Top Pranks

The Economist ran a christmas competition to establish the best pranks in history.

The results are online here and make excellent reading.

My favourite is the wooden bomb.

i've watched the closing ceremony...

...of the olympics tonight.

funny how all those Italians could be so cheerful so soon after that horrific ethnic-minority-killing virus swept through their population...

sunday bloody sunday...

this is the very last blog you'll ever get from this laptop - it's about to go bust, see. it's about to burst into flames, it's about to melt, it's about to short-circuit and smoke and ignite and fizzle and pop and die as surely as a Dalek plugged into the mains.

why, i hear thee ask? cake, is the answer. my brother is making a chocolate-espresso cake. part of this process is to sieve a vast amount of cocoa-powder into a bowl and he's kicking up such a dry miasma of aerosolized choco-dust that some of it is bound to be inhaled into the cooling ducts of this poor, put-upon 'puter and kill it. like garlic to dracula so is Green & Blacks to samsung. and there was i thinking that the probably cause-of-laptop-death would be a slow schleoric plaque-like build-up of benny-jizz betwixt the keys! dang! guess, despite my holistic genius i am still capable of being proven wronged.

ho.

anyway, today is Sunday, hence the cake* - Head Chef Tommy is being ably assisted by Sous Chef Joe and Commis Chef Little Tom. and, aaaaaaaaaaaargh, we're eating it now and it's rather fucking gorrgeous. so fluffy and moist and utterly delectable. cake straight out of the oven...get in!! naaaaaaaaaath...

aaaaaaaaaaanyway! i have scoffed enough for today - i am now, as of this moment, instituting a food-embargo on myself because i have a 6 mile-run to do in an hour and as such need to leave my stomach relatively empty, lest i cramp up & gurgle on the way. i am, however, looking forward to burning off all that cakey sugar by running very, very, very fast indeed - were it not so very indusive of diabetes meliutis i'd down a couple of pints of coke before each run to buzz me along on a tidal-wave of extremely refined carbohydrates, but if only in the interests of my future i decline this temptation and depend purely on natural liveric glycogen. as the man says: there's a hard way and an easy way - and the hard way's hard, alright, but not nearly as hard as the easy way...

currently i am bopping to interpol (Take You On A Cruise) and working on developing a website for this charity cycle-thing i'm helping out with in May - the Great Trike Trek! if i've not mentioned it yet then my drinking-buddy Mr Smeggy (Andy McKenna, to the rest of the world) is cycling from Lands End to John O'Groats on a recumbent trike and i am aiding in this quest by being his support-crew, dicking around in a motor-home getting his food, snacks, route, mechanics ready etc. so that all he has to worry about is the physical exertion instead of worrying about where he's going, spending time cooking and, also, having to carry the weight of all his stuff along with him. so - keep an eye on greattriketrek.com in the next couple of days to see how that all goes...currently i'm arseing around with some templates and wondering what colour to have the logo...maybe green...






*that was tom's reason. "because it's Sunday". i like his thinking...



anyway...because everyone needs a little poetry...





i'm timeless like a broken watch
i make money like Fred Astaire

i see that you've come to resist me. i'm a pitbull in time
your pretence is not what restricts me
it's the circles inside
the anatony of kisses/and a teacher who tries
would you like to be my missus/and in future with child
you knw we can't get back from here
but we can get away

baby don't you try to fight me
baby don't you try to fight
baby it will be alright

along the way/tears drown in the wake of delight
there's nothing like this built today
you'll never see a finer ship in your life
we sail today
tears will drown in the wake of delight
there's nothing like this built today
you'll never see a finer ship or/recieve a better tip in your life

i am a scavenger/between the sheets of union
lately i can't tell for sure/whether machines turn anyone
the anatomy of kisses and the future of lies
who knows/how we'll disappear
would you like to be my missus and in future with child
you know we can't get back from here

lady don't you try to find me
lady don't you try to fight
lady it will be alright

we sail today. tears drown in the wake of delight
there's nothing like this build today
you'll never see a finer ship in your life
along the way/the seas will crowd us with lovers at night
there's nothing like distance today
you'll never see a finer ship or/recieve a better tip in your life


black goddess
white goddess
red temptress of the sea/you treat me right
black goddess
white goddess
red temptress of the sea, you treat me right
oh my love/we're sailing/to norway
oh my love/we're leaving tonight

Phone

6280
Originally uploaded by tom_h.

By request of Macleod: let's get geeky.

