CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Congratulations to Windy & Mike on the birth of your beautiful new daughter Ami.

Can't wait to see pics!

I’ve got a great idea for a small business. It pushes all the right buttons for a true 21st century start up business. It’s internet based, it builds on-line communities and it’s about mental health. Basically, it’s ‘facebook’ for nutters.

The idea is to help neurotics and obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers. Let’s say you need to turn around sixty times before you leave the house. But you’re already running late and you can’t afford to spend the time spinning and then dizzily crashing about as you try to negotiate yourself out of the front door. No problem.You leave the house, catch your bus, go to work…and log on to:

Nuroses-swap?
Nutter-exchange
Bonkerspace?

Haven’t quite decided on a name yet but, you log on and list your mania. Spinning around like a loon. That’s matched, by others on the site, to something equally as odd - say disposing of your gum wrapper in a certain way. So, you arrange for the gum guy to spin around and promise that the next time you throw away a gum wrapper, it will be folded to resemble a bird, or a wine glass, or an amusing approximation of a willy.

The positive benefits are obvious. The afflicted can get on with their lives, knowing that somewhere in the world, somebody else with a spare five minutes is hopping around, or compulsively reciting a poem, or buying ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or something.

Downside? Well, previously quite well adjusted people with only minor personality quirks will probably start to behave quite oddly. It all depends on how you perceive mental health issues - is it like a virus, can you actually ‘catch’ neuroses from others or (my theory), are competing examples of eccentricity mutually exclusive: for instance would somebody doing a neuroses swap for a day feel like a complete loon because they have to brush their hair exactly 36 times, feeling that the guy who got their compulsion to only use alternate sheets of toilet paper got the best end of the deal?

So how does it make money? This is a site for obsessive-compulsives right? Can you imagine how many times a day they’ll be logging in? It’s an ad man’s dream!

Beer Fest

Congrats to Allie, Hether and Lara who all got to meet up in Las Vegas this past weekend......The pics are fabulous!!!

Cry Me a River???

Thanks to the ritual humiliation that is reality TV, we’ve become a lot more used to seeing real people emoting. But even the shattering of the dreams of some deluded twat in stone-washed jeans singing ‘Angels’ off-key could not prepare us for the press conference of the woman who had just been told by the European Court of Human Rights that she couldn’t use the frozen embryos without the consent of her ex-fiancé, who had fertilized the embroyos but had since gone cold on the idea of parenthood.

I did wonder why she had called a press conference. She was obviously distressed - and by ‘distressed’ I mean hysterical with grief. In contrast, her ex-fiancé gave a press conference where he was calm, measured and, basically, came off like a psychopath.

Medical science is presenting us with all sorts of ethical dilemmas, many of them rather more complex than the people who created them are able to cope with. This is why it goes to wise judges, who toss a coin and break for lunch.

Parental disputes used to be simple. If the kid looked like the milkman, you gave the missus a thump but got on with it. Now things are more complex, but I’m not sure that people (men, basically), should be able to escape the consequences of their actions so easily. If the bloke in question had had a drunken knee-trembler up against a few crates of Newcastle Brown with the woman in question and she had caught pregnancy, what would he have done then?

Just how long after the act of ‘fertilization’ should one be allowed to call a halt to things? Popular milestones would probably be: when your kid comes last at some game on sports day, when he breaks your stereo, when he crashes the car or when he announces he’s gay and, worse, a ‘taker’!

Parenthood, I have observed, is all about gritting your teeth and getting through it. You might never stop being a parent but even I know when you start - and that includes being by yourself in a little room with a jizz mag and a cup.

Ice Ice Baby

Whoops! I forgot to fully close the door on my freezer the other day and so the next time I opened it, I found that the interior had gone from ‘a bit icy’ to ‘drifts’.

Of course, I know that sooner or later you’re supposed to de-frost your freezer - the natural indicator for this is when a bottle of vodka is frozen in the back somewhere and you have to get it out…which is why we have knives! I don’t de-frost - I hack! This has the benefit of being jolly good fun and also provides sizeable chunks of ice left over afterwards for that cooling gin and tonic you’re going to need.

Of course, it also occasionally floods the house with freon from a pierced tube….but that’s an occupational hazard and an acceptable risk!

