, we explained all about it and his mouth grew wider and wider as he listened, it was like explaining electricity to an amazon indian.

He disappeared out the back again and reappeared with one Thorn 2 hour video tape, holding it as though it were a fragile egg, then in a hushed voice explained that the cost was £17.

£17 is a lot of money for one tape cassette today, but in 1978 is was more than my weeks wage, my brother and I pooled our wallets together and managed to raise the required sum, just.

We left the shop and its gaping sales assistants like a pair of astronauts departing for the moon, everyone in there was in awe of us and our up to now unheard of invention, a machine that could record TV pictures so that you could watch them later - how outrageously decadent.

And the first programme that I taped ?

A truly awful film starring Carol Channing called "Skidoo", awful, just truly awful, how lucky we were that you could tape over the top of it.

Seven day checklist

Seven days to go to the southstander.com trip to the south of france, ostensibly a trip to watch the mighty Leeds Rhinos take on the superleague frenchie new boys, Les Catalans in Perpignan, but really another chance to enjoy the company of some good friends in gentle surroundings, eat some good catalan food, drink a generous amount of beer and more than a few drops of wine and generally spend four days away from home rlaxing and not thinking of work.

Took a call from Rob today to start the seven day countdown and run through the checklist of things done and things paid for and things missing and still to do, we ran through everything and still we think we've forgotten something.

Flights are booked and paid for, two return flights from Stanstead to Perpignan, £120
Hilton at Stanstead is booked and paid for, £80 for the room but includes free parking for the weekend
The famous Hotel de la Loge in Perpignan is booked but not paid for yet at 150 euros (wish my PC had a euro sign on it)
Transfer from Perp airport to the hotel, an all day trip to Carcasonne on sunday and the matchday tickets for saturday are booked and paid for at a total of £84

and still we think we've forgotten something.

Those prices are all for two people by the way, about £200 each for five days, just a tad less than the Rhinos own official trip at £460 + vat for two days.

but still we can't get the niggle from our minds that we've forgotten something.

The passport has been checked and I know where it is, travel insurance is included in the flights, I need to buy some euros but that can be done next week, we don't need to hire a car in france this time as we are staying in Perp for the whole trip unlike last year.

And still we run over and over the thing again and nothing is coming to mind.

We'll find out soon enough, seven days and counting.

Can you hear me up there Shirley ?

Writing of the office photocopier yesterday got me thinking of other remarkable inventions of our time, and how I was around to see them on their first introduction to the market...

Like mobile phones for instance.

I was working for the same electrical contractors, but I'd emigrated, been forcefully emigrated, sort of ethnic cleansed from Leeds to Newcastle by the bosses at head office and at some point of my sojourn in the North East the office manager decided that too many of us surveyors and supervisors were going AWOL during the day when we were out visiting building sites and that it would be a good idea to have some sort of mobile communication with us.

Up until that point if he needed to speak to us during the day he had to ring around every single building site that he could think of in the hope that he'd find us stood right next to the phone at the instant that he rang. Of course what normally happened was that he'd ring a site that we'd just left three minutes earlier or he'd ring a site that we were actually on but the site agent in the office couldn't be arsed to go fetch us to the phone so he'd deny we were there.

So he rang the only company in the whole of the UK who were licenced to provide mobile communications in the 1970's, Aircall.

Aircalls main business was providing pagers to the medical industry, but they did a line of pagers for general use which had a variable range of radio signals, on a good day, and if you were in a major connurbation and not inside a steel building then maybe, just maybe you'd get a bleep, then all you had to do was find a publc phone box that worked, a not inconsiderable feat of achievement - people tend to forget that nine out of ten public phone boxes were permenantly vandalised in the days before mobile phones, its why mobile phones were invented actually.

We weren't too impressed with the idea of a pager that had a variable success rate - what we really wanted was a telephone inside each of our cars, a big black telephone that looked nothing like todays mobile phones, they were proper big telephones fastened to a big box in the front of your car.

The Aircall rep came to see us and three of us trooped down to his car which had one of the phones fitted in it, Shirley the ageing mother hen figure in the office stayed upstairs to man the phones.

We sat in the Aircall reps car staring at the telephone box which was screwed to his dashboard with brackets, it was at least as big as a payphone box which meant that the front seat passenger didn't have a lot of legroom left to sit in, I was shoved into the front seat by my boss and he sat in the back to watch.

The Aircall rep explained how the waveband that the telephones used was strictly controlled and was part of the emergency services waveband, Aircall probably shouldn't have been using it for private companies but as long as you took an oath not to use oaths on air and to use the proper style of talking while on air then they would licence you for a few of these precious handsets.

He shoved the phone into my hand and gave me a quick lesson, basically you had to pretend to be a policeman when you were using the phone just in case a policeman was listening in or your phone interfered with a nearby police station communications, you couldn't joke or mess about and had to use the phonetic alphabet and say "over" at the end of every line.

To ring the office, which was right in front of us, in fact we could still see Shirley through the window, we had to first of all ring the Aircall operator and book a call, the rep did this for me and then we sat and waited until the operator rang us back to say she'd made the connection.

The phone rang with a loud "brrrrinnnnnggggg" and I picked it up, inbetween lots of crackling and a loud buzzing noise I could just hear Shirley at the other end shouting down the line "Hello, hello, who is that ?", in fact I could see Shirley through the office window shouting down the phone at me although there was a huge time lag, so much so that she may have actually been taking another call to someone else by now.

"Hello Shirley, over" I tentatively shouted, "its me, out here,over"
"Hello, hello, who is that"
"Its me Shirley, over, out the window, over, look I'm waving at you, over"
"Its a bad line, who is this ?"
"Me, its me, look out of the window, its me, over"

Derek my boss had jumped out of the back seat now, standing by the car and was shouting at Shirley and waving, "Its us Shirley, on the car phone, look, over", he didn't really need to say "over" because he wasn't on the phone but he was getting into the swing of things.

Shirley was still struggling to hear me on the phone but she looked out of the window and waved at Derek, still completely unaware that we were using thousands of pounds worth of telephonic equipment and precious waveband that we'd probably nicked from nearby emergency services just to wave at her through the window.

"Say over and out" the Aircall rep told me, this call was obviously going nowhere.
"Over and out Shirley" I said
"No its got to be the last thing you say" informed the Aircall rep
"Shirley, Shirley, can you hear me"
"Who is this, I can't hear you"
"Over and out"

And I put the phone down. Derek sat back in the car and the Aircall rep started to tell him in strings of numbers just how much it would cost to install such incredible equipment in each of our cars so that we could shout at Shirley all day and she couldn't hear us. I don't remember the figures but it was outrageously expensive, so much so that putting a phone in one of the older vans would have increased its worth by 300%.

We all got pagers.