This is my new phone. The key pad slides out from underneath the screen. The slide is active - so it's quite satisfying to hang up on people. There's a crappy camera in the front and a 2 megapixel one with something approaching a flash in the back. It has all the usual bollocks that you'll never use.

The video quality is pretty cool, to be fair. There's a slight downer in terms of the small ad banner for '3' interactive services on the front screen all the time but I imagine I'll find a hack for that when it gets sufficiently boring. It has a mini sd slot on the side and came with a 512mb card. The MP3 playback's good. I got excited this morning when I realised I could play tunes back via bluetooth and thought I might be able to use it via my car stereo. Sadly music via bluetooth sounds awful, so back to the drawing board on that one.

Random Teppan-yaki Grill

Today I ordered one of these off the interweb. I am presently unable to tell you why. I was talking to a colleague about his and thought it might be a good idea. They're basically electric skillets but seem to be incredibly rare. You can cook all sorts on it but you don't need to add fat. They're a bit like those george foreman things but they get much hotter. These might all be good reasons, but to randomly buy one without having first seen one seems a bit, well, random.

Booze Haul

I swung past Tesco on the way back yesterday to buy some healthy dinner.

Then I noticed they had 20% off all wine (and champagne) if you bought 6 bottles.

Cue some hurried back-aisle action.

Essentially, that takes the price of veuve clicquot down to £20. Can you go wrong?

New ipod photo?

iPod Video?
Originally uploaded by Craig Otis.

Rumours abound about new ipods. Tablet design, touchscreen, dropping the scroll wheel appears to be the consensus. Interesting. If true, I think I might have a good look at getting one. The present video ipods are a bit of a fudge and don't appeal. At the same time, I'm finding my shuffle a bit restricting. I'd like something I can load 20gbs of tunez onto and watch some shows on too. Let's see what Jobs comes up with.

Dating Update

It went well on Monday and we’re seeing each other again next week up in Farnham. I have used one of the few perks of my job and booked a hotel up there for the night to facilitate a longer duration visit. It has been a very long time since I did any of this dating stuff. The last time I was getting to know someone I had no history with was in November 2002.

Another dimension to this is that she’s a very accomplished person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not intimidated – but I’ve rarely been in the position before where I feel like I’m on the weaker side of the pairing. I feel like I’ve been places and done lots of good stuff but sometimes it doesn’t quite compare. She teaches music two days a week. She’s off to Madrid to play with the philarmonia next weekend. She’s somehow integrating all of this with a part time law course and all the attendant exams.

You know what? Writing it all down hasn’t made me feel better. Just call me Mr Thicko :)

Cunning (II)

Thanks to a steer from Benny I have won some tickets to see Editors on Saturday via ebay. Cause of victory: being able to bid right up to the wire, live and direct from the restaurant last night using my lovely new phone. Neither of my colleagues were very impressed – either by the process or the goods. Such is the price of working with old men.

Cunning (I)

My associates in Basingstoke think I’m in Aldershot

My associates in Aldershot think I’m in Basingstoke

Actually, I am halfway between the two, tucked up in bed in my hotel.

Reason: far too much wine last night

I wonder how long it will take them to realise.

sheesh

this is Maria Grachvogel, one of the most celebrated dress-designers in all of Sloane Square:




...i think the exact phrase to use would be "i didn't know there were that many branches"...

*shudders*

fuck me. anyway, i'm far happier looking at:



thandie newton, who i think is just plain stunnnnnnnnning. although note that i avoided a photo of her in that ludicrous dress. seriously though, i've always been rather more open to darker-skinned ladies than my peers...perhaps that's my gene-puddle crying out for a touch of fresh meat to the family bonzai-tree.

also, from personal experience, the amount of physical body-heat kicked out by girls seems to increase the darker their skin - this is why i've never fucked Denzelle Washington; i'd ignite.

anyway, lots been happening in my life, involving knobjockey ambulance drivers and broken legs and such. also, won the pub quiz tonight, as per usual. 27/30.

sample questions for tommy, who's currently seeing what notes he can get out of a viola player:

• in which European capital is Spandau Prison?
• is Brighton a village, town, or city?
• previously thought to be extinct for 60,000,000 years, what sort of fish was rediscovered in the 1960s?
• Johnny Cash sang about a giant who was bought low by love. how tall was he?
• which movie superstar was once ballroom-dancing champion of Hong Kong?

tiebreaker: what year was John Wayne born in?



as always: roma victor!!

