Not all of you obviously. Because while I am totally up for a letterbox widening, ego boosting encounter with an incredulous but insanely jealous postman, it’d just be wrong. And mostly because you’re either blokes or surfing from the safety of a mental ward. Or possibly both.

Still I’m on holiday and that’s good. So are the kids which you could possibly label as a slight downside. And so are everyone else’s kids which is a definite goolie masher when you’re all cramming into the same ball pits, swimming pools, parks, A&E departments, etc.

A&E was almost a certainty when the kids demanded roller blading once I’d vetoed the ball pit on the non unreasonable grounds it represented a fire risk. And 300 baying children violently assaulting each other and being noisily sick is not my idea of a tenner well spent.

The choice of knee pads was a good one. Something for me to learn from the kids.

Anyway Carol and I have turned our noses up – quite rightly – at all that Valentine’s nonsense and just settled for a quiet card each. Congratulating ourselves on shunning the rampant commercialism of twelve roses for fifty quid, a short but expensive trip to the picture shop rampantly commercialised me out of£250 on pictures for each others Valentine’s present”

I fully expect these to rest peacefully in our old pictures home where huge expanses of what was previously money collect dust in a upstairs corner. And because I’m married to a klepto, there’s a pictorial history spanning twenty years of changing tastes. Starting with classy black ash framed Athena prints through an expensive original pencil drawing phase and spiralling out of any sort of control once the kids were born. Well the first kid anyway, poor old Random has only the mugshots from school, and the occasional digital recording of her falling face forward into her food.

It does make me hanker somewhat for my poster of Kim Wilde in her ˜Kids in America’ heyday. That poster brought me many hours of enjoyment during long nights in my student days. It’s a double shame that she’s turned into a bit of an old boiler, and that the poster remained in our dingy digs once it became apparent it was stuck to the wall. I’ll leave it at that should I? Right-O.

Two delivery vans waited until we’d left the house before gleefully depositing a why can’t you stay in all day�” note under the door. Randoms’ bike was one of them and now the only time the courier can deliver it is sometime in 2009. And then only to Cornwell or Mars.

I’ll admit to this being a bit of a guess on my part since they’ve clearly heard about customer service by issuing a number with the card. Sadly they’ve failed to understand what it means since there is no one to answer the phone. Somehow I remained calm while an automated attendant reminded me “your call is important to us as we’re creaming 50{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} off the cost of this 0845 number“.

Too early for a beer? No, thought not.

It would be lovely to report that the weeks worth of tumbleweeds rolling through this electronic wasteland were a direct result of a life so filled with excitement and joy. This is sadly not the case. Nor have the creative pathways of drivel been blocked by a foolhardy attempt on sobriety.

It’s worse than that. I’ve been busy. But not busy/interesting or busy/useful more busy/bored or busy/work. The latter came as quite a shock but next years’ budgets wait for no one and there is enough inventive accounting flashing through a thousands spreadsheets to keep us in shredders for a year. My thankless task is to catalogue the project list for next year which is to words what the budget is to figures.

To label it merely dull would be a affront to the glory of English language. It reached high to touch extreme tedium, treacled away hours though dreary and latterly become marooned on an island of mind-numbing boredom. And my reward? Well let me lead you in by explaining it was about as much fun as you can have with a ladder. In winter. Which is not much.

In between was nose-in-the-trough Rugby laid on with four course meals, fifteen different ways to get pissed and some nice cheese to follow. Sandwiched between was a rugby match enlivened only by 82,000 drunken overcoats attempting a Mexican wave. It was more a flaccid handshake performed by the terminally uninterested. It put me in mind of a spontaneous outbreak of Parkinson’s disease.

I drove, didn’t drink and felt worthy. And with the following morning bringing a swaying ladder and some Frank Spencer type action with a bucket, I’m rather glad some bastard hangover didn’t join me up there. If anyone feels the urge to understand the mind numbing task that is cleaning external paintwork, please refer to a previous paragraph for a selection of appropriate adjectives.

To complete a weekend lacking a certain sparkle, my eldest daughter “ who lives outside the rules of self evidency; for example don’t try and eat an elephant” is merely a sulky challenge “ abandoned her thousand toys and rigged up a new game in the kitchen. Simply put, it showed a lively seven year old shrieking weee” as she rotated rapidly through open space, defying gravity by dint of hanging onto a cabinet door.

