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Jake is a big wuss, its official.
You need some background information.
Jake is our Golden Retreiver (left) (obviously) thats is his portrait that I did of him last year, he likes it and hangs it above his bed.
Anyway,
We bought him from a gamekeeper eight years ago, way up in the Yorkshire Dales we went, way, way up almost into Richmondshire to a place that I didn't even know existed, a place where we were driving on private land, a country estate where the landed gentry had staff to look after the game on their land, I thought that sort of thing had died out after the first world war, but not so in North Yorkshire.
We eventually found a pair of small cottages on a hillside and around the back of these cottages were the kennels where the gamekeeper kept his collection of hunting dogs, Labradors for sniffing out shot-down birds on the ground (ground scenters) and Retreivers for sniffing out shot-down birds using the air (air scenters) - see, you learn something new every day don't you ?
The litter of pups that Jake came from had already been split up (he was twelve weeks old) according to their destiny, all of Jakes brothers had been moved to another location for their gun dog training and three sisters had been kept back for breeding from - when we eventually got Jakes pedigree it read like a "who's who" of gun dog champions, his mother had been matched up with his father to specifically breed working pups.
But it had all gone wrong with Jake.
The gamekeeper told us that he would be the softest pet dog on the planet once he got over his little problem.
He hates loud bangs.
Which is a bit of a handicap if you're supposed to be a gun dog.
They had taken all the pups out into a field at eight weeks old and fired a shotgun in the air, Jake was back in his kennel before the "g" of "bang".
So he was offered up for sale as a pet dog rather than a working dog, to the eternal disgrace of his family bloodline.
Their loss, our gain.
He is a fantastic family pet dog, totally fekkin useless as a guard dog because he doesn't bark. In all of his eight years I have only heard him bark on a few occasions - when we had a burglar in the house, he didn't even wake up.
But we love him anyway.
So, thats the background.
Oh yes, one more background thing - he is not allowed upstairs in the house and he never, never, ever breaks that rule, ever.
Except for this morning.
5am this morning and a thunderstorm was pasing overhead. The rain started first, it was heavy rain, and then it got heavier, sleeping with the windows open for the last week or so it sounded really, really heavy rain and it woke us up.
And then we heard the tiptoe of paws coming upstairs, the rain was so heavy that it had frightened Jake into breaking the upstairs rule for the first time in his life.
And then the thunder rolled across the valley from the airport and we heard a scurry of claws on the wooden floor of Jodies bedroom, presumably as he tried to get under the bed.
Suzanne shouted at him to get down stairs and like the obedient dog that his breeding makes him he went, despite being obviously terrified, she is a cruel woman is my wife.
I got up shortly afterwards because I could hear him pacing about downstairs and panting in panic.
So I've had to sit with him holding his paw since 5.30am this morning and even after the thunder went away he wasn't convinced, I'm a soft sod me, none of the females in the house have even woken up yet and here I am holding a dogs paw telling him not to be afraid of some weather.
I feel like Judy Garland sitting with the cowardly lion.
We've had a brainstorming session tonight, me and my brother.
We've got a car in the business which, I believe, is called a lemon in the car trade - a car that spends more time at the dealers repair shop than it does on the road.
Its a Peugeot 307SW, a sort of smallish 7 seat MPV, looks nice, its got a glass roof and other gubbins, but its fooked.
I got it for a family holiday to France in 2003 then gave it to one of my engineers to use, he's done 90,000 miles in it since and two weeks ago it had the latest of its nervous breakdowns on the M62. Our garage has replaced its deisel additive injection thingy and got it going again but now the turbo charger has packed up and it won't do more than 3500 revs, in short its going to cost us another £1000 for a new turbo to get it back on the road.
We'd dump it somewhere if it wasn't for the fact that we still owe £4000 on it, we'd trade it in if it wasn't for the fact that no dealer will offer us any more than a balloon and a goldfish for it, I actually had a private buyer interested in giving us £4000 for it but I just can't sell it to him if he cant drive it round the block without wondering why its got all the pulling power of an old lady pushing a zimmer frame, in a treacle pit.
So we're stuck with it and my new idea tonight would be to park it up at one of our houses and forget all about it and lease the engineer another car, then maybe sometime in the future when we have a spare £1000 lying around, get the turbo fixed and flog the bastard.
Sounds good, my brother agreed, and if it works slowly on the roads then maybe my brothers wife could use it too, sounds good.
And the more we thought about it it got to be a better idea, and then I hit the jackpot - we have an old Dyson vacumn cleaner in the workshop that doesn't work very well but it still whizzes the dust and fluff around in its plastic tub thing a treat, its turbo works just fine.
So maybe, just maybe, we could take the turbo thingy off the Dyson and fit it somehow under the bonnet of the Peugeot, that wouldn't cost us anything, OK we'd probably have to cut a hole in the bonnet to fit the purple Dyson turbo to the engine, but I reckon it would work.
There is a problem though.
Suppose the Dyson turbo starts to pick up all the dust and fluff off the road, as is its habit, and whizz them around and around inside the car while Jon our engineer is driving it, making a loud sucking buzzing noise at the same time - it wouldn't present a very good image for our company when our engineer turns up at customers in a car that whines as loud as a vacumn cleaner and that has a cyclone of road kill whizzing around inside it, would it ?
Time for a slight rethink.
Today is the day that all children of school age love, the day when they finish for their school summer holidays.
I was reminded of this when driving past our local primary school this evening and seeing the school railings festooned with school ties - its the tradition around here for the ones who are leaving primary school and going onto high school next term to tie their now-unneeded and unwanted school ties to the fence on their way out.
Don't know who started that tradition but they are a genius, its a rite of passage, the day when mothers stand in the school playground for the last time as their now 11 year olds leave the safety of their primary school and in the same way that those mothers shed a tear when their kin entered that school at 5 years old, they now shed one for their grown-up son or daughter as they gleefully rip off their ties and abandon them on the fence not realising what awaits them in high school in september.
Amanda is now 17 and has just finished the first year of her A level course with a view to moving into vocational further education next year, possibly in tax accounting which is study based whilst working, she passed her driving test last month and is now mobile having snaffled Suzannes car for 90% of the time - Jodie is 14 and moving inextricably towards GCSE's, making subject choices now that will determine which sort of career path her adult life goes down - and yet I can still remember both of them coming home from primary school with their shirts covered in autographs from their clasmates (some of whom went to different high schools and so have never been seen again) and their ties secured to the school fence - it seems like it was last week.
Just imagine tonight, sitting at home, with at least six weeks holidays stretched out in front of you in what promises to be one of the best summers that we've had in recent years, make the most of it kids, it doesn't last for long.
The screen door slams
Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again
I just can't face myself alone again
Don't run back inside
darling you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright
Oh and that's alright with me
You can hide 'neath your covers
And study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers
Throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now I'm no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven's waiting on down the tracks
Oh oh come take my hand
Riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh Thunder Road, oh Thunder Road
oh Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it's late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road, sit tight take hold
Thunder Road
Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
>From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free
And I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone
On the wind, so Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win.
Copyright © Bruce Springsteen
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
Now isn't that just the sweetest poetry you've ever read ?
Its even better when its set to a tune
Look for it in a record store (online or otherwise) near you, listen and learn.
But do it when you've left your teenage years behind so that you appreciate The Boss properly.
Nearly forgot,
When I could sleep last night I had a dream that I remembered in the morning.
I was driving an estate car down a motorway, my estate car had yellow flashing lights on top of it and a "motorway maintenance" sign too and I was wearing a big flourescent overcoat - I was a motorway maintenance man in my dream.
I drove into a section of roadworks where the left hand lane was cordoned off and the speed limit enforced by speed cameras and when I approached the first of the speed cameras I put the flashing lights on and stopped the car, got out, took out some tools from the back of the car and strated to unbolt the camera from its post.
It came off really easily because it was only held on with one bolt and I put it in the back of the car and then set off for the next camera.
After a short while I had uncoupled and stored six speed cameras in the back of my car when a police car stopped behind me and asked what I thought I was doing, I was a bit uppity and pointed to the big flourescent coat and the "motorway maintenance" sign on top of the car, then showed the police woman my worksheet for the day which clearly showed that I was to remove all the cameras on this stretch of motorway, she argued that the cameras were police property and that I had no right to take them, I told her that my company were sick and tired of its road rollers getting flashed every time they passed one of the cameras, one of our road rollers had picked up forty seven speeding tickets in one day and we'd had to take the number plate off the tarmacadam laying machine because we couldn't keep up with the fines.
She wasn't impressed.