The Return of Harvey the Lush

And so to London then for a weekend full of adventures. I spent a long time in Selfridges looking for shirts, t-shirts and shoes. Eventually I found one (1) shirt I liked in Zara. I seem to go through periods where I think everything in the shops is shite and it would appear I’m in one of those cycles now. I also bought some nice new shoes from Jones. This time out I chose to stay in the Trafalgar. Praise be for mini bars. DVD players and CD players in rooms are nice touches, but surely it would be better for most people these days for there to be a simple mini jack connection for ipods and things? Malmaison and I think maybe CityInns have started putting fully fledged ipod adaptors (so it charges you up as well as playing your tunes) in all their rooms, so how hard can it be? Anyway I digress

My date on Friday night was really cool. I was a bit selfish and we went to Chez Gerard in Covent Garden (which I really like) and drank a really nice bottle of Fleurie (which I also really like). I had a really good evening. We had a surprising amount of common ground. I made her laugh quite a bit. There were hardly any breaks in conversation and there was nothing you’d call an uncomfortable silence. All in all – fab. I walked her to the tube station and said goodbye. No gossip worthy kissing or anything. I think I might have mis-read the signs on that one actually, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the real gossip on that topic is that we’re meeting up again this evening in Odiham. I’m really looking forward to it to the point where I’m finding it difficult to focus on my coding. So much so that I appear to be writing a blog from work for the first time in a good couple of weeks. It is rather soon to be meeting again, I know, but if it feels right then you have to go for it, no?

Aside from female adventures, Saturday lunch found me in Putney. I met up with former flatmate Greg, who disclosed over bottle number 3 that he was shortly to move in with his girlfriend Emma. Greg has been living with her since we moved out of Old Street just under a year ago but has been in denial about the actual nature of his living arrangements, preferring to state that he was only staying with her for a little while. The good lady herself rocked up somewhere around bottle number 4 and by number 5 had ordered Greg to stop drinking. This is where my memory goes blank and I have to rely on witness statements and other materials. I think we (I) called it quits at bottle number 6. Somewhere along the line I appear to have bought a copy of the Jack Johnson CD, presumably as an ad hoc gift – I certainly don’t seem to have it on me any more, although I do have the receipt. There’s a video on my phone of me interviewing Greg as to his views on the recent cartoon crisis on a petrol station forecourt at approximately 1900 hours. Somehow I then transported myself to norf London. Judging by the hole in my finances, I can only assume that some kind of helicopter was involved (or failing this, a minicab).

Apparently I waited around for Nick and Dan to show up for about an hour, said hello and then bolted without telling anyone. I seem to remember a bus journey and then a Margarita (by myself) at the Texan Embassy, over the road from my hotel.

Needless to say, on Sunday I felt like I had been poisoned and spent most of the day having an out of body experience.

"he's having a stroke!! ...OF GEEEENUIS!"

hola

i have just return'ed from the metropolis, where i have spent the while a., drinking and b., gigging. the strokes! what a super bunch of fellas, eh? a decent gig. i have to be honest and say that it wasn't a great gig, though - they just didn't seem to give a shit. tight enough, for sure, and they were putting the effort into playing, aye, but they just couldn't really be fucked to engage, so it was a bit detached. however, the audience more than made up for the mental detachment because they were certainly getting physically intimate with me, or at least trying; me and Chris, with whom i attended this fetching little concerto, had by dint of cunning, guile, brute force (and, on one occasion, stubbing a cigarette out on the bulging muffin-top of some bloated man-mountain) negotiated our way through the heaving crowd to the 2nd row - centre - which as any veteran of any gig at all will tell you is the superbest place to be for the reasons hence:

• you can see everything
• you can hear everything, because not only is the sound balanced but it is also clearer and even non-damaging; antilogically if you get right close to the front of a gig then you punch through the interlocking fields of fire of the vast speaker-stacks into a chord of relative calm and can hear - instead of the big, old, distorted monster speakers the venue has you actually hear the small, new, clear, crisp monitor speakers that the band have onstage. thus clarity unt zero tintinitus. victory!
• by being second from the front your ribcage - unlike the feckless amateurs in front of you - is not crushed to bony paté against the crash-barriers by the combined weight of a thousand people behind you.
• also, you don't get kicked in the back of the head by crowd-surfers and - as an aside - you don't get elbowed in the face by security as they themselves reach over you to pull aforementioned crowd-sufers into the photography pit (wherethence they are lifted bodily by two steroid-addicts and hustled into the don't-you-fucking-do-that-again-sunshine beating-chamber [and ultimately thrown prone into the big river of fagbutty piss that passes for the access-ramp into the Hammersmith Apollo.])