The situation is a bit grim though, the ice build up means it’s getting difficult to close the door properly, meaning more ice, meaning it’s even more difficult to close the door…and so on.

At the moment it’s only at the ‘good overnight snowfall’ stage, but before long it’s going to be ‘March of the Penguins’ before finishing with ‘I’m just going out, I may be some time’.Obviously, I have to defrost before yetis move in - this will probably take place over the weekend and will, I have no doubt, result in a torrent of water like the Zambezi in spate and me with a just a towel to soak it up.

The benefit is that we get to eat all the stuff I’ve had in the freezer. This includes various leftovers that I’ve frozen after meals in a fit of economy. Luckily, this means either chilli or curry, both of which go well with rice.The only drawback is that I’m having them for lunch and as a result my office now smells like a Bombay brothel after a particularly tricky chicken jalfrezi.

Dressing UP.....Or Down

The right outfit for the right occasion - that’s the ticket! Attending a funeral dressed as, say, a jockey, might cause comment (unless the funeral is Seabiscuit’s) and the rules for dress-down-day in the office only go so far - men wearing skirts that finish above the knee are frowned upon, fur may draw furious tutting, and dressing up as a Borg may lead to a fistfight in the loo with the Klingon from accounts.

It’s odd that in a time of apparent plenty, there’s so little evidence of choice of dress being exercised. This statement is drawn from a random sampling of the youth/delinquent hybrids on display outside McChunders. They appear to have been produced from the same jelly mould, all wearing ‘leisure wear’, mobile ‘phones and assorted acne with attitude.

And so to a company dinner on Tuesday at an altogether too fancy resteraunt. What to wear?Business suit?...Nah…too ‘work’. Jeans and a waistcoat? Nope…too much chance of the CEO having a stroke (and not in a good way). So I opted for the ‘safe’ black option, whilst everyone else opted for…yep, you guessed it…jeans. Bastards.

As for dinner, I sat next to vegetarian who, I’m pleased to say, I managed to cure by the end of the evening. I simply explained that the best way to show your concern about the ethical treatment of animals was to buy free-range, organic meat. Indeed, why not adopt or sponsor a beast, so that when your cuts come they are accompanied by a booklet showing Gerald the cow frolicking happily in pasture and living a happy life - right up to the moment they meet Mr Volt and Mr Bolt.

The food? Not bad, but mass catering will never be as good as locally sourced, in-season food cooked for a small dinner party in a kitchen a few yards from the table.

I Even got a gift! How cool is that? - like a posh happy meal.

Service was great though. Wine? Free! Hoorah!

Turkey Lurgey

Bird flu has come to Britain and, predictably, it’s kicked off in the sheds of Bernard Matthews or, as you might refer to them if you’re a turkey, Mordor.

I’ve never understood intensive farming. Lock a turkey in a shed with seven or eight thousand other turkeys and surely any disease is going to spread like a rumour at a girl guide camp. Shouldn’t turkeys all be free range, free to freeze their arse off or be savaged by foxes, sure, but free all the same?

Originally Bernard Matthews were trying to pin the arrival of bird flu on contamination by a wild bird? WTF? How does that work, do wild geese fly down the air-intakes of these sheds like those ‘precision’ bombs from the gulf war? That’s a grainy video I’d like to see on YouTube.

How does a wild bird get into the population? Do the BM team go out at night and kidnap migrating geese to make up the numbers of the turkeys that have expired from lack of fresh air and sunlight?

More likely is the emerging explanation, that the infection arrived with a load of semi-processed bird-bits. Semi-processed bird bits are popular because you can do vile things to birds abroad, then finish the process by giving them a crumb coating or whatever and this allows you to say the produce is British.

A lorry-load of bird-bits from Hungary is being fingered as the source.More likely it’s the driver. Long distance lorry drivers all probably start off normal but endless hours on the road can do things to a man - and turning him into a serial turkey-fucker is not the worst of it. I don’t know how you’d keep cheerful on the road, but looking forward to ten minutes behind the sheds with a turkey might just do it. They should search his cab, if they find bird-seed and gaffa-tape, he’s the culprit.

Of course, this raises the spectre of BM supervisors knowing about this sort of thing, God knows if there is an offence of ‘turkey-pimping’, but there should be.The only thing that should go into a turkey is sage and onion, and then only when you’re sure the bloody thing is dead.