No, Luton Airport

OK, time to resurrect this blog! It’s going to get a new title and a redesign to use a lot more Wordpress plugins and widgets. I want to use Wordpress for a number of upcoming projects and I need to get up to speed with it so this is the place.

Alice is one week away from the summer holidays and in August she joins Holly at George Watson’s so I’m making a concerted effort to get this flat finished and sold so we can pay the school fees and still eat, get a holiday somewhere and get the house in Constitution Street finished.

Right now it’s time for lunch and Joseph Pearce’s beckons. I’m taking the laptop to do some research into how to fix this bloody leaking drainage pipe. I need to find a supplier of 60mm/50mm rubber couplers with big jubilee clips.

Maddie came over to show me her sore finger and couldn’t work out why Alice and I were rolling about laughing!

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Man fined for taking photograph

Being the world’s greatest cynic nothing much surprises me any more but I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I read this. Can you imagine what it actually cost in police and court time to prosecute this man? For taking a photograph!

If you were faced with a girl puking all over the pavement and a man taking a photograph of it, which would you choose to prosecute? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anybody should actually be charged, but if someone had to get it I would choose the vomit spreader any day. If you’re going to throw up, go to the bloody toilet.

Yesterday, Alice and I witnessed a cyclist getting knocked off his bike. Luckily he wasn’t too badly hurt but we dialled 999 as we was clearly in a lot of pain. When the ambulance arrived I asked the paramedic if the police would be coming too and he told me that the police rarely attend accidents when there aren’t serious injuries. I’ve heard they don’t always attend burglaries any more either, they send round the Community Officer the next day. They just don’t have the resources apparently. They’re all far too busy protecting the dignity of nice young ladies from ruthless Polish photographers.

“The lady concerned was entitled to her privacy and not to have a passing stranger take a photograph,” said the sheriff.

“I’m going to impose a fine to remind him chivalry is not dead and when somebody is in distress you leave them to it.”

Wow, so they’re going to start prosecuting all those celebrity chasing paparazzi then are they? This I can’t wait to see.

I’m not sure whether to be pleased or depressed.

It’s car insurance renewal time so I just wentcompared.com and got a quote from Admiralty for a touch over £200 for our Nissan Micra.  That’s fully comp, no claims protection, Louise & me driving, courtesy car, windscreen cover and £150 excess.  For £200.

I was pleased, then I realised why it’s getting so cheap; I’m old. No longer a Lewis Hamilton rival, I’m now considered a sensible, middle-aged, lower risk driver.

I might break the speed limit going home.  Just to show them.

One consequence of getting older is that your possessions also get older.  So, unfortunately, any joy at the saving in insurance premium was also short lived for another reason.  Our faithful Zafira 7 seater family wagon decided to expire on us and I’ve just been told that we’re probably looking at £1000 to fix it.  I’ve always believed that every silver lining has a cloud.

BBC NEWS | In Pictures | In pictures: Transistor history

The transistor is 60 years old. Isn’t it incredible how things have progressed in such a short period of time? We really take for granted what a huge invention this was, virtually all our modern technology revolves around transistor theorey.

This is a latest pic of Maddie, taken on my mobile and uploaded to Flickr.

Frank and Steph kindly took Alice on holiday with them to France this summer. I’ve just uploaded all their photos to my Flickr account.

At least one of us got to go on holiday and get some sun!

The more observant of you, which means nobody, and that’s not a slight on anybody’s observational skills but more a realisation that no one ever visits here, admittedly through my own fault for not writing anything, will therefore not have noticed my CNPS (consecutive number plate spotting) progress in the right-hand side bar.  I have made it past the half-way mark.  500 number plates spotted, only 499 to go.

I don’t have my records to hand at the moment to see exactly how long it’s taken me to get this far, but I’m pretty certain it’s over two and a half years.  Which means I’m looking a five years in total to finish this bloody game, or more probably given that each day there are less and less old style number plates left on the road.  Richard Herring claims to have completed CNPS in 1 year and 8 months.  All I can say is there must be a lot of old motors around in London compared to affluent Edinburgh.

Louise and I went to see Richard’s ‘Menage a Un’ show in the fringe last year and we met him in the bar afterwards.  I did ask him if he really did complete the CNPS task or whether he just put it on his website to get idiots like me to spend the rest of their lives competing in something worse than train spotting.  And I mean spotting trains, not the other kind of trainspotting which my home town is famed for.  He assured me that he had done it, and that he’d had to have therapy to break the habit as he was about to embark on repeating the game.

I was thinking of starting from 999 and working back down to 1.