anyway, i had a jolly good time. i do have to confess though that i had almost as much fun foiling the efforts of my giggish nemesis, some too-keen-teen in the third row who wished to shift (similarly in both positionality & possibility as Prince Andrew becoming King) into the front. alas, as my father is so fond of saying, old age & cunning beats youthful enthusiasm 9 times out of 8, and as such all his efforts to wedge, shunt, shift, claw, elbow, beat and pinch his way past - and sometimes through - me were artfully negated by my expert, expert self. like the USA & USSR in the cold war, everything visible to everyone else was cordial and calm but - below the shoulderline - it was a series of vicious and bloody encounters that respected no law of foul play.

i remain particularly proud of my leg-ju-jitsu in general and a delicately-timed head-butt in particular...i really should start playing rugby again...

anyway! a consequence of immersing yourself into the very centre of such things is fluidic; you literally become drenched with sweat, so t-shirt & shirt clinging to me in a film like...well...clingfilm, we emerged into the brutal cold of a london night to continue drinking elsewhere; however, by that time i had donned my beer-coat, and as such feared no such environment. all back to Barry's flat down the road, a lovely friend of Chris', scottish, and of that celtic strain that combines jet-black hair with the very palest skin - i attempted to create a situation where he'd stand on his head so as to make a comparison between him and a pint of guiness but to no avail, alas. anyway, he provided an effectively infinite supply of white russians and as such we were amused. also, being an A&R man for Sony (at least, up until last week, the poor sod [do have a look at one of his finds and tell me what you think]) he had a stack of so-new-it's-not-even-been-mastered-yet stuff to listen to, a sample CD of which i sniggeringly retitled "music to sell cars to". and then the white russians kicked-in (or perhaps Barry kicked me in) and consciousness was lost...

oh well.



time to fall asleep in the bath; cold, mind - lest my body has a flashback to last night's concert and remembers that the previous time it was pushed and rubbed up against girls was almost nine months ago...

Loaded Weekend

I'm meeting a girl called Tammy on Friday. Tammy is a musician who I met on a dating website. Dating websites are evil and so are most of the people on them. What’s promising about this specific meeting is that I’ve been corresponding with Tammy for a long time and she has yet to display any freakish qualities. Of course, one might argue that simply being on a dating website in first place is quite freakish enough. However.

What’s really nice about musicians is that they generally exhibit the same kind of passion (an abused word) for music that I like to think that I have. Examples are more powerful than explanation. I often remember the musical taste of people I meet, while I’ll often forget their names (witness Sue, who I work with, who’s mad for folk). Nick and I, when we meet, will often spend the first hour of conversation talking about new tunes, arguing about this band and that guitar part. Every time I go to see Jim and Angela I seem to take a CDR brimming with tunez – but I hadn’t realised this myself, and it took McConville to point it out.

Christ knows how that’ll go. There’s also some kind of coked up estate agent party happening in Kentish town (“Gosh, aren’t you great company when you’re on drugs? Oh, is that my taxi?” etc) which may well feature the return of the yummy mummy. Amusing fodder lies ahead, I’m sure. There’s all manner of other crap going on. Hoyan returns from Hawaii on Sunday and has requested that I linger around to receive her. Quite how much fun that will be remains to be seen (one suspects that, fresh off a 16 hour trip having left her boyfriend 15000 miles away, she may not be the proverbial barrel of laughs) but, then, what are friends for?

tumtetumtetum...

ahem.

reason for being absent so long: life block. which is like writer's block, but subtly different; one is where you find yourself unable to write about nothing and the other, mine, is where you just can't can't quite figure out how to write about something.

anyway, who cares. i'm back. in a bit of a weird mood though, to tell you the truth - you may think initially this to be a consequence of today being Clinton's Cards Shareholder's Day but i rise above such consumerist pseudo-soul banalities (for which read: sent three cards, got one - an all time ratio-record. get in!) and instead am troubled by something actually genuinely troubling, which i believe is a first in my little life, for i make it a point of personal policy to expertly avoid anything that could actually affect me. but there's no avoiding this, my children, no. no no no.