The dream ended with me being sent back to the first camera and she stood and watched while I fitted it back to its post and then told me she was going to watch me put all six back.
I woke up in a bad mood.
So it probably wasn't the owls fault.
eeeeh, its hot.
7pm and its hot.
One week and three more days and it will be even hotter.
In Menorca.
When you're sitting huddled around the fireplace with the central heating turned up in the middle of January you look forward to the long summer days and especially the long summer evenings when you can sit outside until the sun sets at 10pm and slurp long cold slurps of lager.
And you forget how hot the nights can be.
So you lie awake on top of the bed all night and you try to sleep but you catnap really, and the lager you've been drinking all night doesn't help that much because lager gives you a headache and you should have known that.
And then you do finally drift off to sleep eventually.
Until a bleedin owl takes up residence in a tree near your open bedroom window, and hoots.
Now I know that barn owls screech and barn owls are actually an endangered species which is shocking to me as they were two a penny round here when I was a kid, so I think this one was a tawny owl because it was doing that cartoon too-whit-too-whoo sort of hoot, and it was nice to lie there in the semi-dawn at around 4am and listen to it, I'm a soft sod for wildlife stuff like that.
But after an hour of hooting it was getting a little tiresome, however I have a secret weapon, the hearing in my right ear is now very poor, I'd say its around 10% of the left one, a residue of a childhood spent listening to extremely loud rock music with headphones which resulted in a perforated eardrum at one point, which then led to an infection and me poking around in the ear with pointy things, which led to a torn eardrum that never healed.
Anyway, the good news is that it means that I can lie on my good ear and hear fook-hall of what goes on in the night, so I did, and the owl noise disappeared, until I rolled over in my sleep and the good ear came into play again.
I left for work at 8am, it had been light for three hours and it was already very warm, but the bloody owl was still in a tree somewhere in the garden, hooting every five minutes or so, my theory is that its a young owl who was left there by a parent and it was calling for them, nice to listen to but a right royal pain when you're trying to sleep on a hot night.
And theres another thing - pigeon man who lives next door but one and (obviously) keeps about 40 homing pigeons in his garden has also invested in some ducks and chickens - and a fuckin rooster.
The rooster has to be locked in a darkened shed through the summer otherwise he starts crowing at first light at around 4am - last night someone forgot to draw the blackout curtains and the rooster woke up when the first rays burst the horizon.
So when the owl wasn't hooting the rooster was crowing.
I'm glad that the UK gun laws are so stringent because a shotgun would have found gainfull employment last night.
Phew what a scorcher
(copyright the tabloid headline databank corp ltd)
Been sat outside all day reading Island Songs by Alex Wheatle, the story of a Jamaican family who emigrate to the UK after a family tragedy, only 100 pages in but its superb and written in the mountain patois, hence the clumsy title, the strange thing is that while its a difficult read, or rather its difficult to read, the patois makes you slow down and actually read and understand each sentence and you can hear the richness of the voices in the dialogue which is a remarkable achievement for an author.
When I say I've been sat outside I should elaborate - I've been sat outside under an awning. Put the awning up on the gazebo yesterday and I'm glad we did. Set up base camp under it this morning with my easel and pastels and have finished off a commission for a friends 50th birthday today as well as reading the book.
Its been hot this afternoon.
I mean its been very hot, as hot as I have known it in this country. I sat out in the sun for 15 minutes with the book at 3pm and I burnt my legs, thats how hot its been, its dangerously hot, not that I'm complaining, love sitting under the canopy painting and a-reading all day and I've opened the first tin of beer now so am going out there again for a warm evenings drinky-poo soon.
Getting into the Jamaican book and burning myself in record time has also got me reminiscing of my time in Barbados a few years ago, its the chapter that I'm also working on at the moment in the classic tale of JerryChicken - What the Hell Kind of Dog Did That. I loved Barbados and its people and the friends that I made there on my five annual working trips, its an island that was granted its independance from the UK sometime in the 70's but it still clings to its Brtishness even more than we do here in Britain, its like visiting a pre-war Britain where everyone greets each other in the streets and old men raise their hats when you pass them, a lovely island and lovely people but with an increasing influx of British holiday makers since I was last there in '98 I hope that we do not dilute their colonial Britishness with what we have in this country now - fukkwit drunk Britishness.
The other thing that has had me thinking this afternoon is the speed at which I burnned me white leg skin in the sun and the way in which we complain when its too hot for one day of the year. The last time that I visited Barbados was in August '98 and in the middle of what they call their "wet season" when every day you can guarantee a couple of hours rain in the afternoon, except that it wasn't raining.
Sonia, the payroll clerk that I worked with at the hotel was complaining to me one afternoon that the heat was simply overwhelming and it was, but I was enjoying it and came out with the typical British response to a fine weather complaint, "don't complain Sonia, its lovely today, it might rain tomorrow".
She replied that it hadn't rained since April and that if it didn't rain soon then the island would have water problems in the coming "fine season" from October onwards, it sort of reminded me that some other countries can't rely on rain as much as we do in this country and that constant sunshine isn't always a blessing.
She also complained to me that the endless days of record sunshine that they were experiencing that year had led to a big increase in sunstroke and sunburn among the indigenous population and that was probably the first time that I realised that black skin burns just the same as white skin and that heat exhaustion also disregards race - I learned a lot about my subterranean whitey views during my visits there, stuff thats normally buried deep within a persons genes, mainly based on ignorance, they were very enlightening visits and I'd love to go back there one day in the hope that things are still the same and not tarnished by the British holidaymaker invasion.
Ho-hum, back to the painting - donkeys on Scarborough beach this time, its raining in the painting, people would never believe it if I showed the sun in a painting of Scarborough.
Its all done, shes booked on the 18.50 Leeds/Mahon flight in two weeks time.
And Jake is booked in a nearby kennels for the same week, and he's had all of his innoculations today too, what a busy lad I've been.
Of course as soon as I confirmed the flight she started moaning that she had no new clothes to go with and somehow parted with £50 so she could go into Leeds to buy something.
There's one bit of bad news I'm saving for later for her - her baggage allowance is only 18kg or for those who prefer it in imperial measurements, thats just a tad under 40lbs.
If that doesn't sound much then you have to consider that last year when the four of us went to Menorca we had a 20kg allowance each, 80kg in total.
I packed my few tee shirts, a couple of pairs of trolleys and some shaving stuff and then left the three females to pack their own suitcases.
Two days later and on the evening before we were due to depart I went to bring one of their suitcases downstairs, picked it up and the handle fell off, it was the one with the hair dryer, straighteners and an iron in, as well as 40 pairs of shoes a whole professional make up kit, 20 or so bottles of nail polish and lots, and lots, lets say an awful lot, of perfume.
After lots of tears and tantrums I finally got them to empty some of the baggage and having caught them trying to sneak some stuff back in I put the suitcases in the car where they couldn't get at them - at check-in our four suitcases weighed a grand total of 80.5 kilos, 177 lbs of luggage for a two week vacation.
She is going to struggle to keep below 18kg this year.
Sometime between now and the week after next I have to take her to the airport and show her where to check in and then what the procedure is after that, she's 17 years old and has been to dozens of airports with us but I doubt very much whether she has ever paid attention to how it is that you actually manage to get on the right aircraft and then eventually collect your luggage at the other end.
I'll be sat in Son Bou two weeks today waiting for the phone call that says "Dad, I'm at Leeds Airport and the man at the desk says I have to pay £134 excess baggage, its just some shoes thats all and I can't come without them..."
I had nothing to do on this hot afternoon
but to settle down and write you a line
I have to finish off the job I started doing yesterday and get Mandy on a filght to Menorca in two weeks time.
And get Jake into a kennels in two weeks time.
Item one is fairly easy, Jet2.com have started a three times a week route to Mahon from Leeds and the bleedin annoying thing is that its cheaper than what we've all paid ten months ago.
Let me explain,
Every second year we journey to the fair Spanish paradise isle of Menorca with some good friends of ours, first two weeks in August every second year, our family and theirs, our kids are exactly the same age, its spooky, we have a great time.
But its not cheap.
OK its not expensive either, about £2500 per family.
The apartments we book direct with the spanish owners, the flights are more difficult.
Leeds/Bradford airport serves the fourth largest connurbation in the UK and yet it is still not over-served by flights and the vast majority of our holidays have always commenced at Manchester Airport, but at least there is a weekly flight to Menorca from Leeds, operated by Airtours, at £275 a seat, for that sort of money I could fly to New York (seriously), but if we want the convenience of journeying from an airport that is only one mile from our home (as the crow flies across fields) then we have to pay the premium.