Somewhat beyond the operating parameters of said door I expect, which is probably why we found it on the floor with crying child desperately explaining I didn’t know it’d break”. Pass me the elephant.

Passably grumpy now, I was confronted by an article by that tosser Nigel Havers’ ranting on about how cyclists are trying to kill him. Normally I wouldn’t waste electrons calmly rationalising why the bloke is a complete dickhead but maybe he’s right. I’d certainly sign up to any club (especially if it came with a club) that roams the streets of London hunting down smug pricks allowed a shouty mouthpiece in the Times.

It’d be a small sample but hey we can have fun with just one.

EDIT: having just re-read Havers’ article and remembering how his last badly argued, poorly researched spite was properly put in it’s place, I may just write that article.

There’s no F’in snow would be the traditional response to a global warmed planet, where grass ski-ing looks to be the next big thing. Except for today where outside it is mostly white and wintry. The garden has disappeared as has one of the children. The other one has built a snowman which has some interesting anatomical details and a “belly like daddy’s” apparently. Snowballs have been thrown, cold hands desperately blown on and some hill based bin bag action looks on the cards for lunchtime.

I’m not that cheap – it’s just what kind of idiot would buy a sledge if you live in the South of the country? Unless for nostalgic value. But at 7am, this was the scene outside the front door. Already “Angry of Aylesbury” was calling any radio station desperate for content and lambasting the railways operators, the gritting companies and anyone responsible for public services.

As you would expect, not much is working with the road blocked by those special people who fail to understand snow traditionally has an adverse effect on braking distances. The railway managed to shunt the odd carriage to London but the platform was filled to capacity with boot stamping, miserable commuters waiting for anything train shaped.

So I heard anyway. Our road doesn’t appear on any gritting map and while there was much sliding and damaging of hedgerows, almost nobody was getting out. We have a local councilor living in the road who maybe could have called in a favour if he wasn’t marooned behind a jacknifed van.

I took the road bike out for a laugh. It wasn’t that funny actually with 100psi in 23cc tyres. Each pedal stroke flipped the bike sideways and left you cursing through a mouthful of snow. The mountain bike fared somewhat better but I think the enjoyment would have faded if a slidey journey to the station offered nothing more than the chance to ride home again.

According to the weather fairies, our massive four inch dump will be nothing more than slush and ice tomorrow. It’s about stopped now but it’ll be fun while it lasts.

A few more snowy shots Here.

Must have been fun for the rest of you going to work 🙂

Steve “Watlington” Watkins a few years back when he had a proper bike. It looks a bit like that outside today with a proper wintery minus five frost and ice on every flat surface. Obviously that’s not our back garden in the picture nor does it have Steve in it right now. Which is good, because much as I like Steve, he and I have a drinking game that started about five years ago and shows no sign of abating until we’re both hospitalised with Liver cirrhosis.

It’s a simple format; turn up at the pub and start drinking until one of us falls over. And fun as it is, 10am is probably not the best time to play it.

EDIT: I’m stunned. Two bits of free to use technology working first time and without any difficult rooting around in the complex underbelly of the hedgehog. Which makes it exactly the opposite of almost any Microsoft product. I’ve decided today is Microsoft bashing day and I bet their quaking.

I’ve already had quite alot to say about the sheer pointlessness of devices that claim to do anything you could ever possibly want but, in reality, do nothing very well at all. My SmartPhone nestles perfectly into this category with it’s head banging slowness, bastardised Windows apps and general unsuitability for making an receiving calls.

Occasionally though, the camera is quite fun.

If this works, it’s a direct post from Flickr. So I fully expect this picture to turn up on some other poor buggers’ blog. Good job I decided not the post the one with the goat then.

EDIT: Bloody Hell, that’s clever. I can now post pictures directly from the useless, over-hyped, irritatingly smug annoyance of the phone to the blog. How did I ever manage to survive without that?

Technology has the habit of creating fantastic solutions for which their are no obvious problems. You don’t agree? I give you Windows Vista and, at which point, the defense rests.