What can you acheive in three years?

Some great public works? The creation of a much admired business enteprise? A trip to all four corners of the earth* maybe? Any of these things has so much more worth than over a thousand day’s of nonsense that makes up this blog.

3 years since I wrote this. 2 years since I said I was stopping and a year since I realised I’d already said everything twice, but no one seemed to have notice. Someone once said “every person has one book in them” and – while they may be right – that’s really where it should stay. The only thing you can charitably say about individuals exposing their vanity electronically is they’re not wasting any real paper, and only wasting their own time.

Not much more to add other than a thousand thanks to Andy who hosts the site and puts up my dumb questions and occasional mass deletions. And a reply to those of you – who clearly also have time to waste – asking what all the random characters are in the archived posts.

At first I thought you meant my friends. Then I mused it was merely lazy spelling and zero proof reading, but on further investigation it seems one of the interminable upgrades has morphed ‘ to {45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}${45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}^{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2}X. I’m seeing it as a bit of an improvement, and with 300 posts to edit, it has a resolution priority just below counting the hairs on the dog.

Later this week, I shall bore you with a non ironic post heavily detailed in the joy of plumbing. 42 this year, which must mean I am due to understand the meaning of life. And possibly plumbing.

In the meantime, the hedgehog rocks on!

* What is that all about? It’s ROUND. 3 years on and this stuff still annoys me.

I’ve never met a nice South African..

as the old song goes. Actually that’s not true, a very high percentage of South African’s who have crossed my path are not even as annoying as fellow Yorkshiremen. So let me be more precise, I’m not going to meet a nice South African this week.

Starting Saturday, when I broke my own Rule#1 (Life is too short to drink with arseholes) and spent the goodly part of a day being Corporate Hospitalitied – an experience that should cause you to happily chop your own leg off, rather than spend even five minutes in this dreadful ‘Jeans’n’blazer’ experience.

And sitting high up with a commanding view of the pride of English Rugby being comprehensively stuffed by the Southern Hemisphere bullies, was in no way improved by a happy Saffer chuntering “Another try, oh this is SO GOOD, I LOVE beating the ENGLISH, It’s BETTER than SEX” [Receive Beery Prod] “Can you HEAR Me, How SHIT are your team? Totally SHIT that’s WHAT”

Eighty minutes of that got a little wearing. It’s the kind of cold strutting arrogance, iced with cruelty, but thinly veiled by Jingoistic flag waving which reminds me very much of another nation. Who would that be? Ah yes, the English.

Luckily I am able to escape the unbridled mirth of anyone who practices extreme schadenfreude whenever English sport has been humiliated- (so that’s every other nation based on today’s experience) – by leaving the country for a week. One could powerfully argue that the country that is to receive me may well continue to heap ridicule on the nation of my birth.

Yes that’s right, with perfect timing, next week I shall be travelling to Johannesburg, before which I shall be desperately practising my Australian accent. This and the terrifying schedule that has just slithered into my inbox is likely to preclude much in the way of hedgehog stuffing for a bit.

Until them, throw another shrimp on the barbie for me!

I wrote something…

.. it’s over there at BikeMagic where Mike was again chronically short of content. I was due to go back and have another go at mincing downhill with truckage the other way, but work got in the way. Which was, too put it very mildly, quite disappointing.

Not quite as disappointing as the train falling to pieces AGAIN this evening, resulting in about 200 people crammed into the two remaining working carriages. And while it resembled the black hole of Calcutta in there, at least the doors didn’t randomly open and spit you head first into some Cotswold stone.

The rest of the train offered that and many other faults including broken heating and a whistling sound which could only have been a precursor to something exploding. I was so grateful to finally get home, only four and one half hours after I’d left London, I fell to my knees on the platform and snogged it – Pope like – to announce my arrival.

I’m starting to get all ‘Chiltern Railways’ about that train journey.