So last September we booked eight seats on the Airtours Leeds/Mahon flight (four per family) and left it at that.
A few months later Mandy decides she didn't want to go with us this year, she's 17 and doesn't want family holidays anymore, etc etc teenage whines etc etc..... so I cancelled her ticket in May after giving her several last chances to change her mind, she didn't, I cancelled.
Last week she changed her mind.
It was my fault, I gave her another very, very last chance when I told her that Jake would need his kennel cough medicine at least two weeks before we left, if she was staying at home then Jake wouldn't go in kennels, if she was coming then Jake would need his kennel cough certificate, it was decision time yesterday.
She wanted to come, but just for a week.
Luckily for her Jet2.com have launched their new route, so I could get her a return flight for one week for £177, almost £100 cheaper (times three) than what we had paid to Airtours - bas'tads.
I have to book it this morning, its a late night flight which means that for two nights of my holiday I can't have a drink at all as I've got to collect/deliver her to Mahon airport, but hey, what are dads for ?
So the problem now is Jake.
I rang three local kennels yesterday, two are fully booked (hardly suprising) and one can only keep him sunday to sunday, we need saturday to sunday.
My brother offered to look after him for one day and deliver him to the kennels on the sunday so we are running with that plan and Mandy is all excited now - I only hope that the place is still open today when I ring to confirm.
I'm dead if it isn't.
This can't be right, the bloody spam catcher's caught nothing in it.
Which is bloody useless in terms of visitor hits, the meter is moving slower than a line of pensioners outside the post office an hour before it opens.
Good people, this is a blatant attempt to get more hits on the hit counter, its embarrassing having to ring people up and ask them to visit my site just so the the number will move up one.
Theres only one way to attract lots of hit - go fishing for spam.
So here is the list of words that I'm using as bait today...
Insurance
Money
Cash
Loans
Artificial limbs
Viagra
Erectile Disfunction
Corn plasters
There, lets see what hits that lot will bring in.
And just as a PS for the companies who do the spamming, just on the off chance that you might actually read some of the sites before you post your crap, you'd be advised to not post your crap here, if you do we are all going to point at you and laugh at how small your penis's are.
Actually, I'll add that word to the list as well.
Penis enlargement
Off we go then, 24 hours of super-hits ...
Yes.
I've added a visitor counter to this site.
Today.
Its pathetic right now.
Because its stuck at four.
I'm going to have to visit as many pc's as I can and log myself in to get the number up a bit.
I could have told it to start at 1,000,353 to look good,
But its more honest this way
And as Stan Laurel said one day, "Honesty is the best politics"
But if its still at four next week
I'll nudge it along a bit.
North winds have made my face a little older
and my back is bent through trying too hard
My vest is torn so I make no perfect picture
to place upon your white-washed wall
I'd like to stay but you have not asked me
Still I don't really expect you to
Dusty boots would shame you now Lady Day
Are we really that far apart
I wish the world could see you now Lady Day
laughing down at your oldest friend
The one who shared just about all he had
in a one-sided love affair
I get scared when I remember too much
Wasted time I suppose you could say that
Strange it don't seem that way to me
But wait a minute
I don't even think you're listening
Just let me tell you how I really feel
I've seen the inside of your heart Lady Day
when you wanted to be shown the way
I loved you then as I love ya now girl
Lady Day, lyrics by Rod Stewart
Not sure why I wanted to put those lyrics on here, I just like the song, have done since I first heard it in 1970, can remember first hearing it and its bookend partner "Jo's Lament", I just like it and its playing on the iPod now.
So where did it all go wrong for Rod Stewart ?
When I first start buying his few scarce albums 36 years ago they were full of self-penned lyrics like that one, Bob Dylan was a big influence on him and all of his early albums have at least one Dylan cover on them, beautiful ballads such as "Tomorrow is such a long time", "Only a hobo", and the gorgeous "Mama you've been on my mind" where the arrangement is (unbelievably) better than Dylans.
I'll tell you where it all went wrong.
When he moved to LA.
And the disco crap took over.
And again when he'd run out of steam and started recording "the old favourites" in that awful "American songbook" series.
My recommendation - don't listen to anything he's done since 1976, but listen to everything he did from 1970 to 76.
Lesson 2 of your musical education will follow at some point in the far distant future.
Took the day off work today to attend the funeral of a close friends mother who we all loved as if she were our own.
The family have taken the bereavement quite hard and so it was nice to see almost all of our gang turn up to support our friends, a bit like an episode of that 30-something programme that used to be on, except that when we watched it we all were 30-something and now we are all 50 this year.
The funeral was at 10.20 and we all gathered at the house afterwards and had coffee and sandwiches and talked for a bit and our friend started to come out of the shell of despondancy that he had wrapped around himself for the past ten days and when people started to drift back to work at around lunchtime he asked if anyone fancied a beer.
To cut a long story short a few of us sat with him and his dad all afternoon in the hot sun, in our funeral suits, drinking his beer in his back garden and now at 7.30pm I'm sitting at home with a sunburnt head and a monster headache which I'm hoping (in vain) two paracetamols and two mugs (so far) of black coffee will shift.
He was much happier when we left him though so it should all have been worth while, and we enjoyed the beer too.
Its a really great achievement in life if you can point to a group of people and say out loud, "those are my close friends" and then lean on them when it matters.
Got some feedback from the couple that viewed the house last night.
According to the estate agent they said that the house needed some redecoration and a new bathroom and they thought it was overpriced, but thank you anyway.
It had a new bathroom last year.
My response was a shoulder shrug and "fukk you then"
The three females who live here are still bitching about those comments ont he lines of "who do they think they are" etc etc.
This selling house business can get personal if you let it get to you.
I had to hire a car yesterday for my employee who's car stopped living on the M62 last Friday.
A quick t'interweb search brought up Stelio's EasyCar as a nice cheap option, we could get a Ford Ka for £117 a week, that would do nicely thank you Stelios, after all, I don't have to drive the bloody thing.
Compared the price with a few others and it remained the cheapest until I tried Alamo car hire, only because they have a branch close by us, they had a Corsa type car for £117 too, so I rang them.
Told the bloke on the phone that I'd seen the price on t'interweb and he paused, then in a small voice mentioned that he couldn't usually match the t'interweb prices.
No I said, it was your company's t'interweb price, £117 for a week, Vauxhall Corsa.
Mmmm, said he, not sure if I can do that he said, but he agreed to try. Came back within seconds and confirmed that he couldn't match or beat the t'interweb price and at this point I was getting very confused, said t'interweb price supposed to be his company or what ?
Then he tells me he can do a Corsa for £113 plus vat.
Then a few seconds later he tells me he can do a Corsa for £113 including vat.
I'm very confused now, but I accepted before he got unconfused and changed his mind.
When we got to his place to pick it up it had grown up into a Vauxhall Astra as he didn't have a Corsa.
I just signed for it and hope it doesn't turn into a pumpkin at midnight.
We're flogging our house.
And I seem to have been delegated to do the flogging.
I thought the estate agent was going to do the flogging tours, but apparently its me.
I've taken four lots of people around it this weekend and I'm bored with the routine now.
"This is a room downstairs, we live in it sometimes so we call it the Living Room, you'll see it has an open fire, its gas, and , erm, well, this is where we live"
"This is another room downstairs, we live in this one too and so we call this the living room as well, what, confusion, oh no, its not that big a fuckin house you know, anyway, this one has an electric fire, no its not gas, yes I know the estate agent thought it was a gas fire but she's an idiot, if you follow me now into the kitchen..."
"...and this is the utility room where the wife does all the washing, just step over my underpants on the floor, I don't think shes finished beating them yet ..."
"...and you'll see theres a toilet just off the utility room, useful for when she's feeling billious after loading my smalls into the washing machine..."
"...if you'll follow me upstairs I'll show you some bedrooms, who would have thought it eh, bedrooms upstairs, full of suprises this house is, what, why are the blinds closed, because the pigeon man two doors down has let his fuckin flying rats out and I don't want you to see them, so we'll go to the front bedroom first..."
And for the man who came on saturday, yes the waterfall pump in the pond does work, I've got it switched on for tonights viewers, no I don't know what chemicals they inject into the brickwork for the damp proof course but I saw you counting all the holes, the hedges all get cut by you if you buy the house, no-one else, you, and no I'm not leaving my hedge trimmers, it hasn't got a garage because theres no fuckin need for one, its got three sheds instead, and ok I admit it, the cctv is because we got broken into 18 months ago but it was a random burglary and the scrote won't be coming out for another 12 months at least, this time you'll be able to record his face though, unlike the fuckin Shell garage down the road who had forgotten to switch their recorder on when he used my credit card there.
