"Nothing but the rain"
There are four things I say to my son as I put him to bed. It’s just a routine that has developed over the last year or so. WW puts #2 to bed and I do the eldest. It’ll change when they are both in the same room but for now:
Have a nice sleep.
I’ll see you in the morning.
Love you loads.
Night night.
Watched this guy park, get out, check his parking and then walk away. What a knob! He might as well have parked right in the middle of the two spaces.
Nissan Micra, red, 1000cc (ish), 16v. I had it for about 4 months.
What a lovely afternoon! Spent time in Whitstable, Kent. Lunch, play, skipping stones and an ice cream. It doesn’t get much better than that. My children were a delight! And I skimmed an 8er.
The Union flag through the orangery roof:
Castle turrets:
More of the castle and a lovely sky:
No real sea movement. Reminds me of Flatford Mill or it would if it was raining!
And here’s the beach 3D style! From Photosynth:
The end of one of the pubs in the Kent village of Eccles. It’s a bit of a shame really. They are going to build some houses on the ground because at least they’ll make money for the land-owners. We do have one pub left in the village and I guess I can’t complain as I went into the Walnut Tree just once in the 6 years it was open and I lived in the village.
This week I shall be mostly trying to avoid the Super Bowl result. I recorded it last night but will take a few days to watch it.
Kids, you see. They don’t get it. Gone are the days of missing lectures because I stayed up until x o’clock watching the Super Bowl and getting a bit drunk. Now I have kids I have the issue that they don’t seem to want to get out of bed late or have a lazy day. They always wake up by 06:30 and just rush, rush all day. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
So I’ll be watching the NFL final game over a few nights, trying to make the next play before falling asleep and getting up with the kids. I guess it beats my college days of not really seeing past the first quarter while playing Chase The Ace and making far too much noise in the hall’s tv room!
It has taken a long time but I think it is now the time to relegate BMW drivers from the much coveted top spot of the Charts of Arrogance. They have been surpassed by a more irritating and rude bunch of gits. I speak, of course, of Range Rover drivers.
This collection of people who drive the huge, gas guzzling, aero-dynamically inefficient, four wheel drive vehicles are quickly turning out to be a bunch of BMWankers.
It used to be that BMW drivers failed to realise that their car had indicators or that to drive too close to another car was dangerous. Everyone knew that if there was a car doing dangerous stuff (and it wasn’t a Citroen Saxo driven by a baseball cap wearing, pierced youth) then it was going to be a BMW. Their reputation was awful. If you were being cut up on a motorway, or cut up at a junction or a car just braked infront of you and turned without warning then it was a BMW. It was just their right to do that.
Now, I find (spot the confirmation bias) that it is Range Rover drivers who do all the nasty stuff on the roads and endanger my life. They don’t indicate. They pull infront of you. They drive too close to you. They are the NEW and CROWNED arrogant arses of the tarmac. Whether it is the height that these drivers have to sit or just the money they must have to own one of these behemoths they really don’t seem to care about any other drivers. Roadcraft to them is just doing what you want, selfishly ignoring the safety of the rest of us.
What would the roads be like if everyone drove Range Rovers? Perhaps, because BMWs are rather ubiquitous and affordable it means that they have regressed back to the norm? Or it could be an economic thing. The type of person who thought that BMWs were cool and nice 15 years ago has now morphed into the type of middle aged man who thinks that owning a Range Rover means that they “own” the road and the right to endanger my safety. If they really used these cars for off-road and risked their own safety then good for them. But, they don’t.
I would like to appeal to these drivers’ sense of community and social responsibility in an attempt to make them see the error of their ways but it is clear they have none. So I won’t.
With two weeks to go before the NFL Super Bowl I have to decide who to support. My teams didn’t get there, New Orleans Saints and the Miami Dolphins. I cheered on the 49ers in the AFC championship as they beat the Saints and so were suitable of my support.
Now the choice is either the New York Giants or the New England Patriots. Too many support the Patriots, they are ridiculously popular in the UK. The Giants have Eli Manning as a quarterback and any Manning is irritating.
So I’ve decided to make my relationships more fun. My sister and her husband like the Patriots and Ades (one of the Fulham Five) likes the Patriots. That settles it. My cheers will go to the New York Giants.
Altogether now: D-Fense!
A long time ago in a college not that far from London, pretty much in the middle actually, there were a bunch of students in their first year at University. “Let’s enter the Field Cup”, someone suggested. “OK”, was the response.
The Field Cup was essentially a pub crawl for teams with challenges and forfeits in each pub. We were rookies and unfortunately for the older entrants we were doing quite well. We had taken some loot and even a Hall Of Residence Warden to the final judgement but, because we were up against a group of girls from the CGCU, we were docked just enough points to ensure we came second. Good try for a bunch of Fresher’s though!
We were in one pub, possibly The Queen’s Arms, and our challenge was to sing on the karaoke machine. Chrissy was lead vocals on “Let It Be” by The Beatles and we were backing singers. However, for some reason we were wearing our socks on our hands! That must have been a forfeit somewhere but precise details elude me, 20 years later. The precise details probably eluded me the next day too. We shall all remember Karl’s backing vocal calls of “socks on hands” to the rest of the pub! Hilarious!
You had to be there, really.
So, I’m sitting with #1 watching some episodes of Dipdap on BBC iPlayer using the PS3. Just thinking how lucky the youth of today are! No waiting for tv shows, films or fast forwarding video cassettes!
When I was a child in the 1970s and 80s there were only 3 channels on tv although that didn’t matter because tv started at 3 in the afternoon. Breakfast tv hadn’t begun and the day wasn’t filled with shows about buying and selling houses because daytime tv didn’t exist. We also had a black and white valve tv which you had to turn on 10 minutes before you wanted to watch it to allow it to warm up.
I remember watching the start of Channel 4 and seeing the first episode of Countdown. I also remember the start of breakfast tv which was pretty rubbish. Also, the start of channel 5, which I saw in Manchester, was pretty rubbish. Now I have Sky and about 500 channels that I don’t watch and about 8 channels that I do.
These days I can watch tv on my PS3 and see catch up tv streamed over the Internet. I can watch live tv on my iPhone and all the catch up services on that too.
All this means my sons will never have to wait for a tv show or worry that they’ve missed the latest episode of their favourite show. Quite stunning the changes that have occurred really. 3 channels on part time to hundreds of channels and on demand. Utter brilliance!