Happy haircut to me,
Happy haircut to me,
Happy haircut to meeeeeeee,
Happy haircut to me.

I must be up to 300 or so by now…

Ooh I’m right excited about my pizza tonight.

I’m trying a new trick you see. Frying up the onions and mushrooms before baking the pizza. The idea being to remove all the juice before cooking so pizzas don’t get all soggy.

And believe me, there is nothing worse than soggy pizza.

That’s BBC Weather. Just to clarify.

I have just looked on the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk) and the weather page there shows it getting EVEN colder.

Back down to single figures by the middle of the week.  Then for the next few days it struggles into double figures before, yep, you guessed it, drifting along as before.

Boo-bloody-hoo!

In a repeated call to the British Weather, I have to ask, yet again, “Can you please sort it out.”

It really is getting ridiculous.  For sure you gave us a lovely Bank Holiday weekend, just gone.  However, your performance in the days since leaves an awful lot to be desired.  And I mean an AWFUL lot.  As I type my fingers are really feeling the cold.  It’s dismal, it’s wet and I for one have had enough.

Please note, moving to an alternative climactic zone is out of the question, so before you start getting smart and making that suggestion… don’t.

So, today has been back to it.  After a three day weekend in the UK, aka May Day Bank Holiday, it’s been catch time up at work.

I was ruminating on this post on Sunday morning, but I was so busy having time off that I didn’t get round to posting it.  So, apologies if it sounds more than a little spurious…

Wow, they really are a funny bunch, my boys.

It is Sunday today and the youngest, nearly eleven, dragged himself from his pit at about nine o’clock.  Yesterday, being Saturday, he was up at around seven thirty.  The other two were pushing it all the way until midday yesterday, but they were both up before ten this morning.

Can anybody explain this to me?

I hope that you have all been enjoying Endeavour on ITV for the past couple of weeks.

I always loved a bit of Inspector Morse, and with what seems like the end of Lewis, this new slant on the story is right up my street.  My wife and I were watching an old Morse the other night when lo and behold, we noticed (well, I noticed) that one of the suspects was being played the chap (Roger Allam) who plays Endeavour’s boss.

Now it’s not that hard to get your head round the fact that the same actor can play two different roles.  It’s just that with the franchise having being extended into the future with Lewis, and then into the past with Endeavour I was quite happy to let my mind wander in a kind of Back To The Future riff.

I nearly missed the younger Allam (playing Denis Cornford in Death Is Now My Neighbour), but for the fact that his voice just kept insisting that I knew that I had seen him before (or rather afterwards) somewhere… you must know how that feels.

This episode is also famous for being the one where Morse finally revealed his first name.  Without which, of course we would have no Endeavour.  Now that’s Back To The Future.

Just a short post this morning… (01:04 to be precise).

I have just got back in after escorting my wife up the road to meet her friend.  We left home at about midnight, give or take a few minutes.  The girls are going out for a few beverages – I myself am not quite in the mood for it. (To be brutal, the kind of night out on offer in this town, doesn’t move me in quite the same way it does my wife.)

Anyway, in order to kill two birds with the same stone, we took the dog for his late night constitutional – the intention being that he will be fully empty and hopefully, won’t wake us quite so early later on this Sunday morning…  well it sounds plausible.

It’s a beautiful evening, as befits the gorgeous day that we’ve just enjoyed.  The sky is crystal clear and the moon, perhaps three-quarters full, is absolutely stunning.  I will be turning in now, keeping the bed warm for my wife, with my memories of the first proper day of spring safely stored.

Eighties music has been making somewhat of a comeback on my chosen radio station.

It may have something to do with the event of Monday 8 April 2013, when Margaret Thatcher died from a stoke in her suite at the Ritz.  The decision to play more music from the decade that compassion forgot was perhaps a subliminal one; it may not even have been taken – I mean I could have imagined that fact.

One thing is for sure, her death has had a divisive impact upon the people of Britain, much like her premiership did in fact.  I have no love for the lady, her politics or her policies.  I found some of the things which happened, the things that she said and did as Prime Minister of the UK deeply unpalatable.  But what I also find unpalatable is the joyous reaction that her death had amongst many people.

It could be argued, it was her choice to behave in the way that she did whilst alive, and consequentially it is their choice to behave in the way that they are now that she is dead.  This tooth for a tooth mentality would not sit well with someone like Nelson Mandela, a man about whom more than one person has stated that she made less than charitable remarks.

Now I’m not attempting to compare myself with Mandela here, but it doesn’t sit well with me either.  Not for the namby pamby “well she was someone’s mother / grandmother / auntie reason”, but instead because I am at last coming round to the fact that we should behave towards people, all people, in the way that we would like to be treated ourselves.  If we don’t get it back, then too bad, but ultimately we can’t claim to be hard done to when we have acted the c*nt in the first place.  And let’s face it, if we feel the need to respond to such treatment by behaving in exactly the same way it doesn’t really leave us basking in the best light does it?

Well that’s it, we have moved.  It’s all done and dusted now, just the odd box here and there to unpack.

As usual (we do move ever three or four years, it seems), we have done all of the hard work of lifting things from one place and taking them and putting them down in another ourselves.

This is a good thing because,

a) we know who our friends are and we have some good ones;

b) we control all the time and pace of moving – if you drop a clanger it’s your own fault and

c) it’s that much cheaper – labour is such an expensive commodity.

We did have a bit of a let down with our telecomms provider.  I won’t mention the name, but it does contain the word telecommunications.  The phone was sorted on the day that they stated, but in a memory of previous dropped ones, they messed up mightily with the broadband.

Suffice to say, it was supposed to be up and working on the same day as the phone line, but actually took them another week to finally sort it out.  Having waited in all afternoon on the day that we should have received a visit from an engineer (!) – they mean technician – it took a phone call on my part to find out that there was no chance that they would have called.  WTF?!  Preparatory work not carried out in the street, they said.

Question, if you know this to be true then why, as an organisation which is supposed to be about communication, couldn’t you have told me this on the day?  Again, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth because of expectations set, but not met on the part of another.