Any more fuckin questions before you pay the asking price ?
I don't like motor insurance companies.
You may have gathered that I don't like motor insurance companies if you have read this blog through June.
Unfortunately, because I have three cars to personally insure in the business then I have to deal with them from time to time, and occasionally I take the bit between the teeth and I shop around using this t'interweb thingy to find a better price than the one that my current provider promises me is definitely the cheapest after they've searched an searched for a better price for me.
Strangely enough, year on year, when they search and search for me they always come up with one thats slighty more expensive than last years premium, whereas when I search and search I can always find one thats cheaper.
It happened last month, Budget Insurance got a strop on with me after direct debits missed payment for two of the policies, (I accidently cancelled one of them - tee-hee) they sent a standard letter stating that they'd cancel both policies if I didn't buck my ideas up.
So I went shopping with a "fuck you Budget" attitude.
One of the cars ended up at Admiral Insurance, home of the most annoying fuckin advert on TV involving Harry Enfield doing a parrot voiceover, absolutely appalling, I almost refused on the principal that any executive who passed that idea as being a good marketing campaign needs his fuckin bumps feeling, but still, they were the cheapest by a long way, so they got the business.
The other car ended up back at Budget.
Yes thats right, just two months earlier Budget had promised me that they had searched and searched and searched for the cheapest ever, ever, ever policy and cross their hearts and hope to die they'd found it for me. Just eight weeks later I found a cheaper one - on their own fuckin web site, the twats.
So I signed up for it and when they asked for proof of the no claims bonus I put a copy of their own letter from eight weeks ago which showed the no claims bonus, in the envelope and sent it back to them.
They wrote to us today.
It was their stroppy letter again.
The one that said I was a bastard for not sending all the details that they'd requested and that they were stomping their feet again and cancelling the new insurance, because they could, so there. And I had to send all of the documents and the insurance certificate back or I would be a very naughty customer and they'd set the bobbys on me.
I rang them in "don't say much make them squirm" mode.
Asked the lady which policy it was that they were going to cancel
She confirmed it was the new one.
Asked why.
She told me that the no claims bonus confirmation that I'd sent back was not good enough proof for them and then she asked the golden question, the one that had me smirking and trying to hold back the gales of laughter - she asked me who it was that had issued that previous proof of no claims.
"It was you"
"Pardon"
"It was Budget Insurance"
"Was it ?"
"Yes, and it was your office"
She looked again at the copy I'd sent and then I heard her mumble to herself "Oh shit"
She didn't cancel the new policy after all.
I bet that ruined her Monday morning, it certainly made mine start nicely.
Had to go to Coventry on Friday on a call-out, its a two hour drive and the job took me a couple of hours to complete.
Got back on the motorway and realised that I hadn't had a cup of coffee all day, a shocking state of affairs, so pulled into a motorway service station for my takeaway caffeine fix, I actually found a parking space right in front of the main door too, which was nice as it had just started raining.
And then I saw them...
Old people.
Old people alighting from a bus, one at a time, on shaky legs, shivering down the steps like a new born foal until they could grab the zimmer frame that the carers were holding out.
And worse.
There were only a few of them left on the bus.
Which meant...
The rest of them were already on their way in towards the service station shop.
Bollacks.
Managed to squeeze past several of them on the short dash to the door but still got stuck in the bottleneck to get into the building and had to join in their shuffle where you move one foot along the floor so that it takes up a position just a few inches in front of the other foot, then repeat with the second foot, and so on and so on.
It took five minutes to get through the door, five minutes in the rain behind two old blokes wearing those "windcheaters" that only old men buy, and baseball caps - only teenage boys and ancient men wear baseball caps these days, and this pair had very nice tartan pattern baseball caps on, christ knows where you buy tartan pattern baseball caps, Scotland probably.
And then when I was finally in the shop I couldn't get around thes two old codgers, I went left, they went left, I went right they went right, it was like they had rear view cctv built into their spectacles, they read every one of my movements and blocked me in an instant, I had to bite my tongue to stop myself shouting out "walk to the bloody side of the shop you stupid old bastards".
I should have known better of course, the middle of the afternoon is no time to be entering a motorway service station. Its just two hours after the touring old bastards have had their lunchstop and now they need a piss break and another cup of tea to get them through the afternoon, the queue outside the ladies toilet was stretching back so far in the rain that they were nearly standing on the motorway itself.
When I made it to the caffe culture automated caffeine machine my heart sunk for there at the button pressing light flashing self service front end were two old buggers trying to work out how to extract a hot chocolate drink from the machine, ten minutes I waited behind them listening to endless explanations to the one pressing the buttons from the other who was equally clueless, ending in a three minute search for the chocolate powder to sprinkle on top.
All of which is why I want to retire early from my job, I don't want to be consigned to a coach tour of the UK's service stations when I grow old, I want to be able to drive myself, stop when I want to stop, not stop when a coach driver says I have to piss, I want to retire now and I want to slow down gracefully to the speed of a snail and hold up all of the other working people who are having to rush through their lives at the speed of sound.
I'm jealous of these old people, why can't my life be so slow ?
So there we have it, France v Italy in the FIFA World Cup 2006 final, and what good semi finals they were.
Which all goes to prove my point of some days back - football is a very simple game which England have managed to turn into a very complicated affair.
All four semi finalists, with perhaps the exception of Portugal, managed to understand the very simple concept of football - you win by scoring more goals than your opponent.
There is nothing more to learn, there is only one way to score points in football and that is to put the ball into your opponents net, for this task you score one point, or a goal, and if after 90 minutes play you have scored more goals than your opponent then you are the winner.
France, Italy and Germany understand this concept well, Portugal less so, England not at all.
The one thing that was obvious from tonights France/Portugal semi final is that Portugal are not as bad a team as they appeared to be in the quarter final against England, which brings you to one conclusion - Portugal played down to Englands level in the quarters.
England play a very methodical game, a very slow game where its often better to pass the ball backwards towards your own goal rather than knock it forwards to your opponents goal. Its a game that lends more towards the tactical blackboard upon which most English players seem to learn their footballing skills nowadays, its almost as if there is a chalked out route for every circumstance that a player will ever find himself in so that all sponteniety is wiped out of their brains and replaced by set patterns of play - in order to remember and enact these set patterns the players have to first slow the game down, hence the boredom creeps in.
Football should be played like the two semi-finals were, no leeway for losers, a draw was not good enough (which it always is in an England footballers mind), in the semi finals the only option when in possesion was to go forward and try to score, both games had end to end play and for once the referees were not influenced by the diving, spinning, cheating players who fall over when nudged.
Lets hope that the final is more of the same, I just hope that France can pull something out of the bag, they looked very tired in the last 20 minutes tonight and would surely have lost if the game had gone to extra time.
The estate agent sign is in the front garden now, they've been and taken the photographs, its on the web in all its glory - our house.
Its up for sale.
And within ten minutes of taking the approval of the text into the estate agent they rang with an appointment to view, who knows, the viewer tomorrow might even buy the place.
Which wouldn't actually beat our family record for selling a house, after he died we sold my dads bungalow within an hour of putting it on the market, but then again the estate agent did have a list of old codgers who were waiting to buy a bungalow in that street, he hardly earned his commission that day.
If we sell quickly we have a place in mind to buy, I've already put in a low offer for it and in doing so got rejected but found out what they'd be prepared to settle at, hopefully we'll find a buyer for this place and then its all settled.
If it takes a while and the first choice is sold then I fancy selling and moving out into a short term rent, maybe in the city into a new apartment, live the cosmopolitan life for a short while, eat out every night and learn to love caffe culture, the offspring would love that and it might turn into a long term plan, not sure how Jake the retreiver would take to it though.
Oh yes, I booked tickets to go and see "Grease" the musical in Bradford on Thursday, must get up to speed on the lyrics for "summer nights" and the like, can't be seen to be square or a grumpy old git, this is the prime opportunity to embarrass the youngest daughter and must be seized without hesitation.
Something really wierd happened on Friday night, something that I had never realised in the last 17 years and eight months.
My eldest daughter is terrified of the sight of blood.
Was sitting in the kitchen late on Friday night when I heard the front door go and in walked Amanda, still in her black restaurant uniform, which was a little unusual as she normally works until 1am on a Friday night.
Asked her if they had closed early and in reply she just held up a shaky finger around which was wrapped one of those blue sticking plasters that they use in the food trade.
She couldn't talk, just stood there shaking like a leaf, gasping for breath, in the middle of a panic attack.
