Yeah, yeah, yeah

No rhyme, no reason, no excuse ever needed for a Beatles video, 1963 in Manchester, how did they ever sing harmony when they couldn't hear each other ?

Anyway,

Tomorrow I venture north, Newcastle for three days training on Sage Accounting products, I never wanted to be an accountant, I don't understand accounting, I have yet to meet an accountant who breaks the stereotype of being the sort of person who finds the colour brown avent garde, I don't belong in that club, yet I am soon to sell the UK's premier accounting software to people, such is life when you sell your soul to a corporate.

Rather than stay in the fair city of Newcastle for two nights I have decided to drive it, every day, two hours there, two hours back, add half an hour to each trip for the bit around the Western Bypass, five hours a day sat in the car that is due to go back to the lessors next week and therefore has not been maintained to its usual average standard, so yesterday I popped to the library to find a talking book to play during the trip as the standard of radio in the early hours is abysmal.

After some time I found a biography of Cynthia Lennon narrated by Nerys Hughes which looked jolly good, twelve hours on eight cd's should cover my journey thought I, so I checked it out at the library auto-check-out-machine thing and it tried to charge me £1.50 for the pleasure of loaning said audio book.

"I'm sorry" I spoke to the machine, a large vending style machine with lcd interactive panel and a slot for the money, "but I don't normally pay over my money when I borrow stuff from the free library, hence the word free in the title over the door"

"Ah yes" replied the chrome plated machine, "but this is a talking book, you get reading books for free, you pay for talking books, think yourself lucky though, if you'd picked up a dvd it would have cost you a fiver - now do you want the audio book or not ?"

"No" I replied, rather indignant at being spoken to in this way by a mere machine that only a couple of months ago would have been an actual real person behind the library counter, "no, I don't think I do want to loan said audio book, principally on the principle that the council library facility should be free at the point of use, but mainly because I have brought no money out with me today being that I only intend to visit the free library this morning"

"Press the button that says "reject" then" replied the machine, so I did.

It left me standing in front of the check-out machine by the library door still holding the Cynthia Lennon talking book which I now didn't want so I tried to put it in the bin where you put the returned books after the machine has checked then back in but the machine saw me trying to do this and refused to unlock the flap on the check-in bin.

"You bastard machine" I thought, and looking around to see if any librarians were watching I placed the Cynthia Lennon audio book on the floor by the side of the checkout machine and walked briskly out of the door, lets see the chromium checkout machine sort that one out then.

So I've got nothing to play in the car on the tedious five hours times three days, except a four part adaptation of Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby which I snaffled in a download on t'interweb then never listened to some months ago, trouble is they are in a zip file format and when you unzip them the files are too big to burn to an audio cd, I could edit them and spread them over six cd's or so...

But frankly I can't be arsed.

So who is on Radio Two at 6am every morning then ?




PS - postings may be scarce for the next three days unless the classroom is full of geeks in which case I'll simply have to write something scathing.