{bops to bloc party and tries to get the words in order}

the father of a friend of mine recently died. one of his christmas/hannuka presents was a set of glenfiddich whisky; three 200ml bottles of the 12, 15 and 18 year-olds. he managed to get through the 12 and 15 and was looking forwards to the 18 when he died.

i get home from work today, reeking of chlorine after going swimming, and find an expertly-wrapped box awaiting me. initially thinking it's for tom (the amount of shite he buys off e-bay is staggering, i tell thee), and then finding it's actually for me (i quickly check it for loose wires, over-enthusiastic postage, grease spots, uneven weight and other tell-tale parcel-bomb cluage) and then carefully slit it open to find - and i'm sure you've guessed this by now - a rather small bottle of eighteen-year old glenfiddich.

i don't cry much, as a rule. end of schindlers list, actually, is the only thing that gets me. i actually cry so infrequently that i'm under doctor's orders to watch the last five minutes of that film twice a year in order to sluice out all the little insect-carcasses that find their way up the ducts of anyone who does as much biking around as i do. and i manage to hold it together tonight, but not by much. a close run thing if i do say so myself, my old plum custards, my old apple tartlets. but i do wander rather listlessly around the kitchen for a goodly while whilst i can coax my superego back into some form of working order.

i'll get the note. actually, no, i'll leave it be. a sub-plot to all of this is that i was intending to come home and have a wee dram of the good stuff (duty-free. laphroig. one litre of. sweet dreams...) and had in fact been using this as my stock-response at work when asked what i was up to on valentine's - "yeah," i said, "i'm going to spend the evening curled up in bed with a beautiful & sophisticated 12 year-old. scottish. very tasty".

and so that's all a bit fucking mad. not looking forwards to work tomorrow. "aha, ben, how was your whisky?", i shall be asked. and i'm just going to have to stand there and smile and go, "yeah!" and smile and nod and look normal whereas *really* i'm going to be in fucking bits...

anyway. it's a small bottle. about eight inches high. unobtrusive colouring and almost camoflaged in the shadows in the kitchen. doesn't stop my eyes flicking to it every ten seconds though.

Roma Victor!

Benny, Widge, Smeggy (don't ask) and I have just won the pub quiz. My main contribution was the answer to "What name links Blondie, Santana and Tony Christie?"

We won a fiver. Around these parts, prizes that fold rather than prizes that jingle are practically unheard of. Behold your quiz gods etc.

Pheasant Curry

Takes 2 days to cook but by god was it tasty! Hunts that take place at the farm often leave us a brace of pheasants (avian dufusness) as an apology for waking us up early. This is very nice and all, but pheasant is actually a very unpleasant meat to cook or consume. It generally dries out really easily and, to my mind, doesn't taste very nice. However, curry may well be the way forward from here on in.

Pretty Golden

I was driving Ben home from the pub the other week after attending for a celebration (including music) of international kazoo day. Rob, the puppet master of the surreal and sometimes (allow me to be honest) irritating pub kazoo orchestra was in the car in front, which suddenly stopped, hazard lights having burst into action.

Quite out of the blue, Rob invited us round to his for a glass or two drawn from his wine silo. We stayed for a couple of glasses and ended up staying the evening and enjoying one of the most excellent breakfasts I've ever had. Simply stunning and quite spontaneous. Very memorable. This kind of stuff is what living's all about really, isn't it?

If you go down to the woods...

Railway Walk
Originally uploaded by tom_h.

Benny is not dead, I think he's just taking a break from blogging. Here's the proof: we went for a walk maybe last weekend maybe the weekend before. It was a nice walk through the Bere Forrest then along a disused railway line then a beer or two in a pub called the forrester then home. Benny kindly brought along one of my hip flasks filled with some of my brandy and then drunk almost all of it. How thoughtful :)

Reaping in Portsmouth

Portsmouth
Originally uploaded by tom_h.

See this building? It's near the main shopping bit in portsmouth. Notice anything? How about the "Offices to Let" sign? Two years ago this was a call centre and employed just over one hundred people. It was part of a network of twelve similar centres across the UK. Feeling (correctly) that the organisation had considerable scope for being operated more efficiently the powers that be called in some management consultants and lo, just under a year later this office and one other like it in London was closed with the loss of around 250 jobs. The consultants had only been brought in to deliver 5% savings but actually delivered 22.7%.