I sat her down and got a glas of water and in between lots of sipping and controlled breathing got the story out in little chunks, she'd been forcing some kitchen roll into a dispenser when her hand had slipped and sliced a finger against the serrated tear-off strip inside the dispenser.
She and one of the other waitresses had tried for over half an hour to stop it bleeding and one of the chefs (who are used to slicing their fingers open) had bandaged it up and declared it "deep but not needing stiching" but because it wouldn't stop bleeding she wouldn't be pacified and had eventually been brought home, still in a state of panic bordering on hysteria.
It wasn't bleeding anymore and I finally got her calmed down enough to tell her to go to bed and sleep it off, but she insisted that it was still bleeding and that she wanted it dressing again as the chefs dressing was now soaked in blood.
Took off the dressing with a little difficulty to find an innocuous slash along the top of one finger and down the side of the nail, no doubt it hurt like buggery but it had all but stopped bleeding and the flap of skin was in place and should heal. I cleaned it up and rebandaged it and eventually got her to go to bed.
The next morning she was still panicky about it, after all these years I never realised that she was quite so bad with wounds, redressed it again and it really is just a bad cut, nothing more, it really needs to be exposed to the air to heal now and two days later we've managed to persuade her to take of the dressing and look at it.
Very strange behaviour, she gets it from her mother of course, I'm far to tough to be fightened by things like that :)
Thank god for that.
In the dullest sporting competition in the world, one of the dullest competitors is out - its England.
I watched the England v Portugal FIFA World Cup Quarter Final yesterday with the honest belief that it couldn't be as poor and boring a game as the previous round against Ecuador, I was wrong.
Both England and Portugal appear to have been coached from the same manual, that is that football is a game where you keep possession and, erm, well thats it really, you keep possession and the other side can't score goals then.
Score goals ? But shouldn't you be scoring goals too ?
Oh no, you keep possession and if you keep it long enough and if you're very lucky then you might find that someone on your side will manage to score a goal, if not it doesn't really matter because a draw is pretty good too, you get a point for a draw in the league so thats not all bad.
But of course this is knock-out football and you get nowt for a draw in the FIFA World Cup, in fact if you draw at the end of full time then they punish you by making you play another half hour, its a bit like detention at school, you get to stay behind until you get it right.
And then when you still can't score a goal (and you've been playing for 120 minutes now), they make you take penalties until a result is reached, and as every England supporter knows, when it comes to penalties you've lost already, everyone knows that, which makes it all the more puzzling why the players don't seem to want to score a proper goal during the two hours of proper play.
To put it simply, at the end of 120 minutes, if Portugal had left the field, got changed and got on the bus home and left England to continue playing on their own, they still wouldn't have scored a goal by midnight, in fact they might have conceeded an own goal and lost.
The same could also be said of Portugal.
After the game I sat and forced myself to watch another quarter final involving Brazil and France in the belief that there must be something that I'm missing about this football lark, too many people are swept along with the hype for it to be all hype and no substance, there must be something good about the game surely ?
And there it was on the TV right in front of me, Brazil v France was an incredible game of football, played the way that it should be played, two teams who both wanted to score goals to win, here was a game that had no chance of going to extra time, penalties were not on the agenda, whenever either side had the ball they used skill and flair that is not seen in the English game to get the ball up into the other sides half and onwards towards their goal - simply superb stuff and I loved watching it.
So maybe, just maybe this week there will be the chance to see two semi finals that are a tad more interesting than the fare provided so far, although as one of them involves Portugal I won't be holding my breath for too long and maybe we could just end up with a France/Germany final that will kick some backsides in this country.
I doubt it though.
In the meantime the bandwagon-jumpers can put away their silly little car flags and take down their JJB flags from their bedroom windows and we as a nation can stop pretending that we know how to play football and stop pretending that we are anything but quarter finalists.
They're all in Leeds today for their annual shindig at Elland Road football ground, sometime home of Leeds Utd, sometime home of 30-odd thousand gullible football supporters who prayed hard last year to win promotion and god let them down - today the Jehovahs took over the stadium to pray and to sell each other the magazines that they couldn't sell door to door since their meeting last year.
I'll not take the mickey out of the Jehovahs, for all I know or care they might even be right, they might be the chosen ones.
Is that why they all look the same ?
Is that why I can tell what they are when they are right down the bottom of my street pestering my neighbours and giving me enough notice to pretend to be out ?
The only religious cult more obvious on the streets are mormons.
If the mormon men didn't all wear long beige raincoats and carry briefcases on a sunday and if their womenfolk didn't wear fancy coloured hankies on their heads then they'd find that a few people might just accidently answer the door to them instead of being met with a thousand "gone to the coast" signs on the doors they knock on.
I'd never trust a religious cult that required me to go out and sell for them, you are either one of gods chosen ones or you're not, its not a sales performance type of thing, you shouldn't make the team just because you can bore the pants off more householders than your neighbour, god doesn't get those magazines printed and delivered to the head jehovah with instructions to "get those goddamn sales crews out on the streets this weekend, we're down 23% in revenue in the first fiscal quarter compared to quarter one last year, I thought you said you were up for this job, your necks on the line this quarter sonny jim"
I only ever knew one jehovah, he was a wanker, the two things may have been mutually compatible, I don't know for sure, but he was definitely a jehovah and a wanker, both at the same time, you make your own mind up.
He was an electrician and was employed by the same company that I worked for when I left school, the first day that started work all the other electricians drew me to one side and whispered, "that bloke there, the weird looking one, hes a god-botherer, a jehovah, and hes a right wanker, you go figure"
I should have known I'd end up working as his apprentice for a few short weeks.
It was only a matter of days before he tried to convert me. We were sat in an empty room of a new house that we were second fixing, having our lunch when he asked if I was any good at algebra. I told him I'd got my maths O level, ok grade 7 wasn't too impressive, but he was impressed.
I should have spotted it coming.
He asked if I'd teach him algebra at lunchtimes.
I sort of grunted a confirmative, wondering where this was leading.
He said if I'd teach him algebra then he'd teach me the scriptures.
That was the first time that I used the phrase "fuck off"
The next morning I was apprenticed to someone else.
I can now spot them a mile off.
,
I've tried not to comment on the FIFA World Cup thing that is currently ongoing (for ever) in Germany, I've tried not to comment on Englands 1-0 win against Ecuador on Sunday.
Because,
I can't watch the game at all without wondering what everyone else sees in it - as I've said before, its the kings new clothes complex, I'm sure I'm the only one who is totally unmoved, nay bored by the whole affair.
The England game on Sunday for instance - I watched it, for the first time in many years I watched a football match all the way through and resisted the temptation to go do something more constructive instead, like for instance flushing something down our toilet and then running outside to see if I could catch it as it ran past the inspection pit in the street outside - I've always wanted to do that, it could be an international sport if I marketed it as good as FIFA do.
Frankly the England/Ecuador game was a complete waste of two hours of my life, I've wasted lots of hours in my life, there was that time went I got all dressed up for a company christmas "do" at a posh hotel but went to the wrong hotel for instance, but Sunday afternoon was a 100% tax deductable write-off of two hours, if I'm not mistaken I believe that it is possible for people who watched that game to apply to heaven and gain a two hour credit onto their lifespan in compensation.
And the worst thing about football is the cheating that goes un-noticed by spectators, commentators and officials.
You know the sort of thing - player A runs towards goal with ball at feet, player B approaches within three feet of him, player A falls over and rolls many, many times on the floor clutching a random part of his anatomy, face screwed in pain, peeping out of one eye now and again to see if he's got the penalty yet.
And instead of the commentators mentioning that player A is a big wuss and a cheat, they replay the incident forty two times in an attempt to justify the lots of rolling around and the obvious agony and come up with a comment like "Yes Bob, I think he just clipped his heels there" or "Oh yes Bob, shirt pulling, look just there".
"I can't see any reason for that Bob, I think he's a fuckin cheating bastard" is what they should really say, but they don't , they partake in the charade that football is "the beautiful game" and that tugging someones shirt really is a grevious crime tantamount to murdering your mother.
Its a game for big nancies.
To play, and watch.
So there.
Noticed last week that the pond was starting to get cloudy, which is normal, normally, at this time of year with the summer sun causing a plantlife and microbe "bloom" in the water.
Except that I've got an ultraviolet filter fitted which is supposed to clean all that sort of stuff out of the water and leave the pond nice and clear right through the year, I just leave it running all year, never check it, not supposed to touch it actually as inside the filter trap is a "live" colony of all sorts of super-bacteria stuff that eats the stuff you don't want in the water - actually it works by magic as far as I'm aware.
So I checked it.
It wasn't working.
There was no water running through it, and there should have been.
