Shameless self-promotion – Rent a room in Chelmsford!

Yes, yes, it’s a blatant misuse of the blog to self-promote the spare room in my flat, but in all honesty it’s a fucking lovely room, and I’m a bloody nice guy, so why wouldn’t you want to rent the spare room and live with me?

Here is the link: http://spareroom.co.uk/2250212

If you’ve read this blog at all you’ll have an idea what I’m like, if not, then do read some of the older entries and ignore the bitchy bits. Maybe you want to be the star of some future entries in the blog? Again, renting a room will get you that privilege. Maybe.

So what do you get for your money? Well I have a full sports package (fnarr fnarr) in my Sky subscription. I have an XBox and Wii wired up to a fucking big HD tv, and I’m a bloody nice bloke. So click the link above, contact me and we’ll go from there.

This post is brought to you after a looooong week and is mostly powered by caffeine and bleach fumes, so you’ll forgive any crapness.

Mood: Tired and sweary.

Location: Home, Chelmsford

Open the thingy! (aka: How we almost crashed the car)

Kids are the source of just about everything weird that seems to happen to me. Well kids and Tasha, who seems to act as though she has the mental age of a cat (yes, that doesn’t make sense, but equally it won’t offend any parents and carers of mentally-aged whatevers.)

I was driving the kids back from school today, with my 7 year old daughter having won the right to sit in the front of the car (and trust me when I say “won”, any immediate imagery of fights that the word kicks up are probably correct.) As we were driving along she wound down her window.

We have a decent car. It has air con. I remember my first car which was an old “Y” registration Mini – 14 years old when I got it, and the only air con that had was a small rusted hole in the passenger footwell, and windows that didn’t quite wind all the way down. The car I currently drive has proper aircon. You press a button and if you left it running it’d double as a refrigerator. PROPER aircon. I’m also mindful that as the aircon is used, fuel consumption levels increase, and as a tightwad, I hate having the windows open at the same time. Back to the story.

My seven year old wound down the window as we drove along in a fully air-conditioned car. I moved my hand down to my door and pressed the button to wind the window back up.

“But daddy, I’m hot!” seven year old whinged.

“The aircon is on,” I countered, waving a hand in the direction of the air vent furthest away from me, “open the thingy…” I said as my hand floundered about in the air like Michael J Fox trying to give a high-five.

“Open this?” seven year old, clearly confused, an emotion I should have clearly picked up on.

The thingy.

“Yes!” I said, wondering why it was such a strange concept for her.

Then next couple of seconds were aural hell. A click, followed by a beeping sound and sudden shouting from within the car. For some reason seven year old had completely misunderstood me and opted to open the passenger door as we drove along at 40mph in rush hour.

Fortunately the door didn’t open far, and swung back immediately after being opened, partially shutting itself, and as I frantically checked mirrors, looked behind me and swung my arm over to close the door properly I was able to get the door shut completely.

Seven year old remained quiet as I asked – fairly calmly, considering – why she’d thought I had meant she should open the door.

That’s been my afternoon…

Mood: Shocked.

Location: Home, Chelmsford

Reflection.

Ahhhh, reflection. At times my life seems like a big mirror, and all I can do is gaze into it and look at what is happening around me.

Recently I’ve been very blasé about life and the things that are happening around me. It almost feels as though I’ve been taking anti-depressants, such is the calm, non-worried approach I’ve adopted to almost any problem in recent weeks. This is very unlike me and – for the record – I’ve taken no drugs at all barring the odd paracetamol.

I really don’t know what my future holds at the moment. This year certainly hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to, and I feel a definite bitterness that my plans didn’t work out as I’d hoped, though bizarrely the bitterness seems buried and as neutral as an acidic taste can be.

Mood: Tired

Location: Starbucks, Chelmsford

So you want a new blog entry?

What is there to say after three weeks of relative silence on the blog? Loads, to be honest, but nothing (again) that I want to go into. Work is going well. The love life is going well. My private life is all over the place, as it always seems to be, and I’m as skint as ever.

We’re in the middle of a drought, despite two weeks of almost constant rain, and if I hear the jokes about having “the wettest drought ever” one more time, I might cry.

I’m finding that the silly little things are annoying me at the moment.

I took the kids swimming yesterday and got the hump at the fact that the lockers had a sign saying they were “1£” rather than “£1″.

1£ FFS!

I turned on BBC News earlier on BBC One, to be met with the announcement that “man found dead and locked in a suitcase was ‘probably killed unlawfully’” – No shit, really?

Sky Sports News tweeted that Fabrice Muamba was confirmed to be attending the Bolton vs Spurs match the next day, just forty something days after having an on-pitch heart attack. Man goes to football match. Newsworthy indeed.