Obviously I was involved with all this. I was one of the three people who ran the project and to be even more precise I was the person responsible for proving in an extremely thorough and indisputable way that all these people were surplus to requirements. Clever old me, eh? I can't help wondering what was going through the mind of the manager of the place as he locked the doors behind him for the last time. He was a good guy, but the organisation wasn't really supporting him. The previous manager had seen the writing on the wall and went into self preservation mode. The new guy tried to turn it all around but...well. The fact that the two selected for closure were the most expensive (being based in the south) can hardly have been a total coincidence.

Of course there are all kinds of sops you can apply to mitigate your guilt. It wasn't my fault, it was the fault of whoever hired all those surplus people in the first place. I'm sure they've all got better jobs now and are happier. If we hadn't delivered the savings then the organisation might have gone under with the loss of many more jobs. I didn't make the actual decision to sack them, the organisation did and it could have found new types of work for them. Whatever.

The simple fact is that when I look at this picture I feel guilty. It's not a logical reaction, it's an emotional one. So in the future when I wonder why I left my job I'll look at it.

(B)logjam

Periodically, I think this happens to the best of us; so much is going on that blogging goes on hold. And then when things calm down a bit it feels like there's so much to write about that you put it off for longer than you might usually. And then, of course, you're in a vicious circle. So here's a summary:

I got a lovely new phone. It's a 6280 with video calling and all sorts, apparently. Unfortunately, no one else I know has a video phone. So I'm reduced to telling people I have one. Or, as in this case, writing about it. Hooray. The important thing is that it's a symbol. I no longer have a company phone, I have my own phone. Suckers!

I started contracting again this last monday. Whether it's being paid by the day or the technical, engaging nature of the work or the increased responsibility I'm suddenly loving work all of a sudden. I'm sitting here on Saturday morning and there's a part of me that can't wait for monday to come. Weird eh?

Johnno and I have decamped from the hilton to a nice hotel called the george which is a junction up the motorway in an old town. It's lovely and a tenner cheaper and instead of walking out on to the ring road we walk out on to a lovely high street which is home to some awesome restaurants. Why we didn't do this ages ago I don't know. Okay, so the rooms are smaller and it's a bit noisier. So what?

I now have Fridays off. Supposedly I negotiated this in order to have time to look for more work, but I spent yesterday chilling out, shopping, fiddling with guitars and wandering around portsmouth... although I did sort my pension and an ISA out, which is vaguely productive.

Music: over the last few weeks I've really got back into this with a vengeance. I have acquired Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, Hard Fi, Editors, Green Day and Kanye West. Why I let all this slip for a couple of months I'll never know. Out of touch I guess. Perhaps it's time to subscribe to NME or something? I can't seem to find any good music websites.

Decaf Coffee. Now, I gave caffeine up as a throwaway new year's resolution last year and have made very few transgressions over the last 14 months. But I've only just started trying decaf and it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The pricier stuff is actually pretty tasty. Perhaps it's time to foresake the mint tea.

Sauces. Adventures in the kitchen proceed apace. I have successfully made Bearnaise and Hollandaise sauce, having recently sorted my life out and got a balloon whisk. I should say another balloon whisk as I had one already but it's packed up in a couple of boxes with all my special kitchen stuff. Anyway, the aise sauces are basically butter whisked together with egg yolks in a bowl over a pan full of simmering water. Bearnaise specifically is a bastard. We're basically talking about very sensitive emulsions which split into a million bits if you whisk them too much, too little, too fast, too slow, in the wrong direction, too hard, too soft, add too much air, get them too hot, let them get too cold etc. And I have made them both, right first time every time. Yay me.

Bass: progress has slowed a bit, but I've identified a bass teacher and have his number so shall call soon and arrange lessons.

Quiz: the pub quiz is a confusing bastard. Last week my team came last, but the week before that we came first. Feck! Benny won with Tim this last week and got 30 out of 30. Grrrr.

PCs: I'm doing stacks of spreadsheet and database and VBA stuff at the moment so I'm working on my PC again. PCs are fucking annoying. They're always telling you things in those fucking tedious balloons at the bottom of the screen, rather like a toddler tugging at your clothes to get your attention. Fuck off windows!