Fished the pump out from its home in the bottom of the pond, it was working but not pumping any water out, the "fans" on the whirring thing were broken, in short the pump was knackered.
Told Suzanne I'd need to buy a new one but with one eye on the fact that we're selling the house she told me "no" even when I asked seven or eight times. A new pump would be around £50 or so , so maybe she had a point.
So I bought one on eBay for £6.
Went to fit it this morning, connected it up no problem, switched it on and water came through, we were back in business, just had the old one to remove then.
Now the old pump obviously had an electrical cable running to it and I'd buried it under some sand and some flat stones that line the edge of the pond, and I could have removed the stones and gently tugged the cable out of the sand covering.
But I didn't.
I yanked the cable and it gave a little so I gave it a bigger tug and then I put all of my delicate frame behind it and gave it a really big pull.
It came out.
And in doing so it dislodged a big flat stone from the side of the pond, which ever so slowly slide into the water, sharp edge first.
Fished the stone out and hoped that it hadn't damaged the pond liner.
Came out a couple of hours later to find my pond lower by at least two inches. Fuckpigs.
And thats where its stayed all afternoon, the stone has obviously punctured the liner near the top (fortunately) so I now have a slightly shallower pond than before with a rim of liner visible all the way around - I'm going to shovel some sand on it tomorrow to give the sparrows and blackbirds a beach when they bathe, the frogs will probably enjoy it too.
Every cloud etc...
Have put an offer in on the house that Jodie liked, our house goes up for sale today.
And now the clear-out starts
This house is full of accumulated stuff from at least 15 years ago, the loft is jam packed full of stuff that we haven't looked at since we moved here five years ago - all of that will go for a start, I think eBay will be getting a big hammering in the next couple of months.
I'm also in mind to plan this removal with some sort of move-house-by-stealth strategy.
One of my customers rents out storage space in a huge warehouse so I'm considering taking one of his units and moving the stuff that we are keeping in there over a period of time rather than have an almighty rush on moving day to get everything out of the house for noon and in the new house by sundown - our last move was absolute chaos and there must be an easier way to do it.
Tim the removal guy, who I sat in front of at school 40 years ago has moved us three times now and each time when I ring him he asks the same question "Have you still got those fekkin pine wardrobes ?", well I'm sorry Tim, but yes, we still have those fekking huge git big pine wardrobes, the ones that are actually bigger inside than the room they are standing in, in a "Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe" sort of stylee.
He'll probably say he's not available when I ring him, even before I've told him what moving day we have in mind.
In the meantime we continue to look for a house to hold in reserve just in case they don't accept our pitifully low offer on the first choice and of course we need to sell this one, its a long drawn out process is buying and selling houses, most of it sitting and waiting, still, we've done it seven times now so should be used to it.
Went back to see a house that we liked last night, the first time we saw it was on a bit of a miserable day and no-one was in so it was all a bit dark but still Suzanne and I liked it, we liked the location, we've lived on that development before and we liked it then and inthe intervening 20 years it seems to have grown even nicer now that some of the trees and shrubs are maturing.
So we took Jodie to see it, Amanda was working so she is out of the decision making for the time being, the house is being rented at the moment so isn't exactly spruced up for the viewings so we warned Jodie to try and see through all that.
And she loved it, wanted to stay there, wanted to buy it there and then.
Why ?
This tells you something of what goes on in the mind of a 14 year old girl with an older sister.
She liked it because both bedroom 2 and bedroom 3 were the same size and for all of her 14 years so far she's always had the smallest bedroom, with this house there will be equilibrium.
Oh yes, she also liked it because the current tenants have a house rabbit, a big lop-eared thing that followed us everywhere we went, I hope they take it with them though or Jake the retriever will be a tad disappointed that he isn't the most favourite animal in the house any more.
Time to make an offer on the house methinks.
The car T-Cut up a treat, all the scratches came out and just left us with a small dent in the door and one on the wheelarch which might be persuaded to pop out if I can find a G clamp somewhere - I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about.
I'm writing this one off to another one of lifes pissing bad luck stories and have explained to the eldest daughter just what that means - its not worth persuing via the insurance company because those bastards will end up charging us through the nose for the repair and won't bother pressing the claim against the other party.
We had a long conversation about how crap life can be sometimes and I used the example of how her mother was once deemed to be 50% to blame when she was parked in her car, in a car park, and someone reversed into her - presumably the insurance company must have argued that the collision wouldn't have happened had she stayed at home that day - I feel like a very wise old man when I impart these pearls of wisdom to my innocent and gullible daughters these days.
So there we have it - One day a total shit will damage your car and when they do you then have to decide whether its worth dealing with the shits who run the insurance companies, or whether to save your time and energy and use it to enjoy yourself elsewhere.
oh yes, nearly forgot - she broke the CD player in the car last night.
Its probably not a record, but its not bad going.
Having your first car accident just 72 hours after you've passed your driving test.
Amanda took the car out today and whilst driving down a busy shpping street near here a jerk in a large 4WD reversed out of a parking bay and caught the back wheel arch of our car.
No one hurt, the dickheads car unscratched and just a slight dent and a surface scratch on our car, but it upset Amanda. Fortunately she had the presence of mind to remember what I'd told her to do in those circumstances and she got the fekkwits name and address and then a very kind third motorist stopped and offered his name as a witness to Amanda and wrote a statement on the back of an envelope which put the blame fair and square on the 4WD dick-for-brains.
All of which leaves me in a quandry now.
The insurance was all sorted out and she was covered to drive that car within an hour of passing her test, so it should be a simple job to ring the company tomorrow and put in a claim for perhaps a £300 to £400 repair (yes I've paid for "slight scratches" before, how could you tell).
But Amanda told me that the tool in the 4WD mentioned something about "I've got my witness too" and that he had two other males in the car with him.
And I've dealt with insurance companies and their fekkwit operations many times in the past.
I know for a fact that if we didn't have a witness statement then the insurance companies would simply deal with the incident in what they call "knock for knock", in other words both insurance companies involved would pay for their own drivers repair bills - and then my insurance company would come back to me and invoke the £400 "young driver" excess on me and mention the fact that my protected no claims bonus was under threat now, and of course next year the premium would be mysteriously increased to "gasping" proportions - in other words for the sake of a small scratch and a little dent in the wheel arch I would suffer financially, tremendously financially.
But wait you say, you have a witness, surely your insurance company will force the other party to pay all of your costs ?
Possibly, I reply, but just suppose that the other driver claims that he too has a witness, we don't know who the two other people were in his car, lets just suppose that he gets one of them to state that the roles were reversed and it was Amanda who was reversing out of the parking bay ?
Another knock-for-knock situation.
With such small claims the insurance companies wouldn't even question the validity of the witness statements because they can't be arsed and its easier just repairing the damage and getting their punter to pay for it himself, they certainly aren't going to invoke legal action to recover the cost of such a minor scrape.
Insurance company's are one big sack of shit, all of them.
I'll check the damage again tomorrow in the cold light of day, if its as minor as it looked in the rain this morning then I won't be advising the insurance company and Amanda will have learned another of lifes hard-knock lessons - this world is full of shits and sometimes they reverse into you and sometimes you have to keep quiet to avoid having to deal with the corporate ones.
I used to do it every year, the annual Wetherby to Filey bike ride across the North York Moors.
Its a slog with lots of hills and an almost mountain climb of a hill at the halfway stage but you get a lot of satisfaction from having done it at the end.
The last time I took part was, I believe, 1996. I only remember the date because its always on this saturday every year and at the time the Euro 96 football competition was ongoing and England were playing Scotland so every pub along the 70 mile route was beseiged by most of the 1500 participants whilst the game was on.
My brother and I stopped at such a pub way up on the moors in blistering June sunshine, the pub was packed and so we fell off our bikes onto the grass verge and lay for a while relaxing until my bro got up and went to fetch us a couple of nice ice cold lagers.
He was gone for a while as the bar was full and he stopped to watch a bit of the football and within two minutes I was fast asleep. I had a lovely half hour nap there on the grass verge in full view of all the traffic and fellow cyclists, helmet for a pillow and feet up on the bike, and was eventually rudely awoken by my bro with my now warm lager.
Unfortunately we had underestimated the distance to the finish line and let me warn you here and now, if you ever find yourself with another 20 miles to ride over an undulating moorland landscape then taking a nap and drinking beer is a bad idea, I struggled like hell to finish that day.
Today I was up bright and early to take my brother to Wetherby racecourse where the ride starts, did I wish I was going with him ?
Yes.
But on the other hand, No.