I had drinks midweek with the very heavily pregnant Loz and her hubby Kip – another amusing night out that included laughing at those less fortunate than us (and that includes Kip taking the piss out of me), Loz moaning with the general aches and pains that a 40-week pregnant woman moans with, only for Kip to declare that he “knows how she feels” because he had some trapped wind.

I read a blog that contained the line “thank you for your concern. I am no longer bleeding from the ass.”, and laughed long and loud at it.

I shared with Twitter how men organise trips to the pub. You’ll note the lack of words, the timing of the texts and the distinct no-pissing-aboutness of it.

And lastly, I got in from work last Saturday at around 3pm, having had a couple of pints in the pub on the way home, snuck into bed and had THE BEST nap I have ever had. Three solid hours of blissful sleep.

This is the most interesting highlights from my week, and you wonder why I don’t blog more?

Mood: Tired

Location: Home, Chelmsford

A letter from the heart.

In early December 2010, Tasha flew off to Australia for several weeks. Since splitting from her boyfriend a few months earlier we had become fairly inseparable, and I knew that I was going to miss her desperately while she was away.

Before she left I popped in to visit her and handed her a sealed envelope.

“This is for you,” I told her, clasping the letter in my hand, “but you must promise me – PROMISE ME – that you won’t open it until you land in Australia.”

Her face flushed with anxiety.

“It’s nothing bad, I swear,” I told her, trying to soothe her worries, “but it’s important to me that you don’t open it until you land in Oz.”

I held on tightly to the letter until Tasha acquiesced, agreeing to my request. She packed the letter away in her luggage and we said no more about it. A couple of days later she was on the plane, spending little over a day flying Down Under.

The plane stopped en route in the Middle East, and Tasha took the opportunity to grab the letter from her overhead bag. Ignoring my pleas from 48 hours earlier to wait until she was at her final destination (“I was bored! There was a long wait.” she later explained.), she opened the letter.

I wasn’t there, which is a shame, as I’d have loved to have seen her face, and the range of emotions as she read the note that I had carefully written for her.

In big red felt tip, taking up most of the page, was just one word.

CUNT!

Edit: I thought I’d check Tasha’s version of events before posting this. This is her view, as taken from our text exchange:

Me: Do you remember the letter I gave to you before you went to Australia, with strict instructions not to open it until you landed? xx

Tasha: Yes…and I followed them….and I had a little wee laughing so much when I opened it! Xxx

Me: What were the instructions? X

Tasha: Do NOT open this till you get to Oz…..

Me: You opened it when the flight landed in the Middle East because you were bored! Can you remember what was inside? Xx

Tasha: No I didn’t I opened it when I got to the bedroom as it was in my suitcase…it said CUNT on a post it note xx

Me: Yay! Yeah it did xx

I’m assured that she found it absolutely hilarious (as did I, obviously) and that the “had a little wee” comment wasn’t merely a bladder-based medical problem, though I appreciate many will read this and be left scratching their heads as to what we find so funny.

Mood: Amused.

Location: Home, Chelmsford

Come Dine With Me

I had the kids over this weekend, and although I ended up spending most of the weekend in bed with a virus that knocked me for six, the kids were generally good and kept themselves amused.

On Saturday night, having spent a couple of hours (no doubt spurred on by my 11 year old) watching Come Dine With Me, which had featured our home City of Chelmsford this week, the kids decided they would rate dinner a la Come Dine With Me.

I took a photo of my 9 year old’s score card. Things I should point out. 1) There was no starter. I can only assume she is referring to the garlic bread that was served up with her pasta. 2) Despite an unhappy face rating, she scored me an overall 8, 3) The dessert (profiteroles) is referred to, and she mentions how her elder sister took too much of the chocolate sauce. I believe this (unfairly) affected the rating towards me.

My seven year old joined in too, declaring, before dessert was served, that she was giving a rating of 4.

“Four?!” I asked, surprised as she had finished her dinner for once, “well that just means you don’t get any dessert.”

“Not four! I rate it a ten. Ten!” was the swift response.

Kids are so easy to bribe.

Mood: Ill.

Location: Home, Chelmsford

Llamas

Llamas - Keeping my brain ticking over.

I was admonished (politely) earlier for not posting on the blog recently. I’ve not really had the time, but seeing as my brain was trying to take leave of it’s own senses earlier, I thought I’d share my 30-second thought process as I walked down the condiment aisle in Tesco earlier when I saw a new product – Llama’s Baked Bites.

Hmmm. Someone who farms llamas would be a llama farmer.

But if someone hurt that farmer, then that person would be a llama farmer harmer.