I'm now sat back in my kitchen with a nice cup of coffee and some chocolate biscuits while he's out on the road pedelling like buggary for the rest of the day.
Yes I wish I was doing it.
I've entered for a ride in September though which is organised by the Yorkshire Cancer Research people, a choice of 20 miles or 50 miles in a circular route around Wharfedale, all I need to do now is find the touring bike in the shed somewhere and get my arse out on the road on it again, oh yes, and lose about two stone in weight, I might just manage the 20 mile route then.
At last, Amanda passed her driving test today - yippee !!!
I have to confess that whilst I was happy for her, and she was ecstatic, my first thought was "thank god I don't have to do the dads taxi thing now", for the last three years I've been on call at all hours of the night and early morning, in recent months its been a regular late night pickup from the restaurant where she works, Friday nights have always been a 1am pickup - and I like my bed at that sort of time.
It also means that I don't get to drink any beer in the house because I have to drive later on, not that I can drink a lot of beer, I can't, but even one bottle is out of the question on dads taxi nights.
But now - she can drive herself.
First thing I did was get on t'interweb and shop around for insurance for Suzannes car, its due for renewal this week anyway so Ieft it for today just in case. Yesterday with just me and Suzanne as drivers it would have cost us £202 fully comprehensive with legal cover too, today by adding Amanda onto the policy its just cost me £1090 and that was cheap, the next nearest price was over £2000.
A Ford Focus, 1600cc, fairly standard second family car, worth about £7000, and because she is a new driver and under 25 years of age then the insurance companies rub their hands with glee and even the ones that advertise "special deals for new young drivers" start their pricing schemes at £2000 - the bastards.
After booking the insurance and paying for it I got a call from the company to confirm everything and the woman asked me how long Amanda had held a licence, "about an hour now" I replied and there was a long pause while she tried to find that option on her computer screen, I think she glossed over that question eventually.
And the most stupid thing is that the insurance policy that I bought online was from Budget Insurance, who just happened to be our previous insurers too, yet when I rang them last week and asked about putting Amanda on the old policy they said that it wasn't possible as she was too young to be insured on a 1600cc car, seems like their office staff don't use the same software that their own internet site do.
So she's gone to work in the car tonight and I've sat down and had two cans of Tetleys to celebrate the tearing up of her "L" plates and the tearing up of my Dads Taxi franchise, it feels so liberating.
Was summoned to the school early this morning for a meeting with a careers advisor for Jodie, all of which is a bit premature as far as I was concerned as she is only 14 and like all 14 year olds, next week is a long time let alone discussions on what she is going to be doing for the rest of her life.
But still we humoured the careers advisor and went and sat in his office and he started by asking lots of questions on what subjects she's taking, what she's good at, what she enjoys, and it was plainly obvious that she likes practical things and not academic things.
Then he went through a list of job types and she rejected all of the office jobs, the legal jobs, the accountancy jobs, the retail jobs, and just when we were htinking that perhaps Jodie didn't really have any plans to join the workforce at any time in the future she mentioned that she likes animals and would love to work with animals.
The careers advisors face lit up as he thought he was getting somewhere now and so he turned to the page in his book that gave details on animal care and vetinary occupations, she told him in no uncertain terms that she didn't want to work anywhere that kept caged animals as she objected strongly to caged animals, which was news to me and I mentally unticked the box with the "Summer holiday good idea #24, Flamingoland" option.
She told him that a vetinary nurse would be ideal and as he looked up the qualifications required she added "In Africa" which sort of took me and the advisor by suprise, him especially so as he probably didn't get too many 14 year old students who wanted to work in Africa.
All he could suggest was that she tries to get a bit of work experience at a local vets in a couple of years time and then maybe takes a gap year with a voluntary organisation when she's 18, all of which was bleedin obvious advice which I could have given her without much research.
Still, at least it keeps him in a job, does anyone ever tell a careers advisor "I want to be a careers advisor" ?
Went to see a nice house today, well a bungalow anyway, and was very impressed, it was option 2 from my post of yesterday and if we bought it I would save myself £70K, which isn' t to be sniffed at.
It would take a bit of a rethink as to what furniture and other possesions we took from here but thats a good thing as we've accumulated too much stuff here now and I'm getting in the mood for a de-clutter and a fresh start without all the crap, this family needs a possesions detox.
I'm collecting Suzanne from the northeast tomorrow, an early start and with a bit of luck and a quick turnaround I'll be back in Leeds before 2pm so I can go see Bramley RL play - none of that England nancyball shite for me, somehow though I think that with this superb weather we're having, she'll want to stay a little longer tomorrow, they are up at the caravan in Rothbury and she was enjoying herself tonight when we spoke on the phone. Leaving Newcastle at 2pm might not be a bad idea either as the whole population of this country will be watching the England nancyball game at that time so I might have the A1 to myself - I'll miss the Bramley game though.
Got another house to go look at next week and another valuation on ours from a different estate agent and then the decision needs to be made - do we go for it or not - at the moment the answer seems to be yes.
Was reading some stuff that an estate agent gave me today in whch they expressed their amazement that most other estate agents don't do accompanied viewings unless you specifically ask them to, whereas they do accompanied veiwings as a matter of course - and of course they are correct.
We have bought and sold seven houses now and when I say "sold" I mean that we have sold them ourselves even though we appointed an estate agent to do the selling bit, it never crossed my mind before that in fact all an estate agent does is market the bloody property and leave YOU to sell it.
The agent in question is valuing the house on Monday and if their rates are ok (I've been quoted anything between a three quarter percent and one and a quarter percent) then I'll go for them and their accompanied viewings, their office is right in front of mine and so all I need to do is give them the keys when they find someone interested - I like the easy way out, as I get older I get less and less arsed to do things, if this deal comes off and I can start takinga back seat in the business then I'm going to really enjoy myself.
I'm in a quandry now.
Had the house valued today and it increased in value very nicely thank you very much.
If we sold it for what the estate agent thinks we should get for it then we have some good options ...
1. We could buy a small 3 bed semi on a 1970's estate close to here on a minimal mortgage, so minimal that I could probably give up work altogether and run the business part time from home just doing the odd mail order thing. It sounds nice but I'm talking a small house here and friends would point and laugh and comment on how the mighty had fallen - no they wouldn't really but they'd think it, but fuck them, I'd be the one retired at 50 and enjoying my freedom from the rat race.
2. We could buy a 1960's 3 bed bungalow close to here in a nice location and have a small mortgage, probably wouldn't be able to pack in the business as it is now but at any time in the near future I could sell the business and easily get rid of the mortgage or keep working and certainly pay it off before I'm 60, and more importantly have money to spare between then and now - I like the idea of this option, it opens up the opportunity to buy a "holiday home" in Northumberland to spend the three and four day weekends - I haven't told my co-director brother yet but I'm going to start taking lots of these extended weekends from now on.
3. We could buy a 1980's 3 bed house on a smart estate close to here and have the same mortgage and options as (2) above.
I'm feeling good about this, options 2 and 3 above are ticking all the right boxes and setting me on the path to taking life a bit more easy over the next ten years, I've taken a lot of shit over the last 22 years in business and I'm getting mightily sick of it, its time to find out what else life has to offer and shaking off the bulk of this mortgage is the starting point. Neither me or Suzanne are emotionally tied to this house, its bricks and mortar and has money locked up in it, I think its time to release that money and release myself a little from the financial need to work like a fucking demon until I'm 67 which is what I'd have to do if we stop here.
I can't describe to you how pleased I am at the news that Wayne Rooney's toe is much better now thank you, what with him running up and down and kicking a football again, its much much better and he should be alright for the world cup.
How relieved I am, I've hardly been sleeping with worry.
No really.
So relieved am I that I may even go out and buy some England flags with which to bedeck my house, like this tosspot in Sunderland did, why is it always the ones in social housing that have to go overboard with house decorations, did his local supermarket run out of cider that week so he bought flags instead ?
Which reminds me, I've got an estate agent coming to value the house on Thursday, it'll annoy Suzanne no end as she's still away and has no idea that we're selling this place, if she stays away much longer we might have moved when she comes back.
Actually its her idea, we want to downsize to shake off most of this horrendous mortgage that we currently have, if this house is worth what we think it is then we can go down to a slightly smaller house on a new-ish development and owe less than half of what we do now and in the next ten years when my company pays me back what we borrowed against the current mortgage then we should be all paid up and done and dusted ready for me to retire in ten years time - thats the big plan.
Hope it works that way.
The alternative is that I work until I die.
And that sounds like a crap idea.
So not only do we have to keep the house clean for when Suzanne comes back on Friday, we now have to keep the house clean for the estate agent to visit on Thursday, its ridiculous having to run the dishwasher twice in a week, we've got loads of plates left in the cupboard and lots of space left on the worktops to pile the dirty ones up on.
Have just received the following text message from my youngest daughter...
"dad, we need 2 go 2 asda coz all da food is out ov date !"
Don't you just love it when your wife has been away from home for several weeks and you're putting to the test the theory that your family could live for months on all the crap thats in the freezer - the stuff you bought last year and thought your offspring would devour quickly only to find that "we don't like this, its got onions in it".
Well tough, there's loads of crap frozen food to go at yet, we ain't going shopping until we're down to the last freezer basket.
With just seven days to go to the opening game of the 2006 Football World Cup I feel a need to nail my colours to the mast.
A small point first for our readers from the American colonies.
When we say "football" in the rest of the inhabited world we mean that game where you kick a round ball across a pitch for a while whilst trying to put it inside a goal once or twice in 90 minutes, or not at all as the case often is - its that game that you all play if you're women or children, but to make the point again, its not that game where you all dress up in outrageous slabs of kevlar padding and throw an oval ball to each other for 20 seconds at a time before stopping to get your breath back for a while.
I needed to make that point.
It might be easier if I refer to the rest-of-the-world game as "nancyball" rather than "football", its a phrase I prefer to use myself and it will prevent confusion with the padded leviathons game.
So, nancyball it is...
The nancyball world cup - its starts next week.
I shall hide in a nearby cave until it finishes.
Here in England - for in the international nancyball world there is no UK team, we have seperate teams for each of the four UK countries, and unfortunately Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland don't have nancyball teams, well not so that you'd notice anyway - here in England we have been inundated, nay, saturated, nay, wall-to-wall newsround covered in bulletins on the current condition of a toe bone, broken in a game of nancyball some weeks ago by an England player who apparently is vital to Englands world cup hopes.
Its not for nothing that Wayne Rooney has earned the nickname "Shrek", he is not a good looking lad, in fact I now have doubts as to whether the Shrek films were animated or not, I honestly believe that the main character part was probably played by Wayne Rooney in a live action / animated movie genre made famous by Gene kelly and Jerry Mouse in "Anchors Aweigh", but I digress.
Mr Rooney apparently is the only England player capable of scoring goals, having no interest in the nancyball game I cannot confirm or deny this, I simply report what has been flung at me in saturation by the English press, we shall not win the world cup unless Shrek plays for England and so every day we have an update on his broken toebone on every news channel and every day I switch off when Shreks face appears.
You see the problem with nancyball is that its protagonists have been elevated by the press to the status of gods and it seems like the whole world outside of the USA have gone along with the hoax, except me. I feel like the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson story of The Kings New Clothes, any day now, and probably while the whole of the known world is slavering in delight over their TV screens at the latest dullfest involving two teams from parts of the world that you couldn't point to on a map, I am going to run out into the street and bawl out "this game is crap", and no-one would hear me, beacuse they are all watching what their media has dubbed "the beautiful game" - my arse.
Why England will never win the World Cup
This theory has been developed over decades of being force fed nancyball on an almost daily basis by friends and family who have fallen for the Kings New Clothes dialogue, its an observation from someone who isn't at all inspired by the game and who sees its protagonists as big wet nancies who fall over writhing in mortal and terminal agonies if you stand too close to them or, god forbid, have the temerity to touch them with any part of your body.
England will never win the world cup because they play to draw.
Yes you heard it here first.
The little boy at the back of the crowd has just stood up and pulled the wool from your eyes, the king is naked, and still you do not see.
In the English leagues it is regarded as "a result" if you can reach a stalemate after 90 minutes of play. If a team is playing an away game then a draw, whether scoreless or not, is regarded as a victory, and if a team is playing a home game then a draw is also ok, you get one point in the league table for a draw and a draw is better than losing and having no point at all.
And so for nine months of the year the players in the English football leagues set out evey weekend with the express intention of making it impossible for their opponents to score against them while at the same time forgetting that in order to win then they need to score at least one more goal, when 90 minutes is reached with no result, then that is a result for both teams, well played, good game.
So we take an England football team to the world cup every four years who are well coached in the art of drawing football games and in the initial group matches they unsuprisingly draw at least one of the first three games which immediatley puts them at a disadvantage to the other teams in the group who astonishingly have arrived at the tournement with a desire to score more goals than their opponents and therefore win all of their games.
It will only take an uninspiring draw against Paraguay and a loss against Sweden, with Paraguay beating Trinidad, for the panic button to be slammed in the English press, and once again the nancyball supporters will be left in bars all over europe, but especially in this country, stood with a bottle of beer in their hand, shaking their heads and wondering where it all went wrong - well you heard it here first again - England football teams like to draw games too much.
My tip for the world cup - buy stock in beer companies, and razor blade and rope manufacturers.
Have just returned this afternoon from the northeast after a three day break in which we reunited most of suzannes family and said goodbye to her mother who died ten days ago.
Its been a strange few days in which myself and the girls have played second fiddle to the family and have deliberately taken a back seat in the proceedings. Suzanne has four brothers and a sister and emotions which were kept under wraps for several weeks (and years) have broken to the surface - I believe that the term that is used in political reporting is that "there was a frank exchange of views", so I'll use that phrase.
Its a long story but one of her brothers estranged himself from the others many years ago and since then has always kept himself at arms length, in the last couple of months of his mothers illness he was initially informed but then made no contact again, its a strange situation and one that I refused to get involved with, the brothers and sisters washed their hands of him many years ago and if it wasn't for the eldest brother taking a lead and speaking to him on the phone then he probably still wouldn't know that his mother died.
He came to the funeral, as did many, many people, I'd estimate almost a hundred from the village and dozens of them couldn't get into the chapel and had to stand outside for the service. The family have always lived in what would at some point have been termed "a pit village", it was a mining community with its own pit until the mid-60's but since then has developed into the large community that it is now, its fairly non-descript and consists of several hundred private and council-owned housing estates just like most villages and towns in this country, but at its heart, and on the council estate that Suzannes family came from, it still has a small, and decreasing element of the original pit village community who turn out to attend the funerals of those original community members.
Its a very touching sight to see, we saw the same thing at Suzannes dad's funeral exactly two years ago, the floral tributes were many and neighbours constantly arrived at the house yesterday with flowers and condolences, then with a half hour to go we noticed whole families leaving the street to attend the crematorium, those who couldn't make it there stood out on the street as the hearse arrived at the house - this sort of thing wouldn't happen where we live, a funeral procession would go unnoticed in our area, but yesterday was a reminder of what communities used to be like.
The funeral service itself was superbly conducted, from one of her small grandsons placing a flower that he had picked himself onto her coffin as it arrived, to an old friend of the family giving a lovely speech about the last fifty years of their friendship and the trials and tribulations that the family had gone through in raising six children on limited means, if it is at all possible to enjoy a funeral service then this one was for enjoying.
And then afterwards, as is traditional, a buffet and an afternoon of drinking and reminiscing in the local Working Mens Club, the former mine workers club, and it was there as the afternoon wore on and the alcohol took effect that the emotions ran high between two of the brothers, one the black sheep (the second eldest) and the other his younger brother an ex-professional boxer who's grief tore to the surface late on in the afternoon as he almost came to blows with his older brother. Fortunately the other two brothers are police officers and intervened to stop any violence but it wasn't pleasant although very understandable, after an hour or so of simmering hatred they eventually agreed to disagree but I don't think that they will ever speak again, Mark still hurts very badly, a side of him that I've never seen before, you need to be tough to earn a broken face like he has but the death of both parents within two years has hit him particularly hard. He's the second youngest and he and his younger brother disappeared for a couple of hours later on in the evening and apparently shed a lot of tears together, they returned later in much better spirits and joined everyone else for some final drinks and memories.
On a more pleasant note they all agreed what should be done with their mothers ashes, when they were all kids and on their school summer holidays their mum would take them all on the short walk to the beach, and because she didn't like sitting on sand she'd take them to Old Hartley where the cove is broken down and filled with rocks and rock pools. Suzanne still talks of spending days and days playing at Old Hartley, picking cockles and muscles and what she calls "whil-acks" or whelks to you and I, and then eating them raw on the beach. For someone who spent his childhood 70 miles from the nearest beach it all sounds disgusting to me but they loved it and it was one of the things that they discussed a few days ago and then came up with the brilliant idea of scattering her ashes on the rocks at Old Hartley later on this week, I popped down there yesterday and today and took 90-odd photographs all along the coastline in brilliant sunshine, the one above is Old Hartley bay, soon to be the last resting place of Susie Jackson.