Imagine if it was the President of the USA that did it! The press would have a field day and he’d forever be known as Obama – The llama farmer harmer.

And if there were TWO murderers, both called Obama, but one was more violent than the other then in order to differentiate between the two we’d have one nicknamed Calmer Obama – The llama farmer harmer.

But then if it was revealed that the violent llama farmer was a bit of a bastard (maybe he’d been killing the llamas. Who knows. That’s not important here.) who’d been killed by the nice Obama then it’d be known as an incident called Calmer Obama – The llama farmer harmer karma.

I swear that this was a real in-head conversation that happened earlier.

Pray for me.

Mood: Brain-fried

Location: Home, Chelmsford

God, Fabrice Muamba and why we don’t need the NHS. (& a sweary photo)

The haze of the past few days seems to have lifted slightly, and the nagging ache in my back, caused by pulling a small, light chair away from a table in Starbucks over the weekend, seems to have subsided somewhat. I still have the remains of a sore throat, thought that can be attributed to hay fever, I guess, and today is the first day since Saturday that I haven’t taken any painkillers. That has its own knock on effect, of course, which is that after several days of taking medicine, my body reacts to the sudden lack of drugs by giving me a headache. No biggy, but still (quite literally) a pain.

My evenings this week have been fairly non-descript, and I’ve tucked myself up in bed before 9pm on three different nights. The only exception was a night out to a local bar in the City centre (God bless Her Majesty for upgrading the town last week) called Baroosh, which is a recent big favourite of Kip & Loz. In fact, the night was remarkable since, given his obvious love of the place, I didn’t once see Kip rub himself against the building in a show of affection as I suspected I may have done.

Kip brought along his new toy, which was a flashy camera, and insisted on taking some photos. If I remember [Edit: I remembered!], I will post the one he’s put on his blog for all to see as – for once – I didn’t hate it on site.

Next week I’m off up North for a few days with work, and then spending the following week on a two day work course in London. Note to self: I really should plan something and go out in London after the course.

Life feels like it is unravelling in front of my eyes in many aspects, but there are at least some constants to keep me going and to keep me distracted. One of these is a visit to see Dave Gorman in Chelmsford on Saturday week. I’ve no doubt I’ll come out of there with the desire to write, as is often the way, only to get distracted by FIFA or something else when I get home. Time will tell.

This week also saw Muamba collapse on the field at Spurs vs Bolton, and then a Twitter-fuelled “Pray4Fabrice” campaign. Fortunately, after suffering a heart attack on the pitch and being officially dead for over an hour (Not sure I believe that, but it was in one of the tabloids), he seems to be on the mend. His fiancée has said that he is alive “by the will of God”, which makes me wonder if we should dock the pay of the on-field paramedics, ambulance drivers and hospital staff who – perhaps fleetingly – seemed to have done the hard work in saving the poor bastard, but now seems as though, seeing as God saved him, they were probably sat round doing nothing.

And we wondered why the government see fit to scrap the NHS.

Mood: So-so

Location: Starbucks, Chelmsford

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Bear faced lie.

Royal Court Theatre

As promised in the entry from a couple of days ago, here is the 100 word play that Tasha & I submitted to The One Show.

The idea for this came from the Royal Court Theatre, who have a website dedicated to the idea here.

BEAR FACED LIE – By Tasha & Dan

A CUSTOMER ENTERS A SHOPFRONT, WHERE A WORKER IS TYPING ON HIS KEYBOARD.

SHOP WORKER: “Good evening. Welcome to The Teddy Bear Company.”
CUSTOMER: “Can you help me? I ordered a bear from you last week. I want to know where it is.”
SHOP WORKER: “Bear with me.”
CUSTOMER: “Right, will do.”

A MINUTE PASSES IN SILENCE AS THE SHOP WORKER CONTINUES TO TYPE.

CUSTOMER: “Erm, Have you found out where my bear is?”

THE WORKER PULLS A BEAR FROM UNDER THE DESK AND PLACES IT IN FRONT OF HIM.

SHOP WORKER: “I’ve just told you. The bear’s with me.”

END

See? I told you that it was short and sweet. Did I say it was funny? If I did, I apologise for misleading anyone, as it’s not, though it does still raise a wry smile with me.

Both Tasha and I failed to watch The One Show to see if we won, though I’d assume that someone, somewhere would have told us if we’d been successful. I have the show on record, but can’t say I’m bothered about watching it (though I must admit I tried to on Friday night, but got distracted). I’ve also submitted the entry to the official website, and they seem to publish five or so entries every day, so maybe it’ll pop up there. Here’s hoping.

Mood: Tired.

Location: Costa, Chelmsford